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	Climate Change continues, impervious to official Declarations by Roberto Savio Inter Press Service   Mar 2015 (IPS)   It is now clear that we are not going to reach the goal of controlling climate change.   It is worth recalling that the goal of not exceeding a 2 degree centigrade rise in global warming before 2020 was adopted at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 as a formula for consensus. Many in the scientific community had been clamouring for immediate action – and at most for a 1 degree rise – but bowed to political realism, and accepted an easier target.   The agreement was to block the rise in global temperature before 2020, and start a process for gradually reverting the climate to safe levels, to be concluded before 2050.   Well, in the last four years, we have already witnessed an increase in temperature by 1 degree, and there is only another 1 degree left before 2020.   The European Environment Agency (EEA), which publishes a report every five years, states that Europe needs “much more ambitious goals” if it wants to reach its declared targets and for 2050, European Union leaders have endorsed the objective of reducing Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent compared with 1990 levels.   However, Germany increased its carbon emissions by 20 million tons in 2012-13, instead of reducing them. This means that, in order to reach its targets, Germany should now reduce emissions by 3.5 percent a year over the next six years, which is a difficult, if not impossible, target to achieve.   It will increase energy costs and probably lead to a reaction to block measures which can hurt the economy. By the way, this is the official position of the Republicans in the U.S. Congress, who will fight any climate proposal.   By now, the effects of climate change have become visible, and not just to the climatologists. Last year the total number of people displaced by climatic disasters (such as hurricanes, landslides, drought, floods and forest fires) reached the staggering figure of 11 million people.   Last month, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think-tank based in New Delhi, issued a study report citing data compiled by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, which maintains a global database of natural disasters dating back over 100 years.   The study found a 10-fold increase to 525 natural disasters in 2002 from around 50 in 1975.   By 2011, the cost of natural disasters had ballooned to 350 billion dollars. In the 110 years between 1900 and 2009, hydro-meteorological disasters increased from 25 to 3,526. Together, extreme hydro-meteorological, geological and biological events increased from 72 to 11,571 during that same period.   There is no doubt that the activities of man are having a dramatic impact on the climate and the planet, affecting people’s lives, but – as usual – the world is moving on two levels, which are unrelated and opposed.   One of the main issues among countries at climate negotiations has been how much to invest in combating climate change but here the signs are very discouraging, to say the least. Take the Green Climate Fund, for example, which was intended to be the centrepiece of efforts to raise 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 but, as of December last year, only 10 billion dollars had been pledged to the fund.   This is the track for reducing fossil emissions. Let us now look to the other track: what the rich countries are spending to keep them.   According to a report from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Oil Change International (OCI), G20 governments are actually subsidising fossil fuel exploration with 88 billion dollars every year ( globally estimated as high as 400 billion, monies that could be redirected to the Green Climate Fund).   The report notes that “with rising costs for hard-to-reach reserves, and falling coal and oil prices, generous public subsidies are propping up fossil fuel exploration which would otherwise be deemed uneconomic.” In fact, G20 governments spend more than twice what the top 20 private companies are spending on finding new reserves of oil, gas and coal, and are doing so with public money.   So, on one hand, the system makes the right declarations of principle and, on the other, does the very opposite.   Meanwhile, there are some signs that the campaign against the need for doing something about climate change is losing credibility.   It is known that some members of the Republican Party in the United States are financed by energy giants, and it goes without saying that they will do whatever they can to boycott any deal on climate change that U.S. President Barack Obama may try to agree to at the next climate conference in Paris in December.   It is also known that a very small number of scientists dissent from the thinking of the more than 2,000 scientists whose work has contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in presenting the link between human activity and deterioration of the climate. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/   Of course, the dissenting voices have received a disproportionate echo in conservative media. However, last month, the Washington Post reported that one of the leading dissenters and guru of climate change deniers, Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, had been receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry.   The report cited documents that Greenpeace obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act showing that Soon had been receiving funding from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company and the American Petroleum Institute, among others.   Climate change dissenters are clearly unconcerned that the very future of our planet is at stake or, like the governmental system, have fallen prey to the ‘ostrich syndrome’.   * Roberto Savio, is founder and President emeritus of the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency. Visit the related web page
	You should Care about Neighborhood Inequality by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) USA   You should Care about Neighborhood Inequality, by Rachel Goodman, Staff Attorney, ACLU Racial Justice Program.   A new study released this week and explored in depth in The New York Times shows what civil rights advocates have long known: in raising children, as in real estate, location is (nearly) everything.   By examining data about poor children who moved at some point during their childhood, a team of Harvard economists determined that each year a poor child spent in a high-opportunity neighborhood did three very important things. It increased the income that child would earn as an adult. It improved the chance that the child would live in a good neighborhood as an adult. And for girls, it increased the likelihood that they would marry or maintain relationships with their children''s fathers.   So what makes a high opportunity neighborhood? No major surprises here. We''re talking about neighborhoods with good schools, good employment opportunities, and, perhaps most important, a mix of poor, middle-income, and wealthier families living side by side.   But, unfortunately, communities like this are particularly inaccessible to poor people of color. In fact, in a number of our biggest cities, the average poor Black child lives in a neighborhood where the poverty rate is 3 or 4 times higher than the poverty rate in the neighborhood where the average poor white child lives.   This disparity is the legacy of many years during which it was official government policy to keep people of color out of "good" neighborhoods, otherwise known as neighborhoods where white people lived. Those policies were perfectly legal until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and we haven''t yet succeeded in dismantling the geography of segregation that they created.   But the new study makes clear just how important that project is. If we want to create equality of opportunity, we have to start by making sure all families have access to high opportunity neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act gives us some important tools for reaching that goal.   First, it requires that all the local government agencies that take housing money from the federal government do their part to affirmatively further fair housing — that is, to make sure their policies don''t keep their communities segregated by race or income or any other factor. And the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is about to issue a new rule that will give those local agencies the data they need to understand segregation and will push them to engage actively in desegregation efforts.   Second, the Fair Housing Act allows us to challenge policies that cause unjustified racial disparities and perpetuate residential segregation. This tool — called the "disparate impact" standard — is the best way to push towns to change zoning rules that unfairly keep people of color out of high-opportunity communities. But just as we''re learning how important it is to open the doors to these communities, the Supreme Court is considering a case which could get rid of the disparate impact standard altogether.   That, of course, would be a step in the wrong direction. As the new study makes clear, giving all kids access to communities where they can thrive is crucial if we want the next generation of adults to be better off than their parents were.   We need to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty created by our history of discrimination, and we need more legal tools to make that happen. If we''re still serious about the American dream, we''ve got to be serious about ending the residential segregation that puts it out of reach for too many of our children.   http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/upshot/an-atlas-of-upward-mobility-shows-paths-out-of-poverty.html   May 2015   Why Today’s Landmark Court Victory Against Mass Surveillance Matters, by Patrick Toomey, Noa Yachot. (Extract)   In a landmark victory for privacy, a federal appeals court ruled unanimously that the mass phone-records program exposed two years ago by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is illegal because it goes far beyond what Congress ever intended to permit when it passed Section 215 of the Patriot Act.   The ruling in ACLU v. Clapper is enormously significant, and not only because the program in question — the first to be revealed by Edward Snowden — is at the heart of a legislative reform effort playing out right now, or because it sparked the most significant debate about government surveillance in decades. The decision could also affect many other laws the government has stretched to the breaking point in order to justify dragnet collection of Americans’ sensitive information.   Under the program, revealed in the Guardian on June 5, 2013, telecommunications companies hand over to the NSA, on a daily basis, records relating to the calls of all of their customers. Those records include information about who called whom, when, and for how long. The ACLU sued the NSA over the program just days after it was revealed, and we took the case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals after it was dismissed by a district court.   A few points on what makes the decision so important.   It recognizes that Section 215 of the Patriot Act does not authorize the government to collect information on such a massive scale. Section 215 allows the government to demand from third parties “any tangible thing” relevant to foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations. “Relevant” is a pretty abstract term, but the government employed a pretty fantastical interpretation to argue that every single call record in America is “relevant” because some of those records might come in handy in a future investigation.   The decision’s significance extends far beyond the phone records program alone. It implicates other mass spying programs that we have learned about in the past two years and — almost certainly ­— others that the government continues to conceal from the public. For example, we know that the Drug Enforcement Administration, for decades, employed a similar definition of “relevance” to amass logs of every call made from the United States to as many as 116 different countries. The same theory was also used to justify the collection of email metadata. Both those programs have been discontinued, but the legal reasoning hasn’t, and it could very well be the basis for programs the government has never acknowledged to the public, including the CIA’s bulk collection of Americans’ financial records..   Metadata is incredibly sensitive and revealing. The government has long argued that the phone records program doesn’t reveal the contents of calls, and as such, it is not an invasion of privacy. But metadata, especially in aggregate, can be just as revealing as content, painting a detailed picture of a person’s life.   The importance of adversarial review. The court recognized that public, adversarial litigation concerning the lawfulness of this spying program was vitally important to its decision — and it drew a direct contrast to the secret, one-sided proceedings that occur in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.   The FISC operates in near-total secrecy, in which it almost always hears only from the government. It oversees a wide variety of broad surveillance programs without any public participation or input, approving a body of secret law that has no place in a democracy. This decision affirms the role that federal courts — and the public — have in overseeing practices with such sweeping constitutional implications.   The congressional reforms under consideration just don’t cut it. Ahead of Section 215’s sunset on June 1, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to push through a straight reauthorization of the provision, extending its life by another five years. After today’s decision came down, he took to the floor to defend the program — a position altogether at odds with the appeals court decision, with the conclusions of multiple executive-branch review groups who found the program hasn’t been effective in stopping terrorism, and with the clear consensus that supports far-reaching surveillance reform.   Another bill in play (which the ACLU neither supports nor opposes), the USA Freedom Act of 2015, doesn’t go nearly far enough, most notably in ensuring that the government cannot engage in broad collection of innocent Americans’ private information.   We didn’t do this alone. Members of Congress have played an instrumental role in the fight for surveillance reform. Along with a number of organizations and experts, they filed amicus briefs on the ACLU’s behalf.   We hope that today’s ruling prompts Congress to consider and enact legislation that’s more robust than what’s currently on the table. Short of that, we continue to believe that Congress should seize the June 1 expiration date as an opportunity to let Section 215 die. Visit the related web page
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