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Stop Slapping, once and for all
He’s even more easily distinguishable at the moment, because, undergoing chemo-immunotherapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, he’s taken to wearing bandanas to hide his balding dome. Bruce Springsteen’s sideman Steven van Zandt sent Raskin five of his own bandanas to choose from; they give the sixty-one-year-old congressman a distinctly piratical air. Perhaps under the influence of that headgear, Raskin has grown saltier—last month, after many years of listening to Republican colleagues talk about “Democrat” plans and “Democrat” policies, he went to the House floor to call Colorado’s Lauren Boebert on the “grammatical error.” He said, “I just wanted to educate our distinguished colleagues that ‘Democrat’ is the noun. When you use it as an adjective, you say the ‘Democratic’ member or the ‘Democratic ‘solution,’” and that “after people are corrected several times and they continue to say it, it seems like it’s an act of incivility. As if every time we mentioned the other party, it just came out with a kind of political speech impediment like, ‘Oh, the Banana Republican Party.’ As if we were to say that every time we mentioned the ‘Banana Republican member,’” he added. “But we wouldn’t do that.”
Raskin could doubtless amuse himself full-time taking on his MAGA coworkers. But he’s among the most serious legislators on Capitol Hill, and one long-running project—putting an end to so-called SLAPP suits—is particularly noteworthy now, because one of the most egregious examples of that kind of legal abuse is coming to a head. In fact, there will be a demonstration day after tomorrow in Oakland, outside the courthouse where Greenpeace will be trying to defend itself against a lawsuit designed to crimp its vital work.
SLAPP—strategic lawsuits against public participation—suits were named by George P. Pring, a law professor at the University of Denver, in the nineteen-eighties. They were, as he put it, a “new phenomenon” typically filed by commercial property developers, corporations, or fossil-fuel companies against citizens or N.G.O.s, and designed to “stop them from exercising their political rights or punish them for having done so.” Such suits, he wrote, “send a clear message: that there is a price for speaking out politically. The price is a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and the expenses, lost resources, and emotional stress such litigation brings.” As a judge wrote in a state court opinion a few years later, “Short of a gun to the head, a greater threat to First Amendment expression can scarcely be imagined.” Even Oprah’s been SLAPPed—by Texas cattlemen, for supposedly disparaging beef. But a current case is illustrative. Greenpeace, which was founded in 1971, is a global nonprofit network of campaigns devoted to “peaceful protest and creative communication.” Peaceful, but pugnacious and, at times, controversial, but it has fought some of the largest corporations on earth to keep forests intact and oil in the ground, and performed other useful tasks for the planet as a whole. And sometimes it’s been sued for its pains.
Greenpeace’s current trials began almost a decade ago, when a Canadian logging giant filed a three-hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against it and several other NGOs for, among other things, defamation and racketeering, employing a novel version of the RICO statute designed to take down mobsters. Most of those claims have been thrown ou in the course of the caset; just two of two hundred and ninety-six allegedly defamatory comments are still at issue. Greenpeace made some mistakes, as it admitted, but it’s not something you should be able to cripple an organization over.
Deepa Padmanhaba, Greenpeace’s general counsel said, “It’s hard to swallow that we have spent millions litigating two statements relating to a dispute over the boundaries of a Canadian mountain range.” Ebony Martin, Greenpeace’s new executive director, told me recently that the lawsuit had “injected turbulence” into the organization. “It’s drained our resources in terms of the millions of dollars we spend on our legal defense,” and, she added, “It makes us think twice about what fights we can show up in. We have to be careful not to show up in fights that could implicate other allies, so that they don’t get dragged in.” Most of all, she said, it robs the organization of its ability to focus: “Instead of developing strategies to stop fossil-fuel expansion and protect the planetary boundaries, we’re fighting for the survival of our organization.”
If Greenpeace makes it through the lawsuit, it still faces another one, brought by the company that built the Dakota Access pipeline. It sued Greenpeace on the ground that, as Padmanhaba put it, “We orchestrated the entire movement at Standing Rock and so it seeks to hold us liable for all of their alleged damage that resulted from the protests.” (The suit also says that other groups, including 350.org, which I founded, were part of this movement, though only Greenpeace, Earth First!, and BankTrack were taken to court.) In fact, Indigenous groups from across the continent did the main work at Standing Rock, gathering behind Lakota Sioux who were defending their reservation. As an article in the American Bar Association Journal put it, “a group of young Native Americans from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation started a movement that would galvanize world attention and bring together the largest meeting of Native Americans since the treaty councils of the 19th century.” The suit claims that “maximizing donations, not saving the environment, is Greenpeace’s true objective”; according to Padmanhaba, “the lawyers behind these suits believed their mere filing would shut us up and likely shut us down.” As Camille Fassett of the Freedom of the Press Foundation wrote, lawsuits like this represent “a kind of privatized censorship.”
This brings us back to Raskin. He has said that his cancer, while serious, is beatable, and that it hasn’t slowed him down. But there seems little chance that he’s not thinking about the whole course of his life. His father, Marcus Raskin, was a deputy national security adviser in the Kennedy Administration, before he left government to run the Institute for Policy Studies, the progressive think tank at the heart of the D.C. left in the nineteen-sixties. (When Raskin was a boy, his father was indicted alongside William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and Benjamin Spock, among others, for “conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft.”) I first knew Jamie Raskin in the early nineteen-eighties, at Harvard, where, as an undergraduate, he led demonstrations against the Reagan-era wars in Central America. He went on to Harvard Law and then, for twenty-five years, taught constitutional law at American University.
Though Raskin has now become, in some sense, a part of the system, he clearly has a fundamental understanding that the system only works when it can be challenged. The greatest invention of the twentieth century may have been the nonviolent social movement, which allowed the small and the many to stand up to the mighty and the few. Without some protection, though, civil society could wither—as it is in nations around the world, where governments are cracking down on peaceful protest movements. The community of NGOs are a vibrant check on an ever-less-equal society.
As Raskin told me last month, “One of the many things we have learned from the astonishing career of Donald Trump is how people with wealth and power can use litigation and courts to insulate their own corruption and avoid justice.” But, he continued, “Right-wing power doesn’t just use legal process to play defense. They use it offensively to attack environmentalists, unions, civil-rights groups and any citizen who stands up in society against their determination to impose their will on everyone else.”
The challenge that SLAPP suits represent is so obvious that thirty-two states and the District of Columbia have passed anti-SLAPP statutes. But there is no federal legislation to rein in this kind of abuse, which is what Raskin is trying to remedy with legislation he introduced last September. As the nonprofit Public Participation Project explained, “a federal anti-SLAPP statute would close the loophole that lets retaliatory plaintiffs file state-based claims in jurisdictions with looser First Amendment protections or file federal claims in federal court. Rather than picking the easiest state to win in, plaintiffs would be forced to litigate in federal courts.”
Raskin correctly understands the challenge in terms of power. “The anti-SLAPP legislation is all about preventing right-wing corporate forces from using the law to exact revenge against their political adversaries and making them pay for their insubordination,” he said. If someone calls you names, cheeky wit is a good response; but you need stronger tools to stand up against the power that a corporate legal department can wield. We badly need Greenpeace—it’s a key part of the future—and a thousand other groups like it. Non-violent social movements stand alongside solar panels as the best inventions of the 20th century; don’t break them.
In other energy and climate news:
+You’ve simply got to watch this new commercial from the English campaign to stop UK banks from lending to fossil fuel companies. It’s funny as can be, and effective too—watch to the end.
+Amazing amazing amazing new art from the people at Fossil Free Media. Check out the posters!
+The nonprofit Oceana, in an important new report, offers President Biden some ways he can block new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, increase the number of wind turbines, and still meet the provisions of the Inflation Reducation Act
He can still prevent new oil and gas leases in 2024 and beyond through the five-year planning process, and he can also exceed his goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind development by 2030. The report also finds that offshore drilling remains dirty and dangerous, with significant safety shortcomings that will not prevent another disaster like the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Meanwhile, veteran climate campaigner Jeremy Symons broadens the analysis, with a spot-on essay about Biden’s “climate blind spot.”
As the planet overheats, Biden has sent the fire brigade through the front door to put out the fire. But he has left the back door wide open to oil and gas companies intent on simultaneously pouring fuel onto the fire.
+You might be interested in a piece I published today in Mother Jones. It’s not an examination of ‘permitting reform,’ but instead an attempt to hit on some general principles that might help people like me (old, white, used to working the system) decide whether to fight new infrastructure projects or acquiesce in them.
If you build, say, a solar farm now, it doesn’t need to be forever; in a generation, if we’ve actually started using less energy, or we’ve actually figured out cheap, safe fusion reactors, then the people who come after us can take it down. But if we delay, then we won’t get to that moment intact—we will break the planet, and those people who come after us will have lost their options (except the option to curse us out). Because climate change is the perfect example of a timed test: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has explained that unless we can cut emissions in half by 2030, even the tepid targets we set at Paris will go by the board.
And maybe you’d even like to another piece of mine that came out today in the New Yorker, this one only distantly related to climate and energy. It’s about the scary attempts of Christian nationalists to rework our nation, and argues that Christian non-nationalists might want to stand up to them.
In fact, Christ—the central focus of Christianity—is not a king, and not a fighter, but an advocate for the downtrodden. His ministry has no apparent interest in nationalism—indeed, welcoming strangers is one of its hallmarks. He is insistently nonviolent, and almost every gesture he makes is one of compassion. (His crime policy states that if someone takes your shirt, you should also give him your cloak.) His chief commandment is to love your neighbor. The four gospels are radical, rich, and deep, but they’re not complicated. If you read them and come away saying, “I’d like an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle,” you’ve read them wrong.
+We’re learning more about who’s bankrolling proposed drilling in the Timor Sea off Australia—largely Japanese and Korean banks. Don’t do this!
+A reminder from Bill Henderson that we need “both halves of the policy scissors,” working on fossil fuel demand and fossil fuel supply at the same time.
Both arms are complimentary: a (carbon budget based) schedule for winding down production would lead to much more time and money invested in innovation for getting to that post-carbon economy; and a speeded up energy transition could speed up the pace of the wind-down and therefor of emission reduction.
But to argue for only innovation and policies on the demand side to speed up the energy transition while not making the case for using both sides of the policy scissors is helping to ensure that we will fail to meet our 2030 imperative.
+The ‘atmospheric rivers’ that inundated California’s mountains with record snowpack are what happens on a planet where warmer air holds more water. Now that snow is going to melt and things may get a bit dicey in the valleys below
“We don’t actually know how the snow will melt,” said Jenny Fromm of the US army corps of engineers at a briefing on Tuesday. Small shifts in solar radiation and groundwater flow can make a big difference in outcomes.
“Climate change has had other plans for us these last ten years,” said David Rizzardo, manager of the California department of water resources hydrology section, explaining how the increase in outlier events has rendered statistics and models less reliable.
+Powerful essay from Chukwumerije Okereke, director of the Center for Climate Change and Development at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria, who argues that Africa should not be a laboratory for solar geoengineering experimentation.
“One risk is that geoengineering will divert attention and investments from building renewable energy and other climate solutions in Africa. The continent has received only 2 percent of global investments in renewable energy in the last two decades, and the lack of access to capital is perhaps the biggest obstacle for countries that would like to cut down on fossil fuels.”
+Good Lord it’s been hot in Asia. Thailand just set a new all-time high temperature record of 114 F (and it’s not a dry heat…)
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Headlines scroll at the Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. headquarters in the Manhattan borough in New York, April 19, 2023. (photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP)
The company could write off a large portion of its $787.5 million settlement it owes Dominion as an income tax deduction
According to a report from Lever News, Fox News could potentially write off a massive portion of the $787.5 million settlement it has agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems as a tax deduction.
Fox Corporation’s Chief Communications Officer Brian Nick, confirmed to Lever News on Wednesday that he could “confirm tax deductibility,” of the settlement, “but not the amount.”
According to a review by Lever, the company could deduct up to $213 million from their income taxes under provisions in the American tax code that allow companies to write off legal bills as “ordinary and necessary” business expenses. Since the dispute was settled between two companies, and not with the government, Fox can claim tax benefits on the payment
Fox agreed to the massive settlement with Dominion on Tuesday, in a last-minute waving of the white flag that spared the network the ordeal of an extremely public defamation trial. Dominion had sued Fox for $1.6 billion after the network repeatedly aired false claims about the voting-machine company rigging the 2020 presidential election.
The trial would have seen the network at a severe disadvantage. In a pre-trial ruling, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis established in a summary judgment that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that “none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” and that Fox had spread false claims about the company. Only the question of whether Fox had acted with malice would have proceeded to the jury.
Despite the magnitude of the settlement and the public scrutiny placed on the network in the course of the lawsuit’s evidentiary phase, Fox remains defiant. In a statement addressing an ongoing, separate suit brought by voting software company Smartmatic, the network defended its coverage of the 2020 election, stating that they “will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025.”
“Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on its face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms,” the network added. While their face-off with Smartmatic constitutes a separate suit, Fox’s attempts to claim First Amendment protections in the Dominion lawsuit were dismissed.
On Fox’s televised programming things are largely business as usual. Following news of the settlement, primetime hosts Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity — all figures who were implicated in Dominion’s case against Fox — were spared from explaining to viewers how their false claims cost the favorite network more than a billion dollars.
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg talks to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky during his unannounced visit to Kyiv, April 20, 2023. (photo: NATO)
The topic will be "high on the agenda" at the Vilnius meeting scheduled for mid-July, Stoltenberg said at a joint press conference with President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.
"Ukraine's future is in NATO. All allies agree on that," Stoltenberg told reporters, adding that the main alliance's focus now is "to ensure that Ukraine prevails" and "continues to exist as a sovereign democratic state in Europe."
Stoltenberg previously invited the Ukrainian president to attend the Vilnius summit, to which Zelensky responded that he was "grateful" for the invitation, but it was important that Ukraine also "received a corresponding invitation."
"There is no objective barrier that would prevent the adoption of political decisions on inviting Ukraine to the Alliance," Zelensky said at the April 20 news conference.
NATO chief arrived in the Ukrainian capital on April 20, on a visit unannounced in advance. The visit is Stoltenberg's first since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
As Russia's war against Ukraine continues with no foreseeable end in sight, Kyiv is continuing to push for a clear path to NATO membership.
Except for meeting with Zelensky, Stoltenberg paid tribute to fallen Ukrainian soldiers on St Michael's Square in central Kyiv and visited Bucha, a town now synonymous with Russian war crimes against civilians.
After the visit, Stoltenberg said, as cited by CNN, that he was "deeply moved" by what he had seen in Bucha. "Russian atrocities continue against the Ukrainian people today, and those responsible must be held to account," he added.
Bucha, a small city near Kyiv, was occupied by Russian troops shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. After it was liberated, mass graves were discovered, and thousands of war crimes were documented.
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Workers hired by BP rake up globs of oil that washed ashore and coated the beaches in 2010 near Port Fourchon and Grand Isle in southern Louisiana. Each wave brought a new batch of oil for workers to clean. (photo: Carolyn Cole/LA Times)
Thirteen years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, documents shed light on the company’s response and ‘scorched earth’ legal tactics
If it were up to him, he’d still be working his trucking job. The 59-year-old was making a decent living and felt fit. But in June 2020, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has already spread to his liver. Now he gets out of breath wheeling his garbage can to the curb at his home in Mobile, Alabama.
Floyd Ruffin, 58, grew up around horses in Gibson, an unincorporated community in south Louisiana. In 2015, he was also diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has made it uncomfortable for him to ride. Before his prostate was removed, he had dreams of having more kids.
Terry Odom, 53, lies awake at night in her home in San Antonio, Texas. She worries that she, too, has cancer. As a chemist she’s used to finding answers, but she can’t figure out why her health is deteriorating. She’s emailed dozens of doctors and researchers in search of answers. “You feel like you might die before your time,” she said.
A single disaster unites the three of them. Thirteen years ago, they helped clean up BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the largest ever in US waters. They rushed toward the toxic oil to save the place they loved, joining forces with more than 33,000 others to clean up our coastlines. Now, they have active lawsuits against BP, saying the company made them sick.
Since the cleanup, thousands have experienced chronic respiratory issues, rashes and diarrhea – a problem known among local residents as “BP syndrome” or “Gulf coast syndrome”. Others, like Castleberry and Ruffin, have developed cancer.
The valor displayed by cleanup workers was comparable to the heroism of first responders during the 9/11 terror attacks, who ran to the World Trade Center to save people and breathed in toxic dust and fumes, said the Alaska toxicologist Riki Ott, who became involved in advocating for oil spill cleanup workers after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. “What resident and professional oil spill responders do is exactly what professional firefighters and emergency responders everywhere do: put their lives on the line to protect ours,” she said.
But while those who responded to the deadliest single terror attack in American history have been rightly cemented into public memory, coastal workers in some of the poorest parts of the country – those who laid their bodies on the line following the worst industrial catastrophe in a generation – have faded away, unrecognized and left to fight for themselves.
On 20 April 2010, a rig contracted by the oil and gas company BP to drill in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico blew up, spewing more than 200m gallons of oil.
Eleven workers were killed that day, but some argue the spill’s death toll could be far higher – and underreported – as cleanup workers soon started to develop illnesses they claim are linked to exposure to toxins in the oil as well as Corexit, the chemical that was used by BP to break up oil slicks.
During the 87 days that oil gushed from the seafloor, lower-income workers in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida picked up tar balls from beaches, sopped up oil with absorbent booms, decontaminated boats, and burned oil on the water surface. They also rescued wildlife, including oiled birds, sea turtles and dolphins.
Some were Vietnamese fishers put out of work when Gulf waters were closed to shrimping. Others were Cajun construction workers and Black cowboys. Most had livelihoods that depended on the Gulf. Those contractors worked the spill for weeks or months at a time, and about 30% of them had annual household incomes under $20,000, according to demographic data collected by the National Institutes of Health.
BP told many of its cleanup workers that they did not need to wear breathing protection because the toxic components of the oil had evaporated or were broken down in the waves, according to the company’s safety briefings. Despite receiving advice from the federal government to conduct biological monitoring by measuring toxins in the cleanup workers’ blood, skin or urine, BP didn’t collect evidence that could have shown whether toxins contained in the oil had entered workers’ bloodstreams, according to plaintiffs’ attorneys.
In 2010, BP ran a huge PR campaign to convince the public that the Gulf would recover. While the smell of oil and Corexit was still in the air, BP was already building its legal defense against the very workers it claimed were repairing the spill’s environmental damage, according to new evidence reported for the first time by the Guardian.
There is no class-action settlement for the cleanup workers and coastal residents who fell ill years after the spill. Due to the terms of an earlier settlement, they must sue BP individually to be compensated for their chronic injuries, and many of the cases are under a court order that prevents them from seeking punitive damages.
BP declined to comment on a series of detailed questions from the Guardian, citing the ongoing litigation. A district court judge found that the company that made the Corexit used during the BP spill, Nalco Holding Co, was not liable for medical claims related to the use of its product during the spill because the use was approved by the federal government, according to court documents. Ecolab Inc purchased the company in 2011 but later sold it to a subsidiary, Corexit Environmental Solutions LLC. (When contacted by the Guardian, Corexit Environmental Solutions said it was never involved in any decisions related to the use of its product in the Gulf.)
BP paid $65m to 22,588 people in the earlier medical settlement for short-term illnesses, less than $3,000 each on average, according to a 2019 claims administrator update. The company also spent more than $60bn to resolve economic and natural resources claims from the spill as well as civil penalties under the Clean Water Act.
But in the cases of long-term health problems, the odds have not been in plaintiffs’ favor.
The oil and gas multinational has taken a “scorched-earth” approach to each lawsuit, said the attorney Jerry Sprague, who has filed about 600 medical cases against BP. According to eastern district of Louisiana court records, nearly 5,000 cases had been filed as of January 2020.
The company has hired experts in hundreds of cases and in certain instances deposed plaintiffs and their doctors for hours, combing over their medical records, tax returns and employment files.
“BP wants us to know they will fight these cases to the end,” Sprague said.
In court, BP has argued that without biological evidence, workers and coastal residents cannot prove their illnesses were caused by the oil spill, despite research linking exposure to the spill with increased risk of cancer and higher rates of long-term respiratory conditions, heart disease, headaches, memory loss and blurred vision. Thousands of cases have been dismissed, according to plaintiff lawyers. Only one known case has resulted in settlement.
“It’s by far the most gut-wrenching public health disaster that I’ve ever been exposed to,” said Tom Devine, the legal director for the Government Accountability Project, which has produced several reports based on interviews with sick cleanup workers. “What’s particularly frustrating is BP doesn’t care,” he said.
The Guardian interviewed more than two dozen former cleanup workers in the reporting of this story. Many had never spoken publicly before.
Frank Stuart Sr, a father of six, described the cleanup work as a “crusade”.
He led a team of boats to stop oil from washing into an estuary in south Louisiana, between Lafitte and Grand Isle. They worked 15-hour days for months. “This was a crusade to make sure that we protected the wetlands. We made sure that if there was a fisherman or crew member who needed work, we put them to work so they wouldn’t lose their home. They wouldn’t lose their car. They had a way to eat,” he said in a video recorded by his daughter, Bailey Stuart, in 2017.
The following year, Frank Stuart was diagnosed with myeloid leukemia, a rare cancer. His condition quickly deteriorated. His wife of 22 years, Sheree Kerner, sat next to his hospital bed on her laptop, trying to understand what had made her husband sick. Her search led her back to Stuart’s exposure to the toxic combination of BP oil and Corexit.
On 19 April 2018, the day before the eighth anniversary of the BP oil spill, her husband died at home in her arms.
“It’s just egregious they could get away with murder,” Kerner said of BP. She has filed a suit against the oil company for her husband’s death.
To get a fuller picture of the illnesses cleanup workers and coastal residents say were caused by the spill, the Guardian analyzed a random sample of 400 lawsuits filed against BP. Sinus issues are the most common chronic health problem listed among those who have sued, followed by eye, skin and respiratory ailments. Chronic rhinosinusitis, a swelling of the sinuses in the nose and head that causes nasal drip and pain in the face, was the most common condition.
Most of the plaintiffs were cleanup workers. One was a first responder and one lived near where oil washed ashore in Gulfport, Mississippi. About 2% of the plaintiffs have cancer, but public health advocates believe more are likely to be diagnosed in the years to come.
“Your results are pretty much what a Yale University study found 13 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” Ott said. “I believe that more oil spill-related cancers will develop over the years.”
John Pabst, 64, also links his cancer diagnosis to his cleanup work during the spill.
It was filthy work. The stench of burning oil wafted through the air, and the humidity and searing temperatures left those out on the water exhausted, sweaty and dehydrated.
Pabst remembers hauling soft boom lines 200ft long from the marshes in his small shrimping boat, the thick, greasy, diesel-like smell of Corexit and oil lingering around his vessel. But Pabst, a barrel-chested and broad-shouldered man whose family has caught shrimp off the Gulf coast for three generations, took pride in the work. The pay was generous. The cleanup efforts were imperative to preserve his way of living for future generations.
“It was a dirty, nasty, stinky job,” he recalled one recent morning sipping coffee near his home in Chalmette, in south-eastern Louisiana. He would go through three packets of baby wipes a week out on the water, washing sweat from his face, leaving his eyes stinging and his head throbbing throughout the 11-hour shifts.
The headaches and nausea became chronic in the aftermath and then, in 2017, he was diagnosed with lymphoma in his eye, which he claims was caused by months of exposure to toxins during the cleanup.
Rounds of radiation therapy followed. The process, he said, left him with claustrophobia and PTSD, and lingering worries about if and when the cancer would return.
“You always wonder: was it worth the money I made?” he said, his case still pending in federal court. “We made 10 grand every other week for three or four months [during the cleanup]. But sometimes we’d make more than that shrimping.
“But now, every time something happens with my health, you wonder: is this part of the cancer?”
Last fall, Sprague, the attorney, filed a motion alleging that BP had a duty to collect and preserve data on cleanup worker exposure levels, but it didn’t do so to help its defense against future litigation.
Oil was still gushing into the Gulf of Mexico when three federal entities, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Research Council all submitted plans suggesting that BP biomonitor cleanup workers, according to emails uncovered during discovery.
Biomonitoring is a way to measure chemical exposure levels by testing bodily fluids for toxins repeatedly over time. This type of monitoring is helpful in determining causation of acute and chronic illnesses. But instead of monitoring workers’ bodies, BP spent more than $13m monitoring air. In an email to his colleagues, John Howard, the director of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, wrote that air monitoring alone doesn’t capture all of the ways that toxins could enter workers’ bodies.
In an email dated 27 June 2010, found during discovery, he wrote:
Since air sampling does not reflect total exposure, and total exposure may be more associated with longer term health effects, the continuation of our approach without incorporating biomonitoring (1) represents only a partial approach to determine exposure; (2) leaves us scientifically incomplete; (3) leaves us unable to address the concerns of those who are in the media now saying that harmful exposures are occurring despite negative air sampling results.
He went on to say that the lack of biomonitoring would also impair researchers’ ability to conduct long-term health studies. Howard did not respond to requests for comment.
To conduct the air monitoring, BP hired a company called CTEH. In June 2010, two members of Congress wrote a letter to BP highlighting the company’s decision to contract with the consulting firm, which has a track record of working with companies to downplay the risks of major pollution events for which they are responsible.
Murphy Oil hired CTEH in 2005 to perform testing after the company’s refinery was flooded by Hurricane Katrina and leaked 1m gallons of oil into 1,800 homes in Meraux and Chalmette, Louisiana. The US congresswoman Lois Capps and senator Peter Welch wrote that hiring CTEH was “yet another misstep at the expense of the public’s health”.
CTEH was recently hired by Norfolk Southern, the operator of the train carrying toxic chemicals that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Though CTEH said its testing showed no harmful chemicals in the homes of nearby residents, ProPublica and the Guardian talked to several experts who said the tests were inadequate and couldn’t prove that residents were safe.
During discovery, Sprague’s firm found a chain of emails among BP’s internal medical team from 31 July 2010 in which they discuss the company’s air monitoring efforts. “Although we are documenting zero exposures in most monitoring efforts, the monitoring itself adds value in the eyes of public perception, and zeros add value in defending potential litigation,” wrote John Fink, a BP industrial hygienist.
For Sprague, this was a critical revelation.
“You have an admission right there that BP is going to do air monitoring not because they’re trying to find dangers in the air but to defend against future litigation,” Sprague said about the email. “The scientists are saying we should do biomonitoring. BP ignores it. How does that look when you know they’re still going to do air monitoring to defend litigation?”
BP declined to answer questions on its toxic exposure monitoring during the disaster.
Jorey Danos keeps reminders of the disaster scattered around his one-acre homestead in the small Cajun town of Golden Meadow, Louisiana. There are jars of brown seawater that contain oil from the spill still floating at the top; suitcases full of his legal documents that bulge with paper and his ID cards from four months working on the cleanup, his photo now faded and scratched.
Danos was 31 when he stepped forward to address the spill. Now in his early 40s, he’s already taken retirement, suffering from a variety of long-term conditions he attributes to the Deepwater disaster, including chronic abdominal and stomach pain and loss of memory.
His recollections of work out on the Gulf remain vivid, however: pelicans smothered in oil, dolphins spewing oily water from their blowholes. “It was just a total disaster,” he said. “Apocalyptic.”
His suit for medical damages was dismissed last year, records show.
“It’s not about the money any more,” Danos said as he sat in his backyard looking through the paper remnants of his case. “I wanted a guilty verdict, and I wanted them to explain why they had to use toxic chemicals known to be harmful to humans.”
Documents suggest that not much was done by BP to prepare cleanup workers for the toxic risks associated with the job. Recently released BP training modules, obtained in discovery by the Downs Law Group, a Miami-based law firm involved in more than 100 active spill cases, have led the firm to argue that cleanup workers received minimal briefing on toxic hazards.
Instead, the warnings appear to have focused on heat exhaustion, insects and the risks of trips and falls. In one module, prepared for shoreline workers, the risk of exposure to dispersant is characterized as “very unlikely”, adding that the “health effects would be similar to exposure to any mild detergent”.
“Dispersants used in the Gulf have no ingredients that cause long-term health effects, including cancer,” the slide reads.
The module also assures shoreline workers they should not need to wear protective breathing gear because they would be exposed only to less hazardous weathered oil, rather than more toxic crude oil. But BP’s own internal safety documents say that even weathered oil still poses a hazard if it contacts the skin, potentially causing skin, eye irritation and diarrhea. And wearing safety goggles, Tyvek protective suits, rubber boots and gloves when in contact with the substance “might not be adequate”, the document states.
Another training module assures cleanup workers that by the time oil reaches the shore, it will have been “subject to time and distance ‘weathering’ before impacting shoreline”.
BP declined to answer questions about its training of cleanup workers.
James “Catfish” Miller said he had received almost no protective clothing at all when he began his work for BP about a month after the catastrophe began.
“I said it about 9,000 times: ‘Where’s our boots and gloves, our Tyvek suits?’ They didn’t have none to give us,” he recalled, remembering his early days working off the coast of Biloxi, Mississippi. “Zero. Zilch-o. But we didn’t complain. The pay was good.”
The slicks would run for miles, coating his shrimp boat in thick smears of a tar-like substance. He claimed to have received so little training that one day early on, when rope was caught in the propeller of his boat, he jumped into the polluted water to cut the rope with no skin protection, treating the incident as he would on any normal day shrimping out in the gulf.
His symptoms began soon after – nausea, headaches, diarrhea.
He nicknamed his deckhand “the canary” because he was the first to pass out. But soon after, Miller did too. About a month and half into the work, he was hospitalized after his esophagus began to bleed during chronic vomiting. He was bed-bound for months and lost over half his body weight, he recalled.
“I thought I was going to die. It was chemical poisoning.” he recalled. “I just couldn’t bounce back.”
The recovery took years and he has battled spates of anxiety and depression ever since. The experience led to the breakdown of his marriage. Miller’s lawsuit for long-term medical damages was dismissed in September last year, according to records.
“I think we’ve just been robbed of our health in our life,” he said.
Within a month of the spill, BP began running an aggressive and expansive local PR campaign, placing frequent advertisements in local newspapers around the Gulf coast over the next year. The company’s army of local cleanup workers were placed front and center.
“We have organized the largest environmental response in this country’s history,” proclaimed one advertisement in the Advocate newspaper on 3 June 2010. “More than 3m feet of boom, 30 planes and over 1,300 boats are working to protect the shoreline. When oil reaches the shore, thousands of people are ready to clean it up.”
The campaign ran under the banner: “We will make this right.”
Over a decade later, the phrase would be repeated almost verbatim as the slogan to another campaign promoting the corporate response to the toxic disaster in East Palestine, Ohio.
The Louisiana chemist Wilma Subra understood the potential for the BP spill to result in a public health disaster. She advocated for cleanup workers to be given respirators and other personal protective equipment during the spill response, with little success.
Soon, she noticed something else: “BP signed agreements with every technical expert they could get their hands on,” she said. “You could clearly see it was aimed toward making them look good and not presenting the real negative impacts of it.”
In addition to trying to control the public narrative, BP put researchers on its payroll and had a role in reviewing certain scientific research about the impacts of the spill. The Downs Law Group uncovered an internal BP spreadsheet in discovery that appears to track the company’s review process in the publication of 29 scientific studies on a variety of topics, including the spill’s toxicity and impacts on birds, fish and oysters.
The spreadsheet, last updated by BP in 2013 or early 2014, shows the company had several steps in its approval process, including “tech review” “sent to author for changes”, and “final legal/BP review”. Annotated next to a study about the impacts of oil and dispersant on oysters, the company notes: “Back with author for changes.”
Not all of the studies listed in BP’s research tracker were published with disclosures indicating that BP provided comments, suggested revisions and performed a legal review of the contents. “BP influenced the science,” said David Durkee, an attorney with the Downs Law Group. “I think it’s becoming more apparent, at least through these documents, that BP had an active influence in trying to put a finger on the scale.”
But other studies published in the past five years have linked exposure to the 2010 BP spill with a slew of health problems, including heart conditions, neurological symptoms and an increased rate of births of premature and underweight infants. These health studies build upon those from the other spills, such as the Prestige oil tanker spill off the coast of Spain in 2002 and the Hebei Spirit oil tanker spill in South Korean waters in 2007.
Health effect research on the Hebei Spirit Oil Spill was given the acronym Heros to denote the cleanup workers’ efforts to fight back the oil as it washed ashore, Ott said.
“They’re acknowledging that the participants in their studies are heroes,” she said of the South Korean cohort study name. The province in South Korea where the spill washed ashore built a memorial hall to commemorate the cleanup effort.
For two years, 11 life-sized steel figures stood in the neutral ground of a busy New Orleans street to memorialize the men who died when BP’s rig exploded in 2010. Those sculptures are no longer there, and the BP oil spill cleanup workers were never memorialized. “Individuals are being victimized twice, the way I see it,” Ott said.
One person has won a settlement so far: Captain John Maas.
Maas had just received his boat captain’s license when the oil began washing ashore in Mississippi. He and his girlfriend at the time went out in search of oiled birds and turtles to rescue. Four months later, she died from cancer. “That sort of lit a fire under my ass,” Maas said.
He filed a suit against BP for his own health issues resulting from the spill, chemically induced asthma and restrictive lung disease.
Maas was deposed by BP twice, totaling 15 hours of questioning, he recalled. BP also deposed his doctor, Dr Charles Wray, prodding him to say that Maas’s asthma was actually caused by his obesity, not the oil spill. But, according to transcripts, Wray was unswayed and the company ultimately settled the suit. Both Maas and his attorney, William “Ken” Burger, were required to sign confidentiality agreements limiting them from speaking publicly about the terms of the settlement.
“I have no illusion that this is over. None … One little dumbass ninth-grade-educated captain beat them. But that’s not the real story,” Maas said. “The real story is how everyone else lost.”
Dr Veena Antony, a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was also deposed in the Maas case. Breathing in even a small amount of Corexit can cause damage to lung tissues, and make the tissue more permeable to toxins, she said. Like a game of Red Rover, the first breath of dispersant breaks open the cell barrier, allowing more toxins through in the next breath. “I think that the bottom line is that people suffered in the end,” she said. “To me that suffering is unacceptable. We should recognize that in times of emergencies the No 1 goal needs to be protection of human health.”
In March this year, the Biden administration gave the green light to a controversial drilling project in Alaska and leased 1.6m acres in the Gulf of Mexico to energy companies. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to enact policy changes since the 2010 BP oil spill to protect future cleanup workers. In 2015, the agency issued a proposed rule to incorporate the lessons learned from the BP spill under the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan, the US government’s blueprint for responding to oil spills and other toxic chemical releases. But the rule was never finalized.
In 2020, the Alert Project, an advocacy group founded by Ott, sued the EPA for its failure to update its regulations on the use of chemical dispersants during oil spills.
A US district court ordered the agency to publish its updated policy by 31 May of this year. The American Petroleum Institute tried to intervene in the case, but was denied by the court. Still, environmental groups say the EPA’s proposed rule is not protective enough and doesn’t consider research published in the past several years showing the human health risks of dispersants.
“These are all baby steps. They’re not going to prevent future tragedies,” said Devine, with the Government Accountability Project. “The oil industry will basically have a blank check to use Corexit over and over again.”
Castleberry, Ruffin, Odom and many others interviewed by the Guardian say they are still waiting for justice – and waiting to be heard.
When Castleberry found out he had cancer, he thought it was God’s way of punishing him for his mistakes. “I just figured it was something that I did somewhere down the line,” he said.
He has since come to believe that his cancer is not the product of karma, but of his exposure to the spill. He says BP should pay for their wrongdoing. “I’m a very firm believer that if you do wrong, you’re deserving of the consequences or whatever follows,” he said.
Ruffin is checked regularly by his doctors to make sure his prostate cancer has not returned. “So now it’s in the back of my mind that this stuff can pop up at any time,” he said. While he can’t forget how the spill has affected his body, he says the public seems to have moved on. “Now that the beaches are pretty much back to normal as far as the eye can see; those that are sick are being forgotten,” he said.
Odom was laid off from her job at a chemical manufacturing plant near Pensacola, Florida, before the spill hit. She was having a hard time finding something else to pay the bills, which is why she took a job as a safety officer during the BP spill response. She was in a Polaris four-wheeler on the beach when her skin broke out in little bumps. “Like I was dunked in a vat of ants,” she said.
The next day she bought herself some long-sleeved shirts to wear to work. When other cleanup workers suffered from heat exhaustion, she took them to a mobile medical trailer to be looked over. But, she said, she was never told to watch out for signs of toxic exposure. Her co-workers were skeptical that what they were doing made sense.
“We were there to assure the public that everything was good and everything was safe and that everything was under control,” she said. “And that just was not true.”
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Cleta Mitchell speaks at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, last year. The longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser worked closely with former president Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
A presentation by Cleta Mitchell at a donor retreat urged tougher rules that could make it harder for college students to cast ballots
Cleta Mitchell, a longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser who worked closely with former president Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, gave the presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday.
The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.
Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear whether she delivered the presentation exactly as it was prepared on her PowerPoint slides. But in addition to the presentation, The Post listened to audio of portions of the presentation obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor in which Mitchell discussed limiting campus and early voting.
“What are these college campus locations?” she asked, according to the audio. “What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”
The GOP has not formally endorsed Mitchell’s plan but has worked closely with her since Trump left office. The presentation made clear that at least some key figures within the party remain intent on tightening rules for voting and elections. The persistence of the message as the 2024 vote approaches comes despite the fact that candidates who emphasized Trump’s stolen election narrative were repudiated in many key statewide races in the 2022 midterms.
After the presentation, Mitchell was seen at the Four Seasons hotel bar, meeting with donors and Republican strategists.
“As the RNC continues to strengthen our Election Integrity program, we are thankful for leaders like Cleta Mitchell who do important work for the Republican ecosystem. Our guests in Nashville were grateful for her to travel to the event and share her efforts,” said Keith Schipper, an RNC spokesman.
Mitchell told her RNC audience that her organization, the Election Integrity Network, “is NOT about winning campaigns,” according to the text of the presentation. But the slides gave little other rationale for why campus or mail voting should be curtailed. At another point in the presentation, she said the nation’s electoral systems must be saved “for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024.”
“The Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs,” she wrote in the presentation. “Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake.”
Republicans have claimed that lax ID requirements — such as allowing college identification or mail voting where no ID is required — open the door for voter fraud. But they have produced no evidence of widespread fraud — and experts say that’s because it doesn’t happen.
At one point in the presentation, Mitchell said she is optimistic that the Virginia Senate will flip to Republican control this year, allowing for the elimination of early voting in the state, according to the audio reviewed by The Post.
“Forty-five days!” she said in a reference to Virginia’s early voting period. “Do you know how hard it is to have observers be able to watch for that long a period?”
Some advisers to other elected officials were frustrated the RNC allowed her to speak at a major event, given her role on behalf of Trump after the election and her repeated false claims about voter fraud. But they did not want to criticize her publicly. RNC officials noted that other speakers who were critical of Trump were also given prime billing at the event.
In Trump’s private comments to donors at the event, he said that he eventually wants to end all mail and early voting, according to audio obtained by The Post. But until that happens, he said, Republicans had to get better at it.
Mitchell advised Trump and was on the call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 when Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the result.
“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said on the call, which is now under investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as part of a broader inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia.
Mitchell has long been a prominent Republican lawyer who has worked for a range of causes, candidates and committees, including the National Rifle Association, former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Mitchell was a partner in the firm Foley and Lardner but resigned a day after the Raffensperger call, following a statement from the firm criticizing her participation in the call and her involvement with Trump.
After her resignation, Mitchell defended her involvement with Trump’s efforts in a letter to family and friends. “Those who deny the existence of voter and election fraud are not in touch with facts and reality,” she wrote.
Mitchell soon founded the Election Integrity Network and has recruited volunteers and held regular calls with officials across the country in a bid to “develop and share research and information, develop policy proposals and create legal strategies,” according to the group’s website.
Campus voting has been a contentious issue for years, with Republicans in states including New Hampshire, Idaho and Texas seeking to curtail the use of college identification cards to vote. Supporters of these measures have said they want to prevent out-of-state students from voting in their states and also prevent the use of identification that does not include a home address.
In her presentation in Nashville, Mitchell focused on campus voting in five states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin — all of which are home to enormous public universities with large in-state student populations.
Mitchell also targeted the preregistration of students, an apparent reference to the practice in some states of allowing 17-year-olds to register ahead of their 18th birthdays so they can vote as soon as they are eligible.
Marc Elias, a Democratic election lawyer who has sued Republicans over their efforts to tighten student and youth voting laws, said Mitchell’s efforts appear aimed at making it harder for young people, who tend to vote Democratic, to cast their ballots.
“Imagine if in every place in this presentation where she references campuses, she talked about African Americans,” Elias said. “Or every place she says students, she instead talked about Latinos. There is a subtle but real bigotry that goes on when people target young voters because of their age.”
Elias is leading a suit in Idaho seeking to block a new law that removes student IDs from the list of permissible identification for voting. Idaho, which has a large in-state student population, saw one of the largest increases of student-aged voter registration between 2018 and 2022 of any state, according to research from Tufts University.
“The point is they don’t want their Idaho students voting in their state,” Elias said.
The chief sponsor of the Idaho bill, Rep. Tina Lambert (R), said on the floor of the statehouse in February that its purpose was to prevent the use of IDs that are issued without rigorous verification processes. She said the bill is not intended to block students from voting.
In her presentation, Mitchell also called for the ouster of two Republican elected officials in Maricopa County, Ariz., who defended President Biden’s victory there in the face of Trump’s false claims that the election was rigged — County Recorder Stephen Richer and County Supervisor Bill Gates.
Richer said any effort to try to eliminate campus voting locations would fail because Maricopa polling places are chosen based on data science. He said such an effort wouldn’t have much effect in Arizona anyway, since the vast majority of voters cast ballots early and by mail.
He also decried the “audacity” of Mitchell targeting two Republican officials at a meeting of the RNC and said it would backfire.
“What do they think will happen in Maricopa County if they run an election denier in the primary against me?” Richer asked. “How do they think that person will do in the general? They’ll get their butts kicked, just like Mark Finchem” — the 2022 Republican nominee for secretary of state — “got his butt kicked.”
Much of Mitchell’s report appeared to be based on years-old Republican talking points, including the need to fight back against moves Democrats made as long as a decade ago to oppose voter ID laws.
But she also exhorted Republicans to help her build — and fund — on-the-ground organizations in 10 states. In particular, she called for “oversight” in Fulton County, home of Atlanta, where Republicans have long criticized election management. And she called for combating the power of the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada, an election turnout juggernaut for Democrats in the Las Vegas area.
The presentation featured a map claiming to highlight the eight states that will decide the 2024 presidential election. But the list included Alaska — a state that has not chosen a Democrat for president since 1964 — and Virginia, which hasn’t chosen a Republican for president since 2004. And it omitted two states that have been razor-thin battlegrounds in recent elections: Pennsylvania and Michigan.
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The Capitol Police force patrols the streets of downtown Jackson, Mississippi, March 15, 2023. (photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/EPA)
Part of a national backlash against criminal justice reforms, the move takes away local control and hands it to an unelected officials appointed by Republicans.
Hinds County, which includes Jackson, would become the only municipality in the state that doesn’t elect its own prosecutors and judges.
The bill is an extension of efforts to control and undermine the voices of the Black people who live in Jackson, said Rukia Lumumba, co-director of the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project and a candidate in the upcoming Democratic primary for a state House seat just north of Jackson.
“We are finding ourselves jumping back to days of Jim Crow, days of apartheid,” she said, “where we’re seeing this theory that Black people can’t govern, that Black people can’t make decisions for themselves around who is best suited to represent them in governing processes, and that Black people can’t create their own safety.”
The bill was written by Republican state Rep. Trey Lamar, who represents a district just under 200 miles away from Jackson. Lamar has framed the bill as an effort to make Jackson “safer” and to help its residents. “My constituents want to feel safe when they come here,” Lamar said during state House deliberations on the bill earlier this year.
Hinds County elected civil rights attorney Jody Owens as district attorney in 2019. The city of Jackson has a history of Black radical mayors, including Rukia’s father, Chokwe Lumumba, and brother, current Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who won reelection in 2021. There have been attempts to pass similar bills targeting Jackson since at least 2012, Lumumba said.
The backlash is also playing out in national politics, where another reformist Mississippi prosecutor and federal court nominee is facing Republican opposition in the U.S. Senate because of his progressive politics. The effort to create a special justice system around Jackson should be seen as part of this national backlash to the elections of progressive and reform-minded officials, said Lumumba.
“We’re seeing attacks in so many places where we saw so many wins,” she said, pointing to efforts in Missouri to restrict the power of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner.
Since 2020, states and municipalities across the country elected reform-minded district attorneys, passed criminal justice reforms, and continued efforts to improve equity in policing, housing, and health care.
“What we’re seeing is opponents to those successes figuring out how to tap into municipal control and county control and use the legislature as a source to literally deprive municipalities and counties of the power that they have to govern,” Lumumba said, “to engage in systems that are more accountable to the people.”
Under the Jackson bill, H.B. 1020, state officials would appoint 11 positions that were previously elected, including judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in a newly created district that includes the city’s wealthy white residents.
“It’s dangerous because it creates a narrative of racial divide,” Lumumba said. “It creates a narrative that continues to perpetuate these stereotypes that Black people are not intelligent enough to do the job, that we are not capable.”
The proposed law would also expand the jurisdiction and size of the Capitol Police force, which was originally created to patrol state buildings and has recently expanded its control throughout an area dubbed the “Capitol Complex Improvement Zone.”
In a February opinion article, Mississippi civil rights advocates opposing the bill said it would create an apartheid system. “Imagine all-white juries in a city that’s nearly 83 percent Black, within a state where lynchings still occur,” they wrote.
The bill is part of a response to Jackson’s murder rate, which spiked in 2020 along with murder rates in cities and rural areas across the country. When a journalist asked about H.B. 1020 during a February press conference, Reeves, the governor, who is up for reelection this year, described Jackson as the “murder capital of the world.”
While gun violence and certain crimes like robbery and gun theft increased in 2021, overall crime in Jackson was down.
“The anecdotal data that the legislature is pushing through does not match the real data,” Lumumba said.
Though public safety is offered as a rationale for the bill, it focuses primarily on exempting the city’s wealthy white residents from local control, Lumumba said: “It focuses and centers its efforts around creating safety for a wealthier, predominantly white population in Jackson that is concentrated in a specific area.”
While state officials advance legislation to revoke local control in Jackson, Republicans are also working to pass bills to suppress voting rights in the state, Lumumba said.
“One thing that’s not understood is that these bills are being introduced because Jackson leadership, specifically the mayoral leadership, has been effective in moving the needle on water, moving the needle on public safety,” she said, noting Jackson’s recent creation of Mississippi’s first ever office of violent prevention and trauma recovery. “What people don’t understand is that Mississippi is not the state where residents don’t care about progress.”
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Fossil fuel-backed groups say offshore wind hurts whales. But some Republicans still embrace the industry's economic benefits. (photo: John Moore/AFP)
Fossil fuel-backed groups say offshore wind hurts whales. But some Republicans still embrace the industry's economic benefits.
The bill is unlikely to become law, but it sheds light on Republicans’ uneasy relationship with renewable energy — and specifically, with offshore wind. The legislation featured a few last-minute provisions that reflect disagreements among congressional conservatives on the future of offshore wind. Some GOP lawmakers say, without evidence, that the emerging industry has caused a recent surge in whale deaths, while others support wind development in the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, major Republican donors are behind a growing misinformation campaign to slow the sector down. The organized opposition may present new obstacles to the future of offshore wind, a clean energy source identified by the Biden administration as critical to the energy transition.
Offshore wind turbines, which can soar up to three times the height of the Statue of Liberty, take advantage of the higher wind speeds at sea to produce more electricity per turbine than onshore wind. Although the U.S. only has two offshore wind farms in operation, in other parts of the world the sector is robust and mature. China, the United Kingdom, and Germany hold a combined 172 offshore wind farms.
Biden has pinpointed offshore wind as a critical renewable energy source for hitting U.S. climate targets. The administration wants to install 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power generation by 2030, enough to power 10 million homes. Most offshore wind projects in development are located along the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coasts.
But those projects have faced controversy in recent months. Since December, 30 dead whales have washed ashore along the Atlantic coast. The recent events follow a disturbing pattern that began in 2016, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, describes as an “unusual mortality event.”
Republicans have claimed that the deaths are linked to offshore wind development. Amendments in the House energy bill would have required the Government Accountability Office to study the potential impacts of offshore wind on tourism, military activities, and marine wildlife. “Like the canary in the coal mine, the recent spate of tragic whale deaths shed new light and increased scrutiny to the fast-tracking of thousands of wind turbines off our coast,” said Representative Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey, at a hearing in March.
But according to NOAA, a federal agency that conducts marine research, offshore wind is probably not at fault for the casualties. “At this point, there is no evidence to support speculation that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys,” NOAA’s website says.
Instead, the agency states that “the greatest human threats to large whales” are vessel strikes and entanglement in fishing gear. Examinations of about half the humpback whales stranded since 2016 attributed 40 percent of the deaths to either of the two causes. (The other half of the beached whales were too decomposed to analyze.)
A few bigger trends could be behind the increase in whale mortality. One is climate change — warming waters have pulled small fish closer to shore, which also draws in whales hunting food. Fishers looking to catch those same fish tend to follow closely behind, leading to a greater risk of collision between boats and whales.
Another obvious source of whale and vessel strikes is the growing global shipping industry. In 2020, almost 15,000 ships sailed through the Port of New York and New Jersey alone. “Collisions involving ships and whales tend to occur around areas with the greatest commercial shipping traffic,” according to NOAA.
To reduce collision risk, the agency and major environmental groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council advocate for tighter restrictions on vessel speed. But Republicans’ proposed policies have made no mention of this evidence-based solution for protecting whales and other wildlife.
Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, points out that Republicans have failed to throw their weight behind other previous proposed bills to protect whales. “But this interest in whales just suddenly springs up when offshore wind is starting to take off and threaten fossil fuels,” he told E…E News.
In addition to drawing criticism from Republicans in Congress, offshore wind has also inspired opposition from multiple campaigns by local nonprofit groups claiming that the industry harms whales. But some of these are actually backed by powerful oil and gas interests, including the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers and other major Republican donors.
Fast Company traced funding for nonprofits like Protect Our Coast New Jersey, Save Our Beach View, and the Long Beach Island Coalition for Wind Without Impact — anti-wind groups claiming to be grassroots — back to the Caesar Rodney Institute. The think tank receives money from industry groups including the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Energy Alliance.
Recent lawsuits launched against offshore wind projects have also been linked to fossil fuel entities. In 2021, attorneys at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of fishing companies challenging Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. The Austin-based foundation counts among its funders Charles Koch, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — all major Republican donors.
Another lawsuit brought against Vineyard Wind is led by the Nantucket Residents Against Wind Turbines, another purportedly grassroots campaign that is backed by David Stevenson, a director at the Caesar Rodney Institute.
Stevenson also leads a group called the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, which supports efforts to launch a lawsuit aiming to stop a Dominion Energy offshore wind project off the coast of Virginia.
Democratic lawmakers have drawn attention to the vested interests behind anti-wind sentiments. “I am 100 percent convinced that fossil fuel is funding some of the opposition,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told Axios. “Any clean energy, they want to find ways to hobble and harass.”
Despite the organized efforts from Republicans’ fossil fuel donors, not all Republicans in Congress oppose offshore wind. Some conservative lawmakers, particularly from states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, just want to make sure their states can cash in on incoming wind lease sales. Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said to Axios that he opposes bans on the offshore wind industry. His own website highlights the inclusion of a provision in the GOP energy bill to ensure that 50 percent of federal lease revenues from offshore wind lease sales go to coastal states.
Megan Milliken Biven, a former staffer at the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the founder of the climate and labor advocacy organization True Transition, said that support isn’t a surprise. Her experiences with offshore industries on the Gulf Coast indicate that politicians on the coast of Louisiana are “very enthusiastic about offshore wind — Republicans and Democrats alike.”
That bipartisan support owes to the decline in oil and gas jobs in the state, including offshore jobs. Over the past decade, Louisiana’s oil and gas sector has become much more efficient, requiring fewer wells to extract more fossil fuels. “The service companies, the shipyards, the vessels — all these companies that used to serve oil and gas have less contracts,” Biven said. “Wind is the way to make sure that these companies stay viable. They see their future in offshore wind.”
A report from the University of Delaware found that the growing U.S. offshore wind industry holds an estimated $109 billion in potential profits to supply-chain businesses this decade.
So far, Republican opposition hasn’t blocked offshore wind growth. The Biden administration proposed the first offshore wind lease sale areas in the Gulf of Mexico in February. Offshore wind off the coast of Texas and Louisiana could power as many as 1.3 million homes. Eight states have set formal offshore wind procurement goals totalling 40 gigawatts by 2040 — enough to power roughly 12 million homes. And 18 projects in development in U.S. waters have already reached the permitting phase.
Yet it also doesn’t seem like the nagging lawsuits and criticism will blow over any time soon. Biven says approaching attacks on offshore wind requires building an effective counternarrative. “It’s always about who is telling the better story,” she said. “It’s a lot easier to mobilize people around a yes than a no.”
One easy “yes” for the average American is good-paying jobs. If offshore wind companies manage to provide “a good job that’s providing for their families, they’re paying local taxes, they’re contributing to their local church, they’re going to defend it,” Biven said. She says people could easily mobilize around the economic and job benefits of a growing offshore wind industry — but only if the federal government takes concrete measures to make those benefits an on-the-ground reality.
“We have an abundant resource to power our homes and our communities,” Biven said. “Do we want to take advantage of that or do we want to sit on our thumbs for another few decades because someone has manipulated us?”
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