LET’S GET INVOLVED! Here in Tucson, we have a chance to provide comment directly to the Arizona Dept. of Insurance on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 – 11:00 a.m. at the Arizona Corporation Commission, Room 222, located at 400 West Congress Street. Public comment can also be sent to ratereview@azinsurance.gov through May 24, 2012.

Here’s why we need to take advantage of this opportunity:

Recently, St. Luke’s Health Initiatives and the Arizona PIRG Education Fund issued a report Getting All the Cards on the Table: The Premise and Promise of Health Insurance Rate Review in Arizona. According to the report, the track records of states that have adopted strong rate review processes show that they meet a real need and can deliver results for consumers:

 Iowa regulators found that a third of filed rate proposals were unreasonable and lowered them,  saving consumers an average of 40 percent off their premiums in these cases.

 In New Hampshire, rate review brought an insurer’s proposed doubling of rates down to a 12.5 percent increase.

 Oregon consumers saved $25 million in the first year after the state strengthened its rate review process in 2009, requiring greater transparency and consumer participation.

The report points to the following steps Arizona should take to strengthen its rate review process:

1. Arizona should make its rate review process more effective in protecting consumers by strengthening the Arizona Department of Insurance’s authority to prevent unreasonable rate increases from going into effect. Over 30 states already have prior approval authority for at least some insurance products,  including New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

For all proposed rate increases or decreases, insurers should be required to file a full range of information with the Arizona Department of Insurance. The Department should make this information publicly accessible, allowing consumers to judge the quality and cost of their care, and enabling advocates to more constructively engage in the Department’s rate review activities.

2. The Arizona Department of Insurance should post all rate increase information on a prominent and easy-to-use website in order for consumers to research rate filings. The Department should offer easy ways for consumers to comment on pending filings and hold public hearings on rate filings.

Let’s tell the Arizona Dept. of Insurance we want transparency and the ability to be involved.

References:  See CALPIRG, Keeping Insurers Honest, May 2010, at http://www.calpirg.org/reports/caf/keeping-insurers-honest.
See Kaiser Family Foundation, State Health Facts – Rate Review, Small Group, and Rate Review, Individual, at http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparetable.jsp?ind=888&cat=7 and http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparetable.jsp?ind=887&cat=7; for the New Mexico law, see SB 208 (Feldman), Health Insurance Rate Increase Review, 2011 Regular Session, at http://www.nmlegis.gov/lcs/_session.aspx?chamber=S&legtype=B&legno=208&year=11.

More information can be found at www.arizonapirg.org or calling (602)252-9227.

Amidst Growing Tensions in Asia, India-Pakistan Confrontation Used to Show Dire Consequences Around the Globe; More Than A Billion People Would be at Risk Under “Nuclear Famine” Scenario.

More than a billion people around the world would face starvation following a limited regional nuclear weapons exchange (such as a clash between India and Pakistan) that would cause major worldwide climate disruption driving down food production in China, the U.S. and other nations, according to a major new report released today by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and its US affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR).

Dr. Ira Helfand, the author of “Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk—Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition,” said: “The grim prospect of nuclear famine requires a fundamental change in our thinking about nuclear weapons. The new evidence that even the relatively small nuclear arsenals of countries such as India and Pakistan could cause long lasting, global damage to the Earth’s ecosystems and threaten hundreds of millions of already malnourished people demands that action be taken. The needless and preventable deaths of one billion people over a decade would be a disaster unprecedented in human history. It would not cause the extinction of the human race, but it would bring an end to modern civilization as we know it.”

The findings and the methodology on which the study is based will be published in a forthcoming issue of the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change. Released during the World Summit of Nobel Laureates in Chicago April 23-25, 2012, the Helfand report was made possible with the financial support of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

Among the specific findings outlined in the report:

 Corn production in the US would decline by an average of 10 percent for an entire decade, with the most severe decline (20 percent) in Year 5. Soybean production would decline by about 7 percent, with the most severe loss, more than 20 percent, in Year 5.

 There would be a significant decline in middle-season rice production in China. During the first four years, rice production would decline by an average of 21 percent; over the next six years the decline would average 10 percent.

 Resulting increases in food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest. Even if agricultural markets continued to function normally, 215 million people would be added to the rolls of the malnourished over the course of a decade. The 925 million people in the world who are already chronically malnourished (with a baseline consumption of 1,750 calories or less per day), would be put at risk by a further 10 percent decline in their food consumption.

 Significant agricultural shortfalls over an extended period would almost certainly lead to panic and hoarding on an international scale, further reducing accessible food.

The IPPNW/PSR report concludes: “There is an urgent need to reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons by all nuclear weapons states and to move with all possible speed to the negotiation of a nuclear weapons convention that will ban these weapons completely.”

Commenting on the report, Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala, president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a member of the governing board of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the former UN Under Secretary General of Disarmament Affairs, said: “Scientific evidence continues to confirm empirically what we already know – that nuclear weapons are the most destructive weapon of mass destruction ever invented with unrivaled genetic and ecological effects. And yet, unlike biological and chemical weapons, they have not been outlawed because of vested interests. Nine countries have 20,530 nuclear warheads among them 95 percent with the US and Russia. As long as these weapons exist others, including terrorists, will want them. As long as we have nuclear weapons their use by intention or accident; by states or by non-state actors is inevitable. Their total elimination through a Nuclear Weapons Convention is therefore the only solution.”

Former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the founding chairman, Green Cross International, said: “I am convinced that nuclear weapons must be abolished. Their use in a military conflict is unthinkable; using them to achieve political objectives is immoral. Over twenty-five years ago, President Ronald Reagan and I ended our summit meeting in Geneva with a joint statement that ‘nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,’ and this new study underscores in stunning and disturbing detail why this is the case and why we must discard Cold War-style plans for the possible use of these weapons and move rapidly to eliminating them from the world’s arsenals.”

Dr. Helfand is the North American vice president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and a past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Working with data produced by scientists who have studied the climate effects of a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan, Dr. Helfand and a team of experts in agriculture and nutrition determined that plunging temperatures and reduced precipitation in critical farming regions, caused by soot and smoke lofted into the atmosphere by multiple nuclear explosions, would interfere with crop production and affect food availability and prices worldwide.

ABOUT THE GROUPS

Physicians for Social Responsibility is the largest physician-led organization in the U.S. working to prevent nuclear war and proliferation and to slow, stop and reverse global warming without using expensive, unsafe nuclear power and toxic degradation of the environment. PSR’s 50,000 health professionals and concerned citizen members and e-activists, 30 PSR chapters, and 41 student PSR chapters at medical and public health schools, along with national and chapter staff, form a unique nationwide network committed to a safer and healthy world. For more information, go to http://www.psr.org on the Web.

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War is a non-partisan federation of national medical organizations in 63 countries, representing tens of thousands of doctors, medical students, other health workers, and concerned citizens who share the common goal of creating a more peaceful and secure world freed from the threat of nuclear annihilation. See http://www.ippnw.org on the Web.

CONTACT: Will Harwood, for PSR, +1 (703) 276-3255 or wharwood@hastingsgroup.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: A streaming audio replay of a related news event will be available on the Web on April 24, 2012 at 1 p.m. EDT/noon CDT/6 p.m. London BST/10 p.m. Lahore PKT/10:30 p.m. Mumbai IST at http://www.psr.org.

How many lobbyists does it take to defend billions in subsidies for one of the most profitable industries in the world? 786. That’s the size of the army that oil and gas companies maintain in Washington to strong-arm Congress into bankrolling an industry that is cutting jobs and literally fueling the climate crisis. This army is bigger than Congress itself, which has only 535 members.

Last year, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee decided to investigate Big Oil’s jobs claims – and it turns out the industry has gone on a firing spree in recent years. They discovered that despite generating $546 billion in profits between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP reduced their U.S. workforce by 11,200 employees over that period. In 2010 alone, the top five oil companies slashed their global workforce by 4,400 employees – the same year executives paid themselves nearly $220 million. But at least those working in the industry as a whole get paid high wages, right? Turns out that 40 percent of U.S oil-industry jobs consist of minimum-wage work at gas stations.

With job numbers like these, it is no wonder the fossil-fuel industry needs to spend millions ensuring they are not branded as “job killers.” As Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said, “Oil companies that make record profits and then cut American jobs strain their own credibility when they claim to be huge job-creators.”

And it gets worse. In what must rank as one of the greatest boondoggles in history, Big Oil is leveraging its taxpayer subsidies to rake in profits that, in the words of The New York Times, are “being continuously recycled to win the support of pliable legislators [and] underwrite misleading advertising campaigns.”

There is also a bigger, far more insidious way that Big Oil is killing jobs and undermining our economy: The industry remains hell-bent on denying climate change and obstructing climate action.

But the planet appears to be running a campaign of its own to persuade Americans that the oil lobby is leading us ever closer to economic ruin. Over the last year alone, hurricanes, floods, and droughts have had a devastating effect on American jobs. After tornadoes hit the area around Tuscaloosa, Ala., in April of last year, more than 6,000 people applied for disaster-related unemployment benefits. In Vermont, the number of workers filing unemployment claims went from 731 before Hurricane Irene to 1,331 two weeks afterwards. For the U.S. economy as a whole, 2011 was a historic year for expensive weather-related disasters, costing taxpayers $52 billion.

Consider one of the centers of U.S. oil production: Louisiana. Economists have been studying the long-term economic effects of Hurricane Katrina [PDF] in hopes of modeling the risks for the rest of the nation’s coastal regions. They found that Katrina wiped out 129,000 jobs in the New Orleans region – about 19 percent. Three years later, in 2008, 47,000 of the jobs lost in Katrina had returned, but 82,000 had not – and that doesn’t even consider the tens of thousands of new jobs that likely would have been created had there been no Katrina.

Our nation is in desperate need of jobs. Instead of bankrolling an industry that is laying off workers and threatening our economic future, why not take the billions in subsidies going to oil companies and invest instead in a sector that both creates jobs and protects the planet? It will be money well spent: According to the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, investment in a green infrastructure program would create nearly four times as many jobs as an equal investment in oil and gas.

Big Oil has spent millions positioning itself as the ultimate job creator, while branding those of us pushing to end fossil-fuel subsidies as “job killers.” But we are the ones fighting to put people back to work and ensure that we have a sustainable economy for generations to come. The oil and gas industry may have an army of 786 lobbyists, but we tally in the hundreds of thousands. This is the year we are coming to take our money back, create jobs, and protect our planet.

May Boeve is the executive director of 350.org. Brendan Smith is an oysterman and cofounder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. Original published by Grist

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/2012/02/07/20120207security-making-us-insecure.html

I value a country that invests in our people, our health, and a socially responsible future. We are not broke. Rather, our financial choices are a matter of our priorities as a nation.

States across the country are laying off teachers and reducing investment in schools. Yet we continue to waste billions on unnecessary military spending. Moreover, increased investment in military and nuclear weapons sends the wrong message to the international community.

I understand that there will be difficult choices ahead as our government attempts to rein in spending. We must, however, not make cuts that harm our children and seniors, the most vulnerable and least powerful, in order to protect a military strategy that is a relic of the Cold War. It is a matter of priorities.

We have 104 nuclear power plants with over 50% being over 30 years old. These plants are initially licensed to be in use for 40 years. Utilities across the nation have been applying to extend licenses to 60 total years. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is acting as a rubber stamp commission and has not turned down one extension so far. As nuclear facilities age, leaks become more common. The report cited above notes that 75% of our power plants have been reported to be leaking tritium through mechanisms that are very difficult to detect and the leaks may go on for some time before discovered. Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that is produced in reactors and in nuclear fuel processing. It causes cancer and genetic mutations resulting in birth defects. Tritium finds its way into our water tables and hence into drinking water.

The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say that populations are at risk of contamination from serious accidents and from leakage into the water table if they live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant. In fact, 49 million Americans live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant in 35 states. Of these, 21 million have their drinking water sources within these 50 miles from a nuclear power plant. The most glaring example of such a risk is that New York City, with 11 million people, is within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant and their drinking water is within that range also.

In the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, radioactive particles traveled well beyond the 50 mile high risk radius all the way to Tokyo, 130 miles away, to contaminate vegetable greens, milk and other foods. The water closer to the power plant is contaminated with not only tritium, but with radioactive cesium-37 and strontium-90;  and plutonium-139 is found distributed around the territory of the plant. The half lives of cesium and strontium are about 30 years and the plutonium has a half of life (the time after which only half of the substance has decayed) of 24,000 years! These contaminants render whole communities and regions uninhabitable forever from our perspectives. All of them cause many kinds of cancer, leukemia, birth defects and other extreme health problems.

So we are already seeing contamination of our water by tritium; we have 3 nuclear power plants sitting on major earthquake faults and near very large cities; 6 of our reactors are the same as that in the Fukushima disaster (the General Electric Mark 1); and our reactors are old and becoming more and more unsafe. What to do?

The answers are definitely not to build new reactors at enormous costs and financial risks to taxpayers. Yes, WE pay those loan guarantees and subsidies out of our taxes. Here is what needs to be done immediately:

• Regular testing of all groundwater for tritium and other possible leaks within 50 mile radii of all nuclear power plants
• Comprehensive safety reviews of our nuclear power plants – now and regularly
• Immediate change, replacement or repair of any unsafe conditions or practices found in safety reviews by neutral and unbiased observers and inspectors.
• Retirement of all existing nuclear power plants at the end of their current operating system licenses. No extensions of operating licenses beyond the life of the reactor.
• Abandon all plans for new nuclear power plants
• Replace all existing power plants at the end of their current operating licenses with clean, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power and with much more energy efficiency practices.

• Do NOT make plans to start moving nuclear waste products and fuel rods around the country for storage in places where the wastes can leak into the water tables and transportation can put us all at risk of life threatening and community threatening accidents. We need to keep spent fuel in hardened on-site storage at the plant site where it is produced for about 100 years, then ship these heavy units off to permanent storage.

Remember, Plutonium is Forever!

“Just posted on CarbonTax.org: Why Isn’t The Environmental Community Using the Fiscal And Tax Reform “Window” to Push For A Carbon Tax? It features Brookings Climate & Energy Director Adele Morris’ wake up call to the environmental community.

“A carbon tax offers a unique and powerful combination of fiscal, economic-efficiency and environmental benefits, argued Adele Morris, the Brookings Institution’s Policy Director for Climate and Energy Economics, at an Oct. 18 forum convened by the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute and the Tax Policy Center. Morris acknowledged the political obstacles. One of course is the failure of anti-tax politicians to distinguish between beneficial “Pigouvian” taxes on pollution and conventional taxes that burden and discourage productive activity. But another has been “tepid” support for a carbon tax from the environmental community.

“We heard that as a challenge: Why has the environmental community (with a few notable exceptions) parked itself on the sidelines of this crucial policy debate?

“Adele shared her presentation text, which we reproduce

“If you prefer video, see Brookings’ short summary of Adele’s presentation here.    All five of the other panelists at the (bipartisan) Brookings forum advocated a Value Added Tax. Like a Carbon Tax, a VAT is a consumption tax, but without the environmental benefits of a tax focused on greenhouse gas pollution. A VAT was the main recommendation of both the Simpson-Bowles and Rivlin Domenici deficit commissions last year, despite Alice Rivlin’s efforts to include a carbon tax. And a VAT is where Congress seems likely to go, unless they hear support for a carbon tax.

Let’s wake up the climate movement and get engaged in this policy debate. It may be the most promising route to a carbon price we’ll see for a long time.”
Best regards,
-jh
James Handley
Carbon Tax Center
202-546-5692

Check it out and enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr7KCswD1qM

Many of us would like this process to include and enhance a very challenging but critical approach to water: that of measuring, detecting, managing and preventing threats to to the quality of our water. This is a growing challenge, as we all know.

Understanding what is added to our water is complex. Part of the problem is associated with managing the storage, distribution and transport processes. For us, this involves looking at the “Water-Energy Nexus”. Another critical part is knowing what we inadvertently or intentionally add to our water as waste products. Many water quality issues are very challenging and costly to manage. But we rely too heavily on the regulatory processes of national government (the EPA) to tell us what we must do and this can become a never ending game of catch up or actions taken too late. The Clean Water Act is critical but let’s do our part in working to prevent that which it must regulate.

Prevention and protection of water quality means reduction of the problems of water contamination from the start. Our water planning in our communities must be innovative and proactive. Let’s think of a few such approaches:

 Look at the water-energy nexus for how energy, used for pumping water may not itself be clean or sustainable. Coal burning power plants produce many life threatening chemicals (such as lead, mercury, arsenic, etc.) that end up in our water table and expose surrounding communities. Use solar or wind power for pumping and prevent these exposures.
 Every day, we all contribute to pharmaceutical contamination of our water with such things as “endocrine disrupters” and much more. We can create safe drug disposal programs, safe waste handling programs for toxic chemicals, strong local regulations to prevent toxic dumping, or broad education and action on use of safer organic chemical products in our communities.
 Industries dump toxic chemicals. We can develop major, multifaceted and visible community education and prevention programs to stop introduction of pharmaceutical and other chemical contaminants into our water by business and individual members of our community. Toxics should not end up in our drains, rivers, lakes, streams, washes, or groundwater.

We can be innovative, energetic and proactive when it comes to water quality. Let’s not leave this challenge up to the slow and arduous progress of research, which slowly percolates into the bureaucratic processes of regulation. Regulation is necessary for when we fail at Prevention and for guiding community safety standards. However, the data is out there now for our own proactive use in our communities.

A trio of Experts Outline Eight Key Concerns: Ongoing Health Woes in Japan, Unaddressed Design Flaws and Inadequate U.S. Regulatory Response Seen As Troubling.
Published WASHINGTON, D.C., September 8, 2011 Regulatory, scientific and health experts agree: The “3/11” Fukushima reactor disaster is still ongoing six month later … and some major lessons are in danger of going unheeded.

Sunday marks the six-month anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis. In anticipation of that milestone, three leading U.S. experts held a news conference to outline both what is now known in the wake of the disaster in Japan and where things stand for the nuclear power industry in the United States.

The news event speakers were:
– Peter Bradford, former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, former chair of the New York and Maine utility regulatory commissions, and currently adjunct professor at Vermont Law School on “Nuclear Power and Public Policy”
– Edwin Lyman, Ph.D., senior scientist, Global Security Program, Union of Concerned Scientists
– Dr. Andrew Kanter, national board president elect (2012), Physicians for Social Responsibility, and director of Medical Informatics/Health Info Services, Millennium Villages Project, Earth Institute, Columbia University.

The following eight concerns and lessons were among those outlined by the speakers:
1. The U.S. regulatory response since Fukushima has been inadequate. “Six months after Fukushima, it seems clear that the U.S. is not going to undertake the type of fundamental, no-holds-barred look at its nuclear regulatory practices that followed the much less serious accident at Three Mile Island some 30 years ago.” – Peter Bradford
2. America should avoid post-9/11 mistakes in tightening reactor safety standards. “In responding to Fukushima by issuing orders, the NRC should not make the same mistakes as it did following 9/11, when industry stonewalling delayed implementation of critical security measures for many years. Even today, some post 9/11 security upgrades have not been completed at numerous plants … The worldwide response to the Three Mile Island accident was clearly inadequate to prevent even worse events from occurring. The U.S. must respond to Fukushima in a much more comprehensive way or it may soon face an accident even worse than Fukushima.” – Edwin Lyman
3. Overall Japanese health dangers are getting short shrift. “The last six months have shown a continued pattern of secrecy, cover-up, and minimization …. (The) news media and some so-called authorities have repeated the false information that doses under 100 mSv (millisieverts) have no health effects. All radiation doses have some effect, particularly when large populations are exposed. The Japanese government’s decision to increase the maximum allowed dose for citizens of Fukushima (including children) from 1 mSv per year to 20 mSv, the equivalent of 200 chest x-rays or the maximum many countries allow for nuclear workers … is unacceptable and remains in place despite vehement public and international pressure.” — Dr. Andrew Kanter
4. In particular, the impact on the health of Japanese children is being glossed over. “Children are at least three-to-four times more susceptible to radiation than are adults. There are about 350,000 children under 18 in Fukushima Prefecture. If each of these children were exposed to the 20 mSv maximum over two consecutive years, the National Academy of Sciences BEIR VII report would predict 2,500 additional cancer deaths… The upshot is that there is no safe dose of radiation and exposing non-consenting people, especially children, to these increased health risks is medically unacceptable. The Japanese government is not adequately monitoring radiation contamination of soil, food, water, and air and is not providing the parents with sufficient information to protect their children.” — Dr. Andrew Kanter
5. The U.S. was warned of Fukushima-style problems but failed to act … and is still failing to do so. “U.S. reactors have some of the shortcomings of the Fukushima plants. Furthermore, citizen groups and scientists had tried to call one of these – spent fuel pool vulnerability — to Nuclear Regulatory Commission attention during the last decade. The NRC dismissed these efforts, with one commissioner even ordering the staff to do a review designed to discredit the concerns. The NRC reviews of Fukushima to date are all well and good, but the Commission and the Congress need to face up to the deeper lessons of Fukushima as well. When mishaps occur at nuclear power plants, the NRC requires a “root cause analysis” that gets at the underlying causes as well as the immediate technical problems. Without a root cause analysis of its own failure to heed the now validated warnings about spent fuel pools, the NRC may patch the technical problems revealed by Fukushima, but it won’t fix the underlying shortcomings that allow defects to persist until catastrophic events rather than regulatory vigilance force the nuclear industry and the public to face up to them.” – Peter Bradford
6. Emergency planning zones in the U.S. must be expanded. “The NRC Task Force report got some things right but others wrong. In contrast to the Task Force conclusions, we believe that emergency planning zones should be expanded, certain hydrogen control measures should be immediately enforced and spent fuel transfer to dry casks should be accelerated. Also, the safety margins of new reactors need to be reassessed.” — Edwin Lyman
7. The recent East Coast earthquake should spur more NRC safety analysis. “The earthquake near the North Anna nuclear plant, which reportedly exceeded the plant’s seismic design basis, reinforces the urgency of the NRC Fukushima task force’s recommendation that all plants immediately be reviewed for their vulnerability to seismic and flooding hazards based on the best available information today.” – Edwin Lyman
8. Fukushima is turning out to be much worse than Chernobyl. “Although the Chernobyl reactor explosion was devastating, scattering the majority of its nuclear core across a wide swath of Europe, the Fukushima accident involved three reactors, which underwent meltdowns (or melt-throughs) and four spent-fuel pools that suffered damage. It will take years to measure the total release of radioactive materials into the environment from Fukushima, but we already know that that the immediate releases are now estimated as being twice as high as originally admitted. Some authoritative sources, using releases of radioactive Xenon as a marker, show that the amount of Fukushima Daiichi radioactive fuel that has been damaged/released could be several times that of the Chernobyl release. Another estimate has the equivalent of 168 Hiroshima bomb’s worth of Cesium have been released onto Japan.” – Dr. Andrew Kanter