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Climate Change Considered: Gov. Brown Hosts Leaders From Politics, Business and Even Entertainment to Talk About ActionSeptember 10 2018
If Jerry Brown could write the script in which he exits the political stage while still in the spotlight, he could do no better than what's teed up for him later this week: presiding over the Global Climate Action Summit with a few hundred of his closest fellow leaders in the fight against global warming.
The San Francisco event is a hybrid of various high-level international meetings in which political figures discuss what can be done to address climate change, sign declarations, adjourn and then meet again later, somewhere else.
This summit, which Brown is co-hosting with former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a bevy of international officials, aims to advance that staid model by including a broad group of "non-state actors"—mayors, governors and leaders representing regions rather than entire countries.
Brown's extensive networking will come into play, as will two organizations he helped found. One is the Under2 Coalition, a group of more than 200 governments vowing to prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.
A second grew out of his partnership with Bloomberg: America's Pledge, a mix of states, cities and businesses that vow to adhere to the emission reductions set out in the Paris agreement.
Perhaps most intriguing is the inclusion of business in the proceedings. Large industries are sometimes shunned as the root of the climate-change problem and not seen as entities offering solutions. Brown's idea is to invite companies to the table, take advantage of whatever solutions they offer, and then ask them to commit to specific goals for reducing greenhouse gases.
Whether and how such promises come to fruition, and whether any other meaningful actions come out of the summit, are the questions that typically bedevil these talk-heavy, photo-opportunity events.
"It could be a lot of pomp and not much action, but there could also be a lot of good things coming out of it," said Sean Hecht, co-executive director of UCLA's Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
"If your metric for success is how confident are we that this will help us turn the corner—there's certainly reason for pessimism. On the other hand, you have to keep trying," Hecht said. "It's possible that there will be some moment that the corner gets turned."
Among the invitees are the heavy-hitters of the climate change world: former Vice President Al Gore; Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change; primatologist Jane Goodall; and prominent climate scientists and researchers. And, this being California, a sprinkling of activist movie stars and other celebrities will be on hand, including actors Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, and musician Dave Matthews.
But with business leaders front and center, the summit affords companies a chance to brag about their green credentials. As unusual as that opportunity may be at climate conferences, it's not uncommon in California.
In fact, much of the state's conservation achievements have been driven by business advocacy, according to David Vogel, a retired business and political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, California Greenin': How the Golden State Became an Environmental Leader, which was published in May, traces the influence of private enterprise in forging environmental and conservation policies.
"The state has carved out a leadership role on climate issues, but influential business leaders have historically supported much of that," Vogel said, citing steamship companies' having lobbied for Yosemite to become a national park, in part so they could gain the lucrative trade in ferrying visitors to California.
"Business has certainly awakened to self-interest around climate," said Kathy Gerwig, vice president of employee safety, health and wellness, and environmental stewardship officer, at Kaiser Permanente, a health-care giant.
Kaiser donated $1 million to help fund the summit, as did the Schwab Charitable Trust, according to filings with the state. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave $1.25 million. Other sponsors contributed as well.
Kaiser set a goal to reduce carbon emissions 30 percent across the company by 2020, which was achieved three years early, she said. Climate change affects the health-care business—both its care facilities and its patients, she added.
"There are business risks associated with climate change—infrastructure where facilities are located, and storm damage. Those are real costs," Gerwig said, referring to extreme weather and rising seas. "And the number, variety and severity of some of the health impacts of climate change are what's front and center for our mind, that's our business."
She cited heat-related illness and the poor air quality that often plagues poorer neighborhoods.
Among the themes to be addressed in panels and seminars at the summit are inclusive economic growth, sustainable communities, and land and ocean stewardship. Some events are open to the public; others are not.
In keeping with the inclusive approach, there will be hundreds of side events, exhibits and tours in addition to the main speakers and panels. There will be much emphasis on environmental justice—how climate change can disproportionately harm low-income communities, many of which are near industrial sites that foul air and water.
The summit is expected to be accompanied by demonstrators—but they, too, are welcomed by at least some participants. A march is planned for the weekend before the conference, with another on its opening day. Greenpeace has docked its ship Arctic Sunrise, which will carry a banner calling for immediate action on climate change.
"I love the collaborative nature of this summit," Gerwig said. "I don't care what anybody's motivation is for action on climate. … Come to the table."
The official portions of the summit run Wednesday, Sept. 12, through Friday, Sept. 14, at the George R. Moscone Convention Center. Affiliated events will take place all week around the Bay Area.
CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
Open Your Wallets for Weather: A New Report Confirms That California's Bill for Climate Change Will Be StaggeringSeptember 01 2018
As California lawmakers struggled to address an apparent new normal of epic wildfires, there was an inescapable subtext: Climate change is going to be staggeringly expensive, and virtually every Californian is going to have to pay for it.
In the final week of August—just before the Legislature agreed to spend $200 million on tree clearance and let utilities pass on to customers the multi-billion-dollar costs of just one year's fire damage—the state released a sobering report detailing the broader costs Californians face as the planet grows warmer.
As horrendous as the wildfire situation is, the report made clear that it's just one line item on a colossal ledger: It could soon cost us $200 million a year in increased energy bills to keep homes air conditioned; $3 billion from the effects of a long drought; and $18 billion to replace buildings inundated by rising seas, just to cite a few projections—not to mention the loss of life from killer heat waves, which could add more than 11,000 heat-related deaths per year by 2050 in California, and carry an estimated $50 billion annual price tag.
"Without adaptation, the economic impacts of climate change will be very costly," warned the Climate Change Assessment report from Gov. Jerry Brown's Office of Planning and Research, noting that the buildup of manmade greenhouse gases has already warmed California by up to 2 degrees since 1900. That bump, the assessment added, could rise to nearly 9 degrees by the century's end.
And Californians are being hit with a double-whammy because fighting and preparing for climate change also costs money, and the Golden State has embraced an ambitious agenda to combat global warming. For example, Californians pay more for gas in part because of the state's low-carbon fuel requirement and the cap-and-trade system that makes polluters pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.
"We are right now disproportionately bearing the brunt of both some of the impacts (of climate change) and trying to mitigate it ourselves," said Solomon Hsiang, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, who has researched the cost of climate change.
As that has sunk in, the reaction has been a mix of pragmatism, panic and political action.
As wildfires laid siege to the state and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of Californians earlier this summer, Brown warned that "over a decade, there will be more fire, more destructive fire, more billions that will have to be spent on it, more adaptation and more prevention."
At the time, California had blown through a quarter of the state's $443 million emergency wildfire fund; in the devastating 4 1/2 weeks since, the fund has been nearly wiped out.
"All that is the new normal we will have to face," the governor said.
That realization swept through the Capitol again this week, as lawmakers approved a bill to require that all electricity in California come from renewable sources such as solar and wind by the end of 2045.
Senate Bill 100 was hailed as bold move away from climate-damaging fossil fuels—but legislative critics pointed out that California already has both the nation's highest poverty rate and the highest per-kilowatt cost for electricity.
"I guarantee you: We pass this, and rates are going to go up," Assembly Republican leader Brian Dahle said during a passionate floor debate. "Californians cannot afford it."
Sen. Kevin de León, the Los Angeles Democrat carrying the bill for 100 percent renewable electricity, dismissed cost concerns as nothing more than the rhetoric of naysayers "who try to undermine our clean-energy climate goals." The cost of solar power has already dropped significantly and will likely continue to come down further, he said, in the years leading up to the 100 percent renewable requirement. And, his supporters argued, there is also a cost to not fighting climate change—even more fires and floods than would otherwise occur.
Noel Perry, a founder of Next 10, a group that researches environmental and economic policy, says the benefits of California's climate policies outweigh the costs, because California can demonstrate to the rest of the world what's possible to fight global warming while expanding the economy with clean technology investments. California's economy, the world's fifth-largest, has grown by 16 percent in the last decade while emissions fell by 11 percent, according to a new report from his group.
"In certain instances, it will involve increased costs for some consumers and businesses. But because of how huge the climate change challenge is, we need to address it," Perry said.
In some cases, the increased costs for fuel and electricity are more directly offset by efficiency standards for cars and appliances meant to help Californians consume less energy. For example, a recent mandate requiring solar panels on new homes in 2020 will likely add $10,000 to the price of a house, but could save homeowners more than $16,000 in energy bills.
In any event, climate costs are no longer abstract. Lawmakers have spent much of this year deep in the political nitty-gritty of who should pay how much for which climate-fueled disaster. The total cost of last year's catastrophic wildfires still isn't fully tallied, for example, but some estimates put it over $10 billion, and lawmakers have spent much of the year debating how much of that should be paid by taxptubbsayers, utility companies or their industrial and residential ratepayers.
Under California's liability law, utilities are liable for damages from any fires sparked by their power lines, even if they weren't negligent. Cal Fire alleges that Pacific Gas and Electric Co. equipment was involved in 16 of last year's fires, and that in 11 of those, the company violated state codes that require keeping trees and shrubs away from power lines. The company says it met the state's standards. Investigators have not yet determined the cause of the Tubbs Fire, the deadliest of last year's blazes.
The utilities lobbied unsuccessfully this year to change the liability law. But they scored a partial win late Friday night as the Legislature OK'd a plan the wildfire committee advanced allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover damages from the 2017 fires and pass the cost onto their customers—even if the company is found negligent.
Senate Bill 901 would require a review of the companies' finances before any surcharge is placed on ratepayers, and lawmakers supporting the plan said it would result in modest new charges—roughly $26 per year for residential ratepayers if the companies paid off $5 billion over 20 years. The alternative, they said, was the possibility that the company could go bankrupt, costing customers even more.
Consumer advocates blasted it as a "bailout" for PG&E; lobbyists for industries that use a lot of power said the plan would unfairly burden customers.
Meanwhile, the bill also calls for creation of a new Commission on Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery that would decide whether utilities can charge customers for fires in 2018 and beyond, and recommend potential changes to state law "that would ensure equitable distribution of costs among affected parties."
Translation: Expect a lot more debate in the coming years over who will pay for damages from California disasters exacerbated by climate change.
CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California's policies and politics.
The Weekly Independent Comics Page for Aug. 23, 2018!August 23 2018
On this week's illegal-payoff-free weekly Independent comics page: The K Chronicles throws out the "few bad apples" argument; This Modern World talks abortion prevention; Jen Sorenson ponders climate-change dystopia; Apoca Clips chats with Kevin Spacey about his new film's actual, real opening-day haul; and Red Meat goes to pick up the kid from camp.
Senate Showdown: Jeff Stone and Joy Silver Face Off for the Right to Represent California's 28th DistrictAugust 20 2018
Before responsible Riverside County voters go to the polls on Nov. 6, not only will they need to determine which candidates are the most qualified; they'll need to examine candidates' statements and positions to determine what is based on fact—and what is not.
This brings us to the race for California's 28th Senate District—which includes the entire Coachella Valley—where incumbent Republican State Sen. Jeff Stone is running for a second term against Democratic challenger Joy Silver.
Silver is an underdog in the race. In the June primary election, Stone received 56 percent of the vote, compared to 34.7 percent for Silver—a margin of more than 34,000 votes. (A third candidate, Anna Nevenic, a Democrat, received 9.3 percent.)
We asked each candidate why he or she thought constituents should vote for them.
"Probably because I have a proven track record of being an elected official," said Stone during a recent phone interview. "I'm completing my 26th year (of holding elected office). You never really forget who your boss is, and that's your constituents, so you have to make sure that you're always doing things in their best interests.
"Whether I was on the city council (of Temecula), or the board of supervisors (of Riverside County) or now in the California state government, whenever I meet with a governing body, I always feel like I've got my constituents sitting on my shoulder, and I ask myself, 'Is this something they would like or not like?' Certainly, coming to the state Senate has been a much more challenging experience, because you have a third dimension, which is not one that we had at a local level too much, and that's partisanship. The partisanship is something you can cut with a knife."
Silver is a small-business owner who built a successful career as a health clinic executive, senior housing developer and business consultant.
"I think it's important for people to know that I'm not a career politician," Silver said. "I'm an outsider who will bring real change to Sacramento, and that will include standing up to those policies coming out of Washington when they hurt all Californians. I want to bring my experience to work on our local priorities, and to fight for the values of our Riverside County constituents … all of us."
The Independent asked what their priorities would be if elected to the four-year term.
"I carry some very basic fundamentals with me in being an elected official," Stone said. "One is that government has limited responsibilities, mostly ensuring that our citizens are safe and healthy; and for those who don't have financial resources, we need to make sure that we help them, especially those who want to help themselves.
"We've seen public safety deteriorate with all these terrible initiatives like Prop 47 (which reduced penalties for some crimes, passed in 2014), Prop 57 (passed in 2016, it incentivizes prison inmates to take responsibility for their own rehabilitation, among other things) and AB 109 (passed in 2011 in response to a U.S. Supreme Court order to reduce California prison populations, it transferred certain nonviolent offenders from the state prison system to county-level supervision). These public-safety experiments have come at the cost of a lot of lives and the demise of many businesses."
Statistics, however, don't support Stone's claims. A June 21 report from the Public Policy Institute of California indicates that property-crime rates have decreased slightly since 2011, when the first of these laws was enacted. While violent-crime rates have increased slightly in that time frame, they are still about 50 percent less than year 2000 levels.
Silver said her priorities would include job creation, universal healthcare for all California residents, developing a clean energy economy, career/vocational training, the expansion of affordable housing, and advocacy for immigrant communities.
We asked if universal health care was a realistic goal.
"I do think it is an achievable goal, and with my expertise in the provision of healthcare services, I think I can help move that concept into a place (where) it can work," she said. "We do have a large economy. Certainly, there are smaller economies in the world that are providing health care for their people, and I think that with the right plan, we can make it happen here for Californians."
The ever-increasing cost of many prescription drugs is another concern she hopes to address.
"I feel that there needs to be a particular focus on the ability to do group purchases," Silver said. "Certainly, I'm not the first one to come up with that. When I did work in the health-care business, and we did provide service to a mostly Medicaid patient population, the key there was for independent ambulatory surgical centers to participate in group purchases of items, and that helped us turn around and provide needed goods to the population that we were serving. I think that would be one of the ways to contain costs in a larger venue like our state."
Stone—who ran unsuccessfully for Congress against Dr. Raul Ruiz in 2016—said the business climate is a top concern.
"I've been an active opponent to taxation since I started my political endeavors in 1992, and I've never voted for a tax," Stone said. "We need to do a better job of keeping jobs in California. We're seeing a flight of the middle class out of the state. We see the price of homes out of the reach of middle-class Californians. Look at the flight out of San Francisco—the liberal experiment that goes on (there) where you have 'shooting galleries,' which are places to shoot heroin. And you see the homeless population exponentially increasing there with people bagging feces on the street, and hypodermic needles all over the place. … Even the property values here in Sacramento have been climbing like crazy. Why? Because the people in the Bay Area are trying to escape all this horrific policy that has reduced the quality of life of the people living in those areas."
The Independent asked both candidates what solutions they would propose to combat the proliferation of wildfires in our state.
"We have to take into consideration that the dryness is part of that issue," Silver said. "I know that in Idyllwild, they've had a plan, and because that plan was in place with various stop-gap measures and ways to coordinate with local fire departments at different points in time, they were able to contain the smaller fires that were initiated by embers. I think that Northern California (communities) could benefit from a plan such as the one in Idyllwild, because they knew how to control and contain. Aside from that, we're going to have to look at climate and environmental issues to see how we can bring down the heat factor. We have to look at how we can work with a clean-energy economy to do that."
Stone pointed out that he's on a committee of lawmakers looking into the spate of fires.
"This has been the worst fire season that we've had, and it's attributable, in some sense, to climate change, but it's also due to our radical environmental policies that don't allow us to go in and thin forests and get rid of the 129 million dead or dying trees in the state of California, all in the name of 'environmental stewardship,'" he said.
The estimate on the dead-tree population came from the U.S. Forest Service in December 2017.
"But at the same time as environmentalists have prohibited us from going in to clear brush and trees, look at how many acres now have been completely erased from California's landscape," Stone continued. "How many endangered species and animals have perished in all of these fires that maybe we could have prevented? Certainly we couldn't have prevented those involving arson, which includes two (recent) fires in my district, the Cranston Fire and the Holy Fire. But in other areas of the state, we could have prevented some of these fires potentially, or at least (lessened) the magnitude of the fires had we cleared the brush."
The facts don't necessarily support Stone's position—particularly his placement of blame on environmentalists for the fires. According to an article from Aug. 7 in The Sacramento Bee, "As of 2015, through the national forests, national parks, Bureau of Land Management, and others, the federal government manages more than 40 percent of California's total (forest) acreage. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, by comparison, manages a little more than 30 percent. The Trump administration's own budget request for the current fiscal year and the coming one proposed slashing tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Interior and U.S. Forest Service budgets dedicated to the kind of tree clearing and other forest management work experts say is needed."
When it's 5 degrees Fahrenheit out, even politically divided Americans can agree on one thing: It's cold. But that's where it ends. President Donald Trump used this winter's frigid East Coast temperatures to Tweet: "We need more global warming!"
Climate hawks fired back: "2017 was the second-hottest year on record." But as much as we'd like to think political discourse is about ideas, it seems much more about defending your tribe. And on no issue is this more evident than climate change.
Many Republicans simply can't support climate action—not because they don't believe the science, but because it would represent a breach of cultural identity, akin to wearing a Che Guevara tank top to the gun range. The left often ignores this dynamic—that climate is a proxy for an entire tribal worldview encompassing issues like abortion and the size of government. But it doesn't have to be this way. Climate solutions exist that cut through cultural biases.
First, though, how did we get here? Over time, climate has moved from the realm of science—President Lyndon B. Johnson's science-advisory committee brought it up in the 1960s—into politics, in the form of early treaties like the one President George H.W. Bush signed in Rio in 1992. Then it finally entered the culture, best exemplified by an email our colleague Andy Hoffman received about his climate research at the University of Michigan: "Greetings, Comrade: Why do you want the Marxist destruction of civilization?"
As Hoffman, a leading researcher on the climate cultural divide, points out, climate change is so polarizing that it can actually appear to challenge some people's belief in God.
Social science shows that factual arguments don't work; they just push people further into their corners. Yet the climate movement continues to ignore the culture barrier. Meanwhile, a record number of voters—63 percent—now say they worry about global warming, according to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. So how do we move forward?
New research by Jeff York and his colleagues, to be published in the Academy of Management Journal, studied how local culture can influence the adoption of climate-change solutions. They tested different approaches within two communities: those with a Republican "market logic" that prioritizes economic profits and self-interest, and others with a Democratic "community logic" more concerned with individuals' responsibility to the world we all live in.
The only approach that had a statistically significant impact in increasing the adoption of solutions in both communities involved emphasizing entrepreneurship and business development. For example, Namaste Solar, founded in Boulder, Colo., has become a national business. But culturally, it is just that—a business—not a radical or polarizing political platform.
With this in mind, climate activists might want to change tactics, particularly in conservative regions. Rather than pursuing the usual policies of light-bulb rebates, tax breaks for green buildings or some new regulation, an entrepreneurship approach might instead invest in local businesses connected to climate change.
Entrepreneurship, unlike rebates, doesn't pay out money, never to see it again. Instead, it builds the local economy. Unlike a policy push, it would also come with buy-in from both sides of the cultural divide: "Community logic" likes the goal, while "market logic" likes the approach to getting there. Sure, new businesses could fail, but even the attempt would help unify the community, not divide it.
While this approach is slower than climate activists might want, it paves the way for eventual policy fixes by defanging climate solutions as a whole. For instance, The New York Times Magazine reported that wind-energy employees in Wyoming may oppose the broader climate movement, yet getting a job in the wind-energy business is considered perfectly respectable.
Perhaps the development of a successful economy around what used to be a fringe and divisive issue normalizes the practice of trying to find solutions to climate change, making it more accepted and embraced. For conservatives, the message is: Why shy away from economic opportunity? For liberals, it's: Here's actual progress on an issue that has been viciously difficult to move the needle on.
Because time is of the essence, and the science is increasingly dire, there is clearly still a need to push for climate policy solutions—no matter how hard they are to pull off. But meanwhile, let's promote any actions we know will work.
The writers are contributors to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News. Auden Schendler is senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Company. Jeff York is associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Sunshine Week: Welcome to The Foilies 2018, Recognizing the Year's Worst in Government TransparencyMarch 12 2018
Government transparency laws like the Freedom of Information Act exist to enforce the public's right to inspect records so we can all figure out what in the heck is being done in our name and with our tax dollars.
But when a public agency ignores, breaks or twists the law, one's recourse varies by jurisdiction. In some states, when an official improperly responds to your public records request, you can appeal to a higher bureaucratic authority or seek help from an ombudsperson. In most states, you can take the dispute to court.
Public shaming and sarcasm, however, are tactics that can be applied anywhere.
The California-based news organization Reveal tweets photos of chickpeas or coffee beans to represent each day a FOIA response is overdue, and asks followers to guess how many there are. The alt-weekly DigBoston has sent multiple birthday cakes and edible arrangements to local agencies on the one-year anniversary of delayed public-records requests. And here, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we give out The Foilies during Sunshine Week, an annual celebration of open-government advocacy.
These fourth-annual Foilies recognize the worst responses to records requests, outrageous efforts to stymie transparency, and the most absurd redactions. These tongue-in-cheek pseudo-awards are hand-chosen by EFF's team based on nominations from fellow transparency advocates, participants in #FOIAFriday on Twitter, and, in some cases, our own personal experience.
If you haven't heard of us before: EFF is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that works on the local, national and global level to defend and advance civil liberties as technology develops. As part of this work, we file scores of public-records requests and take agencies like the U.S. Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Los Angeles Police Department to court to liberate information that belongs to the public.
Because shining a spotlight is sometimes the best the litigation strategy, we are pleased to announce the 2018 winners of The Foilies.
The Mulligan Award: President Donald J. Trump
Since assuming the presidency, Donald Trump has skipped town for more than 58 days to visit his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, according to sites like trumpgolfcount.com and NBC. He calls it his "Winter White House," where he wines and dines and openly strategizes on how to respond to North Korean ballistic missile tests with the Japanese prime minister—for all his paid guests to see and post on Facebook. The fact that Trump's properties have become secondary offices and remain a source of income for his family raises significant questions about transparency, particularly if club membership comes with special access to the president.
To hold the administration accountable, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a FOIA request for the visitor logs, but received little in response. CREW sued, and after taking another look, the Secret Service provided details about details about the Japanese leader's entourage. As Politico and others reported, the Secret Service ultimately admitted they're not actually keeping track. The same can't be said about Trump's golf score.
FOIA Fee of the Year: Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Sexual assault in prison is notoriously difficult to measure due to stigma, intimidation and apathetic bureaucracy. Nevertheless, MuckRock reporter Nathanael King made a valiant effort to find out whatever he could about these investigations in Texas, a state once described by the Dallas Voice as the "Prison Rape Capital of the U.S." However, the numbers that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice came back with weren't quite was he was expecting. The TDCJ demanded he fork over a whopping $1,132,024.30 before the agency would release 260,000 pages of records that it said would take 61,000 hours of staff time to process. That, in itself, may be an indicator of the scope of the problem.
However, to the agency's credit, they pointed the reporter in the direction of other statistical records compiled to comply with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which the TDCJ provided for free.
Best Set Design in a Transparency Theater Production: Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed
"Transparency theater" is the term we use to describe an empty gesture meant to look like an agency is embracing open government, when really it's meant to obfuscate. For example, an agency may dump an overwhelming number of documents and put them on display for cameras. But because there are so many records, the practice actually subverts transparency by making it extremely difficult to find the most relevant records in the haystack.
Such was the case with Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, who released 1.476 million documents about a corruption probe to show his office was supporting public accountability.
"The documents filled hundreds of white cardboard boxes, many stacked up waist-high against walls and spread out over rows of tables in the cavernous old City Council chamber," Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Leon Stafford wrote. "Reed used some of the boxes as the backdrop for his remarks, creating a 6-foot wall behind him."
Journalists began to dig through the documents and quickly discovered that many were blank pages or fully redacted—and in some cases, the type was too small for anyone to read. AJC reporter J. Scott Trubey's hands became covered in paper-cut gore. Ultimately, the whole spectacle was a waste of trees: The records already existed in a digital format. It's just that a couple of hard drives on a desk don't make for a great photo op.
Special Achievement for Analog Conversion: Former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray
In the increasingly digital age, more and more routine office communication is occurring over mobile devices. With that in mind, transparency activist Phil Mocek filed a request for text messages (and other app communications) sent or received by now-former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and many of his aides. The good news is the city at least partially complied. The weird news is that rather than seek the help of an IT professional to export the text messages, some staff members simply plopped a cell phone onto a photocopier.
Mocek tells EFF he's frustrated that the mayor's office refused to search their personal devices for relevant text messages. They argued that city policy forbids using personal phones for city business—and, of course, no one would violate those rules. However, we'll concede that thwarting transparency is probably the least of the allegations against Murray, who resigned in September 2017 amid a child sex-abuse scandal.
The Winger Award for FOIA Feet Dragging: FBI
Thirty years ago, the hair-rock band Winger released "Seventeen"—a song about young love that really hasn't withstood the test of time. Similarly, the FBI's claim that it would take 17 years to produce a series of records about civil rights-era surveillance also didn't withstand the judicial test of time.
As Politico reported, George Washington University professor and documentary filmmaker Nina Seavey asked for records about how the FBI spied on anti-war and civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s. The FBI claimed they would only process 500 pages a month, which would mean the full set of 110,000 pages wouldn't be complete until 2034.
Just as Winger's girlfriend's dad disapproved in the song, so did a federal judge, writing in her opinion: "The agency's desire for administrative convenience is simply not a valid justification for telling Professor Seavey that she must wait decades for the documents she needs to complete her work."
The Prime Example Award: Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority
When Amazon announced last year it was seeking a home for its second headquarters, municipalities around the country rushed to put together proposals to lure the tech giant to their region. Knowing that in Seattle, Amazon left a substantial footprint on a community (particularly around housing), transparency organizations like MuckRock and the Lucy Parsons Labs followed up with records requests for these cities' sales pitches.
More than 20 cities, such as Chula Vista, Calif., and Toledo, Ohio, produced the records—but other agencies, including Albuquerque, N.M., and Jacksonville, Fla, refused to turn over the documents. The excuses varied, but perhaps the worst response came from Maine's Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority. The agency did provide the records, but claimed that by opening an email containing 37 pages of documents, MuckRock had automatically agreed to pay an exorbitant $750 in "administrative and legal fees." Remind us to disable one-click ordering.
El Premio del Desayuno Más Redactado: CIA
Buzzfeed reporter Jason Leopold has filed thousands of records requests over his career, but one redaction has become his all-time favorite. Leopold was curious whether CIA staff members are assailed by the same stream of office announcements as every other workplace. So, he filed a FOIA request—and holy Hillenkoetter, do they. Deep in the document set was an announcement that "the breakfast burritos are back by popular demand," with a gigantic redaction covering half the page, citing a personal privacy exemption. What are they hiding? Is Anthony Bourdain secretly a covert agent? Did David Petraeus demand extra guac? This could be the CIA's greatest Latin American mystery since Nicaraguan Contra drug-trafficking.
The Courthouse Bully Award: Every Agency Suing a Requester
As director of the privacy-advocacy group We See You Watching Lexington, Michael Maharrey filed a public records request to find out how his city was spending money on surveillance cameras. After the Lexington Police Department denied the request, he appealed to the Kentucky Attorney General's office—and won.
Rather than listen to the state's top law enforcement official, Lexington police hauled Maharrey into court.
As the Associated Press reported last year, lawsuits like these are reaching epidemic proportions. The Louisiana Department of Education sued a retired educator who was seeking school enrollment data for his blog. Portland Public Schools in Oregon sued a parent who was curious about employees paid while on leave for alleged misconduct. Michigan State University sued ESPN after it requested police reports on football players allegedly involved in a sexual assault. Meanwhile, the University of Kentucky and Western Kentucky University have each sued their own student newspapers whose reporters were investigating sexual misconduct by school staff.
These lawsuits are despicable. At their most charitable, they expose huge gaps in public-records laws that put requesters on the hook for defending lawsuits they never anticipated. At their worst, they are part of a systematic effort to discourage reporters and concerned citizens from even thinking of filing a public records request in the first place.
The Lawless Agency Award: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
In the chaos of President Trump's immigration ban in early 2017, the actions of U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and higher-ups verged on unlawful. And if CBP officials already had their mind set on violating all sorts of laws and the Constitution, flouting FOIA seems like small potatoes.
Yet that's precisely what CBP did when the ACLU filed a series of FOIA requests to understand local CBP agents' actions as they implemented Trump's immigration order. ACLU affiliates throughout the country filed 18 separate FOIA requests with CBP, each of which targeted records documenting how specific field offices, often located at airports or at physical border crossings, were managing and implementing the ban. The requests made clear that they were not seeking agency-wide documents, but rather wanted information about each specific location's activities.
CBP ignored the requests and, when several ACLU affiliates filed 13 different lawsuits, CBP sought to further delay responding by asking a federal court panel to consolidate all the cases into a single lawsuit. To use this procedure—which is usually reserved for class actions or other complex national cases—CBP essentially misled courts about each of the FOIA requests and claimed each was seeking the exact same set of records.
The court panel saw through CBP's shenanigans and refused to consolidate the cases. But CBP basically ignored the panel's decision, acting as though it had won. First, it behaved as though all the requests came from a single lawsuit by processing and batching all the documents from the various requests into a single production given to the ACLU. Second, it selectively released records to particular ACLU attorneys, even when those records weren't related to their lawsuits about activities at local CBP offices.
Laughably, CBP blames the ACLU for its self-created mess, calling their requests and lawsuits "haphazard" and arguing that the ACLU and other FOIA requesters have strained the agency's resources in seeking records about the immigration ban. None of that would be a problem if CBP had responded to the FOIA requests in the first place. Of course, the whole mess could also have been avoided if CBP never implemented an unconstitutional immigration order.
The Franz Kafka Award for Most Secrets About Secretive Secrecy: The CIA
The CIA's aversion to FOIA is legendary, but this year, the agency doubled down on its mission of thwarting transparency. As Emma Best detailed for MuckRock, the intelligence agency had compiled a 20-page report that laid out at least 126 reasons why it could deny FOIA requests that officials believed would disclose the agency's "sources and methods."
But that report? Yeah, it's totally classified. So not only do you not get to know what the CIA's up to, but its reasons for rejecting your FOIA request are also a state secret.
Special Recognition for Congressional Overreach: U.S. House of Representatives
Because Congress wrote the Freedom of Information Act, it had the awesome and not-at-all-a-conflict-of-interest power to determine which parts of the federal government must obey it. That's why it may not shock you that since passing FOIA more than 50 years ago, Congress has never made itself subject to the law.
So far, requesters have been able to fill in the gaps by requesting records from federal agencies that correspond with Congress. For example, maybe a lawmaker writes to the U.S. Department of Puppies asking for statistics on labradoodles. That adorable email chain wouldn't be available through Congress, but you could get it from the Puppies Department's FOIA office. (Just to be clear: This isn't a real federal agency. We just wish it was.)
In 2017, it's become increasingly clear that some members of Congress believe that FOIA can never reach anything they do, even when they or their staffs share documents or correspond with federal agencies. The House Committee on Financial Services sent a threatening letter to the Treasury Department telling them to not comply with FOIA. After the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Management and Budget released records that came from the House Ways and Means Committee, the House intervened in litigation to argue that their records cannot be obtained under FOIA.
In many cases, congressional correspondence with agencies is automatically covered by FOIA, and the fact that a document originated with Congress isn't by itself enough to shield it from disclosure. The Constitution says Congress gets to write laws; it's just too bad it doesn't require Congress to actually read them.
The Data Disappearance Award: Trump Administration
Last year, we gave the "Make America Opaque Again Award" award to newly inaugurated President Trump for failing to follow tradition and release his tax returns during the campaign. His talent for refusing to make information available to the public has snowballed into an administration that deletes public records from government websites. From the National Park Service's climate action plans for national parks, to the USDA animal welfare datasets, to nonpartisan research on the corporate income tax, the Trump Administration has decided to make facts that don't support its positions disappear. The best example of this vanishing game is the Environmental Protection Agency's removal of the climate change website in April 2017, which only went back online after being scrubbed of climate change references, studies and information to educate the public.
The Danger in the Dark Award: The Army Corps of Engineers
When reporters researching the Dakota Access Pipeline on contested tribal lands asked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' environmental impact statement, they were told nope, you can't have it. Officials cited public safety concerns as reason to deny the request: "The referenced document contains information related to sensitive infrastructure that if misused could endanger peoples' lives and property."
Funny thing is … the Army Corps had already published the same document on its website a year earlier. What changed in that year? Politics. The Standing Rock Sioux, other tribal leaders and "Water Protector" allies had since staged a multi-month peaceful protest and sit-in to halt construction of the pipeline.
The need for public scrutiny of the document became clear in June when a U.S. federal judge found that the environmental impact statement omitted key considerations, such as the impact of an oil spill on the Standing Rock Sioux's hunting and fishing rights as well as the impact on environmental justice.
The Business Protection Agency Award: The Food and Drug Administration
The FDA's mission is to protect the public from harmful pharmaceuticals, but they've recently fallen into the habit of protecting powerful drug companies rather than informing people about potential drug risks.
This past year, Charles Seife at the Scientific American requested documents about the drug-approval process for a controversial drug to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). The agency cited business exemptions and obscured listed side effects, as well as testing methodology for the drug, despite claims that the drug company manipulated results during product trials and pressured the FDA to push an ineffective drug onto the market. The agency even redacted portions of a Bloomberg Businessweek article about the drug, because the story provided names and pictures of teenagers living with DMD.
The Exhausted Mailman Award: Bureau of Indian Affairs
Requesting information that has already been made public should be quick and fairly simple—but not when you're dealing with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A nomination sent into EFF requested all logs of previously released FOIA information by the BIA. The requester even stated that he'd prefer links to the information, which agencies typically provide for records they have already put on their website. Instead, BIA printed 1,390 pages of those logs, stuffed them into 10 separate envelopes, and sent them via registered mail for a grand total cost to taxpayers of $179.
Crime and Punishment Award: Martin County Commissioners, Florida
Generally, The Foilies skew cynical, because in many states, open-records laws are toothless and treated as recommendations rather than mandates. One major exception to the rule is Florida, where violations of its "Sunshine Law" can result in criminal prosecution.
That brings us to Martin County Commissioners Ed Fielding and Sarah Heard, and former Commissioner Anne Scott, each of whom were booked into jail in November on multiple charges related to violations of the state's public-records law. As Jose Lambiet of GossipExtra and the Miami Herald reported, the case emerges from a dispute between the county and a mining company that already resulted in taxpayers footing a $500,000 settlement in a public-records lawsuit. Among the allegations, the officials were accused of destroying, delaying and altering records.
The cases are set to go to trial in December 2018, Lambiet told EFF. Of course, people are innocent until proven guilty, but that doesn't make public officials immune to The Foilies.
The Square Footage Award: Jacksonville Sheriff's Office
When a government mistake results in a death, it's important for the community to get all the facts. In the case of 63-year-old Blane Land, who was fatally hit by a Jacksonville sheriff patrol car, those facts include dozens of internal investigations against the officer behind the wheel. The officer, Tim James, has since been arrested on allegations that he beat a handcuffed youth, raising the question of why he was still on duty after the vehicular fatality.
Land's family hired an attorney, and the attorney filed a request for records. Rather than having a complete airing of the cop's alleged misdeeds, the sheriff came back with a demand for $314,687.91 to produce the records, almost all of which was for processing and searching by the internal affairs division. Amid public outcry over the prohibitive fee, the sheriff took to social media to complain about how much work it would take to go through all the records in the 1,600-foot cubic storage room filled with old-school filing cabinets.
The family is not responsible for the sheriff's filing system or feng shui, nor is it the family's fault that the sheriff kept an officer on the force as the complaints—and the accompanying disciplinary records—stacked up.
These Aren't the Records You're Looking for Award: San Diego City Councilmember Chris Cate
Shortly after last year's San Diego Comic-Con and shortly before the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the city of San Diego held a ceremony to name a street after former resident and actor Mark Hamill. A private citizen (whose day job involves writing The Foilies) wanted to know: How does a Hollywood star get his own roadway?
The city produced hundreds of pages related to his request that showed how an effort to change the name of Chargers Boulevard after the football team abandoned the city led to the creation of Mark Hamill Drive. The document set even included Twitter direct messages between City Councilmember Chris Cate and the actor. However, Cate used an ineffective black marker to redact, accidentally releasing Hamill's cell phone number and other personal contact details.
As tempting as it was to put Luke Skywalker (and the voice of the Joker) on speed dial, the requester did not want to be responsible for doxxing one of the world's most beloved actors. He alerted Cate's office of the error, which then re-uploaded properly redacted documents.
The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass, Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, and Frank Stanton Fellow Camille Fischer. Illustrations by EFF Art Director Hugh D'Andrade. For more on our work, visit eff.org.
After 16 Years (With a 28-Year Break): In His Final State of the State Speech, Jerry Brown Remembers Where He's FromJanuary 26 2018
As Gov. Jerry Brown neared the end of his last State of the State speech on Thursday, Jan. 25, he invoked a name that has become a frequent theme: August Schuckman, his own great-grandfather, who left Germany in 1849 and "sailed to America on a ship named Perseverance."
The 79-year-old Democrat cast his ancestor's journey—and the ship's poetic name—as a metaphor for California in an era of natural disasters and deep rifts with the federal government. "We, too, will persist," he said, "against the storms and turmoil, obstacles great and small."
Brown, delivering his 16th such speech during an unprecedented four-term tenure as California governor, contrasted California with the direction the United States is heading under Republican President Donald Trump—touting the state's efforts to combat climate change and its embrace of Obamacare. He reiterated his commitment to two major infrastructure projects he's long championed: a high-speed train that would eventually connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, and a massive tunnel to move water from the north end of the state to the south. And he gave an impassioned plea for legislators to look at the big picture of California's criminal-justice system instead of passing new laws in response to crimes ripped from the headline.
Democrats praised Brown for an optimistic speech that demonstrated the hallmarks of his leadership. Even some Republicans offered mild praise: Assembly Republican Leader Brian Dahle called Brown "one of the most conservative Democrats in this place" for his relative prudence. But he criticized the governor for signing laws, like the gas tax, that raised the cost of living in California.
What Brown didn't mention: the fact that California has the highest poverty rate in the nation; that housing prices that have skyrocketed beyond affordability for many residents; and that the state's tax structure exposes it to perpetual cycles of boom and bust.
Also absent were the obscure intellectual references that have studded his past speeches—although he did contrast the state's bloated penal code with the Ten Commandments.
His also struck some themes that are vintage Jerry Brown. He cited California's recent wildfires and mudslides, as well as the Doomsday Clock, echoing past speeches in which he predicted environmental disaster. He advocated remedies to slow global warming—like clean cars and renewable energy—that resembled ideas he espoused when he was first elected governor more than four decades ago.
"We should never forget our dependency on the natural environment and the fundamental challenges it presents to the way we live," Brown said to his 2018 audience. "We can't fight nature. We have to learn to get along with her."
Yet as he looked forward for California, he also looked back at his own family history. When Brown was first sworn in, in 1975, he rarely talked about his ancestry. As the years mounted, however, he has increasingly turned to his family-origin stories to illustrate his belief in California's potential.
Now the Brown family's California Dream is a common trope in his rhetoric. He talks about the great-grandfather on the Perseverance, the grandmother who was the youngest of eight children, and the father, Pat Brown, who preceded him in the governor's office.
Some of that reflection may be the natural consequence of age. But it also reveals a governor more assured of his own accomplishments and less fearful that he's riding on his father's coattails, said political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe. A professor at University of Southern California, she's been following Brown's career since he ran for the Los Angeles Community College board in 1969.
The younger Brown first moved into the governor's office less than a decade after his father had moved out. During those first two terms in office, Jeffe said, Brown went to great lengths to distinguish himself from his father.
"He did not want to live in his shadow," she said. "Jerry wanted to build his own legacy, his own philosophy of governance."
His early speeches reflect the schism. Brown—a 37-year-old bachelor at the time, who famously slept on a mattress on the floor of an apartment—opened his inaugural address in 1975 with a quick quip about his dad. "My father thought I wasn't going to make it," to become governor, he said. "But here I am." He went on to talk about problems with environmental and land-use rules, and the need to provide a better system for funding schools and farmworker rights.
For the next six years, Brown used his State of the State speeches to float ideas: developing more clean energy, building more prisons, making housing more affordable, putting a satellite into space, and overhauling the bail system. Then, as now, he acknowledged the uncertainty of the future and urged lawmakers not to spend too much.
But near the end of his first two terms, Brown's 1982 State of the State speech reminisced about his father, his grandmother and his great-grandfather Schuckman, who traveled the plains from St. Louis to Sacramento during the Gold Rush.
"Let me read to you from the diary that was kept during that trek westward," Brown said then, recounting in detail their journey across deserts, through rivers and over mountains. He spoke of oxen dying of thirst and wagons going up in flames.
"These were men and women who matched our mountains, and in not too many years, built these walls," Brown said. "We are bearers of that powerful tradition. It still drives our people and the hundreds from foreign who arrive in our state each day."
Most people assumed, of course, that 1982 speech would be Brown's final State of the State. But after serving as Democratic Party chair, Oakland mayor and attorney general, he reclaimed the governorship in the November 2010 election. In his inaugural address in January 2011, Brown again read from Schuckman's diary.
"We can only imagine what it took for August Schuckman to leave his family and home and travel across the ocean to America and then across the country—often through dangerous and hostile territory—in a wagon train. But come he did, overcoming every obstacle," Brown said.
In 2015, Brown reflected on his father's leadership in ways he never did in those speeches during his early years as governor.
"The issues that my father raised at his inauguration bear eerie resemblance to those we still grapple with today: discrimination; the quality of education and the challenge of recruiting and training teachers; the menace of air pollution, and its danger to our health; a realistic water program; economic development; consumer protection; and overcrowded prisons," Brown said. "So you see, these problems, they never completely go away. They remain to challenge and elicit the best from us."
Whatever challenges lie ahead for 2018 and beyond, Brown said on Thursday: "All of us—whatever our party or philosophy—have a role in play in defending and advancing our democracy. Our forebears set the example."
Now he's planning retirement on the rural land in Colusa County where Schuckman settled in the 1800s. Though Brown's upbringing is very different from most Californians, his family stories can make the austere governor more relatable, said Roger Salazar, a Democratic political consultant who works for the Legislature's Latino Caucus.
"It's a story that I think a lot of legislators can relate to," Salazar. "When you look back at your familial history and the context in which they came to California, I think that's something that we all can connect with."
CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
Community Voices: Drastic Changes in Forest Management, Like More Logging, Aren't the Answer to WildfiresJanuary 03 2018
Like a lot of small towns in the West, my town of Ashland, Ore., is nestled in a lovely valley surrounded by conifer forests. The forests grow on public lands managed by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and last year, as in many recent years, there were fires on those lands. The town of Ashland was not threatened, but our valley filled with thick, eye-burning smoke for weeks at a time.
It was miserable. Outdoor theater and music events were cancelled, drastically affecting the summer tourist season, which is critical for our economy. Folks who would usually be out hiking, camping, fishing, birding and rafting stayed indoors. Parents kept their kids inside. Everyone got cranky. We've never had a summer with smoke as bad as this.
Understandably, people don't want to go through this again next summer—or ever. Southern Californians can relate thanks to all of the devastating fall fires in the area. And so the search is on for solutions.
Some are taking this opportunity to advocate for drastic changes in public-lands forest management. The primary vehicle for this effort is the "Resilient Federal Forests Act," H.R. 2936, often called the Westerman bill for its primary sponsor, Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas. In the name of making forests "resilient" to fire, it would promote logging by sharply curtailing existing environmental laws.
Among other provisions, it would restrict citizen involvement in public-lands management by limiting legal challenges under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws; greatly expand "categorical exclusions" in areas of up to 10,000 acres where logging and post-fire salvage could occur without any environmental assessment; and eliminate the "survey and manage" program which provides data essential for informed forest management. This truly radical bill has passed the House and awaits consideration by the Senate.
Let's be generous for a moment. Let's say that the Westerman bill is not a cynical attempt to exploit anxiety about fire to achieve otherwise unattainable amounts of logging, long sought by the timber industry. Let's assume that it's a genuine attempt to solve the problem of fire—which, of course, implies: (1) that fire is a problem; and (2) that it can be solved.
Most Western conifer forests, except those along the rain-drenched Pacific Coast, are adapted to frequent fires. That is true of Southern California, as well as my region of southern Oregon, where studies of tree rings have shown that fires historically returned to a piece of ground every 15-20 years or so. Most of those fires were relatively low intensity, and many were likely set deliberately by Native Americans, who made sophisticated use of fire as a land-management tool. These fires cleared out dense thickets and fallen limbs and maintained a relatively open forest structure in many areas.
Decades of fire suppression, coupled with logging that has replaced complex mixed-age forests with uniform-aged stands and tree plantations, has certainly made things worse, increasing the likelihood of severe, stand-replacing fires. But that is increasingly overshadowed by another factor affecting wildland fire frequency and severity: climate change. There is not a single mention of the role of climate change in the Westerman bill, so it looks like I was too generous to set aside that whole cynical-exploitation thing.
Much research now supports the correlation between climate change and fire seasons that start earlier and end later, with more days of extreme "fire weather." Such fire weather led to the devastating fires of 2017 in Northern California. Those fires burned at least 245,000 acres, destroyed almost 9,000 buildings, and cost more than $3 billion. They were almost entirely on private land, not on national forests. The severity of those fires had nothing to do with a lack of logging. The same goes for the recent fires in Southern California—for which the damage is still being tallied.
We are kidding ourselves if we think we can find a "solution" to wildlands fire and the smoke that comes with it. Such thinking denies fire its place as a natural and inevitable part of this environment where we have chosen to live. Our forests need fire, and there is no way we can exclude it. Instead of trying to log our way out of fire danger, we need to adapt ourselves to the reality of living in this fire-adapted landscape. We can, and should, practice "fireproof" landscaping around our homes, and carry out larger fuels-reduction projects in high-risk areas like the wildland-urban interface at the edge of our towns.
But we can't "solve" fire here in the West any more than Florida can "solve" hurricanes. Both are natural phenomena—and both are bound to get worse with unchecked climate change. Our best hope of a future with ecologically appropriate forest fires and tolerable levels of smoke is to take immediate action to limit climate change.
What do you say, Congress: Want to focus on a real problem for a change?
Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News. He is a writer and forensic biologist in Oregon.
The De Facto Leader: On a Trip to Europe, Gov. Jerry Brown Found an Audience Receptive to His Climate-Change ConcernsNovember 16 2017
BONN, Germany—The camera and lights switched on, and Ole Torp, the Charlie Rose of Norway, leaned in, silver hair flashing, and posed his first question to Gov. Jerry Brown.
"Is the world going to hell?"
"Yes," Brown answered swiftly.
The interview, taped last week in Oslo, was declared a fabulous success, one the television audience would quite enjoy.
On a nearly two-week swing through Europe—starting at the Vatican and ending at the United Nations climate change conference in Bonn—Brown offered a bleak appraisal of the global future: We are on a trajectory toward hell. It's a headlong rush to a very unpleasant outcome. Mankind is on the chopping block.
Yet Brown dazzled. His message—the planet is burning up, and our oil-driven way of life must change—brought Vatican scientists to their feet. European parliamentarians in Brussels swooned, calling him a warrior. In Oslo, an international group of scientists paid Brown their highest compliment: inviting him to their inner sanctum for a day-long "dialogue," a dreary recitation of the looming crash of spaceship Earth. Students in Stuttgart, inheritors of the mess Brown describes, mobbed the 79-year-old for selfies.
It wasn't all adulation, all the time. A rebuke from a couple of parliamentarians in Brussels led to a sharp exchange over the effect of climate-change policies on the poor. And hecklers tried to shout down the governor during a speech in Bonn as they protested his oil policies.
But the criticism did little to deter Brown, who was on message throughout the trip: Climate change is a serious threat, but California is doing its part—and, especially, come to San Francisco next year for a climate conference that gets things accomplished.
In the absence of climate policy from the U.S. government, or recognition that human activity has played a role in warming the world, Brown has become a de facto climate leader—Al Gore 2.0, as an Afghan journalist here observed offhandedly. During his November trip, Brown was repeatedly called on to voice an opinion on President Trump's assertion that climate change is a hoax. He told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in a taped interview that "Trump better get on board or get out of the way." On most other occasions, Brown largely held his fire, perhaps not wanting to give the president's arguments any oxygen.
Mostly, he focused on burnishing California's "green" reputation—and his own, as he looks ahead to life after Sacramento, a subject he won't go near. Brown reminded his audiences that the state has the nation's strictest fuel standards, subsidizes electric cars, and demands the most energy-efficient buildings. He held sessions with members of the Under2 Coalition, a group of more than 200 nations, states and provinces that have pledged to reduce carbon emissions and work with each other to meet the goals of the U.N.'s 2015 Paris climate agreement. That includes a commitment to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
The group, which Brown helped create, is gaining in heft, with several new members acquired during Brown's trip. According to the coalition, it represents more than 1 billion people and nearly 40 percent of the global economy.
Brown argues that climate-change policy is local as much as national or global, and that mayors, governors and regional officials can bring about significant change. That argument swayed the government of Fiji—which currently holds the rotating presidency of the conference—to name Brown to the position of special adviser for states and regions. That position did not give the governor access to the negotiating table, where the U.S. delegation and others are hammering out implementation rules for the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Brown's stated purpose for going to Europe was to raise awareness about the threat of climate change. At every stop, officials said they found power in his message.
Sandy Pitcher, the chief executive of the Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources for the state of South Australia, described Brown as "authentic."
"He's channeling something like the tough lesson you have to hear and should hear, 'You'll thank me for it later,'" she said. "I don't think we have someone like him in Australia in the public discourse doing what he's doing."
Her state belongs to Under2. These so-called subnationals—or "supernationals" as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said here—will put on their own summit next September in San Francisco. The meeting, sanctioned by the U.N., will bring together nations and industry and require each entity to report its annual emissions and set a reduction goal.
The inclusion of businesses is unique. Brown said that businesses—some of them big carbon-emitters—could potentially provide the technology to solve pressing climate problems. And their presence can send a signal that California is open to, and for, business.
Now Brown and his staff are mostly back in Sacramento. It's likely to be a hard landing for the governor, leaving the mostly enveloping warmth of like-minded people to tangle with a sometimes-unruly Legislature and get back to the arduous job of managing California.
He returns to a state where not everyone is in the thrall of the climate-crusader message. Critics in the environmental-justice movement, for example, say laws to reduce pollution have not yet made lives better in many low-income communities still plagued by toxic air, water and soil—that Sacramento's good intentions seem to be scrubbing clean every backyard but theirs.
With legislative priorities looming for his final year in office, Brown claims to not have a comprehensive idea of what he wants to accomplish.
"I don't have an agenda for next year. I don't even think about it," he told CALmatters in an interview during the conference that was only partly disrupted when Arnold Schwarzenegger, also in town for the conference, stopped by to chat.
"I'm a step-by-step kind of guy," Brown said. "We have continuing work to increase the rehabilitative character of our prisons and jails. We have to up our capacity to transform lives instead of re-imbed and reinforce antisocial behavior. That will require effort, and mental health programs."
Much of the environmental legislation he has championed is now on the books. With enormous political effort during the summer, he was able to extend the state's cap-and-trade program until 2030. What's next? Brown supports an electricity delivery system that spans the West, offering better integration and sharing of renewable power, among other benefits.
Such a plan would cede state decision-making to a regional authority, and Brown admits the highly complex project may take a while.
Control of the grid is a thorny issue. For example, states have varying requirements for the use of renewable energy, and California would hesitate to import coal-fired power from elsewhere. Working out such elements is complex and painstaking.
"We don't get instant coffee," he said. "I didn't do everything the first year. Each year, there are more things that become possible because we've done other things. It's a good idea, and it will come."
First things first: another summit, which Brown, in his grumpy fashion, said will be more of an anti-summit.
"There's a lot of talking and there's a lot of eating at these things," Brown said. "I've talked enough. I want to get something done."
CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
The Weekly Independent Comics Page for Oct. 26, 2017!October 26 2017
On this week's pumpkin-spice-free weekly Independent comics page: Apoca Clips gets its dossiers mixed up; Red Meat hops in the time machine with Milkman Dan; Jen Sorenson looks at "politicization"; The K Chronicles has a revelation about squirrels; and This Modern World is in a state of denial.


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Exodus 7:3-5 Amplified Bible (AMP)
3 And I will make Pharaoh's heart hard, and multiply My signs and My wonders (miracles) in the land of Egypt. 4 But Pharaoh will not listen to you, and I shall lay My hand on Egypt and bring out My hosts [like a defensive army, tribe by tribe], My people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment (the plagues). 5 The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them."
Amplified Bible (AMP)
Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, CA 90631. All rights reserved.
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subset: commoncrawl


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August 9, 2018: BVH Integrated Services, a 120-person multi-disciplined consulting engineering firm that provides building and site engineering services, today announced that Zero By Degrees, a specialist in building envelope consulting, has joined the firm.
Zero By Degrees (ZBD) was founded in Vermont by Jon Haehnel in 2009. BVH's commissioning department, led by Lindsay Huff, has worked with Jon Haehnel and the ZBD team for over 5 years. In that time together, they have provided solutions for numerous building envelope commissioning projects.
"We are very excited to announce that Zero By Degrees has joined BVH. Having ZBD's building envelope expertise as part of our integrated services now gives our clients single source access from pre-design through post-occupancy," said Karl Frey, CEO. "Our expanded cross-disciplinary expertise will further support our vision of providing a seamless integration of services to our clients."
BVH's in-house building envelope services now include:
• Building Envelope Commissioning
• Building Envelope Diagnostics
• Building Envelope Plan & Specification Reviews
• Building Envelope Consulting
• Large Scale Blower Door Testing
• Pressure Balanced Blower Door Testing
• Infrared Imaging • Pressurized Fog Testing
• Window Airtightness Testing
• Window Water Penetration Testing
• Membrane Adhesion Testing
• Mock Up Testing and Inspections
About BVH Integrated Services, P.C.:
With offices in Connecticut and Massachusetts, BVH Integrated Services, P.C., is a multi-disciplined engineering firm providing civil, site utilities, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection engineering, technology design, commissioning and building envelope services. Serving clients since 1958, BVH is a leader in sustainable design, with clients in the academic, healthcare, research, corporate, destination, and municipal markets.
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3/25/2020 » 6/30/2020Project Schedule Management: From Project Initiation to Closeout (ONLINE)
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260 Girard Avenue, 2nd Floor
Hartford, CT 06105
Phone: (860) 768-5659
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Wishing Well Proceeds for Our Lady of Sorrows Foundation
Our Lady of Sorrows Outreach Foundation
On March 1, 2017, The Heritage Hotel Manila forwarded its donation amounting to Php 12,758.85 to "Our Lady of Sorrows Outreach Foundation" from the proceeds of the Wishing Well stationed at the hotel's lobby. The said foundation caters to out-of-school youths and less privileged communities through scholarship grants and livelihood programs.
The Heritage Hotel Manila has forwarded a total of Php 5,795.45 cash from the proceeds of Wishing Well stationed at the hotel's lobby to Our Lady of Sorrows Outreach Foundation last 2 July 2014. The said foundation caters to out-of-school youth and less privileged community through scholarship grant and livelihood programs.
2. Community
Blood Letting Activities
Twice a year, The Heritage Hotel Manila conducts a blood letting activity, which is usually scheduled in August and December. On April 21, 2017, the Philippine National Red Cross collected a total of 9,450 ml from 21 donors, on August 2, 2017 9,000 ml from donors and on December 11, 2017 10,800 ml from 24 donors
On-the-Job Training for Students
The Heritage Hotel Manila provides real world experience and training ground for future players in the industry by equipping students in training with confidence, right attitude and appropriate skills to prepare them for competitive careers. A total of 112 students from various universities around Metro Manila have taken their on-the-job training and familiarization workshop at the hotel. Career opportunities in the hotel were also given to outstanding students.
3. Health & Safety
Annual Annual Fire & Earthquake Drill
To ensure that the hotel is in compliance with the health and safety standards and continuously safeguard the guests, employees and properties, hotel employees underwent trainings on emergency preparedness and rescue responses.
And to show support to the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) in its efforts to create a culture of preparedness among urban residents for the possible 7.2 magnitude earthquake in the country, these trainings were put into action during the annual fire drill and earthquake drill on June 30, 2017 in coordination with the hotel's Engineering Department and local city fire department.
4. Environmental
Earth Hour
The Heritage Hotel Manila participated in the Earth Hour conducted last 25 March 2017. Through this participation, the hotel switched off its interior and exterior lights as well as applied the use of candles at the Riviera Cafe for one hour. This participation corresponds to the call for the international community to mobilize action against global warming and climate change.
Green Practices
The hotel always sees to incorporate daily green practices such as recycling, digitization of paper documents and use of LED lights to reduce carbon footprint.
Coastal Clean Up Day
The Heritage Hotel Manila joined the Philippine Coast Guard Auxiliary Squadron 116th in its service to achieving trash free seas through coastal cleanup. Volunteers from the hotel picked up trash and various litter along the Manila Bay Coastline. Coastal Cleanup is a global event initiated by Ocean Conservancy since 1986 to involve people in the removing of trash and debris from beaches, coastal regions and surrounding areas throughout the world, identify the sources of debris, and change behavioral patterns that contribute to pollution.
5. Employees
Health Information Drive and Wellness Program
We place a high premium on employees' health and wellness through raising their awareness on recent health concerns and interventions that can help employees attain and maintain healthier lifestyle. Through educational campaign such as Wellness Lecture (Smoking & Vaping) and importance of vaccination, there was a significant reduction in absenteeism, sick leaves and turnover. Thorough medical exam among all employees was done in the hotel on July 13-14, 2017 and health conditions of employees are regularly monitored by the hotel doctor. Employees perform better when they feel healthy and enjoy the monetary conversion of their sick leaves thus, improving their morale and sense of fulfillment at work.


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Our country is facing a national identity crisis. In only one week, we have seen our country divided in ways that many of us have never seen. At this historical crossroad, we are questioning who we are as a country and the values that make our country exceptional. One of those values is our belief … Continue reading The Daniel Society Statement on President Trump's Ban on Refugees
Tag: Center for Law and Justice
Giving Voice and Power to Minority and Immigrant Communities
People are angry, and understandably so. They are concerned about stop-and-frisk
tactics, attempts to dismantle sanctuary cities, and threats to deport two million undocumented immigrants.
Together, We Can Do Great Things For Others in 2017!
15 years ago when I had an idea to start an organization to help the poor, I never imagined that it would become "The Daniel Society," a 501(c)(3) organization that brings hope, healing and purpose to people living in extreme poverty. We have made tremendous progress over the past several months to advance our mission. … Continue reading Together, We Can Do Great Things For Others in 2017!
News The Daniel Society Statement About the U.S. Election 2016
On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, our country elected Donald J. Trump as our 45th President. The election outcome has led to various protests across the country and has raised concerns about the rights and future of poor and immigrant communities. On the campaign trail and in recent media interviews, President-elect Trump has promised to take aggressive … Continue reading News The Daniel Society Statement About the U.S. Election 2016
Why Not End Extreme Poverty?
"The end of extreme poverty is at hand—within our generation—but only if we grasp the historic opportunity in front of us," argues internationally renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs in his seminal work The End of Poverty. I join the optimism and idealism of Mr. Sachs to believe that people can—and should—be lifted out of extreme poverty. … Continue reading Why Not End Extreme Poverty?


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detail - Malaysia Office
Boosting the calibre of today's graduates
A Sarawak Roundtable
This roundatable providea a platform to discuss and propose ways to enhance the understanding and effectiveness among the various stakeholders on current issues and challenges with regards to the employability and marketability of today's graduates.
This portlet should not exist anymore
- Challenges and demands of globalisation
- Employability and marketability of today's graduates
- Recruitment: what employers look for in today's graduates?
- The job market in Sarawak: treat or threat?
- Learning & doing: what are the gaps?
- Competency in English: what are the barriers?
- Local universities vs. foreign universitites: competency gaps
- Talent management programme


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Mandala is sanskrit for circle. They are a spiritual and ritual symbol from Hindu and Buddhist traditions representing the universe. They have long been associated with the unfoldment of our inner world to extend into the outter world and beyond. Mandalas have a center point from which intricate patterns emerge to extend out in all directions. They are a symbol of infinite connection and oneness.
Mandalas provide a beautiful base for networking crystal energy to support the manifestation of your intentions.
Grid is made of birch and measures 9" in diameter. The pattern is beautifully etched into the wood to provide years of use.
Crystals not included.


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BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Diffuse lower-grade gliomas are classified into prognostically meaningful molecular subtypes. We aimed to determine the impact of surgical resection on overall survival in lower-grade glioma molecular subtypes.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: For 172 patients with lower-grade gliomas (World Health Organization grade II or III), pre- and postsurgical glioma volumes were determined using a semiautomated segmentation software based on FLAIR or T2-weighted MR imaging sequences. The association of pre- and postsurgical glioma volume and the percentage of glioma resection with overall survival was determined for the entire cohort and separately for lower-grade glioma molecular subtypes based on isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) and 1p/19q status, after adjustment for age, sex, World Health Organization grade, chemotherapy administration, and radiation therapy administration.
RESULTS: For the entire cohort, postsurgical glioma volume (hazard ratio, 1.80; 95% CI, 1.18–2.75; P = .006) and the percentage of resection (hazard ratio, 3.22; 95% CI, 1.79–5.82; P < .001) were associated with overall survival. For IDH-mutant 1p/19q-codeleted oligodendrogliomas, the percentage of resection (hazard ratio, 6.69; 95% CI, 1.57–28.46; P = .01) was associated with overall survival. For IDH-mutant 1p/19q-noncodeleted astrocytomas, presurgical glioma volume (hazard ratio, 3.20; 95% CI, 1.22–8.39; P = .018), postsurgical glioma volume (hazard ratio, 2.33; 95% CI, 1.32–4.12; P = .004), and percentage of resection (hazard ratio, 4.34; 95% CI, 1.74–10.81; P = .002) were associated with overall survival. For IDH-wild-type lower-grade gliomas, pre-/postsurgical glioma volume and percentage of resection were not associated with overall survival.
CONCLUSIONS: The extent of surgical resection has a differential survival impact in patients with lower-grade gliomas based on their molecular subtype. IDH-mutant lower-grade gliomas benefit from a greater extent of surgical resection, with the strongest impact observed for IDH-mutant 1p/19q-noncodeleted astrocytomas.
- lower-grade glioma
- mut
- mutation
- World Health Organization
- IDHmut-Noncodel
- LGGs with an IDH mutation but lacking 1p/19q codeletion
- IDHmut-Codel
- LGGs with an IDH mutation and codeletion of chromosome arms 1p and 19q
- IDHwt
- LGGs in IDH-wild-type subgroup
- © 2019 by American Journal of Neuroradiology