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Controlling images have formed the backdrop for policies over the span of time from slavery to post-Civil War reconstruction and up through the current experiences of welfare reform (Quadagno 1996; Roberts 2002; Windsor 2008). Such policies helped create and maintain structural barriers (such as poverty and inability to obtain a High School degree or meaningful employment) that continually posed great challenges in the lives of the participants. In response, participants developed alternative coping strategies. Sometimes these strategies (such as illegal activities that supplemented their income) were critical in relieving their distress. However, many of these coping strategies also contributed to both their distress and oppression by exposing them to violence and harsh punishments imposed by criminal and welfare policies. Oppressive policies are based on racist, patriarchal expectations. Participants resisted, internalized, and/or coped with these assumptions. In resisting they refused to adhere to controlling images and developed their own theories about their identity and experiences. For instance, Bernice experienced the combined brutality of violence, poverty, substance misuse, and drug traffic but consistently refused to accept the ideology that justified her oppression. Bernice’s resistance involved the following steps to building her own counter narrative: (a) making sure she completed high school, (b) avoiding drug dealers and the violence resulting from the drug traffic present in her community, (c) caring and providing for her children’s basic needs, (d) seeking meaningful employment, and (e) internalizing the importance of African American culture and community. Despite her efforts, she continued to struggle with poverty. To cope with the hard reality of her life, she reframed her experiences by claiming she is a stronger woman because of the challenges she had to deal with. This coping strategy allowed her to feel that the distress she encountered had meaning and purpose. At the same time, it helped her in confronting the injustices of growing up in an oppressive society as an impoverished African American woman. This analysis also revealed resistance and the resources available to participants in coping with great challenges. They counted on family and community support, welfare programs including housing, food stamps, cash assistance, and an ever present hope that, no matter how bad things may get today, the future will be brighter.

At the macro level, controlling images help justify the prejudice that biases social policy, thwarts opportunity and taints daily interactions. Thus, fighting the public use of controlling images and their impact on impoverished African American’s lives presents a powerful mechanism for building social justice. By fostering critical thought, educators, service providers, and policy makers are central to addressing the macro-cultural problems that cause oppression. Specifically, policies must challenge mainstream assumptions by educating the public about the insidious affect of stereotypes, stimulate the creation of meaningful employment for the poor, and focus on family preservation as opposed to family separation. Moreover, comprehensive intervention programs are needed at the community level to foster educational attainment, employment, mental health treatment, and family preservation (also see Freire 2000; Gentlewarrior, Martin-Jearld, Skok, and Sweetser 2008). Service providers must continue to advance methods that inform the public and challenge stereotypes about impoverished Black women through research and practice.

None of these proposals is without its critics, and any fundamental changes to such an enormous program as Social Security would require a great deal of study to assess the pros and cons. However, given the stark racial discrepancies inherent in the current Social Security program, there is a great need for Congress to enact some type of reform. In considering any amendments to the Act, Congress must take into account its inequitable treatment of African-Americans. It can ameliorate these effects by either an explicit race-based response, or by a race-neutral response that eliminates the racial discrepancies, but it must at least consider the effect of any such changes on African Americans with their shorter life expectancies. To fail to do so will simply perpetuate the unconstitutionally discriminatory impact that the program has produced for the last sixty years.

First of all, I believe what Black Americans need the most is accountability and justice. Black people unquestionably call on the United States government and the wealthy elite, the soul of the American system, to see the injustices this system has done by leaving enslaved human beings moneyless and their descendants in their current disparited conditions today.

Secondly, there is no monetary amount that would fully acknowledge or resolve the issues that slavery, legal segregation, and ongoing discrimination and racism have done to Black Americans nor Black people, who are not descendants of slaves or who enter the U.S. as immigrants. According to a 2019 Associated Press poll, 74% of Black Americans believe cash reparations can compensate for slavery and segregation (Williams & Nasir 2019). Yet, the remaining 26%, others and myself, think that regardless of the copious amount of money the United States gives Black people, there is no way to compensate for these grievous injustices. Not to mention that Darity Jr. & Mullen trace back to 1894, when Frederick Douglass observed that:

None of this is to say that implementing universal programs would be simple. But despite their pleas for "unity," figures like Biden, Buttigieg, and Harris have proposed programs that emphasize class divisions. Means testing forces people to prove that they deserve a social good, like education, health care, or food. And there's nothing compassionate, humane, or even reasonable about devising new hurdles to human necessities.

Proposed Intervention

The contemporary proposal for UBI on grounds of racial justice comes from Dorian Warren (2016) in the Movement for Black Lives' manifesto. Under most UBI proposals [excluding those that would overall reduce the benefits available to the worse off, like Charles Murray's (2016)] those most disadvantaged stand to benefit most. Since black families in the United States are disproportionately found at the bottom of the wealth and income distribution, and since unemployment is twice as high among black workers as among white workers, black families stand to gain most from the policy. Warren (2016) also argues that the proposal's commitment to universality would make it harder for governments to exclude felons and ex-felons from the safety net. Under a system designed to target the deserving and screen out the undeserving, those tied up in the criminal justice system would be more easily excluded. This is important for racial justice given the overrepresentation of people of color in prisons, and given the discrimination experienced by ex-convicts in the labor market.

Last, but not least, UBI could help disrupt the racial tropes and racial resentment pervasive around the existing welfare system. Negative racist stereotypes of lazy black youth and welfare mothers have important consequences. For a start, they force those in need to think twice before claiming benefits, the risk of stigmatization and demonization being high. This explains in part low take-up rates. Racial tropes also serve to shame recipients to keep them in check and incentivize them further to find employment. Furthermore, there is now ample evidence that racial resentment contributes to low support for welfare. Even when programs do not in fact benefit nonwhites more than whites, the myth of the lazy black recipient contributes to a welfare backlash. The pervasiveness of racial stereotypes is thus concerning both because demonized populations are less likely to enjoy the full benefits of assistance and because it contributes to a welfare backlash that is worrying from a progressive perspective. A universal income support system would be less likely to stigmatize the target population, since all members of the community would get a UBI. If benefits are destigmatized, those worse off are less likely to suffer self-respect harms and to drop out of programs they require to live well.

Buttigieg is relying on a conservative talking point here, that universal programs are inherently unfair, either to people who don't use the program or people who can afford to not need it. Intentionally or not, he's making an argument against all public education. And if his means tested plan for free-college-for-some-people became a reality, it would be incredibly vulnerable very quickly. Since only a narrow segment of the population would benefit from it, building popular support to defend it would be a difficult task. In The Week, Ryan Cooper argues that universal programs are politically stronger and more resilient to cuts because they benefit more people than just the very poor. For that same reason, universal programs deliver better results. He writes:

Middle- and upper-middle-class beneficiaries can also complain when the program isn't working correctly, and they are much more likely to get an attentive hearing. [Universal programs] are also less complicated, because they don't require as much of a surveillance wing to adjudicate eligibility. Make a program part of the fundamental infrastructure of life for everyone, and it will generally be high-quality. As the transit nerds say, you can tell a public transit system is really good if it is used by rich and poor alike.

The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change. The report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to surpass its  — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s. Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end. Human activities have already transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, the IPCC said, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems. Yet global emissions continue to rise, and current carbon-cutting efforts are wildly insufficient to ward off climate catastrophe. Monday’s assessment synthesizes years of studies on the causes and , leading U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to demand that developed countries such as the United States eliminate carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade earlier than the rest of the world. With few nations on track to fulfill their climate commitments and with the developing world already suffering disproportionately from climate disasters, he said, rich countries have a responsibility to act faster than their low-income counterparts. The IPCC report shows humanity has reached a “critical moment in history,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said. The world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing. Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” Guterres announced on Monday an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate. Emerging economies including China and India — which plan to reach net zero in 2060 and 2070, respectively — must hasten their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said. Both the U.N. chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions. “This report offers hope, and it provides a warning,” Lee told reporters Monday. “The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.” A stark scientific outlook Already, the IPCC’s synthesis report shows, . Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities have increased global average temperatures by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn’t been this high since archaic humans carved the first stone tools. These changes have caused irrevocable damage to communities and ecosystems, evidence shows: Fish populations are dwindling, farms are less productive, infectious diseases have multiplied, and weather disasters are escalating to unheard-of extremes. The risks from this relatively low level of warming are turning out to be greater than scientists anticipated — not because of any flaw in their research, but because human-built infrastructure, social networks and economic systems have proved exceptionally vulnerable to even small amounts of climate change, the report said. The suffering is worst in the world’s  and low-lying island nations, which are home to roughly 1 billion people yet account for less than 1 percent of humanity’s total planet-warming pollution, the report says. But as climate disruption increases with rising temperatures, not even the wealthiest and most well-protected places will be immune. In 2018,  that a 1.5C world would be overwhelmingly safer than one that is  (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the preindustrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees. Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal. Unless nations adopt new environmental policies — and follow through on the ones already in place — global average temperatures could warm by 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the synthesis report says. In that scenario, a child born today would live to see several feet of , the extinction of hundreds of species and the of millions of people from places where they can no longer survive. “We are not doing enough, and the poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, Senegal’s top climate official and the chair for a group of least-developed countries that negotiate together at the United Nations. She pointed to the damage wrought by , the longest-lasting and most energetic tropical storm on record, which has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more after bombarding southern Africa and Madagascar for more than a month. The report shows that higher temperatures make storms more powerful and sea level rise makes flooding from these storms more intense. Meanwhile, the report says, the death toll from these kinds of disasters is 15 times as high in vulnerable nations as it is in wealthier parts of the world. If the world stays on its current warming track, the IPCC says, global flood damage will be as much as four times as high as it will be if people limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. “The world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Sarr said. The price of delay Though much of the synthesis report echoes warnings scientists have issued for decades, the assessment is notable for the blunt certainty of its rhetoric. The phrase “high confidence” appears nearly 200 times in the 36-page summary chapter. Humanity’s responsibility for all of the warming of the global climate system is described as an unassailable “fact.” Yet the report also details how public officials, private investors and other powerful groups have repeatedly failed to heed those warnings. More than 40 percent of cumulative carbon emissions have occurred since 1990 — when the IPCC published its first study on the dangerous consequences of unchecked warming. Governments continue to subsidize fossil fuel use; banks and businesses invest far more in polluting industries than they do in climate solutions. The consumption habits of the wealthiest 10 percent of people generate three times as much pollution as those of the poorest 50 percent, the report said. Decades of delay have denied the world any hope of an easy and gradual transition to a more sustainable economy, the panel says. Now, only “deep, rapid and … immediate” efforts across all aspects of society — combined with still-unproven technologies to pull carbon from the atmosphere — will be able to stave off catastrophe. “It’s not just the way we produce and use energy,” said Christopher Trisos, director of the Climate Risk Lab in the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town and a member of the core writing team for the synthesis report. “It’s the way we consume food, the way we protect nature. It’s kind of like everything, everywhere, all at once.” But few institutions are acting fast enough, the report said. November’s U.N. climate conference in Egypt ended  to phase down oil, gas and coal — a baseline requirement for curbing climate change. , China approved its largest expansion of coal-fired power plants since 2015. Amid soaring profits, major oil companies are  and deepening investments in fossil fuels. Humanity is rapidly burning through our “carbon budget” — the amount of pollution the world can afford to emit and still meet its warming targets, the IPCC said, and it projected that emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure will make it impossible to avoid the 1.5-degree threshold. Yet even as environmental ministers met in Switzerland last week to finalize the text of the IPCC report, the U.S. government  that is expected to produce oil for the next 30 years, noted Hans-Otto Pörtner, a climatologist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute and a co-author of a dozen IPCC reports, including the latest one. “These decisions don’t match reality,” he said. “There is no more room for compromises.” Failure to act now won’t only condemn humanity to a hotter planet, the IPCC says. It will also make it impossible for future generations to cope with their changed environment. The report reveals thresholds in how much warming people and ecosystems can adapt to. Some are “soft” limits — determined by shortcomings in political and social systems. For example, a low-income community that can’t afford to build flood controls faces soft limits to dealing with sea level rise. But beyond 1.5 degrees of warming, the IPCC says, humanity will run up against “hard limits” to adaptation. Temperatures will get too high to grow many staple crops. Droughts will become so severe that even the strongest water conservation measures can’t compensate. In a world that has warmed roughly 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) — where humanity appears to be headed — the harsh physical realities of climate change will be deadly for countless plants, animals and people. “It’s as if we’re traveling on a carbon-intensive superhighway and we’re in the fast lane,” Trisos said. Unless people immediately pump the brakes on carbon emissions, we will zoom past the off exit for 1.5 degrees of warming — and there will be no turning back. Yet just like drivers who have missed their exit, humanity must strive to stay as close as possible to the 1.5-degree target, Trisos said. “We can still take the 1.6 exit, which will be better than 1.7.” “With every increment of global warming, the danger will increase,” he added. “As we leave it later and take hotter and hotter exits, the fewer options we have to thrive.” ‘It does not mean we are doomed’ Despite its stark language and dire warnings, the IPCC report sends a message of possibility, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a member of the core writing team for the report. “It’s not that we are depending on something that still needs to be invented,” she said. “We actually have all the knowledge we need. All the tools we need. We just need to implement it.” In many regions, the report says, electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind is now cheaper than power from fossil fuels. Several countries have significantly reduced their emissions in the past decade, even as their economies grew. New analyses show how efforts to fight climate change can benefit society in countless other ways, from improving air quality to enhancing ecosystems to boosting public health. These “co-benefits” well outweigh the costs of near-term emissions reductions, even without accounting for the long-term advantages of avoiding dangerous warming. The IPCC also underscored that tackling climate change can help address global inequities — and vice versa. Stronger safety nets and policies that aid the poor can help foster support for the massive changes needed to help curb carbon emissions, the report says. Helping developing nations build renewable energy infrastructure will both avert emissions and alleviate the energy poverty that afflicts more than 700 million people worldwide, it said. “It gives a goal to work toward, to a world that looks different,” Otto said of the report. “It does not mean we are doomed.” Report authors say the IPCC’s assessment comes at a pivotal moment. Beginning this year, nations are required to start updating the emissions-cutting pledges they made in Paris in 2015. Diplomats are also hashing out the details of a “loss and damage” fund established at least year’s climate talks, which would provide compensation to vulnerable countries suffering irreversible climate harms. By the end of the COP28 climate conference in Dubai in December, Guterres said, the world’s leading economies should adopt climate plans in line with the IPCC’s findings. The steep political stakes of the IPCC’s findings were evident during the report’s marathon approval session, with representatives from nearly 200 countries haggling over the document’s discussion of climate justice. The science is indisputable, Lee said Monday: The world will not avoid catastrophic warming unless rich nations speed up their own carbon cuts and help poorer countries do the same. What’s not yet clear is whether world leaders will follow through. When asked about Guterres’s call for developed countries to move faster toward net-zero emissions, a State Department spokesperson instead directed attention toward China, which is now the world’s largest annual producer of greenhouse gases. But the planet can’t afford further delays or finger-pointing, the U.N. chief said. “Demanding others move first only ensures humanity comes last,” he said. “We don’t have a moment to loss

But there’s more research available on the climate gap—how people of color and low-income households will be hit hardest by the consequences of climate change—that gives us insight into the problem.

Economic factors are pivotal in explaining this uneven distribution.

An international climate alliance of this size would do more than just shape the rules of trade governing carbon-intensive goods. It would also partly determine which economies will dominate the energy industries of the future. Naturally, those economies inside the coalition would have the upper hand in any international competition. It would be in China’s strategic interest to join, rather than resist, a climate alliance whose price of membership was harmonizing its domestic carbon price with that of its trading partners. China is already experimenting with a domestic carbon price, so this idea is hardly far-fetched. Beijing, after all, would likely understand that it would enjoy greater energy security inside such an alliance than it would outside it.

In the meantime, climate policy does not need to become another source of conflict between China and the United States. In fact, the two great powers could use the climate as a means of cooperating to bring greater prosperity to the world. As China emerges on the world stage, both China and the United States would do well to focus on areas of mutual benefit, even as both sides position themselves for the future.

BERLIN (AP) — Humanity still has a chance, close to the last, to prevent the worst of climate change’s future harms, a top United Nations panel of scientists said Monday. But doing so requires quickly slashing nearly two-thirds of carbon pollution by 2035, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The United Nations chief said it more bluntly, calling for an end to new fossil fuel exploration and for rich countries to quit coal, oil and gas by 2040. “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.” Stepping up his pleas for action on fossil fuels, Guterres called for rich countries to accelerate their target for achieving net zero emissions to as early as 2040, and developing nations to aim for 2050 — about a decade earlier than most current targets. He also called for them to stop using coal by 2030 and 2040, respectively, and ensure carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas-fired power plants either. That date is key because nations soon have to come up with goals for pollution reduction by 2035, according to the Paris climate agreement. After contentious debate, the U.N. science report approved Sunday concluded that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris the world needs to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in six previous reports issued since 2018. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts for thousands of years,” the report said, calling climate change “a threat to human well-being and planetary health.” “We are not on the right track but it’s not too late,’’ said report co-author and water scientist Aditi Mukherji. “Our intention is really a message of hope, and not that of doomsday.’’ With the world only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, scientists stressed a sense of urgency. The goal was adopted as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). This is likely the last warning the Nobel Peace Prize-winning collection of scientists will be able to make about the 1.5 mark because their next set of reports may well come after Earth has either passed the mark or is locked into exceeding it soon, several scientists, including report authors, told The Associated Press. After 1.5 degrees “the risks are starting to pile on,” said report co-author Francis X. Johnson, a climate, land and policy scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. The report mentions “tipping points” around that temperature of species extinction, including coral reefs, irreversible melting of ice sheets and sea level rise of several meters (several yards). “1.5 is a critical critical limit, particularly for small islands and mountain (communities) which depend on glaciers,” said Mukherji. “The window is closing if emissions are not reduced as quickly as possible,” Johnson said in an interview. “Scientists are rather alarmed.”

BERLIN (AP) — Humanity still has a chance, close to the last, to prevent the worst of climate change’s future harms, a top United Nations panel of scientists said Monday. But doing so requires quickly slashing nearly two-thirds of carbon pollution by 2035, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The United Nations chief said it more bluntly, calling for an end to new fossil fuel exploration and for rich countries to quit coal, oil and gas by 2040. “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once.” Stepping up his pleas for action on fossil fuels, Guterres called for rich countries to accelerate their target for achieving net zero emissions to as early as 2040, and developing nations to aim for 2050 — about a decade earlier than most current targets. He also called for them to stop using coal by 2030 and 2040, respectively, and ensure carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas-fired power plants either. That date is key because nations soon have to come up with goals for pollution reduction by 2035, according to the Paris climate agreement. After contentious debate, the U.N. science report approved Sunday concluded that to stay under the warming limit set in Paris the world needs to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, adding a new target not previously mentioned in six previous reports issued since 2018. “The choices and actions implemented in this decade will have impacts for thousands of years,” the report said, calling climate change “a threat to human well-being and planetary health.” “We are not on the right track but it’s not too late,’’ said report co-author and water scientist Aditi Mukherji. “Our intention is really a message of hope, and not that of doomsday.’’ With the world only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, scientists stressed a sense of urgency. The goal was adopted as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). This is likely the last warning the Nobel Peace Prize-winning collection of scientists will be able to make about the 1.5 mark because their next set of reports may well come after Earth has either passed the mark or is locked into exceeding it soon, several scientists, including report authors, told The Associated Press. After 1.5 degrees “the risks are starting to pile on,” said report co-author Francis X. Johnson, a climate, land and policy scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. The report mentions “tipping points” around that temperature of species extinction, including coral reefs, irreversible melting of ice sheets and sea level rise of several meters (several yards). “1.5 is a critical critical limit, particularly for small islands and mountain (communities) which depend on glaciers,” said Mukherji. “The window is closing if emissions are not reduced as quickly as possible,” Johnson said in an interview. “Scientists are rather alarmed.”

The world scientific consensus, as represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has established that the global average temperature needs to be kept below a 1.5°C increase over pre-industrial levels this century—or else, with a disproportionately higher level of risk, “well below” a 2°C increase—if climate destabilization is not to threaten absolute catastrophe as positive feedback mechanisms come into effect. In the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, released in its various parts over 2021–23), the most optimistic scenario is one of an end-of-the-century increase in global average temperature over pre-industrial levels of below 1.5°C. This requires that the 1.5°C boundary not be crossed until 2040, rising by a tenth of a degree to 1.6°C, and then falling near the end of the century back down to a 1.4°C increase. All of this is predicated on reaching net zero (in fact, real zero) carbon emissions by 2050, which gives a fifty-fifty chance that the climate-temperature boundary will not be exceeded.

Yet, according to leading climate scientist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, this scenario is already out of date. It is now necessary, based on the IPCC’s own figures, to reach the zero-carbon dioxide emissions point by 2040, in order to have the same 50 percent chance of avoiding a 1.5°C increase. “Starting now,” Anderson wrote in March 2023, to not exceed 1.5°C of warming requires 11% year-on-year cuts in emissions, falling to nearer 5% for 2°C. However, these global average rates ignore the core concept of equity, central to all UN climate negotiations, which gives “developing country parties” a little longer to decarbonise. Include equity and most “developed” nations need to reach zero CO2 emissions between 2030 and 2035, with developing nations following suit up to a decade later. Any delay will shrink these timelines still further.

Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level, according to a major new report released on Monday.

The report, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, offers the most comprehensive understanding to date of ways in which the planet is changing. It says that global average temperatures are estimated to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels sometime around “the first half of the 2030s,” as humans continue to burn coal, oil and natural gas.

But UBI is a lazy solution that fails to solve the real problem: how to give people an opportunity to create wealth. We need to get more people invested in our country as owners of real things that create this wealth—things like real estate, businesses, cars. Otherwise, like in the days of sharecropping, we risk continuing to have a whole class of people who are merely being sustained, but not given the chance for real economic advancement. After the Civil War, the southern region of the US was left destitute to a degree barely imaginable by today’s standards. Since the economic model of the south was heavily reliant on slave labor, the region’s economy was struggling to survive after the abolition of slavery. The answer? Sharecropping. The practice of giving people a modicum of economic incentives, where they could subsist at a low-income level, but where it was impossible for them to rise permanently, defined American poverty for decades. In the sharecropping system, a person would rent land from an owner and farm that plot. A “share” of the profits was also provided to the landlord/owner. Rents were set to make economic profit impossible. So, sharecroppers survived through very hard work, but they could not statistically rise as a group. As a result, people never became owners, which is a basic tenet of economic advancement. From an economic vantage point, sharecropping resembled a form of slavery, except that it also enveloped poor white people. Not surprisingly, following the Civil War, the South was locked into a cycle of poverty lasting into the 20th century with income down 36% from where it was prior to the war. Today’s proposal for UBI is similarly flawed, specifically since it will not result in more ownership. My fear is that, rather than helping, solutions like this will create a permanent class of people on the margins. Without owning assets of significance, people will remain bystanders. There are better ways to attack the problems of poverty: Education Early and broad education around financial literacy and wealth building, for example, costs taxpayers less and creates more results. I got an MBA and never took a course in simple personal financial management. Poor people are forced into bad financial practices by their circumstances and lack of knowledge. Taxes Another option is tax credits for people who invest in tech companies that produce anti-poverty or wealth-building products that benefit the poor. So, you invest $1 and get a $1 deduction against your income. We have to get tech companies working for the poor rather than indirectly against them. A company can get certified with a B Corporation designation, which indicates that it is a social enterprise. Why can’t we create the same type of designation for companies working on anti-poverty technologies and initiatives? Investments The US’s Small Business Administration (SBA) costs taxpayers about $715 million a year. It seems to me that this is a case where increasing a spend can move the dial for everyone’s benefit, including by aggressively expanding the SBA, but where it partners with private sector non-profit organizations that emphasize helping people start businesses. If you look at the history of disenfranchised people, the pattern is that they got themselves out of poverty either by getting educated or by starting their own businesses. This is especially crucial because, despite the popularity of entrepreneurship, the rate of ownership in private companies continues to fall dangerously low over the past 50 years. Lower ownership in private businesses is a national risk. Having an opportunity to participate and own is integral to human dignity. It is true that the problem of poverty is immensely complicated and encompasses many socioeconomic factors. But, if solutions are well thought through and not slapped together under a false premise, such as sharecropping and UBI, we can significantly reduce poverty in this country with the resources and economic power that we already have.

There has not been a single year since the founding of the United States when Black people in this country have not been sicker and died younger than White people. A growing consensus highlights a structural basis for these preventable disparities — structural racism — clarifying the need for a structural solution. Black reparations are one such solution and, we believe, a long-overdue approach to persistent Black–White health disparities in the United States. Though the racial gap in life expectancy has narrowed, Black Americans continue to die 4 years earlier, on average, than White Americans. The divides on other U.S. mortality measures are starker: Black mothers are three times as likely as White mothers to die from pregnancy-related causes1; Black infants are more than twice as likely as White infants to die in their first year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and the rate of premature death (before 75 years of age) is 30% higher among Black Americans than among White Americans. These racial inequities have been the focus of attention from the medical and public health communities in recent years. The National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities, for example, began as a program within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of the Director in 1990, and through a succession of legislative iterations become an Institute of the NIH in 2010. Its mission, in part, is “to reduce and encourage elimination of health disparities.” The CDC has, since 2011, issued Health Disparities and Inequalities Reports and Strategies for Reducing Health Disparities, highlighting public health approaches. Private foundations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have adopted health disparities reduction as a core goal, and a generation of scholars has worked assiduously on this challenge for several decades. An important advance is that addressing Black–White health gaps is no longer at the margins of academic or health concerns. But though this attention has brought some tangible gains, progress has been strikingly limited. Despite improvements, life expectancy remains stubbornly tied to whether a person is born Black or White. Black–White health gaps continue to characterize American health and, at the current pace of effort and investment, will continue to do so for decades to come. Perhaps the most important insight into why these gaps persist comes from work that focuses our thinking about fundamental causes of health.2 This work shows that forces that shape our societal structures — including power, money, and access to resources — inevitably become embodied in health and will continue to shape health patterns unless they are addressed. This understanding clarifies that the Black–White health gap is inseparable from the enormous gap in resources between Blacks and Whites in the United States. Black Americans earn 65 cents for every dollar earned by White Americans. Even more dramatically, the average Black family has about $10 in assets for every $100 accrued by the average White family. In 2015, for example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found a truly staggering racial gap in wealth in Boston: household assets averaged $8 for Black families and about $247,500 for White families. And power, money, and access to resources — good housing, better education, fair wages, safe work places, clean air, drinkable water, and healthier food — translate into good health. The radical implication of this link is that what really needs fixing is access to resources. We suggest that one means for fixing it is Black reparations for slavery. Reparations would target the underlying causes of Black–White health gaps. Efforts to provide better health care, to provide more medicine, and to tackle the greater disease burden in a population that lacks access to essential resources for health are bound to fall short — they may be necessary, but they will never be sufficient. If the medical and public health communities understood both this inadequacy and the central role that Black reparations could play in narrowing health gaps, they might feel compelled to engage with the question of Black reparations. We believe that there are three pathways through which reparations could reduce health disparities. First, they would go some way toward expanding the extremely limited resources available to many Black Americans. Insofar as the relationship between resources and health is inarguable, there is no way to close a health gap without also addressing a resource gap. In the short term, reparations would give many Black Americans the means to obtain health-producing resources such as better neighborhoods, better schools, and access to cleaner air. Second, reparations would help reduce the stress felt by many Black Americans, which is undoubtedly associated with poor health. Psychological strain has been clearly linked to poor health,3 and reparation funds that alleviated some of this strain could help improve the health of Black Americans. Third, we would expect the ultimate effect of Black reparations to be intergenerational. Health is produced over the life course and across generations, and any effort in the present to level the wealth playing field could reset the potential wealth and assets — and consequent health — of future generations. Thus, any reparations provided today would be an investment in the future and in reducing disparities that have been intractable for generations. A growing literature makes the moral, historical, legal, and economic arguments for Black reparations.4 However, such advocacy has rarely considered the health advantage that reparations would offer.5 Black reparations could be implemented in various ways, ranging from cash transfers to the creation of investment vehicles, and we need research to elucidate the most effective forms. It seems likely that no single approach will be sufficient to counterbalance the centuries-long deprivation that continues to harm the health of Black Americans today. But at the core, reparations would be an acknowledgment of the harms of slavery, a restitution of resources that have long been denied to people affected by slavery over generations, and would bring some closure to profound injustices that the country has long shamefully neglected. Black reparations have been highly controversial, a proposition generally seen as politically untenable. Though supported by most Black Americans, reparations are opposed by a majority of Americans overall. Yet the tide is turning. Democratic presidential candidates discussed — and several supported — reparations during the 2019 primary debates. In 2019, Congress held its first hearings on a reparations bill in more than a decade. Then the murder of George Floyd unleashed unprecedented global rejection of the human cost of the U.S. racial hierarchy. These developments create an extraordinary opportunity to clarify that a fundamental driver of Black–White health gaps is a difference in resources that is structural in origin, owing to many obstacles to Black advancement. We cannot ameliorate long-standing Black–White health inequities without addressing the structural forces that pattern them. Black reparations would not solve racism — structural racism permeates all we do and bars Black Americans from equitable access to housing, occupational opportunities, and safe neighborhoods, to name but a few determinants of health. But reparations would represent a monumental break with the past. At the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed that “In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.” He explained: “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” From this, his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, we remember King’s words about the content of our characters. But his remarks on the obligation to repair have often been overlooked. It is left to those of us in medicine and public health to argue that now is the time to act, because equity is not simply about repair in cash or in kind. Addressing the Black–White wealth gap through reparations is about saving lives. By bringing attention to the health benefits of addressing this gap, we can help shift a national conversation about reparations that often becomes mired in blame and accusation to one that centers the critical importance of health.

Responding to environmental calamity requires working political in- frastructure, the accumulated result of years of development of norms, legal structures, and institutional knowledge. For example: strong legislatures can effectively constrain or altogether prevent excess executive power—even that of dictators.56 Yet colonized countries, particularly on the African continent, often inherited relatively weak legislatures, deeply autocratic political structures, and the dictatorial institutional memory of colonial management.57 These initial conditions affected the trajectory of legislative power development even after formal independence was won, since legislative power develops over time and the effects of institutional development survive the rise and fall of particular regimes.58 This form of accumulation would then directly affect a number of the measures that researchers have found to be key determinants of climate vulnerability, including “government effectiveness,” “political rights,” “voice and ac- countability,” and “civil liberties.”59

Responding to environmental calamity and its impacts on public health requires a working epistemic infrastructure: robust networks of knowledge and trust. Substantial empirical and formal evidence suggests that these are the accumulated result of generations-worth of decisions. Some of these distant decisions shape how cultures of trust or distrust are passed down within and across social groups, which affects how knowledge is produced and distributed in a country, com- munity, or region.60 These factors combine powerfully in institutions, which tend to be built more vulnerably when social trust is low.61

Federalism and localism, in contrast, depend on—even glory in—the idea of minority rule. Neither theory requires you to like every policy passed at the local or state level any more than a nationalist has to agree with everything that Congress passes. But our current system rests on the assumption that decentralization can produce a healthier democracy in the long term. Ours is a world in which decision-making bodies of every sort (school committees, juries, city councils) are dominated by groups of every sort (Italians and Irish, Catholics and Jews, Greens and libertarians). We don’t worry about this representational kaleidoscope—let alone condemn it as “segregated”—merely because one group or another is taking its turn standing in for the whole. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry when it is a racial minority group in that position

Minority rule can promote both the economic and political integration of racial minorities. We have long understood minority rights as furthering those goals, which is why we care so much about them. But minority rule can further these goals as well. Often when we talk about democratic equality, we focus on its symbolic benefits rather than its material ones. We talk about the dignity of political participation but wrinkle our noses at the idea of political patronage. But history suggests a more muscular account of what a democracy can do for minorities. Politics can play an important role in promoting economic integration, and economics can play an important role in promoting political integration.

Progressives are deeply skeptical of federalism, and with good reason. States’ rights have been invoked to defend some of the most despicable institutions in American history, most notably slavery and Jim Crow. Many think “federalism” is just a code word for letting racists be racist. Progressives also associate federalism—and its less prominent companion, localism, which simply means decentralization within a state—with parochialism and the suppression of dissent. They thus look to national power, particularly the First and Fourteenth Amendments, to protect racial minorities and dissenters from threats posed at the local level.

But it is a mistake to equate federalism’s past with its future. State and local governments have become sites of empowerment for racial minorities and dissenters, the groups that progressives believe have the most to fear from decentralization. In fact, racial minorities and dissenters can wield more electoral power at the local level than they do at the national. And while minorities cannot dictate policy outcomes at the national level, they can rule at the state and local level. Racial minorities and dissenters are using that electoral muscle to protect themselves from marginalization and promote their own agendas.

Under President Trump, most federal government programs (with the notable exception of those related to the military) are on course to be slashed. But the major social and economic problems addressed by federal programs will not disappear; they will only intensify. The market alone can’t solve these problems; indeed, it sometimes causes or exacerbates them. Nor can nonprofits, philanthropic organizations, or social sector organizations fulfill these public sector responsibilities, though they can play important partnership roles in researching, catalyzing, advocating, innovating, and delivering programs. Government action at the federal, state, or local level is essential in such critical areas as education, climate change, and health insurance.

The answer to a deadlocked and divided federal government is “progressive federalism”—the pursuit of progressive policy goals using the subnational governments in the US federal system.

Why should states engage with guaranteed income? Every person deserves to live with dignity and have their basic needs met. After decades of rollbacks and disinvestment, our current social safety net is insufficient given the economic situation we face. In the United States there is unconscionable and accelerating wealth inequality,1 wages have been stagnant for 40 years2 and, both before3 and throughout4 the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans struggle to meet their basic needs. In the richest country on Earth, elimination of deep poverty is attainable and long overdue. Historically, states have played a critical role in testing concepts to improve the lives of low-income residents and craaeated a blueprint for anti-poverty measures that can be implemented nationwide.5 It is time to boldly reimagine and revitalize an eroded social safety net, and states have an opportunity to lead by example. It is time to boldy reimagine and revitalize an eroded social safety net. The devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted mitigation strategies intended to get cash to people who were impacted. Federal policies such as increased unemployment insurance, an expanded and fully refundable Child Tax Credit (CTC), and stimulus checks have led to burgeoning support for permanent cash transfer programs like a guaranteed income. Additionally, state and local governments added to relief efforts by using federal dollars provided by both the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to fund cash transfer programs of their own.6 At the same time, an increasing number of municipalities and other units of local government across the country are exploring guaranteed income demonstrations in their community, and states should seize this opportunity to build upon this work. Local guaranteed income programs, though limited in scope, produce incredibly valuable data to prove the efficacy of unconditional cash programs, which are critical for states to obtain buy-in from the necessary stakeholders. One limitation of local programs, however, is that they often aren’t scaled to study the potential for community-level change or other broader economic impacts. At the federal level, the expanded CTC being debated as part of President Biden’s American Families Plan represents a form of guaranteed income for 39 million households.7 Unfortunately, federal conversations around nationwide cash transfer programs – like an expanded CTC – have been underwhelming. As of December 2021, the Build Back Better Act does maintain the fully refundable nature of the expanded-CTC, allowing low- and no-income families excluded pre-pandemic to continue to receive a credit, but only a temporary extension is being considered for the increased amounts families received during the pandemic. While the Build Back Better Act has not yet passed, the stimulus checks and expanded CTC have moved the needle, breaking down barriers to moving cash policies at any level of government. We now have a much better sense of what is possible when it comes to distributing monthly cash payments, and we have data and stories of the impact these policies have in the lives of low- and middle-income earning families. In light of the current limits at the local and federal level, there is an opportunity for state governments to explore ambitious, publicly-funded cash transfer policies that: promote dignity and greatly improve the lives of their low-income residents; add to a growing body of research with assessments of larger scale positive impacts across geographically and racially diverse areas; utilize the revenue raising powers of state government; and could be a model for a permanent federal program. We need a permanent federal guaranteed income, but political gridlock and polarization threaten to frustrate attempts at a federal program in the immediate term. States have an opportunity to push closer to that ideal with large scale, publicly funded, permanent programs of their own that will provide essential data and experience toward the realization of a federal program. This guide seeks to arm state-level advocates and policymakers with information regarding the choice points in program design, the positive impacts shown by existing research, and special considerations for states including options for guaranteed income implementation, interactions with existing public benefits programs, opportunities for public funding, and promoting racial equity.