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The path to net zero. Climate Fight podcast part 2 transcript

This is a transcript of part 2 of Climate Fight: the world’s biggest negotiation, a series from The Anthill podcast.

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What needs to happen to get the world to net zero? Coatesy/Shutterstock

This is a transcript of part two of Climate Fight: the world’s biggest negotiation, a series from The Anthill podcast. In this episode, we talk to experts about the grand goal of the negotiations: reaching net zero emissions.

NOTE: Transcripts may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print


Climate fight: the world’s biggest negotiation is a series supported by UK Research and Innovation, the UK’s largest public funder of research and innovation.

Gregg Milbrandt: I just wanted to give you an idea of kind of where it starts – I guess how the coal comes in, where the combustion and the steam is generated.

Jack Marley: In the prairies of Canada about a 15-minute drive from the American border there’s a coal plant called the Boundary Dam, and the plant director, Gregg Milbrandt, is giving a tour.

Gregg: Above us basically we’ve got huge bunkers of coal that store roughly 12 hours of coal that goes through a set of feeders into coal pulverisers.

Jack: This power plant, run by the government-owned power producer SaskPower, provides some of the electricity for the province of Saskatchewan. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is calling for the world to quote “end the deadly addiction to coal”. So why are we starting this episode at a coal plant? It’s because of what’s attached to it.

Gregg: The flue gas is everything that’s left over, which could be CO2, SO2, fly ash particulate. That exhaust basically normally would go up the stack. In this case here we can go either way, and we actually send the flue gas to CCS.

Jack: CCS stands for carbon capture and storage – trapping carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, and pumping it into the ground where it can’t heat up the atmosphere.

In 2014, the Boundary Dam was the first power station in the world to successfully use the technology. And now carbon capture and storage is one of the technologies that a lot of people are counting on for the future.

Jack: I’m Jack Marley. You’re listening to Climate Fight: The World’s Biggest Negotiation. This is episode two: the path to net zero.

Jack: Around the world, leaders are pledging to get their countries to net zero emissions, all with a similar timeline.

Boris Johnson clip: You voted to be carbon neutral by 2050. And we’ll do it!)

Justin Trudeau clip: Joining countries around the world at reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That means not putting any more carbon emissions into the air than we take out. It’s an ambitious target, but it’s doable.

Jack: What will it take to make it “doable” as Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says? Can we simply suck emissions out of the air to reach these targets? And what are the challenges to get there financially, technically, and politically? We’ll be exploring all these issues in this episode with the help of experts.

Jack: But first – what does net zero really mean?

James Dyke: All it really means is that our dangerous interference with the Earth’s climate will stop when we stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Jack: This is James Dyke, senior lecturer in global systems at the University of Exeter.

James: Now we can do that obviously by stopping the burning of fossil fuels – by stopping burning coal, oil, and gas – but there is an acknowledgement that we probably won’t have enough time to do that completely. So if we also remove some of the carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere – so-called carbon dioxide removal or sometimes negative emission technologies – then our overall impacts on the Earth’s climate will balance to zero. So net zero contains two terms: it’s the amount of carbon that we will emit, and it’s the amount of carbon that we will remove.

Jack: So it’s like a balance sheet on a global scale, I suppose?

James: Indeed, and the only thing that really does matter is the global scale. It doesn’t matter if one country gets to net zero by 2030 or 40 or 50, all the climate cares about is whether or not the overall impact on the climate is zero.

So the idea of net zero by 2050 comes from an agreement to try to do whatever we need to do in order to limit warming to no more than 1.5, calculating the carbon budget that would mean, and then getting to that net zero position as soon as we can in order to ensure that we don’t emit too much.

Jack: And so does 2050 makes sense essentially as the target year for reaching that?

James: Much will depend on what you think the budget for, let’s say, 1.5 is, and also the uncertainties surrounding it. So one thing we need to remember is that we might do everything that we possibly can, you know, throw every kind of policy lever, all sorts of industrial actions; we might transform societies and somehow zero out all the use of fossil fuels by 2050 – that still only gives us something like a one in two chance of actually limiting warming to no more than 1.5. It’s basically a a flip of a coin. We might be lucky and warming might come in a little bit lower, but we as equally may be unlucky and warming might go north of 1.5 – maybe even north of two degrees celsius.

Jack: To figure out how we might stay under 1.5 degrees, scientists model pathways. And according to Carbon Brief – a UK-based website reporting on climate change – most of those pathways include the use of negative emissions technologies.

A lot of technologies have been proposed, and some are already being used at a small scale. But none of these technologies have so far been demonstrated on the massive scale the world would need to meet net zero. A lot of these technologies are going to depend on carbon capture and storage, as we heard about earlier.

So let’s head back to the Canadian coal plant. My producer Tiffany Cassidy took a tour while on a trip in her home province.

Tiffany Cassidy: Jack, I was standing outside with Gregg the plant director, and I’m looking up at the coal firing building we just walked through. So basically there are four huge concrete tubes going up into the sky, releasing what I guess is flue gas to me just looks like clouds.

Gregg: So the white stuff you see going up is what fly ash is not collected.

Tiffany: And mixed with that fly ash, the fine powdery byproduct of burning coal, is the invisible carbon dioxide that also gets released. But one of these giant concrete tubes sees less carbon dioxide pass through it each year and out into the atmosphere. Instead it travels to this building next door, the carbon capture and storage unit.

Tiffany: We step into the multi-storey building, and I know this room is important because it’s the only place in the whole building I can’t take a picture. Gregg says the technology is owned by another company and is proprietary.

Gregg: We were first in the world taking this technology and attaching it to the back of a thermal power plant.

Tiffany: To my eyes it really doesn’t look secret, it’s just a lot of colour-coded metal tubes looping around.

Gregg: Essentially the entire facility is pumps, piping heat exchangers.

Tiffany: They use a chemical called amine to capture the carbon dioxide from the flue gas.

Gregg: So, if you think about little worker bees being the amine, they go capture, and then they deliver it and then they go back and capture some more.

Tiffany: We walk past some workers sawing and working on various repairs. It’s fairly easy to hear them because the noisy carbon capture and storage unit is currently down for repairs. I’m visiting in September. It’s been down for about two months and they expect to be up and running in October.

Gregg: The carbon capture facility itself is quite reliable. We’ve seen really good, over the years, progress and reliability for the facility itself. So, yeah, this was a very unexpected type of issue that wouldn’t be part of the norm, put it that way.

Tiffany: They told me that when it’s running, this carbon capture and storage unit has stopped an average of 68% of the carbon dioxide from being released into the air. That’s just over two thirds, and Gregg says this unit has improved since opening in 2014.

Gregg: You know, anytime you’re venturing down a new road or first in the world, there’s obviously some challenges that come with it. I think over the years, what you’ve seen is a better understanding of the chemical process and the challenges that come with the chemistry side of things. We’ve done some improvements along the way that really focus on reliability; some added redundancy into the system so that if you have a failure or a maintenance item on one component, you don’t have to bring the entire facility down.

Tiffany: We move on to the place where we finally get pure carbon dioxide.

Gregg: What you see to the left and to the right, well to the left is our CO2 stripper. This is really just the base of it. It extends through the roof of the facility. And this is the, after the CO2 has been absorbed into that CO2 amine, it’s sent to here to be basically released. So we do that via heat. And then the released CO2 is then pushed over to the compression building.

Tiffany: Finally we step outside and see the final result from SaskPower’s end. The place where this compressed carbon dioxide leaves the plant.

It’s funny because in some ways I feel like this is the most important part of it. And it’s literally just a slightly bigger than me tube that goes out of the building and into the ground.

Gregg: Yes, it’s – I would estimate – about a 10-inch pipe that carries our product after everything we just looked at, this is kind of what it comes down to on the CO2 end.

Tiffany: From here there are two places the carbon dioxide will end up. But Jack, we can talk more about that when we talk about finance models.

Jack: Right, what I want to focus on now is the technologies that are supposed to get us to net zero. Carbon capture and storage will play a big role with a lot of them, and I’m checking in with someone who’s been following the developments.

Mercedes Maroto-Valer: I’m Mercedes Maroto Valer. I’m a UKRI industrial decarbonisation champion, so based at Heriot-Watt University and director of the UK Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre.

We are really looking at the wide range of options and really solutions to help the UK reach net zero. It’s not going to be just one technology that is going to help us to reach the net zero. It’s going to be really a portfolio of different technologies that are going to be ready at different times.

Jack: So, let’s go through some of the technologies people are working on. Mercedes likes to divide technologies between those that help us reduce the emissions that go into the air – like carbon capture and storage attached to fossil fuel plants or finding an alternative source of fuel – and those that will let us remove carbon dioxide directly from the air. Sticking to reducing emissions, let’s look at the possibility of hydrogen.

Hydrogen is a fuel that doesn’t release carbon dioxide when burned. The tricky part is making it. Unfortunately, currently 96% of hydrogen produced worldwide is made using fossil fuels according to the International Energy Agency.


Read more: Blue hydrogen – what is it, and should it replace natural gas?


People name hydrogen different colours depending on how it’s made. Green hydrogen is made with wind turbines, solar panels, anything that doesn’t emit carbon. This process is expected to stay very expensive for at least the next decade.

The idea behind blue hydrogen is that it would be made with natural gas - that'sthat’s the same fossil fuel that probably powers your boiler. But the emissions from this process would be caught using carbon capture and storage.
Then the hydrogen itself doesn’t emit carbon dioxide when it’s used and burned.

Not everyone believes that we’ll be able to deploy these technologies at a large scale. But Mercedes does. Even if some, such as mass-produced hydrogen are a little further away than others.

Mercedes: In any case, it’s critical that we start deploying infrastructure now in the 2020s, because the longer that we take to start deploying these new technologies, the longer it’s going to take us to reach net zero.

Jack: Why do we need decarbonisation technology like carbon capture and storage? Why can’t we just stop using fossil fuels?

Mercedes: There are some processes that, throughout the process itself, they actually produce carbon dioxide. So even if all the energy demand for those processes you were able to provide through renewables, and I think a good example for instance is if you think about cement production. The issue with cement is that yes, you can provide all renewable power to run the process, but the process itself emits CO2. And therefore, there are processes like that where carbon capture and storage is really critical for them to be able to reach net zero.

Jack: So clearly different sectors of the economy will take different lengths of time to decarbonise. Could you tell us which sectors are likely to be the slowest?

Mercedes: I think I like to put the other question the other way around and which sectors are going to be the fastest ones. Electricity production or power generation, and that’s mainly through renewables and we’ve done a fantastic job in that space.

Next steps, or next sectors, is probably going to be some of our transport sectors, are going to be more difficult to decarbonise, particularly the aviation sector. When we look at other sectors within transport, let’s say road transport or even trains, we have options that may include electrification. We have options like batteries. We don’t have many of those options when we go into aviation, we cannot really electrify it, we don’t really have batteries at the level that we need, particularly when we are looking at long-haul flights. So then when we start looking in transport, is that, in aviation specifically, we need to look at how we can help them to produce aviation fuels that are sustainable and they can continue using to a big extent that current engines and fleets but the fuels that they use, they are significantly different because their CO2 emissions have been reduced or they have actually been, in some cases, they have brought down to zero in terms of the CO2 emissions of those fuels.


COP26: the world's biggest climate talks

This story is part of The Conversation’s coverage on COP26, the Glasgow climate conference, by experts from around the world.
Amid a rising tide of climate news and stories, The Conversation is here to clear the air and make sure you get information you can trust. More.


Jack: This kind of aviation power is still a ways away. So if people are going to continue to fly for the time being, planes are going to have to continue emitting carbon dioxide.

And that’s where some of the other technologies come into play. The ones that can remove carbon dioxide directly from the air: negative emissions technologies. Back to James Dyke.

James: These sort of technologies and they might range from very low-tech from, for example, planting trees – everybody likes trees, we need more trees, so let’s just plant a bunch of trees – all the way to technologically advanced direct air capture schemes or DAC schemes which look like sort of vast banks of air conditioning systems that would strip the carbon out of the air.

Now the trouble with all these schemes is that when you do the maths when you when you look at how much they will cost not just economically but in terms of energetics, none of them really add up. And the suspicion is that they’ve been essentially invented by economic policy experts, by this kind of climate policy system, to justify continual failure to stop burning fossil fuels.

Jack: James is much less optimistic about the technology needed to get to net zero than Mercedes, particularly the politics of it.

James: The problem has been is that how it’s translated into policies and essentially by allowing, predominantly richer nations, those industrialised nations, allowing them a way of saying that they can withdraw carbon from the atmosphere at some point in the future means they’ve got a way out of making the required reductions to fossil fuel use now. It’s essentially licensed a kind of reckless burn now, pay later mentality in which they are really carrying on with business as usual, continuing to burn fossil fuels, whilst at the same time saying that they are essentially honouring the Paris Agreement.

Jack: One negative emissions technology is called Beccs. That stands for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. The idea is that we would grow plants such as trees on a large scale. These would suck up carbon dioxide and be net negative. Then we could burn the plants to produce electricity, a process that emits carbon dioxide. But as we do it, again, we use carbon capture and storage to trap the carbon dioxide underground, so the process is back to being net negative.

James: So it sounds like a win-win. We’re able to generate not just low-carbon electricity but negative carbon electricity, and there was tremendous excitement and interest around Beccs as a direct outcome of the Paris Agreement.

James: It’s become a bit fashionable to put the boot into Beccs because the more that we’ve looked at it the more that you realise this has got real problems. I suppose they can be summarised or captured easily when you just think about the scale of this industrial tree planting operation. There’s still only very small-scale pilot projects, there might be a whole series of engineering and physical geoscience reasons why that’s really not going to scale up but let’s just assume that’s fine, right. Let’s just look at the impacts in terms of land use. Now obviously much will depend on how much Beccs we want to do.


Read more: Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap


So one way to look at this is the longer that we leave the actual mitigation, the longer we continue to burn coal, oil and gas that means the more carbon we’re going to have to remove in the future. And so all things being equal that’s the more Beccs we’re going to need.

Even now, even if we undertook quite rapid and potentially even radical decarbonisation, we would still need a land surface area which might approximate something like twice the size of India, which will be nothing but trees. And these wouldn’t be a nice little indigenous ecosystems, these would be fast growing monocultures planted in industrial scale operations. They devastate biodiversity. They could have devastating impacts on food security because they would exclude people from agricultural lands. There’s problems with water security.

So I think what we can see is happening over the last, let’s say, five years, is that an awful lot of that enthusiasm about Beccs has sort of evaporated as you begin to work through the consequences, you know, what would it actually take in order to run a system that scale and then what would the impact be? So I think now it’s fair to say that the focus has kind of moved away from Beccs and seems to be turning to direct air capture.

Jack: Direct air capture involves huge moving fans and a chemical process that removes CO2 from the air. Some exist now. The world’s largest project is called the Orca plant and started running in Iceland in September 2021. Bloomberg reported it cost between US$10 and US$15 million to build. On the company Climework’s website people can buy subscriptions where it says a monthly fee enables a certain amount of carbon dioxide removal each year. Another market for direct air capture is selling the captured CO2 to fizzy drink manufacturers. With that business model carbon is burped out once people drink it.

But that brings us to one of the most important points when discussing net zero and possible technologies – how will we pay for all of this?

James: One thing that seems to be quite clear is that direct air capture is not going to be cheap. And I don’t mean just in terms of the economic costs. I mean today if you were to run these sort of early generation direct air capture schemes it would cost maybe anywhere between sort of US$250-600 to capture something like a ton of carbon dioxide.

Now the argument is that as the technology matures and as it increases in scale it’s going to become cheaper and would rival and maybe even undercut other carbon dioxide removal technologies. But even then, even if you have the most optimistic assessments for how the efficiencies could be improved, as the thing scales up ignoring the economic costs it’s going to require a tremendous amount of electricity.

Now, the problem there is we need as much renewable energy generation capacity as we possibly can in order to zero out fossil fuels. We’ve got to replace coal, oil and gas as quickly as we can. So we’ve got to throw everything we can in terms of renewable capacity – wind, wave, solar, you know, whether you think nuclear should be in the mix – and we’ve got to do that as quickly as possible.

The problem with direct air capture and some other, let’s say, more high-tech carbon removal technologies, is that they themselves are going to generate a significant drag on that renewable deployment because we’re gonna have to use more and more solar and wind power to drive the carbon-removal systems. And so when you do some kind back of the envelope calculations you could end up in a situation where by the middle of this century, over a quarter of the total amount of electricity that humanity is generating is being used to run the direct air capture machines which are taking out the carbon that we put into the air now, essentially.

So the increasing reliance on direct air capture is sort of signing ourselves up – and actually it’s not ourselves, it’s our kids and future generations – to potentially very, very large energetic debt that they will need to repay sometime from the middle of this century. And then for the rest of the century because these systems will have to run for decades in order for us to be able to capture sufficient amounts of carbon.

Jack: Other technologies also come with costs. When Tiffany was in Canada she asked about the finance models.

Tiffany: So the carbon capture and storage unit I visited has two places they send the carbon dioxide. One is deep under ground forever, but that’s only when their main destination isn’t accepting CO2. And that main destination is an oil field. It’s for a process called enhanced oil recovery that is a major revenue source for lots of carbon capture and storage units around the world. The CO2 loosens it up, and lets the oil flow out more freely. And oil companies pay carbon capture and storage facilities for this CO2.

Jack: So essentially, one of the main business models of carbon capture relies on making it easier to extract a different fossil fuel.

Tiffany: Exactly, and there aren’t other obvious ways to make money on this technology at the moment. To get going in the first place the Boundary Dam got a big investment from the government of Canada – because this technology’s not cheap, and that’s what the director of generation asset management at SaskPower, Doug Opseth, will tell you.

Doug Opseth: All those costs have been spent. So that’s a scenario where we could keep running that facility. Certainly when you start looking at, would we do more of these? I think that you do have to look at that question about the cost because it is an expensive technology. And it does come with its technological challenges.

Tiffany: Note that this is the only carbon and capture storage unit attached to a coal plant that’s currently running anywhere in the world. There was another one in Texas and its business model was also based on enhanced oil recovery. But when the price of oil dropped at the start of the pandemic, they paused the carbon capture.

Jack: To get to net zero where there’s a balance between the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere and the amount being captured, we’re going to need to store it somewhere. So where?

Myles Allen: You can also, of course, manage natural systems to encourage them to take up carbon naturally themselves.

I’m Myles Allen, professor of geosystems science at the University of Oxford, I’m director of the Oxford Net Zero Initiative. My background is in atmospheric physics and in the late two thousands, I was involved in several of the papers that arrived at the conclusion that we needed to get to net zero CO2 emissions to stop global warming.

Jack: What occupies a lot of his thoughts now is how we’ll store the CO2 we remove. Many people talk about natural climate solutions – what ecosystems like forests can do to mop up the carbon humans emit – this is part of the biosphere, and it all traps carbon. But it doesn’t have unlimited capacity to store it.

Myles: The difficulty with that is if you’ve encouraged a natural system to take up carbon, you also have to encourage that natural system to store it, and it needs to store that carbon on a timescale commensurate with the impact of burning fossil fuels, which means, unfortunately, thousands of years.

Now, it’s very difficult to guarantee that a forest we grow or a mangrove swamp we restore or whatever is guaranteed to stay there for thousands of years, particularly in a warming world where the conditions our ecosystems exist in are changing.

Jack: Think about all the possible sinks of the biosphere, like a forest. As the world warms, more fires are ripping through forests, turning them into the the carbon dioxide-emitting sources Myles describes.

Myles: So that’s the difficulty with relying on nature-based solutions entirely, which many people would love to do, we just don’t know what the capacity will be of the biosphere to mop up carbon through to the second half of this century. So that’s where we need to be investing in the engineered solutions as well as investing in nature today.

Jack: From a strictly practical perspective, Myles says it’s likely we have the space we need to pump CO2 underground from engineeered capture.

Myles: We don’t know the capacity of the lithosphere of the geosphere, if you like, of rocks to store CO2, but most estimates are that it substantially exceeds the amount we will need to store. So, there is a lot of capacity down there, but it’s a little bit like the peak oil problem: you never quite know when you’re going to run out of oil because you don’t know what people are prepared to pay for it. And we won’t know what the capacity is of the Earth’s crust to store CO2 until we know what people are prepared to pay to get rid of CO2 back into it. If you’re willing to pay enough, then there’s a lot of capacity down there.

Jack: Myles says the real trick with engineered storage is getting people on board.

Myles: If you capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it’s obvious immediately whether you’ve succeeded because you’ve got a nice, pure CO2 stream coming out at the end of your capture plant. If you’re trying to stall carbon dioxide permanently, it won’t be obvious for decades whether you’ve succeeded because you’ll have injected that carbon dioxide down into some rocks, you’ll be needing to monitor it. You’ll need to check for the impact on seismicity. You’ll be needing to check for the possibility of any leaks. It’ll take decades to convince everybody that yes, it has been stored away safely and forever. So, that’s where we need to be focusing our attentions at the moment.

Jack: How useful a tool do you think net zero is for politicians and does it in some ways, allow them off the hook in some regards?

Myles: Crucial thing that politicians don’t seem to grasp is that if you’re going to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming, you’ve really only got two options. One is to ban them. To instigate a global ban on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. And, some environmentalists, no doubt would say that’s great. That’s exactly what we want to happen. I’m not sure many politicians have really got their minds around what that would entail and are really signed up to the idea of a global ban on the use of fossil fuels.

So the only other alternative is to require that anyone still using fossil fuels disposes safely and permanently of the carbon dioxide generated by the fossil fuels they use. There’s really no third alternative. So, that’s where we need our politicians to be focused.

Jack: So this brings us to the final point we need to settle surrounding net zero. What is the political will to reach it? How do politicians use the term? And will we be able to use the goal of net zero to make real change?

In early September, two months before the COP26 summit in Glasgow, the British prime minister, Boris Johnson addressed the United Nations.

Boris Johnson clip: And when Kermit the frog sang ‘it’s not easy being green’. You remember that one? I want you to know that he was wrong. He was wrong. It is easy. It’s not only easy it’s lucrative, and it’s right to be green. We have the technology.

Jack: We’ve heard there are challenges. Challenges of paying for it, challenges of developing the technology for sectors like aviation. So what do we need to do?

Myles: The whole COP26 process is very focused on what I see as yesterday’s policies. This is because we’re talking about policies like emission trading systems or carbon taxes, for example, that are very effective, economically ideal, if you like, to reduce emissions – to start reducing emissions – but are almost guaranteed to fail if you were actually to rely on them, to get emissions all the way down to zero.

Why do I say they’re almost guaranteed to fail? Well, because the utility of fossil carbon, the amount of benefit we get from it goes up beyond exponentially, as we squeeze out all the unproductive uses and are left with just the most vital uses of fossil carbon left. And those are the uses of fossil carbon which people are prepared to pay in effect any price to keep doing what they want to do. And it’s those uses of fossil carbon that are never going to get squeezed out by an emission trading system or a carbon tax or any form of carbon pricing. For those, we’ve got no alternative, but to insist that anyone who continues to use fossil carbon or to sell fossil carbon to somebody who wants to use it in that way has to dispose of the carbon dioxide they generate.

To look at another situation, we didn’t save the ozone layer by putting a tax on deodorant, or an emissions trading scheme to limit the amount of aerosol cans we used. No, we went upstream. We went to the manufacturers of CFCs and just said, no, you can’t produce these things that are going to destroy the ozone layer. Instead, you’ve got to do something else and we’ve got to do the same thing for fossil fuel producers.

Jack: Regulations change things. For example, in the UK, people won’t be allowed to sell fully petrol or diesel cars from 2030. And getting developed countries to phase out coal by 2030 – and developing countries by 2040 – is a priority for Boris Johnson during COP26.

A lot of people believe there should be different targets for rich and poor countries when it comes to net zero. James Dyke, who we heard from earlier, says richer countries need to get to net zero first.

James: Now when you look at what we would need to do to get to net zero by 2050 it’s not credible, and it’s certainly not fair to insist that a developing nation that might have some existing resources of fossil fuels, basically zeros all those out in as little as 20 or 30 years. These nations will need longer to decarbonise, but that means that the richer nations need to pull their weight.

So we certainly have the existing technology and we’ve certainly got the existing wealth in order to power through that sustainable transformation. So if you take a net zero by 2050 goal, really if you’re going to honour the Paris Agreement that means the richer nations such as the United Kingdom should really be getting to net zero before 2050, and some people argue that we should be doing it as early as, let’s say, 2030.

Jack: So what will we see happen at COP26?

James: This is being billed as the make or break COP, in which the Paris Agreement in 2015 was the what – so what are we going to do – and the answer to that was we’re going to limit warming to no more than 1.5. COP26 in Glasgow this year is going to be how: how on earth are we going to do that? The only way we’re going to do that is by stopping burning fossil fuels.

Jack: As we make these shifts from fossil fuels, people will feel the impacts differently. I’m specifically talking about the people who rely on the fossil fuel industry for a job. When we make policies for a greener future, it’s important to make them so we don’t leave anyone behind.

And that’s what we’ll explore in the next episode, when I take a trip to north-west England.

Rebbca Willis: You can’t do climate policy without people noticing. You know, it’s a change to how we travel about, how we live in our homes, and obviously to what jobs we do.

Jack: Thanks to everybody who spoke to us for this episode. The Anthill is produced by The Conversation in London. You can get in touch with us on on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or email us on podcast@theconversation.com. And you can also sign up for our free daily email by clicking the link in the show notes.

If you’re enjoying the series, please follow the show, and leave a rating or review wherever podcast apps allow you to. Please tell your friends and family about the show too.

Climate fight: the world’s biggest negotiation is produced for The Conversation by Tiffany Cassidy. Sound design is by Eloise Stevens and the series theme tune is by Neeta Sarl. Our editor is Gemma Ware and production help comes from Holly Stevens. Thanks also go to Will de Freitas, Stephen Harris, Jo Adetunji, Chris Waiting, Katie Francis, Khalil Cassimally, Alice Mason and Zoe Jazz at The Conversation. To James Harper and his team at UKRI. And to Imriel Morgan and Sharai White for helping us to promote the series. I’m Jack Marley. Thanks for listening.


UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)

Climate fight: the world’s biggest negotiation is a podcast series supported by UK Research and Innovation, the UK’s largest public funder of research and innovation.


The Conversation has received support from UK Research and Innovation to make the Climate Fight podcast series. Myles Allen has received funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council and the European Commission. Mercedes Maroto-Valer receives funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC-UKRI), European Research Council and EU-H2020.

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now…

Published

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.

The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.

Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.

In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.

The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.

When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.

If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.

We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.

My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.

It goes like this:

1) lockdown,

2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,

3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,

5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,

6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,

7) businesses flee the city

8) cities fall into decay, and that results in

9) more surveillance and police state.

The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.

It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.

But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.

It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.

Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.

As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.

The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.

Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.

By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.

The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.

Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.

The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.

The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.

But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.

What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.

As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.

The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.

Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 16:20

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Spread & Containment

Another beloved brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The beer industry has been devastated by covid, changing tastes, and maybe fallout from the Bud Light scandal.

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Before the covid pandemic, craft beer was having a moment. Most cities had multiple breweries and taprooms with some having so many that people put together the brewery version of a pub crawl.

It was a period where beer snobbery ruled the day and it was not uncommon to hear bar patrons discuss the makeup of the beer the beer they were drinking. This boom period always seemed destined for failure, or at least a retraction as many markets seemed to have more craft breweries than they could support.

Related: Fast-food chain closes more stores after Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The pandemic, however, hastened that downfall. Many of these local and regional craft breweries counted on in-person sales to drive their business. 

And while many had local and regional distribution, selling through a third party comes with much lower margins. Direct sales drove their business and the pandemic forced many breweries to shut down their taprooms during the period where social distancing rules were in effect.

During those months the breweries still had rent and employees to pay while little money was coming in. That led to a number of popular beermakers including San Francisco's nationally-known Anchor Brewing as well as many regional favorites including Chicago’s Metropolitan Brewing, New Jersey’s Flying Fish, Denver’s Joyride Brewing, Tampa’s Zydeco Brew Werks, and Cleveland’s Terrestrial Brewing filing bankruptcy.

Some of these brands hope to survive, but others, including Anchor Brewing, fell into Chapter 7 liquidation. Now, another domino has fallen as a popular regional brewery has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Overall beer sales have fallen.

Image source: Shutterstock

Covid is not the only reason for brewery bankruptcies

While covid deserves some of the blame for brewery failures, it's not the only reason why so many have filed for bankruptcy protection. Overall beer sales have fallen driven by younger people embracing non-alcoholic cocktails, and the rise in popularity of non-beer alcoholic offerings,

Beer sales have fallen to their lowest levels since 1999 and some industry analysts

"Sales declined by more than 5% in the first nine months of the year, dragged down not only by the backlash and boycotts against Anheuser-Busch-owned Bud Light but the changing habits of younger drinkers," according to data from Beer Marketer’s Insights published by the New York Post.

Bud Light parent Anheuser Busch InBev (BUD) faced massive boycotts after it partnered with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. It was a very small partnership but it led to a right-wing backlash spurred on by Kid Rock, who posted a video on social media where he chastised the company before shooting up cases of Bud Light with an automatic weapon.

Another brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Gizmo Brew Works, which does business under the name Roth Brewing Company LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 8. In its filing, the company checked the box that indicates that its debts are less than $7.5 million and it chooses to proceed under Subchapter V of Chapter 11. 

"Both small business and subchapter V cases are treated differently than a traditional chapter 11 case primarily due to accelerated deadlines and the speed with which the plan is confirmed," USCourts.gov explained. 

Roth Brewing/Gizmo Brew Works shared that it has 50-99 creditors and assets $100,000 and $500,000. The filing noted that the company does expect to have funds available for unsecured creditors. 

The popular brewery operates three taprooms and sells its beer to go at those locations.

"Join us at Gizmo Brew Works Craft Brewery and Taprooms located in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Find us for entertainment, live music, food trucks, beer specials, and most importantly, great-tasting craft beer by Gizmo Brew Works," the company shared on its website.

The company estimates that it has between $1 and $10 million in liabilities (a broad range as the bankruptcy form does not provide a space to be more specific).

Gizmo Brew Works/Roth Brewing did not share a reorganization or funding plan in its bankruptcy filing. An email request for comment sent through the company's contact page was not immediately returned.

 

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Government

Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students

An estimated 95% of US cities provide economic development tax incentives to woo corporate investors, taking billions away from schools.

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Exxon Mobil Corp.'s campus in East Baton Rouge Parish, left, received millions in tax abatements to the detriment of local schools, right. Barry Lewis/Getty Images, Tjean314/Wikimedia

Built in 1910, James Elementary is a three-story brick school in Kansas City, Missouri’s historic Northeast neighborhood, with a bright blue front door framed by a sand-colored stone arch adorned with a gargoyle. As bustling students and teachers negotiate a maze of gray stairs with worn wooden handrails, Marjorie Mayes, the school’s principal, escorts a visitor across uneven blue tile floors on the ground floor to a classroom with exposed brick walls and pipes. Bubbling paint mars some walls, evidence of the water leaks spreading inside the aging building.

“It’s living history,” said Mayes during a mid-September tour of the building. “Not the kind of living history we want.”

The district would like to tackle the US$400 million in deferred maintenance needed to create a 21st century learning environment at its 35 schools – including James Elementary – but it can’t. It doesn’t have the money.

Property tax redirect

The lack of funds is a direct result of the property tax breaks that Kansas City lavishes on companies and developers that do business there. The program is supposed to bring in new jobs and business but instead has ended up draining civic coffers and starving schools. Between 2017 and 2023, the Kansas City school district lost $237.3 million through tax abatements.

Kansas City is hardly an anomaly. An estimated 95% of U.S. cities provide economic development tax incentives to woo corporate investors. The upshot is that billions have been diverted from large urban school districts and from a growing number of small suburban and rural districts. The impact is seen in districts as diverse as Chicago and Cleveland, Hillsboro, Oregon, and Storey County, Nevada.

The result? A 2021 review of 2,498 financial statements from school districts across 27 states revealed that, in 2019 alone, at least $2.4 billion was diverted to fund tax incentives. Yet that substantial figure still downplays the magnitude of the problem, because three-quarters of the 10,370 districts analyzed did not provide any information on tax abatement agreements.

Tax abatement programs have long been controversial, pitting states and communities against one another in beggar-thy-neighbor contests. Their economic value is also, at best, unclear: Studies show most companies would have made the same location decision without taxpayer subsidies. Meanwhile, schools make up the largest cost item in these communities, meaning they suffer most when companies are granted breaks in property taxes.

A three-month investigation by The Conversation and three scholars with expertise in economic development, tax laws and education policy shows that the cash drain from these programs is not equally shared by schools in the same communities. At the local level, tax abatements and exemptions often come at the cost of critical funding for school districts that disproportionately serve students from low-income households and who are racial minorities.

In Missouri, for example, in 2022 nearly $1,700 per student was redirected from Kansas City public and charter schools, while between $500 and $900 was redirected from wealthier, whiter Northland schools on the north side of the river in Kansas City and in the suburbs beyond. Other studies have found similar demographic trends elsewhere, including New York state, South Carolina and Columbus, Ohio.

The funding gaps produced by abated money often force schools to delay needed maintenance, increase class sizes, lay off teachers and support staff and even close outright. Schools also struggle to update or replace outdated technology, books and other educational resources. And, amid a nationwide teacher shortage, schools under financial pressures sometimes turn to inexperienced teachers who are not fully certified or rely too heavily on recruits from overseas who have been given special visa status.

Lost funding also prevents teachers and staff, who often feed, clothe and otherwise go above and beyond to help students in need, from earning a living wage. All told, tax abatements can end up harming a community’s value, with constant funding shortfalls creating a cycle of decline.

Incentives, payoffs and guarantees

Perversely, some of the largest beneficiaries of tax abatements are the politicians who publicly boast of handing out the breaks despite the harm to poorer communities. Incumbent governors have used the incentives as a means of taking credit for job creation, even when the jobs were coming anyway.

“We know that subsidies don’t work,” said Elizabeth Marcello, a doctoral lecturer at Hunter College who studies governmental planning and policy and the interactions between state and local governments. “But they are good political stories, and I think that’s why politicians love them so much.”

Academic research shows that economic development incentives are ineffective most of the time – and harm school systems.

While some voters may celebrate abatements, parents can recognize the disparities between school districts that are created by the tax breaks. Fairleigh Jackson pointed out that her daughter’s East Baton Rouge third grade class lacks access to playground equipment.

The class is attending school in a temporary building while their elementary school undergoes a two-year renovation.

The temporary site has some grass and a cement slab where kids can play, but no playground equipment, Jackson said. And parents needed to set up an Amazon wish list to purchase basic equipment such as balls, jump ropes and chalk for students to use. The district told parents there would be no playground equipment due to a lack of funds, then promised to install equipment, Jackson said, but months later, there is none.

Cement surface surrounded by a fence with grass beyond. There's no playground equipment..
The temporary site where Fairleigh Jackson’s daughter goes to school in East Baton Rouge Parish lacks playground equipment. Fairleigh Jackson, CC BY-ND

Jackson said it’s hard to complain when other schools in the district don’t even have needed security measures in place. “When I think about playground equipment, I think that’s a necessary piece of child development,” Jackson said. “Do we even advocate for something that should be a daily part of our kids’ experience when kids’ safety isn’t being funded?”

Meanwhile, the challenges facing administrators 500-odd miles away at Atlanta Public Schools are nothing if not formidable: The district is dealing with chronic absenteeism among half of its Black students, many students are experiencing homelessness, and it’s facing a teacher shortage.

At the same time, Atlanta is showering corporations with tax breaks. The city has two bodies that dole them out: the Development Authority of Fulton County, or DAFC, and Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development agency. The deals handed out by the two agencies have drained $103.8 million from schools from fiscal 2017 to 2022, according to Atlanta school system financial statements.

What exactly Atlanta and other cities and states are accomplishing with tax abatement programs is hard to discern. Fewer than a quarter of companies that receive breaks in the U.S. needed an incentive to invest, according to a 2018 study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit research organization.

This means that at least 75% of companies received tax abatements when they’re not needed – with communities paying a heavy price for economic development that sometimes provides little benefit.

In Kansas City, for example, there’s no guarantee that the businesses that do set up shop after receiving a tax abatement will remain there long term. That’s significant considering the historic border war between the Missouri and Kansas sides of Kansas City – a competition to be the most generous to the businesses, said Jason Roberts, president of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers and School-Related Personnel. Kansas City, Missouri, has a 1% income tax on people who work in the city, so it competes for as many workers as possible to secure that earnings tax, Roberts said.

Under city and state tax abatement programs, companies that used to be in Kansas City have since relocated. The AMC Theaters headquarters, for example, moved from the city’s downtown to Leawood, Kansas, about a decade ago, garnering some $40 million in Promoting Employment Across Kansas tax incentives.

Roberts said that when one side’s financial largesse runs out, companies often move across the state line – until both states decided in 2019 that enough was enough and declared a cease-fire.

But tax breaks for other businesses continue. “Our mission is to grow the economy of Kansas City, and application of tools such as tax exemptions are vital to achieving that mission, said Jon Stephens, president and CEO of Port KC, the Kansas City Port Authority. The incentives speed development, and providing them "has resulted in growth choosing KC versus other markets,” he added.

In Atlanta, those tax breaks are not going to projects in neighborhoods that need help attracting development. They have largely been handed out to projects that are in high demand areas of the city, said Julian Bene, who served on Invest Atlanta’s board from 2010 to 2018. In 2019, for instance, the Fulton County development authority approved a 10-year, $16 million tax abatement for a 410-foot-tall, 27,000-square-foot tower in Atlanta’s vibrant Midtown business district. The project included hotel space, retail space and office space that is now occupied by Google and Invesco.

In 2021, a developer in Atlanta pulled its request for an $8 million tax break to expand its new massive, mixed-use Ponce City Market development in the trendy Beltline neighborhood with an office tower and apartment building. Because of community pushback, the developer knew it likely did not have enough votes from the commission for approval, Bene said. After a second try for $5 million in lower taxes was also rejected, the developer went ahead and built the project anyway.

Invest Atlanta has also turned down projects in the past, Bene said. Oftentimes, after getting rejected, the developer goes back to the landowner and asks for a better price to buy the property to make their numbers work, because it was overvalued at the start.

Trouble in Philadelphia

On Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023, an environmental team was preparing Southwark School in Philadelphia for the winter cold. While checking an attic fan, members of the team saw loose dust on top of flooring that contained asbestos. The dust that certainly was blowing into the floors below could contain the cancer-causing agent. Within a day, Southwark was closed – the seventh Philadelphia school temporarily shuttered since the previous academic year because of possible asbestos contamination.

A 2019 inspection of the John L Kinsey school in Philadelphia found asbestos in plaster walls, floor tiles, radiator insulation and electrical panels. Asbestos is a major problem for Philadelphia’s public schools. The district needs $430 million to clean up the asbestos, lead, and other environmental hazards that place the health of students, teachers and staff at risk. And that is on top of an additional $2.4 billion to fix failing and damaged buildings.

Yet the money is not available. Matthew Stem, a former district official, testified in a 2023 lawsuit about financing of Pennsylvania schools that the environmental health risks cannot be addressed until an emergency like at Southwark because “existing funding sources are not sufficient to remediate those types of issues.”

Meanwhile, the city keeps doling out abatements, draining money that could have gone toward making Philadelphia schools safer. In the fiscal year ending June 2022, such tax breaks cost the school district $118 million – more than 25% of the total amount needed to remove the asbestos and other health dangers. These abatements take 31 years to break even, according to the city’s own scenario impact analyses.

Huge subsets of the community – primarily Black, Brown, poor or a combination – are being “drastically impacted” by the exemptions and funding shortfalls for the school district, said Kendra Brooks, a Philadelphia City Council member. Schools and students are affected by mold, asbestos and lead, and crumbling infrastructure, as well as teacher and staffing shortages – including support staff, social workers and psychologists.

More than half the district’s schools that lacked adequate air conditioning – 87 schools – had to go to half days during the first week of the 2023 school year because of extreme heat. Poor heating systems also leave the schools cold in the winter. And some schools are overcrowded, resulting in large class sizes, she said.

Front of a four-story brick school building with tall windows, some with air-conditioners
Horace Furness High School in Philadelphia, where hot summers have temporarily closed schools that lack air conditioning. Nick-philly/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Teachers and researchers agree that a lack of adequate funding undermines educational opportunities and outcomes. That’s especially true for children living in poverty. A 2016 study found that a 10% increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public schooling results in nearly one-third of a year of more education, 7.7% higher wages and a 3.2% reduction in annual incidence of adult poverty. The study estimated that a 21.7% increase could eliminate the high school graduation gap faced by children from low-income families.

More money for schools leads to more education resources for students and their teachers. The same researchers found that spending increases were associated with reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries and longer school years. Other studies yielded similar results: School funding matters, especially for children already suffering the harms of poverty.

While tax abatements themselves are generally linked to rising property values, the benefits are not evenly distributed. In fact, any expansion of the tax base due to new property construction tends to be outside of the county granting the tax abatement. For families in school districts with the lost tax revenues, their neighbors’ good fortune likely comes as little solace. Meanwhile, a poorly funded education system is less likely to yield a skilled and competitive workforce, creating longer-term economic costs that make the region less attractive for businesses and residents.

“There’s a head-on collision here between private gain and the future quality of America’s workforce,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director at Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that’s critical of tax abatement and tracks the use of economic development subsidies.

Three-story school building with police officers out front and traffic lights in the foreground
Roxborough High School in Philadelphia. AP Photo/Matt Rourke

As funding dwindles and educational quality declines, additional families with means often opt for alternative educational avenues such as private schooling, home-schooling or moving to a different school district, further weakening the public school system.

Throughout the U.S., parents with the power to do so demand special arrangements, such as selective schools or high-track enclaves that hire experienced, fully prepared teachers. If demands aren’t met, they leave the district’s public schools for private schools or for the suburbs. Some parents even organize to splinter their more advantaged, and generally whiter, neighborhoods away from the larger urban school districts.

Those parental demands – known among scholars as “opportunity hoarding” – may seem unreasonable from the outside, but scarcity breeds very real fears about educational harms inflicted on one’s own children. Regardless of who’s to blame, the children who bear the heaviest burden of the nation’s concentrated poverty and racialized poverty again lose out.

Rethinking in Philadelphia and Riverhead

Americans also ask public schools to accomplish Herculean tasks that go far beyond the education basics, as many parents discovered at the onset of the pandemic when schools closed and their support for families largely disappeared.

A school serving students who endure housing and food insecurity must dedicate resources toward children’s basic needs and trauma. But districts serving more low-income students spend less per student on average, and almost half the states have regressive funding structures.

Facing dwindling resources for schools, several cities have begun to rethink their tax exemption programs.

The Philadelphia City Council recently passed a scale-back on a 10-year property tax abatement by decreasing the percentage of the subsidy over that time. But even with that change, millions will be lost to tax exemptions that could instead be invested in cash-depleted schools. “We could make major changes in our schools’ infrastructure, curriculum, staffing, staffing ratios, support staff, social workers, school psychologists – take your pick,” Brooks said.

Other cities looking to reform tax abatement programs are taking a different approach. In Riverhead, New York, on Long Island, developers or project owners can be granted exemptions on their property tax and allowed instead to shell out a far smaller “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT. When the abatement ends, most commonly after 10 years, the businesses then will pay full property taxes.

At least, that’s the idea, but the system is far from perfect. Beneficiaries of the PILOT program have failed to pay on time, leaving the school board struggling to fill a budget hole. Also, the payments are not equal to the amount they would receive for property taxes, with millions of dollars in potential revenue over a decade being cut to as little as a few hundred thousand. On the back end, if a business that’s subsidized with tax breaks fails after 10 years, the projected benefits never emerge.

And when the time came to start paying taxes, developers have returned to the city’s Industrial Development Agency with hat in hand, asking for more tax breaks. A local for-profit aquarium, for example, was granted a 10-year PILOT program break by Riverhead in 1999; it has received so many extensions that it is not scheduled to start paying full taxes until 2031 – 22 years after originally planned.

Kansas City border politics

Like many cities, Kansas City has a long history of segregation, white flight and racial redlining, said Kathleen Pointer, senior policy strategist for Kansas City Public Schools.

James Elementary in Kansas City, Mo. Danielle McLean, CC BY-ND

Troost Avenue, where the Kansas City Public Schools administrative office is located, serves as the city’s historic racial dividing line, with wealthier white families living in the west and more economically disadvantaged people of color in the east. Most of the district’s schools are located east of Troost, not west.

Students on the west side “pretty much automatically funnel into the college preparatory middle school and high schools,” said The Federation of Teachers’ Roberts. Those schools are considered signature schools that are selective and are better taken care of than the typical neighborhood schools, he added.

The school district’s tax levy was set by voters in 1969 at 3.75%. But successive attempts over the next few decades to increase the levy at the ballot box failed. During a decadeslong desegregation lawsuit that was eventually resolved through a settlement agreement in the 1990s, a court raised the district’s levy rate to 4.96% without voter approval. The levy has remained at the same 4.96% rate since.

Meanwhile, Kansas City is still distributing 20-year tax abatements to companies and developers for projects. The district calculated that about 92% of the money that was abated within the school district’s boundaries was for projects within the whiter west side of the city, Pointer said.

“Unfortunately, we can’t pick or choose where developers build,” said Meredith Hoenes, director of communications for Port KC. “We aren’t planning and zoning. Developers typically have plans in place when they knock on our door.”

In Kansas City, several agencies administer tax incentives, allowing developers to shop around to different bodies to receive one. Pointer said he believes the Port Authority is popular because they don’t do a third-party financial analysis to prove that the developers need the amount that they say they do.

With 20-year abatements, a child will start pre-K and graduate high school before seeing the benefits of a property being fully on the tax rolls, Pointer said. Developers, meanwhile, routinely threaten to build somewhere else if they don’t get the incentive, she said.

In 2020, BlueScope Construction, a company that had received tax incentives for nearly 20 years and was about to roll off its abatement, asked for another 13 years and threatened to move to another state if it didn’t get it. At the time, the U.S. was grappling with a racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

“That was a moment for Kansas City Public Schools where we really drew a line in the sand and talked about incentives as an equity issue,” Pointer said.

After the district raised the issue – tying the incentives to systemic racism – the City Council rejected BlueScope’s bid and, three years later, it’s still in Kansas City, fully on the tax rolls, she said. BlueScope did not return multiple requests for comment.

Recently, a multifamily housing project was approved for a 20-year tax abatement by the Port Authority of Kansas City at Country Club Plaza, an outdoor shopping center in an affluent part of the city. The housing project included no affordable units. “This project was approved without any independent financial analysis proving that it needed that subsidy,” Pointer said.

All told, the Kansas City Public Schools district faces several shortfalls beyond the $400 million in deferred maintenance, Superintendent Jennifer Collier said. There are staffing shortages at all positions: teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff. As in much of the U.S., the cost of housing is surging. New developments that are being built do not include affordable housing, or when they do, the units are still out of reach for teachers.

That’s making it harder for a district that already loses about 1 in 5 of its teachers each year to keep or recruit new ones, who earn an average of only $46,150 their first year on the job, Collier said.

East Baton Rouge and the industrial corridor

It’s impossible to miss the tanks, towers, pipes and industrial structures that incongruously line Baton Rouge’s Scenic Highway landscape. They’re part of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s campus, home of the oil giant’s refinery in addition to chemical and plastics plants.

Aerial view of industrial buildings along a river
Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Baton Rouge campus occupies 3.28 square miles. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

Sitting along the Mississippi River, the campus has been a staple of Louisiana’s capital for over 100 years. It’s where 6,000 employees and contractors who collectively earn over $400 million annually produce 522,000 barrels of crude oil per day when at full capacity, as well as the annual production and manufacture of 3 billion pounds of high-density polyethylene and polypropylene and 6.6 billion pounds of petrochemical products. The company posted a record-breaking $55.7 billion in profits in 2022 and $36 billion in 2023.

Across the street are empty fields and roads leading into neighborhoods that have been designated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a low-income food desert. A mile drive down the street to Route 67 is a Dollar General, fast-food restaurants, and tiny, rundown food stores. A Hi Nabor Supermarket is 4 miles away.

East Baton Rouge Parish’s McKinley High School, a 12-minute drive from the refinery, serves a student body that is about 80% Black and 85% poor. The school, which boasts famous alums such as rapper Kevin Gates, former NBA player Tyrus Thomas and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Gardner C. Taylor, holds a special place in the community, but it has been beset by violence and tragedy lately. Its football team quarterback, who was killed days before graduation in 2017, was among at least four of McKinley’s students who have been shot or murdered over the past six years.

The experience is starkly different at some of the district’s more advantaged schools, including its magnet programs open to high-performing students.

Black-and-white outline of Louisiana showing the parishes, with one, near the bottom right, filled in red
East Baton Rouge Parish, marked in red, includes an Exxon Mobil Corp. campus and the city of Baton Rouge. David Benbennick/Wikimedia

Baton Rouge is a tale of two cities, with some of the worst outcomes in the state for education, income and mortality, and some of the best outcomes. “It was only separated by sometimes a few blocks,” said Edgar Cage, the lead organizer for the advocacy group Together Baton Rouge. Cage, who grew up in the city when it was segregated by Jim Crow laws, said the root cause of that disparity was racism.

“Underserved kids don’t have a path forward” in East Baton Rouge public schools, Cage said.

A 2019 report from the Urban League of Louisiana found that economically disadvantaged African American and Hispanic students are not provided equitable access to high-quality education opportunities. That has contributed to those students underperforming on standardized state assessments, such as the LEAP exam, being unprepared to advance to higher grades and being excluded from high-quality curricula and instruction, as well as the highest-performing schools and magnet schools.

“Baton Rouge is home to some of the highest performing schools in the state,” according to the report. “Yet the highest performing schools and schools that have selective admissions policies often exclude disadvantaged students and African American and Hispanic students.”

Dawn Collins, who served on the district’s school board from 2016 to 2022, said that with more funding, the district could provide more targeted interventions for students who were struggling academically or additional support to staff so they can better assist students with greater needs.

But for decades, Louisiana’s Industrial Ad Valorem Tax Exemption Program, or ITEP, allowed for 100% property tax exemptions for industrial manufacturing facilities, said Erin Hansen, the statewide policy analyst at Together Louisiana, a network of 250 religious and civic organizations across the state that advocates for grassroots issues, including tax fairness.

The ITEP program was created in the 1930s through a state constitutional amendment, allowing companies to bypass a public vote and get approval for the exemption through the governor-appointed Board of Commerce and Industry, Hansen said. For over 80 years, that board approved nearly all applications that it received, she said.

Since 2000, Louisiana has granted a total of $35 billion in corporate property tax breaks for 12,590 projects.

Louisiana’s executive order

A few efforts to reform the program over the years have largely failed. But in 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an executive order that slightly but importantly tweaked the system. On top of the state board vote, the order gave local taxing bodies – such as school boards, sheriffs and parish or city councils – the ability to vote on their own individual portions of the tax exemptions. And in 2019 the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board exercised its power to vote down an abatement.

Throughout the U.S., school boards’ power over the tax abatements that affect their budgets vary, and in some states, including Georgia, Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey and South Carolina, school boards lack any formal ability to vote or comment on tax abatement deals that affect them.

Edwards’ executive order also capped the maximum exemption at 80% and tightened the rules so routine capital investments and maintenance were no longer eligible, Hansen said. A requirement concerning job creation was also put in place.

Concerned residents and activists, led by Together Louisiana and sister group Together Baton Rouge, rallied around the new rules and pushed back against the billion-dollar corporation taking more tax money from the schools. In 2019, the campaign worked: the school board rejected a $2.9 million property tax break bid by Exxon Mobil.

After the decision, Exxon Mobil reportedly described the city as “unpredictable.”

However, members of the business community have continued to lobby for the tax breaks, and they have pushed back against further rejections. In fact, according to Hansen, loopholes were created during the rulemaking process around the governor’s executive order that allowed companies to weaken its effectiveness.

In total, 223 Exxon Mobil projects worth nearly $580 million in tax abatements have been granted in the state of Louisiana under the ITEP program since 2000.

“ITEP is needed to compete with other states – and, in ExxonMobil’s case, other countries,” according to Exxon Mobil spokesperson Lauren Kight.

She pointed out that Exxon Mobil is the largest property taxpayer for the EBR school system, paying more than $46 million in property taxes in EBR parish in 2022 and another $34 million in sales taxes.

A new ITEP contract won’t decrease this existing tax revenue, Kight added. “Losing out on future projects absolutely will.”

The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has continued to approve Exxon Mobil abatements, passing $46.9 million between 2020 and 2022. Between 2017 and 2023, the school district has lost $96.3 million.

Taxes are highest when industrial buildings are first built. Industrial property comes onto the tax rolls at 40% to 50% of its original value in Louisiana after the initial 10-year exemption, according to the Ascension Economic Development Corp.

Exxon Mobil received its latest tax exemption, $8.6 million over 10 years – an 80% break – in October 2023 for $250 million to install facilities at the Baton Rouge complex that purify isopropyl alcohol for microchip production and that create a new advanced recycling facility, allowing the company to address plastic waste. The project created zero new jobs.

The school board approved it by a 7-2 vote after a long and occasionally contentious board meeting.

“Does it make sense for Louisiana and other economically disadvantaged states to kind of compete with each other by providing tax incentives to mega corporations like Exxon Mobil?” said EBR School Board Vice President Patrick Martin, who voted for the abatement. “Probably, in a macro sense, it does not make a lot of sense. But it is the program that we have.”

Obviously, Exxon Mobil benefits, he said. “The company gets a benefit in reducing the property taxes that they would otherwise pay on their industrial activity that adds value to that property.” But the community benefits from the 20% of the property taxes that are not exempted, he said.

“I believe if we don’t pass it, over time the investments will not come and our district as a whole will have less money,” he added.

In 2022, a year when Exxon Mobil made a record $55.7 billion, the company asked for a 10-year, 80% property tax break from the cash-starved East Baton Rouge Parish school district. A lively debate ensued.

Meanwhile, the district’s budgetary woes are coming to a head. Bus drivers staged a sickout at the start of the school year, refusing to pick up students – in protest of low pay and not having buses equipped with air conditioning amid a heat wave. The district was forced to release students early, leaving kids stranded without a ride to school, before it acquiesced and provided the drivers and other staff one-time stipends and purchased new buses with air conditioning.

The district also agreed to reestablish transfer points as a temporary response to the shortages. But that transfer-point plan has historically resulted in students riding on the bus for hours and occasionally missing breakfast when the bus arrives late, according to Angela Reams-Brown, president of the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers. The district plans to purchase or lease over 160 buses and solve its bus driver shortage next year, but the plan could lead to a budget crisis.

A teacher shortage looms as well, because the district is paying teachers below the regional average. At the school board meeting, Laverne Simoneaux, an ELL specialist at East Baton Rouge’s Woodlawn Elementary, said she was informed that her job was not guaranteed next year since she’s being paid through federal COVID-19 relief funds. By receiving tax exemptions, Exxon Mobil was taking money from her salary to deepen their pockets, she said.

A young student in the district told the school board that the money could provide better internet access or be used to hire someone to pick up the glass and barbed wire in the playground. But at least they have a playground – Hayden Crockett, a seventh grader at Sherwood Middle Academic Magnet School, noted that his sister’s elementary school lacked one.

“If it wasn’t in the budget to fund playground equipment, how can it also be in the budget to give one of the most powerful corporations in the world a tax break?” Crockett said. “The math just ain’t mathing.”

Christine Wen worked for the nonprofit organization Good Jobs First from June 2019 to May 2022 where she helped collect tax abatement data.

Nathan Jensen has received funding from the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Danielle McLean and Kevin Welner do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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