He might be acquitted, but he won’t live down his disgraceful conduct.
By Editorial Board February 10, 2021
President Donald Trump attends rally January 6, 2021: CAROL GUZY/ZUMA PRESS
Whether a former President ought to be subject to an impeachment trial is a matter of constitutional debate. Whether it’s prudent, if acquittal appears likely, is a related question. But wherever you come down on those issues, the House impeachment managers this week are laying out a visceral case that the Capitol riot of Jan. 6 was a disgrace for which President Trump bears responsibility.
Long before November, Mr. Trump was saying that the only way he could lose the election was if it were rigged. On the night of the vote, he tweeted, “they are trying to STEAL the election.” In his speech that night, he called it “a fraud on the American public,” and said, “frankly we did win.” Is it a surprise that some of his fans took his words to heart?
Instead of bowing to dozens of court defeats, Mr. Trump escalated. He falsely claimed that Vice President Mike Pence, if only he had the courage, could reject electoral votes and stop Democrats from hijacking democracy. He called his supporters to attend a rally on Jan. 6, when Congress would do the counting. “Be there, will be wild!” Mr. Trump tweeted. His speech that day was timed to coincide with the action in the Capitol, and then he directed the crowd down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Mr. Trump’s defenders point out that he also told the audience to make their voices heard “peacefully.” And contra Rep. Eric Swalwell, who argued the incitement to attack the Capitol was “premeditated,” it’s difficult to think Mr. Trump ever envisioned what followed: that instead of merely making a boisterous display, the crowd would riot, assault the police, invade the building, send lawmakers fleeing with gas masks, trash legislative offices, and leave in its wake a dead Capitol officer.
But talk about playing with fire. Mr. Trump told an apocalyptic fable in which American democracy might end on Jan. 6, and some people who believed him acted like it. Once the riot began, Mr. Trump took hours to say anything, a delay his defenders have not satisfactorily explained. Even then he equivocated. Imagine, Rep. Joe Neguse said, if Mr. Trump “had simply gone onto TV, just logged on to Twitter and said ‘Stop the Attack,’ if he had done so with even half as much force as he said ‘Stop the Steal.’”
The impeachment managers hurt their case by blaming only Mr. Trump for earlier clashes. “Donald Trump, over many months, cultivated violence,” said Stacey Plaskett, the delegate for the Virgin Islands. But often those events were showdowns between left and right, with both seeking trouble. “When darkness fell,” the Washington Post reported after one melee, “the counter-protesters triggered more mayhem as they harassed Trump’s advocates, stealing red hats and flags and lighting them on fire.”
Yet there’s no defense for Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 and before. Mitch McConnell is reportedly telling his GOP colleagues that the decision to convict or acquit is a vote of conscience, and that’s appropriate. After the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, Mr. Trump could have conceded defeat and touted his accomplishments.
Now his legacy will be forever stained by this violence, and by his betrayal of his supporters in refusing to tell them the truth. Whatever the result of the impeachment trial, Republicans should remember the betrayal if Mr. Trump decides to run again in 2024.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made up to $640 million while working in White House, report finds
Alex Woodward
(AP)
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump reported as much as $640 million in outside income while working in the White House as advisers to Donald Trump, according to an analysis from a government watchdog group.
The couple – the son-in-law and daughter of the former president – made between $172 million and $640 million, according to financial disclosures analyzed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
While they did not take a public income while working in the administration, and they reportedly stepped away from daily operations at their companies, their extraordinary incomes have alarmed lawmakers and ethics groups chronicling concerns over the family’s allegedly rampant self-dealing and enrichment while Mr. Trump was in office.
Ivanka Trump’s ownership stake in Washington DC’s Trump Hotel – what CREW called a “locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration” – earned her more than $13 million since 2017, according to the report.
She also made up to $1 million from her namesake brand a year after she filed a disclosure with the government that its operations ceased in 2018, the report found.
The report also outlines how her applications for foreign trademarks “may have been her biggest accomplishment” while her father was in office.
Russia renewed two trademarks for Ms Trump’s business a month after her father was elected in 2016. She won preliminary approval for three Chinese trademarks after dining with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in 2017, the first of more than two dozen approvals for trademark registrations with foreign governments while her father was in office.
In October 2018, three months after she announced that her brand had shut down, she received 16 trademarks from the Chinese government, including for voting machines.
Mr Kushner did not divest from his stake in real estate investment platform Cadre, co-owned by his brother Joshua, despite his wife’s role in the administration’s Opportunity Zones program from which Cadre benefitted.
At the beginning of the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner’s stake in Cade was initially valued between $5 million and $25 million, according to CREW.
The couple made at least $24 million during the final year of the administration, according to recent disclosures. A list of future interests for the couple include golf courses in Bali and Dubai and hotel construction in New York City.
Mr. Kushner opened Kushner Companies BVI Limited, an off-shore holding company in the British Virgin Islands. Among its assets is New York’s Puck Building, valued at more than $25 million.
The Independent has requested comment from a representative for Mr Kushner.
His Biz Is Shunned, She Resigned, and Everyone Is Being Sued: What Became of Trump’s Election Dead-Enders
Asawin Suebsaeng, Will Sommer February 8, 2021
Getty
A month after the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump is living comfortably at his private club in Florida. He’s been gearing up for his latest impeachment trial, he’s been deprived of many of his toys and privileges that came with the presidency, and he’s suffering from boredom. But he’s also been basking in the comfort of knowing that the Republican Party will—even today—continue to bend over backwards to please him.
But some of his most hardcore associates and advisers, who egged Trump on and helped fuel his most dangerous or destructive attempts to subvert American democracy, aren’t doing so well. In the three months since the election was called for Joe Biden, most of the lawyers and MAGA enthusiasts who decided to play a consequential role in the ex-president’s efforts to overturn the Democratic nominee’s 2020 win (efforts that led directly to the Jan. 6 mob violence), have had their jobs or businesses shredded, their personal lives shaken, or their reputations irrevocably tarnished—all while Trump’s been relaxing and playing his rounds of golf in the Sunshine State.
The ones who helped spearhead the most extreme chapters in the broader crusade to nullify the election outcome are now besieged by their own legal battles. Several of them have complained that friends aren’t talking to them anymore, or have huffed and fumed over Twitter banning them for life for spreading dangerous misinformation. Several of the Trump-allied attorneys are just trying to hold onto their law licenses, under calls for disbarment for their participation on the Team Trump efforts. Only two of these people responded to requests for comment on this story.
Much of their current ruin came as a direct result of their decisions to become major players in Trump’s failed authoritarian endeavor to cling to power. All of them have refused to admit that Trump, in fact, lost fair and square. Of this band of MAGA allies (which most prominently included people like Rudy Giuliani, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Jenna Ellis, Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman, and Peter Navarro), arguably none of them has lost more in the time since the election than Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and personal friend of the ex-president’s.
When Trump was in power, Lindell served as Trump 2020’s Minnesota co-chair and as a big financial backer of several efforts to overturn Biden’s win. He was welcomed by Trump into the Oval Office in the very last days of the term to brief the then-leader of the free world on a stack of documents purporting to show evidence that China and other foreign nations somehow tipped the election to Biden. (One of the papers in that packet included a suggestion for declaring martial law to bar the Democratic president-elect from office.)
Today, as many of his former compatriots have already given up the fight, Lindell has continued to be the truest of believers in the cause, refusing to move on despite losing business left and right. Last week, Lindell texted The Daily Beast that Mattress Firm, which he described as a “big bedding company… if not the biggest,” had “quit selling MyPillow, too,” following a trend of companies swearing off the pillow mogul’s products after his post-election activity. Last month, the MyPillow creator said he’d already gotten phone calls or notices from Bed Bath & Beyond, Wayfair, and Kohl’s that they’d decided to ditch his product line and halt their business relationship with the MAGA super-fan’s company.
This month, Lindell and his pillow company also suffered a similar fate to the 45th president of the United States: Twitter had taken action against their accounts for spreading pro-Trump conspiracy theories baselessly claiming a rigged election. “They took down MyPillow’s Twitter now! Attacks keep coming,” Lindell lamented to The Daily Beast.
Lindell is still facing a possible lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, the election tech company that has sent warnings to various people in the Trump orbit and in conservative media, demanding retractions and public apologies for making widespread allegations that Dominion helped steal the 2020 election. Other Trump stalwarts who’ve been sent demand letters have backed off, immediately gone quiet, or sheepishly issued on-air correctives.
But not Lindell.
Instead, the pillow entrepreneur claims to have gone into hiding, surrounding himself with ex-Special Forces soldiers. On Friday, Lindell released “Absolute Proof,” a three-hour video premiering on the Trump-aligned One America News Network that he claims will prove the election was stolen from Trump. Lindell cast the video’s release in apocalyptic terms, claiming on a North Dakota radio show shortly before the Friday release that the “end times” await if his video doesn’t catch on with “all the marbles on the line,” and that “I’m serious, this is biblical. This is Revelations. This is Mark of the Beast stuff. This is that vaccine and all that garbage.”
Down in Georgia, Lin Wood isn’t doing that much better. During the tumultuous Trump-Biden presidential transition, Lindell financially supported Wood’s legal work as he made a name for himself with his especially groundless, violence-endorsing assertions about the election. The then-president would repeatedly phone Wood in late 2020 to get updates on his latest moves in Georgia. But Wood’s operation, working in tandem with Powell, caused rampant anxiety among conservatives on Capitol Hill, inside the Trump administration, and in the campaign. Many Republican operatives and lawmakers still, in part, blame Wood for helping to blow the GOP’s chances in this year’s Georgia runoff, costing the party control of the U.S. Senate at the dawn of the Biden era.
But in the time since he seemingly struck up a rapport with Trump, the now-former president has privately bad-mouthed Wood as a crank to close associates, according to two people who’ve heard Trump’s criticisms. Today, Wood’s Twitter account, too, has been taken away from him, and it’s not clear whether Wood will even get to remain a lawyer for much longer.
Nick Sandmann, the former Covington Catholic student whose lawsuits against media outlets had turned Wood into a star with Trump supporters, dropped Wood as his attorney. Wood recently doxxed his own son, publishing his estranged adult son’s email address online and urging his fans to contact him about the “persecution” the elder Wood faced. The Georgia state bar wants Wood to undergo a mental evaluation if he’s going to retain his license to practice law, according to Wood’s posts on social networking app Telegram, and a private lawyers club in Atlanta warned Wood he could face expulsion if he doesn’t resign his membership. Now Wood, one of the most outspoken promoters of the claim that Democrats committed voter fraud in 2020, is reportedly under investigation himself for voting in Georgia after sending an email that suggested he has another residency in South Carolina.
Among this Trumpian collective of would-be election-destroyers, Wood isn’t even the only one whose license to practice law is now under attack or scrutiny.
Powell, Wood’s partner-in-mischief, was slammed last month by Detroit officials who said they want her stripped of her Michigan law license. “This lawsuit, and the lawsuits filed in the other states, are not just damaging to our democratic experiment, they are also deeply corrosive to the judicial process itself,” attorneys for the Motor City wrote to U.S. District Judge Linda Parker.
Following the Jan. 6 riot in Washington—the day Giuliani spoke at the D.C. rally and called for “trial by combat”—the New York State Bar Association moved to expel the once-celebrated New York City mayor, and laid some of the blame for the mob violence at his door. Giuliani, who was the ringleader of Trump’s official election-challenging legal “strike force,” decried the move as a “political act.”
Around the same time, Brad Hoylman, the Democratic chairman of the New York state Senate Judiciary Committee, delivered a formal request to have Trump’s personal lawyer’s license to practice law revoked due to his “participation and role in fomenting a violent insurrectionist attack.”
And like so many in the former president’s good graces who promulgated the pro-Trump lies about the 2020 election, Powell and Giuliani are facing aggressive legal threats from voting tech companies. On Thursday, Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion suit against several Fox stars, Giuliani, and Powell. “We have no choice,” Antonio Mugica, Smartmatic’s founder, told CNN. “The disinformation campaign that was launched against us is an obliterating one. For us, this is existential, and we have to take action.”
But after Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration, Giuliani at least continued to have the ear of his client, still the Republican Party’s most popular figure, by far. According to two people familiar with the matter, Giuliani kept informally advising Trump on impeachment-trial strategy, even after it was made clear to the attorney that he wouldn’t be officially serving on the ex-president’s new legal defense for the February Senate proceedings.
Other lawyers who worked for Trump during the disastrous presidential transition weren’t so lucky, having been used and discarded by the former president’s political operation, and today left without their other jobs.
Early last month, The Washington Post first revealed that Cleta Mitchell was intimately involved with Trump’s scandalous pressure campaign to overturn Biden’s victory in Georgia. She had, mostly under the radar, risen to become Team Trump’s point person in the state, and was on the now-infamous conference call between the Republican president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Over many years, Mitchell had earned a reputation as one of the conservative legal universe’s heaviest hitters, and a top-tier campaign finance attorney for right-leaning activists and political candidates. She was a true star in the field. But when her involvement in Trump’s efforts were revealed in January, her high-powered law firm, Foley & Lardner LLP, released a statement claiming it was unaware of the extent of Mitchell’s pro-Trump activity, and said the firm was “concerned” and probing the matter. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell was out of the job.
In December, John Eastman represented Trump before the U.S. Supreme Court when few others—even longtime Trump attorneys—would do so. On the then-president’s behalf, Eastman—a Chapman University law professor who became an outrage-magnet during the 2020 election for openly questioning Sen. Kamala Harris’s citizenship and therefore eligibility to serve as Biden’s running mate—asked the Supreme Court to allow Trump to intervene in a Texas suit that sought to cancel Biden’s victory in four key states.
This legal maneuver, predictably, went nowhere fast. For his time and service, Eastman was rewarded by Trump by having his name floated as a possible member of his legal team for the second Senate trial. Eastman also got a prime speaking slot at the D.C. rally that preceded the bloody riot on Capitol Hill. However, Eastman and Giuliani were soon barred from working on the team, with several top Trump advisers fearing the pair wasn’t serious enough and that they carried too much riot-related baggage with them.
The week after the rioting, Eastman was forced to resign from Chapman, following mounting pressure on the university’s leadership. The separation was acrimonious enough that both Eastman and the university had to pledge not to sue one another. “Chapman and Dr. Eastman have agreed not to engage in legal actions of any kind, including any claim of defamation that may currently exist, as both parties move forward,” Chapman president Daniele Struppa said in a statement at the time.
As for the rest, Jenna Ellis, one of the most gung-ho of Trump’s senior legal advisers, is no longer representing the former president. Starting in early December, she and other Trumpist lawyers suffered a sharp plunge in the frequency of appearances on Fox News and Fox Business, following legal threats made by the voting-tech companies. But at least she still has her job as special counsel for the socially conservative Thomas More Society, and hasn’t lost her Twitter account of nearly 800,000 followers. Nowadays, she can be found tweeting her continued support of the former president, broadsides against the Biden administration, and her thoughts on issues such as why conservative women are definitely “hotter.”
Peter Navarro, President Trump’s top trade adviser in the White House who spent Trump’s final weeks in office compiling and promoting documents that falsely portrayed massive election fraud, is still trying to talk to his former boss—through the TV, at least. On Friday, Navarro appeared on Newsmax TV to urge Trump to once again upturn his legal team. “You get somebody like Matt Gaetz as your lead attorney instead of that stiff [Bruce Castor] you had on,” Navarro recommended… before touting his own research. “Then you use the ‘Navarro Report’ and other reports that have been put out as your exhibits A, B, C, and D.”
With the Trump presidency in his rearview mirror, multiple close associates of Navarro say they aren’t sure what his next career move will be, as he’s so inextricably tied himself to his onetime boss.
As for Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, he never got his reinstatement or re-elevation in the Trump administration that he and the ex-president had once so desired. In late November, he did, however, finally get his pardon from Trump for his role in the Robert Mueller saga. But in return, Flynn failed to deliver on the authoritarian push to keep Biden out of power, and (thankfully) didn’t have enough powerful takers for his pitch for Trump to proclaim martial law or use the U.S. military to “re-run” the election in electorally crucial states. With his professional reputation in Washington and elsewhere dramatically diminished, he now has to settle for being a folk hero to QAnon kooks.
Down in Palm Beach, Florida, where the twice-impeached 45th president of the United States is prepping with his team for the Senate trial, he’s sometimes letting his boredom with retirement show, even as he tries to project a state of contentment to the public and to his aides. Late last week, Trump’s lawyers and advisers rejected an invitation from House impeachment managers for the former commander in chief to testify. “The president will not testify in an unconstitutional proceeding,” senior Trump adviser Jason Miller flatly told The Daily Beast.
When Trump hasn’t been focusing on his upcoming trial, he’s been golfing. He’s still binging his right-wing media and cable-TV favorites, though even there he’s starting to lose close friends due to the election aftermath. On Friday, the staunchly Trumpy Fox Business announced it had canceled the show of its star, Lou Dobbs, a fervent supporter of the former president who for years also doubled as a key informal adviser to Trump. (Dobbs had been mentioned in Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit the day prior.) After the news broke, Trump voiced his support for Dobbs in an official statement, but by Saturday, Dobbs was keeping mostly tight-lipped about the ouster, texting The Daily Beast, “Sorry. No comment at this time.”
When Trump is not watching television or monitoring line-up developments, he still hasn’t bothered devoting an ounce of introspection on the massive body counts and the ravaged nation he left for others to clean up. “He doesn’t have regrets about it, none that I’ve heard,” said one Trump confidant. He’s been scribbling down potential disses and harangues at his political foes, insults that he now cannot tweet himself to the broader public. He’s dictated petulant remarks sent to the Hollywood elites at the Screen Actors Guild who don’t want him anymore.
In recent days, Trump has been phoning close associates regularly about the next impeachment trial—as well as to gossip about Biden, media, the future, and other members of the GOP. His office has also been messaging friends and high-profile allies on his behalf, inviting them to visit him at Mar-a-Lago, according to two knowledgeable sources and written communications reviewed by The Daily Beast.
Some individuals close to the ex-president say he’s started getting lonely and bored with his existence out of power, and misses being constantly surrounded by powerful sycophants and being the center of attention for the news media, U.S. politicos, and leaders abroad. But the ex-president is still living in luxury, and has been recently very confident about his continued standing and influence in the Republican Party and conservative movement.
And he’s not the only veteran of the sprawling, anti-democratic effort to be sitting pretty in early 2021.
Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne became one of the strangest characters of the last days of the Trump administration, visiting the White House in December, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, scarfing down meatballs, and bickering with Trump’s legal team and administration officials, as he, Flynn, and Powell together pitched the then-president on their democracy-thwarting schemes. But now, with Trump’s dream of overturning the 2020 election in tatters, Byrne appears to be doing comparatively okay—and is blaming just about everyone else for President Biden’s win, turning his blog into the digital burn book of the Trump post-campaign. “Almost every evening, and many early afternoons, Rudy was shit-faced,” Byrne blogged recently. “That, and his podcasts, were the only guarantees in Rudy’s life.” (Byrne declined to comment on this story, saying he wanted to finish his blog series first.)
However thoroughly Byrne was dragging Giuliani and others for their alleged behavior, the Trump attorney didn’t seem to care too much. Asked on Saturday what he thought about Byrne bashing him, Giuliani simply replied to The Daily Beast, “So have you,” without further explaining how this news outlet had “trashed” him lately.
Ex-GOP congressman suggests many Republicans are discussing whether to form a new anti-Trump party
Chris Riotta February 6, 2021
Trucks and cars with Trump flags have abounded on US streets and highways this election season. (Getty Images)
Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R—PA) revealed he and other Republicans have begun discussing whether to form a “new party or a new faction” in the wake of “ugly populism that we’ve witnessed the last four years under President Trump” in a new interview.
Speaking with CNN on Saturday, the former GOP lawmaker and longtime critic of former President Donald Trump shared how he had recently participated in a summit in which the idea of conservatives “united around core principles like democracy” forming their own party had been discussed.
“A new faction within the party or one that operates independently of the party,” he said. “That’s the conversation that many Republicans are having.”
Asked whether he was concerned about Republicans like him “surrendering the party to a fringe element” of extremists and conspiracy theorists, the former congressman said: “Well, I think that’s a real fear.”
Reports in recent weeks have indicated tens of thousands of former GOP members officially removed themselves from the party following the deadly riots at the US Capitol. Mr. Trump was impeached by the House for a second time for fomenting the insurrection, which left at least five people dead, including United States Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.
While the majority of Senate Republicans have already voted against conducting the impeachment trial scheduled to begin on Monday, many conservative figures and prominent GOP critics of the former president have called on the party to disassociate from Mr. Trump and his allies.
Most recently, the Republican Party has been mired in controversy over freshman Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R—GA) and incendiary statements she’s made, some in support of QAnon, the debunked conspiracy theory described by the FBI as a domestic terror threat.
Referencing the recent vote the House took to strip Ms. Greene of her committee assignments, Mr. Dent said: “Let’s be perfectly honest: Democrats now have a recorded vote of 199 Republicans basically defending her right to serve on a committee.”
He added: “Republicans … should have never put themselves in a position where the Democrats did what Republicans should have done themselves, which was remove her from the committees and also, frankly, disinvite her from the Republican conference.”
$1 Trillion in Oil and Gas Pipelines Worldwide Could Become Stranded Assets, New Report Warns
By Sharon Kelly February 4, 2021
Pipeline, April 22, 2010. Credit: Ripperda, CC BY 2.0
On January 7, 2021, Energy Transfer was notified by its insurer, Westchester Fire Insurance Co. of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that it had lost a $250,000 surety bond for the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) — a bond that Iowa, one of the four states it passes through, required the pipeline to maintain.
That loss of insurance coverage comes as the Biden administration and a federal court each must confront a decision about whether to order DAPL to shut down, after a federal appeals court last week upheld a lower court’s finding that the oil pipeline still lacks a completed environmental review. Financial observers have been watching DAPL closely — and a new report warns that DAPL is hardly alone in the oil and gas pipeline industry in facing major financial risks linked to projects’ environmental impacts.
“Dakota Access Pipeline has no federal easement. It’s now losing insurance coverage on the state-level which is a requirement for Iowa’s state permit,” the Indigenous Environmental Network said in a January 29 statement. “It’s time to end this saga and do what’s right.”
Environmentalists predicted that the lost insurance coverage could be difficult for Energy Transfer to replace, particularly given DAPL’s incomplete federal review. “It will be difficult because the bond holder will require the pipeline to comply with all legal requirements,” attorney Carolyn Raffensperger, director of the Science and Health Network, told DeSmog. “If it is operating without a permit, any spill would be a big, big legal problem.”
But as consequential as the DAPL fight — which has raged for roughly a half-decade — might be, Dakota Access is just one of hundreds of pipelines worldwide that a new report finds are at risk of early abandonment because they’re “on a collision course” with climate agreements.
The report, titled “Pipeline Bubble 2021” and published by the climate data nonprofit Global Energy Monitor, warns that pipeline construction projects worldwide have put $1 trillion worth of pipeline investment at risk of being rendered obsolete by the energy transition away from fossil fuels.
The risky projects include over 131,000 miles of pipe, both oil pipelines like DAPL and — to an even higher degree — new natural gas pipelines. “18 of the 20 longest pipelines in development and 82.7% of all pipelines in development globally will carry gas,” the report finds, “reflecting the fossil fuel industry’s success in perpetuating the myth that gas can be a ‘bridge fuel’ to a clean energy future.”
Permian ‘Carbon Bomb’
When it comes to the U.S. oil and gas industry, Global Energy Monitor’s report zeroes in on the productive Permian Basin straddling Texas and New Mexico, an oil and gas play which it calls a potential “carbon bomb,” adding that by 2050, Permian gas “would consume ten percent of the world’s allowable carbon budget if we are to have a 50/50 chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.”
The report adds that there are over 100 institutions providing financial support for the industry in the U.S. Permian Basin alone, including major backers based in Japan, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and the UK, as well as U.S. banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. The authors tallied $102.3 billion in debt financing for the Permian Basin’s pipelines and gas export facilities alone since 2014.
“The ability of the oil and gas industry to overcome near-term challenges to its Permian Basin expansion plans, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse of prices, will depend in part on the appetite of banks and governments to continue funding midstream infrastructure,” they wrote. “Should they decide to do so, it will be in spite of the industry’s long-term decline and growing concerns over the global climate emergency.”
The investment risks are compounded by fossil fuel divestment pressure from investors and financial institutions, which are increasingly wary of projects that fail to take climate risks into account — a wariness the report predicts may grow beyond coal, Arctic drilling, and tar sands projects.
Just four major financial institutions (BNP Paribas, Rabobank, UniCredit, and US Bancorp) have restricted pipeline finance, the report finds — so far. “For the first time, exclusions affecting the entire spectrum of oil and gas extraction activities appeared in 2020, announced by Suncorp Group and Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG),” Pipeline Bubble 2021 said. “But examination of the policies of other institutions suggests that the scope is likely soon to widen to include pipelines and other infrastructure.”
In January, the world’s largest investment fund manager, BlackRock, warned corporate executives that it would ditch investments in companies that fail to disclose plans to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 — though The Guardian reported that announcement only covers BlackRock’s “actively managed” investments, representing about $616 billion of the firm’s $8.7 trillion under management, allowing the firm to retain major oil, gas and coal investments.
Toll Booth on a Closing Highway
The U.S. pipeline industry, often referred to as the “midstream” oil and gas industry, was once marketed to investors as a safe bet, like running the “toll booth” on the shale rush’s highway. This past year, it’s been temporarily rocked by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has led to pipeline construction deferrals and delayed start-ups.
“During 2020, developers completed 3,600 km [2,236 miles] of oil pipelines and 9,619 km [5,977 miles] of gas pipelines, or an overall average of 1,102 km [684 miles] per month for oil and gas pipelines combined,” the report found. “The decline in pipeline completions parallels a general financial decline in private-sector oil company balance sheets and market value” since 2008.
The pandemic has also forced U.S. drillers to slow their activities. “The rig count is less than half of what it was,” RBN analyst Jason Ferguson told trade publication Natural Gas Intelligence in January. “Producers are not out spending, and the historical relationship of how many wells will be drilled at this price has changed.”
The pandemic’s impacts, Global Energy Monitor said, are expected to be temporary and may create little long-lasting deterrence to pipeline construction. “Overall, however, the expansion curve has been bent rather than broken, with pipelines continuing to enjoy both policy support and financial support by governments and major financial institutions,” the Pipeline Bubble 2021 report said.
But the pipeline industry has also faced a political backlash that has created upheaval for the industry. “Intense opposition from landowners, [I]ndigenous groups, and climate activists is causing the cancellation or delay of high-profile pipelines, and is changing perceptions of pipelines as a ‘safe’ investment,” Global Energy Monitor found. But worldwide, the report adds, many pipelines are owned by state-owned enterprises, the report adds, leading them to be “somewhat insulated” from market forces, at least in the short run.
And the looming energy transition should reduce overall demand for the products carried by pipelines, the report warns. “For oil, the main threat in the coming decade is the prospect of vehicle electrification, as more governments announce transitions away from internal combustion sales and manufacturers respond by shifting investments toward electric vehicles,” Global Energy Monitor wrote. “For gas, change is arriving most rapidly in the power sector, where combinations of renewables, batteries, and demand management now offer equivalent reliability at lower cost than gas-fired power plants.
It adds that worldwide, “gas supply chains are lengthening, which means larger investments in infrastructure and greater stranded assets if and when projects stall or are prematurely retired.”
Boom And Bust And …
Some energy analysts have been warning for years that the pipeline industry, especially in the Permian Basin, was on track to over-build.
“If we don’t overbuild this time, it will be the first time in the history of the industry,” Wouter van Kempen, Chairman, President, and CEO of DCP Midstream, said at an April 2018 pipeline indusry conference, as DeSmog has previously reported. “There’s absolutely, we will overbuild, there’s no doubt about it.”
That excessive building is already creating financial difficulties, East Daley Capital Advisors reported this year. Those difficulties aren’t primarily from the sprawling network of small “gathering” pipelines that connect individual oil and gas wells to the large interstate pipes that form the backbone of the oil and gas transportation network, RBN Energy analyst Housley Carr said as he summarized a January 2021 East Daley report, instead “it’s volume and rate declines on large-diameter, long-haul crude oil and natural gas pipelines owned by midstream giants that present the main challenge to sustainable cash flow health in aggregate.”
Other forecasters predict that 2021 could bring higher oil prices and a turnaround for the financially struggling U.S. oil and gas industry — which in turn could revitalize interest in new pipeline projects in the short term. For its part, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that U.S. oil production in 2021 will be 11.1 million barrels a day in 2021, down from 11.3 million per day in 2020, with an average 2021 West Texas Intermediate spot price of $49.70 a barrel — roughly $10 a barrel higher than the 2020 average.
But while oil and gas prices might fluctuate in the short run, over the long run, the pipeline industry faces growing questions about whether it’s wise to build a massive network of pipelines that could become obsolete well within their projected 50-year-plus lifespans.
The report’s authors called on the Biden administration to carefully consider the ways that the U.S. energy industry has changed since Obama was in office, particularly with regards to natural gas, which is predominantly made up of the powerful greenhouse gas methane.
“The policy landscape facing the new administration in 2021 is radically different from the one that Biden left in 2017,” James Browning, lead author of the report, said. “Fossil gas is now recognized as a climate buster, not a climate solution. That means Biden faces the tough decision to rein in gas infrastructure, which is the most effective way to limit emissions.”
A Former Trump Adviser May Have Revealed What The Fossil Fuel Bonanza Was Really About
Alexander C. Kaufman, Senior Reporter, HuffPost –
Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council under former President Donald Trump, is seen here in 2018. He’s remained a fixture on the increasingly political Fox Business Network since leaving office. (Photo: Alex Wong via Getty Images)
Ramping up fossil fuel production and shredding pollution rules, as the Trump administration did for four years, largely defies economic and scientific logic in an era of costly climate disasters. But Larry Kudlow, who was director of the National Economic Council for part of that time, may have indicated Wednesday that the administration saw its policies on fossil fuels through another lens: culture.
During an interview with Fox Business star Maria Bartiromo, Kudlow dismissed President Joe Biden as an ideologue whose approach to climate change threatens to “wreck the whole energy sector.”
“It turns out President Biden may be the most left-wing president we’ve ever seen,” Kudlow said. “His actions on spending and taxing and regulating, on immigration and fossil fuels and other cultural issues… he may be the most left-wing.”
It was only a split second, possibly even an unintentional slip of the tongue. But the idea of defining fossil fuels as a “cultural issue” gets at something that typically goes unacknowledged in policy debates over how to deal with the industry most responsible for destabilizing the planet’s ecosystems. For conservatives, fossil fuel fights are just another front in the U.S. culture war that’s been waged for decades over issues like same-sex marriage and abortion.
On the other hand, the economic logic of pumping and burning more oil, gas and coal is difficult to square.
Already, the planet has warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages, yielding biblically terrifying and astronomically expensive results in the form of deadly floods and fires, prolonged droughts and ravenous locust swarms. Last year, the United States alone suffered a record-breaking 22 warming-fueled disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages.
An aerial view shows pumpjacks in the South Belridge Oil Field near McKittrick, California. Oil prices have cratered with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. (Photo: David McNew via Getty Images)
And that only accounts for fossil fuels’ effect on global temperatures. Tiny particles from fossil fuels that pollute the air kill as many as 4.5 million people worldwide each year, and result in global economic costs totaling roughly $8 billion per day, a study published last year by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air found.
Then there’s the reality that fossil fuel producers rely heavily on debt and generous government subsidies to turn profits. About 50% of new oil drilling in the U.S. would be unprofitable without subsidies, according to a 2017 study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Energy.
Over the past decade, cheap loans from Wall Street investors boosted the popularity of hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique known as fracking ― thereby flooding the market with supply and reducing the price of oil and gas. The sector’s success was its own undoing: Between 2012 and 2017, the 30 largest shale producers lost more than $50 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal estimate. From 2015 to 2016, an eyebrow-raising 91% of all corporate debt defaults in the United States were in the oil and gas sector, the financial research firm Moody’s calculated in 2019.
Now that policymakers are starting to heed scientists’ calls to rapidly transition the global economy away from fossil fuels, even the mightiest companies are showing signs of financial atrophy. Exxon Mobil Corp., the Western world’s largest oil explorer, lost its place in the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index last August as its debt, and its obstinate refusal to plan for a low-carbon future, repelled investors. This week, the company reported its first annual loss in at least 40 years.
If the adoption of renewable power and electric vehicles proves as swift as leaders in the U.S., Europe and East Asia now say they want it to be, new drilling projects ― which can take decades to pay off ― could become what financial experts call “stranded assets,” virtually worthless money pits that will never make a profit but may instead be costly to clean up.
What, then, explains the political power of fossil fuels? Hefty political donations and the long-term need for some supply of the fuels, albeit paired with some kind of technology to capture emissions, only tell part of the story. The industry, especially in the U.S., also serves as an avatar for a certain kind of cultural worldview, one that resonates with tough-guy masculinity and patriarchal families.
The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Virginia Tech political scientist Cara Daggett
In 2011, a study in the peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change found that white males were overrepresented among people who denied the reality of climate change. Researchers attributed the phenomenon to a desire to “protect their cultural identity.”
“Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they create, manage, control, and benefit from so much of it,” the study’s authors wrote. “Perhaps women and nonwhite men see the world as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable, because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions, and because they have less power and control.”
In 2014, researchers in Sweden found that climate denial was “intertwined with a masculinity of industrial modernity that is on decline.” Those who defended the industries destabilizing the planet were trying “to save an industrial society” that men like them had built and dominated, argued the researchers, whose work appeared in Norma: International Journal for Masculinity Studies.
In 2018, Virginia Tech political scientist Cara Daggett gave the concept a name: petro-masculinity.
“The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit,” Daggett wrote in the international studies journal Millennium. “Fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics.”
Reflecting on this growing body of social research, the climate writer Emily Atkin asked in a recent edition of her Heated newsletter: “Do you ever wonder what the planet might look like if men didn’t control the world?”
“I’m not talking about all cisgender men, or the entirety of the male gender,” she wrote. “Really, I’m just talking about people who believe that because they have penises, they are required to act in a traditionally, almost performatively masculine way ― like ‘being strong’ and ‘never showing weakness’ and ’ not ordering sauvignon blanc.”
German Nuns Sold Orphaned Children to Sexual Predators: Report
Barbie Latza Nadeau February 2, 2021
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
ROME—A jarring report outlining decades of rampant child sex abuse at the hands of greedy nuns and perverted priests in the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany, paints a troubling picture of systematic abuse in the German church.
The report is the byproduct of a lawsuit alleging that orphaned boys living in the boarding houses of the Order of the Sisters of the Divine Redeemer were sold or loaned for weeks at a time to predatory priests and businessmen in a sick rape trade. The men involved in the lawsuit say as boys they were denied being adopted out or sent to foster families because selling them for rape lined the sisters’ coffers for their “convent of horrors.” Some of the boys were then groomed to be sex slaves to perverts, the report claims.
The alleged abuse went on for years, with one of the males claiming the nuns even frequently visited their college dorms after they had left the convent. He said the nuns often drugged him and delivered him to predators’ apartments. The Order of Sisters of the Divine Redeemer did not answer multiple requests for comment about the allegations.
The lawsuit, first reported by Deutsche Welle last year, is being led by 63-year-old victim Karl Haucke who, along with 15 other former orphans, demanded the Archdiocese of Cologne carry out a full investigation, which it concluded in January 2021. But the details of that investigative report were so horrific that Archbishop Reiner Maria Woelki refused to make it public, demanding that any journalists who see it sign confidentiality agreements. Eight German journalists walked out of a press conference in January after being denied access to the church’s investigation unless they agreed not to publish its contents.
Haucke says he was abused at least once a week between the ages of 11 and 14, often by more than one priest. “We had no words to describe what was being done to us. Nor did we know what it meant. And it did not stop at physical pain. We had a clear sense of humiliation and being used,” he told Deutsche Welle when the report was due to be released. He called the stifling of the report’s release in January “scandalous” and said that denying the journalists the right to publish the report was “like being abused all over again.”
Now, several lawyers with access to the 560-page report have shared segments with news outlets, including The Daily Beast. The report names various German businessmen and complicit clergy who “rented” the young boys from the nuns who ran a convent in Speyer, Germany between the 1960s and 1970s. Among the worst instances of abuse were gang bangs and orgies the young boys were forced to participate in before being returned to the convent where the nuns would then punish them for wrinkling their clothing or being covered in semen.
The report finds that 175 people, mostly boys between the ages of 8 and 14, were abused over two decades. But it failed to blame the nuns directly, instead saying “systematic” management errors and “leniency” for those who were accused by the children enabled the abuse to continue.
Haucke, who led the victims’ group of those who survived the nuns until he resigned over the censoring of the report, says Woelki told them in October 2020 that the report was not “legally watertight” and contained “inadmissible prejudices” against the Catholic church that were fed by scandals going on elsewhere. “The survivors were used again,” he said, referring to their cooperation in the report only to have it kept private. “People who have already been damaged in their lives by clergymen are being damaged again to protect the institution.”
The lawsuit also spawned a survey within religious orders that found that 1,412 people who lived in or frequented convents, parishes, and monasteries were abused as children, teenagers, and wards by at least 654 monks, nuns, and other members of the orders. Around 80 percent of the victims surveyed were male and 20 percent female. The survey also found that 80 percent of the abusers are now dead, and 37 had left the priesthood or religious order.
The Archdiocese of Cologne told The Daily Beast in a statement that the reason the report was not published was that it failed to fully explain the methodology of the research, but Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesmann, who now leads the archdiocese, said that the abuse report was “so gory” it would be too shocking to make public. Wiesemann told the Catholic News Agency KNA that after reading it he had to take a month’s sabbatical to recover. “I too have limited energy for the burdens I have to carry,” he said.
The main abusers in the report are now dead and many of the victims have settled with the church for financial compensation, which has prohibited them from joining the lawsuit. The archdiocese now plans to publish a new revised, and undoubtedly heavily redacted, edition of the report in March.
DC waitress reveals Trump team was tight-fisted with tips and exhausting to serve
Gustaf Kilander
Trump team tipped badly and were exhausting to serve, writes DC waitress.
(Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)
A DC waitress has revealed that a range of Trump officials and supporters “were exhausting, impossible, often stingy … and memorable,” to wait on.
Writing for Slate, the waitress, who worked in a fine dining DC restaurant during the Trump presidency, said she “felt lucky” when a senior Trump White House official “tipped 18.5 per cent,” after she was interrogated about the origin of the restaurant’s caviar selection and didn’t have a clear-cut answer.
The waitress said “business plunged” as Obama officials left town and that as Trump supporters started visiting DC eateries “the experience was painful for all”.
Baseball hats violated the dress code, so Trump supporters who wore them started their meal with a “persecution complex”. To avoid bad or no tips, the waitress would “send them little comps,” free little extras throughout the meal, but they would still “tip less than 18 or even 15 per cent,” the waitress writes.
She said that she knew one prolific Republican “wasn’t a real Trumpist,” because he was a “reliable tipper,” took 15 seconds to order and didn’t “make you ‘work for it'”.
The waitress writes that a “great displeasure” seemed to envelop a Trump cabinet secretary as she approached his table, that he ordered the cheapest wine and “didn’t tip more than 14 per cent, no matter how often you topped him off without charging”.
Another Trump cabinet secretary was “a paragon of superficial graciousness” but according to the waitress she didn’t tip enough to make up for the “two or three tables that would ask to move if she was seated near them”.
A former Trump campaign official came in under a fake name for an “inexplicably awkward” dinner, tipped 25 per cent, and was never seen again. The waitress writes that he “obviously knew how to act,” since he was a “creature of Washington”.
Another “awkward” meal was had because of a cabinet secretary’s wife and her “many dietary restrictions,” the waitress said and added that she got the guidance to give free grilled calamari to the “newly broke Secret Service agents, who would otherwise sit for hours nursing no more than a Coke or a cup of coffee”.
Living with natural gas pipelines: Appalachian landowners describe fear, anxiety and loss
Erin Brock Carlson, Assistant Professor of Professional Writing and Editing, West Virginia University and Martina Angela Caretta, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Lund University February 3, 2021
Pipeline construction cuts through forests and farms in Appalachia.Provided by Erin Brock Carlson, CC BY-SA
Many of these lines were built in just the past five years to carry natural gas from the Marcellus Shale region of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where hydraulic fracturing has boomed. West Virginia alone has seen a fourfold increase in natural gas production in the past decade.
Such fast growth has also brought hundreds of safety and environmental violations, particularly under the Trump administration’s reduced oversight and streamlined approvals for pipeline projects. While energy companies promise economic benefits for depressed regions, pipeline projects are upending the lives of people in their paths.
As a technical and professional communication scholar focused on how rural communities deal with complex problems and a geography scholar specializing in human-environment interactions, we teamed up to study the effects of pipeline development in rural Appalachia. In 2020, we surveyed and talked with dozens of people living close to pipelines in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
What we found illuminates the stress and uncertainty that communities experience when natural gas pipelines change their landscape. Residents live with the fear of disasters, the noise of construction and the anxiety of having no control over their own land.
‘None of this is fair’
Appalachians are no strangers to environmental risk. The region has a long and complicated history with extractive industries, including coal and hydraulic fracturing. However, it’s rare to hear firsthand accounts of the long-term effects of industrial infrastructure development in rural communities, especially when it comes to pipelines, since they are the result of more recent energy-sector growth.
For all of the people we talked to, the process of pipeline development was drawn out and often confusing.
Some reported never hearing about a planned pipeline until a “land man” – a gas company representative – knocked on their door offering to buy a slice of their property; others said that they found out through newspaper articles or posts on social media. Every person we spoke with agreed that the burden ultimately fell on them to find out what was happening in their communities.
A map shows U.S. pipelines carrying natural gas and hazardous liquids in 2018. More construction has been underway since then. GAO and U.S. Department of Transportation.
One woman in West Virginia said that after finding out about plans for a pipeline feeding a petrochemical complex several miles from her home, she started doing her own research. “I thought to myself, how did this happen? We didn’t know anything about it,” she said. “It’s not fair. None of this is fair. … We are stuck with a polluting company.”
‘Lawyers ate us up’
If residents do not want pipelines on their land, they can pursue legal action against the energy company rather than taking a settlement. However, this can result in the use of eminent domain.
Eminent domain is a right given by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to companies to access privately held property if the project is considered important for public need. Compensation is decided by the courts, based on assessed land value, not taking into consideration the intangibles tied to the loss of the land surrounding one’s home, such as loss of future income.
Through this process, residents can be forced to accept a sum that doesn’t take into consideration all effects of pipeline construction on their land, such as the damage heavy equipment will do to surrounding land and access roads.
One man we spoke with has lived on his family’s land for decades. In 2018, a company representative approached him for permission to install a new pipeline parallel to one that had been in place since 1962, far away from his house. However, crews ran into problems with the steep terrain and wanted to install it much closer to his home. Unhappy with the new placement, and seeing erosion from pipeline construction on the ridge behind his house causing washouts, he hired a lawyer. After several months of back and forth with the company, he said, “They gave me a choice: Either sign the contract or do the eminent domain. And my lawyer advised me that I didn’t want to do eminent domain.”
Pipeline construction cuts through a farmer’s field.Provided by Erin Brock Carlson, CC BY-SA
There was a unanimous sense among the 31 people we interviewed that companies have seemingly endless financial and legal resources, making court battles virtually unwinnable. Nondisclosure agreements can effectively silence landowners. Furthermore, lawyers licensed to work in West Virginia who aren’t already working for gas companies can be difficult to find, and legal fees can become too much for residents to pay.
One woman, the primary caretaker of land her family has farmed for 80 years, found herself facing significant legal fees after a dispute with a gas company. “We were the first and last ones to fight them, and then people saw what was going to happen to them, and they just didn’t have – it cost us money to get lawyers. Lawyers ate us up,” she said.
The pipeline now runs through what were once hayfields. “We haven’t had any income off that hay since they took it out in 2016,” she said. “It’s nothing but a weed patch.”
‘I mean, who do you call?’
Twenty-six of the 45 survey respondents reported that they felt that their property value had decreased as a result of pipeline construction, citing the risks of water contamination, explosion and unusable land.
Many of the 31 people we interviewed were worried about the same sort of long-term concerns, as well as gas leaks and air pollution. Hydraulic fracturing and other natural gas processes can affect drinking water resources, especially if there are spills or improper storage procedures. Additionally, methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and volatile organic compounds, which can pose health risks, are byproducts of the natural gas supply chain.
Oil spills are a major concern among land owners.Provided by Erin Brock Carlson, CC BY – SA
“Forty years removed from this, are they going to be able to keep track and keep up with infrastructure? I mean, I can smell gas as I sit here now,” one man told us. His family had watched the natural gas industry move into their part of West Virginia in the mid-2010s. In addition to a 36-inch pipe on his property, there are several smaller wells and lines. “This year the company servicing the smaller lines has had nine leaks … that’s what really concerns me,” he said.
The top concern mentioned by survey respondents was explosions.
According to data from 2010 to 2018, a pipeline explosion occurred, on average, every 11 days in the U.S. While major pipeline explosions are relatively rare, when they do occur, they can be devastating. In 2012, a 20-inch transmission line exploded in Sissonville, West Virginia, damaging five homes and leaving four lanes of Interstate 77 looking “like a tar pit.”
A gas line explosion near Sissonville, West Virginia, sent flames across Interstate 77. AP Photo/Joe Long
Amplifying these fears is the lack of consistent communication from corporations to residents living along pipelines. Approximately half the people we interviewed reported that they did not have a company contact to call directly in case of a pipeline emergency, such as a spill, leak or explosion. “I mean, who do you call?” one woman asked.
‘We just keep doing the same thing’
Several people interviewed described a fatalistic attitude toward energy development in their communities.
“It’s just kind of sad because they think, once again, this will be West Virginia’s salvation,” one landowner said. “Harvesting the timber was, then digging the coal was our salvation. … And then here’s the third one. We just keep doing the same thing.”
What persistent Covid cases might have in common with chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease, and why it matters.
By Ross Douthat, Opinion Columnist February 2, 2021
Credit…Mario Tama/Getty Images
In this paper’s Sunday Magazine about a week ago, there were two powerful stories about so-called long-haul Covid — a form of the disease that seems to leave certain patients permanently sick, creating a legacy of chronic illness that may be with us long after vaccines have consigned the pandemic’s acute phase to the past.
One was a first-person account by my colleague Laura Holson, detailing her nine months with the disease: the initial terrifying springtime surge of symptoms, and then the persistent ones — low fever, brain fogs, mild chest aches — that were punctuated, in her case, by a brief return of the more frightening ones, the crushing chest pain and racing pulse and gasps for air. Her story ends with sustained improvement, movement “in the right direction” as doctors like to say, but still a shadow of fatigue eight months after she got sick.
The other story, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, follows patients like Holson but also others who haven’t enjoyed even her level of improvement, and the doctors and scientists who are trying to figure out what’s happening to them — with “them” meaning anywhere from 10 to 50 percent of Covid-19 patients, depending on the study and the definition of long-term symptoms.
I wrote about long-haul Covid last summer, when it was still an emergent phenomenon, and at that point I tried to offer some practical lessons for people dealing with it, from my years of experience with an enduring illness, the medically contested chronic form of Lyme disease.
In Velasquez-Manoff’s exploration, many of his sources also draw analogies to forms of chronic illness that predate Covid. For instance, one possible parallel to what long-haul Covid patients are experiencing is myalgic encephalomyelitis, commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome — a debilitating and mysterious affliction that’s increasingly understood as an autoimmune-related condition, in which the body’s own defenses seem to be constantly flaring, independent of actual infection, in ways that consign people to fatigue, brain fog and incapacity.
Similar autoimmune theories are also often applied to the larger constellation of chronic conditions that bear some similarities to what we’ve seen from long-haul Covid: chronic Lyme, multiple sclerosis, rheumatic fever, Guillain-Barré syndrome, various psychiatric conditions that seem to be caused by persistent inflammation in the brain.
And as with Covid, for many of these conditions, there appears to be some precipitating infection. Multiple sclerosis is often associated with the commonplace Epstein-Barr virus, rheumatic fever with the same bacteria that cause strep throat, and Lyme, famously, with bites from ticks that carry a spirochete called Borrelia burgdorferi. Chronic fatigue syndrome isn’t known to have a single agent as its trigger, but as Velasquez-Manoff notes, chronic-fatigue-like symptoms have long been linked to viral infections, from the recent SARS and H1N1 pandemics to the 1918 Spanish flu.
This means that a key unanswered question, for Covid long-haulers now as for other chronic sufferers, is what happens to the infectious agent over the long term of the disease. Past a certain point, is the agent itself gone, and everything that patients like Holson feel just the immune system running amok? Or are people who have some of these conditions really suffering from a persistent infection, from a pathogenic invasion that the immune system keeps exciting itself by trying and failing to suppress?
Given the range of chronic afflictions and the diversity of human beings, the safest answer is simply “It depends” — that different things can happen to different people, that as Velasquez-Manoff writes, the varying long-term reactions to a trigger like a coronavirus infection shouldn’t necessarily be thought of as “a single syndrome at all.”
But the particular case of Lyme disease brings the question to a sharper point, because more than for other chronic conditions, treatment for Lyme has become deeply polarized. There is an official consensus that regards “post-treatment Lyme-disease syndrome” as a problem without a clear cure, and then a smaller faction of doctors who are certain that the infection itself persists and can be treated, with antibiotics and other drugs, in ways that gradually bring most patients back to health.
As it happens, the minority view — that chronic Lyme is actually a chronic infection, not just an autoimmune response or a psychosomatic malady — has a new defense this month: a book called “Chronic: The Hidden Cause of the Autoimmune Pandemic and How to Get Better Again,” written by Dr. Steven Phillips, a Lyme practitioner and researcher, and one of his patients, the musician Dana Parish.
The book makes the case that the spread of what the authors call Lyme+, an array of tick-borne pathogens that often infect patients simultaneously, is responsible not just for the more than 400,000 cases of Lyme disease diagnosed each year in the United States but also for an unknown number of chronic infections beyond that — undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and left untreated because of a combination of testing failures, institutional bias and the horrible complexity of the diseases themselves.
Then further, they argue that most of these cases can be treated effectively. Many people who are told they have a condition that can only be managed, not eliminated — to say nothing of the people told “It’s all in your head” — could claw back toward normalcy, if not always perfect health, with a long-term regimen of oral antibiotics and a doctor who’s willing to work with them to figure out which drug combination works.
In the specific (but in their view, quite broad) case of Lyme, in other words, they are rejecting what Velasquez-Manoff calls the “scary permanence” of the chronic-fatigue-style diagnosis greeting many long-haul Covid patients. Even if issues specific to individual immune systems help make some Lyme cases long-term and others not, the infection itself is usually still there, usually still treatable, and those with the worst symptoms don’t have to suffer in the same way forever.
“Chronic” offers a mix of scientific research and clinical and personal experience to make this case; if you are particularly interested in the questions it raises, I also recommend reading “Cure Unknown”by Pamela Weintraub, the best journalistic account of the Lyme controversy, and dipping into “Conquering Lyme Disease,” by Brian A. Fallon of Columbia and Jennifer Sotsky — a more cautious and academic account.
But I have a particular reason to highlight the Phillips and Parish book, because Phillips is also my physician, with whom I have worked off and on for much of the last five years. I like to think that I would find his argument convincing on its own terms, but my bias is obvious and overwhelming, because his treatments have been crucial to my unfinished recovery from Lyme.
Not them alone: I have tried a lot of things on my own in pursuit of recovery. But nothing I’ve tried was as essential, as obvious in its stabilizing, lifesaving effects, as months and months of high-dose antibiotics. When I didn’t take them, on the advice of doctors who insisted that they had no long-term benefit, I slipped away day by day into the dark. When I took them and stuck with them, when I acted on the reasonable belief that persistent symptoms reflect persistent infection, I began to clamber back toward life and light.
That’s just one man’s testimony, and if chronic Lyme has some striking similarities to chronic Covid, there are obviously manifold differences — starting with the basic fact that one infection is bacterial and the other viral.
But for all the people — doctors and patients both — struggling to figure out this new long-haul condition, the medical establishment’s possible misunderstanding of chronic Lyme is an important signpost, a possible cautionary tale. As Phillips and Parish put it, in their book’s Covid-era afterword, there’s an “echo chamber in the medical community that defaults patients who develop chronic illness after an acute infection, to a ‘post-viral’ or ‘post-infectious’ syndrome, without deep exploration into the likelihood of ongoing infection. We fear that long-term Covid patients will be resigned to the same fate.”
I worry about the same thing. Living through the coronavirus era after spending so many years in the world of Lyme disease is a strange experience because you can see all kinds of different pieces of the tick-borne epidemic refracted strangely in the Covid pandemic — disputes over testing, mysterious and shifting symptomatology, expert failures and medical populism, and controversies around what it means when the disease just hangs around indefinitely. (Even the theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, has counterparts in the theories surrounding Plum Island, the U.S. biowarfare laboratory in Long Island Sound that just happens to sit near the epicenter of the Lyme epidemic.)
One thing we’re definitely doing better with long-haul Covid than with Lyme, chronic fatigue syndrome and all their strange companions is taking the lived experience of long-haul patients seriously — probably because we have so many of them all at once — instead of treating them as weaklings or hypochondriacs.
But I want to believe that we can do better still — and that like the many people restored from Lyme with actual treatment, not just patience, there are people suffering from months and months of Covid misery who will eventually be lifted back to health.
