08 May 20
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Bill McKibben | Big Oil's Reign Is Finally Weakening
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "On some long-distant day when some as-yet-unborn historian sits down to write the story of climate change - the story of the greatest crisis humans ever faced - it's possible that they'll choose an anecdote from this past week as a way into the story."
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, it understandably didn’t get much notice, but JPMorgan Chase announced on Friday that Lee Raymond will no longer serve as the lead independent director of the world’s largest lender to the fossil-fuel industry.
I’ve told the backstory at much greater length here, but, briefly: Raymond was a key Exxon executive from the nineteen-eighties onward—the years when the company was one of the most profitable in the world. (If you want a full account, read Steve Coll’s majestic “Private Empire.”) Those were also the years when Exxon’s scientists discovered—before it was publicly an issue—that climate change was real and dangerous, and when Exxon’s executives decided to join with others in the industry to cover up that truth. Raymond gave the single most audacious speech of the era, telling a World Petroleum Congress audience in 1997, on the eve of the Kyoto climate talks, that the planet was cooling, and that it made no difference if we acted then or waited a quarter century.
Raymond retired from Exxon as C.E.O., in 2005, having earned a reported six hundred and eighty-six million dollars; in his retirement, his job was to help run the board at Chase. Advocates have urged Chase to remove him as lead independent director because of his climate-denying past, and last month the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, joined the fight, pledging to vote the city pension fund’s Exxon shares against Raymond; he persuaded the New York State comptroller and the Pennsylvania state treasurer, in turn, to join him. One can only speculate, but this clearly put pressure on giant investors such as BlackRock, who have been making climate-friendly noises; in any event, as the Financial Times reported, Chase has removed Raymond from his position, though he remains on the board.
The effect is probably practical and definitely symbolic—Raymond’s removal ratifies the notion that, after a decade of relentless campaigning by activists, Big Oil is no longer quite as big. It’s true that, in the same week, much of the industry got the bailout that it had been asking for from Washington. But that was scant cause for celebration: the International Energy Agency released new numbers, predicting that global oil demand would drop nine per cent this year. As economists at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis pointed out, the fossil-fuel sector really faces long-term solvency problems, not just short-term liquidity woes. Demand growth had been slowing in recent years, as regulatory pressure began to mount, as a result of all that activism, and as renewable energy got cheaper. Even before COVID-19 really bit, Exxon had been “humbled,” according to Bloomberg Businessweek, becoming a “mediocre” company. Now it seems entirely likely that we have seen peak oil demand, a moment that the oil companies had predicted wouldn’t come for decades. Here’s the energy analyst Kingsmill Bond’s precis: “If demand for fossil fuels bounces back in 2021 by half the amount it fell in 2020, and grows at 0.5% a year, it would take 8 years to get back to where the industry started. And in the meantime, the renewable energy revolution has not stopped.”
This process will accelerate in places where governments rebuild their economies with Green New Deals, and lag in places where a move back to private cars combines with cheap gas prices to keep the S.U.V. era alive a little longer. But the key point is that, as the industry flags, so will its political power. “The ability of the industry to dictate to governments will weaken,” Bond said, “and the capacity of incumbents to frustrate the growth of renewables will reduce.” Exit Lee Raymond, stage right.
Passing the Mic
Vanessa Hauc took over in March as the anchor of Telemundo’s weekend newscast, but she didn’t give up her other role, leading the Spanish-language network’s environmental-investigative unit for its remarkable program “Planeta Tierra.” She’s also notable for the fact that, in February, she was the first climate journalist chosen to ask questions at a Presidential debate.
Every poll shows that Latinx Americans are the group most concerned about climate change in the country—why?
The climate emergency is affecting everyone on the planet, but not equally. It disproportionately impacts the most vulnerable populations—women, children, and minorities, among them Latinos. Here in the U.S., half of our community lives in the twenty-five most polluted cities in the country, and in neighborhoods that are close to factories and refineries with high levels of pollution. Latino children are forty per cent more likely to die from asthma than non-Latino white children. Our communities work in sectors that are directly impacted by heat waves and extreme-weather events, like agriculture, construction, and landscaping. For us, the climate emergency is a reality affecting not only where we live but where we work. Still, I see my community as a powerful force of change. We care deeply about the environment. Our connection with nature is ancestral—it’s in our DNA. I still remember my trips to the market with my grandmother, in a small town in Colombia, where all the fruits and vegetables were organic and sold to us by local farmers. I remember she didn’t use a plastic bag but a costal, a bag made of dry leaves to carry practically anything. Many of my dresses first belonged to my sisters. I then passed them on to my cousins in Peru. We walked when we could, we shared rides, and food was the center of family gatherings. We feasted around my grandmother’s delicious recipes from Peru.
Many Latino families are like that. We recycle by nature. We believe in conservation, and no food will go to waste in our homes. We are a community that is ready to act on the climate emergency and that wants to be a part of the solution. The challenge we face is to insure that those communities have a platform and the necessary resources and information to work on solutions and live sustainable lives.
What are the other issues that really draw a strong response on “Planeta Tierra”?
“Planeta Tierra” shines a light on the greatest challenges we are facing today, from plastic pollution to the loss of biodiversity and deforestation. But we frame our stories on solutions. We look for the stories of people who are making a difference. For example, entrepreneurs who are rethinking their way of doing business and creating more sustainable products. We interviewed a fashion designer in Mexico who is creating leather from the leaves of nopal, a traditional Mexican vegetable. We also ran a story about a factory that is producing plastic out of avocado seeds. We recently highlighted the work of women who are redesigning our food systems to make it healthy for us and for the planet, too. The story of our changing planet can feel overwhelming. Many of us have felt paralyzed in front of the magnitude of the challenge it presents. Therefore, as a journalist, my job is to inform my viewers about our changing climate in the most rigorous and scientific way. But, as an environmentalist, my job is also to give them hope, to empower them to be part of the solution, to offer the tools and information they need to really be agents of change.
Climate School
If there is one essay from the weeks of pandemic I wish I could make everyone read, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s offering on The New Yorker’s Web site. No novelist has engaged as long or as successfully with the climate crisis. (Anyone who loves Gotham should immediately buy Robinson’s “New York 2140.”) Speaking of our quarantine, he writes that “we realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters.” But, he continues, thanks to global warming “we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants.”
It’s true that coal, oil, and gas use have fallen as we locked down, but the interesting thing may be that they’ve fallen so little. As the Grist reporter Shannon Osaka points out, even with economies at an unprecedented idle, emissions are only slated to fall by five or six per cent. The NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt explains: “People focus way, way too much on people’s personal carbon footprints … without really dealing with the structural things that cause carbon dioxide levels to go up.” Every life, even in quarantine, uses lots of energy for light and heat. And if you’re binge-watching at all hours? According to one U.K. study, “The energy generated from 80 million views of the thriller Birdbox is the equivalent of driving over 146 million miles and emitting over 66 million kg of CO2.”
Thirty-two environmental organizations signed a letter to the asset-management firm BlackRock asking that it divest its holdings in Drax, which operates the biggest wood-burning power plant in the U.K. Rita Frost, a spokeswoman for the Dogwood Alliance in the southeastern U.S., where much of that wood is cut, said, “We witness the social and environmental impacts of the biomass industry first hand. If BlackRock is classifying this as sustainable investment, we urge them to think again.”
Here’s a really illuminating piece on the rocky but still remarkable progress that Germany has been making toward renewable power. Dan Gearino really explains what may be the most complex and hopeful energy story on the planet.
Scoreboard
Solar power just keeps getting cheaper, especially if you have a large, hot desert to work with: the latest bids for a giant array in Abu Dhabi show the price continuing to drop toward an almost unbelievable one cent per kilowatt-hour.
A new study of tree mortality last month concluded: “forests are in big trouble if global warming continues at the present pace. Most trees alive today won’t be able to survive in the climate expected in 40 years,” because “the negative impacts of warming and drying” are already outpacing any fertilizing effect from extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “We really need to be able to hear these poor trees scream,” an Australian researcher said. “These are living things that are suffering. We need to listen to them.”
Warming Up
On the list of people who have willingly paid a price for their climate activism, few rank much higher than Tim DeChristopher. He was sentenced to two years in federal custody, for falsely bidding on Utah oil and gas leases as a protest. I will never forget visiting him in a high-desert prison on the California/Nevada line. He sent along this song, “Brother,” by the Los Angeles folk rockers Lord Huron. If it works for him, it’s probably useful.
The Arbery family. (photo: CNN)
Father and Son Charged With Murder of Black Jogger Ahmaud Arbery
Joe Jurado, The Root
Jurado writes: "On Tuesday, video was released showing the graphic shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery. As the video went viral, public outcry intensified with many outraged that the men responsible hadn't been arrested or faced any charges."
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The Takoma Park Post Office. (photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)
Top Republican Fundraiser and Trump Ally Named Postmaster General, Giving President New Influence Over Postal Service
Josh Dawsey, Lisa Rein and Jacob Bogage, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "A top donor to President Trump and the Republican National Committee will be named the new head of the Postal Service, putting a top ally of the president in charge of an agency where Trump has long pressed for major changes in how it handles its business."
The Postal Service’s board of governors confirmed late Wednesday that Louis DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman who is currently in charge of fundraising for the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, will serve as the new postmaster general.
The action will install a stalwart Trump ally to lead the Postal Service, which he has railed against for years, and probably move him closer than ever before to forcing the service to renegotiate its terms with companies and its own union workforce. Trump’s Treasury Department and the Postal Service are in the midst of a negotiation over a $10 billion line of credit approved as part of coronavirus legislation in March.
The confirmation came after The Washington Post asked for comment on the decision.
Trump has indicated he wants the Postal Service to dramatically raise fees for delivering packages for customers such as Amazon in exchange for tapping the line of credit. Trump has long argued that Amazon doesn’t pay the Postal Service enough, a charge the agency has fiercely contested. (Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Post.)
“Louis DeJoy understands the critical public service role of the United States Postal Service, and the urgent need to strengthen it for future generations,” Robert M. Duncan, chairman of the board of governors, said in a statement.
“Postal workers are the heart and soul of this institution, and I will be honored to work alongside them and their unions,” DeJoy, who will start June 15, said in a statement.
The White House declined to comment.
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, denounced the move as a reward by Trump to a “partisan donor.”
“The Postal Service is in crisis and needs real leadership and someone with knowledge of the issues,” Connolly said. “This crony doesn’t cut it.”
After criticizing the agency for years, Trump has been consolidating his influence lately. Three Republicans and one Democrat sit on the board of governors after the vice chairman, David Williams, a Democrat, resigned last week.
The departure came after Williams told confidants he was upset that the Treasury Department was meddling in what has long been an apolitical agency and felt that his fellow board members had capitulated to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s conditions for the $10 billion line of credit, according to four people familiar with Williams’s thinking.
Williams did not respond to a request for comment.
Democrats have urged the Postal Service to hold firm with Treasury over the terms of the loan, betting they could win more money for the agency in another round of legislation and threatening the Trump administration with taking the risk of disrupting mail service.
But in recent days, the Postal Service’s board has appeared open to some of the Trump administration’s terms, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations. The precise terms could not be learned.
“[Williams’s] main frustration is that he felt the Treasury Department was interfering in an apolitical board and an apolitical agency,” said one person who spoke with him.
A Treasury Department spokesman declined to comment.
DeJoy will be the first postmaster general in two decades who did not rise through the agency’s ranks. He would have to navigate a financially fraught agency while also working with its powerful labor unions, among the last public-sector unions left with significant clout in contract negotiations with the government.
In part because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Postal Service is projecting a $13 billion revenue shortfall by the end of the fiscal year in September.
Trump has for years seized on the rates the Postal Service charges companies like Amazon to deliver packages. The business of package delivery has proved increasingly vital to the service’s finances as first class mail has deteriorated, and Trump has contended the agency charges Amazon and other companies too little.
The Postal Service has rejected those accusations, arguing it is charging competitive rates in an environment where it squares off against UPS, FedEx and even Amazon’s growing delivery service.
Megan Brennan, the current postmaster general, who announced her retirement late last year, had clashed with the Trump administration over its efforts to take more control over postal finances and operations. Trump had urged her early in his tenure to increase fees for Amazon and other companies.
The announcement of Brennan’s successor comes at a tumultuous period for the Postal Service, whose already shaky financial footing has grown weaker during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump, responding to a report in The Post in April, threatened to block the $10 billion Postal Service loan unless officials dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers.
“The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump said publicly last month in the Oval Office. He called for the agency to quadruple its shipping prices. Many analysts warn that if the Postal Service did that, it would put itself at a massive disadvantage in the marketplace.
DeJoy, a North Carolina native, has played a prominent role in Republican politics, particularly since Trump won the presidency in 2016. He has given more than $2 million to the Trump campaign or Republican causes since 2016, according to the Federal Election Commission, including a $210,600 contribution to the Trump Victory Fund on Feb. 19. He has given more than $650,000 to the Trump Victory Fund and more than $1 million to the RNC.
DeJoy was tapped as the finance chairman for the RNC convention in August and has worked in recent months with Katie Walsh, a top Republican operative, to orchestrate the event.
An RNC spokesman declined to comment.
DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, is vice chairman of the president’s Commission on White House Fellowships and is Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Canada. She previously served as ambassador to Estonia in the George W. Bush administration.
DeJoy has donated more than $157,000 to Republican candidates, committees and super PACs since the start of the year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Duncan, the current chairman of the Postal Service’s board of governors, served as RNC chairman from 2007 to 2009. He was confirmed in 2018 after being appointed by Trump.
DeJoy is the owner of a real estate and consulting firm in North Carolina after having served as chairman and CEO of New Breed Logistics, according to his family’s foundation page. New Breed was sold to XPO Logistics. He is a longtime donor to Republican causes, according to FEC records.
Under the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus relief passed in March, the Treasury Department was authorized to lend $10 billion to the Postal Service, which says it may not be able to make payroll and continue mail service uninterrupted past September.
Mnuchin rejected a bipartisan Senate proposal to give the Postal Service a bailout amid the negotiations over that legislation.
Brennan, with the consent of the board of governors, went to Congress to ask for a direct bailout of more than $89 billion to stave off pandemic losses and other long-running accumulated debts.
Top Treasury officials were furious at the request, according to a person with knowledge of their frustration.
The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly exacerbated years of revenue losses for the agency as it struggles to adapt to a digital age amid a decline in first-class mail.
Postal officials have said mail volume is down by a third during the pandemic and continuing to decrease as businesses scale back solicitations and advertisements. Package volume is up, but not enough to cover the other losses, the officials say.
Joe Biden. (photo: AP)
A Top Democrat Says the State Department Has Sent Republicans Thousands of Pages for Their Biden Investigation While Ignoring Democratic Requests
Emma Loop, BuzzFeed
Loop writes: "The State Department has continued to turn over thousands of pages of records to Republican senators investigating former vice president Joe Biden and Ukraine during the coronavirus outbreak, prompting outcry from the top Democrat on one of the committees running the probe."
“It is wholly inappropriate for the State Department to dedicate its limited resources to voluntarily complying with Republican requests,” Sen. Ron Wyden wrote.
In a letter to the State Department on Wednesday, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said the department has provided Senate Republicans with more than 4,000 pages of records — including 1,000 pages in early April as the coronavirus crippled the country and halted some government work.
Meanwhile, Wyden says the department has neither produced any of the documents he requested nearly three months ago nor “communicated with [his] office in any way about the request.”
“It is wholly inappropriate for the State Department to dedicate its limited resources to voluntarily complying with Republican requests without also making a good faith effort to respond to Democratic requests,” Wyden wrote in the letter, which his office provided to BuzzFeed News.
The letter adds to Wyden's criticism of the Trump administration’s willingness to cooperate with the Republican-led inquiry and underscores the tension between Republicans and Democrats involved in the probe.
In February, Wyden accused the Treasury Department of prioritizing Republicans' requests for records over those from Democrats in Congress, which led Republicans to accuse the senator of leaking sensitive information. The next month, former president Barack Obama privately condemned the investigation, BuzzFeed News first reported on Tuesday.
“Glad to see Sen. Wyden agrees that despite Pres. Obama’s assertions, congressional review of federal agency records in the interest of government oversight is worth pursuing,” Taylor Foy, a spokesperson for Finance Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, said in a statement Wednesday. “There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, and every senator has an obligation to ask questions they deem important. That said, it is wrong to leak details of ongoing investigations, as Senate Democrats have done repeatedly.”
Wyden has previously accused Grassley and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson — the other Republican leading the investigation — of trying to hurt Biden’s presidential campaign against President Donald Trump, whose calls for Biden to be investigated were at the heart of the impeachment inquiry against him. But Grassley and Johnson have maintained that they’re conducting legitimate oversight into whether the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine was improperly affected by Biden’s son Hunter serving on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company.
Grassley and Johnson first requested documents on Hunter Biden from the State Department in November, as their investigation took hold. On Feb. 20, two weeks after the Senate acquitted Trump in two articles of impeachment, the department “voluntarily produced” more than 3,000 pages of records to Johnson and Grassley, Wyden’s letter said. On April 8, the department sent an additional 1,000 pages in response to the Republican requests, he wrote.
“Since the State Department's initial production, the United States has become embroiled in a devastating global pandemic,” Wyden said. “To date over 70,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 while over 1 million have been infected. The pandemic has disrupted the lives of nearly every American and over 30 million Americans find themselves unemployed. The pandemic has also limited the operations of the State Department, and some services are only available for Americans ‘with a qualified life-or-death emergency.’”
Wyden’s letter renews his request from February, which demanded a wide range of records on the relationship between the Obama and Trump administrations, as well as people cited in the impeachment inquiry. Wyden said the State Department shouldn’t respond to additional Republican requests until his request is fulfilled.
Wyden also said the records that the department has turned over so far were only from the Obama administration, and that responsive Trump-era documents should be included in the productions, too.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Wyden’s letter noted that the National Archives has also turned over thousands of pages of Obama administration records in response to a request from Grassley and Johnson — a request that Obama criticized but ultimately approved. Wyden said the records included “voluminous spreadsheets and guest lists from official White House events.”
“All that said, nothing I have seen affects the conclusion that U.S. policy toward Ukraine — policy that Chairman Johnson wholeheartedly supported — did not change while Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma,” Wyden said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.
But Republicans are continuing their work. As part of the inquiry, Johnson and Grassley have asked a range of individuals — from former State Department officials to a Democratic lobbying firm — for documents and interviews. It’s unclear when those interviews might occur, with the coronavirus complicating the process. One potential witness, speaking on background to BuzzFeed News, said their communications with committee staffers have continued, though it has been “slower and more sporadic” than before.
Johnson has also said he plans to issue an interim report on the investigation sometime this summer. Asked about that report, an aide said Democrats will “be prepared to correct the record if necessary,” warning that they wouldn’t “allow the Senate to be used to advance foreign election interference efforts.”
Big businesses working with America's prison system are still making money despite the coronavirus crisis. (photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
As Many Companies Struggle During Pandemic, America's For-Profit Prisons Are Thriving
Robin McDowell and Margie Mason, Associated Press
Excerpt: "As factories and other businesses remain shuttered across America, people in prisons in at least 40 states continue going to work. Sometimes they earn pennies an hour, or nothing at all, making masks and hand sanitizer to help guard others from the coronavirus."
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Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gestures as he leaves the federal police headquarters in November 2019. (photo: Getty)
Brazilian Court Upholds 17-Year Sentence Against Lula Da Silva
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Brazil's Federal Court of the Fourth Region Wednesday upheld the 17-year prison sentence handed down in November against former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva."
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Nuclear waste stored in underground containers at the Idaho National Laboratory near Idaho Falls. (photo: Keith Ridler/AP)
Critics Alarmed by US Nuclear Agency's Bid to Relax Rules on Radioactive Waste
Daniel Ross, Guardian UK
Ross writes: "The federal agency providing oversight of the commercial nuclear sector is attempting to push through a rule change critics say could allow dangerous amounts of radioactive material to be disposed of in places like municipal landfills, with potentially serious consequences to human health and the environment."
Nuclear Regulatory Commission keen to allow material to be disposed of by ‘land burial’ – with potentially damaging effects
“This would be the most massive deregulation of radioactive waste in American history,” said Dan Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nuclear industry watchdog non-profit, about a proposal that would permit “very low-level” radioactive waste to be disposed of by “land burial”.
Currently, low-level radioactive waste is primarily disposed of in highly regulated sites in Texas, Washington, South Carolina and Utah. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) also provides exemptions allowing “low-level waste” to be dumped in unlicensed disposal sites, but these exemptions are given only rarely, and are conducted with strict case-by-case protocols in place.
The proposed “interpretive” rule change relaxes the rules surrounding how radioactive materials would be disposed of in unlicensed disposal sites “significantly”, said Hirsch.
“If you dump radioactive waste in places that aren’t designed to deal with it, it comes back to haunt you. It’s in the air you breathe, the food that you eat, the water you drink,” he added.
In an email, David McIntyre, an NRC spokesperson, explained that the rule would apply only to a “small subset” of very low-level waste, and that the agency would not allow such disposals “if we felt public health and safety and the environment would not be protected”.
But major sticking point, say experts, concerns how the term “very low-level waste” is not defined by statute or in the NRC’s own regulations.
The NRC describes low-level wastes as contaminated materials like clothing, tools, and medical equipment. According to McIntyre, the radioactivity of “very low-level waste” is just above background. “The radioactivity level of very low-level waste is so low that it may be safely disposed of in hazardous or municipal solid waste landfills,” he wrote.
Nevertheless, “background doesn’t mean it’s safe,” said Diane D’Arrigo, radioactive waste project director for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, who added that the interpretive rule’s loose language “opens the floodgates” for nuclear waste to be disposed of “as if not radioactive”.
The proposal caps the maximum annual “cumulative dose” to a person from the radioactive wastes dumped into unlicensed sites to 25 millirems – the same limit the NRC uses for highly regulated waste disposal sites. That measurement, said D’Arrigo, is a “projected” amount that can be manipulated through modeling.
Experts point out that the nuclear industry has long sought cheaper ways to dispose of its wastes. As the nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants continues to age, and as more of them approach retirement, some of the decommissioning funds set up to safely dismantle the reactors are proving inadequate.
“The NRC regulations are in effect a cost-benefit analysis,” explained Rodney Ewing, a professor of nuclear security at Stanford University. “It’s been a common trend to look for waste streams that, if separated out, they could be disposed of in less expensive ways.”
Some environmentalists fear the rule change will also disproportionately impact low-income, marginalized communities who are more likely than their wealthier neighbors to be situated near solid waste landfills.
According to Caroline Reiser, nuclear energy legal fellow with the Natural Resources Defense Council, if the proposal is successfully passed, then the issue could end up in court.
“Once it starts getting implemented, that’s when the real fights end up happening,” she said.
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