HOW IS THE US DOING VS COVID-19 COMPARED TO THE REST OF THE WORLD?

 Just a quick note as of Sunday, October 11, 2020.

Credit: geralt/pixabay

The US has 4.25% of the world's population.

To date we've suffered 21.17% of the total recorded cases of Covid-19. That's 7,958,612 documented cases in the US.

But we have a great medical system, so our death rate is much lower, right?

Sorry, but our death rate is almost identical, 20.03% of the total deaths. That's 219,343 Americans who have died from the coronavirus in the nine months since the first documented case, January 20, 2020. That represents an average of 828 covid-19 deaths per day, or almost 5800 per week.

For another comparison, so far documented cases for the whole world equal 4,833 cases per million people. In the US we've chalked up 24,005 cases per million. We've had just under 5 times as many cases per million.

The world as a whole has incurred 139 documented covid-19 deaths per million. The US 662. The US has suffered 4.76 times as many deaths per million.

You can draw your own conclusions as to how we're doing and who's responsible.

Here's my nominee:

A SOURCE FOR ACCURATE AND UP-TO-THE-MINUTE CORONAVIRUS/COVID-19 STATISTICS

 If you want to keep track of how many Covid-19 cases and deaths have occurred worldwide, country-by-country or state-by-state in the US, the best source I've found is https://ncov2019.live/.

Credit: Avi Schiffmann

The site was created and is maintained by a remarkable high-school student named Avi Schiffmann. It's updated in real time, and provides an accurate, detailed basis for understanding how the pandemic is progressing and changing worldwide.

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REA

COVID-19 IN THE US--WHEN CAN WE STOP BEING EXCEPTIONAL?

The following statistics come from ncov2019.live/,  a great source for up-to-the-minute covid-19 data.

I'm just going to present some of the numbers as of September 4, 2020. You can come to your own conclusions.

The US represents 4.3 percent of the world population.

We've had 24 percent of the recorded Covid-19 cases in the world. 

We've had 2.2 million more cases than India, the next most impacted country, India's population is more than four times that of the US.

We've suffered 22 percent of the world's Covid-19 deaths; 191,221 as of 9/4/20.

Credit: Pixabay

Covid-19 deaths per million population as of 9/4/20


Peru                                            890
Belgium                                      853
Spain                                          629
United Kingdom                        611
Chile                                            600
Italy                                             588
Brazil                                           587

UNITED STATES                      578     

Sweden                                        577
...      
                                    
Japan                                           471
France                                         470
...

Netherlands                                364
Ireland                                         359
...

Norway                                        264
Canada                                        243
South Africa                                245
Switzerland                                 232
Argentina                                    209
...

Russia                                           121
Germany                                      112
Denmark                                      108


WORLD                                        113

...

India                                                 50
Norway                                             49
Australia                                           29
Hong Kong                                       13
Singapore                                           5
China                                                  3
Iceland                                                0

To save you the calculations, the US has suffered 5.12 times as many deaths per million than the world as a whole.

Given that we've lost 191,388 people to Covid-19 as of today, if we had managed to just be mediocre, to keep our death rate down to the global average, we would have saved nearly 150,000 lives. Wouldn't it be great just to be average?

In comparison, here are some statistics about US war casualties:

Persian Gulf War       2,586

Korean War               36,574

Vietnam                      58,220

World War I             116,516

World War II           405,399

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And I'll add 9/11         2,977     
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REA

100,000 COVID-19 DEATHS IN US--MORE THAN HALF COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED

The United States just suffered its 100,000th documented death from the coronavirus.

The true number of coronavirus caused or related deaths in the US is probably closer to 130,000.

As more states and localities "open up," this toll of loss and grief will keep rising, and almost certainly will speed up.

". . . while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
(from The Second Coming by W. B.Yeats)Photo credit: Michael Vadon

As reported in the New York Times, researchers at Columbia University modeled the dynamics of the pandemic and calculated that if the United States had taken decisive action to limit the spread of the virus by March 1, just two weeks earlier than we belatedly did, 54,000 lives would have been spared.

To start to understand what this means, look at the front page of the New York Times listing the names of 1000 people from across the nation who have died from COVID-19. Then picture 53 more pages like that, memorializing 53,000 Americans who didn't need to die in this pandemic.

Then remember that as late as March 10, the deluded narcissist who promised to Make America Great Again was still blathering, "It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away."

Unfortunately, even amplified by Fox News and echoed by right-wing true believers, his magic words had no effect on this virulent, deadly virus. Reality inevitably trumps politics, polemics and magical thinking.

Please remember come November--54,000 needless deaths, and counting . . .

REA

Note: The US has 4.3% of the world's population. We've manged to produce 28.6% of COVID-19 deaths. This isn't the fault of China, the World Health Organization, Barack Obama or Joe Biden. The buck stops squarely on the desk in the oval office, no matter what the current resident of the White House would like us to believe.

Much more on how Trump made this pandemic far worse than it needed to be--Dan Benbow details 370 ways that Trump turned this into a man-made catastrophe. Read his piece here.

ONE MILLION CASES AND GROWING FAST

The official count of coronavirus or COVID-19 cases passed one million worldwide early today (4/2/20).** But that number is already out of date, since the count is growing by at least 70,000 per day. As I write this in the late afternoon, 20,000 more people have been diagnosed, and 6,000 have died. That's just today.

Wall Street in lockdown

(along with Main Street)

Credit: Dan Nguyen/Flickr

Tragically, the US is number one among the nations on this statistic.  Despite having less than 5 percent of the world's population, we've incurred nearly 25 percent of the COVID-19 cases, and 11 percent of the deaths. (One day after this posting, the US sped past a grim milestone--1000 COVID-19 deaths in a day).

Many factors are contributing to our unfortunate leadership in this area. Our healthcare system is focused on providing top-quality care to people who are well off or well insured, but lacks a comparable commitment to public health, In response to a problem that requires a  quick, coordinated, disciplined response, and a response that requires personal sacrifice, our national love of individualism and our more recent Ayn Randian valuation of putting oneself first certainly contributed.

Still, if we're going to assign responsibility for where we are today, an awful lot needs to go to our tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump. As anyone whose memory has not been wiped clean by the Ministry of Truth knows. Trump treated the looming pandemic as--take your choice--a hoax, a Democrat scheme to discredit him, just like impeachment; as a threat to his re-election; as something totally under control; as an ordinary, relatively trivial event, like the flu; as another reason to close borders; as something that could be cleared away by Easter, and, even if it risked thousands of deaths, should not be allowed to upset the economy. With his narcissistic, impulsive and erratic leadership, the US was ill prepared, slow to respond, and still extremely spotty in dealing with this grave crisis.

By the way, the fact that even as thousands of Americans die every day--deaths that could have been prevented by prompt and well-informed leadership, Trump's approval ratings are approaching 50 percent suggests that the Ministry of Truth* is doing a bang-up job.

The big question is how we proceed from here. The US is still at the beginning of the epidemic. Nothing that we've done so far in the US has "flattened the curve." Instead, COVID-19 cases in the US are on a steeply rising exponential trajectory.  Experts tell us that social distancing--staying at home and avoiding as many contacts with other people as possible-- is crucial. So is hand washing. If everyone, sick, possibly sick or well, wears a face mask in public, that may help.

A separate, perhaps more crucial factor is testing as many people as possible in order to isolate people who are shedding the virus, along with tracking and isolating their contacts. Where this has been done, for example in South Korea, it has controlled the spread of the virus without shutting down the country, businesses and the economy. Again, unfortunately, the US lags far, far behind on testing.

What lies ahead is in our hands. A swift, strong, coordinated, nationwide attack on the virus can still save thousands or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of live. The two key questions are:

Will enough Americans wake up and do what's needed, or will half of them remain in the dark and asleep even as the plague surges towards them?

Will government, starting with Trump, get its act together, and in time?

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* For another example of Trump's Ministry of Truth revising history as we speak, click here.

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** The number of cases worldwide passed two million on 4/15/20. In other words, the global doubling time for the virus is around 13 days. We'll see if the enormous sacrifices that nations and individuals are making are making a difference. When will we suffer 4,000,000 cases?

REA

A SOBERING STATISTIC: ALCOHOL-RELATED DEATHS IN US HAVE DOUBLED SINCE 1999

By analyzing death certificates, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in Bethesda, Maryland, found that the rate of alcohol-related deaths in the US increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2017 and the number of alcohol-related deaths per year doubled. This new research adds to the growing body of evidence that the mental, physical and social well-being of Americans is deteriorating.

 Alcohol-related deaths in US have doubled since 1999

Photo credit: Pixabay

Neuroscientist Aaron White and colleagues at the NIAAA analyzed data taken from all death certificates filed in the US between 1999 and 2017. Using listed causes of death and contributing factors they found that the rate of alcohol-related deaths of Americans 16 years old or older rose from 16.9 to 25.5 per 100,000 and the number of deaths per year doubled, from 35,914 to 72,558. Alcohol caused or contributed to the death of 944,880 Americans during that 18-year span. Their findings were published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

"Rates increased for all age-groups except 160 to 20 and 75+," the researchers write, "and for all racial and ethnic groups except for initial decreases among Hispanic males and [Non-Hispanic] Blacks followed by increases."

Almost every group was impacted. The sharpest increase was among Non-Hispanic White women. Rates of acute alcohol-related deaths rose most among people aged 55 to 64, while death rates from chronic alcohol use surged most in younger people, aged 25 to 34, and accounted for the majority of alcohol-related deaths.

As worrisome as these documented trends are, the authors point out that previous research has shown that death certificates understate what's really happening; the actual number of alcohol-related deaths is likely significantly higher than they were able to document.

The authors of this paper don't speculate about the causes of this trend. We know that they are part of the growing number of "deaths from despair" that have characterized the US for the past decades. Other researchers cite both economic and social disparities and declines  as at least part of the cause. Needless to say, it's a multifaceted problem and requires an equally multifaceted set of solutions. However, until the current political balance shifts in Washington, the dislocations and inequities that underline this tragic slide are not likely to be acknowledged or addressed.

GUNS, YOUNG PEOPLE AND SUICIDE

Last year, nearly 40,000 people died in the U.S. from the use of firearms. Among those deaths, roughly 60 percent were suicides. And among those were more than 1000 young people between the ages of 10 and 19; nearly three children or teenagers every day.

As a quick internet search will show you, there's a lot of information available to parents, teachers and other concerned people about how to reduce the risk that a child will commit suicide. Unfortunately, many of these well-meaning and supposedly authoritative sources gloss over or fail even to mention the single biggest step to take to reduce the number of suicides by young people.

That step is--get guns out of their homes.

Young people and guns--a lethal combination

Credit: publicdomainpictures.net

New research from the Boston School of Public Health (BUSPH) shows that on a state-by-state basis, every ten percent increase in gun ownership increases the youth suicide rate by 27 percent. That means that young people in states like Alaska, with the highest rate of gun ownership, were five times more likely to kill themselves than young people in states like New Jersey with the lowest percentage of guns in homes.

The rate of gun ownership varies greatly from state to state. The 10 states with the highest rates averaged more than one gun for every two households (52.5%), while the 10 states with the lowest gun ownership averaged just one gun per every five households.

Remarkably, gun ownership outweighed every other factor--poverty, race, educational levels, family structure, mental illness, drug and alcohol use, you name it--contributing to youth suicide. "This study demonstrates that the strongest single predictor of a state's youth suicide rate is the prevalence of household gun ownership in that state," says Michael Siegel, a community health researcher at BUSPH and the study's co-author.

The bottom line is clear. If you want to reduce the number of children and teenagers who kill themselves, the first and most significant thing to do is to get guns out of their homes.

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You can find the full study here.

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Young people in the U.S. are far more at risk from gun-related violence of all kinds than youth in other countries. You can read a zerospinzone post about that here.

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GUNS AND KIDS IN THE US

We all know that guns are a hot-button issue here in the United States. The Constitution grants and the Supreme Court affirms Americans' right to bear arms, and we do that to a fault. According to the Independent, US citizens own 40 percent of all the privately owned arms in the world, more than the next 25 most heavily armed countries combined. That's a remarkable 12 guns for every 10 of us, men, woman and children.

Many of those 393 million guns don't just sit unloaded, securely stored and unavailable to children. While millions of responsible gun owners do keep their weapons safely away from children, millions do not. Here's one sad result whose magnitude shocked me: According to Stephanie Chao, a pediatric surgeon and professor of surgery at Stanford University, children aged 15-19 in the US are 82 times more likely to die from gun homicide than in any other developed country.

Nearly 3000 US children die from firearm injuries every year

Photo credit: Mediapart

Please excuse my emphasis here: American teenagers are not twice as likely to die from a deliberate gunshot, not 10 times more likely, not 50 times more likely, but 82 times more likely. Than in any other developed country.

The statistics for younger children, and for suicide and accidental deaths from guns are not quite so horrendous, but the US is a consistent and clear outlier on every measure relating to gun deaths.

As a pediatric surgeon dealing with trauma every day, Chao would very much like to find ways to reduce or prevent these tragic deaths. Here's a clue that she found. State by state, laws make a difference.

"Firearm-related injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the United States," she says, "but we found a clear discrepancy in where those deaths happen that corresponds with the strength of states' firearm legislation. In states with lenient laws, children die at alarmingly greater rates."

How much difference can gun laws make? Chao and her colleagues found that in states with the most relaxed gun laws 5 children out of every 100,000 die from gun-related injuries every year. States with the strictest gun-control laws cut that death rate nearly in half, down to 2.6 children out of every 100,000.

Saving half of children at risk from gun-related death would be a very good thing. Saving all of them would be even better. "Each and every one of these deaths is preventable," says Chao. "Our study demonstrates that state-level legislation prevents children from dying from guns."

When it comes to our children, perhaps we can get away from slogans and fiery rhetoric, and work towards sensible gun-safety laws in more states. Three thousand US children don't need to die from gunshots next year.

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As I write this, the 2018 midterm elections are just a day away. If you would like to find out about gun-control legislation and pro-gun-control candidates in your state, here's an excellent resource. Your vote could save young lives.

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There's a strong relationship between gun ownership and youth suicide. You can read a zerospinzone post about that here.

  

US AT ESPECIALLY HIGH RISK FROM UNCHECKED CARBON EMISSIONS

How much economic damage does a ton of carbon pumped into the atmosphere really do? That's the question an international team of climate scientists and economists set out to answer on a country-by-country basis. While previous studies have suggested that poor countries are more vulnerable to climate change, these new results reveal the opposite--a large and complex economy like that of the US magnifies the impacts of a destabilized climate. It turns out that the US is especially vulnerable.

Some of the most obvious impacts to the US of a changing climate 

Credit: Union of Concerned Scientists/NOAA

"It makes a lot of sense because the larger your economy is, the more you have to lose," says Kate Ricke, the study's lead author of the recent Nature Climate Change article. "Still, it's surprising just how consistently the U.S. is one of the biggest losers, even when compared to other large economies." 

Other countries who will take major hits due to climate change include India, China and Saudi Arabia.

Ricke and her colleagues estimate that current levels of carbon emissions are already costing the US economy around $250 billion per year. That's nearly $2000 per US household. Even more worrisome, they point out, climate change doesn't just hit us on a year-by-year basis, it's likely to take an increasing  chunk out of America's economic rate of growth. Like a ballooning interest rate on a mortgage, the costs don't just add up, they multiply.

When the researchers take this cumulative economic erosion into account, their estimates of the long-term impact of unchecked global warming and resulting climate change are up to ten times greater than current mainstream estimates, for example those of the US government.

The authors emphasize that these higher estimates of the economic costs of "business as usual" make it clear that it's in the selfish best interest of countries like the US with highly developed economies to take steps--such as a carbon tax--that would actually match the real-world costs and help rein in global warming and climate destabilization.

In an invited commentary,  Frances Moore, an environmental economist at the University of California, Davis, writes: 

"In other words, based on just their own self-interest, these countries should be acting unilaterally to dramatically cut GHG emissions. The fact that we do not see this yet suggests that damages are overestimated or costs are underestimated, that countries have not yet recognized the risk posed by climate change, or that sub-national political constituencies have been able to effectively block ambitious mitigation policies that would otherwise be in their national interest."

To those obstructionist political constituencies including, it appears, the entire Republican Party and our current president, this should be a clarion call to do what Kevin Conrad, representing Papua New Guinea, told the United States delegation to the Bali climate conference in 2008--"lead, follow, or get out of the way."

THE AMERICAN CENTURY: AN OBITUARY

 It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when ‘The American Century’ died, but close observers place its passing somewhere between the 9^th and 16^th of July, 2018 after a long Illness. Cause of death has been tentatively listed as complications due to ‘heart failure.’

Credit: USAF

Born in 1941, it was christened by Time/Life media founder Henry Luce just as the United States was emerging from a Depression decade marked by isolationism and severe economic hardship, and mere months before the nation would be plunged into the Second World War. The fresh and timely concept was quickly adopted, for better or worse, by key architects of the coming transformation of America’s postwar foreign policy into one of internationalism, intervention and global leadership.

            Reflecting the optimistic side of a victorious and expanding middle-class society, ‘The American Century’ grew to express a strong belief in sharing the benefits and bounty of a booming domestic economy along with the energetic promotion of democratic-capitalist ideology abroad. Despite debilitating setbacks and growing pains in the late 1960’s and 1970’s as a consequence of deep racial conflicts at home and the country’s failed policies in Southeast Asia, belief in the concept rebounded strongly in the 1980’s and 1990’s, particularly during the nation’s brief appearance as sole global hegemon following the fall of the Soviet Union.  

The 9/11 terrorist attack on the homeland, however, coupled with disastrous and inconclusive interventions abroad and a serious economic debacle in the early decades of the twenty-first century drained its reserves, leaving it much more vulnerable than many knew to the next new contagion that might come along.  Ironically, the fatal infection came from within in the guise of a virulent campaign to “Make America Great Again,” against which the national immune system proved ineffective.

With an alternative and distorted image of both the postwar world  and American values in mind, and in the service of his own much narrower and darker nationalist vision, once in power Donald Trump moved rapidly and effectively to devalue, reverse and ultimately erase the very policies Luce and other leaders of that era had spent decades putting in place to stabilize a troubled world. 

In rolling back America’s leadership promoting worldwide democracy, and in erecting barriers to free trade and the easy movement of goods, ideas and people across boundaries, demeaning and demonizing allies and carefully-constructed institutions like NATO and the EU, Trump offered in their place only a world of competition, conflict, contention—and often chaos.

 If Luce’s “Century” represented an overly optimistic missionary American spirit, often blind to its own failings, Trump’s stands for its opposite, one which is fearful, suspicious of others, anxiously hoarding its own resources, and hostile to realities which might challenge its own preconceptions. Rather than celebrating and spreading America’s political norms and the nation’s ideals of inclusion, equality and opportunity—even if imperfectly achieved—Trump celebrates their disruption, while actively generating and directing the resentments of those left behind against minorities and real or imagined aliens or other foreign elements.

   

The final blow came with Trump's public attacks on  core institutions and allies and his embrace of old foes. When the call came from Helsinki this week, it only confirmed what many had already suspected. The decedent's last words were incoherent--disjointed phrases about a missing server--and it was noted in passing that a Do Not Resuscitate order was on file. 

Les Adler
Emeritus Professor of History
Sonoma State University

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A slightly different version of this commentary was also published on OpEdNews.

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PORTUGAL GENERATES A SURPLUS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY -- WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

Portugal, home to 10 million people, surged to the front of the pack in terms of renewable energy in March of this year. Using a combination of hydro, wind and solar generation, it produced more than enough electricity to power its 3.6 million households, plus businesses, industry and transport. It exported a surplus of 4.8 percent of its electricity--878 gigawatt-hours--to other European countries.

Portugal's use of renewable energy in March kept 1.8 million tons of climate-destabilizing CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Many other countries, including Sweden, Costa Rica and Germany, are moving rapidly towards meeting all or most of their power needs with renewables. You can read about Scotland's successes here.

Portugal's Alto Minho Wind Farm Under Construction

Credit: BBC News

Portugal's per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is $30,300 per year, just about half that of the United States ($59,500). If they can do it, why can't we?

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THE COP WHO DIDN'T SHOOT--A CANADIAN OF COURSE

The contrast couldn't be greater. When Canadian police officer Constable Ken Lam tracked down Alek Minassian, the suspect charged with running down multiple pedestrians in Toronto on April 23, Minassian did everything he could to provoke the officer into shooting him. Minassian held an object that looked like a gun in his hand and pointed it towards the officer. He twice reached towards his pocket, then quickly raised his hand as if he were pulling and pointing a gun.

Minassian tries to provoke Canadian police officer to shoot him

Credit: CBC.ca

"Kill me," Minassian demanded.

"No. Get down," the officer replied.

"I have a gun in my pocket."

"I don't care," said the officer. "Get down."

You can view the video here.

In it, the officer calmly turns off his car's siren, holsters his gun, advances towards the suspect with his baton raised, and arrests him. No shots fired. No violence. Absolute professionalism.

I can't help but compare this with the dozens of videos I've viewed of similar situations here in the United States. Videos in which far less threatening situations escalate in seconds and conclude in a barrage of shots and a dead body, often found to be unarmed. Here's an example, one of far too many.

The US has about ten times more citizens than Canada. Canadian police kill an average of 25 people a year. US police kill more than 1000 people every year. According to a recent study, that represents more than 50,000 years of life lost (YLL), most of it by the early deaths of young Black men. Clearly, something is very different about police-suspect relations in the US and Canada (and most other developed countries).

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You can read earlier posts about police killings in the US here and also here.

SOME FACTS ABOUT GUNS IN THE U.S.

The debate about guns in the United States is clouded by too much rhetoric and too few facts. Slogans like "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," or More guns, less crime," may sound as though they convey useful information, but in fact they just add further cement to already polarized and fixed positions.

Las Vegas welcome sign adorned with flowers

a week after the October 1, 2017 mass shooting 

Credit: Wikipedia 

Readers may make of them what they will, but here are a few facts about guns and how they are used in the U.S.  They come from a study published in the journal Science on 8 December, 2017.

1. The U.S. is an extreme outlier among developed countries when it comes to guns and violence. The chance of being murdered by someone using a gun is 25 times higher in the U.S. than in other well-off countries, and the rate of suicides by gunshot is 8 times higher. A U.S. male between the ages of 15 and 24 is an astonishing 70 times more likely to die from gun violence than his peer in any of the other highly industrialized countries..

2. Death by gunshot is a major public health threat in the U.S., comparable to the number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents. One difference is that taking rational steps to reduce the risk of death or injury from motor vehicles is not highly politicized or controversial. The result is that the number of deaths per miles driven has plummeted by a factor of 25 since the 1920s.

3. You might suppose that the government would be interested in supporting research to understand the causes and possible ways to mitigate this important public-health problem, as it does with many other diseases and conditions. You would be wrong. In 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment, which effectively killed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) research program on gun violence.

4.Still, non-government researchers have continued to study gun violence and its prevention. These include researchers at many universities and in at least one state--California.

5. An intensive recent study by public-health and legal researchers at Stanford University, in California, and Duke University, in North Carolina, has established several factual reference points:

     --Add-on sentences for the use of guns in assaults and robberies cut the rate of those crimes by around 5 percent.

     --Laws preventing perpetrators of domestic violence from buying or possessing guns save lives, potentially thousands of them--reducing the murder rate for female intimate partners by 17 percent.

     --States with strict restrictions on carrying concealed weapons have significantly lower rates of violent crime than states with right-to-carry laws. Conversely, states that switch from restrictive to right-to-carry on average see a 9 percent increase in their homicide rates.

     --States with a high percentage of households with guns experience 3.6 times as many civilians killed by police than states with fewer households with guns.

If we have any hope of breaking out of the crippling polarization that prevents rational or even civil discourse on gun control here in the U.S., it must start with facts on which people can agree. Facts do not equal policy. But policy without facts is likely to be bad policy. And when it comes to guns, bad policy can and does cost thousands of lives.

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THE WINDS OF CHANGE--SOLAR AND WIND GENERATE 10 PERCENT OF US ELECTRICITY FOR THE FIRST TIME

Despite the best efforts of President Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the US continues to make progress in renewable energy generation. The national Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that in March of this year 10 percent of all electricity generated in the US came from wind and solar--a first for the US.

San Gorgonio Pass windfarm

Riverside County, California

Credit: Nandaro

While the US is by no means the leader in the proportion of energy derived from renewable sources, we are adding a great deal of solar, wind and other renewable-energy infrastructure, so we can expect both the amount and percentage of clean, green energy to grow rapidly.

The fundamental reason for this is that large-scale wind and solar energy is now cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels. This is yet another situation where the slogan "follow the money" rings true, or, to put it another way, actual economics trumps Trumponomics.

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BLOWIN' IN THE WIND--WIND POWER NOW EMPLOYS 102,000 AMERICANS, POWERS 24 MILLION HOMES

Wind power is is soaring worldwide, and the U.S. is no exception. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) just published its annual report, with great news for anyone who loves clean, renewable energy, and the jobs it produces.

Green Mountain Wind Farm near Fluvanna, Texas

Credit: Leaflet/Wikimedia Commons

A few of the milestones reached in 2016:

--15,000 new jobs, bringing the total U.S. wind-power employment to 102,000. Compare that to the 50,500 employed in coal mining at the end of 2016, down from 70,000 in 2003 to get a sense of which way the wind is blowing. And, points out Tom Kiernan, the CEO of  AWEA, since 99% of wind farms are located in rural areas, they are providing jobs and land-leasing income where they are most needed.

--Even though hydropower has been a key part of the U.S. energy system since the early 1900s, windpower edged it out in 2016, and now accounts for 5.5% of the electric power generated in the U.S.

--That's enough to power 24 million homes.

--Wind power is especially important across the midwest--both in terms of energy production and jobs. Wind accounts for between one-fifth and one-third of power production in 7 great-plains states. You can get a sense of this below:

Source: https://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2014/12/

--The wind power industry is also boosting much-needed manufacturing jobs, especially in the rust belt. More than 25,000 men and women are working in 500 U.S. factories manufacturing parts for the giant wind turbines that are harvesting wind energy more and more efficiently.

--Even without subsidies, in many areas of the United States and the rest of the world, wind power is now the cheapest way to generate electricity.

This news is another great example of how moving to a sustainable energy system as fast as possible is a win-win solution for people and the planet.

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US POLICE KILLED THREE PEOPLE A DAY IN 2016

The international newspaper The Guardian has been tracking killings by police in the US since 2015. They've just published their findings for 2016. The numbers continue to be shocking, both in terms of racial disparities and the enormous contrast between the US and other countries.

Protest following the death of Akai Gurley, 11/20/14--Credit Wikimedia

The basics:

--Police in the US killed 1091 people in 2016, slightly down from 1,146 in 2015.

That represents a rate of 3.4 deaths per million people in the US. For perspective, that's 44 times the rate in the UK, 38 times higher than in Germany, 24 times the rate in Canada and 15 times that of France.

--If you're Black in America, your risk of being killed by police is 2.3 times as high as if you're white.

--If you're a Black man 15 to 34 years old, your risk of dying in a police encounter is 9 times that of whites and 4 times higher than a white man your age.

--If you're a Native American, you have 3.5 times the risk of being killed by police than if you're white.

--Deaths at the hands of police vary greatly state-by-state. Police in Alaska, New Mexico and Oklahoma are 3 times as likely to kill people as the national average, and 10 times more likely than police in Delaware, with just one such death in 2016 and a population just under 1,000,000.

In recent years, videotapes of shootings by police under questionable circumstances have shocked millions of people, provoked multiple demonstrations and riots, and brought the issue of police use of lethal force in the US out into the open. Although the statistics for 2016 (and earlier years) clearly show a serious racial bias in US policing, we should be equally concerned about the fact that US citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity, are far more likely to die at the hands of police than citizens of any other western nation.

You can read about some of the causes and possible cures for this ongoing epidemic in two earlier postings:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE US--DUE PROCESS VS STREET "JUSTICE"

OFFICER-INVOLVED DEATHS IN BLACK AND WHITE

And you can read an update for the first 10 months of 2017, showing a continuation of the same deadly pattern, here.