Climate change a threat to security, food and humankind - IPCC report

Warming is leading to more volatile weather patterns that are already reducing crop yields, the IPCC has warned

By Suzanne Goldenberg

A United Nations report raised the threat of climate change to a whole new level on Monday, warning of sweeping consequences to life and livelihood.

The report from the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded that climate change was already having effects in real time – melting sea ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic, killing off coral reefs in the oceans, and leading to heat waves, heavy rains and mega-disasters.

And the worst was yet to come. Climate change posed a threat to global food stocks, and to human security, the blockbuster report said.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC.

Monday's report was the most sobering so far from the UN climate panel and, scientists said, the most definitive. The report – a three year joint effort by more than 300 scientists – grew to 2,600 pages and 32 volumes.

The volume of scientific literature on the effects of climate change has doubled since the last report, and the findings make an increasingly detailed picture of how climate change – in tandem with existing fault lines such as poverty and inequality – poses a much more direct threat to life and livelihood.

This was reflected in the language. The summary mentioned the word “risk” more than 230 times, compared to just over 40 mentions seven years ago, according to a count by the Red Cross.

At the forefront of those risks was the potential for humanitarian crisis. The report catalogued some of the disasters that have been visited around the planet since 2000: killer heat waves in Europe, wildfires in Australia, and deadly floods in Pakistan.

“We are now in an era where climate change isn't some kind of future hypothetical,” said Chris Field, one of the two main authors of the report.

Those extreme weather events would take a disproportionate toll on poor, weak and elderly people. The scientists said governments did not have systems in place to protect those populations. “This would really be a severe challenge for some of the poorest communities and poorest countries in the world,” said Maggie Opondo, a geographer from the University of Nairobi and one of the authors.

The warning signs about climate change and extreme weather events have been accumulating over time. But this report struck out on relatively new ground by drawing a clear line connecting climate change to food scarcity, and conflict.

The report said climate change had already cut into the global food supply. Global crop yields were beginning to decline – especially for wheat – raising doubts as to whether production could keep up with population growth.

“It has now become evident in some parts of the world that the green revolution has reached a plateau,” Pachauri said.

The future looks even more grim. Under some scenarios, climate change could lead to dramatic drops in global wheat production as well as reductions in maize.

"Climate change is acting as a brake. We need yields to grow to meet growing demand, but already climate change is slowing those yields," said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and an author of the report.

Other food sources are also under threat. Fish catches in some areas of the tropics are projected to fall by between 40% and 60%, according to the report.

The report also connected climate change to rising food prices and political instability, for instance the riots in Asia and Africa after food price shocks in 2008.

"The impacts are already evident in many places in the world. It is not something that is [only] going to happen in the future," said David Lobell, a professor at Stanford University's centre for food security, who devised the models.

"Almost everywhere you see the warming effects have a negative affect on wheat and there is a similar story for corn as well. These are not yet enormous effects but they show clearly that the trends are big enough to be important," Lobell said.

The report acknowledged that there were a few isolated areas where a longer growing season had been good for farming. But it played down the idea that there may be advantages to climate change as far as food production is concerned.

Overall, the report said, "Negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts." Scientists and campaigners pointed to the finding as a defining feature of the report.

The report also warned for the first time that climate change, combined with poverty and economic shocks, could lead to war and drive people to leave their homes.

With the catalogue of risks, the scientists said they hoped to persuade governments and the public that it was past time to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to plan for sea walls and other infrastructure that offer some protection for climate change.

“The one message that comes out of this is the world has to adapt and the world has to mitigate,” said Pachauri.

The following is an excerpt from Diane Ravitch’s book Reign of Error.

Public Education: Who Are the Corporate Reformers?

by Diane Ravitch

The education reform movement must be defined in terms of its ideology, its strategies and its leading members.

The “reformers” say they want excellent education for all; they want great teachers; they want to “close the achievement gap”; they want innovation and effectiveness; they want the best of everything for everyone. They pursue these universally admired goals by privatizing education, lowering the qualifications for future teachers, replacing teachers with technology, increasing class sizes, endorsing for- profit organizations to manage schools, using carrots and sticks to motivate teachers and elevating standardized test scores as the ultimate measure of education quality.

“Reform” is really a misnomer, because the advocates for this cause seek not to reform public education but to transform it into an entrepreneurial sector of the economy. The groups and individuals that constitute today’s reform movement have appropriated the word “reform” because it has such positive connotations in American political discourse and American history. But the roots of this so- called reform movement may be traced to a radical ideology with a fundamental distrust of public education and hostility to the public sector in general.

 

The “reform” movement is really a “corporate reform” movement, funded to a large degree by major foundations, Wall Street hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs and the US Department of Education. The movement is determined to cut costs and maximize competition among schools and among teachers. It seeks to eliminate the geographically based system of public education as we have known it for the past 150 years and replace it with a competitive market- based system of school choice — one that includes traditional public schools, privately managed charter schools, religious schools, voucher schools, for- profit schools, virtual schools and for- profit vendors of instruction. Lacking any geographic boundaries, these schools would compete for customers. The customers would choose to send their children and their public funding wherever they wish, based on personal preference or on information such as the schools’ test scores and a letter grade conferred by the state (based largely on test scores).

Some in the reform movement, believing that American education is obsolete and failing, think they are promoting a necessary but painful redesign of the nation’s ailing schools. Some sincerely believe they are helping poor black and brown children escape from failing public schools. Some think they are on the side of modernization and innovation. But others see an opportunity to make money in a large, risk- free, government- funded sector or an opportunity for personal advancement and power. Some — a small but important number — believe they are acting rationally by treating the public education sector as an investment opportunity.

The corporate reform movement has its roots in an ideology that is antagonistic to public education. Partisans on the far right long ago turned against public schools, which they call “government schools.” As a matter of ideology, they do not believe that government can do anything right. From the time that the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman introduced the idea of vouchers in 1955, his supporters embraced vouchers as the best school reform ever, because it would enable parents to take government money to a school of their choice, including private and religious schools. Voucher advocates have long argued that the money should follow the child to whatever institution the family chooses, be it public, private or religious. For years, they made the seductive pitch that parents should be “free to choose” (as Friedman put it) and that government should supply each family its share of the money and get out of the way. But for many years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the idea of school choice was tainted because segregationists used it to evade desegregation in districts facing court- ordered desegregation.

 

President Ronald Reagan, an admirer of Milton Friedman’s, supported vouchers but was never able to persuade Congress to go along. In state referenda, the public has consistently opposed vouchers. Every time vouchers were put to a public vote, they were defeated by large margins. As recently as 2012, voters in Florida decisively rejected a constitutional amendment to permit vouchers. Voucher proponents complain that the public doesn’t understand its own best interest and is misled by teachers’ unions, who are just protecting their jobs and power. The election results in state after state show that the public does not want to subsidize religious schools with its tax dollars. Voucher advocates do not accept that the public likes and supports its community public schools, free from any religious teachings, with doors open to all. So choice supporters continually parrot or manufacture a steady stream of bad news about public education to shake the public’s faith in public schools. However, even when polls show that people have a low opinion of American education, they nonetheless continue to have a high opinion of their own neighborhood schools.

Today’s reformers assert that “the money should follow the child” and they herald this as a bold new reform idea. But it is not new. It is the same idea that was behind vouchers more than half a century ago. Today, the same arguments are made by Governor Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, who wants the money to follow the child to any school (even schools that teach creationism as science), any online corporation, any for- profit vendor of educational services, regardless of experience, quality or qualifications. As public money is dispersed, so is public oversight and accountability for the spending of public money. Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, eager to dismantle public education, proposed a formula for education funding based on this principle: “Any time, any place, any way, any pace.” Conservative governors in other states make the same arguments. But there is nothing conservative about replacing a beloved and traditional community institution — the public school — with a marketplace of privately run schools and for- profit vendors. This is a radical project, not conservative at all.

The organizations that advocate for “reform” have names that are appealing and innocuous, like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Better Education for Kids (B4K), Black Alliance for Educational Options, the education program at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Education Reform, Chiefs for Change, ConnCAN (and its spin- off, 50CAN, as well as state- specific groups like MinnCAN, NYCAN and RI- CAN), Democrats for Education Reform, the Education Equality Project, Education Reform Now, Educators 4 Excellence, EdVoice, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the National Council on Teacher Quality, New Leaders for New Schools, NewSchools Venture Fund, Parent Revolution, Stand for Children, Students for Education Reform, StudentsFirst, Teach for America, Teach Plus and a host of others. Many of these groups have overlapping membership on their boards and are funded by the same foundations. They exist in a giant echo chamber, listening and talking only to one another, dismissing the concerns of parents, teachers and communities.

The reformers are Republicans and Democrats. They include not only far- right Republican governors but some Democratic governors as well. They include President Barack Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as Democratic mayors in such cities as Newark, Chicago and Los Angeles. Elected officials of both parties have signed on to an agenda that threatens the future of public education.

The aims of the corporate reform movement are supported by a broad array of think tanks, some purportedly liberal, some centrist, some on the right and some on the far right. These include the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Education Sector, the Thomas B.

Fordham Institute, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Goldwater Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution and Policy Innovators in Education Network, as well as a bevy of state- level public policy think tanks that support privatization. Many of these think tanks — both liberal and conservative — work closely together, co- sponsoring conferences and publications to advance their shared agenda. Major foundations handsomely fund the think tanks that promote the corporate reform ideology.

The corporate reform movement has co- opted progressive themes and language in the service of radical purposes. Advocating the privatization of public education is deeply reactionary. Disabling or eliminating teachers’ unions removes the strongest voice in each state to advocate for public education and to fight crippling budget cuts. In every state, classroom teachers are experts in education; they know what their students need and their collective voice should be part of any public decision about school improvement. Stripping teachers of their job protections limits academic freedom. Evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students undermines professionalism and encourages teaching to the test. Claiming to be in the forefront of a civil rights movement while ignoring poverty and segregation is reactionary and duplicitous.

The leading funders of the reform movement are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports charter schools and test- based teacher evaluation; the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which supports charter schools and trains urban superintendents in its managerial philosophy; and the Walton Family Foundation, which funds vouchers and charters. These powerful and wealthy foundations have overlapping interests. They subsidize many organizations in common, such as Teach for America (which recruits young college graduates to teach for two years in low- income schools), the KIPP charter schools and Parent Revolution (the chief advocates of the “parent trigger” idea). They jointly funded the digital learning policy statement issued by Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia, which promotes the proliferation of low- quality virtual charter schools. Many other wealthy foundations support the corporate reform agenda, including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, the Fisher Foundation and the Anschutz Foundation, as well as fabulously rich individuals, including the Bezos family (Amazon.com), Reed Hastings (Netflix) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation).

The Gates Foundation is by far the largest foundation in the United States and possibly the world. It awards hundreds of millions of dollars in education grants every year. In addition to underwriting the expansion of charter schools, it invests heavily in test- based evaluation of teachers and merit pay. It has made grants to the biggest teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association and also made grants to start groups of young teachers to challenge the teachers’ unions. It is difficult to find education organizations that have not been funded by the Gates Foundation. It underwrites “advocacy,” by subsidizing almost every major think tank in Washington, D.C. It supported the creation, evaluation and promotion of the Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted in almost every state. In addition, the Gates Foundation has joined in a partnership with the British publisher Pearson to develop online curriculum for teaching the Common Core standards. And the Gates Foundation underwrote the creation of a large database project to collect confidential student data with Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; critics fear that this information will be disclosed to vendors to market new products to schools and students.

 

The corporate reform movement has a well- honed message: We are the reformers. We have solutions. The public schools are failing. The public schools are in decline. The public schools don’t work. The public schools are obsolete and broken. We want to innovate. We know how to fix schools. We know how to close the achievement gap. We are leading the civil rights movement of our era. We want a great teacher in every classroom. Class size doesn’t matter. Teachers should be paid more if their students get higher scores. They should be fi red if their students don’t get higher scores. Teachers should have their seniority and tenure stripped from them because those things protect bad teachers. Bad teachers cause the achievement gap. Great teachers close the achievement gap. Teachers’ unions are greedy and don’t care about children. People who draw attention to poverty are just making excuses for bad teachers and failing public schools. Those who don’t agree with our strategies are defenders of the status quo. They have no solutions. We have solutions. We know what works. Testing works. Accountability works. Privately managed charter schools work. Closing schools with low test scores works. Paying bonuses to teachers to get higher scores works. Online instruction works. Replacing teachers with online instruction not only works but cuts costs while providing profits to edu-entrepreneurs who will spur further innovation.

It is a seductive message because it offers hope that someone knows how to fix difficult problems. They claim they not only know how to do it but are doing it. They express their message with clarity and certainty. Their message resonates with the major media and with the most powerful people in our society: billionaires, corporate executives, the leaders of major foundations, the president of the United States, the US secretary of education, Wall Street hedge fund managers, pundits and think tank opinion makers.

The corporate reformers don’t like local school boards, because they sometimes defer to the views of teachers and they squabble too much; school boards, they say, slow down decision making with public hearings and sometimes they make the wrong decisions. That is always a risk in a democracy; deliberative bodies are slow and sometimes make mistakes.

 

Corporate reformers want education decisions in the hands of a powerful executive who is immune to public opinion. They like the idea of a governor who appoints a commission to override the decisions of local school boards that resist charter schools. They like the idea of a superintendent at the state level who has unlimited power to impose his (their) policies, especially closing public schools and opening charter schools. In urban districts, their preferred mode of governance is a mayor or superintendent who controls the schools and answers to no one. At the school level, they want principals who can hire and fire at will, without due process. Corporate reformers don’t like checks and balances. They want executives who can ignore the protests of parents, students, teachers and community leaders, no matter how loudly they complain and no matter how many show up at public hearings or protest at rallies.

It pays to be on the reform team, certainly much more than it does to be a public school teacher. When Chicago’s teachers went on strike in September 2012, the national media thought it shocking that the average Chicago teacher was paid $75,000 a year; they ignored the fact that Chicago teachers are compelled by law to live in Chicago and that this is not an outrageous salary for an educated, experienced professional who lives in a major city. Yet the media are indifferent when charter executives receive salaries of $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, to oversee a single school or a chain of small schools. The reformers are flush with cash from foundations and corporations. The Walton Family Foundation alone made school- reform grants of $159 million in 2011. Reformers often complain about the power and influence of the teachers’ unions, but the unions cannot match the resources of the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, as well as the many other foundations that march in lockstep with them, plus individual billionaires and millionaires who support candidates for state and local school board races. (The Gates and Walton foundations alone spend more than $500 million annually on education projects, which is more than ten times what unions spend to support civil rights groups and other allies.) When you combine the wealth of the big foundations with the financial and political clout of the US Department of Education, they are a mighty force. The “reformers” are the status quo.

 

For an ambitious person, being part of the corporate reform movement offers not only access to money but an accelerated route to professional success. Graduates of the Broad Superintendents Academy, an unaccredited program created by the Broad Foundation to teach Eli Broad’s management style of corporate reform, are on a fast track to become superintendents of urban districts — and the Broad Foundation may enhance their salaries. Some of the graduates of this short- term program are now state superintendents. Many are in charge of urban districts.

The young person who joins up with Teach for America or one of the big charter chains becomes part of a powerful network. These organizations provide an escalator to the top that no ordinary teaching career can match. Teachers without these connections may work for years in their classrooms before they are even considered for department chair or assistant principal. Those who rise in the corporate reform movement are soon managing their own charter schools or assuming leadership roles in large urban districts or state education departments, some before they reach the age of 30.

Wall Street hedge fund managers have their own organization, called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). DFER raises money for candidates and elected officials whom it likes and it doesn’t like them unless they agree to the corporate reform agenda, especially the expansion of charter schools and the imposition of teacher evaluation systems based on test scores (though not for teachers in the charter schools it supports). At the inaugural meeting of DFER in 2005, the speaker for the event was a promising young senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. When Obama ran for president in 2008, his chief education spokesperson was Linda Darling- Hammond of Stanford University. But when Obama was elected, he chose Arne Duncan as secretary of education. Duncan not only was his friend but was recommended by DFER.

 

Arne Duncan is one of the recognized leaders of the corporate reform movement who implemented many of its ideas when he was superintendent of schools in Chicago. Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, is another national leader. He created an organization called the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which actively promotes vouchers, charter schools, for- profit charter schools, virtual learning and for- profit online corporations, as well as testing and accountability tied to test scores. In states with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature, the measures to privatize education advanced rapidly. In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder promoted legislation to allow emergency managers to take over fiscally troubled districts; in two small school districts, the emergency managers closed the public schools and gave the students to a for- profit charter school chain (the law was repealed in 2012 by Michigan voters, but Snyder left the emergency managers and their decisions in place). Governor Mitch Daniels and the Indiana legislature authorized vouchers, for- profit charter schools, for- profit cyber- charters and a test- based teacher accountability system. Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana pushed through sweeping legislation in 2012 that offered vouchers to more than half the students in the state and authorized the opening of many new charter schools; in addition, students will be able to take their state money and spend it in almost any place that calls itself a vendor of educational services. The money to support the alternatives to public education was to be taken out of the budget for public schools, until state courts ruled it unconstitutional to do so. The Louisiana reform legislation ties teachers’ evaluations to the test scores of their students, but teachers in charter schools and voucher schools do not need to be certified or subject to the same requirements, as is the case in many other states and districts.

When the Louisiana legislation was hurriedly passed, it was hailed by a group of state superintendents called Chiefs for Change as “student- centered reforms” that “will completely transform Louisiana and its students.” Chiefs for Change is affiliated with Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. It describes itself as a coalition of state leaders who share a “zeal for education reform.” Its members include the state superintendents in Rhode Island, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, Maine, New Jersey and New Mexico.

Much of the legislation for the education reform movement in states with conservative governors or legislatures comes from a shadowy group called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). ALEC stayed out of the public eye until 2012, when a shooting in Florida brought it unwanted national attention. A black teenager named Trayvon Martin was killed by a man who said he was defending himself in accordance with Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which was based on model legislation written by ALEC. ALEC was founded in 1973 to advance privatization and free- market principles. Its membership includes some 2,000 state legislators. Funded by scores of major corporations and philanthropists, ALEC writes model legislation, which its members bring to their state legislatures. Many states have adopted ALEC model laws, simply inserting the name of the state into the proposed legislative language. ALEC does not like public schools or unions. ALEC likes vouchers and charter schools. It wants to eliminate tenure and seniority and to encourage paths into teaching that don’t involve getting a license or pedagogical training. ALEC likes for- profit schools, especially cyber- charters. It promotes “parent trigger” laws to enable privatizers to convince parents to sign petitions that will turn their schools over to charter managers.

The most unexpected supporter of corporate reform was President Barack Obama. Educators enthusiastically supported Obama, expecting that he would eliminate the noxious policies of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind. They assumed, given his history as a community organizer and his sympathy for society’s least fortunate, that his administration would adopt policies that responded to the needs of children, rather than concentrating on testing and accountability.

The first big surprise for educators occurred when President Obama abandoned Linda Darling-Hammond and selected Arne Duncan, who had run the low- performing schools of Chicago, as secretary of education. The second big surprise — shock, actually — happened when the Obama administration released the details of Race to the Top, its major initiative, which was designed in Secretary Duncan’s office with the help of consultants from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and other advocates of high- stakes testing and charter schools.

There was very little difference between Race to the Top and NCLB. The Obama program preserved testing, accountability and choice at the center of the federal agenda. Race to the Top was even more punitive than NCLB. It insisted that states evaluate teachers in relation to the test scores of their students, which made standardized testing even more important than it was under NCLB. It encouraged states to authorize more privately managed charter schools, an initiative that President George W. Bush would never have been able to get through a Democratic- controlled Congress. It endorsed competition and choice, which were traditional themes of the Republican Party. The very concept of a “race to the top” repudiates the traditional Democratic Party commitment to equity; it suggests that the winner will “race to the top,” leaving the losers far behind. But a commitment to equity means that federal resources should be allocated based on need, not on a competition between the swift and the slow.

Because Race to the Top was handsomely funded, states eagerly competed for a share of its $5 billion. President Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth about this signature program. He said in his State of the Union address in 2011 that Race to the Top was not a topdown mandate (after all, states had volunteered to accept its mandates) but “the work of local teachers and principals; school boards and communities” (which was not true in any sense).

Even though Race to the Top made standardized testing more important than ever, President Obama spoke out against testing. In 2011, he said he was strongly opposed to teaching to the test. He said,

One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you’re not learning about the world; you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math. All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that’s not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in. They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.

His critics agreed with him. The California teacher and blogger Anthony Cody wondered if the president knew that Race to the Top required states to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, that Secretary Duncan wanted to evaluate teacher preparation programs by the test scores of the students of the teachers they produced and that Obama’s Department of Education “is proposing greatly expanding both the number of subjects tested and the frequency of tests, to enable us to measure the ‘value’ each teacher adds to their students.” At the same time that the president was lamenting “teaching to the test,” his own policies made it necessary to teach to the test or be fired.

In his 2012 State of the Union, the president’s message was even more inconsistent. He said that he wanted schools to encourage teachers to “teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test,” but at the same time he wanted schools to “reward the best ones” and “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.” He didn’t acknowledge that the rewards and the punishments he approved would be tied, at his administration’s insistence, to test scores.

In response to Race to the Top, the number of charter schools grew rapidly. For-profit charter schools expanded, as did virtual charter schools. Neither President Obama nor Secretary Duncan expressed any concern about the risks of deregulating public money to private corporations, nor did they oppose the entry of for-profit entrepreneurs into the charter school market. By advocating for school choice rather than public schools, Race to the Top implicitly encouraged not only charters but the other form of school choice: vouchers.

 

The 2010 elections brought a new crop of far-right governors into office and these governors warmly embraced charter schools and advocated for vouchers. The Obama administration was silent; after a brief attempt to defund the Washington, DC, voucher program, the administration gave in to Republican protests and permitted it to continue. As state after state adopted vouchers, the Obama administration raised no protest against the advance of privatization. Nor did Obama strongly object when the governors of Republican states attacked the collective bargaining rights of public- sector unions. In the spring of 2011, Wisconsin’s right- wing governor, Scott Walker, proposed to strip away the collective bargaining rights of most public sector workers, including teachers and they organized massive protests in Madison. They surrounded the state capitol and mounted daily protests. President Obama said he sided with the workers but didn’t show up in Madison to demonstrate his support. Instead, he and Secretary Duncan flew to Miami in the middle of the Wisconsin protests to praise the former Florida governor Jeb Bush as “a champion of education reform” and to celebrate the successful “turnaround” of Miami Central High School. The national media recognized that President Obama was bestowing important support on Jeb Bush’s policies of testing, accountability and grading of schools. The national media did not pay attention, however, when the Florida Department of Education announced plans to shutter Miami Central because of its low performance only four months after the meeting between President Obama and Governor Bush. The state granted the school a waiver to avoid closure. Despite some gains, it was still one of the state’s lowest-performing high schools.

In his support for charter schools, high- stakes testing, merit pay and evaluating teachers by test scores, President Obama forged a bipartisan consensus. But he had strange bedfellows, at least for a Democrat. When I blogged about ALEC and its right- wing agenda for privatization and lowering standards for entry into teaching, the organization’s research director responded that President Obama shared credit with ALEC for promoting charter schools and “teaching- profession reforms.” During the 2012 election campaign, the only difference between Obama and Mitt Romney in relation to their K– 12 policy was that Romney supported vouchers (which he called “opportunity scholarships”) and Obama did not.

 

Neither candidate in the 2012 election supported public education. Both agreed that it was in crisis and that it needed radical change. In their debates, the subject of poverty never came up. Indeed, the subject of education was barely mentioned aside from the candidates’ agreement that Race to the Top was a great success.

The public is only dimly aware of the reform movement’s privatization agenda. The deceptive rhetoric of the privatization movement masks its underlying goal to replace public education with a system in which public funds are withdrawn from public oversight to subsidize privately managed charter schools, voucher schools, online academies, for- profit schools, and other private vendors.

No matter how many Hollywood movies the corporate reformers produce, no matter how many television specials sing the glories of privatization, no matter how often the reformers belittle the public schools and their teachers, the public is not yet ready to relinquish its public schools to speculators, entrepreneurs, ideologues, snake- oil salesmen, profit- making businesses and Wall Street hedge fund managers.

Secret agenda

Hobby Lobby’s secret agenda: How it’s quietly funding a vast right-wing movement

By Eli Clifton

Hobby Lobby says it’s just trying to protect its religious freedom. The family-founded and -run company is closed on Sundays, has an employee manual that includes biblical references, and announces on its website its commitment to “Honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles.” The company got in hot water last year when an employee told a blogger that no Hanukkah decorations were stocked “[b]ecause Mr. Green is the owner of the company, he’s a Christian, and those are his values.”

Though the company went on to apologize, the battle for its Christian identity was revived this week when lawyers for the company argued before the Supreme Court that the company should not have to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The issue, says Hobby Lobby co-founder Barbara Green, isn’t that the company wants to meddle with women’s rights to take contraceptive drugs. “We’re not trying to control that,” she said. “We’re just trying to control our participation in it.”

But a document published here for the first time reveals Hobby Lobby appears to be going much further than protecting freedom, providing funding for a group that backs a political network of activist groups deeply engaged in pushing a Christian agenda into American law. The document shows entities related to the company to be two of the largest donors to the organization funding a right-wing Christian agenda, investing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars into a vast network of organizations working in concert to advance an agenda that would allow businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians and deny their employees contraceptives under a maximalist interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause of the United States Constitution.

That network of activist groups has succeeded in passing legislation in Arizona requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before an abortion, banning taxpayer-funded insurance paying for government employees’ abortions, defining marriage as a union between a man and woman, and funding abstinence education. And there’s evidence that its efforts go well beyond the borders of the Copper State.

Outside of the Supreme Court case, little has been reported about Hobby Lobby’s political ties. The company is owned privately by the Green family and generates more than $3 billion per year in revenue from its 602 stores. The family proudly promotes its philanthropy to churches, ministries and Christian community centers, dedicating half of the company’s pretax earnings to Christian ministries. In 2007, Hobby Lobby’s founder and CEO, billionaire David Green, pledged $70 million to Oral Roberts University, bailing out the debt-ridden evangelical university. In 2012, Forbes reported, “Hobby Lobby’s cash spigot currently makes [Green] the largest individual donor to evangelical causes in America.”

But until now, its political connections have been obscure.

Hobby Lobby-related entities are some of the biggest sources of funding to the National Christian Charitable Foundation, which backed groups that collaborated in promoting the anti-gay legislation in Arizona – recently vetoed by Gov. Jan Brewer – that critics say would have legalized discrimination against gays and lesbians by businesses.

The path of SB 1062 to the Arizona statehouse was built by two groups, the Center for Arizona Policy and the Alliance Defending Freedom. Center for Arizona Policy employees regularly spoke in favor of the legislation, appearing as the grass-roots face of a bill that the center’s president, Cathi Herrod, characterized as “[making] certain that governmental laws cannot force people to violate their faith unless it has a compelling governmental interest–a balancing of interests that has been in federal law since 1993,” according to a statement on the group’s website. (One hundred and twenty-three Center for Arizona Policy-supported measures have been signed into law; its legislative agenda ranges from requiring intrusive ultrasounds for women seeking abortions to HB 2281, a bill that, if passed by the Arizona Senate, would exempt religious institutions from paying property taxes on leased or rented property.)

For its part, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a national Christian organization based in Arizona, works toward the “spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system and advocating for religious liberty, the sanctity of life, and marriage and family,” according to the group’s website. Both groups are heavily funded by the National Christian Charitable Foundation, “the largest Christian grant-making foundation in the world,” as described on the group’s website. And who is the largest funder of National Christian Charitable? That would be a Hobby Lobby executive.

Here’s how it works: At the end of the 2012 tax year, the National Christian Charitable Foundation had more than $1.22 billion in assets under management in donor-advised funds that offer “innovative, tax-smart solutions [to] help you simplify your giving, multiply your impact, and glorify God.” Outgoing grants – totaling $4.3 billion since 1982, according to the Foundation — go to a range of causes including climate science denial, charter schools, free market and pro-life advocacy. But buried in their voluminous tax filings (at times totaling more than 600 pages) are a number of sizable grants to the Center for Arizona Policy and the Alliance Defending Freedom, issued between 2002 and 2011, the last year that complete tax data is available for all three organizations.

In 2011, the National Christian Charitable Foundation contributed $9,606,281.88 of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s $36,379,373 grant revenue. That same year, the NCF contributed $236,250 of the Center for Arizona Policy’s $1,662,355 in grant revenue.

Overall, from 2002 to 2011 the NCF contributed $1,481,343 to the Center for Arizona Policy and $31,024,584.30 to the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Typically the trail would stop there. The National Christian Charitable Foundation appears to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, single contributor to the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Center for Arizona Policy, but because the foundation is a massive-donor advised fund, its donors are shielded from public scrutiny.

However, a 2009 NCF tax filing, reported here for the first time, offers insights into the deep pockets backing National Christian Charitable Foundation.

The form, viewable here, shows a total of nearly $65 million in contributions coming from a combination of Jon Cargill, who is the CFO of Hobby Lobby, and “Craft Etc.,” an apparent misspelling of Crafts Etc., a Hobby Lobby affiliate company. The document shows that Hobby Lobby‑related contributions were the single largest source of tax-deductible donations to National Christian Charitable’s approximately $383.785 million in 2009 grant revenue.

According to addresses on the filing, both the contributions from Crafts Etc. and Jon Cargill came from a massive warehouse and office facility housing Hobby Lobby’s headquarters in Oklahoma City.

National Christian Charitable declined to comment on the foundation’s relationship with Hobby Lobby. Hobby Lobby did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

While the scope of the Hobby Lobby investment in National Christian Charitable has not been known until now, the Green family has been open about its fondness for the foundation. “National Christian [Charitable] Foundation provides a great solution for our family, as well as our business, to do our giving. We highly recommend them,” says a “review” of the fund by Hobby Lobby founder David Green on the foundation’s website.

Mart Green, David Green’s son, delivered a presentation about “Knowing God” at the foundation’s 2012 “Lifework Leadership” seminar.

In January 2013, Hobby Lobby issued a press release announcing its gift of a former prep school campus in Northfield, Mass., to the fund. The fund reports it is “giving away” the campus and is accepting applicants. (“Large Christian ministries, schools, seminaries and think tanks will most likely be the best potential recipients,” says an NCF website.)

The exact use of Jon Cargill’s and Crafts, Etc.’s contributions to the foundation aren’t clear, but National Christian Charitable’s outgoing grants reveal a series of disbursements to groups that have offered legal services to Hobby Lobby or signed on to amicus briefs supporting the lawsuit. In 2012, the NCF contributed $94,340 to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the D.C.-based legal group representing Hobby Lobby in the upcoming Supreme Court case. Between 2002 and 2012, National Christian Charitable also contributed to at least 40 of the groups that signed on to amicus briefs supporting Hobby Lobby’s case.

Seen in this light, the ideological connection between the Hobby Lobby suit and Arizona’s recently vetoed legislation becomes clearer: One seeks to allow companies the right to deny contraceptive coverage while the other would permit businesses to deny services to LGBT people. “There are really close legal connections between [Arizona’s anti-gay SB 1062 bill] and the [Hobby Lobby] Supreme Court case,” Emily Martin, vice president and general counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, told Salon. “Ideologically, the thing that unites the two efforts is an attempt to use religious exercise as a sword to impose religious belief on others, even if it harms others, which would be a radical expansion of free exercise law,” said Martin.

And the common thread is the much bigger trend across the country. “Individuals and entities with religious objections to certain laws that protect others are seeking to use their religion to trump others,” Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, told Salon.
(Both the ACLU and the National Women’s Law Center participated in amicus briefs opposing Hobby Lobby.)

The centrality of Hobby Lobby in the network advancing this agenda is unmistakable.

The crafts store’s name and owners are rallying cries for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Center for Arizona Policy and the Becket Fund, the key actors in the battle over Arizona’s SB 1062 and the upcoming Supreme Court case. The Center for Arizona Policy held Hobby Lobby up as an example of a company that would benefit from SB 1062 and praised the Green family’s decision to sue the federal government over the contraceptive mandate.

Center for Arizona Policy president Cathi Herrod heralded the Hobby Lobby lawsuit as a rare example of a “business willing to step out in faith and literally risk it all to hold fast to their faith” and encouraged people to shop at Hobby Lobby to show their support on “Stand With Hobby Lobby Day,” Jan. 5, 2013. And, in a January 2014, “action alert,” the center urged readers to support SB 1062 because it would “Clarify that people do not surrender their religious freedom rights just because they go to work or run a business. This provision would help protect businesses like Hobby Lobby that wish to operate according to their faith.”
The Becket Fund hosts a web page extolling the Green family’s Christian values.

“…[T]he Greens strive to apply the Christian teachings on respect and fairness to their employees. […] The Hobby Lobby success story is a true example of the American dream. Now the Greens want to live another American dream: that every American, including business owners like the Greens, should be free to live and do business according to their beliefs,” says the website.

The Becket Fund did not respond to requests for comment.

The Alliance Defending Freedom has also been outspoken in its support of Hobby Lobby, even staging a “Nine Weeks of Prayer” campaign in the weeks leading up to the Supreme Court hearing arguments in the Hobby Lobby suit. “You, your family, and your church” are urged to “Pray for the Christian family who founded and own Hobby Lobby, Inc.” and “Pray God would bless and protect the Green family as they continue to lead their company with integrity.”

Even if Hobby Lobby loses its suit against the U.S. government, groups funded through the National Christian Charitable Foundation will continue to test the limits of the legal system’s interpretation of religious freedom. The Alliance Defending Freedom itself is the organization behind McCullen v. Coakley, a case its lawyers argued in front of the Supreme Court in January challenging the constitutionality of a Massachusetts law that creates a buffer zone around abortion clinics; the Alliance Defending Freedom lawyers argue that the law creates a “censorship zone” for antiabortion protesters.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund, is also attempting to take the case of Elane Photography v. Willock to the Supreme Court, making a similar argument about religious freedom. In 2006, New Mexico-based Elane Photography refused to photograph a same-sex ceremony for Vanessa Willock. Willock sued Elane Photography for discriminating against same-sex couples and New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in favor of Willock. The Becket Fund has written an amicus brief supporting Elane Photography.

Similar legislation to SB 1062 also appeared in at least 13 other states – South Dakota, Kansas, Idaho, Tennessee, Colorado, Maine, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Nevada and Utah. Though those efforts have died or appear unlikely to pass following the setback in Arizona, the range of states is a good indication of the national ambitions that the alliance has for its legislation.

While the network of organizations funded by a foundation heavily backed by Hobby Lobby’s executive and affiliate company are vocal about their support of the Green family and other companies seeking an expansive interpretation of the free exercise of religion, others are less enamored with the agenda promoted in Arizona and in the upcoming court cases.

Amiri told Salon, “These companies are trying to use their religion as a license to discriminate against others.”
Neither the Center for Arizona Policy nor the Alliance Defending Freedom responded to requests for comment.

Suspended

Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death

by Helen Thomson
 

NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.

Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.

"We are suspending life, but we don't like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction," says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. "So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation."

The technique involves replacing all of a patient's blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. "If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can't bring them back to life. But if they're dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed," says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.

The benefits of cooling, or induced hypothermia, have been known for decades. At normal body temperature – around 37 °C – cells need a regular oxygen supply to produce energy. When the heart stops beating, blood no longer carries oxygen to cells. Without oxygen the brain can only survive for about 5 minutes before the damage is irreversible.

However, at lower temperatures, cells need less oxygen because all chemical reactions slow down. This explains why people who fall into icy lakes can sometimes be revived more than half an hour after they have stopped breathing.

Just before heart and brain surgery, doctors sometimes lower body temperature using ice packs, and by circulating the blood through an external cooling system. This can give them up to 45 minutes in which to stop blood flow and perform surgery. However, the cooling process takes time and can only be done with careful planning and preparation.

When someone reaches an emergency department with a traumatic gunshot injury or stab wound, slow cooling isn't an option. Often their heart has stopped beating due to extreme blood loss, giving doctors only minutes to stop the bleeding and restart the heart. Even if the bleeding can be stopped, it's not like filling up an empty gas tank. Resuscitation exposes the body to a sudden onslaught of oxygen, which can cause tissues to release chemicals that damage cells and cause fatal "reperfusion" injuries.

Finding ways to cool the body until it reaches a state of suspended animation – where people are not alive but not yet dead – could give doctors more time in an emergency.

The technique was first demonstrated in pigs in 2002 by Hasan Alam at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, and his colleagues. The animals were sedated and a massive haemorrhage induced, to mimic the effect of multiple gunshot wounds. Their blood was drained and replaced by either a cold potassium or saline solution, rapidly cooling the body to around 10 °C. After the injuries were treated, the animals were gradually warmed up as the solution was replaced with blood.

Vital signs

The pig's heart usually started beating again by itself, although some pigs needed a jump-start. There was no effect on physical or cognitive function.

"After we did those experiments, the definition of 'dead' changed," says Rhee. "Every day at work I declare people dead. They have no signs of life, no heartbeat, no brain activity. I sign a piece of paper knowing in my heart that they are not actually dead. I could, right then and there, suspend them. But I have to put them in a body bag. It's frustrating to know there's a solution."

That solution will be put to the test in humans for the first time. A final meeting this week will ensure that a team of doctors is fully prepared to try it. Then all they have to do is wait for the right patient to arrive.

That person will have suffered a cardiac arrest after a traumatic injury, and will not have responded to attempts to start their heart. When this happens, every member of Tisherman's team will be paged. "The patient will probably have already lost about 50 per cent of their blood and their chest will be open," he says. The team sees one of these cases each month. Their chance of survival is less than 7 per cent.

The first step is to flush cold saline through the heart and up to the brain – the areas most vulnerable to low oxygen. To do this, the lower region of their heart must be clamped and a catheter placed into the aorta – the largest artery in the body – to carry the saline. The clamp is later removed so the saline can be artificially pumped around the whole body. It takes about 15 minutes for the patient's temperature to drop to 10 °C. At this point they will have no blood in their body, no breathing, and no brain activity. They will be clinically dead.

In this state, almost no metabolic reactions happen in the body, so cells can survive without oxygen. Instead, they may be producing energy through what's called anaerobic glycolysis. At normal body temperatures this can sustain cells for about 2 minutes. At low temperatures, however, glycolysis rates are so low that cells can survive for hours. The patient will be disconnected from all machinery and taken to an operating room where surgeons have up to 2 hours to fix the injury. The saline is then replaced with blood. If the heart does not restart by itself, as it did in the pig trial, the patient is resuscitated. The new blood will heat the body slowly, which should help prevent any reperfusion injuries.

The technique will be tested on 10 people, and the outcome compared with another 10 who met the criteria but who weren't treated this way because the team wasn't on hand. The technique will be refined then tested on another 10, says Tisherman, until there are enough results to analyse.

"We've always assumed that you can't bring back the dead. But it's a matter of when you pickle the cells," says Rhee.

Getting this technique into hospitals hasn't been easy. Because the trial will happen during a medical emergency, neither the patient nor their family can give consent. The trial can only go ahead because the US Food and Drug Administration considers it to be exempt from informed consent. That's because it will involve people whose injuries are likely to be fatal and there is no alternative treatment. The team had to have discussions with groups in the community and place adverts in newspapers describing the trial. People can opt out online. So far, nobody has.

Tisherman says he eventually hopes to extend the technique to other conditions.

For now, suspended animation is limited to a few hours. But that's not to say that more lengthy suspension isn't possible.

"We're trying to save lives, not pack people off to Mars," says Tisherman. "Can we go longer than a few hours with no blood flow? I don't know. Maybe years from now someone will have figured out how to do it, but it will certainly take time."

Money Affects Human Lives

PhRMA's Money Affects Human Lives–and Journalism Too

By Jim Naureckas

 

Josh Marshall, editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo (3/27/14), is "excited to announce that we've launched a very cool new section" to the  website called Idea Lab: Impact. 

Marshall describes its focus:

How is science and applied technology affecting real human lives? How is it impacting people and communities living on the margins of global wealth and on the margins of the technological transformations of the 21st century–whether that's in Sub-Saharan Africa or Appalachia or in congested great cities of the world. Basically, how is and how can science and technology change the lives of people in their everyday lives–not only with their gadgets and not only for people who command great wealth, but real world impacts for everyone.

Marshall also points out that Idea Lab: Impact is "being sponsored by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America." Yes, PhRMA, the lobbying group that has helped make the marketing of medicine one of the most profitable industries in America–they certainly do have an interest in how "science and applied technology affect[s] real human lives."

For example, when PhRMA  got the Obama administration to oppose letting people import drugs from other countries, and agree not to let Medicare negotiate lower prices for drugs (Huffington Post, 9/13/09)–that affected real human lives, from Appalachia to congested great cities, by making some humans unable to afford medicine that they need to keep living.

And when PhRMA persuaded Vice President Al Gore to oppose South Africa making its own AIDS drugs to deal with a catastrophic epidemic (Extra!, 9/99), that affected real human lives too–in Sub-Saharan Africa, like Marshall says.

Yes, with such a direct interest in how technology impacts human lives, it's no wonder PhRMA is eager to give its money to fund Josh Marshall's journalism on the subject. The only question is: Why is he willing to take it?

Tax cuts

New report slams Kansas tax cuts

By Niraj Chokshi

In 2012, Kansas enacted one of the largest tax cuts of any state ever, and the short-term results aren’t promising, a new report finds.

“Kansas is a cautionary tale, not a model,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities researchers Michael Leachman and Chris Mai write in their paper. “… Promises of immediate economic improvement have utterly failed to materialize.” The paper is unusually harsh for the CBPP, which despite criticisms of liberalism (including fresh ones from the office of Kansas’s governor), often produces detailed, fair policy analyses.

In response to the paper, the administration questioned CBPP’s leanings and disputed the paper’s findings.

“The Brownback administration has created a competitive advantage for Kansas,” Eileen Hawley, press secretary for Gov. Sam Brownback, said in an e-mail. “We have grown jobs, reduced unemployment and invested in education.”

The 2012 tax cuts were followed by another round last year, bringing the state closer to  Brownback’s stated goal of completely eliminating the income tax. Under those changes, the state’s tax rates ranging from 4.9 to 6.45 percent will continue to drop, reaching a range of 3 to 3.9 percent by 2018. (See the CBPP paper for more details.) After that, automatic cuts could still be made, depending on economic conditions.

When he signed the cuts into law nearly two years ago, Brownback said “the best thing we can do for individuals in this state and particularly for somebody who is struggling is provide jobs and job opportunities.” The cuts, he said, would do just that. But short-term results haven’t supported that, Leachman and Mai argue in their report.

The cuts slashed available revenue, leading to declines at a time when most states have seen revenue growth. Kansas’s revenue drop last year was second only to Alaska’s, according to one academic estimate. Revenues grew in 38 states, fueling a nationwide average of 2 percent growth. Kansas’s own nonpartisan legislative analysts estimate a revenue decline of about $5.2 billion by the end of fiscal 2018 thanks to the cuts.

The impact of the 2012 cuts was uneven as a share of income. The cuts saved the wealthiest 1 percent the most, as a share of their income, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and reproduced by CBPP. Only one group saw taxes eat up a larger share of their income: the bottom fifth.

And the drop in revenue was matched by a drop in school funding, CBPP found. Last school year, 18 states raised general funding per student relative to inflation, while 29 did so this year. As general school funding rebounded in the median state, Kansas’ continues to fall — and would fall further under Brownback’s proposal, CBPP found. Should his cuts be enacted, school funding would be 17 percent below pre-recession levels, adjusted for inflation.

The Brownback administration contends that his budget includes increases to education spending. It does, but they amount to a 0.1 percent increase between the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years, an increase likely to be outpaced by inflation, which rarely grows at rates of less than 1 percent.

ESO 137-001 stripped away

Spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 hurtles through massive galaxy cluster Abell 3627 some 220 million light years away. The distant galaxy is seen in this colorful Hubble/Chandra composite image through a foreground of the Milky Way's stars toward the southern constellation Triangulum Australe. As the spiral speeds along at nearly 7 million kilometers per hour, its gas and dust is stripped away when ram pressure with the cluster's own hot, tenuous intracluster medium overcomes the galaxy's gravity. Evident in Hubble's near visible light data, bright star clusters have formed in the stripped material along the short, trailing blue streaks. Chandra's X-ray data shows off the enormous extent of the heated, stripped gas as diffuse, darker blue trails stretching over 400,000 light-years toward the bottom right. The significant loss of dust and gas will make new star formation difficult for this galaxy. A yellowish elliptical galaxy, lacking in star forming dust and gas, is just to the right of ESO 137-001 in the frame.

Houston Ship Channel spill

It’s fascinating to see just how quickly cleanups can go when the oil companies’ profits are at stake; just a few days have passed since an oil barge and bulk carrier collided in the Houston Ship Channel, releasing nearly 200,000 gallons of the stickiest, heaviest fuel oil into Galveston Bay. The spill contaminated 19 miles of shoreline and shut down the ultra-busy Ship Channel, making it impossible for a number of major refineries to get their product to market.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

The Rosetta spacecraft has caught a first glimpse of its destination comet since waking up from deep-space hibernation on Jan. 20. The first images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko were taken on March 20 and 21 by the Optical, Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System (OSIRIS) wide-angle camera and narrow-angle camera. Rosetta is an international mission spearheaded by the European Space Agency with support and instruments provided by NASA.

The two images were taken at a distance of about three million miles (five million kilometers) and required a series of exposures of 60 to 300 seconds, taken with the wide-angle and narrow-angle camera. The imaging of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is part of six weeks of activities dedicated to preparing the spacecraft’s science instruments for close-up study of the comet. Rosetta has been traveling through the solar system for 10 years, and will arrive at the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in August of this year.

Rosetta was reactivated Jan. 20 after a record 957 days in hibernation. The three U.S. instruments aboard Rosetta are the Microwave Instrument for the Rosetta Orbiter, Alice (an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph) and the Ion and Electron Sensor.

Five Dirty Pipelines

It’s Not Just Keystone — Five Dirty Pipelines You’ve Never Heard Of

by Tara Lohan

By now most people have heard of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline and the fact that, after five years of deliberation and protest, its fate still hangs in the balance (the southern portion is already built, but the northern portion that crosses the Canadian-US border awaits a permitting decision). The issue has galvanized the environmental movement, inspired dozens of high-profile demonstrations and captured media attention. But while the impacts from Keystone XL are significant, it’s not the only tar sands pipeline project in town.

Usually pipelines don’t draw much attention unless something goes wrong — like when a suburban Mayflower, Ark., neighborhood was flooded with heavy crude from the Alberta tar sands last May courtesy of a busted Exxon pipeline. But increasingly, communities aren’t waiting until catastrophe strikes to voice their opposition to new or expanded pipeline projects — partly because of environmental and public health risks from spills and partly out of concern for increasing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

When Keystone XL was brought into the spotlight, people began to understand that not all pipelines are created equal — a pipeline carrying “dilbit,” or diluted bitumen from tar sands — poses different (and often greater) risks than a conventional oil pipeline. Hazardous chemicals and other hydrocarbons need to be added, along with high pressure and heat, to move viscous dilbit through a pipe. And when spills occur, the oil doesn’t sheen at the surface; it sinks — making cleanup difficult (or impossible). Just ask communities along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan where a 2010 dilbit spill of close to a million gallons is still causing headaches even after $1 billion in cleanup operations.

And then there are also the environmental implications that come from the mining of tar sands, which have devastated the boreal forests of Alberta, creating massive lakes of toxic chemicals, clear cuts, and polluted water and air.

Here’s a great description from Worldwatch Institute of what’s involved:

Producing oil from the tar sands is scraping the bottom of the oil barrel. Tar sands consist of a mixture of 85 percent sand, clay, and silt; 5 percent water; and 10 percent crude bitumen, the tar-like substance that can be converted to oil. Bitumen doesn’t flow like crude oil, and getting it out of the tar sands is a messy job. The current technology, which has evolved relatively little since it was first developed in the early 20th century, is a hot-water-based separation process that requires huge quantities of water and energy. Imagine mixing a bucket of roofing tar into a child’s sandbox. Then boil some water, pour it into the sandbox, and try to wash the tar out of the sand.

In summary, it’s about the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive way to get energy these days.

In a 2012 op-ed in The New York Times, leading US climatologist Dr. James Hansen wrote, “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” He was referring to the greenhouse gas impacts from the development and export of tar sands from Alberta. His “game over” assessment became a rallying cry for opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. But these days it could apply to a growing number of other pipelines in the works that could also carry dilbit.

Here are five projects that rival Keystone XL in size, but which very few people have heard of.

Alberta Clipper (Line 67)

The Alberta Clipper (otherwise known as Line 67) is part of a large network of pipelines owned by Enbridge, the company responsible for the spill of dilbit into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. The 1,000-mile Alberta Clipper line, completed in 2010, is still a work in progress. It was recently expanded to carry 570,000 barrels a day and now is seeking the okay to hit a design capacity of 880,000 barrels a day.

The line travels from the tar sands capital Hardisty, Alberta, southeast through Canada and then across North Dakota and Minnesota, ending in Superior, Wis. Enbridge already received permission from Canada’s National Energy Board for the expansion. But like the Keystone XL, things on the US side are still hung up pending State Department approval. With a max capacity of 880,000 barrels a day, the Clipper is larger than Keystone XL’s expected capacity of 800,000 barrels a day.

While most of the public hasn’t heard about it, the project hasn’t escaped the attention of environmental groups. As Lena Moffitt of the Sierra Club wrote, the expansion means hundreds of thousands of gallons more of “heavy, toxic, corrosive tar sands being blasted against the inside of the pipeline — increasing the risk of a spill and increasing the danger and size of any such spill.”

2. Line 3 Rebuild

If pipeline companies like Enbridge and TransCanada have learned anything in recent years, it’s that getting the Obama administration’s stamp of approval for pipeline projects is no longer a sure thing (or at least a quick thing). Fortunately for them, there are some loopholes.

Enbridge is willing to shell out $7 billion for a rebuild of their Line 3 pipeline, which also transports light crude from Hardisty, Alberta, to Superior, Wis. The line, 34-inches in diameter and built in 1968, is one of six in its US Mainline system. The replacement plan would allow the line to be widened by two inches and hit a capacity of 760,000 barrels of oil a day — nearly twice its current capacity.

And here’s the kicker. Heather Libby writes for Desmog Canada, “Unlike the Keystone XL pipeline or its predecessor Line 67… this project is classified as ‘replacement’ or ‘maintenance,’ meaning it operates under an existing presidential permit and does not require a new one.”

The change will allow Enbridge to bring nearly the same capacity as the Keystone XL will handle across the border, without requiring any sign-off from the State Department, and it will also allow it to move crude oil ranging from light (which it currently carries) to heavy (which includes dilbit).

3. Energy East

Not to be outdone by Enbridge, TransCanada is plotting a pipeline that will be the largest in North America, with a capacity of 1.1 million barrels a day. The company will be applying for a permit from Canada’s National Energy Board this summer. The route is not set in stone, but the company reports that the “4,600-kilometre pipeline will carry 1.1-million barrels of crude oil per day from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Eastern Canada.”

The project would involve converting existing gas pipeline, adding new pipeline, and building new pump stations and tank terminals. It would link oil-producing regions in Western Canada with refineries in Montreal, Quebec City, and St. John, New Brunswick.

While it will run entirely on Canadian soil and won’t cross the US border, it’s still an international issue. In addition to supplying Canadian refineries, Enbridge says the pipeline will include “marine facilities that enable access to other markets by ship.”

A new report from Canada’s Environmental Defence reveals that Eastern Canadian refineries have about all they can handle already from other sources and most of what Energy East carries will end up traveling to off-shore markets.

“Canadians are being misled about this risky project. The evidence is clear that Energy East is primarily an export pipeline. Canadians would have all the risks of the pipeline, but little reward,” said Adam Scott of Environmental Defence. “Energy East threatens thousands of Canadians with the risk of a tar sands oil spill and only benefits the companies that want to export Canadian crude oil.”

4. Flanagan South

Work is already underway on Enbridge’s Flanagan South — a 589-mile pipeline — despite legal challenges from the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation. The 36-inch diameter pipeline will link Pontiac, Ill., with “pipeline crossroads of the world” Cushing, Okla. (which is also the starting point of Keystone XL’s already-operational southern leg).

Enbridge says the pipeline will have an “initial capacity of 600,000 barrels per day.” But at the rate Enbridge is going lately, expect a plan to expand its capacity shortly. It will also run alongside Enbridge’s Spearhead pipeline (for a combined volume of 790,000 barrels a day).

The pipeline will be able to carry heavy crude (including dilbit) from Western Canada, as well as fracked oil from North Dakota’s booming (and literally explosive ) Bakken Shale. “The Flanagan South Pipeline gives North Dakota’s Bakken and western Canadian producers timely, economical and reliable options to deliver a variety of crude oil supplies to refinery hubs throughout the heart of North America or as far as the Gulf Coast,” the company reports. “From Cushing, shippers can continue through the Seaway Crude Pipeline System to meet the crude supply needs of refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast.” That’s right — just like the infamous Keystone XL, this largely unheard-of pipeline will enable tar sands product to hit Gulf Coast refineries, making it a prime target for export.

Enbridge doesn’t have to mess around with State Department permits and seek Obama’s blessing for this pipeline, in fact it is speeding the process along by using a Nationwide Permit 12 from the Army Corps of Engineers. This type of permit is considered a “fast-track” because it bypasses the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which would require an environmental impact statement and public comments.

The Sierra Club and NWF’s lawsuit contends that the project was executed behind closed doors. “This massive pipeline has been authorized without any public notice, without any opportunity for public comment, without any public hearings, and without any NEPA review of the extensive environmental impacts of the entire pipeline, including the grave risk of oil spills,” the lawsuit states.

Doug Hayes, a Sierra Club attorney, says the organization has used the Freedom of Information Act to see the company’s permit application, but requests for even that basic information have been denied.

At issue is also the use of the Nationwide Permit 12, which is given for “single and complete projects” that won’t result in impacts to more than a half-acre of wetland. Even though Flanagan South will have about 2,000 stream crossings, “the definition of ‘single and complete linear project’ allows the Corps to treat each water crossing as a separate ‘single and complete project,’” the lawsuit explains. So the cumulative impacts of the pipeline are not assessed.

5. Seaway

In direct competition with TransCanada’s newly operational southern leg of the Keystone XL, which runs from Cushing, Okla., to refineries around Houston, Enterprise Product Partners and Enbridge teamed up a few years ago to reconfigure the Seaway pipeline.

Built in 1976, Seaway originally moved imported oil arriving in Freeport, Texas, north to midwest refineries. But a few years ago Enbridge and Enterprise decided to reverse the flow of the pipeline and use it to bring dilbit south from Cushing, Okla., to Houston. The repurposed and reversed line originally carried 180,000 barrels a day, but was expanded to 400,000 barrels a day last year. And now the companies are building a twin line that together will carry 850,000 barrels a day. It’s expected to be operational this year.

Reversing and repurposing pipelines has become more common with the expansion of tar sands mining in Alberta. Such changes are not usually subject to additional environmental or regulatory scrutiny. But there is concern of increased risk when older pipelines, which previously carried conventional oil, are instead used to carry dilbit, which is more viscous and needs a hotter, heavily pressurized pipeline. The dilbit spill that coated a Mayflower, Ark., neighborhood last year — Exxon’s Pegasus pipeline — was reversed to carry dilbit at a higher volume.

Other pipeline reversal plans are in the works, with Exxon and Enbridge working to reverse the flow of two pipelines in the northeast. The first, Line 9, links Sarnia, Ontario and Montreal. The second is the Portland-Montreal pipeline that crosses into Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Both currently pipe conventional oil west, but would be reversed to send dilbit to the ports of Maine. Both plans have seen much local pushback, but have been a mere blip on the radar of national media coverage in the US.

Sierra Club’s Hayes said that too often, as with Flanagan South, “these other pipelines are being permitted behind closed doors.” The kind of pushback that we’ve seen with Keystone XL, which requires State Department approval, isn’t possible because the public is given no notice.

But increased vigilance from environmental organizations and community groups (as well as growing opposition from landowners angered by potential eminent domain seizures for pipeline routes) may bring some much-needed attention to these projects.

350.org, one of the groups that has led the charge against Keystone XL, says it’s also helping to support other opposition campaigns.

“In project after project, communities are facing an all-risk and no-gain proposition around expanded refining and distribution of tar sands,” said David Stember, 350.org’s regional tar sands organizer. “Like the Keystone fight we’re seeing that local citizens must come together to have a voice in state and local regulatory processes to stop these projects. Though we’re already deeply involved in several state and regional campaigns, once the Keystone project is finally stopped, we’ll continue opposing tar sands infrastructure expansion across North America.”