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Decreases in social disparities in air pollution during lockdown suggest the need for sustainable policies

Is everyone equally affected by environmental pollution? This is the essence of ‘environmental justice,’ a concept that originated in the United States…

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Is everyone equally affected by environmental pollution? This is the essence of ‘environmental justice,’ a concept that originated in the United States during the 1970s. It revolves around the idea of ensuring fairness and equity in environmental issues, preventing the disproportionate impact of environmental problems on specific groups or regions. The U.S. has made significant progress in reducing air pollution through stringent regulations and policies, turning its attention to addressing social disparities in air quality. However, there remains a gap in environmental justice research in Korea.

Credit: POSTECH

Is everyone equally affected by environmental pollution? This is the essence of ‘environmental justice,’ a concept that originated in the United States during the 1970s. It revolves around the idea of ensuring fairness and equity in environmental issues, preventing the disproportionate impact of environmental problems on specific groups or regions. The U.S. has made significant progress in reducing air pollution through stringent regulations and policies, turning its attention to addressing social disparities in air quality. However, there remains a gap in environmental justice research in Korea.

 

A research team led by Professor Hyung Joo Lee from the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), in collaboration with the California Air Resources Board, conducted a study on the air pollution impact of lockdown policies in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research aimed to analyze how these policies affected social inequities in air pollution exposures and provide insights for formulating environmental justice policies. The findings were published in the international environmental journal Atmospheric Environment.

 

Nitrogen dioxide (NO2), an air pollutant emitted from vehicles and industrial activities, serves as a crucial indicator of combustion-related air pollution. The team investigated the influence of lockdown policies on social disparities in NO2 air pollution.

 

The findings revealed a notable reduction in average NO2 concentrations in California, U.S., by approximately 34% post-lockdown, excluding weather-related influences. Non-urban areas experienced a 17% decrease, while urban areas saw a 50% reduction in NO2 levels, primarily attributed to the significant decline in traffic during the lockdown.

 

Furthermore, the research team analyzed shifts in social inequity related to air pollution, employing an environmental justice perspective. They identified socially vulnerable groups based on education level and race/ethnicity and assessed their exposure to air pollution, noting a substantial decrease in the disparity from 79% to 37%. This reduction was attributed to the fact that disadvantaged communities in the U.S. are more likely to reside in areas with elevated nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions from vehicles such as diesel trucks, and in close proximity to roads, distribution centers, and ports. Consequently, these communities were more affected by the reduced traffic during the lockdown. The implementation of lockdown policies to curb the spread of the coronavirus not only resulted in a decline in average air pollution levels but also contributed to a reduction in social inequities linked to air pollution. This highlights the potential for policies regulating NOx emissions from internal combustion engines to lower the average concentration of NO2 and simultaneously narrow the disparity of air pollution exposures.

 

The team underscores the importance of learning lessons for future air pollution policies from the experiences in California. While the decrease in social disparities in air pollution exposure during the lockdown might be temporary, persistent reduction in these inequities can be achieved through targeted source controls via air policies. This requires a nationwide analysis of social inequities in exposure to each air pollutant and efforts to tackle the specific sources responsible for these disparities.

 

Professor Hyung Joo Lee stated, “Currently, Korea is primarily focused on lowering the average air pollution levels. He emphasized, “However, the simultaneous reductions of average air pollution levels and social inequities of air pollution are achievable. This can be accomplished by developing policies that incorporate environmental justice principles.”

 

The research was conducted with the support from the BK21 FOUR program of the Ministry of Education and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Journal

Atmospheric Environment

DOI

10.1016/j.atmosenv.2023.120214

Article Title

Simultaneous decreases in NO2 levels and disparities in California during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Publication Date

27-Nov-2023

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Online dashboard to help fight to save children from deadly diarrheal diseases

University of Virginia researchers are developing a flexible online tool for navigating information used in the fight to save children from deadly diarrheal…

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March 25, 2024

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University of Virginia researchers are developing a flexible online tool for navigating information used in the fight to save children from deadly diarrheal diseases by identifying transmission hotspots and accelerating the deployment of treatments and new vaccines.

Credit: Courtesy Colston lab

University of Virginia researchers are developing a flexible online tool for navigating information used in the fight to save children from deadly diarrheal diseases by identifying transmission hotspots and accelerating the deployment of treatments and new vaccines.

Diarrhea not only kills hundreds of thousands of children around the world every year, it contributes to malnutrition that can prevent kids from growing and developing to their full potential both physically and mentally, trapping them in poverty. While significant progress has been made against the disease in recent years, the UVA researchers say that the modern era of “big data” offers a vast untapped opportunity to respond more nimbly and help more children.

Their Planetary Child Health & Enterics Observatory (Plan-EO) is bringing together the expertise of epidemiologists, climatologists, bioinformaticians and hydrologists (water supply experts) to provide an unprecedented, big-picture view of diarrhea around the world. The information and predictions that these experts come up with, will be hosted in a map-based online portal, giving infectious disease experts and local leaders in low- and middle-income countries the information they need to make smart decisions, prioritize resources and move quickly to save lives.

“Diarrhea is very much the great unmentionable public health threat, often ignored or seen as an unavoidable experience of childhood. We want to change that,” said epidemiologist Josh M. Colston, PhD, an assistant professor in the UVA School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, who is leading the initiative. “As patterns of infectious diarrheal diseases shift due to climate change, we want the public health community to be ready and have all the most up-to-date epidemiological estimates and predictions at their fingertips.”

Addressing Childhood Diarrhea

To build out the new online dashboard, Colston is collaborating with experts in UVA’s School of Engineering, School of Data Science and Biocomplexity Institute, as well as colleagues at Johns Hopkins University. They are taking a multidisciplinary approach to a complex problem, seeking to capitalize on a vast array of expertise and build on longstanding relationships with collaborators overseas.

The researchers say that as climate change accelerates, the need to track diarrhea’s spread is only increasing. Flooding, for example, can help spread dozens of bacteria, viruses and parasites that cause diarrhea, worsening the situation in areas already reeling from the effects of the weather. That’s why it’s important for UVA’s project to include hydrologists, climatologists and experts in areas that go beyond infectious disease, the researchers say.

“Awareness is really growing that diseases have multi-faceted risk factors that encompass environmental, social and behavioral elements. We saw that with the pandemic, and we certainly see it with diarrheal diseases. That’s why a collaborative approach is crucial,” said Margaret Kosek, MD, professor of medicine and an infectious-diseases clinician. “We’re fortunate here at UVA to have experts in all these aspects all on the same Grounds, as well as the support to bring them together.”

Vital Data at a Glance

The new online dashboard, now under construction, will be updated continually to provide the latest data on pathogen dynamics, akin to John Hopkins’ invaluable COVID-19 dashboard during that pandemic. Visitors to the Plan-EO site will be directed to a world map-based interface where they can select data on specific diarrhea-causing pathogens, such as E. coli or Shigella bacteria.

The dashboard will allow researchers and leaders to understand the magnitude of the disease burden and predict the potential implications for the children living in endemic areas. It will also allow infectious disease experts and local leaders to coordinate the best strategies for responding to and containing the outbreaks, ultimately saving lives.

“Let’s say you’re an epidemiologist in Africa or South Asia and you’re interested in a specific community in a particular country to carry out a water-improvement project or vaccine trial,” said Venkat Lakshmi, hydrologist and John L Newcomb Professor of Engineering in Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Using the Plan-EO interface, you’ll be able to navigate to that location on a map and get robust predictions of the prevalence of particular pathogens, as well as published information on studies that have been carried out in the surrounding areas. It’ll be a gamechanger.”

The researchers plan to launch the dashboard later this year, with assistance from capstone students at the UVA School of Data Science. 

Findings Published

The researchers have described their ambitious project in the scientific journal PLOS One. The research team consists of Colston, Bin Fang, Eric Houpt, Pavel Chernyavskiy, Samarth Swarup, Lauren M. Gardner, Malena K. Nong, Hamada S. Badr, Benjamin F. Zaitchik, Lakshmi and Kosek. The researchers have no financial interest in the project.

The work is being supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, grants 1K01AI168493-01A1 and 1R03AI151564-01; the National Science Foundation, Expeditions in Computing grant CCF-1918656; NASA’s Group on Earth Observations Work Programme, grant 16-GEO16-0047; and UVA’s Engineering in Medicine program, Department of Internal Medicine and Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health. Additional funding was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, grant OPP1066146.

To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog at http://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu.

Journal

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0297775

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Government

I’ve been studying congressional emails to constituents for 15 years − and found these 4 trends after scanning 185,222 of them

In taxpayer-funded email messages to constituents, Republicans prefer visual elements and strategic timing, and Democrats prefer more text-heavy missi…

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March 25, 2024

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Messages stream out from members of Congress to constituents around the country. traffic_analyzer/DigitalVision Vectors via Getty Images

Republicans in Congress use taxpayer-funded email messages to contact constituents more often, and perhaps more effectively, than their Democratic counterparts.

That’s what I’ve found over 15 years of compiling and analyzing the archive that I call DCinbox, a free and open real-time archive of every official e-newsletter sent by sitting members of Congress to their constituents.

To my knowledge, no other institution – not even the Library of Congress – digitally archives these significant historical government documents whose creation and distribution is funded by the American people. So far, my compilation includes more than 184,000 official e-newsletters, and it grows by about 30 messages each day.

These communications are a way for legislators to present themselves and their arguments directly to constituents, free from the oversight of a newspaper or magazine editor, and in ways that can put additional information just one hyperlink away.

The messages reveal fundamental differences in how each party seeks to connect with and inform their constituents: Republicans prefer visual elements and strategic timing, and Democrats prefer more text-heavy missives.

A public-minded legacy

Direct ways for lawmakers to communicate with the public have a long and democratic history. When the United States was founded, members of Congress were allowed to adopt what had been a common practice in the British Parliament – using taxpayer funds to send informational mailings to constituents. This privilege, called “franking,” allowed a senator or representative to sign his or her name on an envelope’s top right corner in place of a stamp. There were rules, though – the messages had to be informational, not campaign material or endorsements of other politicians.

In recent years, this practice has evolved into sending constituents email messages from House members’ and senators’ official email accounts. The rules still apply: Members of Congress who want to send campaign material or partisan political messages must do so from their campaign accounts or personal accounts, not email addresses ending in “@house.gov” or “@senate.gov.”

In 2009, I began collecting all of the official messages as a part of dissertation work, with the hopes of creating an archive for researchers to use and to answer my own questions about how legislators would “look” ideologically if all we had to go on were the votes they decided to communicate to constituents. At that time, I had to manually enter my email address into the website of every member of Congress. Now it’s easier to keep up, because I just sign up for new members’ lists after every election.

For years, I’ve shared various insights, analyzing word usage, trends in geographical terms and finer bits of information such as how many members of Congress talked about COVID-19 on a given day during the pandemic.

From this work, I have developed a few major insights into how members of Congress use this free perk, offering a better understanding of contemporary political communication tactics. Here are four important points I’ve learned.

1. Republicans use email more – and with more strategic timing

Over the past 15 years, Republicans have won only slightly more seats in the House and Senate than Democrats. But once in office, Republicans use this email perk far more than Democrats.

In every month I’ve been tracking these messages – except briefly in the middle of 2010, when Democrats held 59% of all the seats in Congress, and for nine of the 11 months at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and early 2021 – Republicans have sent many more official e-newsletters to constituents than Democrats have.

Republicans also tend to be more attuned to the leisure reading habits of people. They send a greater number of their emails on weekends when people are likely to have weekend time to take them in. Democrats are more likely to send their messages during the work week.

2. Republicans tend to stay on message

Republicans in Congress are more consistent in using key terms and phrases than Democrats.

For example, back in 2023 Republicans were unhappy with Democratic attempts to boost the IRS’ efforts to reduce tax evasion. A proposal included the projection that the IRS could hire an additional 87,000 workers over the coming decade. Republicans took to e-newsletters to oppose that move and specifically used that number as a rallying cry.

And in 2022 and 2023, as fentanyl deaths gripped news headlines, multiple Republicans told constituents about how the volume of fentanyl in the U.S. could “kill every single American.”

By contrast, Democrats are far less likely to have overlapping term usage or phrasing. That suggests they are not as focused on coordinating constituent communications as Republicans.

A trio of screenshots of e-newsletters from Republican members of the House and Senate.
Republican e-newsletters tend to include eye-catching images up front. Lindsey Cormack, DCinbox, CC BY-ND

3. Republicans also routinely co-opt opponents’ words

GOP legislators tend to adopt phrases that originate with policy oriented journalists, academics and protesters on the left into a convenient, and dismissive, shorthand. Terms like “Green New Deal,” “critical race theory,” “defund the police” and “Bidenomics” are all used commonly in official Republican e-newsletters railing against Democratic policy proposals.

Democrats in Congress didn’t have a similar sort of concerted effort to use a Republican-originated word or phrase until 2022, when they began to use the term “MAGA” as a way to tell constituents about parts of the Republican agenda they disagree with. And even then, only 292 e-newsletters from Democrats have used MAGA, while Republicans have sent 1,531 messages deriding the Green New Deal, 496 about critical race theory, 824 with defund the police and 330 saying Bidenomics.

A trio of screenshots of e-newsletters from Democratic members of the House and Senate.
Democratic e-newsletters tend to be text-heavy. Lindsey Cormack, DCinbox, CC BY-ND

4. Official e-newsletters have changed with the internet

Official e-newsletters have changed over time, as trends of online communication have shifted. But here again, Republicans are ahead of Democrats.

Republicans use more images than Democrats and tend to refer constituents to more media outlets, including those that support right-wing views.

This official e-newsletter archive allows researchers to better understand the evolving nature of online political communications and learn about how the parties use contemporary tools to connect with their constituents. In order for the public and historians to make sense of American politics, I believe it’s important to analyze what legislators say when acting in their official capacity.

Lindsey Cormack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Will The Democrat Abortion Narrative Work In 2024?

Will The Democrat Abortion Narrative Work In 2024?

Authored by Stu Cvrk via The Epoch Times,

‘Tis election season, and the political narratives…

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12 hours ago

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March 24, 2024

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Will The Democrat Abortion Narrative Work In 2024?

Authored by Stu Cvrk via The Epoch Times,

‘Tis election season, and the political narratives are flying everywhere...

Let us examine the 2024 Democrat political narrative surrounding abortion, including efforts to leverage the 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that has roiled American politics for 50-plus years and counting.

Abortion on Demand as a Political Weapon

On March 14, Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota, “marking what her office said was the first time a president or vice president has toured a facility that performs abortions,” as reported by the Associated Press. The article correctly points out that this represents an escalation of the “[Democrats’] defense of reproductive rights” political narrative this year.

Buried in that article was a reference to President Joe Biden. The practicing Catholic is cited as using the phrase “right to choose” as opposed to actually using the word “abortion” when discussing the issue on which the U.S. Constitution is silent.

Regardless of the euphemism used, President Biden, Ms. Harris, and other elected Democrats support unlimited abortions, and they apparently mean to ride that narrative all the way to November, because they apparently still believe that the 2024 election will be decided by “pro-choice” suburban women who helped make the difference in 2020.

The Wrong Horse

There are big problems with that political strategy. First of all, a March 12 Rasmussen poll revealed that “economic issues and immigration matter more to voters than abortion.” This should come as no surprise to anyone, because single-issue pro-abortion voters are generally going to vote Democrat anyway.

The problem with the claim of the nonavailability of abortion providers is that the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reported back in January that the “Number of Abortions in the United States [Is] Likely to Be Higher in 2023 than in 2020.” That means that there were more abortions per annum after the Dobbs decision than when Roe v. Wade was the “law of the land.”

[Note: the abortion numbers from Guttmacher were 930,000 performed in 2020, with 878,000 performed in the first 10 months of 2023, which, when the November and December totals at around 88,000 per month are added, would greatly exceed 2020.]

The Right Horses

Other issues subordinate abortion in Americans’ priorities.

As the Heritage Foundation headlined on March 12, “Biden’s Border Crisis Comes to the Suburbs.” The article noted that “Biden’s immigration-driven crime wave is now arriving in America’s suburbs and small towns with devastating results” while noting that, regardless of the total number, “every single crime committed by an illegal immigrant is totally preventable.”

Illegal immigrant crime victimhood is not an elective action for suburbanites while abortion certainly is —and the polls reflect that uncomfortable fact for Democrats as open borders continues to be an issue of great concern to most Americans.

President Biden suspended the Department of Homeland Security’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in January 2021, which initiated the 64 policies recently detailed by U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson that have created the ongoing open border crisis. President Biden could easily reverse all of those policies with the stroke of a pen, yet he refuses to do so by claiming that Congress needs to pass a border bill before he can act.

Another major political issue that is sidestepped by Democrats is inflation as a direct result of “Bidenomics.” A February article by Reason described Bidenomics as a political messaging strategy that included the following facets: “pandemic aid, industrial policy, handouts for labor unions and public workers ... [that] could be reduced to a single, overriding response: government spending.”

Trillions of dollars of federal government stimulus spending resulted in a year-over-year inflation rate that peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, which was the highest rate experienced in the United States in over 40 years. Inflation remains stubbornly high as the Federal Reserve interest rate manipulations have consistently missed the inflation target of 2 percent because government spending continues unabated.

Zerohedge reported on March 12 that the year-on-year U.S. Consumer Price Index was 3.2 percent, which was more than expected. Zerohedge further noted that “consumer prices have not fallen in a single month” during Biden’s presidency. And Americans feel that pain at the grocery store and elsewhere throughout the Biden economy.

Concluding Thoughts

Political narrative-shifting to abortion and away from the economy, inflation, and the open border would appear to be a losing strategy, but then abortion has been a litmus test for Democrat politicians for years. Most Democrat voters are pro-abortion, and the strategy seems to be more about shoring up the fracturing Democrat base than persuading independents and others to vote Democrat this year.

The problem for Democrats is that they apparently misunderstand the changing voter demographics in 2024. Inflation affects Gen Z and blue-collar workers far more than Democrat consultants and pollsters, who are from a different class than those people and don’t directly experience the adverse effects.

One result, a Harvard CAPS–Harris survey determined that 64 percent of the Gen Z respondents (ages 18-24) approved of Donald Trump’s job as president because the contrast between the Trump and Biden presidencies is clear with respect to the economy and inflation.

Furthermore, The New York Times recently reported the growing shift of Latinos toward Trump. Of even greater concern to Democrats is the rightward shift of black Americans. The Washington Post reported on a February Gallup poll that must have shocked many Democrats. According to the poll, black Americans in 2020 were “66 points more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans,” but that spread had decreased to only 47 points in 2023.

Key voter demographics are shaping up to be much different in 2024 than those in 2016 and 2020. The Democrats appear to be losing their traditional base of minority and younger generation voters because they don’t seem to have a political narrative that resonates with them on the open border or inflation. And that is a real problem, because the abortion narrative is a lower priority this year.

Tyler Durden Sun, 03/24/2024 - 22:10

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