Living near a power plant is dangerous

Our children are at risk from power plant pollution: Over 25 million children in the U. S. live in counties

that violate national air quality standards for the common pollutants ozone, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide;

Cases of asthma have rapidly increased, more than doubling in the past two decades. Six percent of U.S. children have asthma; 

Thirty-five million of our children live within 30 miles of a power plant — a distance within which local

communities may reasonably be affected by a power plant’s smoke plume; an estimated 2 million of these

children are asthmatic and are particularly susceptible to these pollutants; 72,000 of our schools are within 30 miles of a power plant; Average health risks to children due to exposure to power plant combustion wastes could be up to

10,000 times higher than EPA’s allowable risk levels for cancer and other illnesses. Power plants are a major source of the most common pollutants in the air that harm children. Power plants emit 67 percent of the sulfur dioxide (SO2), 23 percent of the nitrogen oxides (NOX), 33 percent of the mercury, and 38 percent of the carbon dioxide from energy related sources. In much of the U.S., especially in the East, Midwest and South, sulfates make up the bulk of so-called fine particulate matter. Power plants are responsible for about half of the fine particulate matter in

many parts of the U.S. Numerous epidemiological studies have suggested that sulfate particles are among those most strongly associated with health impacts and premature mortality in adults.

http://www.catf.us/publications/reports/Children_at_Risk.pdf

 (Thanks, Meg Sheehan from Stop Spewing Carbon.) Photo from ahhyeah's photostream at Flickr.

Who is worthy? Poverty & the price of shrimp

Community forums where anonymity prevails are a great if sometimes painful way to find out what people really think about poor people.

Yesterday, New Year's Day, someone commented on Springfield MA's s forum that he or she had seen someone on food stamps buy $40 worth of crab legs.

One poster (I am not allowed to quote directly) asserted that some poor working joe who's trying to support a family on a $10 an hour wage would never be eating shrimp or crab legs and that what a person is allowed to buy on food stamps should be circumscribed. My query as to the possibly apocryphal nature of this observation-- was this something the poster had observed first-hand or had heard about from someone else?-- went unanswered.

The next thirty posts were about how 85% of food stamp users sold their food stamps for money or drugs, or bought shrimp platters or other expensive food items with them.

Now, the truth is, the days when food stamp recipients had to fumble with tearing $1, $5 and $10 coupons out of a book while others in the checkout line waited impatiently are long gone. The user swipes a card pretty indistinguishable from a regular debit card, so you really have to be right on top of someone and really trying in their business to know exactly how they're paying.

So let's do a reality check about our poor working slob who earns $10 an hour to support his family, and whether or not a shrimp platter would ever be in his budget.

First of all, our friend Joe is almost certainly eligible for food stamps himself-- and so are at least some of the forum posters.

Let's say Joe has a wife and two kids, works fulltime at $10 an hour, and lives in a $750 a month apartment in which he pays his own utilities.

Luckily for Joe, according to MassResources, his family is eligible for some fuel assistance.

Then, if I go over to the Food Stamp Calculator, and keep it simple by assuming Joe has no other income or major expenses such as childcare, Joe and his family should get about $380 a month in food stamps.

Joe's family's in trouble, of course. Let's take away 25% of $1,600 for taxes, leaving $1,200, and then deduct his $750 rent. He's got $450 a month left to live on, and of course he has other expenses.

But it's New Year's Eve. He goes to Shop and Stop after work to pick up a few things, and his eye is caught by a shrimp platter in the seafood section. It's only $26. He stops for a minute and then thinks, "What the hell."

The woman behind him in the check-out line seems not in the holiday spirit; she frowns at his tentative smile. But that's OK. It's New Year's Eve and he's headed home. Home to his family.

10 Million Millionaires equals 2.8 billion in poverty

It's an old joke poor people tell ourselves:
Why are people poor?
Because we don't have money! Do away with sociological and psychological reasons for poverty; stop confusing the symptoms with the causes, and in the end, it all boils down to money, which is about distribution of wealth, which is about control of resources.

Merrill Lynch & Co reported yesterday that the world now has 10 million millionaires, with an average wealth of about $4 million. Their wealth grew 9 percent last year, some $41 trillion dollars. Those 10 million make up one fifth of 1 percent of the world population. Meanwhile, some 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day.

The super-rich are doing particularly well. Those with incomes of $30 million or more saw their incomes go up by 15% last year. There are about 103,000 of the super-rich.

Very few people in the U.S. earn less than $2 a day, Yet more than 20% of us earn less than $20,000 a year; another 23% of us earn under $40,000. And in this country, almost nothing is free: we pay for housing, food, utilities, water, clothes, medicine; most of us have no land to cultivate, no community well, no cotton to spin into cloth. And half of the country is cold half of the time.

The value of a house has gone down 15% since last year-- bad time to sell if you're a senior, or want to relocate, or can't handle the burden of homeownership anymore and you want to get out.

Heating oil is projected to be $479 for a hundred gallons this winter. That's my take-home pay for a week! I hear the utility companies are at their wits' end, paying nearly the same high coal and oil prices as we do. But pity the poor consumer-- we'll pay that price at least twice.

It's dangerous for people to go without utilities. Fires get started by candles and space heaters. People get hypothermia. Landlords can evict you, child protection services can take your children. All of that will happen more this year.

I worry that the margin for disaster seems so large for so many. We can be creative, we can be act collectively,
but not everybody is going to make it though this winter.

Food riots grow; we can expect more

In Cote d'Iviore, 1500 people took to the streets today to protest rising food prices. In Egypt last week, two people were killed in a clash over bread. 10,000 Indonesians demonstrated outside Jakarta's presidential palace earlier this month. Recent food riots have also taken place in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Cameroon, Morocco, Burkina Faso, India, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Italy.

Food prices are increasing everywhere. Soybean prices have doubled in a month and gone up 125% in a year. Wheat prices have risen 90% since last March, while unseasonable weather in Canada and Australia, two main producers, has limited supply. In Asia, the price of rice has almost doubled since January, causing India, Cambodia, Vietnam and Egypt to limit or completely end exports in an effort to feed their own people. This is bad news for the Philippines, which depends on rice from Vietnam to help meet its country's food needs.

In Haiti some have returned to making cookies from salt, shortening and edible clay-- but even the price of the clay has risen. Food demonstrations have taken place inHaiti, Egypt, Zimbabwe, India, Namibia, Mexico, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen and even in Italy. the U.N. Food Programme says that as of December, 37 countries faced food crises, and 20 had imposed some sort of food-price controls. The U.N. also says it has a $500 million shortfall to feed 89 million of the world's hungriest people.

Even in the U.S., dairy products are up 15%, fruits and vegetables 10%, and cereals and bread is up 8%. The average middle class family would spend $253 more for the same groceries this year compared to two years ago.. And 28 million people are expected to receive food stamps this year, the highest level since the program was created in 1964.

WHY? IMMEDIATE CAUSES

• The increasing use of land to produce biofuels like ethanol. A U.N. report last year warned that “rapid growth in liquid biofuel production will make substantial demands on the world’s land and water resources at a time when demand for both food and forest products is also rising rapidly.” Besides the ethics of using food to create fuel, biofuel production can create even more greenhouse gases.
• The rapid growth of developing nations like India and China. Healthier people demand more food including meat and dairy which sends up the cost of the grain used for cattle feed.
• High global fuel prices which increase to the cost of everything related to food production, from processing to transport.

Prices are expected to stabilize-- in about ten years. Ten years is long enough to permanently stunt a child's life, to leach the joy from early adulthood, to rob middle-years of their bounty, to darken the hours of the elderly.

We are not without power to take those personal actions we know can help-- driving less, eating less meat, growing even a single tomato plant. But more than ever we need to work together for policy change. I have to write this because I have to believe we can make a difference.

Check out Dr. Gideon Palya's perspective on the food crisis in Countercurrents.

Photo: Food Riot, 1917. During World War I, wartime inflation severely taxed the limited budgets of working-class families. Although wages also rose during the war, they could not keep up with prices. On February 20, 1917, after confronting pushcart peddlers who were charging exorbitant rates for necessities, thousands of women marched to New York�s City Hall to demand relief. The “food riot” precipitated a boycott campaign that eventually forced pushcart prices down. Women in Boston and Philadelphia took similar action.
From History Matters.