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Monday, April 12, 2021
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RSN: Louis DeJoy Is Killing It
07 March 21
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Louis DeJoy Is Killing It
Casey Taylor, New York Magazine
Taylor writes:
p until about a year ago, carrying mail for the United States Postal Service was among the most predictable ways to earn a living. My father did it for 20 years, and I worked alongside him for two of them. You show up, throw magazines and loose letters into the labeled slots at your designated mail case, and deliver the route. You come back when the truck is empty, and the next morning, you get to work filling it up again. A Sisyphean means of community service. “Every day!” echoing in a sing-songy voice on the floor by carriers with a strong sense of gallows humor: The mail never stops, and it’ll keep going long after they’re gone.
Until last year, that is, when the pandemic began to crush this American institution under the weight of its sworn duty. As frontline workers, carriers began getting sick: By September last year, roughly 8 percent of postal workers had taken time off as a result of illness or exposure, a percentage that surely increased along with cases. Considering the increase in overall mail volume thanks to the pandemic’s e-commerce boom, this resulted in overworked carriers covering unprecedented levels of empty routes. On-time delivery of presorted first class mail fell from 94 percent at the end of 2019 to 91 percent after the start of the pandemic in 2020.
The pandemic would’ve been enough, but in May 2020, former logistics CEO and Trump donor Louis DeJoy was named Postmaster General. The hiring was criticized from the start as a conflict of interest on two different fronts: Not only was DeJoy seen as a Trump loyalist, but he also had millions invested in USPS competitors or contractors, the very companies that would most benefit should the post office become another federal institution stripped and sold for parts to the profiteers. As such, when he began ordering carriers to hit the street at specific times, often leaving mail behind in the process and disassembling mail-sorting machines, it wasn’t clear whether it could be best explained by sheer incompetence, an attempt to undermine an election, or a desire to kill the very service he was meant to advance. By October, DeJoy’s changes caused on-time delivery to fall all the way to 86 percent nationally, with rates below 80 percent in major cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit. To put a finer point on just how ineffective his leadership was, even these dismal numbers represented an improvement over previous months, all because injunctions required the USPS to roll back some of DeJoy’s policies ahead of the election.
Carriers who had longed joked about the mail never stopping started to wonder if they’d spoken too soon. “People are always scared that the post office is gonna die or whatever, or they’re gonna take away Saturday delivery. When the last postmaster left, it was right after DeJoy, and on his way out, he says to me: ‘Young man, get as much money as you can the next few years, because this is going away,’” said a carrier in southeastern Pennsylvania who has worked seven days a week since last March. “This time feels different.” A continued decline for the postal service also means a narrower pathway to the middle class for Black Americans, who are 27 percent of the USPS’s workforce.
Saving the post office became a rallying cry during the summer of 2020, as national media and politicians began to draw attention to the disruptions in service and the possible nefarious purpose of a Trump appointee sabotaging mail-in votes that skewed heavily Democratic. Joe Biden even made it a key part of his campaign: He laid out a comprehensive plan to save the post office in October and accused Donald Trump of deliberately undermining the election.
Once it became clear that DeJoy’s bungling hadn’t prevented Biden from winning the election, the issue mostly fell out of the news. Despite that, working conditions for postal workers and mail carriers have remained largely static for the same reasons they’d deteriorated in the first place. The pandemic rages on, and sorting machines are still decommissioned, causing massive backups in mail volume and sorting that clerks and carriers simply can’t keep up with. The issue created by eliminating sorting machines is one of extreme volatility within individual branches. Some days are impossibly light, others a flood. “My base average usually stays within a couple hundred pieces day to day, but I’m going from like 600 letters one day to 2,800 the next,” says a carrier on the Central Coast of California. While it’s difficult to pinpoint a precise reason, he says, “… it’s certainly was not the norm at any other point in my career.”
“Not the norm” feels like an excellent summary of the transition period between the previous presidential administration and this one. A few postal workers expressed some degree of understanding for the reduced urgency around the problems. “You’ve got the pandemic, you know. You’ve got the vaccine. There’s a lot that kinda pushes it to the back burner,” says Larry King, former president and current treasurer of the National Association of Letter Carriers’s Local 520 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
Despite their understanding, however, the urgency among letter carriers remains just as high as it had been before the election. DeJoy continues to stall on the presentation of his ten-year reform plan for the USPS, telling the House Oversight Committee last week that they would likely have it “some time in March,” without committing to a date. When asked to elaborate on what would be included in the plan, DeJoy used the indecipherable jargon trail blazed by other CEOs faced with questions they have no answers for — “unachievable hurdles” and “aligning to the new economy” and “better operational management” and other preemptive justifications for what will inevitably be internal cost cuts, reduced service quality, and increased postage rates. There is no evidence that DeJoy’s mission, which has appeared to be to destroy the USPS entirely, has veered from its course. If Biden plans to save the post office, as he pledged to do on the campaign trail, then there’s little time to waste in taking action.
To his credit, Biden acted immediately after DeJoy delivered his testimony to the House Oversight Committee, naming three nominees to fill all but one of the four open vacancies on the postal board of governors. Assuming confirmation from the Senate, that would create a perfectly balanced board, with four Democrats, four Republicans, and one independent (Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the Vote at Home Institute, a voting-rights group with support from liberal and left-leaning organizations). On the surface, it would appear that Biden has a clear majority with four Democrats and one independent sympathetic to his side. A majority is necessary to remove DeJoy, as the president doesn’t have the authority to fire a postmaster general, only a vote by the board members can do that. But one of the Democrats, Ron Bloom (appointed by Trump) reiterated his support for DeJoy and the ten-year plan this past week.
Even with Democrats in place, that alone won’t stop DeJoy. The board may be able to slow his progress once Biden’s nominees begin their tenure, but without a clear majority, there are significant limitations to what can be done. They can voice displeasure and generally make life more difficult for the postmaster general, but only a majority can remove him or prevent him from implementing the business plan that’s being developed in conjunction with one of the Democrats currently on the board.
The only remaining hope for the postal service is that Biden exercises the nuclear option at his disposal — firing the board of governors with cause and installing an entirely new board that will enable the swift removal of its saboteur. Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, has already called for the president to do so, citing the collective failures of this past year to be the only cause needed to justify it. Failing to intervene immediately means more delayed bills and prescription medicines, more 70-hour work weeks for clerks with no days off, and — perhaps worst of all — another year’s worth of eroded public trust that must be repaired. Firing the board is sure to create a legal dispute that the Democrats would need to fight in order to see it through.
In the meantime, while the administration awaits yet another peaceful resolution that is somehow always just out of reach, the workers the president swore to save will toil away. “I mean, I realized last year that the future of my career rests on Joe Biden,” the carrier from Southeastern Pennsylvania said. “That’s not really where you want to be, even if he’s better than the other guy.” Other carriers weren’t quite as cynical, but expressed similar levels of concern for the future of their jobs. “Unless there are some changes made to how things are done, at the very least, I don’t think this is sustainable,” says Joe Roman, a carrier of 26 years and nine-year shop steward for the Bloomfield branch in Pittsburgh. He’s careful to add that he doesn’t tie that directly to DeJoy, but to operations more broadly. However, other carriers Intelligencer interviewed for this story all shared a universal belief that, regardless of what his intentions or motivations are, DeJoy and his changes are the problem and nothing will be fixed until he’s removed.
Turnover for new postal workers is high, with veteran carriers and clerks citing lower pay and increased chaos as a key reason why nobody tends to stick around longer than a couple of months. It makes things harder on a daily basis, but more importantly in the eyes of carriers who have spent decades fulfilling their duty to the community, it devalues the service. “I’ve been delivering my route for a decade,” said one carrier. “I know every person on my route. That makes you take an extra effort to get them their mail. Some guy that’s in and out, and then another takes his place. I mean, that’s obviously going to impact the mission.” The inability to retain new employees exacerbates the absurd workload issues that have made 70 hour weeks the norm for carriers in high volume branches.
Postal workers who thought they were signing on for the last sure thing that exists for the American working class — a clear path towards decades of financial security in exchange for backbreaking community service — are watching in real time as it’s whittled down to another gig. “Morale is as low as it’s ever been,” says King, the union official. “I mean, we were just in a meeting last week, and they’ve got these formulas and charts and it’s just not possible. It had been bad for a little while but it just keeps getting worse for us.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to the press Saturday at the Capitol, after the Senate passed COVID-19 relief legislation on a party-line vote. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Senate Passes $1.9 Trillion Coronavirus Relief Package
Chloee Weiner, NPR
Weiner writes:
he Senate approved President Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan Saturday, securing additional aid for American families, workers and businesses — and a legislative victory for the Biden administration.
After more than 24 hours of debate, the evenly divided Senate voted 50-49 to approve the measure. Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska was absent because he was in Alaska for a family funeral.
The package delivers a new round of financial assistance to Americans grappling with the impact of the pandemic, including $1,400 direct payments, an extension of supplemental unemployment benefits and an increase to the child tax credit.
Individuals earning up to $75,000 and couples earning up to $150,000 would receive the full direct payments of $1,400 per person. But those payments would phase out for individuals and couples who make more than $80,000 and $160,000, respectively.
The income cutoff was lowered after moderate Democrats demanded that the latest round of checks target lower-income families.
Federal unemployment benefits would be extended through Sept. 6 at the current rate of $300 per week and the first $10,200 of those benefits would be tax-free for households that earn $150,000 or less.
Democrats were under pressure to get the bill to Biden's desk before current federal unemployment benefits expire on March 14. The budget reconciliation process allowed them to act without Republican backing, requiring only a simple majority to pass the bill.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., signaled Tuesday that Democrats had the support they needed to move forward with the vote. But debate on the Senate floor was delayed when Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., indicated Wednesday that he'd require Senate clerks to read the more than 600 page bill on the floor, pushing the vote by several hours.
"We need to highlight the abuse," Johnson said in a Tweet. "This is not a COVID relief bill. It's a boondoggle for Democrats."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Tuesday accused the Biden administration of trying to "jam" Republicans on the legislation.
"It is my hope that in the end Senate Republicans will unanimously oppose it, just like House Republicans did," McConnell said to reporters.
House Democrats' version of the bill originally included a provision to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2025, but the Senate parliamentarian decided the provision did not fit the rules that govern budget bills in the Senate.
The House will need to revote on the final version of the bill before it can be signed into law. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in a statement Saturday that the House will vote on an identical measure on Tuesday.
Vice President Kamala Harris. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Progressives Are Worried Democrats May Already Be Blowing the Midterms
Marie Solis, Fortune
Solis writes:
s it too soon to be worrying about the midterms? Not for progressives, some of whom believe President Joe Biden and Democratic leadership are already setting themselves up for defeat in 2022 by making compromises on the latest COVID relief package.
On Wednesday, Biden agreed to narrow the group of people who would be eligible to receive $1,400 stimulus payments, cutting off individuals earning more than $80,000 and couples earning $160,000 in the Senate’s version of the legislation. The package that the House passed last month capped incomes at $100,000 and $200,000 respectively. Biden’s decision to lower the threshold means roughly 12 million adults and 5 million children would be disqualified from receiving the stimulus checks, many of the same people who would have received checks under former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Biden’s concessions—ostensibly intended to appease more conservative members of the party—could easily come back to haunt him, progressive organizers say.
“Biden has hopped onto the wrong track,” said Norman Solomon, the executive director of RootsAction, a progressive grass-roots organization. “If he continues on the wrong track, he’s going to damage the same base he’s going to be pleading with next year to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress.”
Solomon says that his concern, far from being an idle threat, is based in historical precedent: After advocating economic stimulus for everyday Americans on the campaign trail, Bill Clinton ditched the stimulus package in favor of Wall Street–friendly policies as President. The 1994 midterms became known as the “Republican Revolution,” resulting in Republicans sweeping the House and Senate. After reneging on campaign promises to strengthen labor unions and adopt other progressive policies, President Barack Obama saw his party lose 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate in 2010, only adding to those losses in 2014.
“Financial distress has cascading effects in people’s lives,” Solomon said. “The deeper they go in the financial hole, the more desperate they become and the more angry they get. The fundamental question will revolve around: What have you done for us?”
Others—arguing that this is the more realistic stance—have insisted that it’s too soon to speak so critically of the President’s leadership and have asked skeptics to give him a chance. But their opponents say there’s no time to wait and see: Getting assistance to the American people is urgent, and it will make a memorable impression if some are left behind by the latest version of the legislation.
“I definitely believe in giving people chances—and we are giving Biden a chance,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of the progressive public policy advocacy group MoveOn. “But that doesn’t mean watching as Democrats water down policies they should be delivering on. We shouldn’t be delivering less than what Trump delivered—that’s a political miscalculation in my opinion.”
It’s not just the latest income eligibility restrictions that have progressive groups worried about Democrats’ prospects in the midterms. Many see the Biden administration making the same mistakes on issues like student-loan forgiveness and the minimum wage hike, popular policies they have refused to embrace largely because of arcane procedural rules. Biden has said that he doesn’t believe he has the authority to use executive action to forgive student debt, even though some Democratic leaders say there was nothing standing in his way of canceling $50,000 of debt on his first day in office. The administration also capitulated to the Senate parliamentarian after she said Democrats could not include a $15 minimum wage proposal in their COVID relief package, which is going through the budget reconciliation process. According to Senate rules, Vice President Kamala Harris could have overruled the decision.
“We should not have to twist ourselves into pretzels to pass legislation—the fact that we’re using reconciliation is because of the filibuster,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal told The Cut on Wednesday. “…And if it doesn’t change under Majority Leader Schumer and with a President Biden, then we’re going to have a real problem in two years when we try to convince voters that they should give us a shot again.”
But it’s not just members of the progressive wing who are concerned about making too many concessions too soon. On Thursday, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) spoke out against imposing additional means tests—government determinations of who is fit to qualify for assistance based on what some call arbitrary measures—on the COVID relief bill. “We’ve been listening to this debate for a month. Enough,” she wrote on Twitter. “While you’re quibbling over who you want to exclude, people are suffering. SEND THE CHECKS.”
The Senate is nearing a vote on the relief package as it currently stands, meaning that the most likely outcome is that it passes with the new income eligibility limits.
“Morally, people will suffer,” Solomon said of the consequences of the legislation remaining as is. “Politically, the Democratic Party will suffer.”
Amanda Gorman reading her poem 'The Hill We Climb' at Joe Biden's inauguration in January. (photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Amanda Gorman Tells of Being Followed by Security Guard Who Said She Looked 'Suspicious'
Mattha Busby. Guardian UK
Busby writes:
Poet, acclaimed for her performance at Joe Biden’s inauguration, tweeted ‘this is the reality of black girls’
manda Gorman, the poet who won acclaim for her performance at Joe Biden’s inauguration, has told of being followed home and accosted by a security guard who allegedly claimed she looked suspicious.
She said the incident, on Friday night, was emblematic of “the reality of black girls” in the US, in which “one day you’re called an icon” but the next day considered a threat.
Gorman wrote on Twitter:
She said in a following tweet: “In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”
Gorman, 22, from Los Angeles, shared a post she made in February which said: “We live in a contradictory society that can celebrate a black girl poet & also pepper spray a 9 yr old” – in reference to a recent incident in Rochester, New York, that led to protests and three police officers being suspended pending the completion of an investigation.
A favourite with Democratic establishment figures, the youngest inaugural poet in US history was named the country’s’ first youth poet laureate in 2017, when she was a student at Harvard. The Guardian has contacted her for further comment. She did not indicate the ethnic origin of the security guard.
A Virginia state legislator, Mark Keam, tweeted: “Let this story sink in. And realise how – while I’m glad it ended safe for Amanda Gorman – this type of confrontation is an every day occurrence for millions of our fellow Americans.”
In her inauguration poem, The Hill We Climb, Gorman described herself as “a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother [who] can dream of becoming president, only to find her self reciting for one”.
She also spoke of “striving to forge a union with purpose / To compose a country committed to all cultures, colours, characters and conditions of man.”
Talking to the New York Times, Gorman said she had been struggling to write the inaugural poem. But she was compelled to stay up all night and finish it after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol.
“I’m the daughter of Black writers,” Gorman said after the inauguration. “We’re descended from freedom fighters who broke through chains and change the world.”
Gorman also performed at this year’s Super Bowl and has recently been signed by IMG Models. Her forthcoming books, the poetry collection The Hill We Climb and the children’s book Change Sings, shot to the top of book charts after her inauguration performance.
“I AM ON THE FLOOR MY BOOKS ARE #1 & #2 ON AMAZON AFTER 1 DAY!” she wrote on Twitter. Gorman has described herself as having been a bookworm as a child and overcoming a speech impediment in her youth.
She is also the founder of charity One Pen One Page, which supports underprivileged young people through writing.
A woman being arrested in Rochester, New York. (photo: NBC News)
Rochester Police Again Spark Outrage by Pepper Spraying Mother With Toddler
Elisha Fieldstadt and Dennis Romero, NBC News
Excerpt: "A statement from the Rochester Police Department said that on Feb. 22, officers responded to a call of an alleged female shoplifter 'who was arguing with store employees and refusing to leave.'"
body camera video showing a Rochester police officer pepper spraying a mother with a child late last month is "disturbing," the city's mayor said in a statement.
A statement from the Rochester Police Department said that on Feb. 22, officers responded to a call of an alleged female shoplifter "who was arguing with store employees and refusing to leave."
Body camera video shows an officer talking to a woman with her child while she shows the contents of her purse, pulling out a loose diaper and saying she didn't take anything from the drug store. When the officer tells her he is going to check with store employees, but she has to stay with him, she takes off running with her child. In the video, police blurred the face of the child.
An officer chases her down, puts her on the ground and attempts to handcuff her as she cries, "I did not steal anything," and the child wails in the background.
The woman was pepper sprayed during the arrest, according to a statement from Rochester police.
The child was not pepper sprayed or injured, police said. The woman was charged with trespassing.
Interim Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said Friday, "You’ll see where the mother and child are actually grasping each other."
The chief indicated it's her initial response that the use of force was in-policy.
"Some things to me aren't as simple as to whether a policy was followed. Our indicators are that it was," she said.
"If the person’s physically resisting, generally you're safe with pepper spray usages," she said. "You only want to go to the extent that’s necessary. You don’t want to go beyond that."
The officer involved has been placed on administrative leave while an internal investigation is underway, according to police.
A subsequent body camera video shows an officer later addressing the woman as "dear," asking her if she wants her eyes rinsed out, and telling her that she might be on the news later because at least one bystander was filming.
Mayor Lovely Warren said in a statement that the body camera videos of the incident "are certainly disturbing."
“When incidents like this occur, I am relieved that I ensured body-worn cameras are worn by our police, so we can see what occurs on our streets and hold officers accountable," she said.
Herriott-Sullivan "is working to make sweeping, but necessary, policy and procedure changes along with mandatory training for officers regarding racism and implicit bias," Warren said. "Change will not come until we have the ability to fully hold our officers accountable when they violate the public's trust.”
The incident comes about a month after one Rochester police officer was suspended and two were placed on administrative leave after a video was released showing authorities pepper spraying a 9-year-old girl while responding to a report of “family trouble,” officials said.
Body camera video showed police handcuffing the girl while she repeatedly screamed for her father and refused to get in the vehicle. “You’re acting like a child,” one of the officers told her at one point.
“I am a child,” she can be heard responding.
In this video, officers can be heard saying that they would pepper spray her if she continued to resist. And then one does.
In a statement released Friday, the City of Rochester Police Accountability Board said that two officers on the scene of the most recent arrest were also on the scene in the earlier pepper-spraying incident of the child. It isn't clear what role they played in either incident.
"The Police Accountability Board is disturbed by what it has seen," the board's statement said, adding that there were "troubling parallels between the two incidents.
"Both incidents involved Black mothers. Both involved Black children. Both involved Black people obviously in crisis. Both involved officers using pepper spray on or around a Black child," the Police Accountability Board's statement said.
The statement said the body cam videos police released from the Feb. 22 incident show an officer tell a bystander to “Shut the hell up, and get out of here.”
In the Feb. 22 incident, an officer holding the child also tells another to use a car to block the child from witnesses, saying it doesn’t look good that he has to restrain a 3-year-old.
One officer does say a call was made to the Family and Crisis Intervention Team, but another answers that “they said they’re not even logged in yet," according to the Police Accountability Board.
Both incidents "appear to have not involved the Person in Crisis Team, the Family and Crisis Intervention Team, or mental health professionals. Both involved police officers doing nothing to effectively de-escalate the situation," the statement said. "Both involved apparent intimidation of bystanders filming the incident. Without the courage of those bystanders, who were willing to stand up and hold the police accountable, both incidents may never have been brought to light."
The confrontations come less than a year after Daniel Prude, 41, died while being restrained by Rochester police with a “spit hood” over his head.
Police found Prude wandering the street naked after allegedly smashing a storefront window, and he could be seen on body camera footage spitting in the direction of officers and heard saying he was infected with coronavirus. Officers said that led them to employ the hood.
The police department’s chief and entire command staff resigned after Prude’s death, and the city enacted law enforcement reforms, including moving crisis intervention from the purview of police.
The city launched a “person in crisis” response team, but it didn’t respond to the incident with the 9-year-old because the initial 911 call didn't warrant it, Warren has said.
Herriott-Sullivan said in the Friday press conference that since this was a call about a crime, it was treated as such.
"In this case, keep in mind, there were criminal charges pressed by the victims, which are Rite-Aid," Herriott-Sullivan said. "FACIT's [Family And Crisis Intervention Team] not going to be helpful when she's being processed. It's not a time for that. The time is follow-up later."
Sunday Song: Cranberries | Zombie
Cranberries, YouTube
Excerpt: "Another head hangs lowly. Child is slowly taken And the violence, caused such silence. Who are we mistaken?"
The late Dolores O'Riordan lead singer of The Cranberries in the iconic video performance of Zombie.
Another head hangs lowly
Child is slowly taken
And the violence, caused such silence
Who are we mistaken?
But you see, it's not me
It's not my family
In your head, in your head, they are fighting
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head they are crying
In your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
What's in your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie, oh
Du, du, du, du
Du, du, du, du
Du, du, du, du
Du, du, du, du
Another mother's breaking
Heart is taking over
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken
It's the same old theme
Since nineteen-sixteen
In your head, in your head, they're still fighting
With their tanks, and their bombs
And their bombs, and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dying
In your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
What's in your head, in your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh, ay, oh, ya ya
Gas power plants dominate the Texas grid, providing 47% of the state's electricity. (photo: Ken Lund/Flickr)
A Texas City Had a Bold New Climate Plan - Until a Gas Company Got Involved
Emily Holden, Floodlight, Amal Ahmed and Brendan Gibbons, The Texas Observer and San Antonio Report
Excerpt: "When the city of Austin drafted a plan to shift away from fossil fuels, the local gas company was fast on the scene to try to scale back the ambition of the effort."
The fossil fuel industry is using the same playbook to fight city climate plans around the country.
hen the city of Austin drafted a plan to shift away from fossil fuels, the local gas company was fast on the scene to try to scale back the ambition of the effort.
Like many cities across the US, the rapidly expanding and gentrifying Texas city is looking to shrink its climate footprint. So its initial plan was to virtually eliminate gas use in new buildings by 2030 and existing ones by 2040. Homes and businesses would have to run on electricity and stop using gas for heat, hot water and stoves.
The proposal, an existential threat to the gas industry, quickly caught the attention of Texas Gas Service. The company drafted line-by-line revisions to weaken the plan, asked customers to oppose it and escalated its concerns to top city officials.
In its suggested edits, the company struck references to “electrification”, and replaced them with “decarbonization”– a policy that wouldn’t rule out gas. It replaced “electric vehicles” with “alternative fuel vehicles”, which could run on compressed natural gas. It offered to help the city to plant more trees to absorb climate pollution and to explore technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of the air – both of which might help it to keep burning gas.
Those proposed revisions were shared with Floodlight, the Texas Observer and San Antonio Report, by the Climate Investigations Center, which obtained them through public records of communications between city officials and the company.
Instead of reducing its sales to customers, Texas Gas wanted to counterbalance its climate emissions with energy efficiency efforts and offsets. The company suggested the text in blue. Emails obtained under public records laws.
The moves have so far proven a success for Texas Gas. The most recently published draft of the climate plan gives the company much more time to sell gas to existing customers, and it allows it to offset climate emissions instead of eliminating them. The city, however, is revisiting the plan after a backlash to the industry-secured changes.
The lobbying in Austin is not unique. It echoes how an electricity and gas company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars scaling back San Antonio’s climate ambitions by funding the city’s plan-writing process, replacing academics with its preferred consultants and writing its own “Flexible Path” that would let it keep polluting.
The American Gas Association in a statement for this story said it “will absolutely oppose any effort to ban natural gas or sideline our infrastructure anywhere the effort materializes, state house or city steps.” But it argued that position is “not counter to environmental goals we all share”, and said “natural gas is key to achieving the cleaner energy future we all want.”
Texas’s reliance on gas was on display in mid-February when more than 4m households lost power for days after a freak winter storm battered the state. Gas power plants dominate the Texas grid, providing 47% of the state’s electricity. Many of those plants and the natural gas pipelines leading to them failed in the cold conditions.
More than a third of Texas households also rely on gas for heat. Competition for gas-fueled power and heat forced prices to surge as high as 16,000%, one power company said. Utilities now face massive bills from their gas suppliers – and many are passing the costs on to customers in the form of sky-high bills.
The CEO of Comstock Resources, a gas company owned by the billionaire Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, described the gas industry windfall as “hitting the jackpot” in an earnings call.
A nationwide fight goes local
The gas industry is battling climate change reforms in cities around the US – with support from Republican politicians.
In Texas, lawmakers have introduced two bills that would prohibit local governments from banning gas connections. “There hasn’t been a city necessarily that has banned natural gas yet, but we have whispers from the Austin city council, the city of Houston, even smaller cities,” said Jeff Carlson, the chief of staff for Representative Cody Harris, who introduced one of the bills.
Four other state legislatures passed similar laws last year, and 12 more have seen proposals for them in 2021. The gas lobby, the American Gas Association, has said it isn’t actively coordinating support or lobbying for state laws to prohibit gas bans, but its internal records indicate a different story.
“We are increasingly active in the States,” the association’s president, Karen Harbert, said in a November letter to members explaining how the organization spent membership dues in 2020. She said the association is participating in several “Pro Natural Gas Coalitions” to bring allies together.
“Over the course of the year, legislation preserving energy choice for customers passed in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee,” Harbert said.
Another internal association email in February 2020 shows the senior director of state affairs, Daniel Lapato, asking a publicly-owned gas utility to back the Tennessee bill that ultimately passed.
The gas burned in buildings causes about 12% of US climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Cities are trying to shrink those heat-trapping emissions with building codes and mandates to switch from gas to electric appliances.
In Texas, they could have a significant impact. Texas burns far more gas than any other state, 14.9% of the US total.
Gas is cheap, and affordability is a major concern in Austin, where families and people of color continue to get priced out of the fast-growing city.
But even so, Austinites don’t necessarily want gas, said Chelsea Gomez, a community ambassador who consulted on the city plan. “When you talk to people, they don’t want natural gas as a middle man to a sustainable future – they want solar panels to be affordable for them,” said Gomez. “People want better [options].”
Burning gas indoors exposes people to dangerous pollutants that are linked with heart attacks, respiratory disease and asthma. One study found that children in homes with gas stoves were 42% more likely to have asthma than children in homes with electric stoves.
The fossil fuel also has clear climate impacts. In Texas, the number of days that are 100F or hotter has more than doubled over the past 40 years and could double again by 2036, according to a study from the Texas state climatologist. Extreme rainfall and urban flooding are increasing, hurricanes are getting more intense and the Gulf of Mexico is rising. Droughts and wildfires are becoming more severe.
Those effects were what Austin was trying to help to limit when Texas Gas Service got involved.
‘Crashing the party’
After one early meeting in June with the city’s climate program manager, Texas Gas’ regulatory affairs manager, Larry Graham, said in an email to Austin’s climate program manager, Zach Baumer, that the proposal for all-electric new construction had “gotten the attention of people at the highest level of our company.” The city released the internal emails, along with the draft versions of the plan, in response to a request for public records.
By July, employees of the company’s parent corporation, One Gas, were weighing in on the proposals from their headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was a level of involvement that raised red flags among city employees.
Baumer later emailed Graham that his company was “kind of crashing a party” when it attended meeting after meeting.
Still, the city officials listened to Texas Gas’ feedback. The climate plan originally called for completely eliminating natural gas use in all buildings by 2040. A few months after the gas company’s lobbying efforts, the city moved the goalposts: Only 25 percent of existing buildings would need to transition off gas by 2030, although all new buildings would have to be off gas by then too.
Texas Gas would be allowed to offset its pollution, by purchasing credits for climate work elsewhere in the country, upgrading leaky pipes and using ‘renewable’ gas from a wastewater treatment plant – efforts which environmental advocates said weren’t enough.
The steering committee was incensed, according to a handful of participants interviewed. The members were selected from the community to focus on equity and write an ambitious plan, but the industry was already thwarting them.
Baumer said he quickly realized his mistake.
“Everybody was pissed at me. I had to call and apologize to people because we sort of gave into what Texas Gas wanted,” Baumer said. “I thought I was making a compromise position. The people who were part of the plan didn’t think that.”
Shane Johnson, the co-chair of the steering committee who works for the Sierra Club, called Texas Gas’ influence “unnerving.”
After environmental advocates balked at the revisions, the city agreed to revert back to the original, more aggressive goals.
Texas Gas, when asked for comment, said it was “invited to participate in the revisions to the Austin Climate Equity Plan and [has] remained an engaged partner ever since.” The company said it has participated in Austin climate initiatives since 2014 and shares the aspiration of reducing carbon emissions.
“We believe that by working together we can improve our community and create effective, long-term strategies that reach the city’s sustainability goals in an equitable and affordable manner for all residents,” Texas Gas said.
In September, when the company seemed to be losing the fight over the proposal, it sent an email to customers claiming it would “severely” drive up costs and “threatens to take away the rights of people to choose their source of energy.”
San Antonio
In San Antonio, local business interests – from the city’s utility company to car dealerships – were even more successful in scrubbing language that called for a full transition away from fossil fuels.
CPS Energy, the city-owned utility that supplies power and gas to San Antonio, spent $650,000 to fund the climate planning process and helped put its preferred consulting firm in charge instead of faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
As committees were meeting in 2018, CPS Energy leaders announced they had already developed their own plan for the coming decades, called the “Flexible Path”. It called for CPS Energy to get half its energy from wind and solar sources by 2040, while also continuing to operate its coal plant into the 2060s.
A draft plan in 2019 refused that approach, but the utility kept pushing back. In April 2019, CPS CEO Paula Gold-Williams called for an “in-depth cost analysis”. In a letter to San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer Doug Melnick, she suggested the draft would be too costly for customers and might jeopardize grid reliability. She won. The next draft in August 2019 adopted CPS’s “Flexible Path”. It didn’t attempt to address one serious flaw: the “Flexible Path” wouldn’t get San Antonio to its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050.
CPS did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
In response to the lobbying, the city’s final plan watered down key emission goals, replacing specific strategies to cut emissions with vague and sometimes misleading platitudes.
The climate activists did have some successes. They got the city to include interim goals – to cut climate pollution 41% by 2030 and 71% by 2040 as checkpoints on the path to carbon neutrality by 2050.
Greg Harman, a clean energy advocate with the Sierra Club who served on one of the climate plan committees, said Texas’s reputation as hostile to climate action is both earned and imposed on the state by the energy industry. Like the rest of the U.S., surveys show a majority of Texans believe that climate change is real and a cause for concern.
“We’re a complex and interesting state, we just happen to have a lot of energy resources,” Harman said. “But the cynics are right to be cynical.”
This Weekend in Politics, Bulletin 441.
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