How hateful rhetoric connects to real-world violence |
- Rush to summer school? A moment for celebration and caution
- The SEC should—and can—pay more attention to financial stability
- Four takeaways on new guidance for state and local fiscal relief under the American Rescue Plan
- The coming crisis in Idlib
- What would it cost to replace all the nation’s lead water pipes?
- Analyzing artificial intelligence plans in 34 countries
- Hutchins Roundup: Preschool, homeownership, and more
- Figure of the week: COVID-19’s impact on conflict
- Missed opportunities to understand racism in the COVID-19 era
- Environmental permitting might block Biden’s clean energy targets
| Rush to summer school? A moment for celebration and caution Posted: 13 May 2021 02:08 PM PDT By Elias Blinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff "The summer learning experiences we're talking about now really need to be better than they ever were in the past." – Secretary Miguel Cardona, U.S. Department of Education, in the Washington Post Summer school—two words that conjure a memory of poorly performing students forced to attend a summer boot camp to raise test scores as they complete worksheets in sweltering classrooms. This year, amid discussions of learning loss and lost instructional time in the aftermath of COVID-19, policymakers, educators, and researchers stress the role that summer school can play in accelerating learning. But the calls for summer school are different from the past, with an emphasis on reinventing the summer experience. The U.S. Department of Education's "COVID-19 Handbook" identifies summer learning programs as valuable resources for addressing lost instruction from the past school year. Rather than use a punitive, stigmatizing model, educators are instead advised to employ evidence-based pedagogy and design programs tailored to students' needs, local community, and the importance of socioemotional learning. Just being with other children, having real relationships with teachers, and learning with peers will be a key component of healing and learning. Summer school this year needs to embed aspects of summer camp. Local education leaders are hearing the plea to reinvent summer school, and they are responding. In New York City, for example, all K-12 students are invited to participate in the Summer Rising program. This collaboration across city agencies and community organizations will offer students socioemotional and academic support through engagement with their classmates, teachers, and communities. The School District of Philadelphia and other districts across the U.S. are taking similar approaches. Leading educational researchers likewise support this intensive redesign effort—beginning this summer and continuing into the future—as detailed in a recent report from the Spencer Foundation and Learning Policy Institute. The report's authors warn against intensive remediation or boot camp. Instead, drawing on research from the science of learning, they call for "learning environments that center strong teacher-student relationships, address students' social and emotional learning, and provide students with opportunities to construct knowledge that builds upon their experiences and social contexts in ways that deepen their academic skills."
There is alignment among policymakers, educators, and researchers about how to advance summer learning so that we begin to teach in the way that brains learn, with social relationships and social emotional skills at the core. Yet the wide gap between educational theory and practice is well-known. Even intensive tutoring, a widely supported intervention to counteract lost instructional time, must be implemented effectively. An overemphasis on boosting or accelerating academic performance to the detriment of relationship building could lead a tutoring program to backfire. It is imperative that school districts redesign summer learning programs in alignment with the latest research and federal guidance—prioritizing equity, access, and culturally responsive instruction. It is vital that we leverage students' experiences inside and outside the classroom as pedagogical resources. Shaping a new summer experience through the science of learningOur 2020 report for the Brookings "Big Ideas for America" series presents evidence-based checklists of how children learn and what skills they need to learn for success in the 21st century, regardless of their future goals. Conveniently, the items on our checklists overlap with the principles of equitable post-pandemic education identified in the Spencer Foundation and Learning Policy Institute's recent report, and the summer learning objectives described by the U.S. Department of Education and school districts. The how checklist covers a set of learning principles: Children learn best when education is active with room for discovery and experiential learning through inquiry and reflection; consistently engaging without distraction; made meaningful through connections between new information and prior knowledge gained inside or outside the classroom; socially interactive with peer collaboration and adult support; iterative with chances to form, test, and revise hypotheses about how the world works; and joyful. The what checklist corresponds to our breadth of skills approach, "the 6 Cs" of collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence. Educators are encouraged to use these checklists to align their lessons with the best scientific knowledge. The model is intentionally flexible, prioritizing educator expertise and cultural diversity in the promotion of engaging, meaningful learning. In this sense it offers more equitable education that is easily adaptable to educators' and students' strengths, as well as any mandatory standards or curricula. How wonderful it is to see evidence from the science of learning shaping the theories and proposals for a new summer learning experience. If we can meld summer camp and summer school together, we can transform a traditionally dull, stigmatizing experience into an engaging and inclusive one. That is reason for celebration. Yet, there is room for caution. Effective implementation of the plans and guidelines laid out by policymakers, educators, and researchers will be critical. Our Brookings paper offers one model that can foster success.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| The SEC should—and can—pay more attention to financial stability Posted: 13 May 2021 11:08 AM PDT By Daniel K. Tarullo The financial market turmoil resulting from the onset of the COVID crisis in early 2020 highlighted continuing risks to financial stability posed by non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs). Many financial oversight agencies have roles in crafting a regulatory response, but the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will be most important in determining its effectiveness. While there are grounds for optimism that the SEC will finally take the macroprudential regulatory role it has been reluctant to play in the past, significant obstacles remain. The integration of capital markets with traditional lending activities has been steadily increasing for decades. The 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) revealed not only the serious undercapitalization of traditional banks, but also the extent to which free-standing investment banks, money market funds, and other non-bank financial institutions provided a credit intermediation function. Post-crisis reforms increased the resiliency of banking organizations and eliminated their links to the Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) that lay at the heart of the precarious shadow banking system for mortgage finance. The more stringent regulation made banking organizations—which are overseen by the Fed and now include all the formerly free-standing investment banks—a source of stability during the COVID crisis. But money market funds again experienced runs. And this time around hedge funds, mortgage real estate investment trusts, and bond mutual funds were also sources of stress. They suffered liquidity squeezes and began to resort to fire sales of assets into declining markets. Without the unprecedented liquidity provided by the Federal Reserve to so many capital markets, the consequences for many of those NBFIs, and for the financial system, would have been dire. The NBFIs were obviously not the precipitating cause of the COVID financial turmoil. But their fragile funding practices and, in some cases, excessive leverage, amplified the stress. Indeed, the growth of many of these NBFIs has been fueled in part by regulatory arbitrage: They can avoid the capital and liquidity requirements now applicable to banks and their affiliates. The problem is that capital markets tend to be pro-cyclical and can thus increase systemic risk. In normal times margins on funding are low, reflecting a perceived low risk to the value of collateral and the ability of the borrower to repay. As stress increases, funding may be rolled over, but with progressively shorter funding maturities, by which lenders try to protect themselves. At some point, margins jump precipitously, or lenders withdraw entirely. Thus funding is cut off essentially overnight, which can result in fire sales and market panic. Markets now have good reason to believe that, in extremis, the NBFIs will effectively be supported by the Fed. Thus we have the same conjunction of moral hazard and risk to the financial system that motivated the post-2009 changes to banking regulation. Many policy observers have argued ever since the GFC for a more proactive approach to regulating NBFI contributions to systemic risk. The 2020 experience produced something close to a consensus for a regulatory response. While it would have been better if the international Financial Stability Board and the agencies composing the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Committee had acted earlier, their belated recognition of the vulnerabilities could still pave the way for action. This is especially the case in the United States as financial regulatory agency principals are replaced over time by Biden appointees. This brings us to the SEC. In our balkanized financial regulatory system, there is no systemic risk regulator. The Fed has the expertise and at least a general inclination toward regulating with an eye to the stability of the entire financial system. But it has at best indirect, and often no, regulatory authority over many forms of NBFI activity. The SEC, on the other hand, has authority over investment companies and any financial intermediary whose buying and selling of securities meet the fairly capacious statutory definition of "brokers" or "dealers." Exemptions from the securities laws for entities with small numbers of well-heeled investors do limit the SEC's authority over hedge funds. Overall, though, the SEC has enough authority to act as a credible prudential regulator of market-based credit intermediation. An agenda for this SEC role could begin with the following initiatives:
Although the COVID crisis underscored the risks to financial stability from non-bank intermediaries engaged in securities transactions, all those risks had been identified beforehand. Yet, with a couple of exceptions, the SEC has been reluctant in the years since the GFC to take on a systemic risk regulatory role. One factor has been the agency's limited bandwidth. The traditional SEC missions of protecting investors and assuring the operational integrity of securities markets are daunting in their reach. The volume of securities issuance is enormous, the evolution of issuer practices and products unending, and, unfortunately, the opportunities for fraud extensive. Securities fraud is often much publicized, with accompanying loud calls for action to punish the malefactors and provide redress to victims. The latest scandals predictably capture the attention of the Commission. Response to these immediate concerns can squeeze out consideration of important, longer-run financial stability concerns. It was telling that Gary Gensler's first Congressional testimony as the newly installed Chair was dominated by recent investor protection issues such as "gamifying" securities trading and payment for order flow.[2] There was only brief mention of systemic risks. Because, unlike the federal banking agencies, the SEC is dependent on Congressional appropriations, it is more likely both to focus on current Congressional concerns and to shy away from lower profile but important issues that might provoke a lobbying effort by affected firms to limit its appropriation. Quite apart from the bandwidth issue is the institutional culture of the SEC. The dedication of the career staff to the investor protection mission has been a decided strength of the agency. But it seems to have engendered a resistance to assuming a financial stability function, which was evident in the joint rule-making exercises required by Dodd-Frank. Some staff, and even a couple of Commissioners, argued explicitly that the SEC had no financial stability responsibilities. Whether motivated by fear of distraction from the SEC's traditional mission or by discomfort with the analysis and judgment required for financial stability regulation, this attitude sits uneasily with the Dodd-Frank Act. The SEC is one of the agencies on the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and, as such, is required to respond with either action or explanation for inaction to recommendations made by FSOC for the mitigation of financial risks. It was included in the joint rulemakings for some of the new regulations required by Dodd-Frank—the Volcker Rule, risk retention, and incentive compensation, among others. The resistance to incorporating financial stability considerations into the SEC's regulatory activities is also hard to square with the investor protection mission itself. After all, runs on money market funds or freezes in repo markets hurt investors in the first instance, even as they harm the financial system and economy as a whole. In the last several years there have been some signs that the resistance is diminishing. While rules on mutual fund liquidity and margining fall short of what is needed, the SEC has taken steps that seem at least partially motivated by financial stability considerations. Moreover, the dynamic among the members of the Commission itself seems considerably healthier than it was during the period during which effective money market fund reform could not be accomplished. In the person of Gary Gensler, the Commission now has a Chair with a demonstrated commitment to addressing financial stability issues. Still, he and the rest of the Commissioners have their work cut out for them if they are to push the SEC's institutional culture forward and to address financial stability risks alongside more conventional investor protection and market functioning concerns. If they succeed, the foundation may be laid for effective, appropriate regulation of NBFI activities that contribute to systemic risk. If not, opportunities for regulatory arbitrage and the spread of moral hazard will grow, and with them the risks of a non-bank sourced financial crisis. [1] Metrick, Andrew and Tarullo, Daniel K., Congruent Financial Regulation (April 1, 2021), written for the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Spring 2021 Conference. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3817621 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3817621. [2] Testimony of Chair Gary Gensler before the House Financial Services Committee, May 6, 2021, https://www.sec.gov/news/testimony/gensler-testimony-20210505.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Four takeaways on new guidance for state and local fiscal relief under the American Rescue Plan Posted: 13 May 2021 09:55 AM PDT By Eli Byerly Duke, Alan Berube On May 10, the U.S. Treasury Department released its interim final rule on the use of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act's State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. While the publication of most federal regulations doesn't usually turn a lot of heads, this one is different: It will govern the allocation of $350 billion that ARP provided to states, counties, cities, and tribal and territorial governments without a great deal of statutory guidance. Indeed, ARP makes clear that these funds provide greater flexibility than similar resources provided under the CARES Act from spring 2020. That noted, ARP does specify that fiscal recovery funds have four authorized uses:
ARP also restricts receiving governments from using the funds to offset tax cuts or to shore up public pensions (more on that below). This being an interim final rule, the Treasury Department can still change it, and will be considering feedback submitted through the federal eRulemaking portal. For now, we see four key takeaways from the rule that can guide state, local, and tribal leaders' decisions about how to deploy the funds toward promoting what the rule terms a "stronger, more equitable economy."
The interim final rule specifies that funds deployed for ARP's first purpose—responding to public health needs and economic damage from the pandemic—must respond "to the disease itself or the harmful consequences of the economic disruptions resulting from or exacerbated by the COVID-19 public health emergency." On the public health front, a number of pandemic-related expenses qualify: COVID-19 prevention and mitigation, medical care (including mental health and substance abuse treatment), public health and safety staff, and relevant implementation expenses. On the economic front, the Treasury Department points to a number of eligible uses: assistance to unemployed workers (including job training); deposits to replenish state unemployment insurance trust funds; administrative expenses to improve the efficacy of economic relief programs (e.g., through data system upgrades); direct aid to households; assistance to small businesses and nonprofits; rehiring government staff; and aid to impacted industries (specifically tourism, travel, and hospitality). Across these economic relief categories, governments must be able to demonstrate that the ultimate recipients of funds experienced economic harm from the pandemic (such as loss of earnings or revenue) and that the funds they distribute "respond to" that harm in ways that are "related and reasonably proportional." How the department will audit compliance with these provisions is not yet clear, but the guidance would seem to recommend that governments employ "cautious flexibility," carefully documenting who they are helping, and why, with ARP funds in these categories. The rule provides even greater flexibilities for state and local spending in lower-income neighborhoods (Qualified Census Tracts), tribal government spending, and spending targeted to "other populations, households, or geographic areas disproportionately impacted by the pandemic." In these places, the public health and economic impacts of the pandemic often multiplied pre-existing "systemic public health and economic challenges that may have contributed to more severe impacts of the pandemic[.]" The Treasury Department's guidance thus recognizes that there is limited value and ability for governments to try to parse out why and how their spending in these communities responds specifically to the effects of the pandemic. The guidance points to a wider set of presumed eligible uses in these impacted places, such as investing in affordable housing, homelessness prevention, and lead abatement; addressing disparities in educational resources for high-poverty schools and vulnerable students; and promoting healthy childhood environments through child care, home visiting programs, and services for system-involved families and youth. Clearly, these eligible uses are strongly biased toward investments in human needs in impacted communities, rather than more traditional economic development (e.g., support for industry or physical upgrades).
As noted above, ARP names premium pay compensation for essential workers as an authorized use of State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. As our colleague Molly Kinder explains, effective models already exist for state and local governments to deploy these funds toward workers who risked the most during the pandemic while earning the least. The Treasury Department guidance provides significant, welcome flexibility to state and local governments to provide premium pay to essential workers. The rule names a number of qualifying sectors, including health care, public health and safety, education, transportation, and food production and services, but also provides governments with the ability to add other sectors deemed critical during the pandemic. ARP allows for premium pay to be awarded at up to $13 per hour, to a maximum of $25,000 per worker. The rule clarifies that governments should prioritize compensation for lower-income eligible workers, and imposes additional reporting requirements if they award premium pay to workers such that they would earn at least 50% more than their state's average wage. Importantly, state and local officials can apply premium pay retrospectively for work performed at any time since the start of the pandemic—recognizing that many essential workers have yet to be adequately compensated for work they previously performed. At the same time, the rule also provides flexibility to recipient governments to apply premium pay prospectively. Some state and local leaders may consider using the funds to provide incentives (essentially, hiring bonuses) to workers to fill in-person occupations with an abundance of vacancies, such as in health care, care work, public safety, retail, and restaurants. In these ways, the interim final rule provides wide latitude and strong encouragement to state and local governments to devote a portion of their fiscal recovery funds to compensate essential workers who kept their neighbors fed, protected, and healthy over the past year.
ARP specifies that State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds can support necessary investments in drinking water, waste and stormwater, and high-quality broadband service. The interim final rule takes this a step further, defining "necessary" investments as those "designed to provide an adequate minimum level of service and are unlikely to be made using private sources of funds." For water and sewer investments, the rule aligns eligible uses to projects that would be eligible for support from the Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water State Revolving Fund or Drinking Water State Revolving Fund. In this way, governments can expedite project identification and investment, and create a near-term positive impact on community public health and well-being. The rule also "encourages" recipients to select projects that will improve resiliency to the effects of climate change, consistent with efforts to protect lower-income communities that tend to be most affected by climate disasters; and to replace lead service lines associated with negative lifelong impacts for exposed children. ARP's investments in broadband infrastructure represent a direct response to the pandemic-revealed need for reliable, high-speed internet access for remote school, work, and health care delivery. The rule specifies that eligible investments must be designed to provide services that meet "adequate" speeds—at least 100 megabits per second wherever practicable—for unserved and underserved households and businesses. Importantly, the rule also emphasizes that financial assistance to impacted households for broadband subscriptions and digital literacy are also eligible uses. As our colleague Adie Tomer has argued, making broadband more affordable and boosting digital skills are critical parts of a systems-level approach to improving broadband's impacts. The rule also clarifies that general infrastructure projects—say, road construction or bridge repair unrelated to COVID-19—are not permitted uses of the flexible ARP resources. State, local, and tribal governments may be able to draw on other ARP provisions to support infrastructure investments in transit, school buildings, and housing, but the Treasury Department's guidance largely precludes governments from using these flexible resources to tackle their capital projects list. The administration's proposed American Jobs Plan, on the other hand, would provide substantial assistance to help states and cities address those investment needs.
While the Treasury Department's rule provides a good deal of discretion to state, local, and tribal governments on their use of recovery funds (consistent with the ARP statute), it also spells out several things for which they cannot use the dollars. These include:
These provisions of the rule implement certain statutory prohibitions, and aim to ensure that expenditures address the impacts of the pandemic rather than longer-running fiscal issues facing state, local, and tribal governments. Overall, the Treasury Department's interim final rule provides useful direction as to how recipient governments should prioritize deploying the significant resources available through the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. They retain ample room for creativity and the ability to address a variety of specific local needs. Importantly, the more those needs reflect the direct and disproportionate impacts of the pandemic—especially on vulnerable populations and places—the greater discretion state, local, and tribal leaders will enjoy.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Posted: 13 May 2021 09:32 AM PDT By Omer Karasapan On July 10, 2021, Bab al-Hawa, the last remaining border crossing between Turkey and the Syrian rebel province of Idlib, may close as Russia plans to veto an extension to U.N. Security Council Resolution 2533. For the 3.4 million civilians in Idlib—over 2 million of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria—this would be a disaster. Approximately 75 percent of the population in northwest Syria is dependent on U.N. aid to meet their needs; around 85 percent of that aid comes through this border crossing. Caught between a severe economic crisis exacerbated by Lebanon's economic meltdown, further U.S. sanctions in 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation is desperate in all of Syria. The U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says 13.4 million Syrians need humanitarian aid, 20 percent more than last year, but assistance reached only 7.7 million. Nine out 10 people are living in poverty while Syrians without secure access to food increased 57 percent in the past year. UNICEF says that 90 percent of Syrian children need humanitarian assistance. The internally displaced are especially vulnerable, acutely so in conflict-prone Idlib and northwest Syria. Cross-border aid is critical to avert a humanitarian disaster. Yet, that is exactly what may happen, accompanied by massive civilian displacement and a possible war between Russia and Turkey. How did we get here? In 2014, the U.N. Security Council authorized U.N. agencies and their partners to use routes across conflict lines and border crossings into Turkey at Bab al-Salam and Bab al-Hawa, as well as Al Yarubiyah (into Iraq) and Al-Ramtha (into Jordan). This was "to ensure that assistance, including medical and surgical supplies, reached people in need throughout Syria through the most direct routes." The authorization was renewed annually via contentiously debated resolutions until 2018. The Syrian government was notified of shipments in advance and a U.N. monitoring mechanism oversaw loading in neighboring countries. In 2019, amidst mounting disagreements, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2504 authorized the two crossings in Turkey but not to Iraq and Jordan, and only for 6 months. By July 2020 in the aftermath of heavy fighting in Idlib, there remained only Bab al-Hawa. The 2019 fighting signaled the end of the cease-fire agreement reached in September 2018 between Russia and Turkey. Aside from taking the most populous rebel-held area in Syria, a key goal of the regime offensive was to control the vital Latakia-Aleppo (M4) and Damascus-Aleppo (M5) highways. Neither had been opened and cleared by Turkey as agreed. Nor were radical elements neutralized and pulled away from government and Russian forces. Ankara's "red line" focuses on preventing millions of refugees joining the existing 4 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey. Public opinion has turned sharply against them, an initial welcome fading after 2017 as the economy sharply decelerated and was further battered by the pandemic. The intensified fighting after December 19, 2019 led to over 1 million desperate people along the Turkish border, triggering a Turkish military response against the Syrians and their Iranian, Lebanese, and Russian allies. The Turkish intervention led to another ceasefire agreement in March 2020 as rebel-held territory was whittled down to 60 percent of the province. That agreement again stipulates the opening of the M4 highway within a 6 km safety corridor and armed groups removed from the area. Neither has happened. Some 15,000 Turkish troops remain in Idlib and more in surrounding Turkish-controlled enclaves in northern Syria. There is an uneasy relationship with the dominant armed group, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate that has been trying to rebrand as a national revolutionary group—with limited success. While it has a prickly working relationship with Turkey, they reportedly secretly met with European officials and elicited somewhat positive statements from James Jeffrey, the recently departed and unreplaced U.S. special representative for Syria Engagement. HTS remains a terrorist organization according to the European Union, the U.N., and others. To the Russians and Damascus, HTS are terrorists and the Bab al-Hawa border crossing it controls sustains it while undermining Syrian sovereignty. The counterproposal is to use cross-line openings from regime areas to provide humanitarian assistance. This is unacceptable to the West and other donors. Not only is the track record bad with numerous delays and refusals for even basic goods to be transported, but they fear playing into regime hands. Human Rights Watch has systematically exposed these challenges: "The Syrian government has developed a policy and legal framework that allows it to co-opt humanitarian assistance and reconstruction funding to fund its atrocities, advance its own interests, punish those perceived as opponents, and benefit those loyal to it." On the surface, the positions do appear irreconcilable. Indeed, some like Charles Lister have called for a return to the 2014 era when cross-border aid was delivered without a U.N. Security Council resolution. Louis Charbonneau, U.N. director at Human Rights Watch, has called for looking beyond the U.N. Security Council to get aid through. Whether the West, mostly the U.S., has the fortitude to back such measures is unclear. The European Council on Foreign Relations' Julien Barnes-Dacey and Andrey Kortunov of the Russian International Affairs Council propose a final one-year extension of Bab al-Hawa in exchange for increased aid flows through Damascus with accompanying measures to monitor delivery. However, within a year, Idlib's population will find itself totally dependent on an intractably hostile regime. Others such as University of Lyon's Fabrice Balanche see the possibility of a bargain between Turkey and Russia over the M4 highway leading to perhaps a rump Turkish protectorate, or a new Gaza consisting of "a narrow strip of land under the control of … HTS, managing a population of refugees, under a drip of international humanitarian aid." You know you are in a bad situation when Gaza appears as an acceptable outcome, especially these days as fighting again engulfs the strip and Palestine. But even for that to happen, an agreement would have to be reached with HTS or they would have to be militarily pushed away from the highway. Even if HTS wanted to deal, more radical armed groups could and have played a spoiler role when it comes to deals with Russia. It seems that caught between HTS and Russia, Turkey will hang on to what TOBB University's Saban Kardas calls its mission impossible in sustaining Idlib's unstable equilibrium. Yet, despite frequent flare-ups, no one wants a full-scale war, nor is it likely that the regime is enthusiastic about accommodating over 4 million Sunni oppositionists in Idlib and northwest Syria. And despite the Erdogan administration's estrangement from the U.S. and partners in Europe as well as its regional isolation, there is still Turkey's NATO membership. So, a rump Idlib may emerge, especially as the M4 highway is opened, but the critical matter of U.N. participation in the aid effort will be quite contentious. Just as in Gaza, it is also likely that trade and aid routes will be contested for years—until and if a political settlement is ever reached.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| What would it cost to replace all the nation’s lead water pipes? Posted: 13 May 2021 08:43 AM PDT By Sophia Campbell, David Wessel Removing lead from America's drinking water is gathering political support. President Biden's American Jobs Plan proposes $45 billion to replace lead pipes and service lines across the United States. This would be the federal government's most ambitious effort on this front to date—and research suggests that the public health and economic benefits of doing so are extensive. What harm does lead do?When a person swallows or breathes in lead particles, the body stores the toxin in the blood, bones, and tissues, where it accumulates over time. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there is no safe level of lead exposure. Lead is particularly harmful to children, causing reduced IQ, language development, and attention span, and increased aggression and impulsivity. In addition, prolonged exposure for both children and adults can damage the brain and nervous system, reduce fertility, and increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease, and likely even cancer. What are the economic consequences of exposure to lead?Lead's effects on health have serious economic consequences for those exposed. A study of Swedish students found that an increase in blood lead levels from 5 to 10 micrograms per deciliter is associated with a decrease in 9th grade GPA of 2.2 percentile points, and a 2.3% decrease in the likelihood of graduating high school—academic consequences that imply a 5.5% decrease in average earnings in young adulthood. There is also significant evidence that exposure to lead affects crime rates. A 1% increase in blood lead level has been shown to raise the probability of teenage aggressive behavior by 4% and criminal behavior by 5%, and for violent crimes, the associated increase is as large as 8%. Research suggests that phasing out leaded gasoline in the 1980s led to a significant decline in the number of violent crimes in the 1990s. Disparities in lead exposure also exacerbate social inequities. According to the National Health and Nutritional Survey, blood lead levels are highest in low-income and Black children. Due to racial disparities in lead exposure, Black infants are estimated to experience around a 50% higher average loss of IQ points attributable to blood lead than white or Hispanic infants, and an estimated $47,000 loss in lifetime earnings, compared to white and Hispanic losses of around $30,000. Furthermore, a number of studies have found that a given increase in blood lead levels can have larger effects on cognition, academic performance, and earnings for disadvantaged students than for their peers. What has the government done to reduce lead exposure?As a result of federal laws and regulations, including the 1973 phase out of lead in automobile gasoline, the 1978 ban on lead paint for residential and consumer use, the 1991 Lead and Copper Rule, and the 1995 ban on lead in solder in food cans, the median lead concentration in the blood of children aged 1 to 5 years dropped from 15 micrograms per deciliter in 1976-1980 to 0.7 micrograms per deciliter in 2013-2014. Despite some progress in reducing the number of homes served by lead pipes, however, lead in drinking water remains an unresolved problem. How prevalent are lead pipes and service lines?Lead gets into drinking water via lead pipes, fixtures, and faucets as they corrode. The federal government banned the use of leaded pipe and solder in new plumbing systems in 1986, but many remaining pipe networks in older cities and homes predate the policy; the EPA estimates there are still 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country. As of 2016, about 7% of households served by U.S. community water systems were estimated to have lead service lines, and the Biden administration estimates that around 400,000 schools and childcare facilities are currently exposed. If we know lead is a public health hazard, why haven't we gotten rid of all lead in the water yet?Poor record-keeping, for one. Until recently, states and counties were not required to report blood lead testing data to the CDC (and most didn't do so voluntarily), making it hard to determine high-risk locations or raise public awareness. Many cities lack comprehensive maps of where lead service lines are located. It was only in December 2020 that the federal government revised the EPA's Lead and Copper Rule to require water utilities to create a public inventory of lead service lines, alongside other testing requirements that trigger reviews and payment assistance programs for replacement when high exposure levels are found. Money is another big obstacle. Getting lead out of the water is time and cost intensive, with limited political will to do so. Individual households can buy water treatment filters to reduce lead levels at the faucet—Newark, NJ and Flint, MI have provided them free to residents in response to water contamination crises—but these filters need to be replaced relatively regularly and are less effective at high lead concentrations. The only permanent and 100% effective solution is a full lead service line replacement, which can be expensive—the EPA estimates an average cost of $4,700, ranging from $1,200 to $12,300 per line. Lead service lines often extend onto private property, complicating the replacement process. Public water systems typically cover the cost of replacing the portion of the line extending from the water main to the curb stop or meter, but the property owner usually must pay to replace the segment of the line that goes to the home. In lower income neighborhoods, where the risks of lead exposure are high, the cost to customers of replacing privately-owned pipes may be prohibitive. Replacing only the utility-owned pipes is less cost-effective and can even increase the levels of lead in the water. State and local governments have attempted to help property owners and utilities replace lines by offering grants and forgivable loans for pipe replacement, as well as by loosening restrictions to allow water utilities to raise rates to fund improvements to private portions of service lines. States and municipalities can also apply for federal funding to assist with water infrastructure projects addressing lead, but haven't faced significant federal pressure to locate and remove 100% of pipes. Some cities have tackled the problem—Madison, WI successfully ripped out all lead service lines in the city in 2001, after 10% of city water samples showed high lead concentrations. However, the city received significant pushback from homeowners (6,000 of whom faced an additional $1,300 plumbing bill), and it took years to get approval for the initiative from regulators and lawmakers. Removing 8,000 pipes took 11 years and cost $15.5 million. How much would it cost to get lead out of the U.S.'s drinking water?A back-of-the-envelope calculation based on EPA's estimate of average replacement cost per line ($4,700) and assumption of 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country suggests the cost could range from $28 billion to $47 billion, putting Biden's $45 billion near the top of that range. Research suggests it is an investment worth making. A 1987 EPA cost-benefit analysis of reducing the amount of lead permitted in drinking water by 60% found that the benefits of reduced exposure—including avoided medical expenses, lower compensatory education costs, and increased lifetime earnings—outweighed the costs of the policy by about 4 to 1, even without accounting for a number of health benefits that were difficult for the EPA to monetize. A 2019 Minnesota cost-benefit analysis of removing lead from all drinking water in the state estimated the costs would range from $1.5 billion to $4.1 billion over 20 years, and the benefits—including "mental acuity and IQ" improvements and the "resulting increases in lifetime productivity, earnings and taxes paid"—would range from $4.2 billion to $8.5 billion. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that each full lead service line replaced would yield $22,000 in societal benefits from reduced mortality from cardiovascular disease alone, or (by their calculation) a return of over $3 per dollar invested. What are the prospects for action?If enacted, the American Jobs Plan would likely provide enough funding to eliminate lead from drinking water in the United States. The overhaul would take time—possibly ten years or more—and require effective coordination between the EPA, state and local governments, water suppliers, and private homeowners. For now, investing in clean water appears to have bipartisan support. The Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021—which authorizes $35 billion for a variety of water and wastewater infrastructure investments and revolving loan funds—specifically directs $10 million for a pilot program to help communities map lead service lines and $200 million to remove lead from school drinking water systems. The bill passed the Senate in a near-unanimous vote on May 10th and is expected to pass in the House.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Analyzing artificial intelligence plans in 34 countries Posted: 13 May 2021 08:27 AM PDT By Samar Fatima, Kevin C. Desouza, Gregory S. Dawson, James S. Denford The belief that AI dominance is imperative for economic development, military control, and strategic competitiveness has accelerated AI development initiatives across countries. The release of national strategic plans has been accompanied by billions of dollars in investment as well as concrete policies to attract relevant talent and technology. In our previous post "How different countries view artificial intelligence", we presented a snapshot of governments' planning for AI, based on our analysis of 34 national strategic AI plans. Our post covered the description of AI plans and categorized countries based on their coverage of various related concepts. In this post, we extend details about what accounts for the variation in countries’ AI plans. These documents provide information about the planned use of AI within each country and what this information signals about the priorities of countries for AI. For example, some plans mention the use of AI for weaponization while others condemn AI-enabled wars; some capture details on ethical framework design, while others give few or no clues about how AI governance is ensured. The ability to correctly interpret these signals is useful for various internal and external stakeholders such as citizens, non-government organizations (OECD, UN, etc.), other countries, and policy analysts to predict the future trajectories of AI. For example, India's AI plan signals concern for public consent by referring "Upon proper and informed consent from the citizens, these anonymized data may be shared for the purpose of artificial intelligence and data analytics" (India AI Plan, 2018). Similarly, France's AI Plans emphasizes ethics by design, "Looking beyond engineer training, ethical considerations must be fully factored into the development of artificial intelligence algorithms" (France AI Plan, 2018). However, not all signals are created equally, and signals can vary in intention and trustworthiness. This is similar to buying a used car: The used car seller may say that a car is highly reliable but then offer it for a price far below market value. This non-intentional (inadvertent) signal suggests that there may be a problem with the car that is not disclosed. Similarly, the used car seller may say that the car is highly reliable but then refuses to give any sort of mechanical warranty on the car, evidence that the signal is not trustworthy. In much the same way, the signals in national AI plans require interpretation. Correctly interpreting signals allows the reader to understand the country's motivations, such as why certain countries plan on weaponization or some are more concerned with the ethics of AI. Signals can be illuminating to understand the real drive for AI development. We classified signals into four categories:
Evaluating the plansWe did the analysis in two steps. First, we looked at the plans to determine their stated outcomes and looked for differences by type of government (e.g. democratic or authoritarian). Outcome data is the goals or outcomes for developing a national AI strategy. We identified five outcomes: AI Research, AI Data, Algorithmic Ethics, AI Governance and Use of AI in Public Services. The results indicated that bolstering AI research and access to data required for AI system development are the most widely accepted outcomes among all countries. The group of countries releasing AI plans has shown that building capabilities for AI research and data accessibility are necessary preconditions to achieve the other outcomes. Algorithmic ethics and AI governance have shown variety across countries. Democratic countries led authoritarian countries in addressing problems around algorithmic ethics and governance. However, among democratic countries, those with an immature technical environment were more likely than those with a mature technical environment to address ethics and governance. We speculate that this reflects countries' inexperience with these issues playing "catch up". These countries include New Zealand, India, Lithuania, Spain, Serbia, Czech Republic, Mexico, Italy and Uruguay. These findings also indicate that countries that are lagging technically in this area are focusing on ethics and governance not just because they are behind, but also because they are putting in the legal framework to defend against external use of AI and to shape the direction of their own internal developments. This strategy, while admirable, may slow the spread of AI from other countries that are not as aware of ethical and governance considerations. Lastly, the results indicated that some countries, despite asserting an interest in using AI for public services, lacked supporting contextual factors. This casts doubt into the validity of the oft-stated objective that adopting AI at the national level is to improve the quality of life for citizens and suggests that other motivations are more likely. Intended outcomesIn the second step, we sought to understand how to interpret the statements in the plan and assessed them based on their intentionality (did they mean to say something) and their veracity (was what they said supported by other evidence). If a piece of information given in AI plans aligns with contextual conditions, we referred to it as validated information. Based on the results of our analysis, we developed the intentionality and veracity matrix of five outcomes. The first two outcomes, AI Research and Data, are placed in a deliberate and high veracity quadrant as countries expressed the intention to develop both the capabilities and generation of these outcomes is also validated by the contextual conditions. Similarly, Algorithmic Ethics and AI Governance are also validated by the contextual conditions, but the intention of the information is not deliberate (not expressed in plans but found in contextual conditions). The use of AI in public services is deliberately shown by democratic countries, but the information is not validated by contextual conditions and thus placed in the deliberate intention and low veracity quadrant. The authoritarian countries' intention to use AI is inadvertently depicted but the veracity of information is low and thus categorized in the last matrix (inadvertent and low veracity signals).
Since the geopolitics of AI is changing with the advancement of the technology, unexpected trends have started to emerge. The results indicate that democratic countries have signaled greater concern for ethics and governance of AI. However, among such democratic countries, those with less mature technology environments are more concerned about the human-centric use of AI. This phenomenon is a direct indication that merely developing AI capabilities and systems would not be sufficient for sustainable deployment. Human-centric AI enabled by ethical and governance issues is also needed. This insight indicates the beginning of a new trend where the competition for AI dominance will be gradually replaced by a sustainable equilibrium. The long-term deployment of AI is possible with public trust and strengthening the belief that technology exists to serve humans and not to be served by them. In many ways, the rush to AI is similar to the westward expansion of the U.S. in the 1800s, when numerous people and companies raced across the plains to establish outposts in the American West. On the surface, the settlers claimed to be doing so to fulfill America's destiny of bringing education, technology and modernization to the "uncivilized west" but the reality is that many settler had motivations that were far less altruistic. We see this happening with national AI strategies as the plans reflect all manner of honorable goals for racing to AI implementation but major variation in intentionality and veracity of the plans. Much like westward expansion where settlers from Eastern US were induced to various economic incentives to move in far west area. This develops analogy with often reached beyond the legal or ethical constraints of the state, efforts to stress AI governance, ethics, and fairness need to curtail the bleeding edge of technological innovations. Westward expansion eventually ended, but not without many significant clashes and conflicts. Like the "wild west", the race to AI is far too large to be managed by one country or even a group of countries, and there likely is to be massive upheaval before the situation is resolved.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Hutchins Roundup: Preschool, homeownership, and more Posted: 13 May 2021 08:00 AM PDT By Sophia Campbell, Tyler Powell, David Wessel Studies in this week's Hutchins Roundup find that preschool attendance pays off in high school and college years, returns to homeownership vary by race in because of geography, and more. Want to receive the Hutchins Roundup as an email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday. Attending preschool improves outcomes in high school and college yearsIn a long-term study of students attending public preschool in Boston, Guthrie Gray-Lobe of the University of Chicago, Parag A. Pathak of MIT and Christopher Walters of UC Berkeley find that preschool enrollment significantly improves high school and college educational outcomes. By comparing students who were randomly assigned in or out of preschool through a lottery, the authors find that preschool enrollment increases the probability of graduating high school by 6 percentage points and of SAT test-taking by 9 percentage points. Preschool attendance also reduces the frequency of suspensions and juvenile incarceration. Further, children who won a preschool seat were 5.4 percentage points more likely to attend college, and 8 percentage points more likely to enroll directly following high school graduation. The authors also find early evidence of positive effects of preschool on college graduation. The positive effects tended to be greater for boys than for girls. These findings "illustrate the potential for a universal preschool program to improve educational attainment for a disadvantaged student population," the authors say. Geographic variation in racial composition leads to unequal rates of return on housing across racesReturns to investing in housing vary geographically, as cities with limited supply of housing, growing tech industries and desirable amenities grow increasingly expensive. Using Federal Housing Administration loan records and housing price data from Zillow, Matthew Kahn of Johns Hopkins finds that geographic variation in the racial and ethnic composition of home buyers leads to differences across racial groups in the rate of return on investment in housing. Black homebuyers, who are less likely to locate in cities with rising home prices, received lower rates of return on home purchases between 2007 and 2020, while Asian homebuyers received the highest returns. Within geographic areas, differences in returns across racial groups were much smaller. Housing location is driven by differences in demand by group—including racial differences in employment across industries like tech, preexisting concentrations of racial or ethnic groups, and in ability to afford expensive housing in cities with tight supply. These results suggest that geographic variation in residential location contributes to wealth inequality across racial groups. Fed's Paycheck Protection Program Lending Facility caused an increase in PPP lending by banksAfter Congress created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to make loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration to businesses during the pandemic, the Federal Reserve opened the PPP Lending Facility (PPPLF) to provide participating banks with funding for PPP loans. Sriya Anbil, Mark Carlson, and Mary-Frances Styczynski of the Federal Reserve Board find that banks that tapped the PPPLF made almost two times as many PPP loans as those that did not use the Fed facility. The authors show that the banks that were most likely to use the PPPLF were those that had previous experience using the Fed's discount window, which suggests that the difference in lending was because of the facility, rather than differences in demand for loans across banks. The effect of the PPPLF was observed for both large and small banks, but for large banks it was primarily due to the presence of the PPPLF as a backstop. Filing for PPPLF eligibility increased their lending; actual use of the PPPLF had a smaller impact. Chart of the week: CPI, excluding food and energy prices, jumps 3% from April 202012–Month Percentage Change in Consumer Price Index, All Items Less Food and Energy
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics Quote of the week:"Labor supply is one of the confounding aspects of this recovery. As the employment data show, firms have been able to increase their hiring. But we are receiving widespread reports from business contacts across sectors that they are having a hard time finding the workers they need. The question is why, given that the unemployment rate is still so high and a number of indicators point to continued slack in the labor market," says Loretta Mester, President of the Cleveland Fed. "I believe the answer reflects the unusual nature of the pandemic shock that hit the economy. It is likely that some people with the financial means to do so have been cautious about returning to the workforce because of concerns for their health in the midst of the pandemic. Some others have had to withdraw from the workforce to take care of loved ones afflicted by the virus or to tend to children when childcare facilities closed and schools shifted to on-line teaching. Childcare responsibilities fall disproportionately on women and their labor force participation rates fell more sharply during the pandemic than those of men. The fiscal support likely meant that more people had the financial cushion to remain out of the workforce for these or other reasons. That support may also have shifted some bargaining power over wages to workers after decades of decline. Although the aggregate statistics do not show much acceleration in wages, our contacts say that they are beginning to respond to labor shortages by increasing their wage offers and by considering candidates they may have previously passed over because of minor criminal offenses or other reasons. As the public health situation continues to improve over the course of the year, I expect that the factors weighing on labor supply will diminish and that there will be strong job gains, with the unemployment rate falling to 4.5% or less by the end of the year."  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Figure of the week: COVID-19’s impact on conflict Posted: 13 May 2021 07:18 AM PDT By Tamara White The short-term economic and health impacts of COVID-19 in Africa have been myriad, and policymakers are just beginning to anticipate and prepare for the pandemic's long-term effects. Recently, another consequence of the pandemic has been under study: How might the pandemic be affecting conflict in the region? The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) has been monitoring this question since April 2020. In this week's update, ACCORD continues its examination of geographic areas with a significant number of conflict incidents and their alignment with the number of COVID-19 cases. For example, annual fatalities in Mozambique from conflict between 2019 and 2020 rose from 663 to 1,545. Those fatalities were concentrated in the province of Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique—which has experienced increased waves of violent insurgency, resulting in the mass movement of people in the area. In this case study, researcher Rui Saraiva finds a correlation between COVID-19 cases and this mass movement of people. However, while the authors suggest that COVID-19 cases and conflict are correlated (Figure 1), according to the researchers, the relationship is not strong enough to be causal. Figure 1. COVID-19 and conflict
Source: African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes. 2021. COVID-19 and Conflict, Issue No: 13/2021 (May), African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes, Durban, South Africa. Conversations about COVID-19 and conflict are not new: In fact, in April of this year, the Armed Conflict Location and Data Project (ACLED) released their "A Year of COVID-19" report, which highlighted various ways that COVID-19 has exacerbated conflict globally. The report particularly highlights that, while political violence declined in 2020 globally, it did not decline in Africa: It actually rose by 4,328 events. The report also states that in the four months immediately following the pandemic, identity militias—militias organized around a collective, common feature like religion or ethnicity, e.g., Boko Haram, al-Shabab—increased their activity by 70 percent. You can read more about these specific relationships in ACLED's report "A Great and Sudden Change: The Global Political Violence Landscape Before and After the COVID-19 Pandemic." You can find more of ACCORD's COVID-19 and conflict updates on their website.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Missed opportunities to understand racism in the COVID-19 era Posted: 13 May 2021 06:02 AM PDT By Randall Akee, KJ Ward Recent events have made clear the pervasive and continuing animus towards various race and ethnic groups in the U.S. The current COVID-19 epidemic has become the latest impetus for acting on old biases of "otherness" or not belonging towards Asians and baselessly holding them responsible for the pandemic. It has been reported that residents of border towns near the Navajo Nation have targeted Native Americans in their insults as vectors of COVID-19 and demanded that they return home to the reservation. Front-line workers, many Black and Hispanic, who have long endured the disrespect of entitled customers, are now dealing with the ire – racist epithets and even physical assault – of those who are angry at being required to cover their mouths and noses while shopping. In the absence of systematic data on this topic, we are left to these anecdotal instances, and that makes it much more difficult to identify pervasive patterns and behaviors in society. In the media, these instances are often noted, but they can easily be dismissed as outliers or attributed to a single "bad actor.” Even when data are collected, smaller race groups are often not included in national surveys or have so few observations that separate analysis cannot be conducted. These small populations tend to be clustered in an "other" category. From a scientific point of view, this practice is not generally viewed as problematic. If a "representative sample" of 2,000 respondents happens to completely exclude Alaska Natives this may not raise eyebrows because the population of Alaska Natives in the U.S. is less than one percent. This oversight, however, renders invisible the unique lived experience of this population. Not only is this a barrier to any policy discussion that might address the realities of this and other small groups, in the case of the experience of racism, it is a missed opportunity to understand racism as structural and pervasive as opposed to anecdotal and isolated incidents. In other words, if a survey can only explicitly and statistically demonstrate that African Americans and Hispanics report being the targets of discrimination and cannot describe the experiences of discrimination experienced by Khmer immigrants or Pacific Islanders then it is harder to understand that racial discrimination is a function of structural white supremacy and not the "problem" of a couple race groups. A new survey which explicitly oversampled for small race and ethnic groups illustrates what is often missed in standard survey efforts. Research publisher AAPI Data and SurveyMonkey commissioned a new survey on racism, discrimination, and COVID-19 experiences for all of the large and small race and ethnic groups in the U.S. The survey illustrates the pervasiveness of racism toward all non-white groups — challenging the notion that the negative outcomes and experiences of one or two race/ethnic groups have only to do with the lived realities of those groups and supporting the idea that structural racism necessarily harms all Black and Indigenous people and other people of color, even when data sets render them invisible. In the table above, we present some of the survey results to show the experiences of racism and hate crimes in recent years for different race and ethnic groups. The survey results, which oversampled for these small race and ethnic groups, indicate that approximately 5% of white respondents indicated having experienced any hate crimes or incidents in 2020. However, three times that proportion of Black and multi-race individuals report having experienced hate crimes in 2020. Other non-white groups also report experiences in 2020 that are at least twice that of the white population. In column two, which asks about experiences with hate crimes or incidents in 2021, we see that the incidents for all non-white groups are almost twice (or more) that of the white group. Overall, this indicates that hate crimes and incidents occur for all groups but disproportionately more for non-white individuals, suggesting a prominent role for systemic white supremacy in these incidents. Finally, in column three and the graph below, we show the proportion of each race or ethnic group that indicate they have been spit or coughed upon. For the white, Black, Hispanic and Asian American groups, approximately 10% in each group reports having that experience. However, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans and multi-race individuals report substantially higher rates. In fact, the Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander reports almost one in four have had this experience. These results are quite surprising and unexpected; beyond that, in the era of COVID-19, these types of incidents may have dire health consequences. It is thus reassuring to see a renewed call to broaden existing data collection efforts in order to identify the pervasiveness of racial disparities in employment, housing, and policing. President Biden's recent executive order calls for the establishment of an Equitable Data Working Group and acknowledges that "a first step to promoting equity in Government action is to gather the data necessary to inform that effort." It is imperative that the federal government collect and archive data on hirings, firings, mortgages and their interest rates, crime, and violence broken down by race and ethnic groups. This data foundation will be instrumental in identifying dynamic changes occurring across (and perhaps within) race and ethnic groups in the U.S. These actions should serve as useful examples for further data collection intended to address racial disparities and experiences in the U.S. While this effort is aimed at federal government activities, it is an important start that should be expanded to other parts of the economy and society. In related efforts, the American Economic Association has identified the importance of better data collection for the measurement of racism and discrimination and continues to pursue independent efforts to achieve this goal. Increasingly, the lack of timely and accessible data is being recognized as an ongoing obstacle to identifying, diagnosing, and dismantling systemic racism in society. The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. They are currently not an officer, director, or board member of any organization with an interest in this article.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
| Environmental permitting might block Biden’s clean energy targets Posted: 12 May 2021 09:00 PM PDT By DJ Gribbin President Joe Biden has been forging ahead with his infrastructure agenda, having released his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan in March and convening 40 world leaders in April to discuss related climate issues. The president's infrastructure plan is not timid—especially its energy transition agenda, which calls for our nation's power generation to be carbon-free by 2035. To understand the magnitude of this transition, it would require replacing 838 gigawatts (GW) of generation capacity, or approximately 80% of the nation's total. Two major obstacles stand in the way of the U.S. meeting this 2035 goal: adequate funding and the government's ability to provide permits necessary to deploy wind and solar generation. The administration attempted to tackle the need for adequate funding head-on by proposing $100 billion in additional federal funding and providing tax and other incentives for renewable power. The permitting challenges, though, remain a key sticking point that need to be addressed. For those not familiar with project development, any major infrastructure project that is built with federal funds must undergo a host of reviews and authorizations under federal environmental laws—a process referred to as "permitting." These laws range from the well-known (the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act) to the esoteric (the Geothermal Steam Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act). In addition to federal permitting rules, projects are also subject to various planning requirements, including reviews at the state and local levels. The permitting process has led to laudable improvements in the quality of our nation's air and water. However, over time they have also slowed down the deployment of critical infrastructure, including renewable energy projects. For example, the $2.5 billion, 720-mile Clean Line Energy project—which was slated to carry wind power from the Great Plains to the Southeast—has faced years of legal and permitting hurdles. Major projects (such as those on the scale President Biden is advocating) must produce environmental impact statements, which can take four years on average, and in some cases as long as decades. Complicating permitting challenges are the large swaths of land required for the deployment of renewables. The land area required for 1 GW of generation capacity is estimated to range between 2 and 100 square miles for wind and between 13.5 and 15.6 square miles for photovoltaic solar, according to two quite divergent estimates among researchers. Using the smaller estimates produced by renewable energy advocates (2 square miles for wind and 13.5 square miles for solar) and assuming a wind-heavy (less land-intensive) energy mix of 75% wind and 25% solar, the land required to replace today's 838 GW of nonrenewable capacity would be 4,084 square miles. This is equivalent to 1.6 times the size of Delaware or roughly 125 times the pavement area of the original 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System. An alternative study by Bloomberg and Princeton University estimated the land requirements to be the size of South Dakota. To put it bluntly, whether the land required would be equivalent to a couple Delawares or a South Dakota, permitting projects of this magnitude by 2035 will be highly improbable if hundreds of massive projects have to plod through the current permitting system. Permitting represents a barrier to deploying renewable energy even at the smaller scales we've already attempted. In 2020, for example, developers cited permitting as a factor in the delay of several offshore wind projects totaling nearly 3 GW in capacity. And earlier this year, the Biden administration cancelled two offshore wind development zones off the East Coast following concerns about maritime traffic and community opposition. The U.S. renewable sector is not alone in this challenge. European green energy companies have also stressed that permitting will hamper their ability to meet energy goals unless the process is significantly streamlined. As the nation fundamentally rethinks the nature of infrastructure and its role in the country's future, we need to address how to help projects navigate the slew of environmental regulations that could stall the deployment of next-generation infrastructure. The relevant statues have been largely unamended since the 1970s, and simply don't reflect the needs and challenges of today. Calls for a once-in-a-generation change to America's energy infrastructure should include similar calls to modernize the way these projects are permitted. The Biden administration has taken some initial steps to address this challenge, but it will need to propose legislative language to clarify agency responsibilities and provide strong leadership from the White House (in the form of an executive order) if it hopes to deploy renewable projects at the scale required to meet the 2035 deadline.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||
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