Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on corporal punishment in schools (Aug. 20):
While the use of corporal punishment in schools is a widely condemned practice, officials in more than 15 states can still strike a child for misbehavior.
In 2021, a 4-year-old was allegedly hit and then restrained and beaten a second time for talking during nap time in Louisiana. And in Mississippi, an 8-year-old found herself in a hospital bed with a fractured finger after enduring a beating for talking in class in 2018.
Violence is not an acceptable form of discipline. It is not only ineffective, but counterproductive, too. Research shows children who are physically disciplined become more aggressive and antisocial, and experience more mental health problems.
In Louisiana, Mississippi and other states, many still defend the right for schools to physically discipline children. And while these states often say they will seek parental consent, restrict excessive force and establish a variety of other policies to prevent abuse, neither the Louisiana nor Mississippi parents said they approved the beatings. Meanwhile, the definition of excessive force is too vague to be protective.
There should be no gray area. The United Nations considers corporal punishment a human rights violation. And leading medical associations, including the American Psychological Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, decry the practice.
While most schools have abandoned the practice, it lingers in many districts in the South, where a history of racial violence makes the continued existence of school-approved physical punishment more concerning.
About 70,000 instances of corporal punishment were recorded in 2017-2018, according to the latest federal data. Among those who were subjected to it, more than 13,000 students had disabilities — a group that, along with Black students, research has found to be disproportionately targeted for physical punishment.
Mississippi, which had the highest number of corporal punishment incidents of any state in the latest federal data, recorded more than 3,800 instances of physical punishment in the last school year, according to reporting by The Post’s Donna St. George. Of those, 54% were directed at Black students, who make up only 47% of the state’s enrollment.
Defenders, such as a Missouri school district that reinstated paddling as what it claimed is a last resort for consistently disruptive students, argue its necessity. One Texas lawmaker said, “Kids do need to fear leadership,” as the state legislature considered — and defeated — a proposed ban on corporal punishment this spring.
Schools are meant to teach children to become confident, capable citizens, not fearful followers. But when children are beaten at school, they learn the wrong lesson — that conflict should be settled with pain and physical force rather than communication. More than 90% of schools understand this. The rest need to join.
The New York Daily News on a TPS extension for Ukrainian refugees (Aug. 23):
In a welcome move last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the extension and redesignation of temporary protected status for Ukrainians, allowing those who’ve arrived as of Aug. 16 to remain in the country with work authorization and protection from deportation at least through April 19, 2025. The move was a no-brainer, providing some security for those fleeing a brutal invasion.
Still, it’s not the moment to call it a day. TPS is, as the suggests, structured to be temporary, though in practice it often isn’t. There are TPS holders from countries including Somalia and El Salvador that have been living here in a sort of status limbo for decades, getting renewals but no fundamental security. That’s because Congress failed to build in a path to residency and eventual citizenship, apparently having not considered that it would never quite be safe for nationals of certain countries to return.
So we don’t have to speculate about the fate that will befall hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian TPS recipients, because it’s happened to many others before them. Without further congressional action, they’ll be stuck in a kind of semi-permanent status, building lives in the United States without any clear way to guarantee their place past the next redesignation cycle, and never able to naturalize.
That could be addressed by the passage of the Ukrainian Adjustment Act, a bill to provide a path to residency for Ukrainians paroled into the United States — which would cover most TPS holders along with those that have come in through parole programs and not received TPS — since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014.
This is an even bigger no-brainer for Congress, unless it’s interested in the diplomatic, public relations and ethical nightmare of having the fate of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees be subject to the continuing support and whims of the executive, who could very well be Donald Trump, a man who seems all too happy to throw Ukrainians under the bus for his own domestic political ambitions. If
policymakers fail to act and end up in two years with Ukrainians being stripped of status and unceremoniously deported.
Congress should also pass the Afghan and Venezuelan Adjustment Acts, bills that would provide paths to citizenship for hundreds of thousands more people who are busying themselves building lives here after fleeing the collapse of the Afghan government in the aftermath of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal, or the regime Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, one of the U.S.’S most vehement regional opponents.
In fact, why stop there? If Congress is already passing laws, why limit them to these patches without addressing the underlying issues? It should go back to the drawing board and totally reformulate our humanitarian immigration systems to prevent people from ending up in these limbos in the first place. That will entail a recommitment to an expansive global refugee system that can more quickly process people abroad and allow them to arrive in the U.S. with status in hand, as well as a return to policies to let people who’ve been in the country for years without incident apply for permanent residency regardless of their status, a consensus position in a bygone era of bipartisan understanding on immigration.
The Los Angeles Times on Joe Biden and the climate (Aug. 18):
President Biden’s recent claim that he has “practically” declared a climate emergency has renewed calls for him to actually do so.
And he should.
Since the start of his term, climate activists have urged Biden to declare a climate emergency to unlock additional executive powers and resources to increase renewable energy, restrict fossil fuel extraction and protect Americans from wildfires, heat waves, storms and other climate-fueled disasters.
But pressure eased with the deal to pass the renewable energy-boosting Inflation Reduction Act, and after Biden signed it into law, he never declared a climate emergency. So it was laughable when the president said an Aug. 9 interview with the Weather Channel that he already had done so, “practically speaking.” The Poynter Institute’s Politifact Truth-o-meter rated his statement “false.”
If the president is serious about fighting the climate crisis, why not declare it an emergency for real?
Invoking the National Emergencies Act, the Stafford Act and other federal laws that give the president executive authority to respond to disasters, emergencies and threats to national security would enable Biden to access additional funding for climate-resilient infrastructure projects by the Pentagon and Federal Emergency Management Agency. He could go beyond that and restore the ban on crude oil exports, suspend offshore drilling in federal waters and stop investments in foreign fossil fuel projects. And with the Republican-controlled House blocking climate action, the country needs the executive branch to respond more aggressively.
Biden’s rhetoric on climate change has been strong — he has at least called it an emergency — and with the Inflation Reduction Act, he took the biggest federal climate action to date.
But the president’s actions still fall seriously short, particularly when it comes to phasing out fossil fuels that are overheating the climate. In March he broke a major campaign promise to stop drilling on federal land by approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and
he moved forward with a massive oil and gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico that could generate tens of millions of tons of carbon emissions. In June, Biden signed legislation to fast-track the Mountain Valley Pipeline to transport methane gas from West Virginia to southern Virginia.
There is value in the country that has spewed more planet-warming pollution historically than any other declaring the crisis a true emergency. And doing it through executive action isn’t a stretch. Biden has already acted without Congress to spur production of solar panels and heat pumps under the Cold War-era Defense Production Act and designate five new national monuments using the 117-year-old Antiquities Act.
A presidential climate emergency declaration might anger Republicans in Congress, but that should not stop him. Presidents of both parties have declared dozens of national emergencies since the 1970s to respond to natural disasters, terrorism and disease outbreaks. Some of these declarations remain in place decades later, and not one has been overturned in court.
In an interview Tuesday, White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi pointed to other actions Biden has taken, through the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies, to cut greenhouse gas pollution, and said that since signing the Inflation Reduction Act last year “he has been relentless in making sure his administration is looking for additional ways to move faster and faster.”
“The president has been very clear with his team to leave no stone unturned,” Zaidi told a Times editorial writer, and is “looking at responsible uses of emergency authorities where they fit.”
The planet is, of course, already telling us loud and clear that we’re in an emergency. This year alone we’ve seen the hottest month ever recorded, flooding that caused more than $4 billion in damage in California, 101-degree ocean temperatures in Florida, choking wildfire smoke that turned skies orange, a hurricane bound for Southern California and the nation’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century.
We need the president to scale up his response to the climate crisis accordingly, and follow through with bold new actions.
Biden can start by declaring it the emergency that he already knows it to be.
The Guardian on protecting sea coral (Aug. 16):
When images of the climate emergency’s impact are so visceral and so widespread, it is easy to neglect what we cannot see. The shocking photographs and video footage of wildfires in Hawaii and Greece, and floods in China, along with the terrible loss of life and testimony from those who fled, are beginning to bring home the contribution of global heating to such disasters — even if people, and especially businesses and governments, may be slow to accept the truth and even slower to act on it.
Yet our eyes cannot fully capture the devastation in Hawaii, and it does not end where its shores meet the sea. Beneath the surface of the water, sediment runoff may smother coral polyps and block sunlight, affecting the growth of colonies, experts warn. This is only one element of a broader disaster now unfolding, which scientists fear may soon be global and yet which has generated relatively little attention or alarm. Corals in countries across Central America, North America and the Caribbean are suffering significant bleaching as they experience unprecedented levels of heat stress due to record ocean temperatures, and there are similar warnings about reefs off northern Vietnam and southern China. In Florida, some sites have reported total loss of all corals.
Coral reefs account for only 0.1% of the surface area of the ocean. Yet they support a quarter of the world’s known marine life — and an estimated half a billion people, for whom they provide food, jobs and coastal defenses. Most corals grow less than an inch a year; some deep sea colonies have been developing for more than 4,000 years. But destruction happens at a terrifying pace. Reef cover has halved since the 1950s, with the rate of loss accelerating. And while bleaching does not always lead to the death of corals, scientists say they don’t reproduce as well and are more susceptible to disease — or further bleaching. As temperature extremes become more frequent, reefs have less time to recover. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that 1.5C of global warming — the level the world is predicted to reach early next decade — would lead to the destruction of between 70% and 90% of the world’s reefs. A recent study paints an even more alarming picture, suggesting that 99% would experience heat waves too frequently to recover.
Valiant scientists and activists are working on ways to save reefs, such as by nurturing and reintroducing corals — though some of these projects too have been hit by bleaching recently. Potential mitigations include introducing species that are more resilient to high temperatures — though adding nonnative species to an ecosystem is fraught with its own risks.
The focus must be on prevention. Reducing pollutants, especially agricultural runoff, and tackling damage from tourism and overfishing is critical, since these all make reefs more vulnerable to bleaching. But the only real solution is to slash the use of fossil fuels.
It is tempting to shock people into such changes, but not always effective. Humans need to be confronted not only by the haunting images of ghost reefs, with life and color drained from them, but also by the wonder of those that are still healthy, with their fabulous, fantastical populations. Contemplating these ecosystems in all their rainbow glory reminds us not only of what we have lost, but what we must protect.