10 June 23
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Because of a Big Oil–backed exemption, federal air quality data won’t reflect this week’s wildfire smoke. The exemption allows states to ignore pollution from “exceptional events,” freeing polluters from reducing emissions to offset smoke impact.
But in federal air quality data, it will be as if those days never happened. That’s because a Big Oil–backed exemption in federal environmental law allows states to discount pollution from “exceptional events” beyond their control, including wildfires. And while environmental regulators are considering cracking down on soot and particle pollution, industry groups are opposing those reforms, too.
Under current rules, states like New York, where residents have been urged to remain indoors, won’t have their “hazardous” air quality index levels count against their compliance with the federal Clean Air Act — so emissions sources in the state, for example, won’t be required to reduce other discharges to help offset the smoke pollution.
“Every air quality monitor from New York to D.C. is going to blow past the limit,” said Sanjay Narayan, a managing attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. But instead of localities counting that data toward the overall standards they’re required to maintain, he said, “They’ll say, ‘This is caused by wildfires, so we’ll continue to do what we normally do.’”
Environmental justice groups in cities like Phoenix, Chicago, and Detroit have previously accused states of exploiting the wildfire loophole to avoid cleaning up air that’s already dangerously dirty — often to the benefit of polluters that also helped push changes to the Clean Air Act beginning in the mid-2000s.
Those changes allow states to skip reporting pollution from natural occurrences like dust storms, thereby reducing the likelihood of triggering enhanced cleanup measures that could impact industrial activities. In 2016, the oil industry’s top lobbying group even took the rare step of siding with federal environmental regulators in a court challenge from green groups arguing that they had illegally expanded the reporting exemptions to include some human-caused pollution.
In an echo of their larger campaign of climate denial, oil lobbyists argued that it was virtually impossible to differentiate between “purely natural emissions” and those connected to human activity — so regulators should treat wildfires and other similar occurrences as “natural events.”
Last year, a panel of outside scientific experts took the opposite position, questioning whether federal regulators should continue to treat wildfires as “exceptional” given that they’re now seasonal events.
“The dramatic increase in wildfires over the last decade is not natural,” wrote the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee in its March 2022 recommendations, noting that the causes included both climate change and land management practices. “Given the potential for significant adverse health events, it may be time to reconsider the current approach.”
Dirtying the Clean Air Act
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, its advocates were concerned primarily with pollution spewing from industrial sources like smokestacks — problems regulators could pinpoint and reduce. Under the law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets pollution control standards that states must find ways to meet and maintain. States are also required to report any air quality data falling below those standards.
The loophole for exceptional events, which was codified in 2005 amendments to the Clean Air Act, was intended to avoid penalizing states for events they can’t control. While New York City suffers through the worst air quality in the world this week, for example, there’s little state regulators can do to stop Canadian wildfires.
At the time, oil lobbyists praised the move, encouraging the EPA in 2006 regulatory comments to “expand the definition of exceptional events to include all emissions and events that are beyond the control” of states, and they explicitly cited particle pollution from wildfires as an example. Over time, the federal agency has continued to expand the definition, making it easier for states to receive waivers.
But while pollution from wildfires may not fit neatly into the existing regulatory paradigm, environmental groups say that regulators can’t afford to ignore it. Residents forced to breathe soot-filled air aren’t concerned about the source, and erasing smoke pollution from the record doesn’t undo the damage its buildup can cause to the heart and lungs over time.
Seasonal blazes have already reversed decades of progress on clean air, according to a recent study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Part of the problem, some wildfire science experts say, is a framework that can ding states for smoke from the kind of controlled burns that help prevent wildfires, while letting them off the hook for the larger, more dangerous conflagrations that often result.
In public comments on proposed changes to the EPA’s “exceptional events” rule in 2016, one fire science expert suggested that the agency take “the exact opposite” approach to regulating wildfire smoke.
“The state air regulatory agencies should count wildfire emissions,” wrote Scott Stephens, a wildland fire science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, arguing that doing so “would become a driver for ecologically appropriate prescribed fire and managed wildfire use.”
The Cost of Doing Nothing
The EPA didn’t incorporate suggestions from fire scientists in the 2016 changes.
But the agency did loosen the overall standards for what could be counted as an exceptional event — a move that the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, had backed in its own regulatory comments.
In prior years, the API had lobbied alongside Exxon on proposed legislation to relax the criteria for states seeking air quality waivers from such events.
Environmental groups challenged the laxer rule in federal court in 2016, arguing that it created too large a loophole for some types of human-caused emissions. In response, the oil lobby did something unusual: intervene on the side of the EPA.
The API’s attorneys wrote in a brief that overturning the agency’s rule would force states to report more data showing poor air quality — a move that could negatively impact its members’ operations. In other words, forcing states to more fully account for air pollution, even from sources they didn’t completely control, could mean a crackdown on more sources they do control.
The court sided with the EPA and the oil lobbyists. In recent years, states have increasingly relied on wildfire waivers to meet their required air quality standards, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office — even as air quality has declined.
On multiple occasions, local environmental groups have challenged the federal agency’s decisions to sign off on the waivers. In March, a Detroit-based group contested an exceptional event waiver granted by the EPA for poor air quality registered in the city the previous year. State environmental regulators claimed that the readings were influenced by distant wildfire smoke.
But in a letter to the EPA, the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center said that the state was instead seeking “to delay and evade utilizing their regulatory responsibility to lower ozone pollution in the Detroit area,” which suffers from disproportionately high asthma rates. The federal agency approved the state’s waiver in May.
Federal environmental regulators are currently considering one measure that environmental justice groups say could help address rapidly declining air quality, including from wildfires — tightening standards for soot and particle pollution. That move is staunchly opposed by the oil and gas, mining, and chemical lobbies.
While there’s no single regulatory solution for wildfires, the eerie haze currently gripping the skies above huge swaths of the country should serve as a reminder of the urgency of addressing their underlying causes, said the Sierra Club’s Narayan.
“This is why it’s critical that the EPA regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — that’s what the act was meant to do,” he said. “We hear industry complaining about the cost of greenhouse gas reductions, but this should be a reminder that the costs of doing something are a lot lower than the costs of doing nothing.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Intercept)
Much of the evidence used to charge Donald Trump — material including text messages and notes from his own attorney — came from those hired to serve him
The 37-count federal indictment of former president Donald Trump unsealed Friday provides a vivid account of Trump’s actions at his homes in South Florida and New Jersey, and is based on information from a coterie of close aides, household staffers and lawyers hired to serve Trump in his post-presidency.
The account from Trump insiders in the 49-page indictment provides a thorough rebuttal to many claims made by Trump about his handling of classified material, including that he may have kept some material by accident or may have considered the material declassified by him.
A secretary — identified in the indictment as “Trump Employee 2” — told prosecutors that Trump himself had been packing and looking through boxes, contrary to assertions from his own lawyers. A young political aide, referred to as “the PAC representative” in the indictment, told prosecutors that Trump showed him a classified map about a military operation in a foreign country and told him to stand back because it was a secret document. At a recent CNN town hall, Trump said he did not remember doing such a thing.
Key parts of the indictment are based on one of his lawyer’s detailed notes about Trump’s wishing to obstruct justice by not responding to a subpoena — contradicting the 45th president’s claims that he was always cooperative with the Justice Department and the National Archives and Records Administration. And Trump’s valet was indicted alongside him, after prosecutors obtained the aide’s text messages and accused him of lying about moving boxes at Trump’s request.
Over a lengthy investigation, special counsel Jack Smith and his team interviewed dozens of Trump’s staffers, including his secretary, groundskeepers and political aides. The interviews gave Smith a close-up look at how Trump had structured his unorthodox post-presidential life — and made Trump and his advisers deeply angry and uncomfortable, according to people familiar with the matter, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics or the ongoing criminal investigation.
Trump never spoke to prosecutors in the case, but his actions, idiosyncrasies and thoughts were relayed in documents and text messages provided by staffers. Many accounts were provided reluctantly under subpoena, people familiar with those exchanges have said. Other aides’ phones were seized, giving prosecutors access to texts, photos and more.
Security video footage also was taken from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and private club, showing the movements of boxes after prosecutors sent a subpoena demanding the return of documents marked classified. Photos in the indictment show Trump’s bathroom, complete with a dangling chandelier, where he stored dozens of boxes of documents. Additional photos show other places where documents were stored, including his ballroom and a storage room.
Phone records detailed calls between Trump and his valet that coincided with boxes being moved.
Some of the most compelling testimony comes from people who were hired to help Trump.
Evan Corcoran, a lawyer brought onto Trump’s staff in 2022, is the person described as “Attorney 1” in the indictment, according to a person familiar with the situation. Corcoran, a Maryland lawyer, was a former U.S. attorney who represented Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon in the past and was introduced to Trump by Trump’s longtime aide and legal adviser Boris Epshteyn.
Corcoran fought vigorously against testifying in court, citing attorney-client privilege, but was compelled by a judge, who said prosecutors were entitled to Corcoran’s notes and recollections about conversations with Trump because the exchanges may have taken place in furtherance of a criminal act — in this case, withholding documents and deceiving the government.
His testimony rattled Trump.
Through his own lawyer, Corcoran declined to comment.
On the day Trump’s attorneys returned documents to the Justice Department in response to the grand jury subpoena, Trump told Corcoran to search through the material in a folder and indicated that he should remove any problematic documents before handing the folder over, the indictment alleges.
Corcoran provided a detailed summary of Trump’s comments that indicate he was looking to avoid returning documents. In Corcoran’s telling, Trump was determined to keep the boxes even though he knew he had received a grand jury subpoena.
“I really don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t, I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” he said, according to Corcoran.
He allegedly also said: “Well, what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” and “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything there?”
Information prosecutors appear to have obtained from Corcoran also indicates that Trump repeatedly claimed that a lawyer for Hillary Clinton, his 2016 presidential rival, had taken the blame for Clinton’s misuse of emails, and he allegedly said the lawyer’s willingness to do so was a trait he admired.
Another key aide, described in the indictment as “Trump Employee 2,” matches information confirmed to The Washington Post about former Trump executive assistant Molly Michael. Michael and a lawyer representing her did not respond to requests for comment.
Michael sat outside Trump’s office, connected his calls, kept his schedule and often translated his moods to visitors and other Trump advisers. She was deeply involved in all aspects of his life, Trump advisers said, until she left his employ last year. Michael was rattled by the extensive attention from federal authorities conducting the investigation, people familiar with the situation have said.
Michael provided text messages and photos to federal investigators, the indictment shows, and kept close tabs on Trump’s packing of boxes himself — contrary to the claims made by some of his lawyers.
“Box answer will be wrenched out of him by tomorrow,” Michael said in a text message to Alex Cannon, a Trump lawyer trying to get him to return materials to the Archives. Cannon is referred to in the indictment as a “Trump Representative,” according to a person familiar with the situation. He declined to comment.
At another time, Michael updates another Trump aide on the former president’s efforts to sort through boxes and is said in the indictment to help Trump valet Walt Nauta move boxes. Her text messages appear frequently throughout the indictment, often in exchanges with Nauta.
Nauta was charged alongside Trump, but Michael was not, and people familiar with the matter have said she cooperated with the Justice Department. Nauta, on the other hand, is accused of lying during the investigation.
As Trump tried to avoid complying with a May 11, 2022, subpoena that required him to produce all documents with classification markings that were in his possession, Nauta was the person he relied on to help conceal the boxes he wanted to keep, the indictment alleges.
In the time between the issuing of the subpoena and Trump’s attorney’s review of boxes in the storage room on June 2, 2022, to find documents being sought, Nauta moved approximately 64 boxes to Trump’s residence at Trump’s request, according to the indictment.
The indictment shows the valet’s movements — along with phone calls he received from Trump.
On the afternoon of May 22, 2022, it says, Nauta entered the storage room and emerged 34 minutes later carrying one of Trump’s boxes. On May 24, 2022, “between 5:30 p.m. and 5:38 p.m., Nauta removed three boxes from the Storage Room” at Trump’s direction, the indictment reads.
A few days passed, and on May 30, 2022, after a 30-second phone call with Trump, Nauta removed 50 boxes from the storage room, according to the indictment. Later that day, a member of Trump’s family texted Nauta that the person had seen that he put boxes in Trump’s room.
“I think he wanted to pick from them,” Nauta wrote to the “Trump family member” in a text message obtained by prosecutors. The indictment does not identify the family member, but it would be a woman who has access to Trump’s private quarters at Mar-a-Lago.
“He told me to put them in the room and he was going to talk to you about them,” Nauta writes, after the “family member” says there will not be room for the boxes to go on the plane to Trump’s home in Bedminster, N.J., because the aircraft will be “full with luggage.”
On June 1, 2022, at 12:52 p.m., Nauta visited the storage room once again and removed 11 boxes, the indictment says.
Nauta made one more trip before Trump’s attorney arrived on June 2, 2022, to review the boxes in the storage room. After Trump and Nauta spoke on the phone at 9:29 a.m. that day, according to the indictment, Nauta, along with another club employee, moved 30 boxes from Trump’s residence back to the storage room.
The government alleges that Nauta lied in an interview with the FBI about moving boxes.
“Are you aware of any boxes being brought to his home — his suite?” the FBI agent asks.
Nauta responds decisively: “No.”
A lawyer for Nauta did not respond to a request for comment.
In two other instances in the indictment, unidentified Trump aides witness the former president’s mishandling of classified information. At Bedminster in 2021, the indictment says, Trump showed a picture of a classified map related to a military operation of another country to an unidentified aide working for his political action committee.
Trump “told the PAC representative that he should not be showing the map to the PAC representative and to not get too close,” the indictment says.
A recording mentioned in the indictment describes a different meeting at Bedminster during which the former president talks about knowing a document related to Iran is classified. “See as president I could have declassified it,” he says to an unidentified staffer.
“Now I can’t you know,” he says.
“Now we have a problem,” the unknown staffer says.
“Isn’t that interesting?” Trump responds.
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A Ukrainian soldier guards his position. (photo: Mstyslav Chernov/AP)
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky appears to have confirmed that his country's long-awaited counter-offensive against Russia has started.
But he added that he would not talk in detail about which stage or state the counter-offensive was in.
The comments come after an escalation of fighting in the south and east of Ukraine and speculation about progress of the widely anticipated push.
Ukrainian troops are reported to have advanced in the east near Bakhmut and in the south near Zaporizhzhia, and have carried out long-range strikes on Russian targets.
But assessing the reality on the front lines is difficult, with the two warring sides presenting contrasting narratives: Ukraine claiming progress and Russia that it is fighting off attacks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video interview published Friday that Ukrainian forces had certainly begun their offensive but that attempted advances had failed with heavy casualties.
Speaking in Kyiv, after talks with the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, Mr Zelensky described the Russian leader's words as "interesting".
Shrugging his shoulders, raising his eyebrows and pretending not to know who Mr Putin was, Mr Zelensky said it was important that Russia felt "they do not have long left".
He also said that Ukraine's military commanders were in a positive mood, adding: "Tell that to Putin."
Mr Trudeau announced 500 million Canadian dollars (£297m) in new military aid for Ukraine during the unannounced visit.
A joint statement issued after the talks said Canada supports Ukraine becoming a Nato member "as soon as conditions allow for it", adding that the issue would be discussed at the Nato Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July.
Drone debris hits Odesa homes
The news conference followed an overnight Russian strike in which three people died and dozens were injured in the southern city of Odesa.
Falling debris from a shot-down Russian drone started a fire in a residential block in the Black Sea-port city, Ukrainian officials said.
A separate overnight Russian attack targeted an airfield in the central region of Poltava.
Ukraine's air force said the Odesa attack, which lasted six hours, involved eight land-based missiles and 35 drones, and that air defence units were able to shoot down 20 drones and two cruise missiles.
"As a result of the air fight, debris from one of the drones fell onto a high-rise apartment, causing a fire," Natalia Humeniuk, the southern military command's spokesperson, said.
Emergency services said 27 people, including three children, were wounded, and that the fire had been quickly put out. Twelve people were rescued from the building, they said.
Images showed an apartment building in Odesa heavily damaged, with debris covering rooms and windows blown out. Others showed a large crater on the ground.
An airfield in the central region of Poltava was also hit by a Russian attack early on Saturday, with the local governor saying it involved ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones. He said it caused damage to airfield infrastructure and equipment.
A 29-year-old was killed in a separate attack in the northeast Kharkiv region, officials said.
Meanwhile, fighting has escalated in recent days in the key southern Zaporizhzhia region, Russian officials say, with Ukraine forces reported to be trying to regain access to the Sea of Azov, which would split Russian forces.
Ukraine's hope of advances in the region, however, could be hindered by huge flooding in the south of the country after the Nova Khakovka dam was destroyed last week.
The flooding has covered around 230 square miles (596 sq km) either side of the Dnipro River.
Nato and Ukraine's military have accused Russia of blowing up the dam, while Russia has blamed Ukraine.
French publishing employee Ernest Moret was taken into custody in London. (photo: Shutterstock)
The state of democratic rights for journalists in some of the world’s leading Western powers is becoming increasingly worrisome.
Klarenberg has written copious articles critical of the British government’s foreign and national security policies for a variety of left-wing outlets: Electronic Intifada, MintPress News, the Cradle. But the British officers were interested in one outlet in particular: the Grayzone. According to Klarenberg’s account of the detention for that outlet, the officers questioned him about his pay from the news website, his contact with its editor, Max Blumenthal, and any hypothetical links between the Grayzone and the Russian government.
Over the last year, Klarenberg has written several major stories highly embarrassing for the British government based on leaked documents. One series of stories showed the plans of British intellectual Paul Mason — who has, since Keir Starmer’s right-wing takeover of UK Labour, positioned himself as the leading nominally leftist supporter of the Labour head — to collaborate with the UK government and UK intelligence contractors as part of an “information war” campaign against the British left. Another revealed an April 2022 proposal to British intelligence to help Ukrainian forces destroy the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, which Ukraine successfully suicide-bombed last October. Still another exposed British involvement in training Ukrainian soldiers for other attacks on the disputed territory.
Given this, it’s not hard to see how Klarenberg ended up in the British government’s crosshairs.
Klarenberg was reportedly detained under Schedule 3, Section 4 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, a controversial law criticized by human rights groups and the UN that was passed by the ruling Conservative government in 2019, ostensibly in response to the Skipral poisoning two years earlier. The law gives British law enforcement wide latitude to detain and harass individuals deemed to be taking part in a “hostile activity” on behalf of or in the interests of a foreign government.
In practice, this could mean almost anything. The law defines “hostile activity” as something that could threaten national security, threaten the British economy with implications for its national security, or is simply a “serious crime.” This applies whether or not the accused actually knows they’re carrying out a “hostile activity” — and even whether or not the foreign government whose bidding they’re supposedly doing is aware they’re doing it.
The harassment Klarenberg received at the British border seems to vindicate the warnings of the bill’s critics. But it would be a mistake to view this episode as being just about one particularly Orwellian British law. It’s part of a wider recent pattern in Western countries of government attacks on press freedoms and dissident speech.
Silencing Political Dissent
This past April, Ernest Moret, an employee of the left-wing French publishing house Éditions la Fabrique, underwent a similar ordeal, also in the UK. Detained in his case under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, Moret was questioned for six hours over his involvement in the protests against French president Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension cuts, with officers asking him decidedly non-terrorism-related questions about his thoughts on the French retirement age, Macron, and COVID-19, and even asking him to name “anti-government” authors who had written for the publisher.
When Moret refused to provide the passwords for his seized electronic devices, he was arrested and held for nearly twenty-four hours, threatened with being banned from traveling to the UK. In this case, the British police never returned his devices.
This wasn’t the first time they’d used this exact law in a dubious way. Nine years ago, British police cited it to detain Glenn Greenwald’s late husband David Miranda while Miranda was carrying data leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that Greenwald was reporting on at the time. In 2017, they invoked it to detain the international director of CAGE, an NGO that advocates, ironically, against repressive “war on terror” policies.
British government officials have likewise been involved in a recent campaign to get the UK shows of former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters canceled. Waters himself, Jacobin’s Chip Gibbons, and Electronic Intafada’s Asa Winstanley explain in detail how breathtakingly cynical and dishonest this effort has been, involving deliberately taking parts of Waters’s decades-old and beloved The Wall show out of context to present them as an endorsement of Nazism to unsuspecting modern viewers unfamiliar with his work. Waters has charged that the campaign is retaliation for his views on foreign policy, namely his criticisms of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians and of Western governments’ role in the war in Ukraine. (Incredibly, the US State Department has now also weighed in, absurdly labeling the show antisemitic.)
This smear campaign began in Germany, where Waters is currently being criminally investigated over his Berlin show. Waters’s critics contend that his dressing up in the style of a Gestapo officer and miming gunning down minorities is possibly antisemitic and runs afoul of the country’s harsh laws against hate speech and the promotion of right-wing extremism — despite the fact that not only is the spectacle quite obviously a condemnation of what it’s depicting, which is why an Israeli tribute band has performed the same show throughout Israel using virtually the same iconography that Waters is being condemned for now, but it’s been a part of the show going back more than forty years.
This is not the only dubious example of Germany’s famously strict laws against certain types of speech being weaponized against political dissent. This year also saw German peace activist Heinrich Bücker receive a criminal order and a fine of €2,000 for a twelve-minute speech he gave in 2022 on the anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in which he said that “Germans must never again be involved in any form of war against Russia” and accused the German government of collaborating with Ukrainian fascists. (He later made explicitly clear he wasn’t saying all Ukrainians are fascists, and that he was in favor of negotiations “so that the murder stops.”)
There’s much one could criticize about Bücker’s speech. But one doesn’t have to agree with all or even any of it to see the dubious nature of the central allegation — that he was publicly approving of a crime, specifically a war of aggression — or to understand the chilling effect of prosecuting someone for making what’s essentially a call for peace and strategic empathy, however flawed. Though Bücker successfully appealed the charge, the judge made clear he was only being acquitted because he had delivered his speech to a small audience that already largely agreed with him, leaving the door open to similar prosecutions in the future.
The Taxman
Despite its vastly more permissive constitutional protections for speech and press freedoms, the United States is also seeing a similar trend. Take the deeply strange IRS case against journalist Matt Taibbi, in which an IRS agent made the unusual move of physically visiting his home unannounced on the exact day he was testifying to Congress about his “Twitter Files” reporting.
Taibbi was later informed that his 2018 and 2019 tax returns had been rejected due to potential identity theft — even though Taibbi had documentation showing his 2018 return had been accepted, he hadn’t heard anything about these issues in the years prior, and the IRS owed him a refund. It later turned out that the IRS had opened their case against him on Christmas Eve last year, a Saturday, the very same day that Taibbi had posted a particularly explosive edition of his Twitter Files series.
If the IRS was being weaponized against Taibbi over his reporting, it would hardly be a first: the IRS has been used by Richard Nixon and the FBI in the past to harass the president’s political opponents and left-wing groups and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr.
But this followed several other menacing developments centered around Taibbi’s reporting on government-driven tech censorship. During Taibbi’s testimony to Congress, hostile Democratic lawmakers repeatedly pressured Taibbi and his colleagues to reveal their sources while suggesting they were not real journalists and, by implication, not covered by the First Amendment’s press protections. Later, when Taibbi was falsely accused of having invented the government’s role in pressing for tech censorship, one of his congressional critics threatened him with prosecution for perjury and a possible five years in prison.
Because of the widespread perception that Taibbi is now a right-wing reporter and that the “Twitter Files” are merely a PR stunt for billionaire Elon Musk, all this has been almost exclusively covered by conservative media. But given how damaging the reporting was to the growing national security–tech complex, it’s not a stretch to assume this was official retaliation or even intimidation related to Taibbi’s exposure of little-known government policy.
Recent reporting has added a new wrinkle to this. Back in April, a high-ranking official in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) — the country’s equivalent to the FBI, which has been targeting left-wing dissidents in Ukraine and has been accused of torture — revealed to former Intercept reporter Lee Fang that it was collaborating with the FBI to pressure tech companies to censor alleged and broadly defined Russian disinformation. This has recently been corroborated by the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, who obtained documents showing that he and other North American journalists were among the targets of this joint SBU-FBI pressure. Last year, several left-wing press outlets that were critical of US policy toward the Ukraine war had their accounts shuttered by PayPal, hindering their operations.
In fact, the United States fell three places this year in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, owing in part to what the organization called “a troubling pattern of harassment, intimidation and assault on journalists in the field.”
That has often involved the use of state power to attack journalists for doing their jobs, whether county officials caught on tape discussing killing a father and son reporting team in Oklahoma, reporters arrested by police in both blue and red states for trying to do their jobs, or the two North Carolina reporters arrested and convicted for alleged trespassing while photographing the police evicting a homeless encampment. In the last case, body camera footage showed an officer explicitly urging their arrest “because they’re videotaping” — in other words, because they were reporting.
Left-leaning activists are bearing the brunt of this as both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations have moved the “war on terror” to the domestic sphere. Arguably the most high-profile such case right now is the absurd prosecution of Atlanta’s “Cop City” protesters under domestic terrorism charges, an alarming episode whose most recent development has been the unprecedented raid on and arrest of organizers of a bail fund for protesters.
And both the Biden administration and its UK counterpart continue to collaborate in the torture, imprisonment, and possible prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who this week lost his most recent legal appeal, putting him, in his brother’s words, “dangerously close” to being extradited to the United States to stand trial. According to the Daily Mail, the UK Home Office is already preparing extradition papers for Assange to be extradited as soon as in the next few weeks.
Assange’s treatment — based on the radical authoritarian theory that the US government is entitled to prosecute and jail any journalist on earth who reveals Washington secrets, wherever they are, whatever country they hail from, and even if they have no legal US connection — has already sent a menacing signal worldwide to reporters and publishers. But his prosecution would be a serious escalation on top of this if it’s successful, sharply curtailing US press freedoms to publish and report on government secrets by setting the precedent that news publishers can be criminally prosecuted for doing so — which is exactly why numerous press freedom, human rights, and civil liberties groups, as well as members of Congress and leading Western media outlets, have all demanded the Biden administration drop the case.
A Slippery Slope
Taken together, these stories paint a worrying picture of the state of democratic rights in some of the world’s leading Western powers.
Worse, it’s being enabled by the silence of those who should be checking such behavior. The Biden administration, which has framed both its foreign and domestic policy as a battle between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism, not only has nothing to say about these attacks on civil liberties — it’s deeply complicit in, and one of the leading culprits of, such attacks. In turn, the press outlets and media personalities that soaked up publicity when condemning Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on journalists are far quieter about the government’s material threats to press freedoms now that they’re taking place under a Democratic president.
Meanwhile, many of these cases are specifically related to foreign policy dissent, particularly on the matter of NATO policy toward the Ukraine war, which the US and allied governments have framed as an existential battle for worldwide democracy. Yet as has been clear since last year, the war and NATO countries’ participation in it is tragically having the opposite effect on both Ukrainian and Western societies, leading them to behave in more and more authoritarian ways on the basis of protecting Ukraine’s war effort — measures that, ironically, resemble the Russian government’s own authoritarian behavior.
But this is really a ramping up of trends that date back to at least the start of the war on terror this century, which saw governments, especially those of the UK and the United States, clamp down on civil liberties and basic freedoms on the basis of national security. For all the warnings then of the slippery slope we were on, successive administrations, sometimes from different sides of the political spectrum, have never dismantled these structures but rather added to them. And absent any sort of reckoning and mass action to oppose them, we seem destined to keep sliding faster and faster down until we find out what’s at the bottom.
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Immigrants in an ICE detention center. (photo: Jose Cabezas/AFP/Getty Images)
Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the nonprofit organization Al Otro Lado, representing him, confirmed Orozco-Juarez left LaSalle Correctional Center on Wednesday, where he had been detained since April 12.
An ICE deportation officer gave Orozco-Juarez two weeks to present new evidence he had a reason to stay in the country or that he planned to return to Guatemala, his country of origin, according to the attorney.
“We are happy that he could finally see his children and his wife after two months and that a family separated by an unjust choice is now back together,” Jong told The Advocate. “But we are very worried about what’s going to happen in two weeks.”
Orozco-Juarez filed a civil rights complaint with the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office at the Department of Homeland Security last month, claiming his arrest was in retaliation for his role in speaking out against episodes of misconduct inside U.S. factories that rely on immigrant workers.
The DHS launched a probe into his allegations, which triggered a hold on the deportation process, Jong said. However, ICE rejected his request for a stay of removal.
Last month, an ICE spokesperson said Orozco-Juarez would remain in ICE custody pending his deportation as the agency allowed him multiple opportunitiees over the past 14 years to comply with the removal order by planning his own return to Guatemala, but he never did.
The agency confirmed he enrolled Orozco-Juarez under an alternative to detention program while waiting for the next step in his case.
“Regardless of nationality, ICE makes custody determinations on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with U.S. law and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policy, considering the individual merits and factors of each case,” said an ICE spokesperson. “ICE officers make associated decisions and apply prosecutorial discretion in a responsible manner, informed by their experience as law enforcement professionals and in a way that best protects against the greatest threats to the homeland.”
Deportations and policies
A Mississippi resident, Orozco-Juarez spent five months in a Texas federal prison on illegal re-entry charges in 2021, and then was released after repeated pleadings from his family.
He had lived and worked in Mississippi for nearly 14 years before being among nearly 700 undocumented immigrant workers arrested during a series of sweeping ICE raids in 2019 across multiple poultry plants, including Koch Foods.
Following a deportation order before an Alexandria federal judge, he left his wife, who was disabled from a car crash, and two children behind in 2020. The children, who are 5 and 10 years old, are U.S. citizens.
He crossed the U.S./Mexico border a few months later when he was apprehended in Texas.
ICE noted the agency’s enforcement and removal team had removed Orozco-Juarez twice before the Mississippi raid, in 2006 and then again in 2009.
However, his latest arrest prompted criticism from immigrant advocacy groups and immigration attorneys because Juarez had eventually obtained a legal work permit to remain in the country and regularly checked in with immigration officials as required.
His lawyer said he also had a valid driver’s license and a social security number.
His arrest also surprised many because Orozco-Juarez was among immigrant workers who met last year with then-Secretary of Labor Martin Walsh regarding the agency’s effort to pass a new policy to protect immigrant whistleblowers who help the government unveil episodes of misconduct.
Several immigration attorneys told The Advocate that the Department of Labor might file a request for temporary immigration status — known as deferred action — before the DHS for those who can aid the enforcement of labor laws.
Asked if the Department of Labor might intervene in his case, an agency’s spokesperson said it could not comment “on the possibility of pending actions.”
Jeremy Jong said he is waiting to see whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would request immigration protection for Orozco-Juarez in relation to a case involving a plant where he had worked at in Mississippi.
He emphasized that Orozco-Juarez helped inspire a new policy the DHS issued earlier this year offering deferred action for people involved in labor investigations.
“When ICE tries to deport people who advocated these policies, it makes people not trust the government and the program itself,” he said.
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The number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot has grown significantly, the data shows. (image: Emily Sabens/WP; KTVU-TV/AP; iStock)
Tesla’s driver-assistance system, known as Autopilot, has been involved in far more crashes than previously reported
The car — allegedly in Autopilot mode — never slowed down.
It struck Mitchell at 45 mph. The teenager was thrown into the windshield, flew into the air and landed face down in the road, according to his great-aunt, Dorothy Lynch. Mitchell’s father heard the crash and rushed from his porch to find his son lying in the middle of the road.
“If it had been a smaller child,” Lynch said, “the child would be dead.”
The crash in North Carolina’s Halifax County, where a futuristic technology came barreling down a rural highway with devastating consequences, was one of 736 U.S. crashes since 2019 involving Teslas in Autopilot mode — far more than previously reported, according to a Washington Post analysis of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data. The number of such crashes has surged over the past four years, the data shows, reflecting the hazards associated with increasingly widespread use of Tesla’s futuristic driver-assistance technology as well as the growing presence of the cars on the nation’s roadways.
The number of deaths and serious injuries associated with Autopilot also has grown significantly, the data shows. When authorities first released a partial accounting of accidents involving Autopilot in June 2022, they counted only three deaths definitively linked to the technology. The most recent data includes at least 17 fatal incidents, 11 of them since last May, and five serious injuries.
Mitchell survived the March crash but suffered a fractured neck and a broken leg and had to be placed on a ventilator. He still suffers from memory problems and has trouble walking. His great-aunt said the incident should serve as a warning about the dangers of the technology.
“I pray that this is a learning process,” Lynch said. “People are too trusting when it comes to a piece of machinery.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that cars operating in Tesla’s Autopilot mode are safer than those piloted solely by human drivers, citing crash rates when the modes of driving are compared. He has pushed the carmaker to develop and deploy features programmed to maneuver the roads — navigating stopped school buses, fire engines, stop signs and pedestrians — arguing that the technology will usher in a safer, virtually accident-free future. While it’s impossible to say how many crashes may have been averted, the data shows clear flaws in the technology being tested in real time on America’s highways.
Tesla’s 17 fatal crashes reveal distinct patterns, The Post found: Four involved a motorcycle. Another involved an emergency vehicle. Meanwhile, some of Musk’s decisions — such as widely expanding the availability of the features and stripping the vehicles of radar sensors — appear to have contributed to the reported uptick in incidents, according to experts who spoke with The Post.
Tesla and Elon Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
NHTSA said a report of a crash involving driver-assistance does not itself imply that the technology was the cause. “NHTSA has an active investigation into Tesla Autopilot, including Full-Self Driving,” spokeswoman Veronica Morales said, noting the agency doesn’t comment on open investigations. “NHTSA reminds the public that all advanced driver assistance systems require the human driver to be in control and fully engaged in the driving task at all times. Accordingly, all state laws hold the human driver responsible for the operation of their vehicles.”
Musk has repeatedly defended his decision to push driver-assistance technologies to Tesla owners, arguing that the benefit outweighs the harm.
“At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people,” Musk said last year. “Because the people whose lives you saved don’t know that their lives were saved. And the people who do occasionally die or get injured, they definitely know — or their state does.”
Former NHTSA senior safety adviser Missy Cummings, a professor at George Mason University’s College of Engineering and Computing, said the surge in Tesla crashes is troubling.
“Tesla is having more severe — and fatal — crashes than people in a normal data set,” she said in response to the figures analyzed by The Post. One likely cause, she said, is the expanded rollout over the past year and a half of Full Self-Driving, which brings driver-assistance to city and residential streets. “The fact that … anybody and everybody can have it. … Is it reasonable to expect that might be leading to increased accident rates? Sure, absolutely.”
Cummings said the number of fatalities compared to overall crashes was also a concern.
It is unclear whether the data captures every crash involving Tesla’s driver-assistance systems. NHTSA’s data includes some incidents where it is “unknown” whether Autopilot or Full Self-Driving was in use. Those include three fatalities, including one last year.
NHTSA, the nation’s top auto safety regulator, began collecting the data after a federal order in 2021 required automakers to disclose crashes involving driver-assistance technology. The total number of crashes involving the technology is minuscule compared with all road incidents; NHTSA estimates that more than 40,000 people died in wrecks of all kinds last year.
Since the reporting requirements were introduced, the vast majority of the 807 automation-related crashes have involved Tesla, the data show. Tesla — which has experimented more aggressively with automation than other automakers — also is linked to almost all of the deaths.
Subaru ranks second with 23 reported crashes since 2019. The enormous gulf probably reflects wider deployment and use of automation across Tesla’s fleet of vehicles, as well as the wider range of circumstances in which Tesla drivers are encouraged to use Autopilot.
Autopilot, which Tesla introduced in 2014, is a suite of features that enable the car to maneuver itself from highway on-ramp to off-ramp, maintaining speed and distance behind other vehicles and following lane lines. Tesla offers it as a standard feature on its vehicles, of which more than 800,000 are equipped with Autopilot on U.S. roads, though advanced iterations come at a cost.
Full Self-Driving, an experimental feature that customers must purchase, allows Teslas to maneuver from point A to B by following turn-by-turn directions along a route, halting for stop signs and traffic lights, making turns and lane changes, and responding to hazards along the way. With either system, Tesla says drivers must monitor the road and intervene when necessary.
The uptick in crashes coincides with Tesla’s aggressive rollout of Full Self-Driving, which has expanded from around 12,000 users to nearly 400,000 in a little more than a year. Nearly two-thirds of all driver-assistance crashes that Tesla has reported to NHTSA occurred in the past year.
Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who has conducted research on autonomous vehicle safety for 25 years, said the prevalence of Teslas in the data raises crucial questions.
“A significantly higher number certainly is a cause for concern,” he said. “We need to understand if it’s due to actually worse crashes or if there’s some other factor such as a dramatically larger number of miles being driven with Autopilot on.”
In February, Tesla issued a recall of more than 360,000 vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving over concerns that the software prompted its vehicles to disobey traffic lights, stop signs and speed limits.
The flouting of traffic laws, documents posted by the safety agency said, “could increase the risk of a collision if the driver does not intervene.” Tesla said it remedied the issues with an over-the-air software update, remotely addressing the risk.
While Tesla constantly tweaked its driver-assistance software, it also took the unprecedented step of eliminating its radar sensors from new cars and disabling them from vehicles already on the road — depriving them of a critical sensor as Musk pushed a simpler hardware set amid the global computer chip shortage. Musk said last year, “Only very high resolution radar is relevant.”
It has recently taken steps to reintroduce radar sensors, according to government filings first reported by Electrek.
In a March presentation, Tesla claimed Full Self-Driving crashes at a rate at least five times lower than vehicles in normal driving, in a comparison of miles driven per collision. That claim, and Musk’s characterization of Autopilot as “unequivocally safer,” is impossible to test without access to the detailed data that Tesla possesses.
Autopilot, largely a highway system, operates in a less complex environment than the range of situations experienced by a typical road user.
It is unclear which of the systems was in use in the fatal crashes: Tesla has asked NHTSA not to disclose that information. In the section of the NHTSA data specifying the software version, Tesla’s incidents read — in all capital letters — “redacted, may contain confidential business information.”
Both Autopilot and Full Self-Driving have come under scrutiny in recent years. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told the Associated Press last month that Autopilot is not an appropriate name “when the fine print says you need to have your hands on the wheel and eyes on the road at all times.”
NHTSA has opened multiple probes into Tesla’s crashes and other problems with its driver-assistance software. One has focused on “phantom braking,” a phenomenon in which vehicles abruptly slow down for imagined hazards.
In one case last year, detailed by The Intercept, a Tesla Model S allegedly using driver-assistance suddenly braked in traffic on the San Francisco Bay Bridge, resulting in an eight-vehicle pileup that left nine people injured, including a 2-year-old.
In other complaints filed with NHTSA, owners say the cars slammed on the brakes when encountering semi-trucks in oncoming lanes.
Many crashes involve similar settings and conditions. NHTSA has received more than a dozen reports of Teslas slamming into parked emergency vehicles while in Autopilot, for example. Last year, NHTSA upgraded its investigation of those incidents to an “engineering analysis.”
Also last year, NHTSA opened two consecutive special investigations into fatal crashes involving Tesla vehicles and motorcyclists. One occurred in Utah, when a motorcyclist on a Harley-Davidson was traveling in a high-occupancy lane on Interstate 15 outside Salt Lake City, shortly after 1 a.m., according to authorities. A Tesla in Autopilot struck the bike from behind.
“The driver of the Tesla did not see the motorcyclist and collided with the back of the motorcycle, which threw the rider from the bike,” the Utah Department of Public Safety said. The motorcyclist died at the scene, Utah authorities said.
“It’s very dangerous for motorcycles to be around Teslas,” Cummings said.
Of hundreds of Tesla driver-assistance crashes, NHTSA has focused on about 40 Tesla incidents for further analysis, hoping to gain deeper insight into how the technology operates. Among them was the North Carolina crash involving Mitchell, the student disembarking from the school bus.
Afterward, Mitchell awoke in the hospital with no recollection of what happened. He still doesn’t grasp the seriousness of it, his aunt said. His memory problems are hampering him as he tries to catch up in school. Local outlet WRAL reported that the impact of the crash shattered the Tesla’s windshield.
The Tesla driver, Howard G. Yee, was charged with multiple offenses in the crash, including reckless driving, passing a stopped school bus and striking a person, a class I felony, according to North Carolina State Highway Patrol Sgt. Marcus Bethea.
Authorities said Yee had fixed weights to the steering wheel to trick Autopilot into registering the presence of a driver’s hands: Autopilot disables the functions if steering pressure is not applied after an extended amount of time. Yee did not respond to a request for comment.
NHTSA is still investigating the crash and an agency spokeswoman declined to offer further details, citing the ongoing investigation. Tesla asked the agency to exclude the company’s summary of the incident from public view, saying it “may contain confidential business information.”
Lynch said her family has kept Yee in their thoughts, and regards his actions as a mistake prompted by excessive trust in the technology, what experts call “automation complacency.”
“We don’t want his life to be ruined over this stupid accident,” she said.
But when asked about Musk, Lynch had sharper words.
“I think they need to ban automated driving,” she said. “I think it should be banned.”
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A youth climate protest. (photo: Callum Shaw/AP)
Sixteen young people are suing the state of Montana, arguing that its support of fossil fuels violates their constitutional rights.
Each is tired of politicians not only failing to mitigate the problem, but, in their view, actively making it worse. In response, they have taken the bold step of suing the government of Montana, arguing that its enthusiastic support of fossil fuels violates their inalienable right, enshrined in Article II of the state constitution, to a “clean and healthful environment.” They accuse the governor and other officials of neglecting their constitutional duty to preserve and protect the environment for future generations. “Although defendants know that the youth plaintiffs are living under dangerous climatic conditions that create an unreasonable risk of harm, they continue to act affirmatively to exacerbate the climate crisis,” the suit states.
The suit is named for Rikki Held, the rancher’s daughter and the only plaintiff who was 18 when Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Eugene, Oregon, filed the suit in March 2020. It is one of many similar lawsuits nationwide but the first to reach a courtroom. The trial begins Monday and is expected to last two weeks. The youth will take the stand, and the state will vehemently defend itself against what a spokesman for state Attorney General Austin Knudsen has called “meritless and politically motivated” claims by an organization trying “to impose their authoritarian climate agenda on us.”
Defendants include Governor Greg Gianforte, the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, and four other state agencies. The natural resources department, the suit notes, is responsible for “help[ing] ensure Montana’s land and water resources provide benefits for present and future generations,” leading the plaintiffs to wonder how it can it possibly do that while leasing land for oil and gas drilling and devoting less than 1 percent of that revenue to protecting the state’s forests from wildfires.
Over the past decade, as the ravages of climate disasters and fossil fuel extraction have become inescapable, young people around the world have increasingly expressed despair, frustration, and fury. One study found that 59 percent of respondents younger than 25 see climate change as a constant worry — and 39 percent say that concern impacts their daily lives. Young activists have repeatedly begged world leaders to take action, but even as those in power applaud their efforts, emissions continue to climb and extraction continues to increase.
Feeling they have no other choice, 16 youth from throughout Montana decided to sue.
“I’ve done as much as I think I can do as a person,” Claire Vlases, one of the plaintiffs, told Grist. “And now I believe it’s time for my government to take action.”
Vlases, 20, is a student at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. She grew up in Bozeman, Montana, where she was a bright and socially conscious student who lobbied her high school to install solar panels and wrote legislation supporting the technology as a member of the school’s solar club. She joined the lawsuit when she was 17, before, she noted, she could even vote. Though some youth have lost faith in the legal system’s ability to protect them, Vlases wholeheartedly believes in the symbolic and practical power of the case.
“If Montana as a state is able to recognize its unconstitutional promotion of fossil fuels,” she said, “that would be a huge motivating factor for young people across the state to not feel like all hope is lost.”
Vlases, like all of the young plaintiffs, feels enormous responsibility. Even as she’s wrapping up the year’s schoolwork, she’s preparing for tough questions from the state’s attorneys. She’s also found herself in the unusual position of sharing her hopes, fears, and motivations with strangers. She consulted with her sister before talking with Grist, going over the talking points, making sure she got them right. It’s a wild situation to find herself in, she admits.
“I’m a little nervous. I’ve never done that before,” she said. “I hope that what I say matters to the people listening.”
One of the people listening will be Judge Kathy Seeley of the First District Court in Helena. Vlases and the 15 other plaintiffs want her to rule that burning fossil fuels drives climate change, and to declare the state’s support of oil, natural gas, and coal unconstitutional. They also want Seeley to strike down a provision of the state Environmental Policy Act that bars the state from considering the climate implications of energy permitting decisions.
In weighing those matters, Seeley will consider whether the plaintiff’s claims to injury are accurate; whether Montana’s greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts can be measured incrementally; whether those impacts can be attributed to fossil fuel production; and whether a favorable ruling will help the plaintiffs and impact the state’s conduct. Melissa Hornbein, a lawyer with the Western Environmental Law Center who’s working on the case, said the plaintiffs face enormous pressure.
“It takes real courage to stand up to your government and subject yourself to hours and hours of depositions by the state, and having your past and your personal life and your private life dug into by the state,” Hornbein said.
The state of Montana, led by a Republican supermajority, does not seem to believe Vlases and her fellow plaintiffs have much agency in this matter, preferring to cast them as puppets of nefarious private interests. State officials have called the lawsuit an act of “political theater” and accused Our Children’s Trust of using the 16 youth as ignorant props. But if it is political theater, it must be effective if the state is so worked up, Hornbein said.
“They understand how big of a deal this is,” said Hornbein.
Montana is known for abundant natural beauty and vast public lands, a national destination for lovers of the outdoors. But its Republican-led legislature has been running counter to national decarbonization trends. The state is home to the nation’s largest recoverable coal reserves, as well as the Bakken Formation and its billions of barrels of untapped oil. The Big Sky state is the country’s fifth-largest producer of coal and its 12th-biggest oil producer, and multiple state lawmakers spent time in the oil, gas, and coal industries. Fossil fuel interests have contributed mightily to state legislative campaigns over the past 20 years. So far, one activist wrote in an op-ed to the Daily Montanan, Montana’s legislators have flagrantly ignored environmental protections, and judges have done little to enforce them.
Yet Montana is on the front lines of climate change. Over the past decade, fiery summers have turned the state’s expansive blue skies gray and yellow with ash, scorched dense evergreen forests, and rendered great tracts of ranchlands useless.
Despite this, Montana lawmakers recently passed a bill curbing climate impact reviews for large fossil fuel projects. Opponents of the legislation say it was written as a reaction to a revoked permit for a NorthWestern Energy methane gas plant in Yellowstone County. It’s the latest in what policy experts consider a pattern of state policies that are friendlier toward energy interests than public interests. The plaintiffs argue that lawmakers have consciously prioritized the development of fossil fuels over the well-being of residents and the protection of public resources, including rivers, lakes, and wildlife.
The suit is “critically important at a time when our state government is actively undermining the things that make Montana unique,” said Hornbein. “We have a government that really seems bent on destroying it, frankly.”
The state has tried repeatedly to have the case dismissed. Legislators even attempted to change environmental protection laws to remove the legal basis of the complaint. The attorney general asked the state Supreme Court to take the case out of Seeley’s court and issue a stay blocking discovery just as the deposition of expert witnesses was to begin. It denied both requests. Seeley rejected yet another motion to dismiss late last month, though she did rule that the legislature’s recent repeal of the State Energy Policy, which the plaintiffs argue explicitly endorsed the development and use of fossil fuels, rendered that point moot and would not be considered at trial.
Attorneys with Our Children’s Trust were too busy preparing to comment, but senior attorney Nate Bellinger told the Helena Independent-Record the case is “strong legally and factually.” The state constitution, he notes, clearly and specifically states that residents enjoy an inalienable right to a clean and healthful environment. “The courts over the years have given meaning to that constitutional language,” he said.
Before that language was added to the constitution in 1972, the state was even friendlier toward extractive business interests, said Alex Skuntz, a University of Montana law student who has been researching and following the case closely. In that time, some likened Montana to a resource colony, one ruled by the “Copper Kings” who dominated state politics and culture and fought against pollution regulations while, say, insisting on the benefits of arsenic. “Things didn’t pass unless industry wanted them to pass,” said Skuntz, who was until this spring editor in chief of Public Land and Resources Review. As the copper industry grew, so did the environmental disasters associated with it, and the reign of the Copper Kings became the subject of massive grassroots opposition.
In 1972, amid a national flurry of environmental laws and increased concern within Montana about the pace and impacts of environmental destruction, a bipartisan group of 100 delegates rewrote the state constitution in hopes of overturning the oligarchy of private interests that had historically run things. Montana followed Pennsylvania to become the second state in the union to assure its citizens the right to clean air and water (New York became the third in 2021).
Daniel Farber, an attorney and expert on environmental law at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that even if the plaintiffs win, a ruling may not lead to measurable action because the state’s legal code and regulatory structure favors the fossil fuel industry. A win might mean Seely “would issue some kind of opinion that the state government’s violating the Constitution, but not specifically tell them what to do about it,” Farber said.
Still, such a ruling could provide a legal basis for more focused legal attacks in the future, particularly in other states with constitutional guarantees to a healthful environment or in the four states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) with lesser environmental protections enshrined in their constitutions. That could be important, as Our Children’s Trust has filed similar cases in all 50 states, and its federal lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, will soon become the second such case to go to trial. Farber says these suits may have a more symbolic impact individually, but they are part of a practical, comprehensive strategy to challenge polluting industries and weaken their grip on the legal system.
That’s a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of a handful of children and young adults. Claire Vlases considered that as she and her sister went over her talking points. She knows people have asked why she and the 15 others involved in the suit are subjecting themselves to so much pressure and unrelenting scrutiny. Even her sister has shown concern. The answer, she says, is straightforward.
“Taking a drastic measure of action is the only way that we’re going to get there,” Vlases said.
Even as Vlases and her 15 peers gather in Helena, smoke from scores of wildfires burning in Canada blankets much of the state. The air is unsafe to breathe, and fire season is just beginning. It’s a troubling portent of the long, hot summer ahead.
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