Repost of an email from the Pension Boards of the UCC [Editor: I usually refrain from posting articles from my faith community, the UCC. But this report is an exception – it’s encouraging to hear about interfaith efforts to control gun violence and promote environmentally-friendly projects through responsible investment policies. – R.S.]
Corporate Social Responsibility
FAITH & FINANCE IN ACTION
December, 2018
“…action to change laws, influence corporate behavior, and work together as a society to bring about life-sustaining change is the co-creative call of God in our lives to do much more.”
The Pension Boards, through its Faith and Finance Initiative, investment policies, and discernment around its social justice ministry, has responded to the overwhelming call of acting on the issue of gun violence in our country. The Pension Boards has joined with ecumenical partners in calling for specific action to reduce gun violence and live out our commitment to the UCC’s Three Great Loves initiative by engaging in life-sustaining rather than death-dealing action. An extension of our witness to the corporate world has resulted in bold action described in the article below. We invite your response.
The Pension Boards Adds Gun Screen to Investment Policy
Religious organizations, including the Pension Boards, have called for common sense measures to reduce gun violence without interfering in Second Amendment Constitutional rights of legitimate gun owners for several years, even before the most recent mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. PBUCC, however, decided that more action was necessary.
On August 1, 2018, the Investment Committee of the Pension Boards’ Board of Trustees voted to eliminate direct investment in U.S. companies engaged in the production of small arms ammunition or firearms, including pistols, revolvers, rifles, shotguns, or sub-machine guns, and that derive 10% or more of revenues from sales.
Prior to the vote, on May 9, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Committee of the Pension Boards voted unanimously to recommend that the Investment Committee consider an appropriate screen, or policy, regarding firearms. Read the full article.
Catalyzing Corporate Change
In the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) newsletter, read about the more than 100 corporate wins ICCR members scored during the 2018 proxy season, demonstrating the environmental/social concerns shared by mainstream investors. ICCR is a coalition of over 300 institutional investors working together to promote more just and sustainable corporate practices. READ MORE
Repost from the Sacramento Bee [Editor: note that Capitol Corridor is upgraded, but other Union Pacific and AMTRAK systems are not yet complete. The railroads continue to drag their heels. – R.S.]
Capitol Corridor passenger trains just got the biggest safety upgrade in a century
By Tony Bizjak, December 26, 2018 03:00 AM
Apologies for the ads that precede this video…
Two years ago an Amtrak Capitol Corridor passenger train outside Sacramento jolted so violently that passengers thought it would derail.
The engineer had mistakenly sped at double the limit through a track crossover. Coffees, laptops and some bodies went flying. Two people were slightly injured. Ultimately, two train operators were disciplined. But the human-error incident left several passengers saying they wondered if rail officials were really focused on safety.
Now, corridor train officials say, an incident like that is unlikely to happen again.
As of this fall, all trains on the 170-mile Capitol Corridor system have been equipped with a computer system that will take control of the train from the engineer if the engineer fails to heed speed or other warnings.
The system, called Positive Train Control (PTC), gives the engineer an auditory countdown to act if danger looms. If the train is headed toward a curve at too high a speed, for instance, the system will warn the engineer. If the engineer fails to take remedial action in a timely fashion, the computer takes control and stops the train.
Amtrak, which operates the Capitol Corridor line, is one of 41 railroads that have been mandated by the federal government to install the system.
Federal Railroad Administration chief Ronald Batory, speaking recently to Congress, called PTC “the most fundamental change in rail safety technology since the introduction of Automatic Train Control in the 1920s.”
Davis City Councilman Lucas Frerichs, the Capitol Corridor board chairman, said the new system is a major step and statement about the importance of passenger safety.
“PTC is the gold standard of rail safety, and its implementation on the Capitol Corridor fleet that carried a record 1.7 million passengers last year is a huge milestone,” Frerichs said.
The implementation period since October, however, has been suffering from multiple technology glitches. Numerous trains have been delayed because of technical difficulties with the PTC system, Capitol Corridor chief David Kutrosky said.
He said crews have typically been able to correct the problems in a few minutes in most cases, and the number of issues is on the decline.
“With any new technology, it just doesn’t work to full specifications on day one,” Kutrosky said. “You need to work through the systems. We knew there would be some delays. The delays are trending downward.”
Kutrosky said the PTC system has not yet had to step in to take over control of a train.
Capitol Corridor is among the first rail lines in the country to have its system fully up and running.
The federal government first mandated the PTC system for major railroads after a Metrolink passenger train engineer became distracted by text messages on his cell phone, causing the train to go through a red signal and crash head-on into a freight train. The 2008 crash killed 25.
Railroads have been slow to install the system, complaining it is complicated and costly. The federal government has repeatedly extended the deadline for railroads to have the system fully up, tested and running. The initial deadline of 2015 was first extended to the end of 2018, but that deadline, too, was extended for some railroads to 2020.
Union Pacific, the largest rail track owner and freight shipper in Northern California, has informed the federal government it will not be finished getting the system tested and fully operational by the end of this month, and is requesting an extension to 2020.
Although the Capitol Corridor train system has finished its PTC installation and testing, Amtrak overall will not meet the Dec. 31 deadline and has requested an extension to 2020.
Critics, including some members of Congress, say the railroads are dragging their heels and the federal government is complicit in letting them get away with it.
Experts say several recent fatal crashes likely would have been avoided if PTC had been fully in place and operating nationally.
In December of 2017, three people were killed and dozens injured when an Amtrak train in Washington sped at twice the speed limit through a turn and derailed onto Interstate 5. In February, an Amtrak train ran head-on into a freight train in South Carolina, killing two and injuring 100.
The system has limitations, rail officials say. While the computers know what speeds to go, as well as whether the train is on the correct track, the system cannot detect whether a person, car or other object is on the tracks ahead.
APNewsBreak: US miscalculated benefit of better train brakes
By Matthew Brown, December 20, 2018
FILE- In this Nov. 8, 2013 file photo, a tanker carrying crude oil burns after derailing in western Alabama outside Aliceville, Ala. The Trump admiinistration vastly understated the potential benefits of installing mmore advanceed brakes on trains that haul explosive fuels when it cancelled a requirement for railroads to begin using the equipment. A government analysis used by the administration to justify the cancellation omitted up to $117 illion in potential reduced damages from using electronic brakes. Department of Transportation officials acknnowledged the error after it was discovered by The Associated Press during a review of federal documents but said it would not have changed their decision. (Bill Castle/ABC 33/40 via AP, File)
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration miscalculated the potential benefits of putting better brakes on trains that haul explosive fuels when it scrapped an Obama-era rule over cost concerns, The Associated Press has found.
A government analysis used to justify the cancellation omitted up to $117 million in estimated future damages from train derailments that could be avoided by using electronic brakes. Revelation of the error stoked renewed criticism Thursday from the rule’s supporters, who called the analysis biased.
Department of Transportation officials acknowledged the mistake after it was discovered by the AP during a review of federal documents. They said a correction will be published to the federal register.
But transportation spokesman Bobby Fraser said the decision not to require the brakes would stand under a Congressional act that said the costs couldn’t exceed the rule’s benefits.
“This was an unintentional error,” Fraser. “With the correction, in all scenarios costs still outweigh benefits.”
Safety advocates, transportation union leaders and Democratic lawmakers oppose the administration’s decision to kill the brake rule, which was included in a package of rail safety measures enacted in 2015 under President Barack Obama following dozens of accidents by trains hauling oil and ethanol in the U.S. and Canada.
The deadliest happened in Canada in 2013, when an unattended train carrying crude oil rolled down an incline, came off the tracks in the town of Lac-Megantic and exploded into a massive ball of fire, killing 47 people and obliterating much of the Quebec community’s downtown.
There have been other fiery crashes and fuel spills in Alabama, Oregon, Montana, Virginia, West Virginia, North Dakota, Illinois and elsewhere.
Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley said the administration should reconsider the brake rule in light of its miscalculation.
“The omission of $117 million from the rule’s anticipated benefits is further proof that the Trump administration is willing to cut corners to put industry profits ahead of the American people’s safety,” said Merkley, a Democrat. He called for “a new cost-benefit analysis that is full and transparent.”
After the brake rule was enacted, lobbyists for the railroad and oil industries pushed to cancel it, citing the high cost of installing so-called electronic pneumatic brakes and questioning their effectiveness.
But supporters of the brakes said the issue should be reconsidered given the miscalculation and concerns about other benefits that may have been ignored, including reducing the frequency of runaway trains and severity of train-on-train collisions, said Robert Duff, a senior adviser to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.
“This is not theoretical risk. We’ve actually seen these derailments,” Duff said.
Unlike other systems where brakes are applied sequentially along the length of a train, electronic pneumatic brakes, or ECP, work on all cars simultaneously. That can reduce the distance and time a train needs to stop and cause fewer cars to derail.
“These ECP brakes are very important for oil trains,” said Steven Ditmeyer, a rail safety expert and former senior official at the Federal Railroad Administration. “It makes a great deal of sense: All the brakes get applied immediately, and there would be fewer cars in the pileup.”
Under Obama, the Transportation Department determined the brakes would cost up to $664 million over 20 years and save between $470 million and $1.1 billion from accidents that would be avoided.
The Trump administration reduced the range of benefits to between $131 million and $374 million.
Transportation Department economists said in their analysis that the change was prompted in part by a reduction in oil train traffic in recent years. Even as ethanol shipments on U.S. railroads have continued to grow, reaching about 500,000 carloads annually, crude shipments peaked in 2014 and fell to about 200,000 carloads last year.
But in making their cost-benefit calculations, government economists left out the most common type of derailments in which spilled and burning fuel causes property damage but no mass casualties, the AP found. Equipping fuel trains with electronic brakes would reduce damages from those derailments by an estimated $48 million to $117 million, according to Department of Transportation estimates that were left out of the administration’s final tally.
Including the omitted benefits reduces the net cost of the requirement to as low as $63 million under one scenario laid out by the agency. Other scenarios put the net cost at more than $200 million.
Transportation spokesman Fraser said that would not have changed September’s decision to cancel the electronic brake requirement because of the cost.
The Association of American Railroads declined comment on the agency’s cost benefit calculations. Spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek said the move to rescind the Obama rule was in line with the requirements set forth by Congress, which passed a 2015 measure saying the Department of Transportation must repeal the braking requirement if expected costs exceed benefits.
The biggest share of oil now moved by rail goes from the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and Montana to the West Coast, where fears of an accident were realized two years ago when 16 tank cars carrying Bakken oil derailed, igniting a fire that burned for 14 hours along the banks of the Columbia River near Mosier, Oregon.
The accident was caused by track problems. An investigation by the Federal Railroad Administration concluded electronic brakes would have made it less severe.
John Risch, national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, said electronic brakes also would have prevented the deaths at Lac-Megantic.
He added that the omission of benefits from the government’s findings further tilted a study that was otherwise flawed.
“It flies in the face of earlier, much more comprehensive studies,” Risch said. “We are using a 120-year-old technology with mechanical brakes. They’ve come to the peak of what you can do with them.”
The smoke’s gone, but hearts and lungs still may be in danger months after wildfires
By Aaron Glantz and Susie Neilson / November 28, 2018
Pedestrians wear masks while walking through San Francisco’s Financial District on Nov. 9. For two weeks after the Camp Fire ignited, the air in Northern California, stretching as far as 200 miles from the flames, was so full of smoke that it was deemed unhealthy to breathe. Credit: Eric Risberg/Associated Press
Three days after the Camp Fire erupted, incinerating the Northern California town of Paradise and killing 85 people, Katrina Sawa found herself struggling to breathe.
If you or someone you know has had breathing problems or heart problems or had to seek medical care in the wake of the recent fires, we want to hear from you. Text “fire” to 63735 and follow the prompts, or reach out to reporter Aaron Glantz at aglantz@revealnews.org.
But Sawa wasn’t anywhere near Paradise. She lives almost 100 miles away in Roseville, a suburb northeast of Sacramento. Sawa puffed on her emergency asthma inhaler over and over again.
“Usually, I use it once a month,” said Sawa, a 48-year-old businesses coach who has had asthma since she was 13. “After using it four times in one day, I knew it was time to go to urgent care.” There, doctors had her inhale a powerful steroid medication to soothe her inflamed airways.
For two weeks after the fire ignited, the air in Northern California, stretching as far as 200 miles from the flames, was so full of smoke that it was deemed unhealthy to breathe, especially for people with heart and respiratory ailments.
But the health problems Sawa and others experienced while the blaze raged are just the beginning of effects that could plague people from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area long after the smoke clears.
An analysis of hospital data by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that emergency room visits surged several months after a previous large wildfire was extinguished.
Three to five months after the 37,000-acre Tubbs Fire in Napa and Sonoma valleys in October 2017, the region’s emergency rooms treated about 20 percent more patients for respiratory and cardiac ailments compared with previous years, according to the analysis, which used state data. At the time, the Tubbs Fire was the most destructive in California history, killing 22 people and destroying nearly 6,000 structures.
Seven of nine hospitals in Napa and Sonoma counties reported either significantly or slightly more cardiovascular and respiratory cases from January through March 2018 compared with the same period in 2016 and 2017. For instance, at Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center in Sonoma County’s largest city, emergency room visits for respiratory problems jumped by 570, or 37 percent, from January through March 2018 compared with the same period in 2017. Twenty miles down Highway 101 at Petaluma Valley Hospital, heart cases increased by 61 patients, or 50 percent.
Medical experts say these findings raise troubling questions about the long-term health effects of wildfires, which, worsened by drought and global warming, are raging across the West.
The life-threatening effects of smoke disproportionately harm the elderly, children and low-income people of color. More than 2.3 million adults and 644,000 children in California have asthma and another 1.7 million suffer from heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California Department of Public Health. Adult asthma rates are highest for multiracial people and African Americans, while heart ailments tend to afflict the state’s poorest and least educated residents across all racial groups.
Reveal’s analysis does not take into account other factors that might have driven up the emergency room visits, such as other pollutants or the weather. But the conclusion is in line with a growing body of research thathas found more people suffer respiratory problems and heart attacks within days of being exposed to wildfire smoke.
“The uptick in ER visits is very consistent” with scientific research about smoke, said Dr. Kari Nadeau, director of Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research.
Dr. John Balmes, a pulmonologist and professor at the University of California San Francisco who studies air pollution, is not surprised that emergency room visits increased three months after the wine country fire.
“People with asthma, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and other lung diseases could have persistent exacerbations,” he said, adding that inhaling ash could have longer-term consequences, too. The effects of smoke months or years after a fire are not well understood.
There was only a slight increase in immediate emergency room visits during the days when last year’s Tubbs Fire burned. That’s because two of the largest hospitals were evacuated and a third was destroyed. As a result, the analysis was based on the period three to five months later, using data from California’s Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
Busier ERs in Bay Area, Sacramento
This month’s Camp Fire – the deadliest and largest in California history – was more than four times bigger than the Tubbs Fire. Throughout much of the Bay Area and Sacramento area, the smoke was so intense and widespread that many people wore masks, stayed indoors and bought air purifiers. At least two Northern California hospitals have reported busier ERs due to smoke from the fire, which burned 153,000 acres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
Robin Scott, director of the emergency department at Adventist Health Clear Lake, reported a 43 percent increase in respiratory diagnoses when the smoke hung over the region compared with the two previous weeks.
In Berkeley, 160 miles from the fire, Sutter Health’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center treated “increasing numbers of patients with chief complaints that appear to be connected to the poor air quality,” including “asthma, eczema, respiratory illness – as well as worsening heart conditions like congestive heart failure and chest pain,” said Dr. Ronn Berrol, medical director of the emergency department.
Other hospitals in the region, however, reported small increases, while some, including Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, reported no increases.
“There has been a slight uptick in terms of patients coming through our ER with respiratory issues. Most have been quickly treated and discharged,” said William Hodges, director of communications at Dignity Health in Sacramento. “I would say the impact has been minimal at most.”
Francesca Dominici, a biostatistics professor at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said understanding the health effects is critical because climate change is making fires more frequent, ferocious, erratic and long lasting.
Dominici was on a team of researchers that published a study last year that collected data from wildfires across the West between 2004 and 2009 and compared it with hospitalizations of elderly residents. About 22 percent more African Americans 65 and older were hospitalized for respiratory problems on smoky days than on non-smoky days. For elderly women of all races, respiratory hospitalizations increased more than 10 percent on smoky days, and for elderly men, 4 percent.
Five of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last two years, and many of the state’s largest population centers have been exposed to smoke repeatedly.
Dominici said the impacts are likely cumulative.
“More people are becoming susceptible to air pollution because they have been breathing bad air from previous wildfires,” she said. “For these people, the risk of adverse health effects is going to be even larger than the rest of the population.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers, in a study published in April, examined more than a million emergency room visits during California’s 2015 fire season and found a 42 percent increase in heart attacks among adults over 65 on days with dense wildfire smoke. They also found increases in strokes and other cardiovascular effects.
The EPA researchers expressed a willingness to speak about their research, but the agency would not grant permission.
Tiny particles harm hearts, lungs
A major health concern is the makeup of the smoke. Fires emit clouds of fine particles known as PM2.5. For decades, researchers have shown that whenever these tiny particles – which largely come from vehicles and other sources of fuel combustion – increase in the air, deaths and hospitalizations from heart attacks and respiratory problems rise. The particles can irritate airways, travel deep into the lungs and disrupt the heart.
In addition, fires can emit toxic gases from a variety of sources, including oil, metals and pesticides.
Among the estimated 19,000 buildings destroyed in the Camp Fire were gas stations, two grocery stores, eight schools and a hotel.
“When you’re breathing smoke from that wildfire,” said Stanford’s Nadeau, “you’re breathing paint thinner, Drano, plastics, heavy metals and burned leaves, which are very similar to tobacco.”
The long-term effects of breathing this cocktail are unknown.
A firefighter searches for human remains in a trailer park destroyed by the Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif.CREDIT: JOHN LOCHER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In Palo Alto, 200 miles from the Camp Fire, pediatrician Dr. Kellen Glinder said he has seen a marked increase in number of children with breathing problems during each of California’s recent wildfires.
On Friday, after rain cleared much of the wildfire smoke, the waiting room at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a clinic where Glinder works, wasn’t as busy as it was in previous days. Several children sat or crawled around as a television played “Toy Story” overhead. But Glinder said he still was treating kids affected by the smoke.
About one-third of the 20 children he treated each day during the fires – six to eight kids per day – had conditions the smoke exacerbated, Glinder said.
“We (saw) a lot of things hidden under the guise of a cold that wouldn’t have gotten worse unless the air quality was so bad,” he said.
In August, when the Mendocino Complex Fire blazed through the state, Glinder treated more patients with asthma and other conditions. And last year, the Santa Rosa fires brought similar health concerns.
“Each forest fire is going to have its own particular combination of chemicals, depending on what’s getting incinerated and blowing our way,” he said. “With this particular fire, I saw a lot more … skin irritation, headaches and nausea than I had seen in prior forest fires.”
The waiting room had a box of miniature paper masks for the kids, decorated with Mickey Mouse heads. Glinder, however, said such flimsy masks are ineffective at protecting people from smoke’s particles and gases; they are designed to contain germs from colds and flu.
Like the elderly, children are particularly sensitive to soot and smoke.
“Children’s lungs are still growing, their nervous systems are still growing,” Glinder said. “That makes them more susceptible to these pollutants.”
This story was edited by Marla Cone and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
In the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) newsletter, read about the more than 100 corporate wins ICCR members scored during the 2018 proxy season, demonstrating the environmental/social concerns shared by mainstream investors. ICCR is a coalition of over 300 institutional investors working together to promote more just and sustainable corporate practices. READ MORE
On page 11 of “A Just World For All: Strategies for Sustainable Investment,” read how notable green bond issuers held by the Pension Boards’ investment portfolio are using proceeds to finance environmentally-friendly projects.
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