31 December 20
Many Requests, Please Don’t Forget RSN
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31 December 20
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RSN: Marc Ash | Attacking Joe Biden the Man
Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "Progressives are looking at the fledging Biden administration's nominations and appointments with a fair degree of consternation, and the opposition is predictably gaining momentum. There is a question, however, about the best way to litigate the concerns."
Attacking Joe Biden in an even remotely ad hominem way is likely to be counterproductive. Joe Biden’s far more responsible approach to dealing with the ongoing coronavirus catastrophe is likely to be well received by the American people and, on the whole, have a badly needed calming effect.
The same can be said for getting the economy back on track. Yes, it’s the corporate economy and its captive dependents, but that’s rent, food, healthcare, and other vital services for a big swath of the country, and getting those services restored does end up being essential.
Biden doesn’t have all the answers, and stopping the virus in a condensed timeframe will be a tall order, but his honest, straightforward manner is likely to be more effective and comforting than anything the country has seen since the virus was first identified – or since Donald Trump took office, in a broader sense.
The corporate press is defining Biden’s nominees and appointees generally as “centrists.” That’s obviously inaccurate and misleading. They are not centrist, they are at least corporate-friendly if not actively corporatist.
The label “centrist” is a favorite rhetorical gimmick of the corporate-sponsored media. Defining policies that are profitable to Fortune 500 business interests as “centrist” suggests that the average, moderate, or sensible American supports those policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Average Americans are disaffected, disenfranchised, and disenchanted in the extreme with the state of affairs in governance on the whole, and they think elected officials should do what they said they were going to do when they were campaigning. That’s the true center of American political thinking. Keeping it real.
Taking the most positive perspective on the soon to be activated Biden presidency, Biden does have ample opportunity to oversee significant Progressive policy initiatives during his term in office. There are even indications that he at least believes he will. Time will tell.
But a full-frontal acerbic assault on Biden the man probably will not help. With the pandemic and its attendant economic impacts threatening the lives and livelihoods of most Americans, Biden would be likely to brush that off fairly easily.
Progressives have powerful ideas and badly needed energy on policy. It’s time to make the case. Progressives must have enough confidence in Progressive programs to wade in and win the policy debates.
If Progressives can do that, there’s a chance Biden will act. Time for some of that “good trouble.”
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
A screen displays Chinese president Xi Jinping (top left), European Council president Charles Michel (top right), European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen (bottom right), French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel during an EU-China leaders' meeting video conference Wednesday. (photo: Johanna Geron/AP)
Europe and China Approve Landmark Investment Treaty, Snubbing US
Rob Schmitz, NPR
Schmitz writes: "China's president and European leaders met Wednesday to mark their agreement on an investment deal between the European Union and China despite a request for talks on the issue by the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden."
Chinese President Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron joined EU leaders Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel in a video conference to conclude negotiations over the deal, which removes a number of barriers to European companies' investment in China.
After Wednesday's video meeting, von der Leyen tweeted: "The EU has the largest single market in the world. We are open for business but we are attached to reciprocity, level playing field & values. Today, the EU & China concluded in principle negotiations on an investment agreement."
Negotiations had repeatedly stalled since they began in 2013. But after Biden won the U.S. presidential election, Chinese negotiators went into overdrive, offering various concessions on market access for European companies to help push the deal through before the end of the year. Among other things, the investment agreement promises that China will no longer force European companies to transfer their technology to local joint-venture partner companies.
The deal is a diplomatic victory for Beijing and a domestic one for Xi. In Washington, it will be seen as a snub to the incoming Biden administration, which last week urged the EU to wait.
"Before President Biden has even taken the oath of office, the well has been a bit poisoned in transatlantic relations," said Theresa Fallon, director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies, a think tank in Brussels.
The deal has also been criticized by politicians in Europe because of concerns over forced labor and other human rights abuses in China, and for preempting any discussions with the Biden administration on a joint approach to Beijing.
Fallon told NPR that the push on the European side to sign the treaty was led by Merkel, who, in her final year as Germany's chancellor, wants to seal her legacy with a historic EU-China treaty, and whose country is Europe's largest trading partner with China.
"After four years of the Trump administration, which characterized the EU as 'worse than China,' there is a growing anti-American sentiment" among EU leadership, Fallon said, "meaning 'we don't want to do what the U.S. says.' "
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted that the agreement "demonstrates China's determination and confidence to advance toward a higher level of opening up."
The deal will undergo months of debate and discussion in the European Parliament before it can go into effect, which likely will not be until 2022.
Reality Winner received the longest sentence ever imposed in federal court for an unauthorized release of government information to the media, prosecutors said. (photo: Michael Holahan/The New York Times)
Reality Winner Endures Holiday Hardships as Advocates Turn to Biden for Reprieve
Taylor Barnes, The Intercept
Barnes writes: "Even as she looks to the 46th president, Winner's mother is still using all of the tools in her kit to also target the current one."
In the last year of her harsh sentence, the NSA whistleblower’s bid for clemency is gaining backers.
n the days before Christmas, National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner’s family got together to decorate their homes and celebrate the birth of her sister’s new baby. For Winner, the young Air Force veteran, the holiday brought a different sort of gathering: Her federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, had yet another Covid-19 outbreak, prompting her unit to go into lockdown.
The restrictions meant that there were no religious services for the incarcerated women to attend. Likewise, Winner would miss out on much of her holiday mail. Letters from her supporters are the closest thing to a gift that Winner gets her hands on — her friend and advocate Wendy Meer Collins said they mean “everything” to her — but many letters were being rejected by her prison for what her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said appeared to be objections as capricious as being typed rather than handwritten.
Leading up to the holiday season, Winner had even lost her phone privileges for a month after hugging a fellow incarcerated person on a day she was battling severe anxiety, a move that violated the prison’s unauthorized contact policy, according to her mother. Though the privileges were restored on Christmas Day, Winner spent much of the holiday season losing touch with the outside world.
The communication breakdowns marked a tough end of year for Winner. She lost a series of legal cases for compassionate release amid the coronavirus pandemic and seemed increasingly unlikely to be granted clemency by President Donald Trump. After all, the document she allegedly released to the public — for which she received the longest-ever Espionage Act sentence for a leak to the media — was about Russian interference in U.S. elections, a Trump bête noire. (The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept, whose parent company, First Look Media, contributed to Winner’s legal fund through the Press Freedom Defense Fund.)
Things could look up in the Biden administration — her allies were beginning a push for early release under the new government, with some signs of hope — but Winner was, for the moment, dealing with the vagaries of incarceration and missing the things she loved most.
The Winner family usually spends a whole day together in the kitchen to bake Christmas cookies, but during lockdown, she had to rely on meals delivered to her unit. The meals often weren’t plant-based, her mother said, defying Winner to choose between sustenance and keeping a diet she maintains for ethical and health reasons, stemming from an eating disorder that developed during her time working in the drone program.
As Winner endured especially poignant daily hardships, along with the hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned across America’s vast carceral state, Trump issued a flurry of pardons to his wealthy cronies and politically connected defendants. Some of the beneficiaries included former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who was convicted of tax and bank fraud; the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Charles Kushner, who served prison time for tax evasion and attempting to blackmail his own brother-in-law, a federal witness; and former Blackwater contractors imprisoned for massacring Iraqi civilians.
Collins, who leads a social media campaign to raise awareness of the whistleblower’s harsh sentence, said the pardons highlight the injustices reserved for the powerless: “These people were out to harm. Reality Winner was out to help.”
With a year of confinement left in her record-breaking sentence for whistleblowing and a series of recent defeats in the justice system, Winner’s supporters are reinvigorating her campaign for a pardon or clemency. And, in a recent boost, several influential parties have joined their ranks.
Seeking to get Winner into home confinement in the early weeks of the pandemic — something that would not only have brought peace of mind to her and her family but that also was in line with pandemic policy guidance to prisons from then-Attorney General William Barr — her defense team looked to the courts. When a federal judge declined to hear her bid for compassionate release in April, he ominously said that her prison, officially a medical facility, would be “presumably better equipped than most to deal with any onset of Covid-19 in its inmates.” Just four days after that statement, the prison recorded the first death of an incarcerated person from the disease.
Winner’s compassionate release appeal languished as the virus surged in her prison, claiming six incarcerated people’s lives and infecting hundreds of women, including Winner, by July. A three-judge appeals panel that included two Trump appointees heard her case, brought pro bono by attorney Baruch Weiss, and, earlier this month, upheld the lower court’s decision. But they equivocated on whether the nonviolent offender who had already served the lion’s share of her sentence really needed to spend the rest of the pandemic behind bars.
“[T]here will be occasions in which we affirm the district court even though we would have gone the other way had it been our call,” Judge Beverly Martin wrote, citing an applicable past ruling.
Alison Grinter, Winner’s Dallas-based attorney, saw some redemption in that hand-wringing statement. “I think that nobody’s really eager to say, ‘Here’s a woman that belongs in prison,’” Grinter said. “That’s cool, I guess, but not a lot of comfort to a woman who’s in prison.”
FMC Carswell, the facility where Winner is held, and the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to written questions from The Intercept about Winner’s food, access to religious services, mail delivery, and the rollout of a Covid-19 vaccine in her prison. However, some people in federal detention reportedly began receiving the vaccine in late December, and Winner’s mother says some people at her facility are among the first vaccinations.
Even as courts have spurned her requests, a diverse array of political actors called on the incoming Biden administration to turn its pardon power on an Air Force veteran who been given the most severe punishment by the federal justice system for whistleblowing to the media, an act that the government acknowledges was done with the intent to send it to journalists, and therefore warn the American public, rather than for personal gain.
In December, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian, became the first sitting member of Congress to call for Winner to receive clemency, calling her punishment “unjust” because of the “the abusive application of the Espionage Act,” the World War I-era legislation used to prosecute her and similar defendants, even though they share information not with foreign adversaries but with the U.S. public.
Shortly after that, Republican J. William Leonard, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and former director of the Information Security Oversight Office — the “secrecy czar” responsible for overseeing classification procedures during the George W. Bush presidency — said that Winner should be Joe Biden’s first pardon when he takes office. In a Washington Post op-ed, he wrote that the public interest of Winner’s actions “far outweigh[s] any claims of damage” by the government.
“At a time when this sacred process of our democracy is being attacked by party partisans, the ability of local, state and federal government officials to attest to the security of our election process has a profound impact upon the well-being of our nation and its democratic institutions,” Leonard wrote. “Many of these same officials first became aware of the vulnerability of our elections only after Winner’s leak to the media.”
At least one incoming member of Biden’s Cabinet has expressed support for Winner. His nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, wrote about Winner on Twitter in 2018, asking: “Has everyone just forgotten this woman is languishing in jail?”
Marianne Williamson, a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, frequently calls for Winner’s release on social media. And, in an unexpected twist, former Trump confidant-turned-informant Michael Cohen has also become a supporter, telling Business Insider it would be part of his atonement for his former support of the president.
A military advocacy group, Military Families Speak Out, has also joined the fray, planning a letter-writing campaign around the inauguration to get her name on the president’s radar.
“We believe Reality did what she believed was right and acted in defense of her country, which is what our troops are trained to do,” Pat Alviso, Military Families Speak Out’s national coordinator, said in a statement. “Her continued imprisonment sends a message to all military families, and that is: When your loved one comes home, our government is not going to protect them or give them the slightest consideration they deserve.”
Collins, the advocate leading Winner’s social media campaign, thinks the time is right for a broad coalition to back Winner’s bid for clemency or a pardon, since even national security hawks can say that, after three-and-a-half years behind bars, the veteran has served enough time.
Looking ahead to the inauguration, Collins said, “Two weeks before, we’re going to hit it as hard as we’ve ever hit it.”
Grinter, the attorney, is optimistic that the administration will listen to her campaigners. “I believe that a pardon for Reality, or at the very least commutation for Reality, will be something that we’ll see before the spring.”
Even as she looks to the 46th president, Winner’s mother is still using all of the tools in her kit to also target the current one.
“I continue to come to write to the White House every single day, asking for her release,” Winner-Davis said. “Even though people tell me that Trump is not going to do this, I can’t stop asking. This is my daughter’s life.”
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
McConnell Obstructs $2,000 Stimulus Checks With Poison Pills
Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
Kilgore writes: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has now made it clear he's not going to allow a clean vote on $2,000 stimulus checks, confirming earlier indications that he wasn't going to be stampeded into excessive generosity by growing bipartisan sentiment or orders from the White House."
Instead, in a gambit designed to repel Democrats and perhaps convince the president not to smite him, McConnell will only contemplate a vote on the bigger checks if it’s bundled with Trump’s demands for “election fraud” investigations and the repeal of legal protections for social-media platforms, according to the Washington Post:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said that a proposal from Democrats to approve $2,000 stimulus checks has “no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate,” effectively killing one of President Trump’s top priorities in the final days of his presidency.
McConnell said Republicans would not be “bullied” into passing the bill quickly despite intensifying pressure from Democrats and Trump, citing a belief that the proposal would greatly inflate the U.S. debt and benefit some families who are not in need of financial assistance.
In doing so, McConnell pledged he would not sever the one-time checks from a broader package that the leader said he would try to advance — one that includes an effort to study the 2020 presidential election for fraud and terminate legal protections for tech giants. Democrats vehemently oppose both additions, believing they are deliberate poison pills meant to scuttle any hope of a deal.
The social-media-platform issue (widely referred to as the “repeal of Section 230” for the U.S. code provision containing the liability protections Trump wants to eliminate as vengeance for alleged “censorship” of disinformation from him and his allies) is central to McConnell’s true legislative priority as this Congress winds down: a Senate override of Trump’s veto of the 2020 defense bill. Trump cited in his veto the absence of Section 230 repeal in the defense bill and the inclusion of language mandating the removal of Confederate names from military facilities, so McConnell may again be trying to pour water on the presidential volcano just before Trump leaves office.
It’s telling that McConnell made his move to kill the $2,000 checks after allowing Georgia’s embattled Republican senators to endorse Trump’s demands for them, theoretically neutering Democratic attacks on Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for refusing to come to the aid of needy constituents. At the same time McConnell’s claim that bigger checks would be poorly targeted and would boost deficits and debt represented a big shout-out to the fiscal hawks in his conference who would have preferred no stimulus checks at all. McConnell may figure that Trump is too absorbed with his mad plans for a challenge to Biden’s election on January 6 when the new Congress will certify Electoral College votes to pay much attention to other issues.
Yes, Democrats and even a few Republicans may protest this typically devious maneuver; Bernie Sanders continues to threaten dilatory tactics on the Senate floor on remaining business unless there’s a clean vote on the $2,000 checks. But while Democrats can disrupt holiday plans, in the end McConnell is the master of the Senate, which is perhaps the best argument Democrats can make for toppling his reign when Georgians vote on January 5.
A police officer gives a leaflet with information about COVID-19 to a person entering Mexico in Ciudad Juarez, March 29, 2020. (photo: Reuters)
Trump's Crackdown on the US-Mexico Border Has Been a Moneymaker for Border Agents Working With Traffickers
Luis Chaparro, Business Insider
Chaparro writes: "President Donald Trump's crackdown on the US-Mexico border hasn't stopped illicit traffic crossing it or deterred officials who secretly help it across."
Mexican drug cartels have been paying more money to more US agents than ever before in order to move drugs and people across the border, according to documents and sources who spoke to Insider.
The Trump administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to virtually close the border. Trump has built and often bragged about 400 miles of new border wall, installed dozens of surveillance cameras manned by the military, and boosted the number of border agents.
But none of that has had the desired effect: Traffickers have paid millions of dollars to US border agents to keep drugs and people flowing throughout Trump's time in office.
"We pay as much as $10,000 to a migra [Border Patrol officer] only to look the other way while we are using a tunnel to smuggle drugs and to tell us of new trends on surveillance," said a Mexican woman in charge of smuggling operations for a drug cartel in El Paso, Texas.
As Trump tightened surveillance on the border, their costs went up.
"We used to pay no more than $5,000 to a single agent a month or every two months, but now we are paying twice that every month for a migra to give some information," the woman told Insider.
The cartel operative, who asked not to be identified to avoid retribution, said cartels not only have ties to the Border Patrol but to CBP officers at the international bridges as well.
"Some of them provide us with the shift role so we know who is gonna be working where on that week and plan our shipment. That way we know if one of the agents working [with us] is gonna be on a shift and exactly on which lane number," she said.
In addition to bribes with money, cartels use young girls, according to a Mexican diplomatic source, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
"They are bribing CBP officers on ports of entry with girls. The girls start hanging out with them and they convince the officers to let illegal cargo through," the source said.
The cartel operative in El Paso confirmed that was a method to entice border agents.
Border agents "love alcohol and women," she said. "We started inviting some of the agents to party across the border, in a house we have in Juarez [in Mexico], and we set him up. At the beginning the officer working for us started because we were threatening him with showing his pictures with an underage girl to his wife, but later he learned to love money."
Stricter controls at the border are directly responsible for an uptick in corruption cases, most of them related to organized crime, according to David Jancsics, a professor at San Diego State University and author of the 2020 report "Corruption on the US-Mexico border."
"Tighter border security may further increase the level of this type of bribery. A trust-based strategic conspiracy between the corrupt partners is already the dominant form of border corruption in the United States," Jancsics said.
Jancsics' report estimates that workers with the Department of Homeland Security accepted $15 million of bribes over a 10-year period.
"By the logic I would say with Trump the corruption must be worse than before, but it's very difficult to say. We only know of people arrested, which are small numbers — the tip of the iceberg," said Jancsics.
During the Obama administration, cases of misconduct among border officers dropped steadily. But since 2017, when Trump took office, cases have reached a five-year high, according to a recent internal Customs and Border Patrol report.
There were 286 total arrests during fiscal year 2018 — 268 CBP employees arrested twice, one employee arrested four times, and one employee arrested five times.
The charges include drug smuggling, bribery, theft, and sharing classified government data, records show.
"As an Agency charged with law enforcement activities, CBP regards any violation of law by its employees as being inconsistent with and contrary to its law enforcement mission," the CBP report states.
During 2020, at least a dozen CBP employees were arrested on suspicion of working directly with criminal organizations at the border, according to media releases.
In August, a Border Patrol agent in Arizona was arrested on suspicion of trafficking drugs for a Mexican criminal organization. The same month, a US border agent was arrested in Juarez and accused of smuggling 30 rounds of ammunition, a loaded firearm magazine, and a bulletproof vest.
In September, six border agents were arrested on suspicion of stealing cocaine and marijuana from dealers to sell in the US. That month, a CBP officer in Laredo was arrested in connection with four murders and one kidnapping.
Customs and Border Protection did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent in San Diego, said corruption is part of Border Patrol culture.
"To my knowledge, no other agency is as bad as the Border Patrol in terms of corruption. Since Trump took office he has empowered corrupt agents. They feel Trump is one of them and they can do whatever they want," Budd said.
Budd worked with former border agent Raul Villarreal, who was arrested in Tijuana in October 2008 and convicted four years later of running a human-smuggling ring that brought hundreds of immigrants across the US-Mexico border illegally.
"It still is very common for Border Patrol supervisors to smuggle drugs or people using their own official vehicles. There are agents that have cartel connections before even entering BP," Budd said.
Budd, now a whistleblower about Border Patrol corruption, thinks management is responsible for corruption and abuse inside the agencies.
"I've been advocating in Washington for the Border Patrol and CBP [to] be managed by an external agency. That would be the only way out," Budd told Insider.
A park ranger asks Darrell House to identify himself before tasing him at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, N.M., on Dec. 27, 2020. (photo: Darrell House/Instagram)
VIDEO: Native American Walks "Off Trail" Park Ranger Tases Him
Wilson Wong, Rima Abdelkader and Ali Gostanian, NBC News
Excerpt: "A park ranger was seen on video using a stun gun on a Native American man who was walking his dog with his sister at a national monument in New Mexico on Sunday."
A park ranger stunned Darrell House, who is Oneida and Navajo, after he stepped off a trail while on a walk at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque.
The man, Darrell House, who is Oneida and Navajo, said he went for a stroll with his sister and his dog Sunday afternoon at Petroglyph National Monument in Albuquerque, where, he said, he often prays and meditates in honor of the land and his ancestors.
House said he stepped off the trail to maintain social distancing from an approaching group of hikers when a park ranger ran behind him and warned him to stay on the path.
The National Park Service released on Tuesday a 10-minute long recording from the officer’s body camera. It appeared to show the park ranger, who has not yet been publicly identified, asking House for his identification multiple times. House initially refused to provide ID before giving a false identity and date of birth, the video shows.
The officer can be seen warning the man that he would be detained if he did not ID himself.
"I didn't see a reason to give my identification. I don't need to tell people why I'm coming there to pray and give things in honor to the land. I don't need permission or consent," House said. "And I don't think he liked that very much."
Tensions escalated, with the ranger seen in another video his sister recorded repeatedly stunning House to the ground while he cries for help.
In the video, House's sister can be heard pleading for the ranger to stop.
"I don't have anything," House says between screams. "I apologize for going off the trail."
The ranger, who has not been publicly identified, directs House to sit on the ground as he appears to drag the dog by the leash toward House's sister.
"You're being detained because you refused to identify yourself," the ranger says. "If you resist, I will Tase you."
Another officer can be seen handcuffing House before the video cuts out.
NBC News does not know what happened before or after what's shown in House’s sister video and the National Park Services’ video, and the identities of the rangers in the video have not been confirmed.
The National Park Service said on Tuesday the agency is investigating.
“Prior to the officer using his electronic control device, or taser, the officer attempted to resolve the interaction with an educational contact and simple warning,” the agency said in a statement. “During this initial interaction, both individuals provided fake names and dates of birth to the officer.”
A spokesperson for the National Park Service previously told NBC News in an email on Monday that all park officers complete extensive law enforcement training and are required to undergo special training to carry stun guns.
The National Park Service said House was ticketed for three citations: “being in a closed area off trail, providing false identity information, and failing to comply with a lawful order.” House’s sister was also cited for providing false information and being off trail, according to the agency.
House, who had grown up on a reservation, said he has never run into an issue or encountered a ranger on the hiking trail, where he will often perform his rituals, like offering tobacco and stirring sage.
"We don't have a set time, we don't have set places, we don't have buildings, and we don't have things built to worship," House said. "Nature is what we've been worshipping ... and protecting it has always been our job."
"I am Native, you know. I have rights to this land. I have rights off the trail," he said.
ADDED:
Vanessa Keegan, her boyfriend and 3-year-old son live a block from where rail cars will carry liquefied natural gas to an export facility on the Delaware River. (photo: Emma Lee/WHYY)
'That Terrifies Me': Trump Rule Allows Natural Gas Transport by Rail in Dense Areas
Susan Phillips, NPR
Phillips writes: "In an effort to boost natural gas exports, the Trump administration has reversed longstanding federal policy and approved transport of gas by rail anywhere in the country."
Opposition has come from Hollywood stars, state attorneys general and local residents who worry about the danger this poses. But plans are moving ahead for a New Jersey project that calls for one of the longest such transport routes in the country: 200 miles through densely populated areas of the East Coast.
The gas from Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale would first be sent by pipeline to a new liquefaction plant in the rural northeast part of the state. Refrigeration units would chill it to negative-260 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point it becomes liquid and easier to ship. The part of the plan that scares a lot of people is the next step — transporting the gas by truck or rail down the busy I-95 corridor to a planned export terminal along the Delaware River in Gloucester County, New Jersey.
"That terrifies me," says Vanessa Keegan, who lives nearby with her family, including her three-year-old son Theo. She points to where rail cars full of highly flammable liquefied natural gas — or LNG — would roll about a block and a half away from her house. "That train track that you could skip on down to in about a minute and a half."
A daycare center sits right next to the gate of the planned export terminal.
Pipelines are the more common way to move gas long distances, but battles over them have delayed or even scrapped some projects. Trucks are also allowed to transport LNG. But using rail cars in densely populated areas had been limited until the new rule took effect in August.
Even before that, Delaware River Partners, a subsidiary of New Fortress Energy, which has ties to President Trump, secured a special federal permit to move the LNG by rail. It allows two 100-car trains to transport the gas each day.
In this rust-belt region of New Jersey the project does have support, including from building trade unions and powerful state lawmakers. State Assemblyman John Burzichelli says his grandfather worked at a shuttered DuPont dynamite plant that will house the planned LNG export terminal.
"That site will create jobs as it once did, contribute to the tax base as it once did, and be an important economic driver for people to make a living and feed their families," says Burzichelli.
He says safety issues should be addressed, but that rail cars carry much more hazardous materials through the region every day. "The history of moving this stuff is pretty sound," he says.
The new rule does require rail cars to be built with a thicker outer tank than is mandated for other hazardous cryogenic liquids like ethylene and ethane. (Although it's unclear if that applies to projects like this one, greenlighted earlier through a special permit.)
Ray Mentzer, a chemical engineer at Purdue University, spent his career working on LNG projects for Exxon Mobil. He says the specially designed containers that transport hydrocarbons have a good safety record. But he says transporting the gas through densely populated areas increases the risk if there's a leak.
"It's not flammable until it's vaporized, but it's going to be vaporized pretty darn quickly and then it's going to seek an ignition source," he says. "Believe me, it will find an ignition source pretty darn readily."
The developers of the New Jersey export project — New Fortress Energy and Delaware River Partners — did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, and would not confirm details of their plans.
Rail companies lobbied for the rule and downplay the potential for accidents.
Earlier this year, Ian Jefferies, CEO of the Association of American Railroads, told NPR "the track record speaks for itself: 99.99% of all hazmat moved by rail reaches its destination without any incident whatsoever." He also said industry uses "risk-based routing analysis to ensure that railroads are using the lowest risk routes."
Fifteen state Attorneys General, including those in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, have challenged the move saying it put people's lives at risk.
"We're going to court because our families expect our government to put their safety first, not put them in harm's way," said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra in a statement. Becerra is now president-elect Joe Biden's nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary.
Despite joining that suit, New Jersey recently signed off on construction of a dock for the LNG export project, although N.J. Governor Phil Murphy says the state "will explore all avenues within its authority to prevent the use of this dock for LNG transport."
The Delaware Riverkeeper Network has challenged a number of state and federal permits for the project, saying a thorough Environmental Impact Statement was never done.
"The Biden Administration could step in and set a policy that this project, and all other LNG export projects, require comprehensive environmental review," says the network's deputy director Tracy Carluccio.
Standing on her porch along the route to the planned export terminal, Vanessa Keegan worries that transporting LNG by rail is untested. "If an accident happens," she says, "we don't get to show up the next day and say, 'Look, I told you so.'"
She also thinks fossil fuel projects like this should be abandoned in favor of renewables like wind or solar.
In fact, if the export facility gets built, none of the gas traveling through the area will go to power New Jersey homes. The state is planning a large offshore wind farm to help reach its goal of using all clean energy by 2050.
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