Our World is Changing in Ways We Would Rather Deny

Welcome to the new normal: It’s called a Polycrisis  to describe multiple crises occurring simultaneously. The term polycrisis illuminates how global crises are interconnected, entwining and worsening one another. It, of course, includes  America’s summer of heat, floods, and climate change. The United States is hardly alone in its share of climate disasters. 2022 wasn’t just a freak summer. Arctic sea ice algae is heavily contaminated with microplastics;  Fast-warming Europe risks more droughts as Alps glaciers melt at a record rate. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans live in communities with harmful air quality.  The ocean warming study is so distressing that scientists don’t want to talk about it.

Nearly one in five Americans live in communities with harmful air quality. The most severe impacts are felt in the Western United States, where increasing wildfires have worsened air pollution. People of color are also disproportionately affected.

Elevated levels of toxic metals detected in popular drinks.  A new study led by Tulane University has found that various commonly consumed beverages, such as single and mixed fruit juices, plant-based milk, sodas, and teas, contain toxic metals exceeding federal drinking water standards.

By measuring the concentrations of 25 toxic metals and trace elements in 60 beverages frequently found in grocery stores, the experts discovered that five contained such potentially dangerous substances above federal drinking water standards.

Giant blobs of seaweed are hitting Florida. Heat waves fueled by climate change topple records around the globe. Underwater heat waves could be reshaping the weather around the world.

Over the years, such extreme events are occurring in increasing frequency and intensity, magnifying the human and financial cost of these disasters. We’re headed for 4 degrees of global warming and looking at a future where we cannot stop climate change. A colossal iceberg trapped near Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ for 20 years is finally on the move.

There has been a devastating’ melt of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. A once-stable glacier in Greenland is now rapidly disappearing.  The unexpected melting of Greenland Glacier could double sea-level rise projections.

The current climate path will lead to the collapse of life on Earth, say scientists. Failing to limit the global temperature to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels could trigger tipping points and lead to the collapse of life on Earth, two climate scientists have warned.

He also said that how the Earth’s natural systems behave after 1.5C is unknown and that it will likely trigger five tipping points which would see the Earth heat uncontrollably towards disaster.

The five tipping points identified are the melting of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the melting of permafrost in the far north, a mass die-off of tropical coral reefs, and melting sea ice in the Bering Sea.

A study of almost 2,000 lakes, covering 95 percent of the world’s lake water, showed that they lost 53 percent of their water storage in over 30 years — three times more than previously estimated. Climate change caused about 36 percent of this loss for natural lakes. For both natural and human-made lakes, climate change and human consumption accounted for 47 to 65 percent of the loss, the study said.

The research also found that one in four people worldwide lives near a lake that is drying up, highlighting “the need to include climate change and sedimentation impacts in sustainable water resources management.”
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A recent study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has found that we are headed toward a sixth mass extinction. The study, which analyzed more than 70,000 species across the globe, found that 48% of these species are declining in population size, with fewer than 3% seeing increases. The IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species classifies about 28% of species as under threat of extinction.

The main drivers of this extinction crisis are destroying wild landscapes to make way for farms, towns, cities, roads, and climate change. Climate change is already significantly impacting many species and is predicted to have an increasingly worse impact as the world warms.

The IUCN study is a stark warning of the consequences of human activity on the natural world. If we do not take action to protect our planet’s biodiversity, we could lose millions of species in the coming decades.

‘Frightening’: record-busting heat and drought hit Europe in 2022

El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals

The threat of climate change is real and urgent. It affects our lives in many ways, such as higher temperatures, more extreme weather, and more frequent natural disasters. Global weather patterns are changing due to climate change, and the future looks grim. For example, California has experienced severe droughts, floods, blizzards, and winds in the past few months, causing deaths and damages.

The state has also recorded the highest snowpack ever, which raises questions about how a warmer climate will impact it. Meanwhile, scientists warn that deadly tornadoes that have struck parts of the US are a sign of more damage from global heating. These tornadoes and storms have killed over 50 people in Alabama, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Massive amounts of methane gas spew from wildfires.

Climate report: Earth just had its second-warmest March on record

Globally, March 2023 was the second-warmest March in the 174-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January–March) global surface temperature was the fourth warmest on record. According to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Outlook, it is virtually certain (>99.0%) that the year 2023 will rank among the 10-warmest years on record, and there is a 96% chance it will rank among the top five.

Coinciding with the release of the January 2023 Global Climate Report, the NOAA Global Surface Temperature (NOAAGlobalTemp) dataset version 5.1.0 replaced version 5.0.0. This new version includes complete global coverage and an extension of the data record back in time an additional 30 years to January 1850. While anomalies and ranks might differ slightly from what was reported previously, the main conclusions regarding global climate change are similar to the previous version. Please see NOAA’s Commonly Asked Questions Document and web story for additional information.

Our overheating world is likely to break a key temperature limit for the first time over the next few years, scientists predict.

Researchers say there’s now a 66% chance we will pass the 1.5C global warming threshold between now and 2027.

The chances are rising due to emissions from human activities and a likely El Niño weather pattern later this year.

If the world passes the limit, scientists stress the breach, while worrying, will likely be temporary.

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Hitting the threshold would mean the world is 1.5C warmer than it was during the second half of the 19th Century, before fossil fuel emissions from industrialisation really began to ramp up.

And breaking the limit even for just one year is a worrying sign that warming is accelerating and not slowing down.

The 1.5C figure has become a symbol of global climate change negotiations. Countries agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Going over 1.5C yearly for a decade or two would see far greater warming impacts, such as longer heatwaves, more intense storms, and wildfires.

But passing the level in one of the next few years would not mean that the Paris limit had been broken. Scientists say there is still time to restrict global warming by cutting emissions sharply.

Our overheating world is likely to break a key temperature limit for the first time over the next few years, scientists predict.

Researchers say there’s now a 66% chance we will pass the 1.5C global warming threshold between now and 2027.

The chances are rising due to emissions from human activities and a likely El Niño weather pattern later this year.

If the world passes the limit, scientists stress the breach, while worrying, will likely be temporary.

Hitting the threshold would mean the world is 1.5C warmer than it was during the second half of the 19th Century before fossil fuel emissions from industrialization began to ramp up.

And breaking the limit even for just one year is a worrying sign that warming is accelerating and not slowing down.

The 1.5C figure has become a symbol of global climate change negotiations. Countries agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Going over 1.5C yearly for a decade or two would see far greater warming impacts, such as longer heatwaves, more intense storms, and wildfires.

But passing the level in one of the next few years would not mean that the Paris limit had been broken. Scientists say there is still time to restrict global warming by cutting emissions sharply.

Implausible heat is everywhere. Looking at historical data from 1959 to 2021, we found that 31% of Earth’s land surface has already experienced such statistically implausible heat (though the Pacific Northwest heatwave is exceptional even among these events). These regions are spread all across the globe with no clear spatial pattern.

Socioeconomic factors, including population size, population growth, and level of development, will exacerbate these impacts. As a result, we factor in population and economic development projections in our assessment of the regions that are most at risk globally.

The first is that statistically implausible heatwaves can occur anywhere on the Earth, and we must be very cautious about using the historical record in isolation to estimate the “maximum” heatwave possible. Policymakers across the globe should prepare for exceptional heatwaves that would be deemed implausible based on current records.

The second is that there are many regions whose historical record is not exceptional and, therefore, more likely to be broken. These regions have been lucky so far, but as a result, they are likely to be less well-prepared for an unprecedented heatwave in the near future. These regions must prepare for more intense heatwaves than they have already experienced.

Republicans have been lying to their voters in the Midwest and South for decades, and now those same voters are dying as a result of unprecedented severe weather that ties directly back to those lies. As more and more people are killed by extraordinarily severe weather in places where it used to be unusual, it will get harder and harder to keep Red State citizens from finding out how badly the unholy alliance between Republicans and oil barons has screwed them.

The record-breaking temperatures seen in the summer of 2022, with temperatures exceeding 40ºC for the first time here in human history, brought unprecedented numbers of heat-related deaths, wildfire incidents and significant infrastructure disruption.. Climate change means many weather extremes driving these impacts will continue to get worse for several decades at least.”

Breaks Summer Heat Record Set During Dust Bowl in 1936: NOAA

The United States in June, July, and August were the hottest since records began, including the Dust Bowl summer of 1936. The combination of high temperatures with drought in some regions and high precipitation in others led to a summer of weather extremes all closely tied to global warming and the climate emergency.

Just months ago, one of the biggest environmental stories out of California and much of the western U.S. was a drought — megadrought to be exact. According to the Forest Service, 9.5 million trees died last year in California, mostly fir and pine died. Now as the region has been drenched with record rains and snow in recent weeks, California is having its 12th atmospheric river this winter following the historic drought. Though the wet weather is not without its problems, including flooding and landslides, scientists say it has started to fill up some of the country’s biggest reservoirs that were previously dangerously low.

Climate change added at least 10% more rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm shows. MIT hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel said in general, a warmer world does make storms rainier.

Scientists have predicted that droughts and floods will become more frequent and severe as our planet warms and climate changes.   Now a new NASA-led study confirms that major droughts and pluvials – periods of excessive precipitation and water storage on land – have indeed been occurring more often.

In the study published March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water, two NASA scientists examined 20 years of data from the NASA/German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellites to identify extreme wet and dry events. Floods and droughts account for more than 20% of the economic losses caused by extreme weather events in the U.S. each year. The economic impacts are similar around the world, though the human toll tends to be most devastating in poor neighborhoods and developing nations.

The scientists also found that the worldwide intensity of these extreme wet and dry events – a metric that combines extent, duration, and severity – is closely linked to global warming.

From 2015-2021 – seven of the nine warmest years in the modern record – the frequency of extreme wet and dry events was four per year, compared with three per year in the previous 13 years. This makes sense, say the authors because warmer air causes more moisture to evaporate from Earth’s surface during dry events; warm air can also hold more moisture to fuel severe snowfall and rainfall events.

“Climate change is sometimes misunderstood as being about changes in the weather. In reality,  it is about changes in our very way of life.” – Paul Polman. The West is running out of water. Lake Mead and Shasta Lake are running dry and are projected the water supply is headed toward catastrophic failure. Entire cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix exist because of these waters. They sustain California’s agriculture, which is America’s breadbasket.

The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.” in the next seven years, we are going to run out of water. This finding — demand exceeding supply by 40% — comes from a new report by the Global Water Commission. It’s the first of its kind from this organization.

We now face the prospect of a 40% shortfall in freshwater supply by 2030, with severe shortages in water-constrained regions. And fundamentally, as the science and evidence show, this mismanagement of water has pushed the global water cycle out of balance for the first time in human history. We have breached the planetary boundaries for water that keep the Earth’s system safe for humanity and all life.

The U.S. is facing scorching heat in the summer of 2022 with more than two dozen states experiencing heat warnings and many Americans being exposed to temperatures higher than 90 degrees. The deadly weather is severe on its own, but it’s also a sign of what’s to come as the planet heats up due to climate change. A quarter of the U.S. will fall inside an extreme heat belt. Breathing is going to get tougher as hotter temperatures mean more air pollution.

Here are the 10 cities with the worst air pollution in the United States:

10. Central areas in Birmingham, Alabama
9. A semi-circle of neighborhoods in central Atlanta
8. Semi-rural areas in central Pennsylvania
7. A swath of the St Louis Metro Area
6. A large portion of Houston
5. A central swath of Indianapolis, Indiana
4. North-west Indiana industrial zones
3. Chicago’s South and West Sides
2. South Los Angeles
1. Bakersfield, California – The area around Bakersfield, an agricultural town in California’s Central Valley 100 miles north of Los Angeles, has the most unhealthful air in America.

The last eight years have been the warmest on record, researchers say
Concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane have continued to rise despite an urgent need to reduce them.

Last year was the fifth hottest ever recorded on the planet, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Tuesday. It was part of an unabated broader warming trend as humans continue to pump massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Extreme heat waves in Europe, Asia, and the United States — which stemmed in part from more than a century of burning fossil fuels — helped drive 2022’s unusual warmth, researchers found. Twelve European countries broke temperature records in 2022.

Europe sweltered through its hottest summer on record and its second-hottest year overall, researchers said. Pakistan experienced catastrophic flooding as a result of extreme rainfall. In February, Antarctic Sea ice reached its lowest minimum in 44 years of satellite records and the Arctic sea ice is melting worse and faster than expected, studies show.

Rising temperatures and pollution have led to an explosive growth of harmful algal blooms, contaminating drinking water and harming human health.

The year “2022 was yet another … of climate extremes across Europe and globally. These events highlight that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of our warming world,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said in a statement announcing the annual findings.

The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit.

Governments must urgently stop subsidizing the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water.

Nations must start to manage water as a global common good because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbors for water supplies, and overuse, pollution and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report’s authors say.

Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report told the Guardian the world’s neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. “The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It’s a triple crisis.”

As the water gets more scarce and the land becomes hotter, drier, and harder to live upon, the discontent of MAGA Republicans could very well metastasize into violence — especially if California discourages the rebuilding of fire-destroyed towns. Likewise, flooding in seacoast towns all over America results in governments refusing to rebuild in these areas all but certain to be devastated by hurricanes again.

Drought has become a way of life in some parts of the United States. Long-term shifts in streamflow could signal a fundamental change in climate that scientists believe the country’s infrastructure is not designed to endure. Wells are running dry in the drought-weary Southwest as foreign-owned farms guzzle water to feed cattle overseas.

Water levels at one of the UK’s largest reservoirs has dropped to just 20 percent of its capacity amid fears of shortages this winter in England.

For small islands, climate change is life and death. Some islands will be swallowed up. The effect on lost cities from the U.S. coastline is even more dramatic.

Political conflicts occur when idealogy is at odds with reality. Florida congressmen are requesting emergency funding to make repairs resulting from Hurricane Ian. In the month before Ian, they opposed legislation that provided billions in disaster relief.  They can’t have their cake (their ideological rigidity) and eat it, too. More anger, more potential for violence.

Solutions to growing water shortages are hard to achieve. A proposal to use ocean water to desalinate seawater in Mexico, at the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez, and send it north across the border. The panel concluded that California shouldn’t pursue such a plan, citing costs estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, harm to the coastal environment, and a construction timeline that would take many years before any water would reach the lake.

Scientists have long warned that climate change will adversely affect weather patterns and living conditions around the world. These warnings are now turning into a painful reality. Worse, the range of possible outcomes has proven to be increasingly “fat-tailed”: extreme weather events such as heatwaves, severe storms, and floods are more likely than normal statistical distributions would predict.

California produces more than one-third of U.S. vegetables and three-quarters of domestic fruits and nuts.

The drought is echoing through beef supply chains, resulting in higher prices for consumers for at least the next two years – and likely be the last straw for many small family-run cattle herds that are a key part of the cattle industry.

What lies ahead are inevitably higher food prices and shortages.

In California, desalination offers only a partial solution to growing drought
As the water in the Western U.S. becomes an increasingly rare commodity, the driest states are grasping at solutions for an even drier future — investing heavily in technologies to maximize the conservation, and creation, of the region’s most precious resource.

With more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Ocean coastline, California appears to have access to a wellspring that other arid states lack. The technology to transform that unlimited sea supply into potable drinking water has existed for decades, through a process called desalination. Yet while two new desalination plants have received approvals in the past couple of months, California’s coast isn’t exactly teeming with such facilities.

That’s because the technology, which is both expensive and energy-intensive, can leave behind a mammoth-sized footprint on both surrounding communities and marine life, even as it helps quench the thirst of a parched citizenry.

 

Seattle

Portland

Boise

Shasta

Lake

Salt Lake

City

Lake

Oroville

Denver

San Francisco

Lake

Powell

Las

Vegas

Lake

Mead

Albuquerque

Los Angeles

Phoenix

San Diego

100 mi

100 km

Source: EPA

The big picture: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 600 people in the U.S. each year are killed by extreme heat, though other studies put the figure much higher.

A 2020 study looking at counties representing about 62 percent of the U.S. population found that in those alone, there were an average of 5,608 heat-attributed deaths each year between 1997 and 2006.

The Arctic is warming at a more rapid pace than previously thought — and four times faster than the world at large, according to research published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. A heat wave at -37˚C? that’s bad news at the South Pole
Arctic’s Last Ice Area May Disappear During Summer Months
Melting the Antarctic could impact oceans ‘for centuries.’

Because of the killing heat, crops are beginning to fail. like everything from cocoa to coffee to wheat to sugar to mustard is beginning to decline.

Extreme heat kills more people each year in the U.S. than in any other kind of natural disaster. A recent study found that more than a third of all heat deaths worldwide can be pinned on climate change. Parts of the U.S. are feeling the danger now.

Extreme heat uncovers lost villages, ancient ruins, and shipwrecks

In an eerie twist, volatile weather and heat-induced drought are unearthing glimpses of lost archaeological treasures and forgotten history.

 The U.S. is responsible for about 25 percent of all planet-warming emissions currently in the atmosphere, while Guatemala, for example, has contributed roughly 0.0002 percent. But more 75 percent of the heat deaths in that country can be linked to climate change.

Blistering heat waves have smashed temperature records around the globe this summer, scorching crops, knocking out power, fueling wildfires, buckling roads and runways, and killing hundreds in Europe alone.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 96 large active fires have burned 690,030 acres in eight states so far this summer, mostly concentrated in areas spanning the Northwest, Great Basin, and Northern Rockies. Smoke from the fires has been compromising air quality.

The sudden shift from an abstract threat to reality has many people wondering: is climate change unfolding faster than scientists had expected? Are these extreme events more extreme than studies had predicted they would be, given the levels of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere?

Every day, car tires produce vastly more particle pollution than exhaust. Tire particles contain a wide range of toxic organic compounds, making them subject to regulation.

A new poll in 2022 finds that the majority of households in the U.S. have been affected by extreme weather events, which have led to health and financial problems for some.  some report serious health problems (24 percent) or financial problems (17 percent). Fourteen percent of them say that they’ve had to evacuate from their homes and 14 percent say that they’ve suffered damage to their home or property.

Heat and Melting Ice

Global warming is causing glaciers and ice sheets to melt. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer. The expanding reach of climate-fueled disasters, a trend that has been increasing at least since 2018, shows the extent to which a warming planet has already transformed Americans’ lives. The American West is in the hottest and driest 23-year period in at least 1,200 years. The frequency of extremely hot weather and record temperatures and rainfall has increased around the world as a result of global warming, according to an international research project. Extreme heat kills more Californians every year than any other extreme weather event.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) declared 2021 was one of the planet’s seven hottest years since records began. It was a year of weather extremes. The year was about 1.11℃ above pre-industrial levels—the seventh year in a row that the average global temperature rise edged over 1℃. The WMO report echoes two separate official US analyses released last week that found 2021 was the sixth hottest year on record, tied with 2018.

Arctic temperatures soared to an unprecedented 100 degrees in 2020. 2021 experienced a tornado that is the longest one on record in the United States in a month in which tornadoes do not usually occur. Many of these events were exacerbated by climate change. Scientists say there are more to come – and worse – as the Earth’s atmosphere continues to warm through the next decade and beyond.

Heat-related deaths are occurring in regions that typically have milder climates, according to a University of Washington study published in August 2022 in the journal Atmosphere.

Global warming is causing more frequent and longer heat waves. Extreme heat causes crop losses, power failures, and school closures, and will test the “limits of human survivability.”

Based on the number of greenhouse gases humans have already added to the Earth’s atmosphere, the world is already guaranteed to experience  5 feet of sea-level rise in the coming decade. The first country to be swallowed up by the sea will be Kiribati, a small nation on a Pacific atoll. 64 percent of Americans live in places that experienced a multi-day heatwave in the past three months of 2021.  Mountain glaciers hold less ice than previously thought – it’s a concern for future water supplies but a drop in the bucket for sea-level rise.

Environmental threats are among our greatest risks by likelihood and severity of consequences.  This has been brought home by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic’s severe storms, fires, hurricanes, coastal storms, and floods. The eight worst wildfire weather years on record happened in the last decade. The rise in pollutants from forest fires in the Western states is reversing a decade of clean air gains in the U.S., according to a new study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Extreme winds, topography,  and vegetation influence the severity of mega-fires.

The climate crisis is turning the Arctic green. In northern Norway, trees are rapidly taking over the tundra and threatening an ancient way of life that depends on snow and ice.  The changes ahead may also bring the beginning of the end – a final termination – for many glaciers north and south,

Humidity

When it comes to measuring global warming, humidity, not just heat, matters in generating dangerous climate extremes, a new study finds. Researchers say temperature by itself isn’t the best way to measure climate change’s weird weather and downplays impacts in the tropics. But factoring in air moisture along with heat shows that climate change since 1980 is near twice as bad as previously calculated. The energy generated in extreme weather, such as storms, floods, and rainfall is related to the amount of water in the air. So a team of scientists in the U.S. and China decided to use an obscure weather measurement called equivalent potential temperature — or theta-e — that reflects “the moisture energy of the atmosphere.”

Wildfires in Colorado raged through the end of 2021. More than 500 families may enter a new year having lost their homes after runaway grass fires bore down on the region northwest of Denver. Approximately 34,000 residents of the towns of Superior and Louisville in Boulder County fled the “life-threatening” situation Thursday as 100-mph-plus winds acted like a turbine fanning the flames.. Residents remained barred from some adjacent municipalities as the Colorado State Patrol warned that flames were still present.

Climate change has destabilized the Earth’s poles, putting the rest of the planet in peril. These warm conditions are catastrophic for the sea ice that usually spans across the North Pole. This past summer saw the second-lowest extent of thick, old sea ice since tracking began in 1985. Large mammals like polar bears go hungry without this crucial platform from which to hunt. Marine life ranging from tiny plankton to giant whales is at risk.  The Greenland Ice Sheet Shrunk for 25th Year Straight in 2021, Report Shows.

Biden has told the nation “We can’t wait any longer to deal with the climate crisis. “We see it with our own eyes and it’s time to act.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said “Floods in New York are a reminder of what is at stake if we do not build resilient infrastructure while meeting the climate crisis. “American transit doesn’t just need repairs, it needs upgrades to withstand the climate challenges of the 21st century.”

Trapped under Earth’s permafrost – ground that remains frozen for a minimum of two years – are untold quantities of greenhouse gases, microbes, and chemicals, including the now-banned pesticide DDT. As the planet warms, permafrost is thawing at an increasing rate, as reported by the Environmental News Network.  A paper published earlier this year in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment looked at the current state of permafrost research. Along with highlighting conclusions about permafrost thaw, the paper focuses on how researchers are seeking to address the questions surrounding it.

Infrastructure is already affected: Thawing permafrost has led to giant sinkholes, slumping telephone poles, damaged roads, and runways, and toppled trees. More difficult to see is what has been trapped in permafrost’s mix of soil, ice, and dead organic matter. Research has looked at how chemicals like DDT and microbes – some of which have been frozen for thousands, if not millions, of years – could be released from thawing permafrost.

The risk of infectious diseases is now ranked at Number One, while in 2020 it came in 10th place.  Regardless of where COVID-D came from – passage from animals to humans or in a laboratory, we can expect new variants like Delta and Omicron named a “variant of concern”  and new diseases, like the Havana Syndrome.    COVID-19 is spreading to animals.  15 species in the U.S.—including cats, dogs, tigers, lions, hyenas, hippos, and white-tailed deer— have contracted the virus that causes COVID-19 so far. Might it spread to animals we use for food?

The U.N. climate summit, known as COP26 this year, brings officials from almost 200 countries to Glasgow to haggle over the best measures to combat global warming.

Drought

The American West has spent the last two decades in what scientists are now saying is the most extreme megadrought in at least 1,200 years. In a new study, researchers also noted that human-caused climate change is a significant driver of the unprecedented drought parching the U.S. Southwest since 2020.  They found the drought would not have reached its current punishing intensity without the extremely high temperatures brought by human-caused global warming. destructive conditions and offered a grim prognosis: even drier decades lie ahead. 

As part of their analysis, the team compared observations of precipitation and temperature across six southwestern states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah—for the 20-month period from January 2020 through August 2021. Many areas in the region experienced three successive “failed” wet seasons; the 2019-2020 winter wet season, the 2020 June-August North American monsoon, and the 2020-2021 winter wet season were all below average.    The cumulative precipitation for the 20-month period was the lowest on record, dating back to 1895. That left almost the entire western half of the contiguous United States in some level of drought at the end of August. 2021.  Drought in the breadbasket states of the midwest.

Lake Powell, the country’s second-largest reservoir and a key source of water and power for much of the West, is more parched than ever. In March 2022 month, the lake dropped below 25% capacity, the federal government said and has also lost 7% of its total potential capacity since 1963.

California has adopted drought rules outlawing water wasting, with fines of up to $500. In an effort to discourage wasteful water practices such as hosing off driveways or allowing irrigation water to run down streets, California water officials have imposed new drought rules for cities and towns throughout the state.

Water Shortages Rise to Crisis

Farmers use a majority of our groundwater, but corporations like Nestle and Coca-Cola in making their products, and companies like Google, who use billions of gallons of water a year to cool their servers.

We drink water to survive, to make food, to bathe, to wash our clothes, and use the bathroom. Every time you flush the toilet, it uses at least a gallon of water — and that’s an efficient model. Older toilets use six or seven gallons.

We already pay for our water.   Besides all that is sold in stores, if you live in a house, you have a water bill. If you live in an apartment, it’s factored into your rent.

Pure, clean drinking water will become one of the most valuable assets on earth worth more than oil. Imagine if the only way you could afford water was from public fountains and restrooms.

Groundwater accounts for nearly half of the domestic and agricultural water supply in the United States. Our current consumption of water vastly outstrips the water table refill rate, and demand is only expected to increase in the coming decades.; every nation on Earth is scrambling for freshwater reserves. The United States is not alone in this problem. The more groundwater we use, the less there is. This is because surfaces on the ground from which water has been extracted settle and close spaces once occupied by groundwater.

It is not only water that is being overly consumed; this applies to all types of commodities.  For example, Germany needs three planets for all it consumes.

In 2018, Cape Town came perilously close to ‘Day Zero’  that is, four million city inhabitants would have been left without water. Now another city, Nelson Mandela Bay, is facing acute water shortages and risks approaching its own Day Zero.

In increasingly dry western Kansas, underground water makes everything possible. Irrigation for crops. Stock water for cattle. Drinking water for towns. In increasingly dry western Kansas, underground water makes everything possible. Irrigation for crops. Stock water for cattle. Drinking water for towns. The Ogallala Aquifer provides 70-80% of the water used by Kansans each day. But the aquifer is drying up at an accelerating rate. Aquifer water levels across western and central Kansas dropped by more than a foot on average this past year. That’s the biggest single-year decrease since 2015, according to the Kansas Geological Survey’s annual report.

And while the aquifer is losing that foot of water, it’s barely being refilled. In most of western Kansas, less than one inch of water seeps underground to recharge the aquifer each year.

Water Moves

Water is moving away from dry regions towards wet regions, causing droughts to worsen in parts of the globe while intensifying rainfall events and flooding in others. In other words, wet areas are getting wetter, and dry areas are getting drier.  Because around 80 percent of global rainfall and evaporation happens over the ocean, while land gets drier, the oceans get fuller. In dense cities, only around 20% of rain actually infiltrates the soil. Instead, water drains and pipes carry it away.

In addition to obvious consequences like crop and sanitation failure, groundwater depletion can lead to disastrous social conflicts and even war. Between 2007 and 2010, drought in Syria drove millions of rural people into cities, where tensions quickly mounted and civil war ensued. Competition among nations for freshwater will only intensify.

There is a worldwide movement that seeks to restore water’s natural tendency to linger in places like wetlands and floodplains instead of tightly confining rivers with levees, putting buildings or parking lots where water wants to linger so it can be used, or erecting dams. In China, the idea of giving water space has been elevated from a fringe concept to a national mission.

Scientists are using the geological record of the deep sea to discover that past global warming has sped up deep ocean circulation. This is one of the missing links for predicting how future climate change may affect heat and carbon capture by the oceans. More vigorous ocean currents make it easier for carbon and heat to be “mixed in.”

Microscopic marine organisms called plankton use this dissolved carbon to build their shells. They sink down to the seabed after they die, sequestering the carbon. These sedimentary deposits are from the Earth’s largest carbon sink.

Maps indicate that over the last 13 million years as the earth progressively cooled and developed expanding inland ice caps, sediment breaks gradually became less frequent—a tell-tale sign of deep-sea circulation becoming more sluggish.

At the same unusual flooding is afflicting communities around the nation.

Water Quality 

91% of Pennsylvania schools that tested drinking water found lead in their water—only 9% of the schools removed it.  EWG researchers collected and reviewed results from water contaminant tests conducted by water utilities and regulators from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. After combing through the data from almost 50,000 water systems serving tens of millions of American households, the researchers found sweeping drinking water contamination from numerous pollutants such as arsenic, lead, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), radioactive materials, and pesticides.

Since the 1960s, the extent of an open ocean with low oxygen has increased by roughly the area of the European Union. More than 500 low-oxygen sites have been identified in coastal waters. These “dead zones” can cause mass killings of fish and are contributing to climate change. The problem starts on land with chemical pollution.

Compared to the previous (2019) update to the database, which identified 268 chemicals in America’s water utilities, the new database added 56 new chemicals. These substances are new PFAS or emerging pollutants, such as pesticides and radioactive material, that are currently monitored by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the agency’s Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule. However, these substances have yet to receive any legal limits, thwarting the water systems’ impetus to tackle the contamination, according to EWG.

Currently, the EPA regulates more than 90 contaminants in drinking water, a fraction of the agency’s inventory of more than 85,000 chemicals that fall under the Toxic Substances Control Act. The EPA’s Office of Water has not added any new substances to its regulated list since 2006.

Even for substances that are regulated by the EPA, their “legal limits were set based on outdated science,” Uloma Uche, an environmental health scientist at EWG who helped construct the tap water database, told EHN.

“We are not being exposed to just one contaminant when we’re drinking water,” said Uche. “We’re being exposed to multiple contaminants.”

The EPA’s water regulations “assure that public water systems are monitoring and taking actions to achieve meaningful reductions to human health risks from contaminants in accordance with the Safe Drinking Water Act,” an EPA spokesperson told EHN. The agency also “has evaluated a number of unregulated drinking water contaminants” under the Safe Drinking Water Act and is taking actions to update its regulations, said the spokesperson.

Consumers can enter their ZIP code into the tap water database and see a report of toxic contaminants in the area’s drinking water as well as safety assessments put together by EWG scientists. In many areas, various dangerous contaminants have been uncovered in water samples, although they were still in compliance with federal health-based drinking water standards.

Although your water is below the legal limit, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is safe from contaminants.

Air Pollution

Exposure to air pollution is linked to the increased severity of mental illness. The most comprehensive study of its kind., involving 13,000 people in London, found that a relatively small increase in exposure to nitrogen dioxide led to a 32% increase in the risk of needing community-based mental health treatment and an 18% increase in the risk of being admitted to hospital.

Other research has shown that small increases in dirty air are linked to significant rises in depression and anxiety and increased suicides.  It reduces intelligence and is linked to dementia. A global review concluded that air pollution may be damaging every organ in the human body.  More than two million people worldwide died of causes attributed to air pollution.  Methane in the atmosphere is at an all-time high; it has more than doubled in the atmosphere since 1750. Fossil fuels emit 70% more methane than governments admit.

The rate of major depression in adolescents increased more than 50% between 2005 and 2017, and the rate of moderate to severe depression in college students nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018.

A Harvard study links air pollution from fracking to early deaths. Among nearby residents. The researchers studied more than 15 million Medicare beneficiaries living in all major fracking regions and gathered data from more than 2.5 million oil and gas wells.

as air pollution may help predict people’s chances of dying from conditions like heart attack and stroke.

Exposure to above-average levels of outdoor air pollution increased the risk of death by 20 percent and increased the risk of death from cardiovascular disease specifically by 17 percent, the survey published in PLoS One  in June 2022.

The use of wood- or kerosene-burning stoves for cooking and heating homes without proper ventilation increased death risk by 23 percent and 9 percent respectively — raising the specific risk of death by cardiovascular disease by 36 percent and 19 percent, the study determined.

Extreme Heat

Extreme humid heat has more than doubled in frequency since 1979 raising the risk of heatstroke. If the hot air is too humid, heat exchange is blocked, and the body loses its primary means of cooling itself. When your body temperature gets too high, your body cooks to the point that your body’s proteins break down, enzymes stop regulating your organs’ functions. and your organs start shutting down. These are heat strokes.

Increased heat, drought, and insect outbreaks, all linked to climate change, have increased wildfires. Increasing global warming and land-use change are driving a global increase in extreme wildfires, with a 14% increase predicted by 2030 and a 30% increase by 2050, according to a UN report. and up to 52 percent by 2100. If emissions are not curbed and the planet heats up more, wildfire risks could rise by up to 57 percent by the end of the century.

Declining water supplies reduced agricultural yields, increased ill-health in cities due to heat, and flooding and erosion in coastal areas are additional concerns.

The city of Abbotsford in British Columbia, just north of the US border near Vancouver, recorded its hottest day ever in late June when temperatures climbed to 109 degrees Fahrenheit during an unprecedented heatwave.

Just 140 days later, it smashed another record: The city observed its wettest day with nearly four inches of heavy rainfall in less than 24 hours.

Depleting Our Reserves

To get an idea of the imprint, humans have made on our planet, consider that all the structures we have built − roads, houses, skyscapes, schools, and churches outweigh all the animals and plants on Earth put together. People and our domestic animals now add up to 95% of the mass of all vertebrates – wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians constitute the remaining 5%.

As many as a million species could soon disappear from the face of the Earth in what amounts to the planet’s sixth mass extinction. Two-fifths of the world’s plant species are endangered.  Wetlands mismanagement is endangering 40,000 small but vital plant and animal species, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.  Already wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years as humans continue to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet, and fail to curb pollution.

73% of the planet’s regenerative capacity: that is, what we use for fuel and housing was still within the limits of sustainability. By 2016, the demand for food, fuel, and housing had grown to an unsustainable 170% resulting in around 700 to 800 million people starving, and another one to two billion children and adults malnourished.  Antarctica’s ice is falling into the ocean and this will lead to higher food prices.

Alarming stories from Antarctica are now more frequent than ever; the ice surface is melting, floating ice shelves are collapsing, and glaciers are flowing faster into the ocean.

Antarctica will be the largest source of future sea-level rise. Yet scientists don’t know exactly how this melting will unfold as the climate warms.

Our latest research looks at how the Antarctic ice sheet advanced and retreated over the past 10,000 years. It holds stark warnings, and possibly some hope, for the future.

The Current Imbalance

Future sea-level rise presents one of the most significant challenges of climate change, with economic, environmental, and societal impacts expected for coastal communities around the globe.

While it seems like a distant issue, the changes in Antarctica may soon be felt on our doorsteps, in the form of rising sea levels.

Complex models now gauge the impact of climate change on global food production. Climate change is a “threat multiplier,” with alarming results. It makes hunger emergencies worse. Crop yields could plummet, faster than expected. If crops fail, especially in two or three major breadbasket regions at the same time, as some models began to suggest, millions of people could starve.

Tomatoes are the most popular vegetable in the U.S. The time is approaching when there won’t be enough tomatoes. For the past 30-plus years, on average, the Central Valley would get five to seven days with temperatures above 100°F. This is the physiological threshold beyond which tomato plants cease producing By the end of the century, there could be 40-50 days that ho days per year.

More enormous storms are happening with greater frequency.  Kentucky in December 2021 was battered by another huge storm three weeks after tornadoes killed 80 and injured 100.

Hurricane Ida didn’t inundate New Orleans, but it did its surrounding communities that did not have the massive flood protection systems New Orleans has. How much money for infrastructure can go to save land destined for certain flooding?

Greenland’s immense ice sheet has lost enough ice in the past 20 years to submerge the entire United States in half a meter of water. The climate is warming faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet and melting ice from Greenland is now the main factor in the rise in the Earth’s oceans, according to NASA.

More than two million people have been killed by storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves since 1970, according to WMO data, as Reuters reported. The data showed that these weather-related natural disasters resulted in $3.64 trillion in damages worldwide. Since the 1970s early warning systems for extreme weather helped reduce the number of people killed by natural disasters by 76 percent, Reuters reported.

As wildfires worsen and sea levels rise, growing numbers of Americans are moving to places such as Vermont and the Appalachian Mountains. These are seen as safe havens from climate change. This population movement will intensify in the coming decades.

Since measurements began in 2002, the Greenland ice sheet has lost about 4,700 billion tonnes of ice, said Polar Portal, a joint project involving several Danish Arctic research institutes.  This represents 4,700 cubic kilometers of melted water — “enough to cover the entire US by half a meter” — and has contributed 1.2 centimeters to sea-level rise, the Arctic monitoring website added.

Civil Unrest

Population growth sparks both civil unrest and international conflict and ever-higher global average temperatures exacerbate the desperation of people and willingness to resort to violence.   It is predicted that between 25 million and 1 billion people will be driven from their homes by drought, poverty, civil war, flooding, or heat extreme by 2050.

The pandemic has produced cascading effects: more people are working at home than ever, supply bottlenecks are creating the worst inflation in 30 years, and people are more ill-tempered than ever.

In October, the American Psychiatric Association released a study showing a dramatic increase in anxiety among Americans, hitting 62% of all Americans, up from ~35% over prior years. The main causes were their families’ safety (80%), systemic racism (76%), COVID-19 (75%), their health (73%), gun violence (73%), and the looming presidential election (72%). Youth suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 – 24.  According to Gallup, 51% of Americans can’t think of a news source that reports the news objectively.

The climate of fear created by the prosecutions has already pushed some talented scientists to leave the United States and made it more difficult for others to enter or stay, endangering America’s ability to attract new talent in science and technology from China and around the world.
Lawmakers say these findings are “alarming.”

Unruly passengers on flights and the mounting surliness of customers toward service workers are resulting in many workers not returning to jobs after the pandemic. School shootings have become regular occurrences: Columbine High School, West Nickel Mines Amish School, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School.

A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September as workers took advantage of the surge in job openings across the country, a sign of how labor market imbalances continue to complicate the economic recovery 20 months into the pandemic. This is being called the Great Resignation. The number of people quitting in September constituted a whopping 3 percent of the workforce, according to the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. That number is up from the previous record set in August 2021 when 4.3 million people quit their jobs — about 2.9 percent of the workforce. In February 2020, before the big wave of pandemic-related layoffs began, 2.3 percent of workers quit their jobs.

The pandemic has deepened the rifts that exist between people from marital to work conflicts.  We are witnessing bad behavior acted out every day in our lives and on the news and with people being injured.  School and supermarket massacres are reflections of the disquiet.  Public officials are receiving death threats for performing their duties as Congressmen, election, and health officials. The movie Unhinged starring Russell Crowe shows the rage and fury manifested during the January 6 insurrection.

that the climate of fear created by the prosecutions has already pushed some talented scientists to leave the United States and made it more difficult for others to enter or stay, endangering America’s ability to attract new talent in science and technology from China and around the world.
Lawmakers say our findings are “startling.”

The new statistics reflect how severely in flux the labor market remains after the pandemic upended the course of business and life across the country in 2020.

How Americans feel about the economy roughly translates to how they feel about their politics. Factory workers, nurses, and school bus drivers are among the tens of thousands of Americans who walked off jobs in October, 2021 amid a surge of labor activism that economists and labor leaders have dubbed “Striketober.” The strike drives stem from the new leverage workers hold in the nation’s tight job market.

Shortages and Supply Lines

Climate change leads to changes in economic life. The same is beginning to hold true for everything from electronics to energy. What’s going on here? 

People are once again hoarding resulting in shortages on grocery shelves because of the supply-chain crunch.  Gas prices are high.

Consumer prices surged 6.8 percent in the year leading into November and 0.8 percent last month alone as a roaring economy overwhelmed struggling supply chains and fueled inflation, according to data released Friday by the Labor Department.

Consumer prices surged 6.8 percent in the year 2021 leading into November and 0.8 percent last month alone as a roaring economy overwhelmed struggling supply chains and fueled inflation, according to data released by the Labor Department.

You can search the keywords “supply chain management” on this database.

The continued and expanded use of nonrenewable natural resources will lead to their growth in shorter supply with sharply rising prices, or pricing above what most people can pay will worsen the economies of the world.  Some commodities may not be obtainable. China controls the supply of all 16 strategically critical rare-earth metals. In fact, 96% of global mining output for rare-earth metals comes from within China’s borders.

On the horizon is robots doing all production work, including manufacturing replacement robots. This can lead to massive unemployment, and the reduction in the share of income going to human labor, probably accompanied by increasing inequality. The economy is undergoing such massive changes there’s a big mismatch at the moment between the jobs available and jobs workers take.  Why does America have 8.4 million unemployed when there are 10 million job openings?

Consumers no longer instinctively trust the words of companies from which they have previously purchased goods or services. Instead, businesses need to demonstrate efforts towards key initiatives before consumers reach for their wallets. 85% of consumers have changed their minds about purchasing from a company because they felt it did not do enough to properly address climate change,

Shortages of semiconductor chips,  crucial materials, and staff are delaying the deployment of 5G infrastructure. What’s happened? Three factories — each hit in a different way. The one in Japan caught fire due to an equipment malfunction The one in Texas was hit by a historic snowstorm, which knocked out power for days. The one in Taiwan is being affected by the worst drought in half a century — and microchips require huge amounts of water to manufacture. Supply chain disruptions are stalling the delivery of goods, ranging from computer chips and medicines to meat and lumber. These shortages have been caused by the pandemic.

The “chip shortage” is something that the world doesn’t really grasp yet, in its full importance and magnitude. It is the first climate catastrophe-related shortage to hit us at a civilizational, global level. In a world of stable temperatures, guess what, we’d probably still have microchips to power our cars and gadgets and AV studios because factories wouldn’t be losing power or be so parched they don’t have enough water. But they are — and so we do have a microchip shortage that has been caused by climate change, aka global warming.

As the price of energy rises, the price of everything has to rise, too. Our economies are still about 80% dependent on fossil fuels. The problem isn’t the electricity grid, as you might think. It’s that making things like steel and cement and glass still use gas. The world has just one fossil fuel-free steel factory so far.  The Energy Information Agency forecasts that by 2023, the nation will set a new annual record for oil extraction: 4.6 billion barrels. Plans to build more than 200 new natural gas power plants are in the works.

In October 2021 the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach hit a fresh record of 100 vessels floating off the coast waiting to dock and unload, data from the Marine Exchange indicated.

The pandemic has hastened the disruption of supply lines.  Microchips, the sets of circuits hosted on small flat pieces of silicon, are intrinsic to industrial civilization: they are used in computers, cars, mobile phones, home appliances, and virtually all other electronic equipment. Chipmakers were usually able to keep pace with the growing demand for chips in products like automobiles and home electronics.  We already had a shortage of microchips because of COVID-19. Roughly 91% of the contract chipmaking business is located in Asia with a handful of foundries that account for most of the world’s chip fabrication.

As the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many factories closed with it, making the supplies needed for chip manufacturing unavailable for months. Increased demand for consumer electronics caused shifts that rippled up the supply chain. A recent report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explains that this “will clearly lead to delays in the distribution of microchips and will presumably have an adverse impact on the semiconductor and computer industries. Now we are learning that new car production is in suspense because of chip shortages.

Shortages are immediately felt because of long supply lines. Beginning in the 1970s, major corporations went to China, India, Brazil, and other places far away from where goods could be produced at a much lower cost. That is why we have long supply chains.

The U.S. inventory restocking cycle is being dragged out by power constraints in China. Output from factories is being curtailed by widespread electricity rationing due to a shortfall of natural gas and coal supplies — making it even more likely that the U.S. inventory replenishment cycle will persist well into next year.

The raw materials required to create EV batteries – lithium, cobalt, and nickel – are up. Lithium carbonate alone has gone up 400% in the last year alone. Then, with demand for EVs and energy storage on the rise, are ticking prices skyward. The inflection point for EV battery prices to become competitive with gas-powered vehicles is about $100/kWh.

“How long will this last? Until bottlenecks are removed at the ports. It will probably not return to pre-pandemic normalcy.

We are changing in other ways, too. Women now make up close to 60% of US college enrollees, a record, The Wall Street Journal reported. NYU professor Scott Galloway told CNN that the gap is leading to a “mating crisis. This will leave many unmarried and lonely.

Agriculture

The Department of

Agriculture lists the ways climate change threatens America’s food supply: Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, more pests and disease, reduced soil quality, fewer pollinating insects, and more storms and wildfires will combine to reduce crops and livestock.Wildfires are likely to increase by a third by 2050, warns the United Nations.

 

To address those challenges, the department calls for more research into climate threats and better communication of those findings to farmers.

The plan is also candid about the limits of what can be done. In response to drought, for example, farmers can build new irrigation systems, and governments can build new dams. But irrigation is expensive, the department notes, and dams affect the ecosystems around them.

Transportation

Climate change also threatens Americans’ ability to move within and between cities, restricting not just mobility but the transportation of goods that drive the economy. In a list of potential effects from climate change, the Department of Transportation notes that rising temperatures will make it more expensive to build and maintain roads and bridges.

And the experience of getting around will become slower and more frustrating. As hotter days cause asphalt to degrade, congestion will increase as traffic slows. Severe weather events will “require flight cancellations, sometimes for extended periods of time,” and more heat will force planes to fly shorter distances and carry less weight.

 

Some of the effects the transportation department anticipates are dangerous. They include “more frequent/severe flooding of underground tunnels” and “increased risk of vehicle crashes in severe weather.”

 

Even the quality of driving could get worse. The plan warns of “decreased driver/operator performance and decision-making skills, due to driver fatigue as a result of adverse weather.”

 

Cars swept over a bridge by heavy rains and flooding in Waverly, Tenn., in August.

 

Even the quality of driving could get worse. The plan warns of “decreased driver/operator performance and decision-making skills, due to driver fatigue as a result of adverse weather.”

Sometimes, the plans demonstrate how much work remains. The Department of Energy, for example, said it has assessed the climate risks for just half of its sites, which range from advanced research laboratories to storage facilities for radioactive waste from the nuclear weapons program.

“DOE’s nuclear security mission is critical to national security and is also largely conducted at DOE sites that are vulnerable to extreme weather conditions,” the department’s plan says. “DOE’s environmental mission could also experience disruptions if facilities dedicated to radioactive waste processing and disposal are impacted by climate hazards.”

The department says it’s able to address that threat but doesn’t go into specifics. “DOE has a well-established hazard assessment and adaptation process focused on its high-hazard nuclear facilities. This process ensures that the most critical facilities are well protected from climate risks,” the plan states.

COVID-D

Despite what is approaching five million deaths from of COVID-19, the Global Risks Report 2021, it is global warming that makes up the bulk of this year’s list of risks, which the report describes as “an existential threat to humanity.”  It is a sad commentary on the stubbornness of the unvaccinated to get vaccinated than unvaccinated people have an 11 times higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people, according to data posted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

With the loss of wilderness comes the reduced pollination of crops, the depletion of soils, poorer air, and water supplies becoming scarce.

The lockdowns caused a drop in carbon emissions, but as economies start to recover, emissions will soar.

Most people have difficulty grasping the magnitude of the environmental calamities that we likely face.   Saving ourselves will require the most significant technological change in history. We need technology to replace the extractive and polluting industries that will produce the food and resources we need to live.

It means ending the use of fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energies such as solar, wind, and battery storage that are much cheaper than we thought years ago. Solar panels will be everywhere. By 2050, 96% of vehicles will be electric, supported by a national network of charging stations. Virtually all energy in homes will be electric. Gas may disappear completely from kitchens and its use will be reduced for hot water systems and household heating.

Controlling CO2 output must be done; however, some impacts of global warming are not reversible things like sea-level rise. Human activity is producing irreversible damage to several environmental constraints necessary to human life.  These are biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle change, groundwater depletion, ocean acidification, and peak phosphorous.

We rely on a host of organisms for food, medicine, shelter, and clothing; but as biodiversity diminishes, so do our basic necessities.  Climate change is forcing some animals to move. Up to one million plant and animal species are facing extinction due to human activity.

We are overfishing, overhunting, and over-harvesting the earth. Overexploitation destroys biodiversity. Deforestation is another contributor to biodiversity loss; human demand for land development, fossil and wood fuels, and building materials result in the loss of 18 million square acres of forest each year.

Life on earth depends on balance.  The Earth and its atmosphere maintain an energy balance by either absorbing incoming radiation or reflecting it energy back into space.

Nitrogen 

78% of the earth’s atmosphere is nitrogen. All organisms — including humans — require nitrogen for survival. The natural nitrogen balance incorporates nitrogen into the peptides and amino acids essential to life.   Agricultural and industrial practices have dramatically altered the earth’s natural nitrogen cycle.

Synthetic fertilizers, industrial pollution, combustion of fossil fuels, vehicle exhaust doubles the natural conversion of nitrogen to ammonia and nitrates every year.  Nitrous oxide is the greenhouse gas N2O that results in photochemical smog covering large regions.

Fertilizers Cause More Than 2% of Global Emissions

Unlike organic fertilizers, which come from plant or animal material, synthetic fertilizers are made by humans using chemical processes.

Unlike organic fertilizers, which come from plant or animal material, synthetic fertilizers are made by humans using chemical processes.

Production and transportation cause carbon emissions, while agricultural use of these fertilizers leads to the release of nitrous oxide (N₂O) – a greenhouse gas 265 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO₂) over a century.

The research team – from the Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, and the University of Turin – found that the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer supply chain was responsible for emitting the equivalent of 1.13 gigatonnes of CO₂ in 2018.

This is more than 10% of global emissions from agriculture, and more than the emissions from commercial aviation in that year.

The top four emitters – China, India, USA and the EU28 (European Union countries plus the UK) – accounted for 62% of the total.

The excess of nitrogen results in losses of soil nutrients, such as calcium and potassium, essential for soil fertility, the mass killings of saltwater fish, thus reducing the food supply and oceanic biodiversity. It increases the acidification of soils, streams, and lakes greatly increases the transfer of nitrogen through rivers to estuaries and coastal oceans.

The consequences of human-caused changes to the nitrogen cycle appear grim.

Human activity is producing irreversible damage to several planetary limits necessary to human life are biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle change, groundwater depletion, ocean acidification, and peak phosphorous.

We’ve already lost 33% of the Earth’s topsoil

Alone, each of these crises is enough to precipitate widespread human suffering. Together, along with climate change, they present the gravest threat in the history of humanity to the survival of our species.

Biodiversity Loss

Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth. Human beings rely on a host of organisms for food, medicine, shelter, and clothing; as biodiversity diminishes, so do our basic necessities.

Deforestation is a principal contributor to biodiversity loss; clearing land and using timber for building materials, fossil and wood fuels results in the loss of 18 million square acres of forest each year.

A 2014 study estimates that roughly 30 percent of both the world’s languages and animal species have declined between 1970 and 2009. Up to one million more plant and animal species are facing extinction due to human activity, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Overexploitation — such as overfishing, overhunting, and over-harvesting — also threatens the earth’s biodiversity.

Ocean Acidification

The world’s oceans absorb roughly 30% of the carbon dioxide that human activity releases into the atmosphere. Because of oceanic CO2 absorption, ocean acidity has increased 30% globally since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Shellfish are particularly vulnerable to rising seawater acidity. Over a billion people currently rely on marine life for protein. Unless the world converts to clean energy in the immediate future; the world’s climate and food reserves are equally at stake.

Peak Phosphorus

Carbon emissions affect more than global temperatures.  While nitrogen contamination imperils ocean life, phosphorus pollution threatens freshwater fish. Phosphate ores primarily come from ancient salt deposits in seabeds and are used to make artificial fertilizers and detergents.

Phosphorus is also a key ingredient in human bone. We derive phosphorus in protein foods such as milk and milk products and meat, beans, lentils, and nuts. Grains, especially whole grains provide phosphorus. Phosphorus can be derived in smaller amounts in vegetables and fruit.

In the long run, phosphorus always returns to the oceans, but phosphate deposits replenish at a rate drastically slower than we consume it. Without it, malnutrition is the result. Global phosphorus shortages are predicted by as early as 2040. Peak phosphorus is, therefore, an even more pressing problem than climate change.

Global warming is just one of the crises to our survival. Biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle, groundwater depletion, ocean acidification, and peak phosphorus each threaten our existence, and taken together could potentially spell our extinction. Carbon sequestration is just one of the technologies we must master to survive the coming environmental crises.

Homeland Security

 

For the Department of Homeland Security, climate change means the risk of large numbers of climate refugees — people reaching the U.S. border, pushed out of their countries by a mix of long-term challenges like drought or sudden shocks like a tsunami.

Defense

 

Climate change will lead to new sources of conflict, and also make it harder for the military to operate, the Department of Defense wrote in its climate plan.

Water shortages could even become a new source of tension between the U.S. military overseas and the countries where troops are based. At DOD sites outside the United States, “military water requirements might compete with local water needs, creating potential areas of friction or even conflict.”

But learning to operate during extreme weather should also be viewed as a new type of weapon, the plan says, one that can help the United States prevail over enemies. “This enables U.S. forces to gain distinct advantages over potential adversaries,” the plan reads, “if our forces can operate in conditions where others must take shelter or go to ground.”

The Department of Commerce, which runs the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, said that as the effects of climate change become more severe, it expects a surge in applications for patents for “climate change adaptation-related technologies.” Such a surge “would impact the department’s ability to process such applications in a timely manner.

 

Climate Chaos Has Arrived

I watched a movie last night showing the world entering a new ice age. The movie was made in 2004. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago, today’s headlines were the predictions of fringe extremists. Now they’ve come true. The proof is all around us.  C The cascading impacts of climate change will affect every sector of the economy. Some sectors including fossil fuels, utilities, travel and leisure, housing, forestry, mining, and agriculture can be expected to be particularly hard hit, with the financial sector deeply linked to them all.

The Arctic Is Sweltering

Temperatures in Siberia climbed to 118ºF this year — an almost unthinkable level of heat. Marine life is migrating to cooler waters. Arctic sea ice reached its lowest levels in the last two years. Between 1979 and 2020, the report found the Arctic lost an area of ice about six times the size of Germany.

 Extinctions and Plagues Are on the Rise

Warmer waters are also causing the populations of some sea-dwelling species to shrink. It found that sole, European lobster, sea bass, and edible crabs were being adversely affected by extreme heat fluctuations in the North Sea.

Toxic microbial blooms thrived during the Great Dying, the most severe extinction in Earth’s history, and they are proliferating again due to human activity. Fish die as a result of algal blooms in Florida.

Millions of mice have created havoc for Australian farmers. In recording its wettest November on record, the humid conditions enlarged the rodent population creating a boom in snake and spider numbers.

Snake numbers increased after wet, humid weather. Snakes prey on mice. Wet weather is also the perfect climate for bugs and frogs, food sources for hungry snakes or spiders. It’s a perfect storm for mice, snakes, spiders, bugs, and frogs, and a plague on people.

Power Lines and Crucial Infrastructure Are Melting

In the Pacific Northwest, where temperatures are reliably in the 70s and 80s, temperatures have exceeded 100º in the past few weeks. Citizens all across the region lost power— 9,000 in Spokane, Washington alone.

Roads are buckling as the heat melts asphalt.

Buildings Are Collapsing

Experts believe that the collapse of beachside condos is due to the rise of the sea level directly underneath the foundation of those beachside condos. Miami faces the worst risk of any coastal city in the world, per a recent report.

Alaska is Experiencing Ice Quakes

Because of the heatwave across Alaska, the state is reporting “icequakes” — seismic activity triggered by glaciers melting too fast. Ice melting, refreezing, and expanding enough to cause quakes. 25 miles off of Juneau, the magnitude of the ice quake was 2.7.

Detroit’s Streets Became a River

Last week, Detroit experienced a storm that flooded the city with 7 inches of rainfall in only a few hours. More than 1,000 cars had to be abandoned in the highway flooding as they had no other choice.

Hydropower Plants in Danger as Reservoirs Drain

One reservoir, in particular, Lake Oroville in California (the state’s second-largest), announced it would be forced to shut down the connected hydropower plant for the first time ever.   Intense dry heat and unrelenting drought lower the water levels in the reservoir and it simply cannot sustain the plant.

We can’t change weather patterns once they’re already happening. We can’t, for example, reroute Detroit’s rain and give it to California.

The climate crisis is here in spades. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the key 1.5 degrees Celsius  (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold in the fight to stop climate change will be crossed within the next 15 years.

Now the world must come together to confront these multiple crises. It’s in this context that the Biden infrastructure proposals make sense. It’s a matter of survival. We’re already dealing with calamitous weather events and so we have the choice of immediate sacrifice or near and long-term peril.

Here are some of the terms and key issues that will be discussed at the event ran from Oct. 31 to Nov. 13. The  Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. First held in 1995, it also serves as the meeting of parties to the 1992 Kyoto Protocol that first committed countries to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and those that signed on to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Governments meeting in the French capital six years ago agreed on a target of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), ideally no more than 1.5C (2.7F), by the end of this century compared with pre-industrial times.

Faced with new research showing a significant gap between current commitments to cut planet-heating emissions and the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target, negotiators from nearly 200 countries on Saturday struck a deal that critics say falls short of what is needed to tackle the climate emergency.  The failure of the countries of the world to put their full efforts into financing climate transformation — including mitigation, adaptation, and losses and damages — weakens our chances of avoiding the most calamitous effects of global warming.

More movies and fiction and non-fiction books and games will make water their central theme as the environmental crisis is recognized and commercialized.

More than two million people have been killed by storms, floods, droughts, and heatwaves since 1970, according to WMO data, as Reuters reported. The data showed that these weather-related natural disasters resulted in $3.64 trillion in damages worldwide. Since the 1970s early warning systems for extreme weather helped reduce the number of people killed by natural disasters by 76 percent, Reuters reported.

As wildfires worsen and sea levels rise, growing numbers of Americans are moving to places such as Vermont and the Appalachian Mountains. These are seen as safe havens from climate change. This population movement will intensify in the coming decades.

Healthy ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands have an amazing ability to remove planet-warming emissions from the atmosphere and lock them securely underground. Experts call them “nature-based solutions” to climate change. To save Earth 30 percent of the planet must be protected. Such conservation efforts must double by 2030 to prevent dangerous warming and unraveling of ecosystems.

Extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that it affected people differently based on their location and people may respond in radically different ways. The burden weighs us down and curtails opportunities and possibilities.  This requires addressing both violence and material shortages and other outcomes like contamination.

The latest climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends a 2x increase in investment in climate technologies. This goes beyond producing more paper straws.

Eliminating air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and provide more than $600 billion in health benefits in the United States every year, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

Published in the journal GeoHealth, the study reports the considerable health benefits of removing from the air harmful fine particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides produced by electricity generation, transportation, industrial activities, and building functions such as heating and cooking. Highway vehicles make up the largest single share.

 

These economic activities from coal, oil, and natural gas are also major sources of carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, so cutting back on their emissions provides additional benefits.

 

 

“We are trying to shift mindsets from burdens to benefits,” said Jonathan A. Patz, a professor of health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

 

“Our work provides a sense of the scale of the air quality health benefits that could accompany deep decarbonization of the U.S. energy system,” said Nicholas A. Mailloux, lead author of the study and a graduate student at the Nelson Institute. “Shifting to clean energy sources can provide enormous benefit for public health in the near term while mitigating climate change in the longer term.”

The study uses models from the Environmental Protection Agency, notably its CO-Benefits Risk Assessment, or COBRA, to look at the impact of local, state, and national policy on separate areas around the country. It shows that while the cost of overhauling energy industries can be local, so, too, are the benefits.

“Between 32 percent and 95 percent of the health benefits from eliminating emissions in a region will remain in that region,” the study says. On average, slightly more than two-thirds of the health benefits of removing emissions in a region stay in that region.

 

The Southwest, for example, would retain 95 percent of the benefits if it moved alone to eliminate fine particulate matter. The Mountain States, however, would retain only a third of their benefits, which would flow to large population centers downwind.

What we do is look at all at once, if you were to remove fossil fuel emissions from these different sectors, how many lives would be saved, how many emissions avoided, and the numbers are pretty big,” Patz said.

“The report highlights the air quality benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning the energy system away from fossil fuels,” said Susan Anenberg, director of George Washington University’s Climate and Health Institute, who was not involved in the study. In addition, she said, “it helps us to think about policies and what level of policies are needed to address this problem.”

Patz said that “people look at this as such a huge challenge, but when you look at the health repercussions of switching to clean energy, the benefits are enormous.”

The U.S. plummeted in international rankings of action on climate change due to the rollback of environmental protections during the Trump Administration. In particular, the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement weakened methane emissions rules, according to a report released on June 1, 2022, by Yale and Columbia University researchers.

U.S. cities last year announced 21 projects to turn “brownfields” which include transformed closed landfills and other contaminated lands into solar farms, also called “brightfield.” Brownfields are often located in “economically distressed communities. Transforming these into sources of clean power, jobs, and economic opportunity can play a key role in revitalizing these neighborhoods.

The Supreme Court has dealt another blow to the Government’s ability to o regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions by the  Environmental Protection Agency/

A 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court restricting the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit power plant emissions is the latest blow to U.S. efforts to fight climate change, contributing to a renewed sense of pessimism that the U.S. political system will address the issue at the federal level.  In its ruling, the majority said, ” Only Congress has the power to make “a decision of such magnitude and consequence.”

The decision is likely to have broad implications. While the EPA will still be able to take some action in regulating emissions, more wide-reaching programs, like setting emissions caps to encourage a shift away from coal, will be constrained in the future. The ruling deals a major blow to the federal government’s ability to take action on climate change as the world continues to set new emissions records and makes changing the composition of the Supreme Court more imperative.

Congress has adopted the first climate change measure in our history.   It invests in technologies that would bolster various types of energy including fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear hydrogen, and energy storage.  It also invests in reducing both domestic emissions of planet-warming carbon and methane, and in global emissions reductions.

Meanwhile, blackouts are growing more frequent in the United States.

What are chemical pollutants doing to our bodies? It’s a timely question given that last week, people in Philadelphia cleared grocery shelves of bottled water after a toxic leak from a chemical plant spilled into a tributary of the Delaware River, a source of drinking water for 14 million people. And it was only last month that a train carrying a suite of other hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, unleashing an unknown quantity of toxic chemicals.

There’s no doubt that we are polluting the planet. To find out how these pollutants might be affecting our own bodies, we need to work out how we are exposed to them. Which chemicals are we inhaling, eating, and digesting? And how much? The field of exposomics, which seeks to study our exposure to pollutants, among other factors, could help to give us some much-needed answers

Republicans are fighting a social movement directed at the financial sector to address systemic issues like climate change. Regressive initiatives in Florida, West Virginia, and Texas are targeting powerhouse Wall Street firms they say are engaging in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, which they view to be harmful to their states’ economies. Some state and regional regulators often have political incentives to fight against changes to the power grid.

Climate change is man-made. So man can undo or mitigate much of what we have done. We can choose to save our lives and those of our children and their children. Future cities composed of fire-resistant, high-tech wooden buildings can counter the climate impacts of the coming urbanization boom. Half of the world’s population currently lives in towns and cities, a number that is expected to increase to 85 percent by 2100.

The study in Nature Communications builds on a growing architectural and engineering movement that sees wood as not only a more sustainable building material than concrete and steel — but in many ways a superior one.

Housing this many people in 20th-century-style mid-rise buildings would mean a staggering hike in carbon emissions, as it would lead to huge increases in the production of concrete and steel — the production of which is already the source of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

The alternative is housing the growing urban population in mid-rise buildings — is four to ten stories — made out of wood.”

One of America’s great waterways, the Mississippi River is pretty much gone. In Memphis, there’s nothing left but a dry river bed. It looks like a desert. It’s so low that ships can’t pass. They’re running aground.  The Mississippi River is a pillar of the American supply chain and the agriculture industry. This is bad.

271 Ways the Trump administration is Making It More Difficult for People to Survive


Trump and his cronies are daily undoing the government to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter.

Steve Ferrara, running for Arizona’s 9th Congressional District, declared in an audio: It’s worse than a child, you’ve relegated them (the poor) to the status of a pet. Right? I mean, honestly, because if you can’t feed yourself, like — we all love our pets. But if you don’t put the food down for them, you don’t put the roof over their head, they would starve, right? And that’s essentially what you’ve done to poor people with these programs.”

The Oklahoma Republican Party posted on Facebook that food stamps compare to people feeding the animals at national parks.

  1. Jobs are not the main economic issue if the jobs available don’t pay enough to live on. Almost all the US jobs created since 2005 are temporary.
  2. Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession.
  3. On December 21, the Dow  suffered its deepest weekly plunge since 2008and the Nasdaq is officially in a bear market.
  4. A record 95.9 Million Americans are no longer in the labor force. Can I land a job? The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can. Instead, the question is, what kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
  5. Not only has real wage growth in the United States declined by the most that we have seen in 6 years most workers haven’t seen any rise in their wages, adjusted for inflation.
  6. Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, health care, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.
  7. Last year, about 40 percent of American families struggled to meet at least one basic need—food, health care, housing or utilities, according to an Urban Institute survey.
  8. It was similar in the years leading up to the crash of 2008. We may be careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. Had the majority of households taken home more income, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.
  9. Some 44% of people said their expenses exceeded their income in the past year and they used credit to make ends meet. Another 42% said they have no retirement savings at all.
  10. Unemployment is at a 48-year low, so why are only 28% of Americans considered ‘financially healthy’?
  11. Clear away the financial remains from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce.
  12. The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest one percent of Americans now take home about 20 percent of total income and own over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.
  13. For a time, the middle class and poor can keep the economy going nonetheless by borrowing. But, as in 1929 and 2008, debt bubbles eventually burst.
  14. We’re getting dangerously close. By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion. 78% percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. In a recent Federal Reserve survey, 40 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills if faced with a $400 emergency. They’ve managed their debts because interest rates have remained low. But the days of low rates are coming to an end.
  15. The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top.
    • 47 percent of Americans say their spending equaled or exceeded their income in the past 12 months.
    • More than a third (36 percent) are unable to pay all of their bills on time.
    • 45 percent of Americans do not have enough savings to cover three months of living expenses.
    • 37 percent are not confident they are taking the necessary steps to meet their long-term financial goals.
    • 1 in 3 Americans (30 percent) say they have more debt than is manageable.
    • And 4 in 10 do not agree with the statement “My household plans ahead financially.” According to the report in 1973, middle-income Americans could “live comfortably,” put their children through college and invest in the future. Today, the high cost of basic living expenses puts that lifestyle out of reach for millions of Americans.
    • Loan defaults are inching up and credit card debt is at an all-time high.
    • Total household debt is higher than it was before the financial crisis. Boomers are nearing retirement with insufficient savings. And Americans of all ages are struggling under mounting student loan debt. The median wealth of U.S. households has not yet recovered to pre-recession levels.
  16. Trump’s actions that could lead to the next economic crash are sabotaging Affordable Care Act, rolling back overtime pay, putting burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
  17. U.S. national debt rises $2 trillion under Trump
  18. The economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
  19. Home health care has emerged as an archetypal job in this new, low-pay service economy. Demand for home health care has surged as the population has aged, but according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2017 median annual income for home health aides in the United States was just $23,130. Half of these workers depend on public assistance to make ends meet. For example, a Florida home health aide earned $9,815.75 in 2015, $12,763.94 in 2016 and $10,446.81 last year. To afford basic necessities, the federal government estimates that families would need to bring in $29,420 a year.
  20. When Americans see a homeless man cocooned in blankets, we often wonder how he failed. As Bill O’Reilly said of poor people: “You gotta look people in the eye and tell ’em they’re irresponsible and lazy because that’s what poverty is …” When the French see the same man, they wonder how the state failed him.
  21. Homeless men and women, and increasingly children are the collateral damage of the takeover of government by Trump. The massive transference of wealth upward, deindustrialization and the slashing of federal investment in affordable housing begun during the Reagan administration has ruined their lives. The lack of stable jobs that pay a living wage in the gig and temp economy, the collapse of mental health and medical services for the poor, and gentrification are turning large parts of America into a third world country.
  22. Cities believe the number of home people is three times the federal estimate of 554,000. Many homeless students, because they often drift from one temporary space to another, never appear in the official statistics.
  23. The stress of living on the streets takes a toll on mental health and often pushes those who already have mental health issues over the edge.
  24. A top priority for the Trump administration is expanding work requirements for some of the nation’s biggest safety-net programs. In January, the federal government announced that it would let states require that Medicaid recipients work.
  25. If all states inaugurated Medicaid work requirements, as many as four million Americans could lose their health insurance.
  26. By executive order, President Trump ordered federal agencies to review welfare programs, from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to housing assistance, and propose new The Congressional Budget Office estimates that work requirements could deny 1.2 million people a benefit that they use to eat.
  27. In July, the White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report enthusiastically endorsing work requirements for the nation’s largest welfare programs. The council favored “negative incentives,” tying aid to the labor-market effort, and dismissed “positive incentives,” like tax benefits for low-income workers because the former is cheaper. The council also claimed that America’s welfare policies have brought about a “decline in self-sufficiency.”
  28. With Vice President Mike Pence’s tie-breaking vote, the Senate voted to overturn Obama era protections for Title X providers. Trump signed the bill, which allows states to block Title X funding.
  29. Funding provides critical reproductive, educational, and counseling services related to family planning and contraception to 4 million clients each year.
  30. Women earn about 80 cents for every dollar a man earned; their incomes grew slower than they did in the previous two years, and all the income growth mostly benefited the richest 10 percent of US families.
  31. The bottom 10 percent of US households saw their average income their incomes all compared to the previous year to $14,219 — adjusting for inflation. It’s upon these people that the main economic impact of federal entitlement programs, such as food stamps and housing subsidies, have on low-wage workers. More than 38 million people are on food stamps. The government shutdown hits them hard.
  32. Standard &Poors Global Ratings estimates that the longest shutdown in U.S. history cost the economy “at least” $6 billion, due to “lost productivity from furloughed workers and economic activity lost to outside business.
  33. During President Donald Trump’s first year in office, income from safety net programs like as food stamps and housing subsidies directly kept 44.9 million people out of poverty in 2017. That’s 200,000 more people compared to 2016.
  34. Trump has tightened food stamp access, forcing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of the program.

  35. US students were healthier school lunches as a result of Obama requirements for improved meals. Now Trump has eliminated those requirements and is allowing cheaper, processed foods with salt. Big food processors are major donors to Republican campaigns.
  36. Of all the social safety net programs, Social Security had the biggest impact on poor people last year, keeping 27 million people above the poverty level, which was $12,060 for an individual in 2017. Refundable tax credits, such as the earned income tax credit, helped another 3 million people. Food stamps (a.k.a. SNAP), disability insurance, and housing subsidies each kept about 3 million people from falling into poverty.
  37. The “greatest economy ever” was actually during the post–World War II economic expansion, where the male of the household had one high paying career as his wife stayed home raising the children. That was enough to buy a home, auto, and experience the “American Dream” of consumerism without massive amounts of debt. Those days are gone not because it is politically incorrect to say women should stay home, but instead, today’s gig economy in a failing economy provides households with low skill/low paying jobs (not careers). How times have changed.
  38. Some 82 percent of Americans now say their “American Dream” is financial security for themselves and their family, three-quarters say it is owning a home, and 71 percent believe it is achieving financial independence. And here is the shocker: One-third of Americans believe the American dream has vanished. Why? They have too much debtDow plunges more than 600 points in another day of losses, officially wiping out its 2018 gains.
  39. Almost 2 out of 3 people have a home mortgage of those surveyed (3,200 people during January and February 2018) and 56 percent said they have credit card debt, 26 percent have student loans. A majority of those surveyed said they do not feel financially secure. More than 25 percent said they regret not being fiscally responsible.
  40. The evaporation of the American dream seems to be correlated with increasing debt loads. There is a lot of hopelessness and a lot of concern, simply because the Great Recession isn’t that far in the past.
  41. Consumer credit just hit another all-time record high, surpassing  $1 trillion in the US for the first time, according to the Federal Reserve. Another $1.5 trillion in student loans, $1.1 trillion in auto loans, and $15 trillion in mortgage debt outstanding.
  42. In the second quarter of 2008, total consumer credit reached a grand total of 63 trillion dollars, and now ten years later that number has soared to 3.87 trillion dollars.  That is an increase of 48 percent in just one decade.
  43. Consumer debt or euphemistically, consumer “credit” – jumped 4.9% in the third quarter compared to the third quarter in 2017, or by $182 billion, to $3.93 trillion (not seasonally adjusted), according to the Federal Reserve this afternoon. As befits the stalwart American consumers, it was the highest ever. Consumer debt includes credit-card debt, auto loans, and student loans, but does not include mortgage-related debt: Auto Loans and LeasesAuto loans and leases for new and used vehicles in Q3 jumped by $41 billion from a year ago, or by 3.7%, to a record of $1.11 trillion. These loan balances are impacted mainly by these factors: prices of vehicles, mix of new and used, number of vehicles financed, the average loan-to-value ratio, and duration of loans originated in prior years.
  44. Many people still struggle to pay bills — even for something as basic as food.   That’s the troubling conclusion of a new report released this week by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit policy group based in Washington, D.C., which surveyed almost 7,600 adults last December.
  45. For most U.S. workers, the hourly wage has the same purchasing power as in 1978. MassMutual’s survey also said many Americans are in poor financial health. Some 18 percent said they had less than one month of expenses saved for an emergency. Another 26 percent said they have one to three months’ expenses saved. And 21 percent said they had three to six months’ expenses saved.
  46. Many people have figured out their existence is meaningless as the institutions of what made this country great are being systematically dismantled. Today we do not have the “greatest economy ever.”Some 39.4% of adults said their families had trouble meeting at least one basic need for food, health care, housing, or utilities last year. Nearly 24% of respondents reported two or more hardships in 2017 and 14% said they experienced at least three of these.
  47. The most common hardship Americans said they faced was food insecurity, with 23.3% of respondents saying they did not have reliable access to a sufficient amount of affordable and nutritious food. Other basic needs Americans had trouble meeting included paying medical bills (18% of respondents), getting medical care (17.8%), missing utility bill payments (13%) and missing rent or mortgage payments (10.2%).
  48. Adults under the age of 35 were 8.6 percentage points more likely to report a financial hardship, which echoes recent research that has suggested young adults experience more difficulty staying afloat financially.
  49. The Urban Institute’s “Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey” tracks individual and family health and financial security at a time when the economy is improving and unemployment is falling, but the researchers said the social safety net for low-income Americans “may be undergoing significant changes.” In fact, almost two-thirds of families with incomes below the federal poverty level — currently $25,100 for a family of four — had problems meeting their basic needs.
  50. Once again, moneyed elites got the gold mine, working families got the shaft. As Bloomberg News reports, far from enjoying their promised $9,000 income boost, the workaday majority of Americans now find that their hourly earnings are lower than they were a year ago.
  51. The 45 million Americans now living below the poverty line. That line means they’re trying to make ends meet on only $25,000 a year — not per person, but for a family of four.
  52. Yet pay gains have been disappointingly moderate and employers are slow to increase hours and benefits — the primary reason why workers continue to rely on a patchwork of jobs.
  53. Women, black Americans, Hispanic Americans and single adults are also more likely to struggle to make ends meet. Close to 20% of people whose household income was 400% above the federal property level also experienced some sort of difficulty meeting a basic need.
  54. These results are supported by previous research. Earlier this year,43% of households said they couldn’t afford a basic monthly budget for housing, food, transportation, child care, health care and a monthly smartphone bill, according to an analysis of U.S. government data released in June by the United Way Alice Project, a nonprofit based in Cedar Knolls, N.J. that aims to highlight the number of people who live in poverty. (Alice stands for “asset limited, income constrained, employed.”)
  55. Believe Republicans when they say they’re coming after your health care
  56. The U.S was one of 18 countries in which people said they were actually worse off than half a century ago. Some economists point to growing inequality in the U.S. and say the rich get richer, while the poor are stuck in low-paid jobs.
  57. Economic growth that is produced by unendingly increasing the amounts of debt is not a positive thing.  People understand this basic concept just as individuals if we max out our credit cards, we’re just more in debt than before. The size of the official U.S. budget deficit is up 21 percent under President Trump in 2017 and 17 percent to $779 billion in the fiscal year 2018.
  58. Personal tax receipts are up on their own, but corporate tax receipts are down by about a third from a year ago. That overall drop looks worse when you consider inflation. A dollar today buys about 2 percent less than it did a year ago.
  59. Only 28% of Americans are considered “financially healthy,” according to a CFSI survey of more than 5,000 Americans. “Financial health enables family stability, education, and upward mobility, not just for individuals today but across future generations.”  “Many are dealing with an unhealthy amount of debt, irregular income, and sporadic savings habits.”
  60. Some 44% of people said their expenses exceeded their income in the past year and they used credit to make ends meet. Another 42% said they have no retirement savings at all.
  61. Meanwhile, 17% of Americans are “financially vulnerable,” meaning they struggle with nearly all financial aspects of their lives, and 55% are “financially coping,” meaning they struggle with some but not all aspects of their financial lives.
  62. 10% of U.S. jobs will be lost to automation in 2019. Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) will create digital workers — software that automates tasks traditionally performed by humans — for more than 40 percent of companies next year, and a full one-tenth of future startups will employ more digital workers than human ones. Moreover, in 2019 roughly 10 percent of U.S. jobs will be eliminated by automation, which will also be responsible for creating the equivalent of 3 percent of today’s jobs.
  63. Trump’s tariffs are ill-founded as is Congressional spending wasted on war.

    Here are potential catalysts for a major recession or worse:

    1. Junk Bond Bubble Bursting
    2. Equity Bubble Bursting
    3. Italy
    4. Tariffs
    5. Brexit
    6. Pensions
    7. Housing
    8. China

Pay Gap

Social and Safety Programs

  1. Safety net programs have long been despised by Republicans. Now they are chipping away at the social safety net. It’s no secret that Trump and Republican leaders in Congress want to gut the government’s anti-poverty programs.
  2. This popular GOP solution to deal with poverty conveniently leaves out an important fact: Millions of full-time workers qualify for welfare because businesses pay them poverty wages. Wages are hardly rising, and these social welfare programs could be the only reason millions of low-wage workers have food on the table.
  3. So while this year’s census data shows that safety net programs helped millions of low-income Americans pay their bills and feed their families, if Trump and his fellow Republicans get their way, that might not be the case next year.
  4. The official poverty rate (which is based on outdated, limited economic factors) dropped from 12.7 percent to 12.3 percent. And the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes more forms of income, showed a more modest drop from 14 percent to 13.9 percent.
  5. Yet the White House tried to make the case that these social programs are doing more harm than good. This is surprising since many programs already require recipients to work.
  6. One program that has work requirements is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, often known as food stamps. Beneficiaries who are not disabled, and have no children, must work 80 hours a month or show they’re meeting other similar requirements.
  7. For the first time in a decade, the number of uninsured children in the country has increased.
  8. Other programs that don’t require beneficiaries to work, such as Medicaid — most of the recipients work anyway. Two out of three Medicaid recipients have jobs, and the rest are mostly people who are ill, disabled, retired, or taking care of a family member.
  9. In January, the Trump administration let states to impose work requirements for Medicaid, which provides health care to Americans who are poor and disabled. Then in April, Trump told his Cabinet to find other social services on which they could add work requirements or make existing rules harsher.
  10. The loss of the Affordable Care Act will be provisions that combat fraud and abuse in Medicaid and Medicare. Gone would be provisions for coal miners suffering from black lung and their survivors. Gone would be efforts to improve health care provider quality, medical innovation, and data collection efforts to reduce health disparities.
  11. Work requirements barely caused poverty rates to budge, partially because even people who found work weren’t earning enough to lift themselves out of poverty. In addition, at half the experiment sites, work requirements caused more people to be in deep poverty.
  12. The fact that work requirements don’t seem all that effective in helping keep Americans out of poverty hasn’t discouraged Republicans from pushing for more work rules, or from trying to slash millions of dollars in spending on the social programs that seem most effective in preventing economic hardship.
  13. The president’s budget proposal for the fiscal year 2019 would slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance over the next 10 years. It includes a1 percent cut to Medicare, a 22.5 percent cut to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies, a 27.4 percent cut to SNAP, and a 20.1 percent cut to Section 8 housing aid.
  14. Trump has finally gotten his way and gotten a federal court to overturn the Affordable Care Act, putting at risk the 133 million Americans with preexisting conditions and the 20 million Americans who rely on the ACA’s consumer protections. Now the ruling of this Texas court goes to the Supreme Court stacked with Trump appointees.

  15. In July, House Republicans passed a farm bill that imposes strict work requirements on food stamps, but the Senate took them out before passing its version.
  16. Trump tried to cut his own taxes by millions of dollars while taking health insurance from tens of millions of Americans. Based on President Trump’s leaked 2005 Tax Return Form 1040, repealing the ACA could give Trump a personal tax cut of more than $2 million. At the same time, the House legislation to repeal the ACA would have taken health insurance from 24 million Americans.
  17.  The top one percent and big corporations could reap hundreds of billions of windfall profits in version 2.0 and 3.0 of their tax scam.
  18. President Trump’s reneged on his promise to disclose his tax returns. His refusal leaves Americans in the dark about whether any tax reform he proposes will benefit him or working Americans. Trump repeatedly stated before and after he was elected that he would disclose his tax returns. While initially, he said he could not release them because he was being audited—a fact that does not prevent anyone from releasing their returns—his counselor, Kellyanne Conway now says, “He’s not going to release his tax returns.”
  19. By executive order, he repealed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces,  This required that federal contractors comply with worker protection laws before receiving government contracts.
  20. Trump banned forced arbitration in the case of sexual assault, harassment, or discrimination claims.
  21. Attacked neutral budget analysts so that lawmakers ignore negative effects from their policiesThe Trump administration attacked the nonpartisan CBO in an attempt to preemptively discredit their estimates related to legislation repealing the ACA. These attacks continued after the CBO estimated that the House ACA repeal bill would take coverage away from 24 million Americans by 2026. This is part of a larger attempt by the Trump administration to discredit independent data and analysis in order to obscure the negative impacts that their agenda will have for working families.
  22. They’ve set up the 2019 budget bill so that require $302 billion in mandatory program spending cuts, mandatory programs being things like Medicaid and Medicare. The budget bill would allow the Senate to pass the bill with a simple majority, preventing a Democratic filibuster.
  23. When the nation was transfixed by the Kavanaugh nomination, House GOP votes to give the rich another $3 Trillion in tax cuts. This is yet another shameful tax law that would swindle working families and siphon even more funding from the programs that help our communities thrive. At least 90 percent of Americans will end up poorer thanks to that cut.
  24. With the nation’s attention rightly transfixed by the Senate GOP’s outrageous efforts to ram through a Supreme Court nominee who has been credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault, House Republicans on Friday voted overwhelmingly to approve another $3 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans just weeks before the November midterms.
  25. In less than a year, House Republicans have handed out trillions of tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations. Now, middle-class families are on the hook for higher healthcare costs, and Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block.
  26. Speaking at a conference of state legislators hosted by the anti-government American Legislative Exchange Council (“ALEC”), Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, revealed that he plans, presumably after Trump is in his second term,  for the administration not just to cut these programs but to end them as we know them.

Health Care

  1. Republicans are asking ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
  2. Trump has handed Medicaid over to an enemy of Medicaid.
  3. CVS won approval for a $69 Billion merger with Aetna Insurance. This is where US healthcare is headed. Expect Walmart and Amazon to start the same kind of endeavor sooner rather than later.
  4. The most neglected aspect of health are mental, emotional and psychological, long wait times, restricted access to providers, high deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, third-party bureaucracy, system consolidation (i.e Aetna + CVS) and increasing use of non-physician providers.
  5. Science and medicine are getting very close to big and meaningful breakthroughs on diseases and maladies that were once only somewhat treatable with very expensive routines of medications. Most Americans believe that one of the things our government should help to do, besides funding the arts and education, is to foster scientific research and innovation. The current Republican-led government does not believe in that, having already laid out massive cuts to scientific research.
  6. Social underfunding probably has more long-term implications than underinvestment in medical care. If the underspending is on early childhood education — one of the key socioeconomic determinants of health — then there are long-term implications.
  7. About 1 in 5 Americans age 65 or older have untreated cavities, and 2 in 3 have gum disease, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
  8. Forgoing dental care can have serious long-term consequences Poor oral health affects your ability to speak, eat healthy foods and feel confident in how you look. More importantly, perhaps, taking good care of your teeth can decrease your risk of serious problems such as heart attack, stroke and poorly controlled diabetes. Putting off care will likely cost you money — and pain — down the road.
  9. Slow income growth could also play a role because poorer health is associated with lower incomes. It’s notable that, apart from the richest of Americans, income growth stagnated starting in the late 1970s.
  10. In 2017, out-of-pocket medical costs, which includes health insurance premiums, copays, and prescription drug costs, pushed the incomes of 10.9 million people below the poverty threshold. That’s 400,000 more people who were impoverished by medical bills in 2017, compared to last year.
  11. The Trump budget proposes a $50 million reductionin funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which works with organizations across the United States to implement evidence based, proven programming.
  12. President Trump’s health care bill, the AHCA, would defund Planned Parenthood, which served 5 million patientsin 2014.
  13. Repeal of the ACA would cause significant stress and anxiety for millions of families who rely on it for coverage. The AHCA would have resulted in 24 million more people being uninsured in 10 years—breaking President Trump’s promise to cover “everybody.” It would also have broken Trump’s campaign promise not to cut Medicaid.
  14. The Trump administration has already undermined the ACA marketplace by refusing to officially abandon its efforts to repeal the law. In addition, its refusal to commit unequivocally to paying the cost-sharing reduction subsidies is generating massive uncertainty for insurers. This uncertainty is having a direct impact on the marketplace by encouraging insurers to quit the market in 2018 or raise premiums.
  15.  In a letter to governors by Secretary of Health and Human Services, the administration encouraged states to pursue harmful changes to their Medicaid programs, including work requirements and increased cost-sharing.
  16. In the final days of the most recent open enrollment period, the Trump administration cancelled Healthcare.gov TV ads and email outreach, which are critical in helping people remember the deadline and enroll in time. Although some of this was restored after a backlash, a former Healthcare.gov chief marketing officer estimated that the administration’s actions reduced enrollment by 480,000 people.
  17. We’re dying sooner. America just registered its second straight year with a decline in life expectancy. That last happened more than a half-century ago. There is some good news: heart disease and cancer death rates are down.
  18. Trump made Americans more vulnerable to pandemic diseases such as Zika and Ebola. Massive cuts in aid, diplomacy, and health proposed in President Trump’s FY 2017 budget would end the Global Health Security account, which works to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks around the world, including Ebola. In his proposed budget, Trump has also called for the eliminationof funding for the Fogarty International Center, which supports global health research initiatives, including for infectious diseases research in developing countries.
  19. Trump has move to weaken protections for individuals with pre-existing conditions. His administration also has refused to defend the Affordable Care Act against a lawsuit that would undermine these protections. The Trump administration no longer supports a provision of Obamacare that makes it possible for people with preexisting health conditions to buy insurance.
  20. The United States is still the only developed country on the planet — and just one of a handful overall — that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave. We also don’t guarantee paid vacation time — most countries in Western Europe guarantee weeks— and there’s no guaranteed paid sick days. Insurance companies profit from government contracts but are subject to little oversight of how they spend the money.
  21.  52 percent of Republicans said they supported universal healthcare in the United States. Twenty-fiver percent of the GOP voters said they “strongly” backed Medicare For All, which would offer healthcare to ever American at a lower cost.  The poll also foundthat 92 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of independents support Medicare for All.Alcohol
  22. We drink too much. With alcohol cheaper today as a percentage of income than at any time since 1950, Americans are drinking a lot moreper Bloomberg. A follow-up study done by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism saw risky drinking behavior jump to 12.6% among American adults in 2012-2013 from 9.7% in 2001-2012. That increase amounts to about 7 million more Americans binge drinking each week.Opiods
  23. America’s opioid crisis has become an “epidemic of epidemics. Rising intravenous drug use has created new public health epidemics of hepatitis C and deadly bacterial infections.
  24. The opioid crisis is shocking. The CDC reports that sales of opioids almost quadrupled from 1999 to 2010 without any change in the amount of pains reported by Americans. Now, 91 people in the United States die every day from an opioid overdose. The U.S. has 4% of the world’s population but 27% of its drug overdose deaths.
  25. Trump attempted to bring back the war on drugs.The outdated strategy was ineffective and caused long-term devastation to thousands of families. Attorney General Sessions is implementing a tough-on-crime approach that would increase federal prosecutions and long prison sentences even for low-level, nonviolent offenders.Homicide and Gun Violence
  26. A 2016 study found that US homicide rates were 7 times higher than in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that was 25 times higher.
  27. The Onion’s continuously re-upped headline says it all: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says the Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” And research from the period 2000-2014 shows that the United States has had more mass shootings and more people killed in those mass shootings than 10 other developed nations combined.
  28. Triump signed a law that weakens the firearms background check system and undermines enforcement of the current law that prohibits certain individuals with a serious mental illness from gun possession
  29. Using the shortcut process of the Congressional Review Act, PresidentTrump repealed a  Social Security Administration regulation that formalized the process by which the agency could provide to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, the names of beneficiaries who—because of serious mental illness—are prohibited from gun possession under federal law. This action represents a significant step backward from recent efforts at the federal and state level to better enforce current law by ensuring that all records of prohibited purchasers are provided to NICS.
  30. Trump made it easier for fugitives to buy gunsUnder federal law, anyone who is “a fugitive from justice” is prohibited from buying and possessing guns. Since at least 2006, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives have disagreed over the proper scope of this law, with the FBI adopting a position that it applies to all individuals with an outstanding arrest warrant while the ATF argued for a narrower interpretation that it applies only to individuals who had left the state where the warrant was issued. Because the FBI is the agency that operates the background check system, that agency’s interpretation prevailed. However, in February 2017, the Department of Justice issued new guidance resolving this dispute by adopting ATF’s interpretation and dramatically narrowing the category of individuals with active criminal warrants who will be prohibited from buying guns.Education –  Our Education System Is Middling
  1. While the United States has some of the world’s best higher education, its elementary, middle, and high schools are positively average compared to other developed nations. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that U.S. STEM education is especially lacking. In 2015, only 38% of fourth-graders, 34% of eighth-graders and 22% of 12th-graders were rated proficient or better in science based on the government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.
  2. President Trump’s budget proposed more than $5 billion in cuts to valuable programs, including the Pell Grant program and the work-study program, which provide needed funds to help low-income students afford the rising cost of college. The cuts also target important college-access programs—including TRIO and GEAR UP—that provide supports such as tutoring, mentoring, and research opportunities to low-income and first-generation students.
  3. Robert Eitel, senior counselor to Secretary of Education DeVos, joined the administration well before he even left his job at Bridgepoint Education—a for-profit college company facing multiple federal investigations. And Taylor Hansen, a former lobbyist for for-profit colleges—whose father’s student loan debt-collection company sued the Obama administration—served on the department’s “beachhead” team. 
  4. In President Trump’s budget, the administration zeroed out the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which provides $1.2 billion to districts across the country for after-school programs that support students and working families. This funding serves more than 1.6 million students participating in these programs.
  5. In President Trump’s budget, the administration zeroed out Title II of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which provides $2.4 billion to states and districts for teacher recruitment, training, retention, and support. This cut translates to a loss of 40,000 teacher salaries.
  6.  Betsy DeVos, Secretary of Education’s only experience with education is as a lobbyist and mega donor pushing private school voucher schemes in states across the country. Instead of working to support public schools and the students that attend these schools, she has called public education a “dead end.”
  7. Through the Congressional Review Act, Congress and President Trump eliminated key protections and guidance for states and districts to implement the law, leaving significant confusion at the state and local level. The Trump administration has also signaled that it will take a very lax enforcement stance with states, opening the door for states to ignore their responsibilities to protect vulnerable students.
  8. Through the Congressional Review Act, Congress and trump eliminated requirements for states to make sure that teacher preparation programs are helping prospective teachers gain the skills needed to be successful in the classroom and support student learning. Without these regulations, states will continue to struggle to improve teacher preparation programs and support the most effective programs.
  9. This proposal includes harmful private school voucher schemes and the creation of a new $250 million federal program that will allow taxpayer dollars to flow to private schools, which are not accountable; can discriminate in admissions and discipline; and are not subject to basic monitoring, oversight, and civil rights laws.
  10. By zeroing out support for the AmeriCorps program, President Trump would undercut many of the most successful education organizations—from KIPP Public Charter Schools, to Teach For America, to City Year—that have had positive effects on students across the country and rely on that program.
  11. The Trump administration supported education policies that harm students of color and cuts to Pell Grants and tuition assistance programs as well as cuts to after-school programs that would affect 1 in 4 African American students. The administration also supports voucher programs that do not encourage the success of students of color.
  12. Congress is now taxing college endowments and in doing this hurting the U.S. ability to compete in the innovation war with China.

Children

  1. One in five women in the U.S. doesn’t have children. As a result of the declining birth rate, for the first time in U.S. history, there may soon bemore elderly people than children.
  2.  The cost of raising a child in America has soared, Between 2000 and 2010, the cost shot up by 40%. American parents spend, on average, $233,610 on child costs from birth until the age of 17, not including college, raising their kids. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services deems child care affordable if no more than 10% of a family’s income is used for that purpose. However, parents currently spend 9% to 22% of their total annual income on child care, per child.
  3. It’s plain why many families are choosing to have fewer children — or in some cases, no children at all; others don’t have children because of the demands of their career. Due to the rising costs of sports,the number of children who aren’t physically active has increased to 17.6%, resulting in their being less physically fit and without the structure for their time sports and opportunities provides.
  4. Allowed a dangerous pesticide to stay on the market, despite it being a threat to children’s health. Chlorpyrifos a common agricultural pesticide that causes neurological harm in children exposed in utero. In 2016, the EPA’s scientists concluded that the agency should ban chlorpyrifos after finding unsafe levels of the chemical on apples, peaches, oranges, strawberries, and other fruits.

College Education

  1. The Census Bureau’s annual report on income and poverty highlights this depressing fact. Among bachelor’s degree recipients, roughly 3.6 millionor 4.8% were living in poverty in 2017, according to the Census Bureau. That’s up from 3.3 million and 4.5% in 2016. Bachelor’s degree recipients were the only educational cohort to see the number or the share of people in poverty rise among their ranks.
  2. What’s more, the mere fact that millions of college-educated Americans are living in poverty adds another data point to the increasingly complicated picture of a college degree’s value in the labor market. On the one hand, a degree is more necessary than everto succeed in today’s economy — those with a bachelor’s degree or above are the least likely to be in poverty, according to the Census Bureau; on the other hand, getting a degree still involves some risk.

Libraries

  1. Trump wants to eliminate federal funding for public libraries that millions of Americans depend on for information and educational services. Free libraries are an American tradition.Student Debt
  2. Student debt is piling up. College costs continue to soar, jumping 6.1% from 2013 to 2016, but the median income for those with college degrees only rose 2.1% over that same period. As a college degree becomes a requirement for entering an increasingly competitive workforce, many young people are doing so with a pile of debt. Student debt hit $1.46 trillion this year, compared to just $243 billion back in 2003. This is more than the GOP’s tax giveaway.
  3. Trump rescinded protections for student loan borrowers.On March 16, the Trump administration withdrew measures to protect struggling student loan borrowers and made repayment more difficult by allowing debt collectors to charge a 16 percent fee—even when the borrower agrees to make good on their debt within 60 days. On April 11, the Trump administration stripped away important measures that would hold student loan servicers accountable when their actions are not in the best interest of students. It has been well-documented that servicers sometimes place borrowers in repayment programs that could ultimately make it more difficult for them to repay their debt.
  4. In March 2017, with no advance warning, the IRS and U.S. Department of Education disabled a key web-based tool that helps millions of students apply for aid and repay their loans. Failure to notify students put financial aid applicants at risk of losing access to grant aid that helps pay for college and put student loan borrowers at risk of seeing their payments jump by hundreds of dollars.
  5. A new rule makes it harder for defrauded students to seek debt relief. Currently, students may be eligible for federal loan forgiveness if their college closed or was accused of fraudulent activity. More than 130,000 borrowers have applied since 2015, a majority of whom attended for-profit colleges.
  6. Gamblers and reality TV stars can claim bankruptcy protections when in financial trouble, but 44 million student loan borrowers can’t. Unemployed, underpaid, destitute, sick, or struggling borrowers simply aren’t able to start anew.
  7. With a default rate approaching 40 percent, one would expect armies of distressed borrowers marching in the streets demanding relief from a system that has singled out their financial anguish. Distressed student debtors, however, seem to be terror-struck about coming forward to a society that, they say, ostracizes them for their inability to keep up with their finances.
  8. Financial shame alienates struggling borrowers. Debtors blame themselves and self-loathe when they can’t make their payments, explains Colette Simone, a Michigan psychologist. “There is so much fear of sharing the reality of their financial situation and the devastation it is causing in every facet of their lives,” she says. “The consequences of coming forward can result in social pushback and possible job–related complications, which only deepen their suffering.”
  9. Debtors are isolated, anxious, and in the worst cases have taken their own lives. Simone confirms that she has “worked with debtors who were suicidal or had psychological breakdowns requiring psychiatric hospitalization.”
  10. With an average debt of just over $37,000 per borrower for the class of 2016, and given that incomes have been flat since the 1970s, it’s not surprising that borrowers are struggling to pay. Student loans have a squeaky-clean reputation, and society tends to view them as a noble symbol of the taxpayers’ generosity to the working poor. Fear of facing society’s ostracism for failure to pay them back has left borrowers alienated and trapped in a lending system that is engulfing them in debt bondage.
  11. Alienation impacts mental health issues. As long as debtors they blame themselves within the system, they’re lost. Student debtors can counter despair by fighting back through activism and political engagement.
  12. While workers with a college degree in general have lower unemployment rates, higher earnings, lower poverty rates and, on average, they have much better outcomes, those are averages. “It’s a worthwhile reminder that there are people with college degrees that are living in poverty — they can’t find a job with good wages, they can’t find a job at all.”
  13. Prelude to a crisis: student debt passes $1.5 trillion and 65% of borrowers have less than $1,000 in the bank

Retirement is becoming more and more expensive

  1. Future generations may have to abandon the idea of a single home altogether. So what kinds of jobs will we do when we’re old and grey? Will we be well enough to work? And will anyone want to employ us? 

Nursing Homes

  1. Revenue from independent and assisted living couldn’t compensate for the losses incurred by the nursing home. Nearly one nursing home bed in five now goes unused. In 2015, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that more than a third of beds were empty in some states, including Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Utah. Texas wasn’t far behind.
  2. Occupancyis now down to 81.7 percent, the lowest level since the research organization began tracking this data in 2011, when it was nearly 87 percent.
  3. The median cost for a private room in a nursing home now tops 1.6 times the median national household income.
  4. Nationally, “200 to 300 nursing homes close each year. The number of residents keeps shrinking, too, from 1.48 million in 2000 to 1.36 million in 2015, according to federal data.
  5. So if you become ill or disabled and can no longer live at home, don’t expect there will be a nursing home available for you.
  6.  Seniors can’t afford nursing home care to the tune of $8000 + a month.  If you think  you’re going to care for grandpa at home? Few people can handle the cost, time, and effort required.

More Seniors Fillng homeless shelters

  1. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, in 2008 seniors made up 22 percent of the national population. In 2016, that number jumped to 28 percent, and as the Baby Boomer population gets older, those numbers are only expected to grow.
  2. Typically homeless seniors do not fit the overall homeless stereotype. Most are not mentally ill or dealing with addiction. They no longer have an income that will allow them to live independently or in a nursing home.
  3. Older Americans are filing for bankruptcy at more than double the rate of just 25 years ago, a sign of a “coming storm of broke elderly,” a new study finds.
  4. The rate of people 65 and over filing for bankruptcy grew nearly 204 percent from 1991 to 2016, a study published by the Social Science Research Network found, and the percentage of seniors among all U.S. bankruptcy filers increased by nearly five times over the same period.

Protection for Those Retiring

  1. Ended the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, which would have required retirement advisers to act in their clients’ best financial interest.  Delayed enforcement of a rule to reduce workers’ exposure to deadly silica dust for three months.Our Infrastructure is Falling Behind
  2. President Trump has promised a massive infrastructure package sometime early in 2018. That couldn’t come soon enough, as the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States’ infrastructure a D+ grade for 2017.Housing
  3. Raised housing payments for new homebuyers by about $500 in 2017.On its first day, the Trump administration reversed an Obama administration action to lower Federal Housing Administration, or FHA, mortgage insurance premiums for new homebuyers by 25 basis points, which could have lowered mortgage payments for 1 million households purchasing or refinancing their home this year alone.
  4. 11 million Americans spend more than half their paychecks on rent for homes they don’t own, in counties that aren’t the ones they work in. More than 550,000 people in the U.S. are homeless altogether. For those Americans who can afford to buy a home, they’re paying a larger percentage of their wages for the same property than they would have in years past, since pay increases aren’t coming as fast as price increases.The problem is worst for people at the lowest end of the market. America’s housing stock is laughably depleted, and affordable units are demolished all the time to make way for more lucrative luxury condos. Just 57 percent of homes sold between April and June of this year were affordable to Americans making the median U.S. income of $71,900, according to HousingWire. For the renters most in need, there are only 35 units available for every 100 extremely low-income households.

  5. First-time homebuyers accounted for 34% of all home purchases in 2017, which neared a historic low, per CNBC. Chalk that up to sky-high home prices and those massive piles of student debt, which the New York Fed said accounted for a noted drop in homebuyers amongst millennials this year, making home out of their reach.
  6. The Trump administration wants to shift the way it enforces an aspect of fair housing around the US, pivoting away from efforts to integrate lower-income housing into wealthier neighborhoods in favor of promoting more housing development overall. The Obama administration took steps to encourage the development of low-income housing in high-income neighborhoods.
  7. President Trump’s budget would eliminate the $6.7 billion that funds the Community Development Block Grant, which is used by 1,265 local communities for important initiatives such as Meals on Wheels, neighborhood rehabilitation, the development of affordable housing, job training, and business expansion. The Housing Choice Vouchers program will also experience deep cuts in funding, as will other programs providing supportive services for the elderly and persons with disabilities. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, about 200,000 families will no longer receive a housing voucher to pay for their rental costs and could eventually face homelessness in a housing market where there is a severe shortage of affordable housing.
  8. White House Says Cutting Meals on Wheels Is ‘Compassionate’

  9. The proposed budget would eliminate the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which supports billions of dollars in financing across low-income communities, including more than $300 million inrural and NativeAmericancommunities, as well as the Economic Development Administration and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, costing another $300 million or more that is annually invested in community growth. Without federal support, economic development in these locations will suffer, including small-business development.

Civil Liberties

  1. Trump suggests that protesting should be illegal.
  2. President Trump’s empty claims of widespread fraud undermine the integrity of our elections and lay the basis for voter suppression efforts that attack our constitutional right to participate in self-government. When government officials spread lies that call into question the legitimacy of our elections, people lose faith in the democratic process. Instead of responding to the clear and present dangers of foreign interference and discriminatory efforts to keep some American citizens from casting their ballots, Trump chooses to spread baseless slander while calling for a witch hunt against American voters.
  3.  Trump undercut students’ civil rights by naming skeptics to top civil rights positions. The nominee to serve as general counsel in the Department of Education, Carlos Muñiz, defended Florida State University against allegations that it protected a star quarterback from rape charges. And the new head of the Office for Civil Rights, Candice Jackson, has claimed she experienced discrimination for being white and called the women who accused President Trump of assault and harassment “fake victims.”
  4. Trump promises to destroy the Johnson Amendment, which prevents nonprofit organizations—including houses of worship—from endorsing political candidates. A leaked draft executive order indicates plans to insert religious exemptions in federal nondiscrimination protections, revealing a pattern of attempts to redefine the foundational value of religious freedom so it will only protect people of faith who share conservative Christian beliefs.
  5.  President Trump’s January 27 executive action on refugees and revised March 6 executive action both aimed to prohibit travel to the United States for nationals of Muslim-majority nations and fundamentally reshape the refugee admissions program to prioritize the claims of Christians. Trumps actions have alienated the Muslims communities not only within the United States but also around the world, damaging critical relationships with national security allies.
  6.  From the anti-Muslim travel bans to disturbing Holocaust-denying remarks, the administration is a threat to religious minorities, many of whom are already vulnerable to rising incidents of anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry.Consumer Protection
  7. The administration’s de facto financial deregulation, systematically gutting of consumer financial protection punishes the least well off, since poor families and less educated workers are the most likely victims of exploitative bankers.Banking
  8. The rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991.
  9. 2 percent of American consumers paid their credit card bill late “at least once in the last year”, and 24 percent of Americans consumers paid their credit card bills late “more than once in the last year”. According to the Federal Reserve, the credit card default rate in the U.S. has risen for 7 quarters in a row.
  10. Two more hard-right Supreme Court justices. There are 12,000 migrant children in detention centers today –  it could be 24,000 next year.Trade
  11. The trade wars Trump has tempted with China and the EU don’t seem like they’re going anywhere any time soon.. The economic leverage Trump promised has not yet become clear. But neither has the world economy imploded. The administration has had to pivot to help some farmers being hurt by retaliations from other countries.Rural America Loses Ground
  12. President Trump’s budget would eliminate programs that support rural jobs, housing, infrastructure, health care, and economic development. If implemented, these budget cuts would eliminate affordable housing for tens of thousands of struggling rural families; eliminate community service jobs for 18,000 senior citizens living in rural areas; and eliminate critical support for airline connections serving 175 small and rural communities.
  13. Japan is the top market for U.S. beef, but Australia’s products could now take over America’s spot since foreign beef tariffs in Japan will be cut by 27.5 percent for Australian producers.
  14. Canadian and Australian wheat exports to Japan now immediately benefit from a 7 percent drop in the Japanese government’s mark-up price, which will become a 12 percent reduction in April, By April, American wheat will face a $14 per metric ton resale price disadvantage to Australia and Canada. The wheat market a faces “imminent collapse” in JapanJob Training
  15. Job training programs would be slashed and worker wage and safety enforcement. President Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2018 budget could result in 2.7 million adults and youths losing access to job training and employment services in 2018.Cuts in Public Transportation

  16. Proposed budget cuts that would increase roadway congestion. The budget calls for eliminating the TIGER grant program at the U.S. Department of Transportation, or USDOT, which funds innovative surface transportation projects. Additionally, the budget calls for the phased elimination of the New Starts program within the Federal Transit Administration, which funds major public transportation projects. Rail and bus rapid transit projects help to reduce roadway congestion and air pollution while spurring economic development.Justice
  17. An independent and vigorous Division of Enforcement at the SEC is vital to preserving free and fair financial markets for investors. After the Bernie Madoff scandal, Obama administration SEC Chair Mary Schapiro made it easier for Division of Enforcement staff to open investigations and issue subpoenas to protect investors and get to the bottom of suspected malfeasance. The new chair inexplicably rolled back this change, hindering the SEC’s ability to protect the average investor from financial wrongdoing. He has also proposed rolling back key advances in corporate transparency, including regarding human rights risks in supply chains and the pay ratio between CEOs and the median worker. In so doing, he undermined investor protection by making it harder for the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, to hold Wall Street accountable.
  18. Nearly every other justice on the Court had bipartisan support and crossed the 60-vote threshold at some point during their confirmation process, but many senators objected to President Trump’s nominees. The nuclear option means Senate leaders can now confirm Trump’s ideologically driven judges with a simple majority.
  19.  As a candidate and as president, Trump has attacked judges whose rulings he does not like and undermined the legitimacy of these courts. He called a judge who ruled against his discriminatory Muslim ban a “so-called judge.” During the campaign, he said that a Mexican-American judge could not be impartial in a lawsuit against Trump due to his ethnicity. These attacks on the third branch of government undermine the founders’ separation of powers as well as the very rule of law.
  20.  The Trump administration is already vetting conservative ideologues to appoint to federal courts. President Trump’s nominations, particularly for seats on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, signal an aggressive push to bend the federal judiciary ideologically. Trump has well over 100 seats to fill—thanks to Senate obstruction during President Obama’s term—and Trump recently announced that the administration would no longer seek the recommendation from the nonpartisan American Bar Association.
  21. Already scarce access to justice will be put even further out of reach for 60.6 million low-income Americans under President Trump’s proposal to eliminate the Legal Services Corporation—the nation’s main funding stream for civil legal services.
  22.  Attorney General Sessions asked a court at the last minute not to accept a consent decree that was supported by the Baltimore police commissioner, mayor, community members, and career Department of Justice attorneys. The federal court rejected Sessions’ motion, allowing needed police reforms that would build trust between the police and the communities they serve to proceed.
  23.  Attorney General Sessions should be focusing on the need for police reform; supporting innovative crime-reduction strategies; and ensuring drug treatment and alternatives to incarceration are available. Yet, instead, he has ordered a review of current pattern and practice cases of police misconduct where evidence and a clear record has shown a police department has acted with systemic misconduct. He has also questioned decades of research and science rejecting a tough-on-crime approach.
  24.  Private prisons create a perverse incentive to incarcerate more people since these companies are motivated to increase profit, which is generated only if there are more inmates filling their facilities. Private prisons that contracted with the Department of Justice were found by the department itself to be less efficient and have more issues with security and management.
  25. Turned a blind eye to illegal anti-transgender discrimination in schools.The Trump administration revoked Title IX guidance issued by the Department of Education clarifying schools’ long-standing obligations under federal civil rights law to treat transgender students equally and with dignity. Transgender students face pervasive harassment and discrimination in schools, impeding these students’ ability to learn. Nearly 1 in 6 out transgender K-12 students have been forced to leave school because of this harassment. 
  26. Erased LGBTQ people from federal surveys, making it impossible to know if government programs serve them fairly. The Trump administration removed questions about LGBTQ people from key federal surveys about programs that serve seniors and people with disabilities, without which policymakers and advocates cannot ensure LGBTQ people have equal access to key government services such as Meals on Wheels. The administration also appears to have included—but then gone back and omitted—questions about LGBTQ people from the American Community Survey, an annual survey that gathers information about Americans’ educational attainment, housing, and health coverage.
  27. Appointed longtime opponents of LGBTQ rights—including members of anti-LGBTQ hate groups—to key administration positions.Many of President Trump’s appointees, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, made their careers standing in the way of LGBTQ rights—and now, they’re in charge of agencies that enforce those very rights. The appointments get even more disturbing the closer you look: Trump tapped Ken Blackwell, a former fellow at an anti-LGBTQ hate group, as a domestic policy adviser; selected leaders of the hate group C-FAM for the president’s delegation to the United Nations; and appointed Roger Severino, a longtime opponent of transgender civil rights, to run the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights.
  28.  Proposed slashing funding for research to cure HIV/AIDS. President Trump has proposed devastating cuts to health research, including $6 billion in cuts to the National Institutes of Health in the budget and a $50 million cut to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV research and prevention programs. The administration has also pushed a $300 million cut to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR—an extraordinarily successful program that provides lifesaving treatment to 11.5 million people worldwide and has broad bipartisan support.

    Racial justice
  29. Supported economic policies that are detrimental to communities of color. Many of the budget cuts proposed by President Trump would cut key social service programs. For example, 41 percent of the 9 million.  Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, recipients are people of color. The budget also eliminates the Minority Business Development Agency, which promotes business development for people of color—the fastest growing segment of the population.
  30. Proposed funding cuts for programs that support and encourage small business development.
  31. The federal government shutdown is blocking almost $200 million in small business loans per day: 7(a) loans for working capital and 504 loans for commercial properties. Usually, the SBA manages about 200 loans for working capital and 120 loans for commercial properties per day, amounting to roughly $200 million worth of loans every day for small and midsize businesses. Currently, only funds for disaster-related loans remain active. As the longest government shutdown in U.S. history drags on to day 24 with no clear end in sight, small business advocates are urging the president to restart the SBA’s lending program.
  32. President Trump budget  cuts funding for several programs that help groups with historically low business ownership rates overcome barriers to becoming entrepreneurs, including the PRIME technical assistance grants for low-income micro-entrepreneurs; the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Economic Development Administration.
  33. Attempted to make it harder for entrepreneurs to get access to affordable healthThe ACA helps millions of entrepreneurs obtain access to health care without relying on a spouse or employer, which allows them to take one of the necessary risks associated with starting a business. The proposed American Health Care Act, or AHCA, would reduce access to health care and make it more expensive for many people to get comprehensive health care coverage.
  34. President Trump’s skinny budget proposed eliminating the Corporation for National and Community Service, which would also eliminate AmeriCorps, a vital service program that plays a critical role in mobilizing volunteers to aid with disaster preparedness and response. Thus leaving 23,000 calls for help unanswered from Americans in disaster-struck areas.
  35. President Trump’s proposal to slash funding for the WIC program puts basic food security at risk for thousands of families. At an annual food cost of about $513 per person, the $200 million cut could help pay for a year’s worth of food and formula for nearly 390,000 participating women, children and infants.
  36. Trump proposed eliminating HOME Investment Partnerships Program. To date, HOME has helped more that 1.2 million families gain access to safe and affordable housing. But this successful program is also on President Trump’s budget chopping block, thereby threatening housing security or thousands of families.
  37. NeighborWorks America provides grants to community development organizations that help build and maintain affordable housing. The program created 53,649 jobs and assisted 360,009 families with affordable housing in the last year alone. Trump proposed eliminating NeighborWorks America.
  38. Whopping 62 percent of jobs don’t support middle-class life after accounting for cost of living.Environment
  39. Several studies have found evidence that the rising seas levels are eroding coastal property values, and owners may not be fully aware of the rising threat to their lives.Energy
  40. The Trump budget blueprint calls for a 5.6 percent cut overall to the U.S. Department of Energy. This cut, along with calls for additional funding to nuclear security and waste cleanup, mean that there will be steeper cuts for programs designed to develop household appliances that save families money. President Trump’s budget proposal also eliminates programs such as ARPA-E, which helps entrepreneurs develop clean, affordable energy, and the Weatherization Assistance Program, which upgrades the homes of low-income families with insulation and cost-effective energy efficient improvements to help reduce utility bills. Trump eliminated pollution standards for power plants and oil and gas facilities.
  41. Trump responds to worst fires in California’s history by threatening to withhold federal aid. The president blamed California’s environmental policies for the “deadly and costly” toll of the wildfires. In contrast, California Governor Jerry Brown unequivocally blamed climate change for the devastation.

    Science

  42. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has a fleet of empty desks.  The staff has dropped to 45 people, a substantial decline from President Obama’s OSTP, which had a staff of 135 people. Another difference from the Obama years — the majority of Mr. Trump’s OSTP staffers do not have a background in science.Clean Water
  43. Proposed cutting EPA programs to clean up water sources by 31 percent and its staff by one-quarter. The proposal targets popular programs, such as regional efforts to clean up the Great Lakes, Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay, and other iconic bodies of water.Exposure to Lead-Based Paint
  44. Proposed eliminating programs at the EPA dedicated to preventing children’s exposure to lead-based paint, which can cause neurological delays. An estimated 38 million U.S. homes contain lead-based paint, and in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control found that 243,000 children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. Lead is a neurotoxin that causes permanent nerve damage.Coal
  45. One of the Trump administration’s first actions was to nix the Stream Protection Rule put in place by the Obama administration to prevent coal companies from polluting nearby streams. Scrapping this environmental protection was a top priority of the coal industry at the expense of clean drinking water in coal communities.
  46. President Trump eliminated an anti-corruption rule that had required oil and gas companies to disclose payments to foreign governments. When he was still the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had lobbied to remove the rules established under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to the delight of the oil industry.
  47.  The Trump administration moved to preserve a loophole the Obama administration closed that allows coal companies to rip off taxpayers by allowing them to sell coal mined on federal lands to their own subsidiaries at artificially low prices and shirk royalty payment responsibilities.
  48. Halted the first comprehensive review of the federal coal program in more than 30 years while simultaneously opening public lands for new leases to mine coal. Federal coal lease sales only bring in, on average,$1 per ton in bids, and taxpayers are estimated to be losing $1 billion annually in lost royalty payments on undervalued coal sales.
  49. EPA formally unveiled the details of its new plan to devolve regulation of coal-fired power plants back to the states, one that is expected to give a boost to the coal industry and increase carbon emissions nationwide. The move would reverse Obama administration efforts to combat climate change and marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise at the heart of his appeal in coal-producing states like West Virginia — an appeal embodied by Trump’s 2016 campaign stops in the coal country of West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, where Trump supporters waved “Trump Digs Coal” signs and where the President-to-be donned a coal-mining helmet. This specific move by the EPA move will cause an additional 36,000 deaths per year. Trump dislikes renewable energy and greatly prefers coal and has tried to prop that industry up.
  50. Global warming exacerbates world conflicts, says Red Cross president – “It’s very obvious that some of the violence that we are observing is directly linked to the impact of climate change and changing rainfall patterns.Climate Change
  51.  Catastrophic climate change is not a problem for economic royalists, sometimes called fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracies: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
  52. Proposed major cuts to the Department of the Interior’s budget that would impair critical maintenance of our national parks while making a public show of supporting themA few weeks after proposing to cut $1.5 billion, or 12 percent, from the Department of the Interior’s budget, President Trump had Press Secretary Sean Spicer ceremoniously hand a $78,000 check—Trump’s first-quarter earnings—to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to help the National Park Service.  Here’s the rub: Trump’s check only covers 0.01 percent of $1.3 billion in “critical systems deferred maintenance” that the National Park Service urgently needs.
  53.  Climate Trauma is continually triggering many of our traumas, creating a psychological milieu of perpetual powerlessness, what does healing our trauma look like in this toxic culture?
  54.  Trauma is a multi-valent phenomena. It happens at the individual level when the trust we have placed in someone with power over us is fundamentally ruptured. When we lack the emotional tools to deal with such a violation, we ‘check out’ (dissociate) and end up storing the trauma in our bodies (so-called ‘somatic memory’). It happens at the epigenetic level, when the members of our tribe have been severely traumatized, or have perpetrated mass traumas, stunting the RNA passed onto us in our genes. It happens at the cultural level, when we bring to mind the shock of social upheavals like the attack on the World Trade Towers, the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, or more recently the institutionalized separation and imprisonment of children from their families. In a very real sense, all the problems we face are the result of past traumas.
  55. Trauma lives in memory and in our bodies, and perpetuates increasing dysfunction the longer it goes unresolved. When it is repressed, we recreate it in the dramas of our personal relationships, we perpetuate it in our family dysfunction, we institutionalize it in our social structures, and we encode it in our cultural memes. It is the troublemaker in our lives, revealing itself in cyclic patterns that get repeated over and over. And the longer it goes unaddressed, the more trouble it causes – just like a troubled child who demands attention. In fact, the stubborn persistence of trauma first revealed itself when researchers discovered, much to their surprise and puzzlement, that the offspring of survivors of the Holocaust were more traumatized then their parents. This phenomena, of course, comes as no surprise to Native Americans.
  56. So climate trauma is calling on each of us individually, and all of us collectively, to face our traumas. Our natural psychological inclination is to turn away, because trauma is painful and raises fundamental identity issues. But we cannot turn away from Climate Trauma any longer. It poses an existential threat to the survival of all species, including the human species. The Earth is our Witness. The earth is calling on us to acknowledge some harsh truths about all our relations. Trauma is rooted in relationship, and thus can only be resolved through healing relationships. She demands reconciliation, and such a process begins with fully acknowledging difficult truths.
  57.  Pulled the rug from under private investors backing conservation efforts. As part of a sweeping executive order aimed at gutting actions the Obama administration took to address climate change, President Trump rescinded the presidential memorandum that encouraged private investment when developers work to mitigate impacts on natural resources. This action undercuts the economic and environmental gains that the fast-growing restoration industry has made recently to the tune of $1.15 billion between 2014 and 2015 in private capital invested in habitat conservation and water management. These relatively new environmental marketplaces rely on regulatory consistency that President Obama’s memorandum bolstered.
  58.  President Trump overturned a rule that had protected black bear mothers and their cubs from being hunted in their dens. The Obama administration’s “Fair Chase” rule, which applied to national wildlife refuges in Alaska, also limited baiting, trapping, and the use of aircrafts to track and shoot bears and wolves.
  59. Ozone pollution is a key contributor to smog, which can cause more frequent asthma attacks and exacerbate lung diseases. President Trump’s EPA is moving toward changing air quality standards established under the Obama administration to allow greater ozone pollution. Ground level ozone pollution can increase the frequency of asthma attacks, cause shortness of breath, aggravate lung diseases, and cause permanent damage to lungs through long-term exposure. Elevated ozone levels are linked to increases in hospitalizations, emergency room visits, and premature death, and can cause pronounced health impacts in children and the elderly.
  60. President Trump essentially determined that climate change has no cost by eliminating a critical metric used to measure the benefit of cutting carbon pollution. He was in effect nullifying the “social cost of carbon. 
  61.  Trump’s EPA is stopping rules that would limit the dumping of toxins, such as mercury and arsenic, and pollution from power plants into public waterways. These would have been the first protections in more than 30 years to curb toxins and other pollutants in power plants.
  62.  Secretary of the Interior Zinke reversed a ban on using lead bullets for hunting in wildlife refuses. Lead content in these bullets can poison water and wildlife, thereby changing the standard for protecting water and wildlife from lead poisoning.
  63. The president signed an executive order directing the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management to review the methane pollution standards for oil and gas drilling facilities and determine whether to rescind or revise them, opening the door to reducing methane pollution standards. Methane pollution supercharges global warming 86 times as much as carbon pollution.
  64.  President Trump signed an executive order rescinding previous executive orders related to preparing the U.S. for climate change; encouraging private investment in efforts to mitigate pollution; and ensuring our national security plans consider climate change impacts.
  65.  The President’s appointees deny scientific proof of climate change. EPA Administrator Pruitt told the media that he does not think carbon dioxide is the primary contributor to climate change. His statement is the climate science equivalent of saying the world is flat.Heating Bills
  66. Proposed budget cuts to that will cause 5.7 million low-income residents to lose assistance with their heating bills and about 673,000 to lose cooling assistance. President Trump’s proposal to eliminate the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, will be especially dangerous as more states experience extreme weather.
  67. Climate change is reshaping aspects of our environment that many of us thought were static — from where deserts begin and end, to what we can grow in backyard or community gardens. Climate change is literally redrawing lines on the map, like “the line of where wheat will grow, or where tornadoes tend to form, where deserts end, where the frozen ground thaws, and even where the boundaries of the tropics lie.”Democracy and Government Reform
  68.  The Trump family continues to promote their private business interests at home and abroad while profiting off of the presidency. Corruption, or even the appearance of corruption, diminishes trust in government and increases cynicism toward democratic institutions. At a time when 75 percent of Americans already believe that corruption is widespread in government, President Trump’s blatant disregard for ethics rules and constitutional prohibitions on presidential enrichment further undermine democratic norms and threatens our democracy, economy, and national security.
  69. Undermined transparency and accountability by continuing to hide his tax returns and withholding White House visitor logs. Due to his refusal to release his tax returns the full extent of President Trump’s indebtedness and foreign entanglements remains unknown. As a result, Americans cannot be sure that Trump is not providing favors and special treatment to his business partners or that foreign states and businesses are not leveraging influence over the Trump administration and its decisions. It is impossible for Trump to lead an effort to revise the tax code without Americans knowing how his proposals would line his own pocket. Changing the practice to stop disclosing White House visitor logs prevents the public from knowing who is accessing federal officials on a daily basis and keeps special interest influence shrouded in secrecy.
  70. The administration wants to freeze a rule mandating that automakers work to make cars substantially more fuel efficient. It called its plan a “50-state fuel economy and tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions standard for passenger cars and light trucks.” The administration also proposed a withdrawal of California’s Clean Air Act preemption waiver. California and about a dozen states that follow its rules account for about a third of all the passenger vehicles sold in the United States. California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, called the proposal “reckless.”
  71. Pushed environmental policies that will negatively affect communities of color. As noted above, the EPA wants to eradicate programs dedicated to reducing exposure to lead paint, which disproportionately affects communities of color. The EPA is also cutting funding for the environmental justice office that had just been set up to specifically deal with lead, pollution, and other issues facing communities of color.Military and National Security
  72.  The Trump Administration announced creating a Space Force by 2020, while also announcing immediate steps the Department of Defense would take to reform how the military approaches space… In June, President Donald Trump said he was directing “the Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.
  73.  The anti-Muslim bigotry of the Trump administration makes every American less safe by helping IS and other terrorist groups recruit followers. As one IS commander in Afghanistan put it, the Trump administration’s “utter hate towards Muslims will make our job much easier because we can recruit thousands.” The original Muslim ban included Iraq, where Iraqi soldier fighting alongside U.S. forces against IS called it a “betrayal.”
  74.  President Trump has taken no actions to achieve more balanced trade with China. He recklessly toyed with overturning nearly 40 years of official policy recognizing “one China” but backed down during his first call with the Chinese president, showing that his threats were hollow. Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson claimed they would stop China from building on disputed islands in the South China Sea, but China proceeds to do what it wants, where it wants. Trump’s summit with President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago resort resulted in no progress on any difficult issues. Beijing sees Washington as hot air with little substance. Trump’s all talk, no action approach is encouraging repression over freedom and making authoritarian leaders confident that repression will be tolerated.
  75.  After years of decline, civilian deaths from U.S. military operations have surged under Trump, destroying families, undermining strategic aims, and providing a propaganda boon to U.S. enemies. U.S. military spokesperson Col. Joseph Scrocca said “[More civilian casualties] is probably detrimental to the strength of our coalition. And that’s exactly what ISIS is trying to target right now.” Civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria have spiked in 2017, already far surpassing the total for all of 2016. Trump’s first major raid as president, in Yemen in January, was decided over dinner in the White House—far outside the regular process—and resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
  76.  Trump has threatened national security and hurt the integrity of America’s democracy by an ongoing lack of transparency and refusal to disclose details about his finances and ties to Russia. Americans cannot know who President Trump might owe money or what obligations or commitment he and his team could have to Russia or other foreign powers. Trump’s refusal to condemn the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 elections; release his tax returns; step away from his business; and support an independent commission and special counsel to get to the bottom of Russia’s influence over the 2016 election are a green light to Russians and others who want to meddle in U.S. democracy. All Americans from all political parties are vulnerable when foreign influence, money, and hacking can run roughshod though America’s democratic institutions.
  77.  President Trump has announced the United States plans to withdraw from the U.S.-Russian Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
  78. This list is just a sample of the ways in which President Trump and his administration have already broken their promises to Americans and revealed their true priorities. As this list grows, real damage is being done to communities and working families across the nation. Trump should heed their calls to put the needs of ordinary Americans ahead of corporations and the wealthy. Our unfunded liabilities are well in excess of 200 trillion dollars right now and the U.S. went 17 trillion dollars further into debt during 2017 due to the loss of revenue from tax cuts.
  79. If individuals, corporations, state and local governments and the federal government all stopped going into more debt, we would plunge into the greatest economic depression in U.S. history immediately.
  80. The system is deeply, deeply broken, and the only way that we can keep this debt bubble going is go keep accumulating even more debt.
  81. Anyone out there that believes that the U.S. economy has been “fixed” is completely deceived.  NOTHING has been fixed.  Instead, our long-term financial imbalances are getting worse at an escalating pace.
  82. Unfortunately, the attitude of the general public is so similar to what it was just prior to the great financial crisis of 2008.  Most people seem to assume that just because we have not experienced great consequences for our very foolish decisions up to this point that no great consequences are coming.
  83. And many also assume that since control of the White House has switched parties that somehow things must magically be better as well.
  84. Of course the truth is that the only way that our long-term problems are ever going to be fixed is if we start addressing the issues that caused those long-term problems in the first place, and that simply is not happening.
  85. As I have traveled extensively over the course of the past year, I discovered that most Americans do not want to make fundamental changes to the system, because they are under the illusion that the current system is working just fine.  So it will probably take another major crisis before most people are ready to consider fundamental changes, and when it finally arrives we will need to be ready to educate the public.
  86. The system that we have today is not fundamentally sound at all.  We desperately need to return to the values and principles that this nation was founded upon, but until things start getting really, really bad it is highly unlikely that the American people will be ready to embrace those changes.
  87. One of Trump’s first actions as president was to reinstate the Global Gag Rule, which prevents recipients of U.S. foreign aid from offering any information, referrals, services, or advocacy regarding abortion care—even if they do so with separate funding sources. The Global Gag Rule will lead to more maternal deaths, more unintended pregnancies, and higher rates of unsafe abortion.Restructuring the Veterans Administration
  88.  An informal council is exerting sweeping influence over the US Department of Veterans Affairs from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.  This group of three, led by Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, was very open about the fact that they had been “anointed by the President and had his full support to influence policy at the VA” despite never being appointed or installed as formal advisers.Reduced Job Opportunities for Veterans by Instituting a Federal Hiring Freeze
  89. Veterans receive a strong hiring preference for federal jobs, and roughly one-third of all newly hired federal employees in 2015 were veterans. Even if many jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, are exempt from the hiring freeze, other vacant jobs will still be unavailable at other federal agencies.Loans for Veterans
  90. The Trump administration plans to eliminate routine audits of lenders for violations of the Military Lending Act, according to internal agency documents. The interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, plans to terminate the supervisory examinations of lenders, arguing proactive oversight is not laid out in the legislation, according to the report.Immigration
  91.  White House adviser Stephen Miller is pushing to expedite a policy that could penalize legal immigrants whose families receive public benefits and make it more difficult to get citizenship, three sources familiar with the matter tell CNN. The White House has been reviewing the proposal since March at the Office of Management and Budget, which is the last stop for regulations before they are final. But concerns over potential lawsuits have delayed the final rule, and the draft has undergone numerous revisions, multiple sources say. The crux of the proposal would penalize legal immigrants if they or their family members have used government benefits — defined widely in previous drafts of the policy.
  92. In January, and then again in March, President Trump signed executive orders banning immigrants from seven—and then, subsequently, six—Muslim-majority nations for at least three months and halting the refugee program for four months. The January executive order sparked widespread protests at airports all across the country and was quickly blocked by a federal court in Washington state and then by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In early March, Trump signed a barely revised version of the original order, which courts in Hawaii and Maryland rightly acknowledged still constituted a Muslim and refugee ban. The core parts of the ban were once again put on hold.
  93.  The Obama administration focused its immigration enforcement on serious threats to national security and public safety, as well as recent border crossers. Within days of taking office, Trump signed an executive order eliminating the Obama priorities, effectively making all unauthorized immigrants a priority for deportation, regardless of how long they have been in the country, their ties to families and communities, or other equities. In practice, this has meant that thousands of people have been deported.
  94. Aggressive immigration enforcement by the Trump administration—including a case in El Paso, where immigration officials arrested a victim of domestic abuse at a courthouse after she received a protective order against her abuser—has made immigrants and Latinos, regardless of immigration status, increasingly reluctant to come forward to report crimes. Prosecutors in Denver have been forced to drop four domestic violence prosecutions because immigrant victims no longer wish to cooperate. Another domestic violence case in Austin hangs in limbo under similar circumstances. Since last year, Los Angeles has seen reports by Latinos of sexual assault decline by 25 percent, and Houston has seen reports by Latinos of rapes decline by nearly 43 percent. By making everyone a priority, the administration has made no one a priority to the detriment of public safety.
  95. Even though Trump has said that he will deal with young unauthorized immigrants with “great heart,” and even though Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly has said that he is “the best thing that happened to DACA,” the Department of Homeland Security has detained at least five recipients of DACA—which grants eligible young people a two-year reprieve from deportation and a work permit—since taking office.  
  96. As part of the January 25 executive order on interior immigration enforcement, President Trump threatened to take away federal funds from more than 600 so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. On March 27 Attorney General Jeff Sessions threatened to revoke Department of Justice grants that, among other purposes, help local law enforcement to eliminate barriers to processing rape kits, combat gang and gun crime, and stop human trafficking. The attorney general’s comments were swiftly denounced by the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Research shows that counties with sanctuary policies have lower crime rates and stronger economies than those without the policies.
  97.  Not long after the Trump administration took office, a draft executive order leaked, illustrating that the administration was looking to target even legal immigrants living in the United States. Among other provisions, the draft order would make lawful permanent residents, or green card holders, eligible for deportation if they use any type of means-tested benefit. The mere possibility of the order, as well as increased immigration enforcement, has had a chilling effect on communities across the nation. In California, for example, the Alameda County Community Food Bank saw 40 families cancel their food stamps and another 54 eligible families choose not to apply for food stamps. Other reports indicate that some immigrants are taking their names off of the list to receive baby formula or keeping children away from child care centers.
  98.  The dominant immigration story from the summer has been the administration’s decision to separate children of undocumented from their families at the US border. Repercussions from that decision earlier this year, the decision to reverse course in June and the ongoing process to reunite children with their families has been a serious problem for the administration that has involved every branch of government from the HHS to the DOJ.
  1. President Trump’s refugee suspension blocked LGBTQ Syrian and Iraqi refugees from finding protection in the United States, leaving them stranded in countries where they are persecuted. His policy of detaining all immigrants who enter at the southern border and expanding the populations targeted for deportation traps LGBTQ asylum seekers in dangerous immigrant detention facilities and increases the risk that they will be wrongly deported to countries where their lives are at risk. The administration also decided to close the only dedicated transgender immigrant detention pod in the country, leaving transgender immigrants in detention at risk.Foreign Tourism1. The rest of the world is noting what happened to the U.S. Tourism is down across the board. Fewer British travelers come to the United States. Tourist centers like Las Vegas and Orlando saw double digit declines in U.K. visitors in 2017. The Trump administration has increased barriers to entry for foreign guests, cutting the revenue they spend in the U.S.What Else Trump Has Done1.  President Donald Trump had a clear message for supporters that drew many comparisons to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 about a totalitarian regime that wields ultimate power over its people through psychological manipulation: “Just remember—what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening.” Once again, Trump is back in the headlines claiming that a video of him from an NBC interview is somehow not what it appears, due to “fudging my tape on Russia,” suggesting that the video was somehow doctored using advanced technology to make the president look bad. This is despite the fact that NBC had put out a full transcript of the interview accompanied by a full video of it uninterrupted.This tactic of getting people to question their direct experience is a type of psychological manipulation scientists call “gaslighting”. A person who is gaslighting an individual or group that they have chosen to target does so by getting them to doubt their own memory, perception, and reality. Through persistent lying, misdirection, and contradiction, the gaslighter attempts to delegitimize the victim’s beliefs by confusing and destabilizing them.2. Gaslighting on a national level is terrifying, but the best thing we can all do right now is stay calm, collected, and confident in our reality and direct experiences. When someone is making statements like, “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” red flags should immediately go up, because those are the words of an intentional gaslighter.

The Government shut down is hurting Americans:

  • Families in public housing have no one to call about their health and safety problems.
  • Our national parks are in chaos.
  • TSA agents are calling in sick since they are not being paid
  • Your tax refund check won’t be in the mail. The funds are frozen.
  • You might have problems getting your tax refund.
  • Food stamps are at risk; funds run out in January or February.
  • Mike Pence and other senior executives gets a raise!
  • No transcripts from IRS needed for home loans

In the first nine months of his presidency, Trump made 1,318 false or misleading claims, an average of five a day. But in the seven weeks leading up the midterm elections, the president made 1,419 false or misleading claims — an average of 30 a day. Combined with the rest of his presidency, that adds up to a total of 6,420 claims through Oct. 30, the 649th day of his presidency, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president. Here are 30 specific lies he has told:

  1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more.
  2. He promised that the average family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of the tax law.
  3. He promised to close special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers. it.
  4. He promised to bring an end to Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear program.
  5. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful,” including “insurance for everybody.”
  6. He told you he wouldn’t “cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.”
  7. He promised to protect anyone with pre-existing conditions.
  8. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border..
  9. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
  10. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp.
  11. He promised to re-institute a five-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for five years after they leave government.
  12. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape.
  13. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by negotiating “like crazy” with drug companies.
  14. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.”
  15. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.”.
  16. He said he’d create tax-free dependent care savings accounts for younger and elderly dependents, and have the government match contributions low-income families put into their savings accounts.
  17. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.”
  18. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.”
  19. After pulling out of the Paris accord, he said he’d negotiate a better deal on the environment.
  20. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.”
  21. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and criticized Barack Obama for taking too many vacations.
  22. He vowed to “push colleges to cut the skyrocketing cost of tuition.”
  23. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be consequences for companies that shipped jobs abroad, especially government contractors.
  24. He promised to end DACA.
  25. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back lost coal mining jobs..
  26. He promised to protect American steel jobs.
  27. He said he’d make America safer.
  28. He promised to make two- and four-year colleges more affordable.
  29. He promised to eliminate the federal deficit and bring down the debt.
  30. He said he’d release his taxes.