carldavidson – Page 21 – Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

Study Shows How the US Could Achieve 100% Renewable Energy by 2050

By Chris Wood

Gizmag.com

June 9, 2015 – A team of researchers led by Stanford University’s professor Mark Z. Jacobson has produced an ambitious roadmap for converting the energy infrastructure of the US to run entirely on renewable energy in just 35 years. The study focuses on the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies such as wind, solar and geothermal solutions, claiming that the transition is both economically and technically possible within the given timeframe.

As a starting point, the researchers looked at current energy demands on a state-by-state basis, before calculating how those demands are likely to evolve over the next three and a half decades. Splitting the energy use into residential, commercial, industrial and transportation categories, the team then calculated fuel demands if current generation methods – oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewables – were replaced with electricity.

That already sounds like a mammoth task, but its true complexity comes to light when you consider that for the purposes of the study, absolutely everything has to run on electricity. That means everything from homes and factories to every vehicle on the road.

As it turns out, while the calculations might be complex, the results are extremely promising.

"When we did this across all 50 states, we saw a 39 percent reduction in total end-use power demand by the year 2050," said Jacobson. "About 6 percentage points of that is gained through efficiency improvements to infrastructure, but the bulk is the result of replacing current sources and uses of combustion energy with electricity."

In order for each state to make the transition, it would focus on the use of the most easily available renewable sources. For example, some states get a lot more sunlight than others, some have a greater number of south-facing rooftops, while coastal states can make use of offshore wind farms, and for others geothermal energy is a good option. (Continued)

Continue reading Study Shows How the US Could Achieve 100% Renewable Energy by 2050

Mass Incarceration: The Most Important Political Issue of 2016 No One Wants to Talk About

By David J. Krajicek

AlterNet

June 14, 2015 - Five years ago, while America clutched a tin cup during the recession, politicians shouted hallelujah about saving money by reducing the country’s grossly bloated prison population.

The national inmate count declined fractionally for a few years, reaping celebratory headlines. One expert quoted by the New York Times declared “the beginning of the end of mass incarceration.”

Then came the bipartisan miracle–the Koch brothers linking arms with libertarians and progressives to declare support for criminal justice reform, prompting dreamy talk about cutting prison rolls in half, to levels last seen before mandatory minimum madness began in the 1990s.

But as another legislative season toddles to a close, where are the broad reforms?

“Right now, the focus is still on reforming sentencing for nonviolent, first-time offenders,” says Nkechi Taifa [3], a senior policy analyst with the Open Society Foundations. “This the safe, low-hanging fruit of reform…And it’s like pulling hen’s teeth to even get that kind of legislation passed.”

How will the nation’s prison population decline significantly if there is no political will to reform hard-time sentences, including lifers?

“It won’t,” says Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums [4].

In fact, Pew now projects [5] that state prison populations will increase by 3 percent over the next four years, begging the question of whether the heralded end of mass incarceration was dead on arrival as a political issue.

Lifers Excluded from Reforms

America’s growing lifer population is a quandary that pols choose to ignore.

“This population is treated as out of sight, out of mind,” says Ryan King [6], an Urban Institute senior fellow who tracks sentencing trends. “It’s like we don’t want to deal with the problem—and life-without-parolers (LWOPs) are the most extreme example.”

A sentence of life without parole has become popular (and more palatable to some jurors) as capital punishment has ebbed in many states. Some Americans find solace in the adage that there is just one way for an LWOP to leave prison: in a hearse.

“It condemns you to die in prison,” Open Society’s Taifa told me. “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve changed, no matter that you’ve aged out of committing crime, no matter how much you’ve tried to better yourself. There is no hope for you.”

Two years ago, Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project reported [7] that state and federal prisons held 160,000 lifers, nearly 50,000 of whom were LWOPs, with had no hope for parole.

For context, the number of lifers incarcerated today nearly matches the entire U.S. prison population in 1968. The lifer population began to mushroom in the 1980s—34,000 in ’84, 70,000 in 1992, 128,000 in 2003. The boom in life-without-parolers started in the early ‘90s, just as the crime rate began its precipitous drop. The number of LWOPs nearly tripled between 1992 and 2003, from 12,500 to about 34,000. (continued)

Continue reading Mass Incarceration: The Most Important Political Issue of 2016 No One Wants to Talk About

Case in Point: Intersection of Race, Class and Gender

Georgia Woman Faces Murder Charges for Taking Pill that Allegedly Killed Fetus

[Editor’s Update: After three days in jail, the changes were dropped, but the outrage remains.]

By Lauren Gambino
The Guardian via Alternet

June 10, 2015 – A Georgia woman is facing a murder charge in the death of a five-and-a-half-month-old fetus she delivered after she allegedly took a pill that terminated her pregnancy.

Officials have charged Kenlissia Jones, 23, of Albany, Georgia, with malice murder and possession of a dangerous drug, according to local [3] news [4] reports. She was arrested on Saturday night after giving birth to the fetus in a car on the way to the hospital and taken to nearby Dougherty County jail, where she is being held without bond.

Pro-choice advocates said there was no abortion clinic nearby and that initial reports of the young woman’s arrest were “deeply disturbing” in the wake of so-called “feticide” – killing a fetus – laws sweeping the US.

According to a police report obtained by the Associated Press, a county social services worker called Albany police to the hospital, and told officers that Jones ingested four pills she purchased online to “induce labor”. The social services worker told the police Jones wished to end her pregnancy because she and her boyfriend had broken up.

Jones’s neighbor drove her to the hospital, but she gave birth to the fetus before they arrived. Officials said the fetus died at the hospital about half an hour after she gave birth, according to the report, which did not indicate how far along Jones was in her pregnancy.

WALB-TV reported earlier that authorities had said the woman was five and a half months pregnant.

The Dougherty County district attorney, Greg Edwards, reportedly said the case is likely to be presented to a grand jury, and that prosecutors needed time to explore their options under state and federal law.

Albany police refused to answer questions about the case, citing an open investigation and directing all calls to the Dougherty County district attorney’s office. The office did not return multiple requests for comment by the Guardian.

“If women do not have the means to access medical care, they will take matters into their own hands, with tragic consequences,” said Jaime Chandra, a spokeswoman for the Feminist Women’s Health [5] Center in Atlanta.

More than 50% of women in Georgia live in a county with no abortion clinic, and this is true of Dougherty County and nearly all of south-west Georgia, according to the Health Center.

Cytotec, a misoprostol drug, can be used in combination with another drug – mifepristone – to end a pregnancy non-surgically, a method known as medical abortion. It was not immediately clear to the Guardian whether Jones took the first pill, or only Cytotec, which by itself is not considered a so-called “abortion pill”.

There were 28 abortion providers in Georgia in 2011, down from 32 in 2008,according to the Guttmacher Institute [6]. A full 96% of counties in the state had no abortion clinic in 2011, which would require more than half of all Georgia women to travel outside their county to receive an abortion. Chandra said she is unaware of an abortion clinic in or around Albany.
Purvi Patel case: legal experts warn on reproductive rights in Indiana Read more

Elizabeth Nash, a state policy expert at the Guttmacher Institute, said reports on the Georgia case were “deeply disturbing” and that she was alarmed at what appears to be a spike in the number of cases in which women are charged with crimes for self-aborting their fetus. Criminalizing abortion discourages women from seeking the medical care they may need, she said.

“You could imagine a woman might not go to the hospital if she thinks she is going to be arrested,” Nash said.

Currently, at least 38 US states [7] – including Georgia – have fetal homicide laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The first person convicted in the US under such a law is Purvi Patel, an Indiana woman serving 20 years in prison [8] for ending her own pregnancy using abortion drugs in July 2013.

In Georgia, the penalty for “feticide” is life in prison.

“The woman wasn’t able to access healthcare when she needed it, she took action on her own and then when she sought out healthcare she was then arrested,” Nash said. “She was let down every step of the way.”

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lauren-gambino
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
[3] http://www.walb.com/story/29263746/official-5-month-old-fetus-lived-30-minutes-after-abortion-pill-delivery
[4] http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/abortion-pill-leads-murder-charge-fetus-dies-31630905
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/society/health
[6] https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/sfaa/georgia.html
[7] http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx
[8] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/02/purvi-patel-case-alter-reproductive-rights-indiana
[9] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Georgia Woman Faces Murder Charges for Taking Pill that Allegedly Killed Fetus
[10] http://www.alternet.org/
[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B