RSN: Bill McKibben | What Will It Take to Cool the Planet?

25 May 20

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24 May 20

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Bill McKibben | What Will It Take to Cool the Planet?

Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "Following the lead of Canada, state authorities in North Dakota said last week that they would use some of their covid-19 relief money to employ oil workers to plug abandoned oil wells. That's good and bad."

his week’s newsletter is a little different, in that I mainly want to encourage you to watch a video and then play with a Web site. Both come from the remarkable people at Climate Interactive, a project that grew out of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. I’ve admired the group’s co-directors, Elizabeth Sawin and Andrew Jones, for many years, and watched their En-ROADS simulator grow from fairly crude beginnings into a truly sophisticated and useful model. It allows you to change different variables to see what it would take to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions enough to get us off our current impossible track (screeching toward a world something like four degrees Celsius hotter) and onto the merely miserable heading of 1.5 to two degrees Celsius envisioned in the Paris climate accords.

I pointed out last week that the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us something interesting: even locking down most of the planet didn’t cut emissions as much as we might have thought. (By early April, daily carbon-dioxide emissions decreased by seventeen per cent.) This suggests that a great percentage of the trouble is hardwired into our systems, and not solely a function of our habits and choices. Indeed, the simulator shows that, if you reduce the growth of both populations and economies to the lowest level the programmers considered possible, the planet still warms almost 3.5 degrees Celsius.

But now reset the variables and go into the submenus for coal, gas, and oil, and perform a little experiment: stop building any new infrastructure for these fossil fuels beginning in 2025 and, all of a sudden, you’re at a world that warms only 2.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. That’s why it is such good news, for instance, that New York State last week quashed plans for the Williams natural-gas pipeline across the New York City harbor: if you keep building stuff like this now, it locks in emissions for decades to come, busting our carbon budget. It’s why the climate movement has fought so hard against pipelines and fracking wells and L.N.G. terminals: with ever-cheaper renewable power, when you manage to stop such projects, sun and wind have a chance at filling the vacuum.

And, once you’ve made this basic course change, you can go back to work on other steps that the simulator can model. Stipulate an all-out effort at making buildings and transport more efficient, and cut way back on deforestation—and now you’re at about 2.5 degrees. Figure out some ways to “highly reduce” methane emissions from oil and gas wells, cows, and other sources, and suddenly you’re nearing the two-degree mark.

None of these things are easy, of course. In fact, all of them are very hard. But stopping new infrastructure is possible—it’s basically a battle with the fossil-fuel industry, which, as I’ve been pointing out, is losing financial muscle with each passing week. Last week, according to the Financial Times, in a fascinating interview with Bernard Looney, the C.E.O. of BP, “Looney noted that as crude prices have plunged, renewable energy projects had been able to attract funding, suggesting the pandemic has weakened the investment case for oil. ‘It’s the model that is increasingly respected and admired by investors as being resilient and having a different risk profile,’ he said.”

Passing the Mic

Bernadette Demientieff is the executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, which has been coördinating that First Nation’s fight against plans for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She’s spent much of the past few years visiting with representatives of major banks and asking them not to finance the project, because it would damage the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd and, as a consequence, her community’s way of life. And she’s been successful: among the six biggest American banks, only Bank of America has not agreed to the Gwich’ins’ request.

Could you tell us what the Arctic Refuge is like this time of year—has spring begun to reach the far north?

I would be honored to share the true beauty of the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. This place right now would be melting and summer on the rise. Animals coming out and appearing all over. Creeks and lakes starting to form beautifully. It’s like nature slowly waking up.

Bank after bank has agreed not to fund drilling in the Arctic these past months. Do you think that will make a difference?

We have been visiting these banks for the past two years, and it was really heartfelt to see that many of them made a commitment to withdraw from going into the Arctic Refuge. Our human rights are being violated, and we will not sit by quietly and allow this to happen.

What do you think people don’t understand about this fight—what message would you most like to get across?

Many people are not aware that this is not just about protecting our polar bears but this is about the indigenous voices being ignored, this is about a whole identity, about a people’s entire way of life being destroyed for profit. We have a spiritual and cultural connection to the Porcupine caribou herd, and we will stand strong in unity for the protection of their calving grounds and the Gwich’in way of life. We are rich in our culture, we are rich in our way of life. Look out across this country and understand this is a prime example of why we continue to fight for protection of these places. These lands, these waters, these animals are our survival.

Many of us will be O.K., because we are survivors, but we don’t only think about ourselves or our people. We think about our human race and all the many American people who deserve a chance at survival. We stand up for our future generations, the ones that do not have a voice yet, and we carry on “in a good way” the love, kindness, and strength of our ancestors.

Climate School

The climate campaigner Jamie Henn—an old colleague—wrote a provocative piece for Common Dreams last week arguing that environmentalists need to do a better job of describing the future world they’d like to build. If Fox News says that the Green New Deal is all about taking away hamburgers, Green New Dealers should respond with a vision of a “cleaner, healthier, freer, fun-er new world. A world where we aren’t choking on smog and exhaust. Where you don’t have to worry about gas leaks or expensive water bills. Where there’s no oil to change, no gaskets to replace, maybe even no car to worry about, because you’ve got a sexy electric bike and free, all-electric transit is just a block or two away.”

For Future Tense (a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University), David Zipper argues persuasively that cities have a short window—perhaps measured in weeks—to break the reflexive habit of driving cars. The nightmare is that subway-leery commuters will soon be driving. “A recent Vanderbilt study found that Bay Area residents could soon spend an additional 20 to 80 minutes per day stuck in congestion due to a shift away from mass transit. Evidence from China, which is attempting to return to life as usual following extended coronavirus lockdowns, is ominous: In early April, cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou already had higher levels of rush hour congestion than a year ago.” The dream looks like—well, like these survey results from the U.K., which found that six out of ten Brits want their government to prioritize health and well-being over economic growth even after the pandemic subsides. Doubtless that’s why London continues to amaze with its plans to turn the city center into a zone for bikes, buses, scooters, and pedestrians. In a sign of the times, the staid Financial Times offers a guide for first-time bike buyers.

With hurricane season about to start (and a gun-jumping storm, Arthur, making an appearance off the East Coast), it’s an apt moment for a report from the tech company Morning Consult on how the COVID-19 pandemic could affect coastal-climate resilience around the world. Bottom line: a global recession “will limit the ability of governments, financial institutions, and NGOs to invest in climate resilience solutions,” and, especially in poor regions, the fiscal pressure may be so high that it “threatens to overwhelm public services in many coastal cities.”

Obviously not important in the long run, but a fascinating glimpse into the vagaries of short-term climate forecasting: NASA’s climate chief, Gavin Schmidt, said last month that there is a sixty-per-cent chance that 2020 will be the hottest year on record. Last week, his predecessor, the legendary climate scientist James Hansen, said, “Don’t bet on it.” He forecasts a La Niña chilling of the Pacific, which might keep temperatures below record levels until 2022. Hansen’s excellent Web site also contains chapters from his forthcoming book, “Sophie’s Planet.”

The clean-energy advocate and investor Ramez Naam has been making forecasts of the price of solar power since 2011. Though he was more bullish than almost anyone else about the decline in costs, he now says that he wasn’t bullish enough. “Solar has plunged in price faster than anyone—including me—predicted. And modeling of that price decline leads me to forecast that solar will continue to drop in price faster than I’ve previously expected, and will ultimately reach prices lower than virtually anyone expects. Prices that are, by any stretch of the measure, insanely, world-changingly cheap.” In fact, he predicts that, per kilowatt-hour, “average prices in sunny parts of the world” will be “down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035.” This would mean that “building new solar would routinely be cheaper than operating already built fossil fuel plants, even in the world of ultra-cheap natural gas we live in now.”

Scoreboard

An own goal: writing last week about the threat of a union leader to violate social-distancing rules in an effort to stop anti-gas ordinances, I managed to omit the link to the story in the Los Angeles Times that first detailed the nastiness. I’m kind of glad for the omission, though, because it allows me to point out the fine work of the reporter in question, Sammy Roth. You can read more of his thinking regularly in the L.A. Times newsletter “Boiling Point”; it’s especially valuable for keeping track of California, which has the world’s fifth-largest economy and is en route to being among its cleanest.

Following the lead of Canada, state authorities in North Dakota said last week that they would use some of their COVID-19 relief money to employ oil workers to plug abandoned oil wells. That’s good and bad: good that these people will get to do this necessary work; bad that the taxpayers are footing the bill, instead of the energy companies that made big profits doing the original damage.

The tiny Pacific island of Niue has been designated the world’s first “dark sky” country by astronomers. Niue’s willingness to replace outdoor lighting with low-glow L.E.D.s won’t just preserve the splendor of the Milky Way; it will also make life a lot easier for wildlife. “In areas brightly lit at night, turtles can’t find the ocean, birds become disoriented while flying, and clownfish don’t hatch,” an Australian researcher told the Web site Mongabay. “It can also affect the mass-spawning event of many reef-building corals.”

In a potentially huge breakthrough for energy storage, a Minnesota utility supplier has signed a contract for a pilot project with a Bill Gates-backed battery manufacturer, Form Energy, which says that its product can provide a hundred and fifty hours of full-power-capacity backup, a big improvement on the current standard of about four hours.

The University of California finished the job of divesting its hundred-and-twenty-six- billion-dollar portfolio from fossil fuels. As the L.A. Times reported, the chief investment officer said that “his team is convinced that investments in fossil fuels pose an ‘unacceptable financial risk,’ particularly with ‘geopolitical tensions and likely, a bumpy and slow global financial recovery in a post-pandemic world.’ ”

And at the JPMorgan Chase annual shareholder’s meeting, campaigners came breathtakingly close—49.6 per cent of the vote—to forcing the company, according to Reuters, to report on “whether and how it will align its business lending” with the temperature targets set in the Paris climate accords. As Reuters noted, “traditionally shareholder measures that receive more than 30% of support usually push companies to make at least some changes to assuage investor concerns.” Certainly the heat is on: two members of the Rockefeller family, which has historic ties to the bank, joined New York City comptroller Scott Stringer in writing an op-ed in the Daily News on the day of the vote, saying that the company “needs to move away from financing the dirty fossil fuels of the past and toward the big, strategic clean energy investments of the future.”

Warming Up

Blake Mills is a virtuoso guitarist and a producer who’s worked with, among others, Alabama Shakes. His new single, “Summer All Over,” was released in time for Earth Day. It’s a reminder that a “summer song” on an overheating planet doesn’t necessarily mean a good-times anthem.

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Pro-choice activists rally in support of Planned Parenthood. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

The Trump Administration Is Demanding That Planned Parenthood Affiliates Give Back Their PPP Loans
Anna North, Vox
North writes: "Earlier this year, 38 Planned Parenthood affiliates around the United States received over $80 million in loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Now, the Small Business Administration (SBA) is pressuring those affiliates to return the loans, arguing that they were not eligible for them in the first place."

EXCERPTS:

In normal times, the clinics provide reproductive health services from STI testing to contraceptive counseling to abortion. But with coronavirus spreading across the country, clinics have had to space appointments out, convert some in-person visits to phone consultations, and cancel fundraisers, leaving them with a drop in revenue, Stephanie Fraim, the chief executive of Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, told Vox.

Thanks to the PPP loan, she was able to keep all of her staff employed and launch a telehealth program to offer prescriptions for hormone therapy for gender-affirming care, among other services. “Not only did we not lay anyone off, that meant health care got delivered to lots of patients,” Fraim said.

The SBA wants Planned Parenthood affiliates like Fraim’s to return their PPP loans, claiming that because the clinics are overseen by the nationwide Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which has more than 500 employees, they are not eligible for a loan program meant for smaller employers. Amid this pressure from the SBA, Republicans in Congress are calling on the Department of Justice to investigate whether Planned Parenthood committed fraud by applying for the loans.

The affiliates, meanwhile, argue that their leadership and finances are separate from the nationwide group — and other local affiliates of national nonprofits, like the YMCA, have received PPP loans without issue. Planned Parenthood affiliates say they’re being singled out by the Trump administration because some of their clinics provide abortions, although the PPP money cannot be used to pay for them.

“This is a deliberate strategy by Trump and his allies in the Senate to exploit a public health crisis to gut essential reproductive health care, including abortion access and STI testing and treatment,” Jenny Lawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes, said in a statement on May 22.



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Photos of Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia and his family.(image: Joan DelValle/Soohee Cho/The Intercept)

ICE Detainee Who Died of Covid-19 Suffered Horrifying Neglect
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "If there's one thing the men locked inside the Otay Mesa Detention Center want the world to know, it's that Carlos Ernesto Escobar Mejia didn't need to die."

EXCERPTS:

Because people in ICE custody are held for civil rather than criminal violations, the agency could release them at any time. Though ICE has made limited releases in some areas, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center, it continues to hold more than 26,600 people, many in for-profit facilities with abysmal health and safety records. The agency has tested only a fraction of those in its custody — 2,394 people in total, as of Saturday. Among that population, more than half, 1,201 individuals, have tested positive for Covid-19. An additional 44 ICE employees at detention centers have also tested positive.

The men who were with Escobar Mejia in his final days say they did everything they could to alert ICE and CoreCivic, the private prison corporation that runs Otay Mesa, of his worsening condition, and that the officials responsible for his well-being failed to take those alerts seriously. Escobar Mejia had lived in the U.S. for 40 years. In addition to being locked in a coronavirus hotbed where social distancing is impossible, he had a range of underlying health conditions that exacerbated his vulnerability to the virus, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart problems. His right foot was partially amputated, and he used a wheelchair.

The men in his unit believe that if Escobar Mejia had been taken directly to a hospital when the seriousness of his illness first became obvious, rather than being quarantined in a unit for infected detainees he might still be alive today.

Escobar Meija came to the U.S. from El Salvador as a teenager in 1980. At the time, a wave of refugees was beginning to flee the country, hoping to escape a catastrophic civil war that featured the torture, disappearance, and death of tens of thousands of Salvadoran civilians, often at the hands of U.S.-backed death squads, and the displacement of more than a million others. At the outset of the conflict, Escobar Mejia’s brother was murdered, with family members suspecting that government forces were behind the killing. A few years later, when his sister narrowly avoided a massacre orchestrated by guerrilla fighters on the other side of the war, his mother decided to take her children — Escobar Mejia was the youngest of five — and flee north.

The family landed in Los Angeles. While Escobar Mejia’s siblings eventually obtained citizenship, he did not. He seemed to carry the trauma of the civil war into his adult life, his former attorney, Joan Del Valle, told The Intercept. He struggled with addiction and in the 1980s and early 1990s, received convictions for grand theft, possession of a controlled substance, receiving stolen property, and a DUI. Though the last of those convictions was in 1993, according to Del Valle, ICE nonetheless cited the decades-old cases in its statement announcing Escobar Mejia’s death.

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Elaine Eklund holds her son as they visit the grave of Elaine's mother, Yok Yen Lee, who died from covid-19. Lee was among 34 Walmart employees in Quincy, Mass., who tested positive for the coronavirus. (photo: Hannah Reyes Morales/WP)

On the Front Lines of the Pandemic, Grocery Workers Are in the Dark About Risks
Nicole Dungca, Jenn Abelson, Abha Bhattarai and Meryl Kornfield, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "By the end of April, employees at a Walmart in Quincy, Mass., were panicking: Sick colleagues kept showing up at work. Other employees disappeared without explanation. The store's longtime greeter was in the hospital and on a ventilator, dying from covid-19."

Local health officials grew alarmed as employees and their relatives reported sick co-workers. Shoppers called to complain about crowded conditions.

“We have had consistent problems with Walmart,” wrote Ruth Jones, Quincy’s health commissioner, in an April 28 email to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. “They have a cluster of Covid cases among employees and have not been cooperative in giving us contact information or in following proper quarantine and isolation guidelines.”

The next day, at another Walmart in Worcester, Mass., a local public health director ordered a shut down after obtaining an internal company list showing nearly two dozen employees had tested positive.

Health officials in the two cities pressed the nation’s largest grocer to test all of its employees at the two stores for coronavirus. The screenings, which began within days in the store parking lots, helped confirm a wider problem: 119 of the workers were infected, according to health officials.

Despite the pandemic, grocery stores generally are not required to publicly disclose cases of coronavirus involving employees or report them to the local health departments. As states now move to reopen, many grocers are being criticized by health officials, lawmakers and store employees for not being more open with the public and their own workers about outbreaks within their stores.

The Post interviewed about 40 current and former employees at more than 30 supermarkets who alleged that the companies had not disclosed cases of infected or dead workers, retaliated against employees who raised safety concerns and used faulty equipment to implement coronavirus mitigation measures.

The $800 billion grocery industry ­— dominated by a handful of major players, including Walmart, Kroger and Albertsons — employs more than three million people in what are typically low-paying positions with little job security.

Amid the pandemic, the country’s nearly 40,000 grocery stores have been classified by officials as essential businesses that must remain open, putting the stores at the front lines of the crisis. Grocery stores, one place most consumers cannot avoid during the pandemic, have reported double-digit growth in sales in recent months.

At least 100 grocery workers nationwide have died from the virus since late March, and at least 5,500 others have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a Post review of data from the nation’s largest grocery workers union, other workers’ rights coalitions and media reports.

Many local health officials told The Post they have been left in the dark as clusters of cases have emerged in supermarkets coast to coast.

“We really need to have better communication. There’s got to be something moving forward ... that changes the current process,” said Karyn Clark, Worcester’s public health director. Clark said a nurse had to call the local Walmart several times before the company shared its internal list of infected employees.

In interviews, supermarket chains defended their efforts to protect workers and the public, saying they have required masks for employees, encouraged social distancing and rewarded workers with hazard pay and bonuses. Some grocers said they have collaborated with health departments across the country to help stop the spread of the coronavirus.

“Our associates are playing a critical role in helping people have access to fresh food, medicine and critical supplies during this crisis, and their safety is our highest priority," said Lorenzo Lopez, a Walmart spokesman. “In areas experiencing community-wide outbreaks like Quincy and Worcester, our associates also felt the impact as members of those communities. We work closely with public health and medical experts and follow their guidance in implementing safety and health measures for our associates and customers.”

Supermarket chains said they are being transparent about outbreaks while protecting the privacy of affected workers, which is governed by a patchwork of laws and regulatory measures.

All of the grocers contacted by The Post — Walmart, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods Market, Target, Kroger, BJ’s Wholesale Club and Lidl — declined to provide the number of workers who tested positive for the coronavirus or died from it. Combined, those employers account for roughly 11,300 stores and 2.4 million employees nationwide.

United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 900,000 workers at major chains, including Kroger, Safeway and Giant, has called on the companies to be more forthcoming to protect workers and customers in an industry that has remained a lifeline for households after states shut down most nonessential businesses for the pandemic.

Over the past five weeks, the union said the number of its grocery workers who have been infected or exposed to the virus jumped from 1,557 to 10,453.

“While some companies are doing the right thing and keeping shoppers and employees informed, there are still some keeping consumers in the dark and trying to sweep this information under the rug,” union president Marc Perrone said.

No reporting requirements

Many grocery workers told The Post that despite social distancing measures, they often share break rooms, bathrooms and devices for clocking in and out of their shifts. One sick employee, public health experts said, can potentially expose hundreds of colleagues and shoppers each day.

Local government health officials, whose job is to track and notify the public of disease outbreaks, said they have been hamstrung by many supermarkets responding slowly to their pleas for information about employees who are infected with the coronavirus or may have been exposed to it.

In Quincy, the health department first contacted the local Walmart on April 11 to inform the store of an employee it learned had tested positive for the coronavirus. Jones, the health director, said they asked the company repeatedly for the names and contact information for employees who worked closely with the infected employee so they could identify and inform other workers who may have been exposed.

In the meantime, the health department kept learning of new cases among store employees and the number of potentially exposed employees mushroomed.

After receiving no information for nearly two weeks, Jones escalated her request to the Walmart corporate office.

Finally, on April 28, Walmart provided contact information for employees at the Quincy store who had been exposed to the virus, Jones said. Five days later, 69-year-old Yok Yen Lee, the greeter at the store, died from covid-19, her family said.

Under pressure from the health department, Walmart then closed the store for a week, cleaned it and offered testing to every worker. In all, 34 employees at that location tested positive. In Worcester, more than 80 employees were infected, health officials said.

Troubled by Walmart’s response in Quincy and Worcester, lawmakers sent a letter on May 7 to Doug McMillon, the company’s president and chief executive.

“Across the country, more than 20 Walmart employees have died from COVID-19, and employees have had to take the critical work of contact tracing into their own hands to try and remain safe,” the delegation, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), wrote in the letter.

In a May 19 response to lawmakers, Bruce C. Harris, a Walmart vice president of federal government affairs, wrote that managers are required to meet with associates to let them know about each positive case, and that they are monitoring the number of employees taking leave.

“We are managing thousands of different, and sometimes conflicting, emergency orders and directives,” Harris wrote.

In Los Angeles, a Ralph’s supermarket employee Jackie Mayoral said managers instructed workers not to talk about sick colleagues around customers and that managers also refused to disclose how many employees were infected. It was only through the union that Mayoral learned more than 20 of her colleagues at the supermarket, owned by Kroger, had tested positive for the virus.

“Me and my co-workers are a family, and we should be able to talk about the things that are going to be able to affect us and possibly kill us,” said Mayoral, who was diagnosed with covid-19 in April and believes she contracted the virus at the supermarket, the only place she regularly visits outside of her home. She has since recovered.

Asked about the directives to avoid speaking about cases, Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokeswoman, said the company’s guidance “is always to communicate with integrity — openly and transparently — while protecting the privacy of any affected associate.”

Employment attorneys said companies must balance protecting employee privacy with keeping workplaces safe.

“We’re dealing with overlapping laws, gaps in laws and differing guidance from different levels of government,” said Kirk Nahra, an attorney at the law firm WilmerHale who specializes in privacy, data and health-care issues. “Companies are not supposed to disclose your name, but can they tell other employees in the meat department that someone who worked there Tuesday tested positive? Sure.”

Industry experts said the pandemic has left some supermarket chains struggling with what information should be shared with regulators or the public about sick and exposed employees.

Grocery companies are facing unprecedented challenges when an employee falls ill or dies, according to Hilary Thesmar, chief food and product safety officer for the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group for grocery stores and wholesalers.

“Companies are having to weigh a lot of factors: When did the employee test positive? When were they last at work?” she said.

But Oscar Alleyne, chief of programs and services at the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said that retailers need to be more transparent with public health officials in order to protect these high-risk essential workers and the public.

“You’re only as good as the data you have,” Alleyne said.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which oversees workplace safety, issued guidance in April that coronavirus cases were reportable to the agency under certain circumstances. But the agency said it generally wouldn’t enforce the rules except for employers in the health-care industry, emergency response organizations and correctional institutions.

New workplace safety guidance from OSHA that goes into effect Tuesday asks most industries to report coronavirus cases that meet certain criteria. But employment experts say it’s murky and allows employers to decide whether the cases are work-related.

In the absence of data, UFCW has compiled daily reports on infected employees from its local chapters. Employees at chains, including Walmart and Whole Foods, have started their own grassroots efforts to tally illnesses and deaths at their stores, using social media and published reports to confirm tips. (Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, owns The Washington Post.)

During the outbreak, Whole Foods, which has about 500 stores in the United States, began sending voice mail and text messages to employees to notify them of coronavirus cases in their stores. But some officials are pushing for more disclosure. On May 11, attorneys general from 12 states and the District wrote to Whole Foods and Amazon, admonishing the companies for failing to alert health officials and the public about infections and deaths of their workers.

The attorneys general said they learned from media reports of multiple infections among workers at a Whole Foods in the District and of two employee deaths in Portland, Ore., and Swampscott, Mass.

By not sharing a breakdown of coronavirus cases, the retailers may be breaching consumer protection laws, which “require businesses to provide truthful information and disclose material information to consumers,” the letter said.

Whole Foods has not responded to the letter, but a company spokeswoman said the chain is balancing the essential services it provides with ensuring the “health, safety and privacy” of their workers.

‘Putting us all in danger’

Grocery chains have publicly touted face masks, social distancing requirements, rigorous cleaning and temperature checks as proof that they are keeping workers and customers as safe as possible.

Two grocery chains have used faulty or ineffective equipment, according to documents and interviews.

The Kroger-owned Quality Food Centers chain uses infrared sensors to count the number of shoppers in its stores as a way to limit customers and facilitate social distancing. But the technology routinely provided false tallies, according to internal company documents obtained by The Post.

“Once a person is inside for 30 minutes, the system assumes that individual is an associate and stops counting that person,” QFC President Chris Albi said in a Q&A with employees of the chain, which has 62 stores in Washington and Oregon.

A Kroger spokeswoman declined to answer specific questions about any problems with the system but said management regularly verifies the capacity limits within the store.

At BJ’s Wholesale Club in Baltimore, a manager said the thermometers were not calibrated properly and the temperature readings of employees consistently reported 96 or 97 degrees. The manager said a supervisor also brushed off concerns about the lack of social distancing by employees who examined customers’ receipts as they left the warehouse.

“It is appalling conduct and a policy that is putting us all in danger,” said the manager, who spoke anonymously for fear of retaliation. “I would quit in protest, but I worry that without me, it’s one more person in a leadership role who is not taking this seriously.”

A BJ’s spokeswoman said since the coronavirus outbreak, the company has “taken aggressive actions and implemented extensive safety and sanitation measures across all our facilities; and we always encourage our team members to provide feedback and voice concerns.”

Even when employees have reported feeling sick, some said that their managers have insisted that they continue to work because of staffing shortages.

Gladys Cortes, who worked at the Best Market supermarket in Islip, N.Y., told her manager in late March that she wasn’t feeling well and had a bad cough, but her boss wouldn’t allow her to leave early and said she needed to be back the next day, according to Noemi Salavarria, a former colleague who said she talked with Cortes when she was hospitalized days later with covid-19. Two other workers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said they had heard Cortes talking in the store about how she felt sick and needed a break.

Cortes, a single mother of a young child, died on April 9 of complications from covid-19.

“If they would have let her go home, she could still be alive,” Salavarria said. “She didn’t deserve this.”

Upon learning on April 9 that Cortes died of complications from covid-19, management notified employees in conversations and then in a letter of “the passing of one of our colleagues,” but did not identify her by name or how she had died because of privacy concerns, according to the company.

LatinoJustice, a nonprofit legal defense fund, documented concerns about Cortes and employees at other supermarkets in an April 30 letter to the chief executive of Lidl US, a chain that owns Best Market and has about 100 stores in the U.S.

After receiving no response, LatinoJustice said it filed a complaint on May 12 with the New York state attorney general.

William Harwood, a Lidl spokesman, said the company had “no reports indicating that she was sick while working. Our policy is clear that employees who are sick should stay home.”

Marian Meszaros, a 63-year-old employee at the Best Market supermarket in Long Island’s Franklin Square in New York, said she believes a manager waited more than a week to inform her in late April that her co-worker in the cramped meat department had tested positive for the coronavirus.

She said the human resources manager offered her five days of paid leave, saying that it was sufficient time off because she had been exposed over a week ago and wasn’t showing symptoms. Meszaros said she believes the manager delayed informing her because the store had been so short-staffed, and she worried she could still get sick and infect her co-workers.

“I have nightmares about this,” Meszaros said. “No one in the store feels safe.”

The supermarket chain in March had announced a new pandemic-related policy that provides 14 days of paid leave to workers who test positive for the coronavirus, as well as paid leave for colleagues who came into close contact with them.

Harwood said the store immediately contacted Meszaros when it learned of the infected employee, and she was given five days off because it had been nine days since they had been in contact at the supermarket. The human resources team called Meszaros to ensure she had no symptoms prior to returning to work, Harwood said.

“We are taking significant steps to protect the health and safety of our team members during this public health emergency,” Harwood said.

Fear of retaliation

As infections have spread within supermarkets, employees at two national chains said that stores retaliated against them for speaking up about safety or discussing sick colleagues.

When a Target manager informed Michael Branss in late April that a co-worker in Palatine, Ill., had tested positive for the coronavirus, Branss said the manager also told him not to talk about the case.

A longtime employee, Branss worked in the back of the store where employees were in close proximity as they unloaded incoming merchandise.

Frustrated by the lack of information about the department where the infected employee had worked, Branss said he called several colleagues and advised them to bring their own masks because the store didn’t always have enough. After noticing a missing co-worker, he and fellow employees discussed whether they had been exposed.

A few hours later, Branss said he was called into the human resources office and reprimanded for talking about the sick employee. He was told the store was concerned about following federal privacy laws.

Fearing retaliation, he said he denied talking about the case. About two and half weeks later, Branss said Target fired him for refusing to answer questions for the store’s investigation of potential privacy violations.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. These are my friends, and I want them to be safe and healthy,” he said. “They punished me for trying to gather information to make a personal safety plan for myself.”

A Target spokeswoman, Danielle Schumann, said Branss was terminated “for conduct reasons unrelated to these claims” but provided no details.

In a Target store in Riverdale, N.J., employee Mary Jo Kalchthaler said workers are informed of their colleagues’ illnesses and deaths but are told not to discuss the cases publicly.

“Every store that I know of has had cases of covid-19, but they don’t want to spook people,” said Kalchthaler, who took a leave of absence in early May because she felt unsafe at work. “There are still people who think Target, Walmart and other food stores are magical kingdoms where everything is sterile and nobody has ever gotten sick, and that’s what they want people to keep thinking.”

Target did not respond to questions about allegations that employees were told not to discuss coronavirus cases. But Schumann said, “while being transparent, we’re also careful to keep team member privacy from being compromised.”

Some workers alleged they have been disciplined simply for raising safety concerns.

In early March, Kris King took two weeks off from his job at a Trader Joe’s in Louisville after coming down with a cough, fever and sore throat.

King said he created a private Facebook group for his colleagues to discuss frustrations with the store’s handling of the pandemic and to come up with recommendations to keep them safe. After he returned to work, a manager on March 21 confronted King about the Facebook messages and repeatedly encouraged him to quit, according to a lawsuit King has since filed against Trader Joe’s.

“He said, ‘If you don’t feel safe here, we can end this right now,’” King recalled in an interview.

A week later, King was terminated. Trader Joe’s cited multiple reasons, including the creation of the Facebook group, according to King.

“The safety of the people I work with is the most important thing and that workers in this situation are able to be heard and have a voice,” said King, a 37-year-old with four children. “And that’s really just not happening.”

Trader Joe’s, which has 505 outlets nationwide and employs 50,000 people, has denied in court his claims, including that the supermarket "was not following appropriate safety measures” at the store.

“We have made it clear that Mr. King’s employment at Trader Joe’s did not end because of desire to set up a social media page or because he expressed concerns,” said Kenya Friend-Daniel, a Trader Joe’s spokeswoman. “I have been clear that ... for privacy reasons I am not at liberty to say more.”

Jon Tenholder, a Trader Joe’s employee at the same Louisville store, received a written disciplinary warning on May 10, roughly two weeks after Tenholder spoke with customers about the Kentucky governor’s order that only one person per household at a time be permitted inside a grocery store.

Management accused Tenholder of making customers uncomfortable by saying they shouldn’t be shopping together. Tenholder refused to sign the incident report and described it in a written rebuttal as “retaliation” for asserting that employees “deserve to be the central voice of our safety.”

Friend-Daniel disputed Tenholder’s account but declined to comment further citing privacy laws.

“We don’t retaliate against people for sharing concerns or for trivial reasons,” Friend-Daniel said.

‘A much better job’

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, has touted its response to the pandemic from the start, including a policy that allowed its 1.5 million U.S. employees to take up to two weeks off if they were exposed to the coronavirus, and waived attendance policies for workers who felt uncomfortable or unable to work.

Shortly after the policy was announced on March 10, Kyle Quiros and his wife, Rebekkah, took jobs as temporary workers at a Walmart in Medina, Ohio. By mid-April, Kyle, who was born with one kidney and has other health problems, had a fever and was vomiting frequently. He said he tested negative for the coronavirus, but a physician recommended he stay home for two weeks.

Rebekkah also fell ill. When she returned to work, she said a supervisor informed her that she was being let go because she had called in sick too many times. A few days later, Kyle came back to work but was sent home because he had a temperature of about 100 degrees. He soon received a call saying his employment was over, despite several weeks left on his contract.

“It was unfair. I was fired because I was sick, even though they have a policy saying you wouldn’t get fired,” he said.

Lopez, the Walmart spokesman, said Rebekkah Quiros was terminated “for performance reasons unrelated to any request for time off due to the pandemic.” He said he “had not been provided with enough information to substantiate” allegations made by Kyle Quiros.

Other Walmart employees also told The Post that workers fear calling in sick because they did not want to jeopardize their jobs.

“These claims are not consistent with the experiences of the more than 235,000 people recently employed by Walmart or the countless other associates that have been able to utilize our emergency leave policy to stay home and keep their jobs protected,” Lopez said.

But in Quincy, days before Lee, the Walmart greeter, was rushed to the hospital on April 20, she told family and friends that she was worried she could lose her job because she was sick and needed time off, said her daughter, Elaine Eklund.

After Lee died, Walmart officials put out a statement saying the company was “mourning alongside their family.” Since then, messages have streamed in from colleagues and longtime shoppers remembering the grandmother of two.

“I worried about her the last time I saw her in the store,” one stranger said in a handwritten letter.

READ MORE

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. (photo: Erin Schaff/Verge)

Congress Has No Idea How Much Web Browsing Data the FBI Collects
Janus Rose, VICE
Rose writes: "With Congress looking to renew the PATRIOT Act, privacy advocates are scrambling to re-attach a provision that would prevent law enforcement agencies from collecting Americans' web histories without a warrant."

EXCERPT:

Over 50 organizations have signed a letter to Pelosi asking for the privacy amendment to be re-added. And next week, Fight For the Future is planning a virtual day of action calling on Congress to rescue the privacy measures.

Wyden's full letter can be read below.

May 20, 2020

The Honourable Richard Grenell
Acting Director

Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Washington, DC. 20511

Dear Director Grenell,

I am writing to inquire whether public reporting on the use of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act would capture the government?s collection of web browsing and internet searches. As you know, on May 13, 2020, 59 U.S. Senators voted to prohibit this form of warrantless surveillance, rejecting the broad, bipartisan View that it represents a dangerous invasion of Americans? privacy.

There have also been long-standing concerns about the inadequacy of public reporting on the use of Section 215, including whether the data released annually by the Director of National Intelligence adequately captures the extent of the government?s collection activities and its impact on Americans. These concerns are magnified by the lack of clarity as to how the public reporting requirements would apply to web browsing and internet searches.

Current law requires the DN1 to report publicly on the number of targets of Section 215 collection and the number of unique identifiers used to communicate information? the government collects. In its annual Statistical Transparency Report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has used email addresses as an example of a unique identifier. While this may help put into context the scale of the government?s collection of email communications, 1 am concerned it does not necessarily apply to web browsing and internet searches. This ambiguity creates the likelihood that Congress and the American people may not be given the information to realize the scale of warrantless government surveillance of their use of the internet. I therefore request that you respond to the following questions:

How would the government apply the public reporting requirements for Section 215 to web browsing and internet searches? In this context, would the target or unique identifier be an IP address?

If the target or unique identifier is an IP address, would the government differentiate among multiple individuals using the same IP address, such as family members and roommates using the same WiFi network, or could numerous users appear as a single target or ?unique identifier?

If the government were to collect web browsing information about everyone who visited a particular website, would those visitors be considered targets or ?unique identi?ers? for purposes of the public reporting? Would the public reporting data capture every internet user whose access to that website was collected by the government?

If the government were to collect web browsing and internet searches associated with a single user, would the public reporting requirement capture the. scope of the collection? In other words, how would the public reporting requirement distinguish between the government collecting information about a single visit to a website or a single search by one person and a month or a year of a person?s internet use? Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Sincerely,

Ron Wyden
United States Senator

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Brazilian resident Jair Bolsonaro outside the Planalto Palace in Brasília on Monday. (photo: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

'Horror Show': Critics Hope Bolsonaro's Foul Tirade Could End Rule
Tom Phillips, Guardian UK
Phillips writes: "Jair Bolsonaro swore 34 times during a two-hour cabinet meeting some think could help bring his four-year term to a premature end."

Brazilians horrified by lack of focus on Covid-19, which has now killed more than 21,000

“If [the left] had taken power in 1964 we’d be fucked,” Brazil’s pro-dictatorship president proclaimed at one point.

After a video of the session was made public that painted a wretched portrait of Bolsonaro’s far-right administration some believe that he now is – in the mid-term at least.

“A horror show,” tweeted Marina Silva, a one-time presidential rival, after she, like much of Brazil, watched the expletive-ridden footage. “The whole of Brazil has now seen the sinister entrails running the country … This cannot go on.”

The video, which is at the centre of a potentially presidency-ending investigation into claims Bolsonaro tried to meddle in the federal police, was divulged on Friday after a supreme court ruling. It shows a cabinet summit at the presidential palace on 22 April – and a carnival of cusswords and conspiracy.

Bolsonaro emerges as Brazil’s curser-in-chief, uttering 34 swearwords, according to local reports. “These bastards are after our freedom – that’s why I want the people to arm themselves,” Bolsonaro declares at one point.

“Oh just fuck right off. I was the one who chose this bloody team,” Bolsonaro later grumbles about a lack of media praise for his leadership.

Elsewhere the rightwing populist rejects criticism over his flouting of social distancing guidelines. “A bad example my arse,” Bolsonaro snaps, before apparently confusing the word “hemorrhoid” with either “hegemony” or “hemorrhage”.

On a fourth occasion, which could have serious implications for his presidency by providing potential grounds for impeachment, Bolsonaro seems to confirm claims from his ex-justice minister Sergio Moro that he sought to shield his family from investigation by meddling in the federal police.

“I’m not going to wait for them to fuck my whole family or my friends just for shits and giggles,” Bolsonaro says. Nineteen of the president’s relatives are reportedly facing police scrutiny, including two sons, although Bolsonaro denies that is the case.

Bolsonaro’s coarseness made front-page headlines but many were most horrified by the lack of focus on Covid-19, which has now killed more than 21,000 Brazilians. “On the day of the meeting Brazil had already suffered nearly 3,000 Covid deaths – and the issue simply wasn’t raised,” said Sônia Bridi, an author and broadcaster. “This just shows how we’ve been abandoned by the federal government during this pandemic.”

One of the only ministers to raise the crisis was environment chief Ricardo Salles who suggested it had distracted the press and provided good cover to enact highly controversial changes to environmental legislation.

“The minister’s words are criminally opportunistic – to take advantage of the fact that the country is facing a pandemic to advance this agenda of environmental destruction,” said Flávia Oliveira, a columnist for the newspaper O Globo.

Another source of alarm was an authoritarian outburst from Bolsonaro’s education minister, Abraham Weintraub, who branded supreme court judges “punks” who needed jailing.

Bolsonaro’s human rights minister, Damares Alves, raised the spectre of a supposed plot to contaminate indigenous people in the Amazon with Covid-19 in order to “decimate” their villages and discredit Bolsonaro.

Bridi said the video had left her feeling ashamed: “We don’t use this kind of ‘presidential’ language in my house, and my parents didn’t allow it either.”

“But more than shame I felt sadness,” Bridi added. “They have no plan for the country – and the country is now in the hands of people who are worse than unqualified.” Brazil was witnessing “the empowerment of stupidity and ignorance”.

Oliveira said she had been repulsed at Bolsonaro’s “egocentric, shallow and offensive” show. “What you see is a government that isn’t in the slightest bit engaged with the most pressing issue, not just for the country but for the whole planet.” Was it any wonder Brazil had been “plunged into this spiral of death, illness, inefficiency and incompetence” when this was the group in charge?

But one thing had come as a relief to Oliveira, who is one of Brazil’s leading black voices. Bolsonaro’s all-white and almost entirely male cabinet contained not a single Afro-Brazilian face. “The lack of diversity is shameful … But thank goodness my black brothers and sisters aren’t part of this. Thank goodness the indigenous are not involved. It gives me the chills to say this but thank goodness this isn’t our work. It’s the work of those who have always had a supremacist and destructive vision of Brazil.”

Bolsonaro celebrated his vulgarity as proof he was a man of the people. “Is there swearing? Yes,” he told reporters. “I’m sorry – if you don’t like it vote for some boring suit next time.”

Monica de Bolle, a Brazil specialist from the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said the video was part of “a horror film that is playing out in real time”. “None of what was said is unexpected. All of it is shocking,” she said.

READ MORE

Urban farmer Ali Greer inspects her crops at Avenue 33 Farm, a backyard urban farm in Los Angeles, California, on March 25, 2020. (photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)

COVID-19 Sparks a Rebirth of the Local Farm Movement
Stephanie Hiller, YES! Magazine
Hiller writes: "When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the future of the Cannard Family Farm - whose organic vegetables supplied a single Berkeley restaurant - was looking stark."
READ MORE

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