The holiday feel-good story of the year

Someone is trying to create hope for change at what is normally just a factory for destroying human potential. Image by Katherine H via Flickr

Awesome. Well done, sir, whomever you are.

In the past two years, The Investor has donated $294,000 so that kidnappers, bank robbers and other felons at three state prisons can go to college behind bars.

College for prisoners

An anonymous donor has been financing community college classes for inmates at three Oregon prisons.

Current enrollment:
Oregon State Correctional Institution: 31 students

Oregon State Penitentiary: 44 students

Mill Creek Correctional Facility: 20 students

Grade point average for all students 2007-09: 3.4

Requirements for participation:
18 months' good conduct

High school GED

Be within five years of release

Donor's latest gift: $15,000 Christmas donation for books for women at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville

Donations from others: $26,483, 2007-09, for textbooks
Contact: Nancy Green, director for Corrections Education at Chemeketa Community College: 503-399-5050

His latest gift, just in time for Christmas this year, is $15,000 for women inmates at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville to buy books for themselves.

Oregon's educational offerings for prisoners have been limited largely to GED classes and vocational training since 1994. That's the year Congress stopped Pell grants for college tuition for prisoners, effectively shutting down every prison college program in the country.

More than four in 10 Oregon inmates go to prison without even a high school education. Nationally, the average is more than six in 10. Giving prisoners education while they're incarcerated is a key factor in preventing them from coming back once they're out. . . .

"He believes government can't do everything and private citizens need to step up," Green said. "He also believes people deserve a second chance because all of us have made mistakes in our lives." . . .

"At a time when public agencies and Oregonians are reeling from the effects of the current economic environment," he said, "it is even more impressive to know that one individual is investing in the safety of Oregonians and is supportive of creating opportunities for so many offenders."

Speaking of futile gestures, did someone say Copenhagen?

TomDispatch:

Don’t think for a minute that global warming will destroy planet Earth. It’s already made it through worse moments than ours, and worse climate conditions than industrial civilization has to offer. Planet Earth has no sense of time. Give it 10 million, 20 million, 100 million years, and it will reconstitute itself in some fashion and spin on, life included, until our sun gives out. But the way things are going, we may not do so well.

The Soviet Union, that “evil empire,” fell after only 70 years, to everyone’s amazement. Barely the span of human life. If we -- or at least our various civilizations -- were to disappear in the coming century or so, after only a few thousand years on this planet, it would be no less short, no less amazing, no less unexpected. But it’s possible. That anyone doubts the existence of global warming as a threat to our existence seems no less amazing to me. That, at this crucial moment, on the eve of a gathering of the world’s nations in Copenhagen to try to pound out some kind of agreement for the abatement of greenhouse gases, opinion polls show Americans actually losing interest in global warming, or even in the belief that it’s happening at all, is depressing indeed. (Only 35% of Americans, according to a recent Pew poll, for example, think global warming is a “very serious problem,” a drop of nine points in six months.) To find “conservatives” obsessed over the fact that climate-change scientists turn out to be frustrated, careerist, even mean-spirited, and willing to simplify or fiddle with their complex figures to deal with opponents they consider dangerous idiots (“Climate-gate”) is simply to meet human nature, not a conspiracy of monumental proportions.

The most recent information is clear enough. The world is changing, and not for the better. According to Elizabeth Kolbert, possibly the best journalist now reporting on climate change (writing at Yale University’s splendid Environment 360 website), a new report by leading climate scientists, released on the eve of the Copenhagen meeting, reflects surprise at how much more quickly the planet is proceeding toward various “tipping points” than previously expected. The report, she writes, “points to dramatic declines in Arctic sea ice, recent measurements that show a large net loss of ice from both Greenland and Antarctica, and the relatively rapid rise in global sea levels -- 3.4 millimeters per year -- as particular reasons for concern. Sea-level rise this century, it states, ‘is likely to be at least twice as large’ as predicted by the most recent IPCC report, issued in 2007, with an upper limit of roughly two meters.” This, believe me, is not good news.

Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and TomDispatch regular, explains just why conservatives and everyone else around should board the global-warming express, and pull hard on the brake cord before it’s too late. You can, by the way, catch a TomDispatch audio interview with McKibben on President Obama and climate-change politics in the U.S. by clicking here. Tom

The Physics of Copenhagen
Why Politics-As-Usual May Mean the End of Civilization
By Bill McKibben

Most political arguments don’t really have a right and a wrong, no matter how passionately they’re argued. They’re about human preferences -- for more health care or lower taxes, for a war to secure some particular end or a peace that leaves some danger intact. On occasion, there are clear-cut moral issues: the rights of minorities or women to a full share in public life, say; but usually even those of us most passionate about human affairs recognize that we’re on one side of a debate, that there are legitimate arguments to the contrary (endless deficits, coat-hanger abortions, a resurgent al-Qaeda). We need people taking strong positions to move issues forward, which is why I’m always ready to carry a placard or sign a petition, but most of us also realize that, sooner or later, we have to come to some sort of compromise.

That’s why standard political operating procedure is to move slowly, taking matters in small bites instead of big gulps. That’s why, from the very beginning, we seemed unlikely to take what I thought was the correct course for our health-care system: a single-payer model like the rest of the world. It was too much change for the country to digest. That’s undoubtedly part of the reason why almost nobody who ran for president supported it, and those who did went nowhere.

Instead, we’re fighting hard over a much less exalted set of reforms that represent a substantial shift, but not a tectonic one. You could -- and I do -- despise the insurance industry and Big Pharma for blocking progress, but they’re part of the game. Doubtless we should change the rules, so they represent a far less dominant part of it. But if that happens, it, too, will undoubtedly occur piece by piece, not all at once.

Moving by increments: it frustrates the hell out of many of us, and sometimes it’s truly disastrous. (I just watched Bill Moyers’ amazing recent broadcast of the LBJ tapes in the run-up to the full-scale escalation of the Vietnam War, where the president and his advisors just kept moving the numbers up a twitch at a time until we were neck deep in the Big Muddy.) Usually, however, incrementalism, whatever you think of it, lends a kind of stability to the conduct of our affairs -- often it has a way of setting the stage for the next move.

We may have to wait years for the next round of health-care reform and, in the meantime, doubtless many people will suffer, but here’s the one thing we know: what we don’t do now doesn’t foreclose future progress. In fact, it may make it more likely -- if, after all, people grow comfortable with the idea of a “public option,” then the next time around the insurance industry won’t be able to make actual, honest-to-God public medicine seem so scary.

Climate Change as Just Another Political Problem

When it comes to global warming, however, this is precisely why we’re headed off a cliff, why the Copenhagen talks that open this week, almost no matter what happens, will be a disaster. Because climate change is not like any other issue we’ve ever dealt with. Because the adversary here is not Republicans, or socialists, or deficits, or taxes, or misogyny, or racism, or any of the problems we normally face -- adversaries that can change over time, or be worn down, or disproved, or cast off. The adversary here is physics.

Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible "with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.

And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble -- because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late.

Oh, and the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is already at 390 parts per million, even as the amount of methane in the atmosphere has been spiking in the last two years. In other words, we’re over the edge already. We’re no longer capable of “preventing” global warming, only (maybe) preventing it on such a large scale that it takes down all our civilizations.

So here’s the thing: When Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen, he will treat global warming as another political problem, offering a promise of something like a 17% cut in our greenhouse gas emissions from their 2005 levels by 2020. This works out to a 4% cut from 1990 levels, the standard baseline for measurement, and yet scientists have calculated that the major industrialized nations need to cut their emissions by 40% to have any hope of getting us on a path back towards safety.

And even that 17% cut may turn out to be far too high a figure for the Senate. Here’s what Senator Jim Webb (a coal-country Democrat) wrote to the president last week: "I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed in Copenhagen… The phrase 'politically binding' has been used. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."

In any case, the Senate has decided that it will not debate any climate-change bill until “the spring,” after health care is settled, and maybe entitlement reform, and perhaps even financial regulation. And awfully close to the next election.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are apparently prepared to offer a 40% reduction in the “energy intensity” of their economy by 2020. In other words, they claim they’ll then be using 40% less energy to make each yuan worth of stuff they ship off to WalMart. Which is better than not doing it, but more or less what the experts think would happen anyway as China’s economy naturally becomes more high-tech and efficient. It’s at best a minor stretch from “business as usual.”

Meanwhile, the Indians almost sacked their environment minister after the newspapers decided he was compromising the national interest by engaging in real negotiations about global warming.

Meanwhile, the Australian opposition last week did sack their leader for being willing to compromise on an already-compromised Emissions Trading Scheme that would have capped carbon -- meaning nothing will pass.

Meanwhile…

A Challenge Unique in History

A new analysis released Thursday by a consortium of European think-tanks shows that the various offers on the table add up to a world in which the atmosphere contains 650 parts per million and the temperature rises an ungodly five degrees Fahrenheit.

What I’m saying is: even the best politicians are treating the problem of climate change as a normal political one, where you halve the distance between various competing interests and do your best to reach some kind of consensus that doesn’t demand too much of anyone, yet reduces the political pressure for a few years -- at which time, of course, you (or possibly someone entirely different) will have to deal with it again.

Obama is doing the same thing with climate change that he did with health care. He’s acting with complete political realism, refusing to make the perfect the enemy of the good (or, really, the better-than-Bush). He’s doing what might make sense in almost any other situation.

Here, unfortunately, the foe is implacable. Implacable foes emerge rarely. The best human analog to the role physics is playing here may be fascism in the middle of the last century. There was no appeasing it, no making a normal political issue out of it. You had to decide to go all in, to transform the industrial base of the country to fight it, to put other things on hold, to demand sacrifice.

Yet it’s all too obvious that we’re not dealing with it that way. The president hasn’t, for instance, been on a nonstop campaign to make everyone realize the danger. When he went to China, he certainly reached some interesting agreements about cooperation on automobile technology, but that’s not the same as seeking a wartime partnership.

Nor is the senate meeting late into the night figuring out how to mobilize our country’s resources and people in the struggle to save our planet. Here’s how Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill summed up the mood: “I don’t think anyone’s excited about doing another really, really big thing that’s really, really hard that makes everybody mad.”

Some of us have been trying hard to open some political space for world leaders to step up to this challenge. We built a worldwide movement at 350.org that managed to pull off the “most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history” (at least according to CNN). In some places, it even sparked the desired result. Ninety-two nations, all poor and vulnerable to the early effects of climate change, have endorsed that radical 350 target.

Some of their leaders, like Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, a nation made up of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, have emerged as tigers, ready to fight. No one would be surprised to see him lead some kind of walkout from the Copenhagen negotiations, since he’s declared over and over that he won’t be party to a “suicide pact” for his low-lying nation; he is, in other words, unwilling to treat global warming as a normal political issue.

We, however, couldn’t get even the most minor player in the Obama administration to come to one of the 2,000 rallies we staged across this country. None of them were interested in jumping into the space we were trying to open. If the U.S. is this willing to treat climate change as politics-as-usual, most of the other major players will simply follow suit.

They'll sign some kind of paper in Denmark -- that became all but certain on Friday night when Obama announced he'd jet in for the meeting's close. European leaders and some environmental groups may then call it a “qualified success,” and on we will go through more years of negotiation. In the meantime, physics will continue to operate, permafrost will continue to thaw, sea ice to melt, drought to spread.

It’s like nothing we’ve ever faced before -- and we’re facing it as if it’s just like everything else. That’s the problem.

Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. His The End of Nature, published in 1989, is regarded as the first book for a general audience on global warming. He is a founder of 350.org, a campaign to spread the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million worldwide. He is, most recently, the editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (Library of America). His next book will be Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, which will be published in April. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with McKibben on President Obama and climate change politics in the U.S., click here.

Probably a futile gesture

Image by yourpicturesarejon via Flickr

Somebody left a stolen grocery cart in front of LOVESalem HQ a couple minutes ago -- I walked through the living room and looked out the window and it wasn't there, then a few minutes later, presto, there it was -- a grey, Sprawl-Mart shopping cart. I thought perhaps the "owner" of the cart might be around scrounging in the alley for bottles and cans, but it seems to have been simply left.

So I called the "shopping cart 'hotline'" -- where I was told that it would be collected in 48 - 72 hours. Hardly seems like much of a "hotline," but we'll see.

FIND A STRAY CART?
Seven Portland and Salem area grocery chains are participating in the shopping cart hotline:
Albertson's
Danielson's Thriftway
Fred Meyer
Haggen Food & Pharmacy
QFC
Safeway Food & Drug
Winco

The toll-free number to report abandoned carts from these stores is 888-552-2787.

Northwest Cities leaving Salem behind

Look familiar? It should -- Bellingham is a city much like Salem, only it has done a far better job engaging with the threat of peak oil. Image via Wikipedia

Salem and Marion County are falling further and further behind those cities and counties that have taken seriously the government's obligation to do more than act as a servant to business as usual and to instead help people anticipate and prepare for challenges ahead.

For example, Transition Bellingham will be presenting its report to the City of Bellingham and then to Whatcom County (large pdf file). Salem and Marion County, in contrast, misunderstand the current economic challenges, thinking them to be temporary aberrations in an overall ever-growing economy rather than the first concrete evidence that a social and economic model of continuous growth necessarily collapses, not when resources run out, but as soon as the expanding energy resources needed to power continuous expansion become constrained.

Great book for fireside reading

Image by WSDOT via Flickr

"Waiting on a Train: The embattled future of passenger rail service" by James McCommons. A well-written book about a year spent riding on trains across the US and thoughts about why we've let them decay so badly and what we need to do to restore a functioning rail system.

Includes a chapter on the Cascades line that runs up through the valley, which brought McCommons to Salem to discuss the differences between Oregon and Washington's support for trains and plans for expanding service up to Seattle and B.C. and down to Eugene.

The publisher's blurb:

During the tumultuous year of 2008, when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California, journalist James McCommons spent a year on Americaas trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

Good News from Open Up Oregon

Image by amy allcock via Flickr

Professor Bill Harbaugh down at U of O sends the following about an initiative that might have a substantial positive effect in Salem if pursued seriously. The state tends to set the standard for open government measures -- municipalities, particularly the City of Salem, find it hard not to follow good practices the state uses.

Dear Friends:

I just had a conversation with the Oregon Attorney spokesperson, Tony Green. Tony told me that tomorrow AG Kroger will announce some immediate reforms in how his office administers Oregon's public record law.

In particular, he will post the Public Records manual online for free access (it's already available at http://openuporegon.com) and he will appoint a DOJ attorney, Michael Kron, as the "Government Transparency" point person. Additionally, AG Kroger will hold public hearings across the state this winter on reforms to Oregon's public records law.

My own view is that Oregon's law is fine, and that the AG's office simply needs to make it clear to state agencies that they will not allow them to deny, delay, or charge unreasonable fees for access to public records. I am cautiously optimistic that the reforms Attorney Kroger is pursuing will do this and improve the current situation - perhaps substantially. I certainly intend to find out!

Thanks for your support for my efforts to encourage the AG to make these reforms.

Bill Harbaugh
Professor of Economics

When will we ever learn?

US troop levels the Afghan war - 2003 through the planned increase - laid alongside US troop levels in Vietnam during 1960-1965

Don't forget: Community Energy Strategy Skull-Session Tomorrow, 12/1

Image via Wikipedia

Ahhhh, it becomes clear at last. Salem finally sets about doing what it should have done long ago -- because that came as a string tied to a grant.

Tues., Nov. 24, 2009
CONTACT: Nicole Wahlberg, Public Information Manager
City of Salem – Urban Development Department
Tel: 503-588-6178, ext. 7552
Email: nwahlberg@cityofsalem.net Website: www.cityofsalem.net

Help Shape a Community Energy Strategy for Salem
Community Energy Forum Dec. 1 at Salem Conference Center

Tues., Dec. 1, 2009 – Salem, Ore. – Join City of Salem staff, business leaders, and industry experts at Salem’s Community Energy Forum and learn about energy trends, technologies, and tools that Salem businesses and residents can employ to reduce energy use, cost, and spur economic growth. The Forum is being held at the Salem Conference Center on Tues., Dec. 1 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The public is invited to attend. The classes and lunch are free, but a lunch RSVP is required.

Climate Solutions, a Washington-based company [sic -- actually a non-profit] that specializes in energy, will lead morning informational sessions with support from Portland-based ECONorthwest.

Session topics will target ways to prepare our community for future energy needs including efficient buildings, renewable energy, transportation options, next generation energy infrastructure, finance, and community engagement. Information will also include an overview of Salem’s current energy use, relevant energy policies and programs, and practical tools for preparing Salem to meet future energy demands and capitalize on opportunities for economic growth.

Afternoon sessions will provide an opportunity for stakeholders and interested citizens to provide input on draft goals and actions to be included in Salem’s Community Energy Strategy (a road map for implementing energy savings measures next year and beyond). Short term action items may be included in the City’s December submission to Department of Energy and eligible for funding in 2010-11.

In May 2009, the City of Salem became the recipient of a $1,521,000 formula grant from the U.S. Department of Energy through the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program. Development of an Energy Strategy is the first grant requirement. Having a Strategy in place will also position the City to compete for future funding.

A final Community Energy Strategy will be completed by March 2010, at which time staff will seek Council’s adoption of the document. The strategy will include actions the City can take to improve energy efficiency and save cost in its own facilities and as well as goals, projects, and programs designed to improve energy efficiency, conservation, and cost savings in the industrial, commercial, transportation, and residential sectors, promote sustainable industry and jobs, and related activities as appropriate.

RSVP is required for those attending lunch on the day of the Community Energy Forum. For questions or to RSVP, please contact Annie Gorski at 503-588-6178 or agorski@cityofsalem.net

Tuesday 12/1 -- A chance to untangle the tangled web some

If you're a cat with questions, this meeting might be for you. Image by silgeo via Flickr

Every week we hear something new about the debate on reforming our broken health care system. As we gear up for the home stretch, its important that we are all on the same page. So, we are holding a series of meetings to clear up any confusion, frustration, or misinformation that comes with following the process in Congress. Come join us and your fellow health care activists for an evening of lively discussion.

Salem - Tuesday, December 1st
5:00 - 6:30 pm
Salem Central Library
585 Liberty St, SE, Salem, OR

If you can't make it to a meeting, but still have questions please feel free to email me and I will do my best to get back to you by the end of the week. Hope to see you soon.

To your health,

Betsy Dillner
Oregon Health Care for America Now

An important example for Salem from the 90s . . . the 1890s

Give people access to land for growing food. It's what's for dinner.