Ocasio-Cortez Becomes Most Ambitious Climate Democrat After Surprise Primary Win

EcoWatch

Ocasio-Cortez Becomes Most Ambitious Climate Democrat After Surprise Primary Win

Olivia Rosane       June 27, 2018

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – 2018

After what CNN called a surprise primary victory Tuesday over 10-term incumbent Representative Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th congressional district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just became the leading Democrat on fighting climate changeThe Huffington Post reported.

Ocasio-Cortez, a 28 year old Democratic Socialist, is now likely to win November’s general election in the historically Democratic district that stretches from the Bronx to Queens, meaning she will join Congress with some of the most ambitious climate plans of any current representative, according to The Huffington Post.

In an email to The Huffington Post, she explained her plans for a Green New Deal to help America switch to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, which advocates say is our best shot of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she wrote. “We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy, but this time green energy.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s climate plans dovetail with some of the other progressive points on her platform, such as a Federal Jobs Guarantee and Solidarity with Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria.

Ocasio-Cortez told The Huffington Post that the island would be the ideal place to test-run a Green New Deal to help with recovery efforts.

“Our fellow Americans on the island have suffered horrendous losses and need investment at a scale that only the American government can provide,” she said.

On her platform, Ocasio-Cortez also links the fight against climate change with her commitments to economic justice and immigrant rights.

“Rather than continue a dependency on this system that posits climate change as inherent to economic life, the Green New Deal believes that radically addressing climate change is a potential path towards a more equitable economy with increased employment and widespread financial security for all,” her platform reads.

Her platform also says fighting climate change is necessary “to avoid a world refugee crisis.” Concern for immigrants is a large part of her platform. She supports abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which was created in 2003 in the post-9/11 escalation of national security operations and executive power and operates outside the Department of Justice, unlike previous immigration enforcement.

The link between the potential for global warming to increase the number of climate refugees and the need to improve the treatment of current immigrants, many of which are already fleeing deteriorating environmental conditions, is something picked up by the Democratic Socialists of America, the group to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs, on the platform for its climate and environmental justice working group, according to The Huffington Post.

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Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers

Money Watch

Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers

By Irina Ivanova        June 26, 2018

“Think about trying to live today on the income you had 15 years ago.” That’s how agriculture expert Chris Hurt describes the plight facing U.S. farmers today.

The unequal economy that’s emerged over the past decade, combined with patchy access to health care in rural areas, have had a severe impact on the people growing America’s food. Recent data shows just how much. Farmers are dying by suicide at a higher rate than any other occupational group, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The suicide rate in the field of farming, fishing and forestry is 84.5 per 100,000 people — more than five times that of the population as a whole. That’s even as the nation overall has seen an increase in suicide rates over the last 30 years.

The CDC study comes with a few caveats. It looked at workers over 17 different states, but it left out some major agricultural states, like Iowa. And the occupational category that includes these workers includes small numbers of workers from related occupational groups, like fishing and forestry. (However, agricultural workers make up the vast majority of the “farming, fishing and forestry” occupational group.)

However, the figures in the CDC study mirror other recent findings. Rates of suicide have risen fastest, and are highest, in rural areas, the CDC found in a different study released earlier this month. Other countries have seen this issue, too — including India, where 60,000 farmer suicides have been linked to climate change.

In the U.S., several longtime farm advocates say today’s crisis mirrors one that happened in the 1980s, when many U.S. farmers struggled economically, with an accompanying spike in farmer suicides.

“The farm crisis was so bad, there was a terrible outbreak of suicide and depression,” said Jennifer Fahy, communications director with Farm Aid, a group founded in 1985 that advocates for farmers. Today, she said, “I think it’s actually worse.”

“We’re hearing from farmers on our hotline that farmer stress is extremely high,” Fahy said. “Every time there’s more uncertainty around issues around the farm economy is another day of phones ringing off the hook.”

Finances are a major reason. Since 2013, farm income has been dropping steadily, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This year, the average farm’s income is projected to be 35 percent below its 2013 level.

“The current incomes we’ve seen for the last three years … have been about like farm incomes from early in this century,” said Hurt, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University in Indiana.

Farmers are also at the mercy of elements outside their direct control, from extreme weather events that threaten crops to commodity prices that offer less for farm goods than it costs to produce them.

“We’ve spoken to dairy farmers who are losing money on every pound of milk they sell,” said Alana Knudson, co-director of the Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis with the University of Chicago.

As America’s trading partners slap tariffs on U.S. crops, those prices are set to be further undermined. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s gradual raising of interest rates threatens the financing for many smaller farms.

A lot of our farmers take out operating loans so they can buy seed, fertilizer and spray. As we’re looking at increasing interest rates, this is going to exacerbate financial vulnerability,” Knudson said.

Unreliable finances are a major reason why three-quarters of farmers must rely on non-farm income, often from a second job. Health insurance access is another.

Health care and mental-health services can be critical, Knudson said, particularly in rural areas, where medical care may be scarce. The farm bill that passed the House last week threatens to undo that, she said, because it allows for health insurance to sell plans that exclude mental health coverage. The Senate version of the farm bill allocates $20 million to a program to connect farmers with behavioral health services.

Such programs are even more crucial today, said Fahy, because many publicly-funded programs that were created in the wake of the 1980s farm crisis have been chipped away over the years. She pointed to Minnesota, where a suicide hotline closed earlier this month after a budget dispute between the legislature and the governor.

“Farmer stress right now is extremely high, the farm economy is very precarious and not predicted to improve in the near future,” she said. However, she added, “When there are steps in place to address the root cause, which is usually financial and legal, the stress becomes manageable.”

Because people can feel stigma around issues of mental health, conversation is important, said Doug Samuel, associate psychology professor at Purdue University.

“When you’re looking at someone who you have a concern about,” Samuel advised, “don’t be afraid to ask, don’t be afraid to listen.”

This Performance Is a Uniquely American Brand of Authoritarianism

Esquire

This Performance Is a Uniquely American Brand of Authoritarianism

Some Trump supporters know it’s a shtick. That doesn’t make the consequences any less real.

By Jack Holmes      June 26, 2018

Getty Images

Like it or not, this country that has for so long called itself Exceptional can now take some cues from other nations—specifically, those that slid into authoritarianism.

We have a president who attacks and seeks to undermine all institutions of democracy that provide a check on his power, from an independent judiciary and the rule of law to the free press. (The Republican Congress no longer merits a mention.) He combines that with dehumanizing attacks on vulnerable social minorities, whom he blames for the country’s problems—real and imagined. He has cultivated a base of support whose members have incorporated support for The Leader into their basic identities.

And, as Filipino author Rin Chupeco put it so well in a series of tweets early Tuesday morning, all this has been met by a chattering class of predominantly white elites who deny efforts to resist the slide into autocracy on the basis they are “uncivil.”

Rin Chupeco: Speaking as someone born in the last years of a dictatorship, you Americans are already several steps in one. Ferdinand Marcos’ greatest trick was convincing people all protesters were communist animals, so when they went missing, few cared. Even after bodies were discovered.

Rin Chupeco: Speaking as someone born in the last years of a dictatorship, you Americans are already several steps in one. Ferdinand Marcos’ greatest trick was convincing people all protesters were communist animals, so when they went missing, few cared. Even after bodies were discovered.

Rin Chupeco: These white people & journalists talking about being civil? These were the rich people, the Fil-Chinese, the mestizos in the Philippines who knew they won’t be affected by many of Marcos’ policies, and therefore could ignore them even as the killings started.

Rin Chupeco: But Filipinos have always been susceptible to strongman personality cults, just like your Republicans. (Yeah don’t @ me on this one, Repubs still singing Reagan’s praises despite the fact he was FRIENDS with Marcos and helped him retain power, making it 1000x worse for us.)

Rin Chupeco: White people, journalists who insist on civility- you seem to think civility is a common ground you share with opponents like Trump et al. Here’s a clue – whenever you offer these assholes middle ground, they will invade that space & then claim you never gave them ground at all.

This was in evidence at President Trump’s rally in South Carolina Monday night, which was nominally on behalf of South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster. In reality, it could only ever be about Trump. This was a full exhibition of the Trumpian id, as he rated late-night hosts and talked up his verification-free nuclear deal with Kim Jong-un and explained that if Melania Trump had gotten a facelift, he would let you know.

But one moment in particular spoke to Chupeco’s point:

Aaron Rupar: Trump detours into telling the crowd about a backhanded compliment filmmaker David Lynch gave him, then tells his audience that they are “the super elites.”
“Look, everybody here makes money, works hard, pays taxes. Does a great job.” pic.twitter.com/pECbx0uF1K

Aaron Rupar: Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people,” then brags about a woman who was recently interviewed and said there was nothing Trump could possibly do to lose her support. pic.twitter.com/pHuDcFM4XW

Here Trump called the free press “the enemy of the people,” a suggestion it spreads false information to the detriment of Trump and, in his extended view, the country. Except he then told the story of a supporter who said she would never abandon him, which the president learned about because … members of “the media” interviewed her. This is part of a long-running performance from Trump, who has openly admitted he attacks the media as “fake” to defend himself against legitimate negative reporting, and that when he says “fake news,” he really means negative coverage:

donald j. trump: The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?

Of course, the most troubling thing about Trump’s account a fan is that she has completely abdicated her responsibility as a citizen to hold her elected representative accountable, instead pledging undying fealty to a politician. (You don’t really have to trust Trump on this—accounts like this are common among Trump supporters.) But both sides of this point to the irrelevance of facts, and even intention.

It doesn’t matter that Trump openly admits he derides legitimate coverage as fake. It doesn’t matter that this entire thing is delivered in bad faith, just like all the calls for “civility.” What matters is the performance: Trump, the strongman leader, bashing the Enemies. That includes undocumented immigrants, but it also includes the free press, Democrats, late-night hosts, and anyone else who might stand in the way of The Movement. The details aren’t important.

This has filtered down to the fanbase, which had a fascinating encounter with CNN’s Jim Acosta last night at the rally.

Chuck@Hyduch: This is just….wow. Trumpers scream at CNN, then ask for autographs, then ask for on air shout outs. Attention seeking morons
https://twitter.com/i/moments/1011402213401358336 …

At least some of Trump’s supporters understand his shtick as a performance, and they engage in it, too. That’s why they’re ready with “Build the Wall” and “Lock Her Up!” chants, even when they’re only tangentially related to whatever he’s ranting about. All the world’s a stage, and even Acosta got in on the act, signing autographs for people who just assaulted his integrity and suggested he did not belong there. And yet the performance, at its root, is a primal scream from White America in defense of a social order fast eroding under strain from monumental forces of change.

And of course, Trump’s performance has real consequences:

the realkenidrawoods: A friend, Esteban Guzman sent me this video of a racist white woman harassing him while out working with his mom.

“Why do you hate us?”
“Because you’re Mexicans.”
“We are honest people right here!”
“Haha..yeah.. rapists & animals.”

Trump supporters always reveal themselves 1/2

This reality show presidency is a uniquely American flavor of authoritarianism. Citizens from the national home of The Bachelor require only a thin veneer of reality to paper over the obvious money-grabbing deceit of the production in order to be taken in. This is our version of the authoritarian slide, in which The Leader rants about Jimmy Fallon and whether his wife got a facelift as he attacks the institutions of democracy that safeguard a free society. The entire production is carried out in complete bad faith, just like when Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who works for a man who invents demeaning nicknames for opponents, bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” and calls predominantly black and brown countries “shitholes”—insists we need civil discourse.

It is a way of waging the trench war against any and all constraints on the range of acceptable discourse, the range of acceptable behavior, and The Leader’s power. It’s just our American version of the same impulses Chupeco highlighted:

Rin Chupeco: So you shift the goalposts, and you enable the gaslighting, even if inadvertently. “Maybe if YOU hadn’t been so rude they wouldn’t have done that.”
Bullshit. You KNOW they’ll do it anyway because again, your goddamn status quo.

People invested in putting kids in cages don’t want your civility. They don’t want you to extend them the same courtesy they never had – and never wanted – from you. What they want is for you to retreat.

Replying to RinChupeco: People invested in putting kids in cages don’t want your civility. They don’t want you to extend them the same courtesy they never had – and never wanted – from you. What they want is for you to retreat.

Rin Chupeco: And every ground you grudgingly give, hoping that they’ll construe that as some good faith on your part, is only an incentive for them to push harder until you have no ground left. Then they’re going to tell you they’ve owned the land all along.

Chupeco’s whole thread is worth reading.

The president again suggested we should suspend due process for people captured at the border last night. He is creeping up the field, seizing first the shallow ground allotted to the most vulnerable among us. No amount of civil discourse is going to convince him to turn back, or persuade any of his supporters they have chosen the wrong path. It might be reality TV, but the supporters don’t want to know. They’re enjoying the show. The tax cuts might be reserved for the rich, but the attacks on the Other are all theirs to savor. Where will the next attack be, the next ground seized?

Rick Perry gives pep talk to natural gas industry in wake of damaging climate study

ThinkProgress

Rick Perry gives pep talk to natural gas industry in wake of damaging climate study

U.S. gas industry also opposes Trump’s proposed bailout of coal and nuclear industries.

Mark Hand     June 26, 2018

Energy Secretary Rick Perry gave a keynote speech on June 26, 2018, to kick off the 2018 World Gas Conference in Washington, D.C. Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Energy Secretary Rick Perry touted natural gas as an environmentally friendly fuel in a speech Tuesday, kicking off an international gathering of natural gas industry officials in Washington, D.C.

Perry’s pep talk at the triennial World Gas Conference, attended by thousands of industry representatives from around the world, came less than a week after the release of an important new study that found natural gas to be far more destructive to the climate than previously thought.

The new study, published last week in the journal Science, found that methane emissions from the nation’s oil and gas industry are nearly 60 percent higher than earlier estimates — effectively enough to offset much of the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.

The study’s results upend arguments made over the past decade — as the controversial practice of fracking gained momentum across the country — that natural gas could play a key role in fighting climate change, including serving as a bridge fuel to greater integration of renewable energy resources.

Perry advocated for the Trump administration’s all-of-the-above energy policy — one that he said includes wind and solar energy — although he paid the highest tribute to natural gas. The president’s strategy “includes the cleanest fossil fuel and one of the most abundant energy sources on the planet, and that’s natural gas,” Perry emphatically told the audience.

Perry criticized fossil fuel opponents who “flatly reject” an all-of-the-above energy strategy. “The answer is not to exclude oil and gas and coal from the world’s energy mix,” he said. “For the sake of environmental progress … we must honor the right of every nation to responsibly use every fuel at its disposal.”

He also claimed these opponents are ignoring the positive side of fossil fuels. “There is still this stubborn opposition to natural gas and other fossil fuels. Opposition exists even as fossil fuels have become cleaner and low-emission natural gas increases its share of total fossil production and use,” Perry said.

The new study, “Assessment of methane emissions from the U.S. oil and gas supply chain,” was led by the Environmental Defense Fund. It has authors from 16 different institutions, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Carnegie Mellon — experts who have co-authored many of the most important studies in this area.

The study found that methane emissions are so large that the total warming from natural gas-fired power plants, including leaks from transporting the gas to the plant plus emissions from the burning of gas, over a 20-year period is comparable to the total warming from coal plants over 20-year period.

Researchers concluded that if a coal-fired plant is replaced with a gas-fired plant there is no net climate benefit for at least two decades. Perhaps even more important is that other studies have shown natural gas not only does not have a climate benefit over coal, but that its use displaces many carbon-free sources of power such as wind and solar.

The argument for fracking as a climate solution just went down in flames

Although Perry received a warm welcome at Tuesday’s conference, the natural gas industry has strongly criticized Trump’s plan to subsidize the coal and nuclear power industries. The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America — the industry trade group for the North American natural gas pipeline industry — said in a statement earlier this month that it is “deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s apparent move to scapegoat natural gas to prop up uneconomic coal and nuclear plants.”

Perry didn’t address the coal and nuclear bailout in his address to the natural gas industry. On Monday, though, Perry told reporters that the Trump administration is making progress on the proposal, although he did not offer a timetable for implementation.

A small group of protesters held signs and tried to engage in conversations with attendees as they entered the Washington Convention Center for the conference. One of the protesters, Steve Norris, a member of Beyond Extreme Energy, told ThinkProgress that the “present policies of the United States government with regard to gas, the present regulatory apparatus, and the present leadership of the Department of Energy are heading us in the wrong direction.”

For several years, Beyond Extreme Energy has tried to get officials at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to consider the climate impacts of natural gas. In a change of tone at the commission, the two Democratic members of FERC — Cheryl LaFleur and Richard Glick — have starting highlighting the climate impacts of natural gas.

“We’ve been in their faces for the last four years,” Norris said. “And we’re seeing some changes there. Two of the commissioners, for the first time, are beginning to dissent because of climate issues. And that’s really encouraging. Rick Perry, on the other hand, has his head stuck in the ground, drinks oil for breakfast, and gas for dinner.”

Everybody hates Trump’s coal and nuclear bailout plan

ThinkProgress

Everybody hates Trump’s coal and nuclear bailout plan

Except the president’s favorite coal industry executive and a bankrupt nuke company.

Mark Hand      June 7, 2018

A truck delivers coal to a Pacificorp’s coal-fired power plant on October 9, 2017. Credit: George Frey/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s fixation on bailing out the coal and nuclear power industries has proved confounding to renewable energy advocates and climate activists. But other sectors of the energy industry, including one that Trump purportedly wants to help, are also questioning the need for the radical intervention in energy markets proposed last week.

The White House issued a statement last Friday that said Trump has directed Energy Secretary Rick Perry to “prepare immediate steps to stop the loss” of what the administration described as “fuel-secure power facilities,” a thinly veiled reference to coal and nuclear power plants. Also last Friday, Bloomberg News released a leaked draft proposal from the Energy Department that cited national security concerns as a reason for allowing Trump to require regional grid operators or electric utilities to purchase enough power from coal and nuclear plants to prevent them from closing.

But most of the energy industry concedes there’s no emergency that requires the federal government to intervene on behalf of coal and nuclear power.

Speaking earlier this week at an industry conference, Chris Crane, the CEO of Exelon Corp, the nation’s largest owner of nuclear plants, said the retirement of coal and nuclear plants is not a grid emergency that warrants urgent intervention from the federal government.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), one of the president’s biggest industry supporters, also opposes Trump’s directive. The powerful oil and gas lobbying group has joined a diverse coalition that includes wind, solar, and energy storage trade groups to fight any proposed bailout of the coal and nuclear industries that may come from Trump’s Department of Energy.

The renewable energy industry worries about the bailout plan’s potential negative impact on its finances. Investment banks and private equity firms may become skittish about investing in energy sectors that are not on the receiving end of Trump’s handouts.

“It’s a very confused and conflicted and backward-leaning policy that is finding support in no quarters apart from the coal industry,” John Morton, senior fellow at the Global Energy Center at the Atlantic Council, told ThinkProgress. “It seems like a Hail Mary pass and a dangerous political gesture at best. There’s no support for it, not simply from the renewables industry but from most parts of the nuclear industry.”

Trump plan to bail out coal industry punishes red states the most

Morton was one of the speakers at an event on Thursday in Washington, D.C. — that offered a status update on the global move to a clean energy economy — sponsored by the Atlantic Council, the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century. Founded in 1961, the Atlantic Council is a think tank that focuses on international affairs.

In his interview with ThinkProgress, Morton asked why the Trump administration would seek to interfere in an electric power marketplace that is functioning fairly efficiently. “There is only one answer,” Morton said in response to his own question. “And it’s pure politics and it’s pure politics to a relatively small base. In the long run, it’s going to set us back in this race to a clean energy future.”

Tom Kiernan, CEO of of the American Wind Energy Association, pointed out at the event that despite claims of a pending catastrophe, the nation’s electric grid operators “are on the record saying that the orderly phaseout of some of these very expensive coal and nuclear plants does not constitute an emergency.”

Kiernan emphasized that coal and nuclear plants do not necessarily improve grid resilience, even though they have onsite fuel supply. During the polar vortex of early 2014, huge amounts of coal-fired plants stopped operating due in large part to frozen equipment.

Of the approximately 19,500 megawatts of capacity lost due to cold weather conditions, more than 17,700 megawatts was due to frozen equipment, according to a report on the polar vortex issued by the North American Electric Reliability Corp. There were also reports of frozen onsite supplies of coal that forced coal-fired generating facilities to shut down.

In 2011, a terrible cold snap in Texas led to frozen coal supplies and prevented equipment on some coal plants from operating properly, forcing coal units to shut down.

More recently, Hurricane Harvey knocked out two coal-fired power plants in Texas “because that wonderful onsite fuel was flooded,” Kiernan pointed out. Operators had to shut down a few wind farms in Texas due to tropical storm-strength winds. But other wind farms “powered right through” the storm, producing large amounts of electricity from the high wind speeds, he said.

Nuclear plants also often face unscheduled outages due to equipment failures or extreme weather, calling into question whether their continued operation creates a more resilient electric grid.

“The notion of promoting nuclear power on the basis of resilience is playing to its weakness,” argued Greg Wetstone, president and CEO of ACORE. “The one thing that history has demonstrated about nuclear power is that it is not resilient, and you can talk to the people at Fukushima about that.”

Morton also fears the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies are skewing policymakers’ views on renewable energy. The transition to a low-carbon economy is occurring at an extraordinarily fast clip, and one that is faster than most people realize, he told the audience.

David Livingston: “Making policy without good data is inefficient, sub-optimal and, when comes to climate and clean energy, dangerous.” Today at @AtlanticCouncil , @ACGlobalEnergy‘s John Morton kicks off our US launch of the @ren21 Global Renewables Status Report 2018, in partnership with @ACORE

There is “a dangerous gap currently between the perception of where we are in this transition to a low-carbon economy and the reality of how quickly that transition is occurring,” he said.

“If the U.S. pretends that we are playing in a world in which renewables is 2 percent of annual new energy installations and not 70 percent, which it was last year, you make a very different set of policy decisions about how to position your industry,” he said.

The lack of awareness of renewable energy’s rapid growth — and a bias toward fossil fuels — is ingrained in the thinking of Trump administration officials.

But Morton also cautioned that the current trajectory of the clean energy movement is still not occurring fast enough. “We’re not on a 2-degree pathway [set] in the Paris agreement goals,” he said. “And, of course, there are many people, myself included, that agree a 2-degree pathway is insufficient to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change.”

Those who do support Trump’s directive last week have telling motivations.

Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray, one of the few supporters of Trump’s bailout plan for the coal-fired generation, revealed the real reason he supports the initiative in an interview on Fox News Business on Thursday.

He pointed to the fact that coal’s share of the nation’s electric generation capacity is projected to drop from its peak of 58 percent three decades ago to 27 percent by 2020. This will undoubtedly have a negative impact on Murray Energy’s domestic revenues, even though the company is one of the most financially stable coal companies in the nation.

Top energy regulator points to problematic wartime language in Trump’s coal bailout plan

On Wednesday, E&E News shed new light on the close relationship between Murray and the Trump administration. The news service reported that Murray presented Trump administration officials with half a dozen draft executive orders in 2017 aimed at exiting the Paris climate agreement and reducing coal regulations.

Another one of the few supporters of Trump’s plan is FirstEnergy Solutions, the bankrupt nuclear plant-owning company that petitioned Perry earlier this year to use the emergency powers of the Federal Power Act to order regional grid operator PJM to bail out a long list of nuclear and coal power plants. At the time, NRG Energy, one of FirstEnergy’s competitors in the region, described the request as a “manufactured crisis.”

new filing in FirstEnergy Solutions’ bankruptcy case detailed how lobbyists at Akin Gump, a powerful law and lobbying firm in Washington, D.C., spent hundreds of hours in April working on a renewed campaign to secure bailouts for the utility’s coal and nuclear power plants from the Trump administration and state lawmakers in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Emails indicate Pruitt tried to recruit oil execs for EPA jobs

The Hill

Emails indicate Pruitt tried to recruit oil execs for EPA jobs

By Morgan Gstalter      June 25, 2018

© Greg Nash

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt tried to recruit top executives from oil and gas trading groups to jobs within the agency, according to emails obtained through an Freedom of Information Act request.

The emails, by the Sierra Club, show that oil company ConocoPhillips reached out to the EPA after Pruitt met with the American Petroleum Institute’s (API) board of directors.

Kevin Avery, a manager of federal government affairs at ConocoPhillips wrote to then-EPA aide Samantha Travis on March 27, 2017, describing Pruitt’s recruitment “plea.”

“I understand that Administrator Pruitt met with the API executives last week and he made a plea for candidates to fill some of the regional director positions within the agency,” Avery wrote in an email. “One of our employees has expressed interest. He is polishing up his resume. Where does he need to send it?”

A few days later, on April 4, Avery emailed Travis again with the resume of a company employee as well as a friend of one of the executives.

The resumes were reportedly never sent to the EPA.

“We are not aware of that ‘recruiting plea’ but EPA has sought a diverse range of individuals to serve in the Agency and help advance President Trump’s agenda of environmental stewardship and regulatory certainty,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill.

However, Michael Brune, executive director of Sierra Club, blasted Pruitt’s attempt to outsource the position.

“This is Scott Pruitt trying to outsource his job to protect our air and water to the exact people responsible for polluting them. Pruitt’s corrupt tenure at EPA has been a dereliction of the duties he swore to uphold. He’s gotten sweetheart deals from corporate lobbyists and then turned around and pushed their agenda, all while trying to enrich himself at the expense of taxpayers,” Brune said in a statement.

Dozens of CEOs from the oil industry were in attendance for the March 23 dinner at the Trump International Hotel.

Avery offered up the resumes of Brad Thomas and Kim Estes shortly after the dinner, according to Buzzfeed News.

Avery praised Thomas in the email as someone who is “very knowledge on a host of EPA regulations and policies” in Alaska, where he worked for ConocoPhillips.

“The other candidate is recommended by our Vice President for State and Federal Government Affairs, John Dabbar,” Avery wrote in the email. “He is a personal friend of Mr. Estes’ and would be willing to give you any additional information you might need.”

Estes’s consulting company, the Estes Group LLC, works on environmental health and safety issues and emergency response in California.

Estes confirmed to the outlet that he his name had been submitted as a candidate to possible lead the EPA’s Region 9 office in San Francisco.

Dabbar did tell him about the position but Estes said he never submitted a formal application or have an in-person interview.

Why are migrants fleeing their home countries?

USA Today

Thousands of immigrants pass through the Southern border. Why are they fleeing their home countries?

Christal Hayes, USA Today         June 25, 2018

Government provided video shows more than 1,100 people inside metal cages in a warehouse that’s divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. USA TODAY

Every day thousands of migrants pass through the U.S. Southern border. 

     (Photo John Moore, Getty Images)

Some travel as far as 1,000 miles, walking through deserts and carrying water jugs and the small possessions they need to start a new life. It is a perilous journey that isn’t for the faint of heart: More than 400 died trying to make it to the U.S. last year, according to the United Nations’ migration agency.

So why are they risking their lives and the possibility of being separated from family?

While Mexico is the country most-often talked about in the immigration debate, many of those crossing the border are traveling from Central American countries synonymous with corruption, crime and poverty. These root problems have been a driving force for years for immigrants to make the journey to the U.S.

President Donald Trump enacted a “zero-tolerance” policy when it came to those trying to cross the border illegally, hoping to dissuade migrants. He’s also talked about ending aid to already impoverished countries where these migrants are traveling from to reduce the numbers of travelers.

But that hasn’t stopped immigrants. While totals on borders crossings are down, the number of families coming through the Southwest border jumped six-fold in May to 9,485 compared with the same month in 2017. There are now an estimated 11 undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

More: Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ border prosecutions led to time served, $10 fees

Since October, more than 58,000 have arrived, the bulk from Guatemala, followed by Honduras and El Salvador.

While Republicans and Democrats debate what to do with those seeking a new life in America and future immigration policies, those making the trek have several key motivations.

Violence

It doesn’t take much to understand why those living in the so-called Northern Triangle countries — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras  — would want to leave.

El Salvador was the murder capital of the world with a staggering rate of 104 people per 100,000 in 2015. The country still has a higher homicide rate than all countries suffering armed conflict except for Syria, according to the most recent global study by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey.

Similarly, residents of Honduras live in fear because of extortion and criminals demanding a “war tax,” which, if not paid, could mean death.

More: Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy sparks outrage in Central America

More: Families fleeing violence keep coming to US illegally despite Trump zero tolerance policy

“This isn’t about immigrants chasing the American dream anymore,” Sofia Martinez, a Guatemala-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, told the Associated Press. “It’s about escaping a death sentence.”

Those fleeing Mexico also are hoping to get away from the violence.

Georgina Ayala Mendoza, her husband and their three kids fled Michoacán, a state along the west coast of Mexico, on May 3. One day earlier, gunmen — Ayala believes they were members of a cartel — entered her mother-in-law’s home and killed two of her husband’s brothers, she said.

More: Along California-Mexico border, more Mexicans fleeing violence seek asylum

She worried the cartel would try to recruit her husband to work with them — or face the same fate as his brothers.

In March, the U.S. State Department listed Michoacán as one of five Mexican states to which U.S. citizens should not travel. Violence in the country has been on the rise, and last year more homicides were recorded than in any year since the government started tracking them, according to the Los Angeles Times. 

Poverty

More than half of all residents in Guatemala and Honduras are living in poverty, according to CNN, which cited data from the World Bank Group.

Honduras is considered the second-poorest country in Central America where 60 percent of its population is in poverty. The conditions are echoed in Guatemala, where even though it has the largest economy out of other Central American countries, poverty rates have also nearly hit 60 percent.

            Border Patrol detains immigrant families crossing US-Mexico border

        Border Patrol agents take a group of migrant families to a safer place to be transported after intercepting them near McAllen, Texas, on June 19, 2018. More than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents at the border as a result of the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, creating a deepening crisis for the government on how to care for the children.  Courtney Sacco, Caller-Times via USA TODAY NETWORK

       Border Patrol detains immigrant families crossing US-Mexico border

The president’s crackdown on illegal migrants could end up worsening the security and economic situation in Central America, Martinez said, leading even more people to flee in the future.

Earlier this year, Trump ended temporary protected status for 57,000 Hondurans and 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants, some of whom have been living in the U.S. for decades. If deported, they’ll return to countries ill-equipped to absorb them and generating too few jobs to provide opportunities to work.

Gangs and drug cartels

Lawlessness rules many of these countries where immigrants flee, and drug cartels, gangs and bribes are part of everyday life that runs similar to war zones in some areas.

The groups enforce informal curfews, demand taxes and force recruitment on young people.

Last year, 35 bus drivers, passengers and fare collectors were killed while riding buses into gang-controlled neighborhoods, while those that were spared a bullet were extorted to the tune of $19 million, according to the Salvadoran public transport owners’ association.

More: DOJ: Trump’s immigration crackdown ‘diverting’ resources from drug cases

The number of people displaced in the nation of 6.5 million by turf battles between El Savador’s two biggest gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, skyrocketed last year to 296,000, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

In Mexico, the government has been fighting drug cartels for years, which when combined with the battle between cartels over territory has left behind a trail of destruction and blood. Homicide rates have broken records recently, which many believe is tied to the arrest and extradition of former drug boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

His arrest caused an instability in Mexico’s drug trade and allowed other groups to move in, thus causing a behind-the-scenes battle for territory and the killings of both criminals and innocents throughout the country.

Immigrant families in the spotlight

                An immigrant child looks out the window of a bus as protesters try to block a bus carrying migrant children out of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection Detention Center on June 23, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. Dozens of protesters blocked the bus from leaving the center resulting in scuffles with police and Border Patrol agents before the bus retreated back to the center.  Spencer Platt, Getty Images

BNSF: Estimated 230,000 gallons of oil spilled in derailment

Orlando Sentinel

BNSF: Estimated 230,000 gallons of oil spilled in derailment

Associated Press, Doon, Iowa       June 24, 2018

Des Moines Register

An estimated 230,000 gallons (870,619 liters) of crude oil spilled into floodwaters in the northwestern corner of Iowa following a train derailment, a railroad official said Saturday.

BNSF spokesman Andy Williams said 14 of 32 oil tanker cars just south of Doon in Lyon County leaked oil into surrounding floodwaters from the swollen Little Rock River. Williams had earlier said 33 oil cars had derailed.

Nearly half the spill — an estimated 100,000 gallons (378,530 liters) — had been contained with booms near the derailment site and an additional boom placed approximately 5 miles (8.05 kilometers) downstream, Williams said. Skimmers and vacuum trucks were being used to remove the oil. Crews will then use equipment to separate the oil from the water.

“In addition to focusing on the environmental recovery, ongoing monitoring is occurring for any potential conditions that could impact workers and the community and so far have found no levels of concern,” Williams said.

Officials still hadn’t determined the cause of Friday morning’s derailment, but a disaster proclamation issued by Gov. Kim Reynolds for Lyon and three other counties placed the blame on rain-fueled flooding. Reynolds visited the derailment site Saturday afternoon as part of a tour of areas hit by recent flooding.

Some officials have speculated that floodwaters eroded soil beneath the train track. The nearby Little Rock River rose rapidly after heavy rain Wednesday and Thursday.

A major part of the cleanup work includes building a temporary road parallel to the tracks to allow in cranes that can remove the derailed and partially-submerged oil cars. Williams said officials hoped to reach the cars Saturday.

The train was carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to Stroud, Oklahoma, for ConocoPhillips. ConocoPhillips spokesman Daren Beaudo said each tanker can hold more than 25,000 gallons (20,817 imperial gallons) of oil.

Beaudo said Saturday that the derailed oil cars were a model known as DOT117Rs, indicating they were newer or had been retrofitted to be safer and help prevent leaks in the event of an accident.

The derailment also caused concern downstream, including as far south as Omaha, Nebraska, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the derailment site. The spill reached the Rock River, which joins the Big Sioux River before merging into the Missouri River at Sioux City.

Omaha’s public water utility — Metropolitan Utilities District — said it was monitoring pumps it uses to pull drinking water from the Missouri River.

Rock Valley, Iowa, just southwest of the derailment, shut off its water wells within hours of the accident. It plans to drain and clean its wells and use a rural water system until testing shows its water is safe.

For the latest information about the derailment: https://bit.ly/2K1wIAZ

Story has been corrected to show that 32 oil tanker cars derailed, not 33.

Vote against the GOP this November

The Washington Post – Opinion

Vote against the GOP this November

By George Will, Opinion writer         June 22, 2018


House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) meets with reporters at the Capitol on Thursday. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life. When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . But for Wales!” Ryan traded his political soul for . . . a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.

Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it. As explained in Federalist 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate this president. By leaving dormant the powers inherent in their institution, they vitiate the Constitution’s vital principle: the separation of powers.

Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring , became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. Corker’s measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade restrictions imposed in the name of “national security.” All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution’s structure. But the Senate would not vote on it — would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year .

This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president. The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control.

Trump’s policy of family separation was part of a broader pattern of attacks against immigrants and should never have existed, argues Elias Lopez. (Kate Woodsome , Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

The Trump whisperer regarding immigration is Stephen Miller, 32, whose ascent to eminence began when he became the Savonarola of Santa Monica High School . Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king’s grace but is crawling back (he works for Vice President Pence’s political action committee), recently responded on Fox News to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome taken from her parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: “Wah, wah.” Meaningless noise is this administration’s appropriate libretto because, just as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.

In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive 

Read more:

Jeh Charles Johnson: Trump’s ‘zero-tolerance’ border policy is immoral, un-American — and ineffective

Dana Milbank: Paul Ryan has been living in a cave

Jennifer Rubin: This is why Paul Ryan and the GOP need to be ‘discharged’

Kathleen Parker: Good night, GOP of Trump

The Post’s View: The Trump administration created this awful border policy. It doesn’t need Congress to fix it.

Workplace Deaths Are Rising. Trump-Era Budget Cuts Could Make It Worse.

In These Times

Workplace Deaths Are Rising. Trump-Era Budget Cuts Could Make It Worse.

By Bruce Vail     June 18, 2018

A worker carries lumber as he builds a new home on January 21, 2015 in Petaluma, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

In an alarming development in the world of workplace safety, the latest statistics reveal that the number of accidental deaths on the job in America is on the rise, reversing the longer-term trend toward fewer fatal incidents.

The number of deaths hit a total of 5,190 in 2016, up from 4,836 in 2015, according to an April 2018 report by the AFL-CIO. That’s about 14 deaths each day from preventable worker accidents. It’s also the third year in a row that the number has inched up, and the highest death rate since 2010, the labor federation reported.

Workplace safety systems are “definitely in the failure mode,” says Peter Dooley, a consultant with the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health who was worked closely with labor unions over the years. “In the last two years it is getting dramatically worse. It’s just outrageous.”

The precise reasons for the rise are not simply stated, adds Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO’s long-time director of occupational safety and health. Overall patterns such as very high rates of injury in the logging and construction industries are consistent over time, she says, and there is no single employment trend that accounts for the recent rise. “The numbers are actually down in construction, but they are up almost everywhere else,” she says.

Inadequate enforcement of existing safety rules is the most commonly cited explanation for the rise, Seminario tells In These Times. A Jan. 8 report from NBC News estimates that the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) employs only about 1,000 inspectors to cover all workplaces in America—and that the number of inspectors has declined four percent since President Donald Trump took office. The number of inspectors is far too low to be effective, Seminario suggests, and OSHA has been “under resourced” for years, including during the Obama administration years.

“Construction is a good example. OSHA has a big focus on construction and construction deaths are down. The areas where OSHA has less interest are up,” she says

The figures cited by Seminario and Dooley are taken from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries published annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The way the figures are compiled is a problem in itself, Dooley says, because it zealously protects the anonymity of employers. That diverts attention from specific workplace behavior that needs close examination and corrective action to reduce accidental deaths over time, he says.

The National Council’s answer to this problem is to publish its own “Dirty Dozen” list of employers notable for health and safety problems among their workforces. The Council uses a standard of measurement that includes non-fatal injuries and other factors, but the list stands out in that it names some very well-known companies. For example, the online retailer Amazon is on the list because it has seen seven of its warehouse workers killed since 2013. And the largest garbage disposal company in the United States, Waste Management, has had an excessive number of OSHA citations and fines. Other companies on the list are Tesla Motors and Dine Brands Global (owner of IHOP and Applebee’s restaurants).

“There is injustice in the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a totally anonymous database. There is no public record of who is dying and who the employers are,” Dooley says. The information actually does exist deep in the Labor Department files, he adds, but government policy is to keep this information out of public hands, or for use by safety experts. “This needs to be changed,” he says.

Seminario and Dooley agree that the worker safety signals coming from the Trump administration are troubling, even if the statistics are not up-to-date enough to make a direct link to increased workplace deaths. Trump’s budget proposal last year called for a 21 percent cut in Department of Labor spending, and the initial proposal for this year call for a 9 percent cut. Congress pared back last year’s proposed cut, and is expected to do so again this year, but it is clear that current Labor Department officials have no plans to take the initiative against the rise in workplace deaths, Dooley charges.

In issuing its report, the AFL-CIO noted: “The Trump administration has moved to weaken recently issued rules on beryllium and mine examinations and has delayed or abandoned the development of new protections, including regulations on workplace violence, infectious diseases, silica in mining and combustible dust.”

“At the same time, Congress is pushing forward with numerous ‘regulatory reform’ bills that would require review and culling of existing rules, make costs the primary consideration in adopting regulations, and making it virtually impossible to issue new protections.”

The reference to workplace violence represents one of the most troubling statistics buried in the government reports. According to a press release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Workplace homicides increased by 83 cases to 500 in 2016, and workplace suicides increased by 62 to 291. This is the highest homicide figure since 2010 and the most suicides since the National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries began reporting data in 1992.”

“It’s a very complicated problem,” observes Seminario. “You can devise safety regulations to avoid common and predictable accidents. But how do you do that with a homicide?”

Bruce Vail is a Baltimore-based freelance writer with decades of experience covering labor and business stories for newspapers, magazines and new media. He was a reporter for Bloomberg BNA’s Daily Labor Report, covering collective bargaining issues in a wide range of industries, and a maritime industry reporter and editor for the Journal of Commerce, serving both in the newspaper’s New York City headquarters and in the Washington, D.C. bureau.

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