After announcing her retirement, one GOP congresswomen is torching the GOP health care plan.

DailyKos

After announcing her retirement, one GOP congresswomen is torching the GOP health care plan.

By Jen Hayden May 04, 2017

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-27) recently made a surprise announcement that she will be retiring, not seeking re-election in 2018. Perhaps that has freed her up to speak the truth about the impending disaster of a massive tax cut for the wealthy, stealthily disguised as a health care plan , because today she issued a statement saying she intends to vote against the Trumpcare AHCA bill. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen plainly says this bill “fails to prove for the needs of my constituents” and has the “potential to severely harm the health and lives of people in South Florida.” Read her statement and see why she isn’t just a no, she’s a HELL NO:

“Despite amendments and changes, the AHCA still fails to provide for the needs of my constituents. I will not support a bill that has the potential to severely harm the health and lives of people in South Florida and therefore I remain steadfast in my commitment to vote NO on the AHCA. The recent addition of further funds to high risk pools continues to be inadequate and fails to cover those who need it most. If enacted, the older and poorer South Floridians will be worse off and will find it more difficult to obtain quality healthcare. My constituents should not have to take a step backward in their ability to obtain treatment for any illness and thus, I will vote NO.”

Too bad her colleagues are caving right and left, ignoring the will and the needs of their constituents. The midterm elections take place on November 6, 2018. We have 551 days to get these bums out of Congress and restore our health care protections.

Here’s what you need to know about preexisting conditions in the GOP health plan

Washington Post, Fact Checker

Here’s what you need to know about preexisting conditions in the GOP health plan

By Glenn Kessler May 4, 2017

Inside the messy, last-minute rush for the GOP health-care plan

With House Republicans prepared to take a vote Thursday on yet another version of a plan to overhaul the 2010 Affordable Care Act, attention has been especially focused on whether Obamacare’s popular prohibition against denying coverage based on preexixting medical conditions will remain in place. Republicans, from President Trump to lawmakers pushing for the bill, insist that it remains intact, just in different form. Democrats and opponents of the bill say the guarantee is gone or greatly weakened.

The reality is more nuanced and complicated, as is often the case in Washington policy debates. Despite Ryan’s tweet that people with preexisting conditions are protected, there is no guarantee that they will not face higher costs than under current law. The impact of recent tweaks to the proposed legislation is especially unclear because lawmakers are rushing ahead without an assessment by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. So here’s The Fact Checker’s guide to the debate.

What’s the issue?

Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies could consider a person’s health status when determining premiums, sometimes making coverage unaffordable or even unavailable if a person was already sick with a problem that required expensive treatment. The ACA prohibited that, in part by requiring everyone to purchase insurance.

But that “individual mandate” was unpopular and Republicans would eliminate that requirement in their proposed American Health Care Act. As a replacement, the AHCA initially included a continuous coverage provision that boosted insurance rates by 30 percent for one year if he or she has a lapse in coverage. (We explored this interaction between the provisions earlier.)

As part of an effort to attract more votes, Republicans have added an amendment, crafted by Rep. Tom McArthur (R-N.J.), that instead allows states to seek individual waivers from the law. One possible waiver would replace the continuous coverage provision so that insurance companies for one year could consider a person’s health status when writing policies in the individual and small group plan markets. Another possible waiver would allow the state to replace a federal essential benefits package with a more narrowly tailored package of benefits, again limited to the individual and small-group markets.

The theory is that removing sicker people from the markets and allowing policies with skimpier options would result in lower overall premiums.

Who would be affected?

If the law passed, a person generally would not be affected unless they lived in a state that sought a waiver. Moreover, they would need to have a lapse in health coverage for longer than 63 days and they would need to have a preexisting condition. Finally, they would have to purchase insurance in the individual market, i.e., the health exchanges in Obamacare that currently serve about 18 million Americans.

Someone who got their insurance from an employer – and that’s most Americans (155 million) – presumably would not be affected, though the CBO did project that under the initial version of the AHCA 7 million fewer people would be covered by employers than under current law by 2026.

Then, for a period of one year, a person who fell into this category would face insurance rates that could be based on their individual condition. But states that seek a waiver are required to operate a risk mitigation program or participate in what is called an invisible risk sharing program. Alaska currently has such a program that helps cover the bills for one of 33 conditions (such as HIV/AIDS or metastatic cancer). The individual with the condition still submits bills to the insurance company, which then turns around and bills the state. But then the insurance company does not consider the cost of this care as part of its calculation for premiums to other individuals in the state.

All told, the AHCA would allot $138 billion over 10 years for a variety of funds that would seek to keep premiums lower or to assist with cost-sharing. Just this week, $8 billion over five years was added to the pot to woo wavering lawmakers, with the idea that the additional funds could be used for so-called high-risk pools. Many states had such pools to help people with preexisting conditions before the ACA. But the proposal does not require a state with a waiver to set up such a pool.

What could go wrong then?

There are many uncertainties about this path. The health insurance market has a lot of churn, so many people may experience a gap in coverage of just a few months. One estimate, by the Commonwealth Fund, indicated that 30 million adults would have had such a gap in 2016, potentially exposing them to a surcharge or being placed in a high-risk pool. On top of that, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated that 27 percent of the people in the individual market have existing conditions that would have been uninsured before the ACA.

The AHCA eliminates cost sharing and offers a stingier tax credit to defray premium costs, likely resulting in higher overall health costs that may make insurance unaffordable for many people. (The CBO projected that 24 million more people would be without health insurance than under current law by 2026.)

Then, if people get sick, they may suddenly find themselves for a year being priced on their illness if they live in a state that sought a waiver. Depending on the approach taken by a state, some people might find it difficult to keep up their coverage for a full year before they qualify for prices at the community rate.

A big question is whether the funding to cover these folks is adequate. High-risk pools were big money losers and underfunded in the pre-Obamacare days, even though many had restrictions, high premiums and waiting lists. A $5 billion federal pool, established by the ACA as a bridge to the creation of the exchanges in 2013, covered about 100,000 people but was suspended when it ran out of money.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning group that opposes the AHCA, produced an analysis that indicated that even with the additional $8 billion, the maximum enrollment the AHCA’s funds would cover is about 700,000 people. If just 5 percent of the people currently in the individual market ended up in high-risk pools – and all states sought a waiver – that would overwhelm the proposed funding.

Avalere Health, a consulting firm, said in an analysis that $23 billion is specifically allocated in the bill for helping people with pre-existing conditions. That would cover about 110,000 people. If states allocated all of the other available funding, that would cover 600,00 people. “Approximately 2.2 million enrollees in the individual market today have some form of pre-existing chronic condition,” the analysis said.

When states had high-risk pools, people in those pools represented just 2 percent of the non-group health insurance participants. But given the limitations of those funds, that percentage may not be a good guide for what would happen under the AHCA.

Whenever health-care laws are changed, there are unknown and unintended consequences. The current system does not take into account a person’s health status when assessing premiums. But, as a Brookings Institution analysis suggested, under the AHCA’s provisions, healthy people might have an incentive to join plans based on health status. That would leave sicker people in the community rated plans, which in turn would face higher premiums. Over time, that could make the community rating meaningless. Another possible outcome: If the pool of money is used to pay insurance companies for the difference in costs for patients with preexisting conditions, there may be little incentive for companies to keep their prices low; the difference would be made up by U.S. taxpayers.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to health care, readers should be wary about claims that important changes in health-care coverage are without consequences and that people are “protected” – or that the changes will result in massive dislocation and turmoil. There are always winners and losers in a bill of this size. In this case, if the bill ever became law, much would depend on unknown policy decisions by individual states – and then how those decisions are implemented.

How the Affordable Care Act Drove Down Personal Bankruptcy

Consumer Reports

How the Affordable Care Act Drove Down Personal Bankruptcy

Allen St. John, April 24, 2017

As legislators and the executive branch renew their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act this week, they might want to keep in mind a little-known financial consequence of the ACA: Since its adoption, far fewer Americans have taken the extreme step of filing for personal bankruptcy.

Filings have dropped about 50 percent, from 1,536,799 in 2010 to 770,846 in 2016 (see chart below). Those years also represent the time frame when the ACA took effect. Although courts never ask people to declare why they’re filing, many bankruptcy and legal experts agree that medical bills had been a leading cause of personal bankruptcy before public healthcare coverage expanded under the ACA. Unlike other causes of debt, medical bills are often unexpected, involuntary, and large.

“If you’re uninsured or underinsured, you can run up a huge debt in a short period of time,” says Lois Lupica, a bankruptcy expert and Maine Law Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Maine School of Law.

So did the rise of the ACA—which helped some 20 million more Americans get health insurance—cause the decline in bankruptcies?

The many experts we interviewed also pointed to two other contributing factors: an improving economy and changes to bankruptcy laws in 2005 that made it more difficult and costly to file. However, they almost all agreed that expanded health coverage played a major role in the marked, recent decline.

Some of the most important financial protections of the ACA apply to all consumers, whether they get their coverage through ACA exchanges or the private insurance marketplace. These provisions include mandated coverage for preexisting conditions and, on most covered benefits, an end to annual and lifetime coverage caps. Aspects of the law, including provisions for young people to be covered by a family policy until age 26, went into effect in 2010 and 2011, before the full rollout of the ACA in 2014.

“It’s absolutely remarkable,” says Jim Molleur, a Maine-based bankruptcy attorney with 20 years of experience. “We’re not getting people with big medical bills, chronically sick people who would hit those lifetime caps or be denied because of pre-existing conditions. They seemed to disappear almost overnight once ACA kicked in.”

The first attempt to repeal and replace the ACA, in March, failed to gain enough Congressional support and never came to a vote.

Then in April, details of a new replacement plan were released. Although President Donald Trump has said that this new version, like the first bill that was pulled from consideration, will cover pre-existing conditions, the revised law gives states broad latitude to allow insurance companies to increase rates for consumers with an existing illness.

Since the start of the year, more than 2,000 consumers have answered an online questionnaire from Consumer Reports’ advocacy and mobilization team, sharing their experiences with the ACA. Katie Weber of Seattle was one of them.

In 2011, she had just landed her first job out of college, as a teacher with AmeriCorps, she explains in a phone interview. That’s when the unusual numbness in her hand began, which she—and her doctor—at first mistook for a pinched nerve. Then came debilitating headaches and nausea and, ultimately, a diagnosis of medulloblastoma, a fast-growing cancerous brain tumor.

The treatment for her tumor was straightforward: surgery, radiation, then chemotherapy. Figuring out how to pay for it was much less clear. She worried that the insurance she had through AmeriCorps wouldn’t cover enough of her bills.

“My dad said to me, ‘Your health is the most important thing. If you have to declare bankruptcy at age 23, it’s no big deal,’” Weber says.

Because of the ACA, she says, it never came to that. After her year with AmeriCorps, the new healthcare law enabled her to get coverage under her parents’ insurance plan.

The ACA provisions required that the family’s insurance company cover her even though she had already been diagnosed with cancer. That would not have been the case before the ACA, which mandates the coverage of pre-existing conditions for all consumers.

Later, when she aged out of her parents’ insurance, Weber was able to enroll in Apple Health, Washington state’s version of Medicaid, a program that was expanded once the ACA was passed. That coverage, she says, has been crucial to her financial and medical well-being, especially once the cancer returned last fall.

Weber says she now spends more time discussing treatment options and less time worrying how she’ll pay for MRIs and drugs. These are covered in full under her Apple Health policy.

“Cancer is really expensive,” she says. “My insurance saved my life.”

Numbers Plummet

If you want further testimony about how much personal bankruptcies have dropped over the past decade, talk to Susan Grossberg, a Springfield, Mass., attorney.

For more than 20 years she has helped consumers push the financial reset button when debt triggered by divorce, unemployment, or a costly illness or medical episode became too much to handle. “Medical debt can get really big really quickly,” Grossberg says. “When you’re in the emergency room they’re not checking your credit score while they’re caring for you.”

With the advent of the ACA—and before that, expanded state healthcare in Massachusetts—she says fewer clients with large medical debts walked through her door.

Grossberg adds that her bankruptcy business has slowed so much that she has been forced to take on other kinds of legal work—landlord-tenant and housing discrimination cases—to cover her own bills.

The American Bankruptcy Institute suggested that veteran Chicago bankruptcy attorney and trustee David Leibowitz could also help parse the reasons for the decade long decline.

First, he says, the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 made it more difficult for consumers to file for bankruptcy. The law required credit counseling and income verification and forced many consumers to seek protection under Chapter 13, which restructures, but does not eliminate, most debt. The piles of paperwork also meant most filers needed a lawyer, which made bankruptcy more costly and therefore not an option for many poor consumers.

Then there was the economy. After a slow and steady recovery following the housing crisis of 2008, Leibowitz explains that American consumers generally had fewer problems with their mortgages, better employment prospects, and greater access to credit, which made them less likely to file.

The final factor, according to Leibowitz, has been the ACA, which afforded health coverage to many more consumers and expanded protections for all.

Of course, not everyone sees such a direct connection between the decline in bankruptcies and the emergence of the ACA.

Thomas P. Miller, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of “Why ObamaCare is Wrong for America” (HarperCollins, 2011), cautioned against “reaching broad conclusions” because the subject is so complex.

“Certainly there are fewer people declaring bankruptcy, and certainly fewer are declaring bankruptcy because of healthcare spending,” he says. But his earlier research suggested that some studies exaggerated the degree to which high healthcare bills cause bankruptcies. “They tended to reflect other problems with credit card balances well beyond healthcare,” he says. “It stems from multiple causes.”

Figuring Out Why

Over the past decade, determining the cause-and-effect relationship between medical debt and bankruptcy has become a political football, particularly during the years the Obama administration was trying to pass the ACA through Congress.

The truth is that it’s not that easy to determine how many bankruptcies are caused by medical debt. Examining the paperwork doesn’t always offer insight because debtors often juggle their indebtedness, for example, using a credit card to pay an outstanding medical bill while leaving other debts unpaid.

But a 2014 study from Daniel Austin, a bankruptcy attorney and, at the time, a professor at the Northeastern University School of Law, offers some of the most in-depth research to date.

Austin and his team selected a nationwide group of 100 bankruptcy filers meant to represent a cross-section of the U.S. population, studied their paperwork, then followed up with a survey asking filers, basically, “Why?”

His team’s research found that medical debt is the single largest factor in personal bankruptcy. First, Austin analyzed the paperwork of individual case files, which suggested that medical bills were a factor in 18 percent of filings. But when he directly asked the same filers, in a survey, the number was even higher, with 25 percent citing medical bills as a factor in their decision to file bankruptcy.

In addition to the nationwide group, Austin isolated a group of 100 bankruptcy filers from Massachusetts. Why Massachusetts? Because its citizens, starting in 2006, had been covered by a comprehensive state healthcare program similar to the ACA known as Romneycare, after the state’s former governor, Mitt Romney.

The differences between the two groups were striking. Even though the Massachusetts filers owed substantially more in unsecured debt (that is, debt not backed by a home, a car, or another asset) than their counterparts in other states, they reported less than half as much medical debt, which is also unsecured.

“The average medical debt in Massachusetts in 2013 was relatively low at just $3,041 (6 percent of total unsecured debt) compared to $8,594 (20 percent of total unsecured debt) nationwide,” Austin writes in his 2014 study, portions of which were published in the Maine Law Review.

“Only about 9 percent of Massachusetts debtors felt their bankruptcy filing was a result of medical bills,” Austin explains. “This compares to 25 percent for debtors from [other] jurisdictions.” Austin’s research found that comprehensive medical coverage in Massachusetts had all but eliminated medical bills as a cause for bankruptcy.

“Not only in absolute numbers—they had much smaller medical debt—but psychologically, medical debt did not loom nearly as large for people in Massachusetts as it did for other people in other states.” And in 2010, four years after Romneycare began, the state had a bankruptcy rate that was about 30 percent lower than that of other states.

In Search of Certainty, Consistency

At its most basic level, health insurance allows consumers to pay for the medical care they need. Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines how well the system is working by surveying Americans and asking a simple but powerful question: Did you have problems paying medical bills in the last 12 months?

The percentage of those reporting problems has dropped from 21.3 percent of households when they first asked the question in 2011 to 16.2 percent in 2016. That’s almost 13 million fewer Americans no longer facing collection notices from a doctor or hospital.

“It’s been happening across the board, by race, by age, by insurance status, by gender,” says Robin Cohen, the study’s lead author.

But insurance is also about peace of mind. And judging from the consumers who have shared their stories with Consumer Reports, that certainty is in short supply as the fate of the ACA is decided. People are wondering what comes next: Repeal? Replace? Improve? Retain and neglect? No one really knows the answer. Americans are concerned about how the future of healthcare will affect them and their families.

In CR’s Consumer Voices survey in January 2017, 55 percent of consumers said they lacked confidence that they or their loved ones would be able to afford insurance to secure that care.

Don Shope of Ocean View, Del., said the availability of ACA coverage gave him the confidence to leave a corporate job and start his own consulting business. But now, with the ACA’s future in limbo, he and his wife are watching the action in Washington and worrying that they might have to return to jobs with benefits.

“I’m not a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican,” Shope said in a phone interview. “Our biggest concern is that with repeal and replace we’re going to be left high and dry.”

He also believes in expanded health coverage for all. “If any American is sick, we should be willing to take care of them,” Shope says. “It’s the right thing to do. Economics and profit shouldn’t be part of the healthcare equation.”

Hanging On Every Dip and Turn

And then there’s Kristin Couch, who has channeled the uncertainty into her own brand of activism.

“I was kind of anxious,” Couch says about the day in March when Congress was set to vote on a less robust bill that would replace the ACA.

The 31-year-old public relations executive, of Gainesville, Ga., has started to follow health-care politics in the intense, almost obsessive way some people follow sports. The morning after Election Day, she called the offices of her local congressional representatives, urging them to preserve the protections the ACA offers.

Couch began caring about healthcare as a high school senior when she was diagnosed with lupus and since then has become something of a reluctant expert on how to manage not only her treatment but also the insurance that pays for it.

With friends and neighbors she talks about the law in simple but personal terms. “I tell people, ‘I have a pre-existing condition, and this has helped me,’” she says of the ACA. Couch follows the healthcare debate in Washington so closely because she knows firsthand what happens when you don’t have adequate coverage.

Couch remembers the time, before the ACA, when a new immuno-suppressive drug that wasn’t covered by her policy became available. “It was expensive,” she explained in an interview, “but it worked, and I knew I needed it. Every month I’d just put it on a credit card. When your medication is thousands of dollars a month, that’s the start of being in debt.” She considered bankruptcy but ultimately worked her way out from under the pile of medical bills.

As a result of the ACA, her coverage shifted again when her employer no longer offered a traditional plan and she had to switch to one with a high $3,000 deductible. Initially she was stunned by her out-of-pocket costs, but she quickly realized that her total costs would be capped once she’d met that threshold.

“It seemed scary and it seemed different,” she explains. “But it actually saved me money.” And now, she says, “I don’t have to worry about how much a new drug costs.”

So on the March day the House of Representatives was supposed to vote on repealing the ACA, she worried that the insurance she’d come to depend on was about to be yanked away. Only after emerging from a client meeting did she learn the vote had been canceled. “I started crying I was so happy,” Couch recalls. “It’s like a weight has lifted.”

But Couch’s relief was short-lived. Now she’s back to paying close attention to the rhetoric and vote-counting deals in Washington, awaiting another possible vote on the newly revised plan. “I’m still optimistic,” she said this week. “I think enough people will stand up and fight for the coverage.”

Consumer Reports, Inc.

May Day 2017….International Workers Day

May 1, 2017 John Hanno

May Day 2017….International Workers Day

Many parts of the world recognize May Day, as International Workers Day. For us in Chicago, May Day represents the very beginning of immigrant workers solidarity and the fight for better working conditions. On May Day 1886, more than 200,000 U.S. workers engaged in a nationwide strike for an eight-hour work day. The Chicago protests took place over several days. On May 3rd, a strike at the McCormick Reaper plant turned violent. On May 4th, a proposed non-violent meeting turned into what was to become known as the Haymarket Riot and Massacre. This peaceful rally was in support of workers throughout the nation, striking for an eight-hour work day and for several workers who had been killed the day before. When the police attempted to break up the meeting, someone threw a bomb. The blast from the bomb and the following gunfire set off the rioting and caused the deaths of seven police officers, four civilians and scores of people were injured.

Eight anarchists were subsequently convicted of conspiracy. Seven were sentenced to death and one received a 15 year prison term. 4 of those were hung, 2 had their sentences commuted to life by the Illinois Governor and one committed suicide.

The site of the Haymarket Square riot on North Desplaines Street, was designated a Chicago Landmark in 1992 and the defendant’s burial site in Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.

Workers congregate at the square every year to pay tribute to our brothers and sisters who fought and died for the workers rights, just working conditions and living wages some of us still enjoy today. But organized labor participation is at it’s lowest point in more than 4 decades. Workers and their living wage jobs, in red states throughout the nation, are again under siege by Republi-con controlled legislatures and governors and plutocrats like Trump, the Koch brothers and other billionaires bent on stepping up the anti-labor campaign President Regan and the Republi-con’s launched against America’s middle class in the 1970’s. Their single minded obsession with attacking union rights like collective bargaining and passing “right to work” for less laws will not “Make America Great Again.” It will take America back to the middle of the 1800’s.

Trump often criticized President Obama for sluggish GDP growth. Trump has repeatedly lied to his voters, claiming that under his leadership, the economy would see 3, 4 or even 5% GDP growth. But the U.S. economy grew at just a 0.7 percent annual rate in the first quarter of this year, which is the Trump administration’s first quarter. The experts blame anemic auto sales for the slowdown. Who does Trump and the billionaires think can afford these products and services if they continue to attack what’s left of the middle class?

Most American workers, especially union and organized labor, government workers, teachers, immigrant farm workers and minimum wage workers, in their sights and under attack, will not feel like dancing around the May Pole today. John Hanno

Haymarket affair, From Wikipedia,

“Haymarket Affair” May 4, 1886, Chicago, Illinois

Strikes, protests and demonstrations for an eight-hour work day.

Principle parties: Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions. The Chicago Police Department.

Lead figures: August Spies, Albert R. Parsons, Samuel Fielden,

Carter Harrison Sr. and John Bonfield.

Casualties and arrests:

4 dead, 70 plus injured and 100 plus arrested for the demonstrators.

7 deaths and 60 injured police.

The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre or Haymarket riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on Tuesday May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day and in reaction to the killing of several workers the previous day by the police. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; scores of others were wounded.

In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were convicted of conspiracy. The evidence was that one of the defendants may have built the bomb, but none of those on trial had thrown it. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. The death sentences of two of the defendants were commuted by Illinois governor Richard J. Oglesby to terms of life in prison, and another committed suicide in jail rather than face the gallows. The other four were hanged on November 11, 1887. In 1893, Illinois’ new governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining defendants and criticized the trial.

The Haymarket affair is generally considered significant as the origin of international May Day observances for workers. The site of the incident was designated a Chicago Landmark in 1992, and a public sculpture was dedicated there in 2004. In addition, the Haymarket Martyr’s Monument at the defendants’ burial site in nearby Forest Park was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.

“No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today. Although the rally is included in American history textbooks, very few present the event accurately or point out its significance,” according to labor studies professor William J. Adelman.

Background

Following the Civil War, particularly following the Depression of 1873-79, there was a rapid expansion of industrial production in the United States. Chicago was a major industrial center and tens of thousands of German and Bohemian immigrants were employed at about $1.50 a day. American workers worked on average slightly over 60 hours, during a six-day work week. The city became a center for many attempts to organize labor’s demands for better working conditions. Employers responded with anti-union measures, such as firing and blacklisting union members, locking out workers, recruiting strikebreakers; employing spies, thugs, and private security forces and exacerbating ethnic tensions in order to divide the workers. Mainstream newspapers supported business interests, and were opposed by the labor and immigrant press. During the economic slowdown between 1882 and 1886, socialist and anarchist organizations were active. Membership of the Knights of Labor, which rejected socialism and radicalism, but supported the 8-hour work day, grew from 70,000 in 1884 to over 700,000 by 1886. In Chicago, the anarchist movement of several thousand, mostly immigrant, workers centered about the German-language newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung (“Workers’ Times”), edited by August Spies. Other anarchists operated a militant revolutionary force with an armed section that was equipped with guns and explosives. Its revolutionary strategy centered around the belief that successful operations against the police and the seizure of major industrial centers would result in massive public support by workers, start a revolution, destroy capitalism, and establish a socialist economy.

May Day parade and strikes

In October 1884, a convention held by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions unanimously set May 1, 1886, as the date by which the eight-hour work day would become standard. As the chosen date approached, U.S. labor unions prepared for a general strike in support of the eight-hour day.

On Saturday, May 1, thousands of workers went on strike and rallies were held throughout the United States, with the cry, “Eight-hour day with no cut in pay.” Estimates of the number of striking workers across the U.S. range from 300,000 to half a million. In New York City the number of demonstrators was estimated at 10,000 and in Detroit at 11,000. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some 10,000 workers turned out. In Chicago, the movement’s center, an estimated 30,000-to-40,000 workers had gone on strike and there were perhaps twice as many people out on the streets participating in various demonstrations and marches, as, for example, a march by 10,000 men employed in the Chicago lumber yards. Though participants in these events added up to 80,000, it is disputed whether there was a march of that number down Michigan Avenue led by anarchist Albert Parsons, founder of the International Working People’s Association [IWPA], his wife Lucy and their children.

The first flier calling for a rally in the Haymarket on May 4. (left) and the revised flier for the rally. (right)

The words “Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!” were removed from the revised flier.

On May 3, striking workers in Chicago met near the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant. Union molders at the plant had been locked out since early February and the predominantly Irish-American workers at McCormick had come under attack from Pinkerton guards during an earlier strike action in 1885. This event, along with the eight-hour militancy of McCormick workers, had gained the strikers some respect and notoriety around the city. By the time of the 1886 general strike, strikebreakers entering the McCormick plant were under protection from a garrison of 400 police officers. Although half of the replacement workers defected to the general strike on May 1, McCormick workers continued to harass strikebreakers as they crossed the picket lines.

Speaking to a rally outside the plant on May 3, August Spies advised the striking workers to “hold together, to stand by their union, or they would not succeed.” Well-planned and coordinated, the general strike to this point had remained largely nonviolent. When the end-of-the-workday bell sounded, however, a group of workers surged to the gates to confront the strikebreakers. Despite calls for calm by Spies, the police fired on the crowd. Two McCormick workers were killed (although some newspaper accounts said there were six fatalities). Spies would later testify, “I was very indignant. I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement.”

Outraged by this act of police violence, local anarchists quickly printed and distributed fliers calling for a rally the following day at Haymarket Square (also called the Haymarket), which was then a bustling commercial center near the corner of Randolph Street and Desplaines Street. Printed in German and English, the fliers claimed that the police had murdered the strikers on behalf of business interests and urged workers to seek justice. The first batch of fliers contain the words Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force! When Spies saw the line, he said he would not speak at the rally unless the words were removed from the flier. All but a few hundred of the fliers were destroyed, and new fliers were printed without the offending words. More than 20,000 copies of the revised flier were distributed.

Rally at Haymarket Square

The rally began peacefully under a light rain on the evening of May 4. August Spies, Albert Parsons, and Samuel Fielden spoke to a crowd estimated variously between 600 and 3,000 while standing in an open wagon adjacent to the square on Des Plaines Street. A large number of on-duty police officers watched from nearby.

Paul Avrich, a historian specializing in the study of anarchism, quotes Spies as saying:

There seems to prevail the opinion in some quarters that this meeting has been called for the purpose of inaugurating a riot, hence these warlike preparations on the part of so-called ‘law and order.’ However, let me tell you at the beginning that this meeting has not been called for any such purpose. The object of this meeting is to explain the general situation of the eight-hour movement and to throw light upon various incidents in connection with it.

Following Spies’ speech, the crowd was addressed by Parsons, the Alabama-born editor of the radical English-language weekly The Alarm. The crowd was so calm that Mayor Carter Harrison, Sr., who had stopped by to watch, walked home early. Parsons spoke for almost an hour before standing down in favor of the last speaker of the evening, the British socialist Samuel Fielden, who delivered a brief ten-minute address. Many of the crowd had already left as the weather was deteriorating.

A New York Times article, with the dateline May 4, and headlined “Rioting and Bloodshed in the Streets of Chicago … Twelve Policemen Dead or Dying”, reported that Fielden spoke for 20 minutes, alleging that his words grew “wilder and more violent as he proceeded”. Another New York Times article, headlined “Anarchy’s Red Hand” and dated May 6, opens with: “The villainous teachings of the Anarchists bore bloody fruit in Chicago tonight and before daylight at least a dozen stalwart men will have laid down their lives as a tribute to the doctrine of Herr Johann Most.” It referred to the strikers as a “mob” and used quotation marks around the term “workingmen.”

Bombing and gunfire

At about 10:30 pm, just as Fielden was finishing his speech, police arrived en masse, marching in formation towards the speakers’ wagon, and ordered the rally to disperse. Fielden insisted that the meeting was peaceful. Police Inspector John Bonfield, proclaimed:

I command you [addressing the speaker] in the name of the law to desist and you [addressing the crowd] to disperse.

A home-made bomb with a brittle metal casing filled with dynamite and ignited by a fuse was thrown into the path of the advancing police. Its fuse briefly sputtered, then the bomb exploded, killing policeman Mathias J. Degan with flying metal fragments and mortally wounding six other officers.

Witnesses maintained that immediately after the bomb blast there was an exchange of gunshots between police and demonstrators. Accounts vary widely as to who fired first and whether any of the crowd fired at the police. Historian Paul Avrich maintains that the police fired on the fleeing demonstrators, reloaded and then fired again, killing four and wounding as many as 70 people. What is not disputed is that in less than five minutes the square was empty except for the casualties. According to the May 4 New York Times demonstrators began firing at the police, who then returned fire. In his report on the incident, Inspector Bonfield wrote that he “gave the order to cease firing, fearing that some of our men, in the darkness might fire into each other”. An anonymous police official told the Chicago Tribune, “A very large number of the police were wounded by each other’s revolvers. … It was every man for himself, and while some got two or three squares away, the rest emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.”

In all, seven policemen and at least four workers were killed. Another policeman died two years after the incident from complications related to injuries received on that day. About 60 policemen were wounded in the incident. They were carried, along with some other wounded people, into a nearby police station. Police captain Michael Schaack later wrote that the number of wounded workers was “largely in excess of that on the side of the police”. The Chicago Herald described a scene of “wild carnage” and estimated at least fifty dead or wounded civilians lay in the streets. It is unclear how many civilians were wounded since many were afraid to seek medical attention, fearing arrest. They found aid where they could.

Aftermath and red scare

A harsh anti-union clampdown followed the Haymarket incident. There was a massive outpouring of community and business support for the police and many thousands of dollars were donated to funds for their medical care and to assist their efforts. The entire labor and immigrant community, particularly Germans and Bohemians, came under suspicion. Police raids were carried out on homes and offices of suspected anarchists. Scores of suspects, many only remotely related to the Haymarket affair, were arrested. Casting legal requirements such as search warrants aside, Chicago police squads subjected the labor activists of Chicago to an eight-week shakedown, ransacking their meeting halls and places of business. The emphasis was on the speakers at the Haymarket rally and the newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung. A small group of anarchists were discovered to have been engaged in making bombs on the same day as the incident, including round ones like the one used in Haymarket Square.

Newspaper reports declared that anarchist agitators were to blame for the “riot”, a view adopted by an alarmed public. As time passed, press reports and illustrations of the incident became more elaborate. Coverage was national, then international. Among property owners, the press, and other elements of society, a consensus developed that suppression of anarchist agitation was necessary. While for their part, union organizations such as The Knights of Labor and craft unions were quick to disassociate themselves from the anarchist movement and to repudiate violent tactics as self-defeating. Many workers, on the other hand, believed that men of the Pinkerton agency were responsible because of the agency’s tactic of secretly infiltrating labor groups and its sometimes violent methods of strike breaking.

Legal proceedings

Investigation

The police assumed that an anarchist had thrown the bomb as part of a planned conspiracy; their problem was how to prove it. On the morning of May 5, they raided the offices of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, arresting its editor August Spies, and his brother (who was not charged). Also arrested were editorial assistant Michael Schwab and Adolph Fischer, a typesetter. A search of the premises resulted in the discovery of the “Revenge Poster” and other evidence considered incriminating by the prosecution.

On May 7 police searched the premises of Louis Lingg where they found a number of bombs and bomb-making materials. Lingg’s landlord William Seliger was also arrested but cooperated with police and identified Lingg as a bomb maker and was not charged. An associate of Spies, Balthazar Rau, suspected as the bomber, was traced to Omaha and brought back to Chicago. After interrogation, Rau offered to cooperate with police. He alleged that the defendants had experimented with dynamite bombs and accused them of having published what he said was a code word, “Ruhe” (“peace”), in the Arbeiter-Zeitung as a call to arms at Haymarket Square.

Defendants

Rudolf Schnaubelt, the police’s lead suspect as the bomb thrower, was arrested twice early on and released. By May 14, when it became apparent he had played a significant role in the event, he had fled the country. William Seliger, who had turned state’s evidence and testified for the prosecution, was not charged. On June 4, 1886, seven other suspects, however, were indicted by the grand jury and stood trial for being accessories to the murder of Degan. Of these, only two had been present when the bomb exploded. Newspaper editor August Spies and Samuel Fielden had spoken at the peaceful rally and were stepping down from the speaker’s wagon in compliance with police orders to disperse just before the bomb went off. Two others had been present at the beginning of the rally but had left and were at Zepf’s Hall, an anarchist rendezvous, at the time of the explosion. They were: Arbeiter-Zeitung typesetter Adolph Fischer and the well-known activist Albert Parsons, who had spoken for an hour at the Haymarket rally before going to Zepf’s. Parsons, who believed that the evidence against them all was weak, subsequently voluntarily turned himself in, in solidarity with the accused. A third man, Spies’s assistant editor Michael Schwab (who was the brother-in-law of Schnaubelt) was arrested since he was speaking at another rally at the time of the bombing (he was also later pardoned). Not directly tied to the Haymarket rally, but arrested because they were notorious for their militant radicalism were George Engel (who was at home playing cards on that day), and Lousi Lingg, the hot-headed bomb maker denounced by his associate, Seliger. Another defendant who had not been present that day was Oscar Neebe, an American-born citizen of German descent who was associated with the Arbeiter-Zeitung and had attempted to revive it in the aftermath of the Haymarket riot.

Of the eight defendants, five – Spies, Fischer, Engel, Lingg and Schwab – were German-born immigrants; a sixth, Neebe, was a U.S.-born citizen of German descent. Only the remaining two, Parsons and Fielden, born in the U.S. and England, respectively, were of British heritage.

Trial

The trial, Illinois vs. August Spies et al., began on June 21, 1886, and went on until August 11. The trial was conducted in an atmosphere of extreme prejudice by both public and media toward the defendants. It was presided over by Judge Joseph Gary. Judge Gary displayed open hostility to the defendants, consistently ruled for the prosecution, and failed to maintain decorum. A motion to try the defendants separately was denied. The defense counsel included Sigmund Zeisler, William Perkins Black, William Foster, and Moses Salomon. Selection of the jury was extraordinarily difficult, lasting three weeks, and nearly one thousand people called. All union members and anyone who expressed sympathy toward socialism were dismissed. In the end a jury of 12 was seated, most of whom confessed prejudice towards the defendants. Despite their professions of prejudice Judge Gary seated those who declared that despite their prejudices they would acquit if the evidence supported it, refusing to dismiss for prejudice. Eventually the peremptory challenges of the defense were exhausted. Frustrated by the hundreds of jurors who were being dismissed, a bailiff was appointed who selected jurors rather than calling them at random. The bailiff proved prejudiced himself and selected jurors who seemed likely to convict based on their social position and attitudes toward the defendants. The prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, argued that since the defendants had not actively discouraged the person who had thrown the bomb, they were therefore equally responsible as conspirators. The jury heard the testimony of 118 people, including 54 members of the Chicago Police Department and the defendants Fielden, Schwab, Spies and Parsons. Albert Parsons’ brother claimed there was evidence linking the Pinkertons to the bomb. This reflected a widespread belief among the strikers.

Exhibit 129a from the Haymarket trial: Chemists testified that the bombs found in Lingg’s apartment, including this one, resembled the chemical signature of shrapnel from the Haymarket bomb.

Police investigators under Captain Michael Schaack had a lead fragment removed from a policeman’s wounds chemically analyzed. They reported that the lead used in the casing matched the casings of bombs found in Lingg’s home. A metal nut and fragments of the casing taken from the wound also roughly matched bombs made by Lingg. Schaack concluded, on the basis of interviews, that the anarchists had been experimenting for years with dynamite and other explosives, refining the design of their bombs before coming up with the effective one used at the Haymarket.

At the last minute, when it was discovered that instructions for manslaughter had not been included in the submitted instructions, the jury was called back, and the instructions were given.

Verdict and contemporary reactions

The jury returned guilty verdicts for all eight defendants. Before being sentenced, Neebe told the court that Schaack’s officers were among the city’s worst gangs, ransacking houses and stealing money and watches. Schaack laughed and Neebe retorted, “You need not laugh about it, Captain Schaack. You are one of them. You are an anarchist, as you understand it. You are all anarchists, in this sense of the word, I must say.” Judge Gary sentenced seven of the defendants to death by hanging and Neebe to 15 years in prison. The sentencing provoked outrage from labor and workers’ movements and their supporters, resulting in protests around the world, and elevating the defendants to the status of martyrs, especially abroad. Portrayals of the anarchists as bloodthirsty foreign fanatics in the press along with the 1889 publication of Captain Schaack’s sensational account, Anarchy and Anarchism, on the other hand, inspired widespread public fear and revulsion against the strikers and general anti-immigrant feeling, polarizing public opinion.

In an article datelined May 4, entitled “Anarchy’s Red Hand”, The New York Times had described the incident as the “bloody fruit” of “the villainous teachings of the Anarchists.” The Chicago Times described the defendants as “arch counselors of riot, pillage, incendiarism and murder”; other reporters described them as “bloody brutes”, “red ruffians”, “dynamarchists”, “bloody monsters”, “cowards”, “cutthroats”, “thieves”, “assassins”, and “fiends”. The journalist George Frederic Parsons wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly in which he identified the fears of middle-class Americans concerning labor radicalism, and asserted that the workers had only themselves to blame for their troubles. Edward Aveling remarked, “If these men are ultimately hanged, it will be the Chicago Tribune that has done it.” Schaack, who had led the investigation, was dismissed from the police force for allegedly having fabricated evidence in the case but was reinstated in 1892.

Appeals

The case was appealed in 1887 to the Supreme Court of Illinois, then to the United States Supreme Court where the defendants were represented by John Randolph Tucker, Roger Atkinson Pryor, General Benjamin F. Butler and William P. Black. and The petition for certiorari was denied.

Commutations and suicide

After the appeals had been exhausted, Illinois Governor Richard James Oglesby commuted Fielden’s and Schwab’s sentences to life in prison on November 10, 1887. On the eve of his scheduled execution, Lingg committed suicide in his cell with a smuggled blasting cap which he reportedly held in his mouth like a cigar (the blast blew off half his face and he survived in agony for six hours).

Executions

The next day (November 11, 1887) four defendants—Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies—were taken to the gallows in white robes and hoods. They sang the Marseillaise, then the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. Family members including Lucy Parsons, who attempted to see them for the last time, were arrested and searched for bombs (none were found). According to witnesses, in the moments before the men were hanged, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” In their last words, Engel and Fischer called out, “Hurrah for anarchism!” Parsons then requested to speak, but he was cut off when the signal was given to open the trap door. Witnesses reported that the condemned men did not die immediately when they dropped, but strangled to death slowly, a sight which left the spectators visibly shaken.

Identity of the bomber

Notwithstanding the convictions for conspiracy, no actual bomber was ever brought to trial, “and no lawyerly explanation could ever make a conspiracy trial without the main perpetrator in the conspiracy seem completely legitimate.” Historians such as James Joll and Timothy Messer-Kruse say the evidence points to Rudolph Schnaubelt, brother-in-law of Schwab, as the likely perpetrator. Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States also pointed towards Schnaubelt, suggesting he was a provocateur, posing as an anarchist, who threw the bomb so police would have a pretext to arrest leaders of Chicago’s anarchist movement. However, Paul Avrich disputes this claim as being “sheer speculation and utterly without foundation.” Avrich argues that Schnaubelt’s appearance did not match the description of the bomber and that his behavior was inconsistent with either being the culprit or a mole.

Documents

An extensive collection of documents relating to the Haymarket affair and the legal proceedings related to it, The Haymarket Affair Digital Collection, has been created by the Chicago Historical Society.

Pardon and historical characterization

The Altgeld Monument, by Borglum, was erected by the Illinois Legislature in Lincoln Park, Chicago in 1915.

Among supporters of the labor movement in the United States and abroad and others, the trial was widely believed to have been unfair, and even a serious miscarriage of justice. Prominent people such as novelist William Dean Howells; celebrated attorney Clarence Darrow; poet and playwright Oscar Wilde; and playwright George Benard Shaw strongly condemned it. On June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, the progressive governor of Illinois, himself a German immigrant, signed pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab, calling them victims of “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge” and noting that the state “has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it.” Altgeld also faulted the city of Chicago for failing to hold Pinkerton guards responsible for repeated use of lethal violence against striking workers. Altgeld’s actions concerning labor were used to defeat his reelection.

Soon after the trial, anarchist Dyer Lum wrote a history of the trial critical of the prosecution. In 1888, George McLean, and in 1889, police captain Michael Shack, wrote accounts from the opposite perspective. Awaiting sentencing, each of the defendants wrote their own autobiographies (edited and published by Philip Foner in 1969), and later activist Lucy Parsons published a biography of her condemned husband Albert Parsons. Fifty years after the event, Henry Davis wrote a history, which preceded another scholarly treatment by Paul Avrich in 1984, and a “social history” of the era by Bruce C. Nelson in 1988. In 2006, labor historian James Green wrote a popular history.

Christopher Thale writes in the Encyclopedia of Chicago that lacking credible evidence regarding the bombing, “…the prosecution focused on the writings and speeches of the defendants.” He further notes that the conspiracy charge was legally unprecedented, the Judge was “partisan,” and all the jurors admitted prejudice against the defendants. Historian Carl Smith writes, “The visceral feelings of fear and anger surrounding the trial ruled out anything but the pretense of justice right from the outset.” Smith notes that scholars have long considered the trial a “notorious” “miscarriage of justice.” In a review somewhat more critical of the defendants, historian Jon Teaford concludes that “[t]he tragedy of Haymarket is the American justice system did not protect the damn fools who most needed that protection… It is the damn fools who talk too much and too wildly who are most in need of protection from the state.” In 2011, labor historian Tomothy Messer-Kruse published a history. Based on his examination of the trial transcripts and other archival material, he concludes there is abundant evidence connecting defendants to advocacy of violence and preparations for it. He argues that Chicago’s anarchists were indeed “part of an international terrorist network and did hatch a conspiracy to attack police with bombs and guns that May Day weekend”; and he calls the evidence establishing the guilt of “most of the defendants” “overwhelming.” Moreover, Messer-Kruse opines that the trial was fair “by the standards of the age” and the jury representative. According to him, “The tragic end of the story was the product not of prosecutorial eagerness to see the anarchists hang, but largely due to a combination of the incompetence of the defendant’s lawyers and their willingness to use the trial to vindicate anarchism rather than to save the necks of their clients.

During the late 20th century, scholars doing research into the Haymarket affair were surprised to learn that much of the primary source documentation relating to the incident (beside materials concerning the trial) was not in Chicago, but had been transferred to then-communist East Berlin.

Effects on the labor movement and May Day

The Haymarket affair was a setback for the American labor movement and its fight for the eight-hour day. Yet it also can be seen as strengthening its resistance, especially in Chicago, where, as historian Nathan Fine points out, trade union activities continued to show signs of growth and vitality, culminating later in 1886 with the establishment of the Labor Party of Chicago.

Fine observes:

[T]he fact is that despite police repression, newspaper incitement to hysteria, and organization of the possessing classes, which followed the throwing of the bomb on May 4, the Chicago wage earners only united their forces and stiffened their resistance. The conservative and radical central bodies – there were two each of the trade unions and two also of the Knights of Labor — the socialists and the anarchists, the single taxers and the reformers, the native born…and the foreign born Germans, Bohemians, and Scandinavians, all got together for the first time on the political field in the summer following the Haymarket affair…. [T]he Knights of Labor doubled its membership, reaching 40,000 in the fall of 1886. On Labor Day the number of Chicago workers in parade led the country.

On the first anniversary of the event, May 4, 1887, the New York Tribune published an interview with Senator Leland Stanford, in which he addressed the consensus that “the conflict between capital and labor is intensifying” and articulated the vision advocated by the Knights of Labor for an industrial system of worker-owned co-operatives, another among the strategies pursued to advance the conditions of laborers. The interview was republished as a pamphlet to include the bill Stanford introduced in the Senate to foster co-operatives.

Popular pressure continued for the establishment of the 8-hour day. At the convention of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1888, the union decided to campaign for the shorter workday again. May 1, 1890, was agreed upon as the date on which workers would strike for an eight-hour work day.

In 1889, AFL president Samuel Gompers wrote to the first congress of the Second International, which was meeting in Paris. He informed the world’s socialists of the AFL’s plans and proposed an international fight for a universal eight-hour work day. In response to Gompers’s letter, the Second International adopted a resolution calling for “a great international demonstration” on a single date so workers everywhere could demand the eight-hour work day. In light of the Americans’ plan, the International adopted May 1, 1890 as the date for this demonstration.

A secondary purpose behind the adoption of the resolution by the Second International was to honor the memory of the Haymarket martyrs and other workers who had been killed in association with the strikes on May 1, 1886. Historian Philip Foner writes “[t]here is little doubt that everyone associated with the resolution passed by the Paris Congress knew of the May 1 demonstrations and strikes for the eight-hour day in 1886 in the United States … and the events associated with the Haymarket tragedy.”

The first international May Day was a spectacular success. The front page of the New York World on May 2, 1890, was devoted to coverage of the event. Two of its headlines were “Parade of Jubilant Workingmen in All the Trade Centers of the Civilized World” and “Everywhere the Workmen Join in Demands for a Normal Day.” The Times of London listed two dozen European cities in which demonstrations had taken place, noting there had been rallies in Cuba, Peru and Chile. Commemoration of May Day became an annual event the following year.

The association of May Day with the Haymarket martyrs has remained strong in Mexico. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones was in Mexico on May 1, 1921, and wrote of the “day of ‘fiestas'” that marked “the killing of the workers in Chicago for demanding the eight-hour day”. In 1929 The New York Times referred to the May Day parade in Mexico City as “the annual demonstration glorifying the memory of those who were killed in Chicago in 1887.” The New York Times described the 1936 demonstration as a commemoration of “the death of the martyrs in Chicago.” In 1939 Oscar Neebe’s grandson attended the May Day parade in Mexico City and was shown, as his host told him, “how the world shows respect to your grandfather”.

The influence of the Haymarket affair was not limited to the celebration of May Day. Emma Goldman, the activist and political theorist, was attracted to anarchism after reading about the incident and the executions, which she later described as “the events that had inspired my spiritual birth and growth.” She considered the Haymarket martyrs to be “the most decisive influence in my existence”. Her associate, Alexander Berkman also described the Haymarket anarchists as “a potent and vital inspiration.” Others whose commitment to anarchism, or revolutionary socialism, crystallized as a result of the Haymarket affair included Voltairine de Cleyre and “Big Bill” Haywood, a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Goldman wrote to historian Max Nettlau that the Haymarket affair had awakened the social consciousness of “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people”.

Suspected bombers

While admitting none of the defendants were involved in the bombing, the prosecution made the argument that Lingg had built the bomb and two prosecution witnesses (Harry Gilmer and Malvern Thompson) tried to imply the bomb thrower was helped by Spies, Fischer and Schwab. The defendants claimed they had no knowledge of the bomber at all.

Several activists, including Dyer Lum (a close associate of the defendants who wrote an account of the case in 1891), Voltairine de Cleyre and Robert Reitzel, later hinted they knew who the bomber was. Writers and other commentators have speculated about many possible suspects:

Rudolph Schnaubelt was indicted but fled the country. From this photograph, a prosecution witness identified Schnaubelt as the bomber.

Rudolph Schnaubelt (1863–1901) was an activist and the brother-in law of Michael Schwab. He was at the Haymarket when the bomb exploded. Schnaubelt was indicted with the other defendants but fled the city and later the country before he could be brought to trial. He was the detectives’ lead suspect, and state witness Gilmer testified he saw Schnaubelt throw the bomb, identifying him from a photograph in court. Schnaubelt later sent two letters from London disclaiming all responsibility, writing, “If I had really thrown this bomb, surely I would have nothing to be ashamed of, but in truth I never once thought of it.” He is the most generally accepted and widely known suspect and figured as the bomb thrower in The Bomb, Frank Harris’s 1908 fictionalization of the tragedy. Written from Schnaubelt’s point of view, the story opens with him confessing on his deathbed. However, Harris’s description was fictional and those who knew Schnaubelt vehemently criticized the book.
George Schwab was a German shoemaker who died in 1924. German anarchist Carl Nold claimed he learned Schwab was the bomber through correspondence with other activists but no proof ever emerged. Historian Paul Avrich also suspected him but noted that while Schwab was in Chicago, he had only arrived days before. This contradicted statements by others that the bomber was a well-known figure in Chicago.
George Meng (b. around 1840) was a German anarchist and teamster who owned a small farm outside of Chicago where he had settled in 1883 after emigrating from Bavaria. Like Parsons and Spies, he was a delegate at the Pittsburgh Congress and a member of the IWPA. Meng’s granddaughter, Adah Maurer, wrote Paul Avrich a letter in which she said that her mother, who was 15 at the time of the bombing, told her that her father was the bomber. Meng died sometime before 1907 in a saloon fire. Based on his correspondence with Maurer, Avrich concluded that there was a “strong possibility” that the little-known Meng may have been the bomber.
An agent provocateur was suggested by some members of the anarchist movement. Albert Parsons believed the bomber was a member of the police or the Pinkertons trying to undermine the labor movement. However, this contradicts the statements of several activists who said the bomber was one of their own. Lucy Parsons and Johann Most rejected this notion. Dyer Lum said it was “puerile” to ascribe “the Haymarket bomb to a Pinkerton.”
A disgruntled worker was widely suspected. When Adolph Fischer was asked if he knew who threw the bomb, he answered, “I suppose it was some excited workingman.” Oscar Neebe said it was a “crank.” Governor Altgeld speculated the bomb thrower might have been a disgruntled worker who was not associated with the defendants or the anarchist movement but had a personal grudge against the police. In his pardoning statement, Altgeld said the record of police brutality towards the workers had invited revenge adding, “Capt. Bonfield is the man who is really responsible for the deaths of the police officers.”
Klemana Schuetz was identified as the bomber by Franz Mayhoff, a New York anarchist and fraudster, who claimed in an affidavit that Schuetz had once admitted throwing the Haymarket bomb. August Wagener, Mayhoff’s attorney, sent a telegram from New York to defense attorney Captain William Black the day before the executions claiming knowledge of the bomber’s identity. Black tried to delay the execution with this telegram but Governor Oglesby refused. It was later learned that Schuetz was the primary witness against Mayhoff at his trial for insurance fraud, so Mayhoff’s affidavit has never been regarded as credible by historians.
Thomas Owen was a carpenter from Pennsylvania. Severely injured in an accident a week before the executions, Owen reportedly confessed to the bombing on his deathbed by saying, “I was at the Haymarket riot and am an anarchist and say that I threw a bomb in that riot.” He was an anarchist and apparently had been in Chicago at the time but other accounts note that long before his accident he had said he was at the Haymarket and saw the bomb thrower. Owen may have been trying to save the condemned men.
Reinold “Big” Krueger was killed by police either in the melee after the bombing or in a separate disturbance the next day and has been named as a suspect but there is no supporting evidence.
A mysterious outsider was reported by John Philip Deluse, a saloon keeper in Indianapolis who claimed he encountered a stranger in his saloon the day before the bombing. The man was carrying a satchel and on his way from New York to Chicago. According to Deluse, the stranger was interested in the labor situation in Chicago, repeatedly pointed to his satchel and said, “You will hear of some trouble there very soon.” Parsons used Deluse’s testimony to suggest the bomb thrower was sent by eastern capitalists. Nothing more was ever learned about Deluse’s claim.

Burial and monument

Lingg, Spies, Fischer, Engel, and Parsons were buried at the German Waldheim Cemetary (later merged with Forest Home Cemetery) in Forest Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Schwab and Neebe were also buried at Waldheim when they died, reuniting the “Martyrs.” In 1893, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert was raised at Waldheim. Over a century later, it was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior.

Throughout the 20th century, activists such as Emma Goldman chose to be buried near the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument graves.

In October 2016, a time capsule with materials relating to the Haymarket Affair was dug up in Waldheim Cemetery.

Haymarket memorials

In 1889, a commemorative nine-foot (2.7 meter) bronze statue of a Chicago policeman by sculptor Johannes Gelert was erected in the middle of Haymarket Square with private funds raised by the Union League Club of Chicago. The statue was unveiled on May 30, 1889, by Frank Degan, the son of Officer Mathias Degan. On May 4, 1927, the 41st anniversary of the Haymarket affair, a streetcar jumped its tracks and crashed into the monument. The motorman said he was “sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised”. The city restored the statue in 1928 and moved it to Union Park. During the 1950s, construction of the Kennedy Expressway erased about half of the old, run-down market square, and in 1956, the statue was moved to a special platform built for it overlooking the freeway, near its original location.

The statue-less pedestal of the police monument on the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket affair in May 1986; the pedestal has since been removed.

The Haymarket statue was vandalized with black paint on May 4, 1968, the 82nd anniversary of the Haymarket affair, following a confrontation between police and demonstrators at a protest against the Vietnam War. On October 6, 1969, shortly before the “Days of Rage” protests, the statue was destroyed when a bomb was placed between its legs. Weatherman took credit for the blast, which broke nearly 100 windows in the neighborhood and scattered pieces of the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway below. The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, to be blown up yet again by Weatherman on October 6, 1970. The statue was rebuilt, again, and Mayor Richard J. Daley posted a 24‑hour police guard at the statue. This guard cost $67,440 per year. In 1972, it was moved to the lobby of the Central Police Headquarters, and in 1976 to the enclosed courtyard of the Chicago police academy. For another three decades the statue’s empty, graffiti-marked pedestal stood on its platform in the run-down remains of Haymarket Square where it was known as an anarchist landmark. On June 1, 2007, the statue was rededicated at Chicago Police Headquarters with a new pedestal, unveiled by Geraldine Doceka, Officer Mathias Degan’s great-granddaughter.

In 1992, the site of the speakers’ wagon was marked by a bronze plaque set into the sidewalk, reading:

“A decade of strife between labor and industry culminated here in a confrontation that resulted in the tragic death of both workers and policemen. On May 4, 1886, spectators at a labor rally had gathered around the mouth of Crane’s Alley. A contingent of police approaching on Des Plaines Street were met by a bomb thrown from just south of the alley. The resultant trial of eight activists gained worldwide attention for the labor movement, and initiated the tradition of ‘May Day’ labor rallies in many cities.”

Designated on March 25, 1992

Richard M. Daley, Mayor

On September 14, 2004, Daley and union leaders—including the president of Chicago’s police union—unveiled a monument by Chicago artist Mary Brogger, a fifteen-foot (4.5 m) speakers’ wagon sculpture echoing the wagon on which the labor leaders stood in Haymarket Square to champion the eight-hour day. The bronze sculpture, intended to be the centerpiece of a proposed “Labor Park”, is meant to symbolize both the rally at Haymarket and free speech. The planned site was to include an international commemoration wall, sidewalk plaques, a cultural pylon, a seating area, and banners, but construction has not yet begun.

As of 2016, a feature motion picture is being produced about the Haymarket affair, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath.

Rank and FileCA.

The history behind Canada’s National Day of Mourning

Posted on April 28, 2017 in Day of Mourning, Injured Workers

By Dorothy Wigmore

April 28 has many names. In Canada, it’s the Day of Mourning. In the United States and the United Kingdom, it’s Workers’ Memorial Day. The International Labour Organization calls it the World Day for Safety and Health at Work. Marked around the world, there’s confusion about its origins, even in Canada.

Around 1983, the health and safety director of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), Colin Lambert, and his long-time friend and fellow activist, Ray Sentes, came up with the idea of a day to recognize workers killed and injured on the job.

As a steelworker and miner in Sudbury, Ontario, Lambert was instrumental in having mandatory coroners’ inquests for all miners’ deaths in Ontario. He also lamented the contrast between the lack of recognition for miners and other workers who died because of their work and the large public events for “fallen” police officers and firefighters.

Lambert “floated the idea” with CUPE’s national health and safety committee, talking about a special day of recognition for workers killed and injured on the job, to be held on May 1 (celebrated as May Day in Europe and elsewhere). The committee endorsed the idea. At its 1984 convention, union delegates supported the proposal. Soon after, some CUPE locals started negotiating events, such as lowered flags and moments of silence.

In 1984 and 1985, CUPE representatives took the idea to the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) executive and its national health and safety committee. Local unions also sent resolutions to the CLC.

In February 1986, the CLC announced the first Day of Mourning, coinciding with the first day of its convention that year. Rather than May 1, they chose the date when the Ontario legislature passed the country’s first workers compensation law, in 1914. The convention passed a resolution supporting April 28 as a day to “mourn for the dead and fight for the living.”

In 1990, Lambert and CUPE pushed for innovative ways to recognize the day. April 28 could be a “year-round series of public events”, not just a Day of Mourning. We can attract “broad public recognition for the day by adopting a universal, unthreatening symbol of worker safety, the canary.”

“The canary’s an appropriate symbol,” Lambert said. “It shows that today workers are the canaries — they are front-line protection for all of us.” The canary also showed up in the CLC’s new poster for April 28.

Lambert and others saw the potential for a day of “preventive action for workers which will be recognized by society in general.” They called on CUPE locals to have activities in the week heading up to the 28th. They sent a package with a new poster — introducing the canary symbol — and a special issue of the health and safety newsletter. There also was a workplace inspection checklist and calls for locals to campaign for government recognition of the day, and to bargain or ask employers for a moment’s silence at 11 a.m. on April 28.

CUPE members and others responded with enthusiasm. The British Columbia CUPE health and safety committee had a “Spot the Hazard” campaign for workplace inspections. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, the Federation of Labour and CUPE produced tags with the canary symbol and “Day of Mourning, April 28”. They sold them with members of the local professional football team and the Boys and Girls Club, with proceeds to the Club. In Windsor, Ontario, more than 300 people marched to the Ministry of Labour to lay a wreath and release black balloons inscribed with “We came here to work, not to die”.

The campaign for government recognition paid off. In February 1991, the Canadian government passed a private member’s bill, naming April 28 as the “Day of Mourning for Persons Killed or Injured in the Workplace.” Provincial and municipal governments also recognize the day.

These efforts and many others inspired trade unions and health and safety activists and around the world. Monuments and plaques are some of the most common responses. There were so many by 2001 that Ed Thomas of Hamilton wrote a book about them [1]. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) put some of his pictures on a web page.

The campaign for recognition of the day has been successful. Now, what about the goals behind it?

This article was first published in the Occupational Health and Safety Section Newsletter, Spring 2010, of the American Public Health Association.

[1] E. Thomas, Dead But Not Forgotten: Monuments to Workers. Ed Thomas, 2001.

Time

The Bloody Story of How May Day Became a Holiday for Workers

Lily Rothman May 01, 2015

Celebrations on May 1 have long had two, seemingly contradictory meanings. On one hand, May Day is known for maypoles, flowers and welcoming the spring. On the other hand, it’s a day of worker solidarity and protest; though the U.S. observes its official Labor Day in September, many countries will celebrate Labor Day on Friday.

How did that happen?

Like so many historical twists, by complete accident. As TIME explained in 1929, “To old-fashioned people, May Day means flowers, grass, picnics, children, clean frocks. To up-and-doing Socialists and Communists it means speechmaking, parading, bombs, brickbats, conscientious violence. This connotation dates back to May Day, 1886, when some 200,000 U. S. workmen engineered a nationwide strike for an eight-hour day.”

The May 1, 1886, labor action wasn’t just any strike—it was part of what became known as the Haymarket affair. On May 1 of that year, Chicago (along with other cities) was the site of a major union demonstration in support of the eight-hour workday. The Chicago protests were meant to be part of several days of action. On May 3, a strike at the McCormick Reaper plant in the city turned violent; the next day, a peaceful meeting at Haymarket Square became even more so. Here’s how TIME summed it up in 1938:

A few minutes after ten o’clock on the night of May 4, 1886, a storm began to blow up in Chicago. As the first drops of rain fell, a crowd in Haymarket Square, in the packing house district, began to break up. At eight o’clock there had been 3,000 persons on hand, listening to anarchists denounce the brutality of the police and demand the eight-hour day, but by ten there were only a few hundred. The mayor, who had waited around in expectation of trouble, went home, and went to bed. The last speaker was finishing his talk when a delegation of 180 policemen marched from the station a block away to break up what remained of the meeting. They stopped a short distance from the speaker’s wagon. As a captain ordered the meeting to disperse, and the speaker cried out that it was a peaceable gathering, a bomb exploded in the police ranks. It wounded 67 policemen, of whom seven died. The police opened fire, killing several men and wounding 200, and the Haymarket Tragedy became a part of U. S. history.

In 1889, the International Socialist Conference declared that, in commemoration of the Haymarket affair, May 1 would be an international holiday for labor, now known in many places as International Workers’ Day.

In the U.S., that holiday came in for particular contempt during the anti-communist fervor of the early Cold War. In July of 1958, President Eisenhower signed a resolution named May 1 “Loyalty Day” in an attempt to avoid any hint of solidarity with the “workers of the world” on May Day. The resolution declared that it would be “a special day for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States of America and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.”

CNN

What is May Day, anyway?

AJ Willingham, CNN May 2, 2016

Story highlights

May Day falls on May 1 every year
It is a holiday of summer celebration, but also marks International Worker’s Day

(CNN)To most people in the Northern Hemisphere, May Day conjures images of brightly colored twirling ribbons and promises of warm days ahead. That’s not the whole story, though: May Day is also a day of protests and riots that traces its modern roots back to a world-changing explosion in Chicago.

When is May Day?

May Day is May 1 every year. Easy to remember, right?

What is May Day?

Depending on where you are, it’s either a seasonal celebration or a day to celebrate workers’ rights, or maybe a little bit of both. Think of the latter use as a Labor Day, if you will, for the rest of the world.

How did it start?

This is a more complicated question. Originally, May Day was an ancient pagan holiday celebrating the start of summer. In Gaelic traditions, it is known as Beltaine (or the Anglicized “Beltane”). As time went on, different groups adapted the celebration to their specific cultures or beliefs. Europeans and Americans often celebrate in a more secular manner with diversions like maypole dancing and flower crowns. (That certainly lends a bit of cultural context to all the young women breezing around summer music festivals this time of year with giant daisies on their heads.)

Also of note: In May, the Southern Hemisphere is getting ready for winter, so May Day as a seasonal celebration is, for the most part, a Northern Hemisphere thing.

How did it become a day for labor rights?

May Day is also a labor holiday in many areas of the world, and that part of its history is a thornier story. May Day has shared a date with International Workers’ Day since the 1880s. At the time, labor movements around the world were fighting for fair work accommodations like eight-hour workdays and unions. The date was chosen because it aligned with the anniversary of the Haymarket affair in Chicago, where police killed four people at a peaceful protest after someone threw a bomb into the crowd.

The event had a huge impact on labor movements across the world.

So why are there sometimes riots and marches on May Day?

Because of its more recent history, International Workers’ Day/May Day is often a day of protest for labor unions around the world. The people come come out to rally, and sometimes their passionate demonstrations can turn violent. In 2014, Turkey attempted to ban labor rallies, citing security concerns. Across Europe, similar events have attracted heavy police presence.

Riots and protests occur in the United States, as well. One of the most notable is the Seattle May Day Marches, which, though intended to be peaceful, have broken out in violence in the past.

In a strange way, some of these demonstrations overlap with the more festive roots of May Day: The planned protests in Seattle include a rock concert, and the long-running May Day Parade in Minneapolis features both colorful, festive floats and revelers who wear satirical costumes related to the labor and political issues of the day.

Is this related to the “Mayday! Mayday!” distress call?

It’s actually not at all! “Mayday” the distress call comes from the French term m’aidez, which means “help me.”

Nothing wrong with a little French lesson to go along with the holiday’s history!

International Workers of the World

The Brief Origins of May Day

By Eric Chase – 1993.

Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers’ Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don’t realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as “American” as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions. Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such books as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. As early as the 1860’s, working people agitated to shorten the workday without a cut in pay, but it wasn’t until the late 1880’s that organized labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday. This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many of the working class. At this time, socialism was a new and attractive idea to working people, many of whom were drawn to its ideology of working class control over the production and distribution of all goods and services. Workers had seen first-hand that Capitalism benefited only their bosses, trading workers’ lives for profit. Thousands of men, women and children were dying needlessly every year in the workplace, with life expectancy as low as their early twenties in some industries, and little hope but death of rising out of their destitution. Socialism offered another option.

A variety of socialist organizations sprung up throughout the later half of the 19th century, ranging from political parties to choir groups. In fact, many socialists were elected into governmental office by their constituency. But again, many of these socialists were ham-strung by the political process which was so evidently controlled by big business and the bi-partisan political machine. Tens of thousands of socialists broke ranks from their parties, rebuffed the entire political process, which was seen as nothing more than protection for the wealthy, and created anarchist groups throughout the country. Literally thousands of working people embraced the ideals of anarchism, which sought to put an end to all hierarchical structures (including government), emphasized worker controlled industry, and valued direct action over the bureaucratic political process. It is inaccurate to say that labor unions were “taken over” by anarchists and socialists, but rather anarchists and socialist made up the labor unions.

At its national convention in Chicago, held in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (which later became the American Federation of Labor), proclaimed that “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor from and after May 1, 1886.” The following year, the FOTLU, backed by many Knights of Labor locals, reiterated their proclamation stating that it would be supported by strikes and demonstrations. At first, most radicals and anarchists regarded this demand as too reformist, failing to strike “at the root of the evil.” A year before the Haymarket Massacre, Samuel Fielden pointed out in the anarchist newspaper, The Alarm, that “whether a man works eight hours a day or ten hours a day, he is still a slave.”

Despite the misgivings of many of the anarchists, an estimated quarter million workers in the Chicago area became directly involved in the crusade to implement the eight hour work day, including the Trades and Labor Assembly, the Socialistic Labor Party and local Knights of Labor. As more and more of the workforce mobilized against the employers, these radicals conceded to fight for the 8-hour day, realizing that “the tide of opinion and determination of most wage-workers was set in this direction.” With the involvement of the anarchists, there seemed to be an infusion of greater issues than the 8-hour day. There grew a sense of a greater social revolution beyond the more immediate gains of shortened hours, but a drastic change in the economic structure of capitalism.

In a proclamation printed just before May 1, 1886, one publisher appealed to working people with this plea:

Workingmen to Arms!
War to the Palace, Peace to the Cottage, and Death to LUXURIOUS IDLENESS.
The wage system is the only cause of the World’s misery. It is supported by the rich classes, and to destroy it, they must be either made to work or DIE.
One pound of DYNAMITE is better than a bushel of BALLOTS!
MAKE YOUR DEMAND FOR EIGHT HOURS with weapons in your hands to meet the capitalistic bloodhounds, police, and militia in proper manner.

Not surprisingly the entire city was prepared for mass bloodshed, reminiscent of the railroad strike a decade earlier when police and soldiers gunned down hundreds of striking workers. On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In Chicago, the epicenter for the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on strike with the anarchists in the forefront of the public’s eye. With their fiery speeches and revolutionary ideology of direct action, anarchists and anarchism became respected and embraced by the working people and despised by the capitalists.

The names of many – Albert Parsons, Johann Most, August Spies and Louis Lingg – became household words in Chicago and throughout the country. Parades, bands and tens of thousands of demonstrators in the streets exemplified the workers’ strength and unity, yet didn’t become violent as the newspapers and authorities predicted.

More and more workers continued to walk off their jobs until the numbers swelled to nearly 100,000, yet peace prevailed. It was not until two days later, May 3, 1886, that violence broke out at the McCormick Reaper Works between police and strikers.

For six months, armed Pinkerton agents and the police harassed and beat locked-out steelworkers as they picketed. Most of these workers belonged to the “anarchist-dominated” Metal Workers’ Union. During a speech near the McCormick plant, some two hundred demonstrators joined the steelworkers on the picket line. Beatings with police clubs escalated into rock throwing by the strikers which the police responded to with gunfire. At least two strikers were killed and an unknown number were wounded.

Full of rage, a public meeting was called by some of the anarchists for the following day in Haymarket Square to discuss the police brutality. Due to bad weather and short notice, only about 3000 of the tens of thousands of people showed up from the day before. This affair included families with children and the mayor of Chicago himself. Later, the mayor would testify that the crowd remained calm and orderly and that speaker August Spies made “no suggestion… for immediate use of force or violence toward any person…”

As the speech wound down, two detectives rushed to the main body of police, reporting that a speaker was using inflammatory language, inciting the police to march on the speakers’ wagon. As the police began to disperse the already thinning crowd, a bomb was thrown into the police ranks. No one knows who threw the bomb, but speculations varied from blaming any one of the anarchists, to an agent provocateur working for the police.

Enraged, the police fired into the crowd. The exact number of civilians killed or wounded was never determined, but an estimated seven or eight civilians died, and up to forty were wounded. One officer died immediately and another seven died in the following weeks. Later evidence indicated that only one of the police deaths could be attributed to the bomb and that all the other police fatalities had or could have had been due to their own indiscriminate gun fire. Aside from the bomb thrower, who was never identified, it was the police, not the anarchists, who perpetrated the violence.

Eight anarchists – Albert Parsons, August Spies, Samuel Fielden, Oscar Neebe, Michael Schwab, George Engel, Adolph Fischer and Louis Lingg – were arrested and convicted of murder, though only three were even present at Haymarket and those three were in full view of all when the bombing occurred. The jury in their trial was comprised of business leaders in a gross mockery of justice similar to the Sacco-Vanzetti case thirty years later, or the trials of AIM and Black Panther members in the seventies. The entire world watched as these eight organizers were convicted, not for their actions, of which all of were innocent, but for their political and social beliefs. On November 11, 1887, after many failed appeals, Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fisher were hung to death. Louis Lingg, in his final protest of the state’s claim of authority and punishment, took his own life the night before with an explosive device in his mouth.

The remaining organizers, Fielden, Neebe and Schwab, were pardoned six years later by Governor Altgeld, who publicly lambasted the judge on a travesty of justice. Immediately after the Haymarket Massacre, big business and government conducted what some say was the very first “Red Scare” in this country. Spun by mainstream media, anarchism became synonymous with bomb throwing and socialism became un-American. The common image of an anarchist became a bearded, eastern European immigrant with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other.

Today we see tens of thousands of activists embracing the ideals of the Haymarket Martyrs and those who established May Day as an International Workers’ Day. Ironically, May Day is an official holiday in 66 countries and unofficially celebrated in many more, but rarely is it recognized in this country where it began.

Over one hundred years have passed since that first May Day. In the earlier part of the 20th century, the US government tried to curb the celebration and further wipe it from the public’s memory by establishing “Law and Order Day” on May 1. We can draw many parallels between the events of 1886 and today. We still have locked out steelworkers struggling for justice. We still have voices of freedom behind bars as in the cases of Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier. We still had the ability to mobilize tens of thousands of people in the streets of a major city to proclaim “THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!” at the WTO and FTAA demonstrations.

Words stronger than any I could write are engraved on the Haymarket Monument:

THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR SILENCE WILL BE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE VOICES YOU ARE THROTTLING TODAY.

Truly, history has a lot to teach us about the roots of our radicalism. When we remember that people were shot so we could have the 8-hour day; if we acknowledge that homes with families in them were burned to the ground so we could have Saturday as part of the weekend; when we recall 8-year old victims of industrial accidents who marched in the streets protesting working conditions and child labor only to be beat down by the police and company thugs, we understand that our current condition cannot be taken for granted – people fought for the rights and dignities we enjoy today, and there is still a lot more to fight for. The sacrifices of so many people can not be forgotten or we’ll end up fighting for those same gains all over again. This is why we celebrate May Day.

Washington Post House Republicans just voted to change overtime rules for workers

By Jena McGregor May 2, 2017

On Tuesday afternoon, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that Republicans have promoted since the Newt Gingrich era, one that would allow private-sector employees to exchange overtime pay for “compensatory time” off, electing to accrue extra hours off rather than extra pay in their wallets. The bill passed 229 to 197, largely along party lines.

The bill — which supporters say would add flexibility to hourly workers’ schedules while opponents worry it doesn’t do enough to protect employees — is not a new idea. It seeks to take a similar provision that has been available to government workers since 1985 and extend it to private-sector employees, making it legal for them to choose between an hour and a half of paid comp time and time-and-a-half pay when they work additional hours.

Similar bills have been introduced multiple times over the past two decades, passing the House three times before failing to pass the Senate. While its fate is unclear in the Senate this year, the White House said Tuesday it supports the bill, saying in a statement it would “help American workers balance the competing demands of family and work by giving them flexibility to earn paid time off.”

Under the proposed changes, eligible employees — if their employer decides to offer the option — would be able to voluntarily choose to receive comp time they can bank and use at a future date in lieu of immediate overtime pay in their paychecks. If they change their minds and want the pay after all, employees would have the option of “cashing out,” with the employer required to pay the overtime within 30 days.

Proponents of the bill suggest the change would improve flexibility for overtime-eligible employees — often lower-wage hourly workers who don’t have the same access to paid time off as their salaried counterparts — to take care of their families.

“Ask any parent just how precious their time is,” Rep. Martha Roby (R-Ala.), who introduced the bill, said during debate on the House floor Tuesday. The bill, she said, “provides flexibility for working moms and dads who need more time to spend taking care of their family responsibilities.”

Some employer groups are big supporters. “It’s our strong belief that we ought to make this option available,” said Lisa Horn, director of Congressional affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management, which represents employers, in an interview. “The bill has built-in protections to make sure employees aren’t coerced into choosing comp times.”

But opponents worry those protections aren’t strong enough. Though the bill includes language that bans employers from “directly or indirectly intimidating, threatening, or coercing or attempting to intimidate, threaten, or coerce an employee” to choose comp time over pay, many Democrats and advocates for workers say they are concerned that people will feel pressure to opt for the comp time and may not have the resources to seek legal help if they are coerced.

“Under current law, if an employee wants to work overtime, put the money in the bank where it can earn interest and use it to cover the cost of taking some time off later with the permission of the employer, he can do that today — without this bill,” said Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, on the House floor Tuesday.

While employees have the choice of whether to take comp time or extra pay, opponents warn it is their bosses who makes the schedules that offer the extra hours many low-wage workers depend on.

“Whether it’s overt coercion, which language in the bill prohibits, or just a preference, there’s going to be strong incentives to giving overtime hours to workers choosing to take comp time,” said Vicki Shabo, vice president for the nonprofit advocacy group National Partnership for Women & Families.

She adds: “When you’re thinking about low-wage workers who need these jobs, the appetite to pursue [legal] remedies is going to be quite low.”

Others suggest the limitations requiring workers to give “reasonable notice” and not “unduly disrupt” the workplace with their requests for time off give employers plenty of latitude to say no.

“The reality is that it significantly shifts the balance of power and really puts the decision into the hands of the employer instead of the employee,” said Jocelyn Frye, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress. “It doesn’t provide any level of assurance that the person will actually be able to use the leave for the purpose they need it.”

Democrats in the House sounded similar concerns Tuesday. “The choice between overtime pay and comp time is a false choice for workers,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) “We know what happens in the reality of the workplace. The vague promise of time off in the future is often never realized.”

Horn, the SHRM executive, said she doesn’t see that as a concern. Employers who are “going to go to this trouble of setting up this program — I think it’s highly unlikely they’re going to turn around and forbid the worker from using it,” she said. She also notes that the penalties in the bill for coercion are “stiff” and should help deter employers from it.

Jonathan Segal, a partner in the employment group of the law firm Duane Morris, agreed. Penalties such as double damages to employees, he said, means “there’s a material disincentive for employers to do the wrong thing,” he said.

(Workers endured long hours, low pay at Chinese factory used by Ivanka Trump’s clothing maker)

Still, opponents said GOP rhetoric has suggested comp time programs could be an alternative to family-friendly policies such as paid sick leave, which have been gaining ground at the state and local level in recent years. They argue that low-wage workers should not have to make the choice, as well as that sick or family leave needs often don’t come with “reasonable notice.”

“It sets up a false narrative,” Frye said. “The notion you somehow have to trade off your pay for flexibility is certainly not the way it works for higher paid employees.”

A spokesman for Roby, Todd Stacy, said such remarks are “frustrating” and noted that the current bill is not a mandate, as well as that it prohibits even indirect coercion and lets workers cash out their accrued time if they and their employer can’t agree on when the comp time is taken. “It’s not for every employer and it’s not for every employee,” he said. “It’s simply meant as an option, to legalize it in the private sector.”

The bill now faces the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hasn’t shared his plans on the issue, according to a report in Bloomberg. In 2013, however, he did support a version of a similar bill.

If it does ultimately become law, employers will then have to decide to offer it. Horn says that of SHRM’s 285,000 members, “I probably have just as many who would like to offer the comp time as those who would never want to pursue this option. It is a lift for employers,” she said, meaning it requires planning, expense and logistics to launch and run. “There’s the tracking of hours, and they carry the liability on their balance sheet in case there’s a cash-out. Some employers are just like ‘I would rather pay the straight option.’ ”

NPR GDP Grew Just 0.7 Percent In First Quarter Of 2017

Laurel Wamsley April 28, 2017

The U.S. economy grew at just a 0.7 percent annual rate in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest report on the gross domestic product from the Commerce Department. That’s below market expectations and indicates the economy grew at the slowest pace in three years.

Weak auto sales and lower home-heating bills dragged down consumer spending, offsetting a pickup in investment led by housing and oil drilling. Employment costs rose 0.8 percent in the first quarter.

This “advance” estimate showed the U.S. economy with its slowest growth since the first quarter of 2014. The GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2016 was 2.1 percent.

The price index for gross domestic purchases, which measures the prices paid for goods and services purchased by consumers, increased 2.6 percent in the first quarter. That’s compared with an increase of 2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016.

Washington Post Trump’s new VA office to help fire feds faster also could hurt, not protect, whistleblowers

By Joe Davidson Columnist April 28, 2017
President Trump signs an executive order on improving accountability and whistleblower protection on April 27. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

President Trump is correct to hold federal employees accountable, even as he and his folks make every effort to squirm away from a steady flow of ethical quandaries.

His executive order on “Improving Accountability and Whistleblower Protections” “would create an office in the Department of Veterans Affairs to identify barriers to bouncing bad workers from an agency whose ethical reputation was shredded during a scandal over the coverup of long patient wait times.

The importance of this presidential action was emphasized by Trump’s visit to the VA headquarters, just across Lafayette Square from the White House. Vice President Pence, members of Congress and veterans joined VA Secretary David Shulkin as the president signed the order Thursday afternoon.

Trump praised the “many VA employees who do a fantastic job,” a reality too often lost in discussions about the agency.

“This executive order makes it clear,” he said, “that we will never, ever tolerate substandard care for our great veterans. With the creation of this office, we are sending a strong message: Those who fail our veterans will be held, for the first time, accountable.”

Trump seems to think he created all that’s good. He is not the first to hold VA employees accountable.

Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Shulkin said the new VA Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection will help officials deal with employees who “should no longer be working [at] VA, and make sure that we can do that expeditiously.” He didn’t have a cost estimate for this new layer of bureaucracy, which he said will confront “systemic barriers that prevent us from making the right decisions.” But the secretary did say it would not be “small amounts. This is going to be a substantial commitment.”

Unfortunately, the administration’s commitment to move “expeditiously” was not accompanied by a promise to balance swiftness with fairness. Civil service protections were not even an afterthought at the executive order signing ceremony. Due process was not mentioned there by Trump, Pence or Shulkin, or in the order itself.

The order charges the Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection with assisting the secretary in using “all available authorities to discipline or terminate” employees who violate the public’s trust and identifying statutory obstacles that get in the secretary’s way as he seeks to do that.

This rush to fire feds faster, first at VA, but with attempts to spread it across government, comes with a serious risk. Yes, due process rights can be slow and cumbersome. They protect, however, not just employees, but more importantly, also the public from a politicized system that favors citizens of one political party over another. Reforms must respect civil service protections. They should be acknowledged by government leaders and not be ignored as they were at the signing.

Furthermore, those protections protect whistleblowers.

While expedited firing has a certain appeal, allowing faster firing also could empower vengeful managers to more easily dismiss employees who report cases of agency waste, fraud and abuse.

The notion of protecting whistleblowers with the new VA office was met with skepticism by those who actually protect them from aggression by individual managers every day.

Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, said he appreciated Trump’s “good intentions” but that “it would be unprecedented for this office to be an effective, genuine resource for whistleblowers. As a rule, internal agency whistleblower offices always have been Trojan Horses.”

Elizabeth Hempowicz, policy counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, agreed.

She pointed to the VA’s Central Whistleblower Office, created by Congress last year to investigate whistleblower complaints and charges of retaliation against them. Because it is housed within VA, without “proper independence,” she said, “our worry is that it risks becoming an internal clearinghouse to help agency managers identify and retaliate against whistleblowers.”

Congressional Republicans, who generally speaking have advanced numerous workplace protection dilution measures, were full of praise for Trump.

“I applaud the Trump administration for taking action to hold bad actors accountable and enhance whistleblower protections throughout the VA,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

But will the administration enhance those protections or provide cover to subvert them, as whistleblower advocates fear?

Did Republi-cons Really Suffer During Obama’s 8 Years in Office?

From: Voices4Hillary, February 24, 2017

One of many, many infuriating parts of having Trump as the President is the insufferable smugness of conservatives. When they’re not telling you to “suck it up, snowflake” or trying to sell you fake news, they’re gloating: “We suffered for eight years under that tyrant Obummer. Now it’s your turn.”

One man, Scott Mednick had enough with his Republican acquaintances and penned this powerful response:

“I am surprised you would wish suffering upon me. That, of course, is your right, I suppose. I do not wish harm on anyone. Your statement seems to continue the ‘US v THEM’ mentality. The election is over. It is important to get past campaigning and campaign rhetoric and get down to what is uniting, not dividing and what is best for ALL Americans.

There will never be a President who does everything to everyone’s liking. There are things President Obama (and President Clinton) did that I do not like and conversely there are things I can point to that the Presidents Bush did that I agree with. So I am not 100% in lock step with the outgoing President but have supported him and the overall job he did.

And, if you recall, during the Presidential Campaign back in 2008 the campaign was halted because of the “historic crisis in our financial system.” Wall Street bailout negotiations intervened in the election process. The very sobering reality was that there likely could be a Depression and the world financial markets could collapse. The United States was losing 800,000 jobs a month and was poised to lose at least 10 million jobs the first year once the new President took office. We were in an economic freefall. So let us recall that ALL of America was suffering terribly at the beginning of Obama’s Presidency.

But I wanted to look back over the last 8 years and ask you a few questions. Since much of the rhetoric before Obama was elected was that he would impose Sharia Law, Take Away Your Guns, Create Death Panels, Destroy the Economy, Impose Socialism and, since you will agree that NONE of this came to pass, I was wondering: Why have you suffered so?

So let me ask: Gays and Lesbians can now marry and enjoy the benefits they had been deprived of. Has this caused your suffering?

When Obama took office, the Dow was 6,626. Now it is 19,875. Has this caused your suffering?

We had 82 straight months of private sector job growth – the longest streak in the history of the United States. Has this caused your suffering?

Especially considering where the economy was when he took over, an amazing 11.3 million new jobs were created under President Obama (far more than President Bush). Has this caused your suffering?

Obama has taken Unemployment from 10% down to 4.7%. Has this caused your suffering?

Homelessness among US Veterans has dropped by half. Has this caused your suffering?

Obama shut down the US secret overseas prisons. Has this caused your suffering?

President Obama has created a policy for the families of fallen soldiers to have their travel paid for to be there when remains are flown home. Has this caused your suffering?

We landed a rover on Mars. Has this caused your suffering?

He passed the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Has this caused your suffering?

Uninsured adults has decreased to below 10%: 90% of adults are insured – an increase of 20 Million Adults. Has this caused your suffering?

People are now covered for pre-existing conditions. Has this caused your suffering?

Insurance Premiums increased an average of $4,677 from 2002-2008, an increase of 58% under Bush. The growth of these insurance premiums has gone up $4,145 – a slower rate of increase. Has this caused your suffering?

Obama added Billions of dollars to mental health care for our Veterans. Has this caused your suffering?

Consumer confidence has gone from 37.7 to 98.1 during Obama’s tenure. Has this caused your suffering?

He passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Has this caused your suffering?

His bi-annual Nuclear Summit convinced 16 countries to give up and destroy all their loose nuclear material so it could not be stolen. Has this caused your suffering?

He saved the US Auto industry. American cars sold at the beginning of his term were 10.4M and upon his exit 17.5M. Has this caused your suffering?

The deficit as a percentage of the GDP has gone from 9.8% to 3.2%. Has this caused your suffering?

The deficit itself was cut by $800 Billion Dollars. Has this caused your suffering?

Obama preserved the middle class tax cuts. Has this caused your suffering?

Obama banned solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons. Has this caused your suffering?

He signed Credit Card reform so that rates could not be raised without you being notified. Has this caused your suffering?

He outlawed Government contractors from discriminating against LGBT persons. Has this caused your suffering?

He doubled Pell Grants. Has this caused your suffering?

Abortion is down. Has this caused your suffering?

Violent crime is down. Has this caused your suffering?

He overturned the scientific ban on stem cell research. Has this caused your suffering?

He protected Net Neutrality. Has this caused your suffering?

Obamacare has extended the life of the Medicare insurance trust fund (will be solvent until 2030). Has this caused your suffering?

President Obama repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Has this caused your suffering?

He banned torture. Has this caused your suffering?

He negotiated with Syria to give up its chemical weapons and they were destroyed. Has this caused your suffering?

Solar and Wind Power are at an all time high. Has this caused your suffering?

High School Graduation rates hit 83% – an all time high. Has this caused your suffering?

Corporate profits are up by 144%. Has this caused your suffering?

He normalized relations with Cuba. Has this caused your suffering?

Reliance on foreign oil is at a 40 year low. Has this caused your suffering?

US Exports are up 28%. Has this caused your suffering?

He appointed the most diverse cabinet ever. Has this caused your suffering?

He reduced the number of troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Has this caused your suffering?

Yes, he killed Osama Bin Laden and retrieved all the documents in his possession for analysis. Perhaps THIS caused your suffering?

From an objective standpoint it would appear that the last eight years have seen some great progress and we were saved from a financial collapse. Things are not perfect. Things can always be better. We are on much better footing now than we were in 2008.

I look forward to understanding what caused you to suffer so much under Obama these last eight years.”

This article appeared by Natalie Dickinson in Occupy Democrats on February 22, 2017.

Maryland could host the nation’s largest offshore wind farm

Washington Post

Maryland could host the nation’s largest offshore wind farm

By Cara Newcomer | AP April 26, 2017

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Maryland Public Service Commission is considering two proposals for offshore turbines off the coast of Ocean City, giving Maryland the potential to host the nation’s largest offshore wind farm.

The companies — US Wind and Deepwater Wind — plan to build turbines off the coast, using wind to generate clean energy. The turbines are connected to transmission lines that travel underground, carrying the energy to substations to be stored, distributed and used.

The approval of just one farm would put Maryland on the map with the largest, but the commission could potentially approve both proposals as long as both projects would not exceed an established price and fee increase for ratepayers, according to the Maryland Public Service Commission’s Communications Director Tori Leonard.

Maryland is required to produce a certain amount of renewable energy through its renewable energy portfolio standard. If Maryland is not able to produce that amount within the state, they can purchase energy credits known as ORECs from out-of-state vendors, and vice versa. An OREC, or Offshore Wind Renewable Energy Credit, is a way of bundling and selling the clean electricity produced by wind farms.

Maryland’s current standard has a specific carve-out for offshore wind energy of up to 2.5 percent per year. Until an offshore wind project is approved and running, the 2.5 percent of renewable energy is being fulfilled by other fuels, like solar or geothermal energy.

The cost of the credits is capped, so a residential ratepayer would not pay more than $1.50 per month more, and a non-residential rate payer, like a small business owner, would not pay more than 1.5 percent more per month.

“For less than a cup of coffee (per month for homeowners), we can produce cleaner energy,” said Liz Burdock, executive director of the Business Network for Offshore Wind, calling the decision a no-brainer.

If the commission approves both projects, the estimated non-residential rate would increase per bill by 1.39 percent, with US Wind’s totaling 0.96 percent and Deepwater Wind’s totaling 0.43 percent. The estimated monthly residential rate would increase by $1.44, with US Wind’s being $0.99 per month and $0.45 per month, according to a March 21 report from Levitan and Associates, a contractor that provides documents and analysis on the offshore wind projects.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, signed into law the Offshore Wind Act of 2013. This law set the parameters for wind farms in Maryland, clarifying where they could be located, requiring the commission’s approval, and authorizing the state to provide and purchase energy credits from these wind farms.

The Democrat-controlled legislature overrode Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto of the 2016 Clean Energy Jobs Act during the 2017 General Assembly session. Under the law, which the governor argued passed along too many additional costs to ratepayers, the state’s requirement for renewable-energy sourced electricity increased from 20 percent by the year 2022 to 25 percent by the year 2020.

Those who support Maryland offshore wind believe the farms will produce clean air, bring jobs to the state, and put Maryland on the map for clean energy.

Opponents are concerned about the costs, and how the visual impact of the turbines would affect tourism and the possible negative affect it could have on the community.

Delegate Robbyn Lewis, D-Baltimore, told the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service she believes a wind farm could help Maryland reach its renewable energy goal. “Given the fact that the state of Maryland has made commitments to expand renewable energy, this is a perfect time to do it,” Lewis said.

Lewis said while she does not have any comment on which proposal she prefers, it would be a disappointment if the commission did not approve either project.

“I hope the Public Service Commission decides to go forward with this,” Lewis said earlier this month. “I look forward to the possibility of creating more jobs, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and having clean air.”

On Nov. 22, the Public Service Commission announced it was considering the two offshore wind farm proposals, one by US Wind Inc., a subsidiary of Toto Holding SpA, and the other by Skipjack Offshore Energy LLC, a subsidiary of Deepwater Wind Holdings, LLC.

The US Wind project occupies a Maryland leasing area, while the Deepwater Wind farm is projected to be built in a Delaware leasing area. Both projects will bring clean energy to Maryland.

Clint Plummer, vice president of development for Deepwater Wind, said he believes his company’s project would benefit Maryland in a manageable way, with a strategy to develop the project in different phases.

“We’re the most experienced developer and we’ve proposed a smaller project with an aggressive price,” Plummer said, comparing his company’s proposal to the competing US Wind project.

Deepwater Wind’s Skipjack project would consist of 15 wind turbines about 19.5 miles off the coast, Plummer said. “It will be a 120 megawatt project, which is enough to power about 35,000 houses in the state of Maryland,” Plummer said.

The Skipjack project is planned to be built 26 miles away from the Ocean City Pier, according to Plummer, minimizing visualization. It is expected to be completed by 2022, according to the company’s website.

The US Wind farm proposal includes 187 turbines, which would create up to 750 megawatts of power, enough to power 500,000 homes in Maryland, according to Paul Rich, the director of project development for US Wind.

The company expects to have the project built by 2020, Rich told the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service. US Wind anticipates its project would create hundreds of engineering, construction and operating jobs.

There are reportedly about 2 million households in the state, according to the U.S. Census. Maryland gets its energy from coal, hydroelectricity, natural gas, nuclear, solar and wind.

While the US Wind project is closer to shore, expected to be built 12 to 17 miles off the coast, there are reports from Europe that the view attracts tourists, according to Rich. “They’ll be seen, although minuscule. I think the upshot is that there are people who want to see them; people see them as a bright side of the future,” Rich said.

Rich said they have reached out to the Public Service Commission to discuss the potential for the US Wind project to be moved five miles further from the coast to address visual concerns. If this happened, the current layout for the farm would change. Rich confirmed this move is not definite, but is a discussion he hopes to engage in.

Lars Thaaning, the co-CEO of Vineyard Wind, a company under Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners that has managed and invested in European offshore wind farms, spoke at an April 20 Business Network for Offshore Wind Conference about the differences between building in Europe versus building in Maryland.

Thaaning said the industry in the United States is still new and developing while the industry in Europe has been established. America needs more infrastructure investment, according to Thaaning. “There will not be a long-term market (for offshore wind in America) if we do not establish a supply chain,” Thaaning said.

The Public Service Commission held two public hearings — March 25 in Berlin, Maryland, and March 30 in Annapolis — where legislators and constituents testified on the proposals.

Don Murphy, a Catonsville, Maryland, resident who said he plans to retire in Ocean City, testified against the wind farm proposals at the hearing in Berlin.

Murphy said the project proposals made him feel outraged, horrified and speechless.

“The decisions you make could have an adverse impact on Maryland’s greatest economic engine, Ocean City,” Murphy said. The sight of the wind turbines could impact tourism in Ocean City, according to Murphy.

Murphy proposed that Maryland hold off building these wind farms until the industry is more established, with the fear that they would make headway on the project and regret doing so without proper research.

“It’s said that the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese,” Murphy said. “Why rush into this venture when you can wait long enough to just (receive) the benefits?”

Ocean City Mayor Rick Meehan acknowledged Murphy’s concerns during his testimony. “I am concerned about our community and about, as I said, 26,000 property owners and over 8 million visitors that come to Ocean City every year,” Meehan said. Meehan reiterated Murphy’s point that the commission shouldn’t rush into a decision.

“I believe we should more forward, but we only have one chance to get this right,” Murphy said. “.We ought to make sure that we’re not asking questions later that we didn’t have the answers to in the beginning. I can assure you, once this starts, there will be questions.”

Multiple people who gave testimony in Annapolis addressed the concerns from those opposed for aesthetic reasons. One man testifying asked those in the room to raise their hands if they found turbines aesthetically beautiful, to which many people responded in favor.

James McGarry, the Maryland and D.C. policy director for Chesapeake Climate Action Network, urged the Public Service Commission to take action and be the leader for offshore wind. “Maryland is one of the most vulnerable (states) in the country from climate change with sea level rises,” McGarry said.

What Trump has done for, and to, the environment in his first 100 days

Yahoo News

What Trump has done for, and to, the environment in his first 100 days

Michael Walsh April 26, 2017

Donald Trump’s election victory, after a campaign characterized by railing against environmental regulations and dismissing the work of climate scientists, sent shivers through the environmental and scientific communities. During his first 100 days in office, the brash and unpredictable president has been following through on his campaign promises to bolster the oil, coal and natural gas industries and reverse the eco-friendly policies of his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.

Nearly every step President Trump has taken to enact his vision for the country has sparked a swift backlash. Shortly after Trump’s win, scientists took steps to back up environmental data that was stored on government servers, fearing it might be scrubbed under a Trump administration.

After Trump took office on Jan. 20, scientists at various federal agencies — including the National Park Service (NPS), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) — launched a batch of “rogue” Twitter accounts in defiance.

The scientific community and its allies organized a March for Science scheduled for Earth Day, April 22, inspired by the enormously successful Women’s March on Washington. They are pushing back against what they see as Trump’s attempts to suppress federally funded research on the link between human activities and climate change, part of a larger trend of political attacks on scientific consensus.

Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, pointed out that almost all of the steps Trump has taken regarding the environment so far have been announcements of plans rather than concrete actions. Still, Brune says he is deeply troubled by the direction Trump is taking the country in.

“As a father of young children, I’m angry at what he’s been doing with the EPA and our commitment to the environment generally. At almost every opportunity this administration has increased the risk to the quality of our air and water and our climate. That’s just wrong,” Brune told Yahoo News. “Protecting the environment creates jobs, it saves money and improves the quality of every American’s life. Trump is undermining the progress that we’ve made, not just in the last administration but under Republican and Democratic administrations for the last 40 years.”

Below are the major actions taken by the administration on environmental issues during Trump’s first 100 days in office:

America First Energy Plan excludes renewables

The White House unveiled Trump’s America First Energy Plan on Inauguration Day. It does not mention renewable sources of energy, such as wind or solar.

Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines advanced

On Jan. 24, Trump signed two executive actions advancing the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Earlier that day, during a meeting with CEOs for three automobile manufacturers, Trump said, “ I am to a large extent an environmentalist. I believe in it, but it’s out of control.”

The Dakota Access pipeline is a 1,172-mile underground crude-oil pipeline that will stretch from northwest North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois. A number of Native American tribal nations are protesting the pipeline, which will pass within a half-mile of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The protesters argue that it could pollute the tribe’s only water source, Lake Oahe, and damage sacred and cultural sites.

The Keystone XL pipeline would be an expansion of the existing TransCanada infrastructure that transports oil from tar sands in the energy-rich province of Alberta to refineries in the United States. The Obama administration had blocked a proposed 1,179-mile pipeline from Alberta to Nebraska.

Environmentalists have raised concerns about both pipelines’ necessity and their potential impact on the surrounding areas.

On March 24, the under secretary of state for political affairs granted a permit authorizing TransCanada to construct and maintain the Keystone XL pipeline.

EPA hiring and grants reportedly frozen

In the first week of the administration, officials reportedly directed the EPA to freeze its grants and contracts and to remove a page dedicated to climate change from its website.

New regulations require repealing others

Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 30 stipulating that two federal regulations must be identified for repeal each time a new one is established.

ExxonMobil CEO becomes secretary of state

Trump chose Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, as secretary of state. Environmentalists were outraged that Trump nominated a lifelong oilman to represent the U.S. to the international community. There has also been widespread concern over Tillerson’s close ties to Russia.

Tillerson was confirmed on Feb. 1 by a 56 to 43 vote. It was one of the closest confirmation votes in at least 50 years.

Stream Protection Rule revoked

Shortly before Obama left office, the U.S. Department of the Interior established the Stream Protection Rule, which forbade coal companies to dispose of mining waste and debris in rivers and other waterways near mines.

On Feb. 16, Trump signed a joint resolution by Congress rescinding the rule. Republicans argue that the regulation was redundant and made it extremely difficult for coal companies to operate. This was one of several ways Trump followed through on his campaign promises to be a champion for the coal industry.

Longtime adversary of EPA becomes its leader

On Feb. 17, the U.S. Senate voted 52 to 46 to confirm Scott Pruitt, who denies the scientific consensus on climate change, as EPA chief. Critics said this was a classic instance of the fox guarding the hen house; Pruitt, in his previous position as Oklahoma attorney general, sued the EPA more than a dozen times and played a major role in undoing various environmental regulations that he considered government overreach.

More than 770 former EPA officials had signed a letter urging every member of the Senate to oppose Pruitt.

A few days after his confirmation, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a national watchdog group, published thousands of pages of emails showing how closely Pruitt worked with the fossil fuel industry in challenging EPA regulations.

Environmentalists expect Pruitt to pursue his pro-oil and gas policies as head of the EPA.

Waters of the United States placed under review

Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 28 directing environmental regulators to review the controversial Obama-era Waters of the United States Rule, which expanded the number of waterways protected under federal law. The EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers finalized the rule in 2015.

“The EPA’s so-called Waters of the United States rule is one of the worst examples of federal regulation, and it has truly run amok, and is one of the rules most strongly opposed by farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land,” Trump said at the signing. “It’s prohibiting them from being allowed to do what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s been a disaster.”

Republicans, farmers and energy corporations argue that the rule places unnecessary burdens on businesses and subjects them to pointless fees.

Lead ammunition approved for federal land and water

A day before Trump’s inauguration, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) issued Director’s Order 219 banning lead ammunition or fishing tackle from federal land and water in an attempt to shield birds, fish and other wildlife from lead poisoning. The ban was unpopular with the National Rifle Association and groups representing hunters and fishermen, including the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, which expressed “utter dismay” at the Obama-era directive’s “unacceptable federal overreach.”

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke revoked the ban on March 2 — his first day as part of Trump’s Cabinet.

EPA withdraws information request from energy companies

EPA announced on March 2 that it was withdrawing a 2016 request for information from the oil and gas industry intended to help the agency determine the best ways to reduce emissions of substances such as methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

EPA chief says carbon dioxide is not primary cause of global warming

During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” administrator Pruitt rejected the overwhelming consensus of climate experts and said the scientific evidence linking carbon dioxide emissions with global warming is still inconclusive.

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” Pruitt said. “But we don’t know that yet. … We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) and many other leading scientific organizations have issued statements saying the main cause of the rapid climate change of the past half-century has been the release of atmospheric greenhouse gases as a result of human activity.

“The most important of these over the long term is CO2, whose concentration in the atmosphere is rising principally as a result of fossil-fuel combustion and deforestation,” the AMS statement reads. “While large amounts of CO2 enter and leave the atmosphere through natural processes, these human activities are increasing the total amount in the air and the oceans.”

Later that month, in response to requests from the Sierra Club, the EPA’s Office of Inspector General referred Pruitt’s CNBC interview to Francesca Grifo, the EPA’s scientific integrity officer, to review his statement and determine whether he violated any agency policies.

Trump proposes gutting the EPA budget

The White House’s first budget proposal for 2018, released on March 13, slashes funding for the EPA by 31 percent. Trump said he intended to cut climate change programs and efforts to protect water and air from pollution, which he says are harming coal miners, oil company employees and other workers in the energy sector.

The budget also called for a 17 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal government’s leading climate science agency.

Emissions standards for vehicles reconsidered

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Pruitt announced March 15 that the Obama administration’s standards for emissions from cars and light duty-trucks manufactured between 2022 and 2025 would be reconsidered.

“Today’s decision by the EPA is a win for the American economy,” Chao said in a statement. “The Department of Transportation will re-open the Mid-Term evaluation process and work with the EPA to complete the review in a transparent, data-driven manner.”

The Midterm Evaluation process was established in 2012 to set standards for vehicle models from 2017 until 2025.

EPA continues to fund drinking water upgrades for Flint

In a win for the environment, EPA announced March 17 that it would provide a $100 million grant to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to upgrade the water-supply infrastructure in Flint, Mich., where high levels of lead caused a public-heath emergency last year. The money is provided by the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of 2016, which Obama signed into law.

“The people of Flint and all Americans deserve a more responsive federal government,” Pruitt said in a statement. “EPA will especially focus on helping Michigan improve Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure.”

Executive order targets climate regulations

Trump’s most concerted attack on Obama’s climate legacy came in the form of his Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth executive order on March 28. It essentially started the process of dismantling Obama’s signature climate legislation: the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which placed limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-burning power plants.

“The action I’m taking today will eliminate federal overreach, restore economic freedom and allow our companies and our workers to thrive, compete and succeed on a level playing field for the first time in a long time,” Trump said. “It’s been a long time. I’m not just talking about eight years. I’m talking about a lot longer than eight years.”

It also directs all agencies to review their regulations and guidance documents to determine and end any that could potentially “burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources.”

EPA chief rejects pesticides ban

On March 29, Pruitt signed an order rejecting a decade-old petition to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide that’s been in use since 1965. He argued that the insecticide is essential for U.S. agriculture.

“We need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of American farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment,” Pruitt said in a statement. “By reversing the previous Administration’s steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-making — rather than predetermined results.”

Under the Obama administration, the EPA had begun the process of banning chlorpyrifos in response to a petition from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Pesticide Action Network North America, which said the step was necessary to protect children’s health.

Recent scientific research links chlorpyrifos exposure with several health risks, including brain damage in children. The neurotoxic chemical is sprayed on crops that are commonly consumed by children, such as apples, strawberries and oranges.

“EPA turned a blind-eye to extensive scientific evidence and peer reviews documenting serious harm to children and their developing brains, including increased risk of learning disabilities, reductions in IQ, developmental delay, autism and ADHD,” Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a senior scientist at NRDC, said in a statement. “Today’s decision means children across the country will continue to be exposed to unsafe pesticide residues in their food and drinking water.”

Sheryl Kunickis, the director of the Office of Pest Management Policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, applauded the decision not to ban this “important pest management tool” that ensures an “abundant and affordable food supply.”

The EPA had already banned chlorpyrifos in household settings in 2000, but it is still used in agriculture.

Trump donates part of salary to National Parks

The White House announced April 3 that Trump will donate his first-quarter salary of $78,333 to the U.S. National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior dedicated to maintaining parks and monuments. It was a step toward fulfilling his campaign promise of donating his presidential salary to charity.

But environmentalists largely dismissed the donation as a publicity stunt, pointing out that he had proposed cutting the Department of the Interior’s budget by $1.5 billion.

Pruitt calls for leaving the Paris Agreement

During an April 13 appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Pruitt said the U.S. should withdraw from the Paris Agreement to limit global warming.

“It’s something we need to exit, in my opinion. It’s a bad deal for America. It was an America second, third, forth, kind of approach,” Pruitt said.

EPA unveils Back-to-Basics agenda

During a meeting with coal miners at Harvey Mine in Sycamore, Pa., on April 13, Pruitt announced the EPA’s “back-to-basics” agenda of handing power to the states to create “sensible regulations” that allow economic activity to flourish.

“What better way to launch EPA’s Back-to-Basics agenda than visiting the hard-working coal miners who help power America,” Pruitt said. “The coal industry was nearly devastated by years of regulatory overreach, but with new direction from President Trump, we are helping to turn things around for these miners and for many other hard-working Americans.”

EPA to review ELG Rule

The EPA announced April 13 that is intends to reconsider the ELG rule (effluent limitations guidelines) for steam electric power under the Clean Water Act. The rule, which was finalized by the Obama administration in 2015, places the first federal limits on toxic metals from the wastewater of steam electric power plants.

“This action is another example of EPA implementing President Trump’s vision of being good stewards of our natural resources, while not developing regulations that hurt our economy and kill jobs,” Pruitt said in a statement.

According to Pruitt, some of the country’s largest job producers have objected to the rule, saying it includes economically or technologically unfeasible requirements.

Former Georgia governor becomes secretary of agriculture

The U.S. Senate confirmed former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue as head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on April 24 with a strong bipartisan vote: 87 to 11.

Along with overseeing farming and food programs, the Department of Agriculture is responsible for the country’s forestry and is the parent agency of the United States Forest Service.

Perdue found success in the agriculture business before entering politics. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, he stepped down from several businesses before he was confirmed as agriculture secretary.

Brune released a statement denouncing what he called Perdue’s history of “crony capitalism, indebtedness to big agribusiness and denial of climate science.”

“We will be closely watching Secretary Perdue’s actions on land conservation, forest management, and funding for forest fire fighting,” Brune said. “We stand ready to resist attacks on our food, our forests, and our families.”

Trump advisers to discuss future of Paris Agreement

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement” within his first 100 days in the Oval Office, but he’s said little on the subject since his victory.

The New York Times reports that Trump’s advisers disagree on whether the U.S. should stay in the climate accord. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly advocate staying in the Paris Agreement, over the opposition of senior strategist Stephen K. Bannon, whose influence within the White House has waned in recent weeks.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer says Trump plans to make his final decision concerning the Paris Agreement before a meeting with the Group of Seven at the end of May. The group consists of the world’s seven major advanced economies: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Brune told Yahoo News that pulling out of the Paris Agreement would be a blow to the global effort to fight climate change and an even more significant blow to American leadership.

“China is going all in on clean energy, as is South Korea, India and other rising world economics,” Brune said. “If we forgo the leadership opportunity in the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy, much less the global economy, our competitive position will suffer as will the air and water quality of all Americans. It would be a boneheaded move by a president who isn’t fit for the job.”

The Kochs have already spent over $3 million lobbying for Trump’s anti-environmental agenda

ThinkProgress

Samantha Page, Climate Reporter at @ThinkProgress. April 25, 2017

The Kochs have already spent over $3 million lobbying for Trump’s anti-environmental agenda

Fossil fuel spending swamps environmental efforts.

New filings indicate that Koch Industries, the primary company of petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch, spent $3.1 million on congressional lobbying efforts in the first quarter of 2017, according to its disclosure report. Much of that money went towards anti-environmental initiatives, where the Kochs have found an ally in the new president.

Lobbyists for Koch Industries worked on convincing congress to repeal the renewable fuel standard; to repeal requirements for vehicle efficiency, known as the CAFE standards; to repeal a Clean Air Act provision to decrease the risk of chemical accidents; to stymie the Clean Power Plan, an EPA rule to reduce carbon emissions from power plants; and on various budgetary allocations.

In addition, the company lobbied senators to confirm former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt is just one of several cabinet members with ties to fossil fuels.

“The dirtiest corporate polluters in the country spent big to get a cabinet that puts their profits before the health of the public, and they are getting what they paid for,” the Sierra Club’s Adam Beitman told ThinkProgress.

The Koch brothers declined to back now-President Trump during the election, but it seems that now they are finding significant overlap between Trump’s anti-environmental agenda, including getting rid of the Clean Power Plan and rolling back regulations, and the Koch brothers’ top agenda items.

Koch Industries wasn’t the only fossil fuel company to spend significantly on lobbyists in the first quarter of the year. The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and natural gas industries, spent an additional $2.7 million in the first quarter of the year. ExxonMobil spent $3.4 million; Shell Oil Company spent $2.3 million; Chevron spent $3.3 million; and BP spent $1.7 million. In contrast, the Sierra Club spent $290,000, the most out of any of the “Big Green” groups.

See: 6 times Trump’s EPA head did exactly what industry told him to do, The Environmental Protection Agency has gone pro-business. thinkprogress.org

Overall, the interests of the environment are significantly less represented than the interests of the fossil fuel industries. The Outdoor Industry Association, whose members depend on a healthy environment, spent only $80,000, while the American Wind Energy Association spent $170,000 during the same time period. SolarCity, the biggest residential solar installer in the United States, spent $190,000.

But the fossil fuel industry is notorious for its outsized — and effective — lobbying efforts. According to analysis by Oil Change International, the oil and gas industry gets $119 in tax breaks and other benefits for every $1 it spends on Congress.

“Influence is a tricky thing to measure,” the group writes. “It is obvious to anyone that pays attention to U.S. politics that the oil and gas industry is one of the most influential industries on Capitol Hill. But quantifying that influence is not always straightforward.”

It’s not surprising that now-EPA Administrator Pruitt’s nomination got the attention major fossil fuel interests. Pruitt has longstanding ties to the fossil fuel industry and, prior to his appointment to the agency, was a well-known opponent of the EPA. As attorney general, Pruitt sued the EPA numerous times, including over the Clean Power Plan and other Clean Air Act provisions. He was on the same side as oil, gas, and coal companies for many of those lawsuits.

One of the companies Pruitt has been closely entwined with is Devon Energy, an Oklahoma-based oil and gas company. In the first quarter, Devon spent $390,000 towards lobbying on a few specific issues, all related to the environment. The company filed lobbying disclosures on methane emissions regulations, “limitation guidelines” on fracking wastewater disposal, air quality standards, and endangered species protection measures. The company did not directly lobby for Pruitt’s confirmation.

Since taking a position in the Trump administration, Devon and the rest of the fossil fuel companies have seen a good return on their investment. Pruitt has — at the admitted behest of industry — repealed and delayed numerous rules intended to protect the nation’s environment, including some of the regulations specifically targeted in Devon’s lobbying efforts.

Pruitt was confirmed by the Senate by a narrow margin: a vote of 52-46, with 51 votes needed for confirmation. It’s impossible to say — without direct confirmation from a senator — whether the activities of the Koch brothers affected any of those votes or not.

Other groups that lobbied on the Pruitt confirmation included the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Wildlife Association, the Michigan Farm Bureau, the League of Conservation Voter, and the American Coalition for Ethanol, to name a few.

Thanks to Kiley Kroh.

Samantha Page, Climate Reporter at @ ThinkProgress

Chicago Sun Times

Big oil spill a silent threat to Lake Michigan, Great Lakes

Sun Times Editorial Board, April 25, 2017
A study released Tuesday has ratcheted up worries that a 64-year-old mussel-encrusted oil pipeline in northern Lake Michigan threatens an ecological catastrophe.

The study by the National Wildlife Federation said the Enbridge Energy Line 5 pipeline has had nearly double the number of spills that were previously known. Nor were most of the leaks discovered by Enbridge’s remote pipeline detection system, the federation said.

Environmentalists are concerned because 4½ miles of the pipeline lies mostly exposed on the bed of the Straits of Mackinac, at the northern tip of Lake Michigan, where it joins Lake Huron. Over the years, pressure inside the pipeline, which is split into two separate pipes as it goes under the straits, has been increased so that it can move more oil.

EDITORIAL

If the pipeline starts leaking large amounts of petroleum, hundreds of miles of shorelines would be fouled and drinking water for thousands of people would be at risk. So would the commercial fishing, tourism and boating industries. Strong currents could spread the oil over a great distance.

Environmentalists warn that the damage could linger for decades in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. In 2014, University of Michigan hydrodynamics expert David Schwab said the Straits of Mackinac is “the worst possible place for an oil spill in the Great Lakes.”

That’s a huge concern in a region that depends on its lakes. Regional officials should accelerate an existing investigation into the safety of the pipeline, and local authorities should start planning now — while they have time — for how they will ensure the safety of their communities if closure of the pipeline means more oil must be piped or transported by rail through the Chicago area, which already is home to major pipelines.

The Great Lakes region is an important North American hub for transporting and refining oil. The Enbridge pipeline is part of a 16,000-mile network that transports oil to 21 refineries, as well as natural gas and propane. If the line across the Straits of Mackinac is shut down, the nearly 23 million gallons of oil it moves each day — more than that planned for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline — would have to be transported by other pipelines or by rail. Environmentalists say that can be managed with existing infrastructure.

A sign is posted on a bridge to indicate water contamination after an oil spill of approximately 800,000 gallons of crude in the Kalamazoo River July 28, 2010 in Marshall, Michigan. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

Enbridge and the Illinois Petroleum Council say oil pipelines have an excellent safety record, and Enbridge says new safety measures it has put into place guard against a disastrous spill. But that’s what Enbridge said before one of its pipelines ruptured in 2010 in Michigan, dumping more than a million of gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River. Even after three years of cleanup, oil remained in the river. Forgive us if we are skeptical.

An advisory board in Michigan, which has regulatory authority over the pipeline, is assessing the risks of the pipeline and weighing alternatives. A draft report is scheduled to be released this summer.

Clean energy may be America’s future. But transporting oil will remain an important part of the region’s economy in the foreseeable future. Officials should make the safety of the lakes paramount.

ThinkProgress

Dr. Joe Romm is Founding Editor of Climate Progress, “the indispensable blog,” as NY Times columnist Tom Friedman describes it. April 24, 2017

Climate change poses ‘nightmare scenario’ for Florida coast, Bloomberg warns

America’s trillion-dollar coastal property bubble could burst ‘before the sea consumes a single house’. Here’s why.

Donald Trump’s presidency may make this future for South Florida and “Miami Island” unstoppable.

“Pessimists selling to optimists.” That’s how one former Florida coastal property owner describes the current state of the market in a must-read Bloomberg story.

Right now, science and politics don’t favor the optimists. The disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets is speeding up, providing increasing evidence we are headed for the worst-case scenario of sea level rise — three to six feet (or more) by 2100.

The impacts are already visible in South Florida. “Tidal flooding now predictably drenches inland streets, even when the sun is out, thanks to the region’s porous limestone bedrock,” explains Bloomberg. “Saltwater is creeping into the drinking water supply.”

See: Rapid warming and disintegrating polar ice set the stage for ‘societal collapse’ Carbon pollution is destabilizing both the Arctic and Antarctic. thinkprogress.org

At the same time, President Trump is working to thwart both domestic and international climate action while slashing funding for coastal adaptation and monitoring. E&E News reported earlier this month that the EPA has already “disbanded its climate change adaptation program” and reassigned all the workers.

Faster sea level rise and less adaptation means the day of reckoning is nigh. Dan Kipnis, chair of Miami Beach’s Marine and Waterfront Protection Authority — who has failed to find a buyer for his Miami Beach home for nearly a year — told Bloomberg, “Nobody thinks it’s coming as fast as it is.”

See: Florida’s Climate Denial Could Cause Catastrophic Resession. thinkprogress.org

But this is not just South Florida’s problem. The entire country is facing a trillion-dollar bubble in coastal property values. This Hindenburg has been held aloft by U.S. taxpayers in the form of the National Flood Insurance Program.

A 2014 Reuters analysis of this “slow-motion disaster” calculated there’s almost $1.25 trillion in coastal property being covered at below-market rates.

When will the bubble burst? As I’ve written for years, property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community — mortgage bankers and opinion-makers, along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public — realize that it is too late for us to stop catastrophic sea level rise.

When sellers outnumber buyers, and banks become reluctant to write 30-year mortgages for doomed property, and insurance rates soar, then the coastal property bubble will slow, peak, and crash.

The devaluation process had begun even before Trump’s election reduced the chances we would act in time to prevent catastrophic climate change. The New York Times reported last fall that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”

Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned a year ago that values could plunge if sellers start a stampede. “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses,” he said. “Others will not be so lucky.”

As this week’s Bloomberg piece puts it, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”

So here’s a question for owners of coastal property — and the financial institutions that back them — as they watch team Trump keep his coastal-destroying promises: Who will be the smart money that gets out early — and who will be the other kind of money?

Business Insider

Arctic thaw quickening threatens trillion-dollar costs – report

Reuters By Alister and Doyle

OSLO, April 25 (Reuters) – The Arctic’s quickening thaw is melting the permafrost under buildings and roads from Siberia to Alaska, raising world sea levels and disrupting temperature patterns further south, an international study said on Tuesday.

The frigid region’s shift to warmer and wetter conditions, resulting in melting ice around the region, may cost the world economy trillions of dollars this century, it estimated.

The report by 90 scientists, including United States experts, urged governments with interests in the Arctic to cut greenhouse gas emissions. U.S. President Donald Trump doubts that human activities, led by use of fossil fuels, are the main driver of climate change.

“The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on Earth, and rapidly becoming a warmer, wetter and more variable environment,” according to the study, which updates scientific findings from 2011.

“Increasing greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the primary underlying cause,” they wrote in the study commissioned by the Arctic Council grouping the United States, Russia, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland.

Arctic warming could have cumulative net costs from 2010-2100 of between $7 trillion and $90 trillion, it said, with harm exceeding benefits such as easier access for oil and gas exploration and shipping, it said.

The period 2011-2015 was the warmest since records began in 1900. Sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, which shrank to a record low in 2012, could disappear in summers by the 2030s, earlier than many earlier projections, it said.

ACCELERATING MELT

“The Arctic is continuing to melt, and it’s going faster than expected in 2011,” Lars-Otto Reiersen, head of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) which prepared the report, told Reuters.

Among signs of harm, thawing permafrost has triggered more landslides at Russia’s Bovanenkovo gas field in Siberia. Rare warmth and spring floods closed the highway to Alaska’s North Slope oilfields for three weeks in 2015.

Further inland in Alaska, though, there have been drier conditions, meaning wildfires were worse there now than at any time in the past 10,000 years, it said.

Rising temperatures are threatening livelihoods of indigenous hunters and thinning sea ice vital to wildlife such as polar bears and seals.

The Arctic is warming fast partly because snow and ice reflect the sun’s faint heat into space. The thaw exposes ever more party-coloured sea water and ground that absorb more of the sun’s heat, in turn accelerating the melt.

Walt Meier, a NASA scientist who was among the authors, said there was also new evidence since 2011 that the thickest Arctic sea ice, which survives multiple summers, was breaking up.

“Multi-year ice used to be a big consolidated pack. It’s almost like a big thick ice cube versus a bunch of crushed ice. When you warm the water, the crushed ice melts a lot quicker,” he told Reuters.

Among recommendations, the report said Arctic states and those interested in the region “should lead … global efforts for an early, ambitious and full implementation” of a Paris Agreement in 2015 among almost 200 nations to limit warming.

Reiersen at AMAP said that appeal for action was similar to ones issued in the past by Arctic governments. The eight Arctic Council nations are due to hold a meeting of foreign ministers in Fairbanks, Alaska, on May 11.

But it is unclear if the scientists’ advice will be heeded in the conclusions of the U.S.-led meeting.

Trump threatened in his campaign to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and has sometimes tweeted that global warming is a hoax, preferring to bolster the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

(Reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Earth Day 2017, A Turning Point?

John Hanno – April 22, 2017

save planet earth, recycle; three hands around ecology globe - earth day stock pictures, royalty-free photos & images

At this time last year, many of us concerned with the survival of the planet, saw a faint light at the end of the apocalyptic global warming tunnel. President Obama was in charge and the White House was full of climate change true believers; deniers were relegated to Fox News and the Republican fossil fuel panders in Congress.

The Paris Agreement, under the authority of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, negotiated by 195 countries, was opened for signatures on Earth Day last year at a ceremony in New York. As of April 2017, 195 members have signed the treaty, and after enough (143) countries ratified it, it went into effect on November 4, 2016.

Also last year, the Standing Rock Nation Earth Protectors and millions of supporters and environmentalists around the world, were stopping Dakota Access and Keystone XL Pipelines in their dirty tracts. This valiant opposition convinced President Obama to deny approval for the Keystone and order the Army Corp to reevaluate the DAPL.

But what a difference a year makes. Trump had barely been sworn in when he approved both Keystone and Dakota Access. And with the installment of fossil fuel panderer and climate denier Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump began paying back the fossil fuel polluters who helped get him elected.

With Trump in the White House and the Republi-cons in control of Congress, this Earth Day is fraught with ominous clouds. The Donald wants to slash the EPA budget by 30%. He also wants to make steep cuts to the Energy Departments environmental programs designed to shift America’s dependence on fossil fuel to primarily supporting renewable energy. This budget could effectively eliminate the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, clearly antithetical to ‘true’ conservative governance. It would also strip $1 billion from the Office of Science. And of course, Trump and his fossil fuel and polluter friends, have proposed eliminating any and all environmental regulations as a top priority.

Unfortunately, the one consistent thing we can count on concerning our climate, is that every month and year establishes more extreme weather records. But no matter how many obstacles Trump and his cast of anti science, oil, gas and chemical pandering cabinet deniers, along with the Repubs in Congress, place in the way of the undaunted march of sustainable alternative energy progress, rational folks will not be deterred. Tomorrow, more than 1 billion earth protectors around the world will celebrate Earth Day 2017.

The original environmentalists, our Native American Standing Rock Earth Protectors, are regrouping and joining Bold Nebraska and the landowners standing in the way of Trans Canada’s plans to build the Keystone pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta to Texas refineries, for the sole purpose of exporting tar sands to the world markets. These tar sands are the dirtiest oil on the planet. This dilbit (tar mixed with sand), must be melted with steam and mixed with cancer causing diluents so it can be transported in a pipeline. This process is the most devastating to the environment. This dilbit is also extremely corrosive to pipelines and runs the risk of leaking and contaminating the Nebraska sand hills and the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to eight states and 10’s of millions of Americans.

This isn’t about American energy independence, its about the greed of Canadian pipeline companies and the oil industry they serve, and their indifference to the health and safety of families, farmers and Native American tribes in the middle of America. It’s just not worth the risk to only benefit greedy oil interests and their political benefactors.

Investment in these dirty tar sands has been cut by two thirds. Di-vestments by cities, universities, green funds, pension funds and others has made a difference and has put pressure on the banks funding these toxic pipelines and tar sand extraction interests to withdraw funding or sell their interests.

Earth Day’s ‘Marches For Science’: “Many scientists prefer to work quietly, letting their research speak for itself. But recent attacks are galvanizing scientists and supporters throughout the U.S. and elsewhere. The March for Science on Earth Day, April 22, has been building steam for months. The main march will take place in Washington, DC, but more than 425 marches are planned around the world. That kicks off a week of action, culminating in the Peoples Climate March on April 29—also focused on Washington but with satellite marches throughout the world. The March for Science website says organizers are ‘advocating for evidence-based policymaking, science education, research funding, and inclusive and accessible science.’ ” Dr. David Suzuki

Responsible politicians and business leaders in America and around the world are joining the inevitable switch to a sustainable future for mankind. Donald J. Trump is unfortunately not one of those forward thinking leaders. Hundreds of corporations have pledged to switch to 100% renewable energy. Some have already achieved their lofty goals. Apple already uses 96% renewables for its manufacturing processes and has pledged to use 100% recyclables for it products. China is now the largest user of solar energy and India has also gone all in on solar, having gone on line with the largest solar array in the world. Every day brings a new chapter in the fight to save our planet and some amazing story about alternative energy progress. The Smithsonian will present its series on the fight to save animal species on the National Geographic Channel.

RE100 is a global campaign of The Climate Group in partnership with CDP, to promote and support businesses committed to 100% renewable electricity. Goldman Sachs, Johnson & Johnson, NIKE, Inc., Procter & Gamble, Salesforce, Starbucks, Steelcase, Voya Financial, and Walmart have joined RE100 and pledged to source 100% of their electricity from renewable energy in order to reduce CO2 emissions.

When RE100 was launched in 2014, there were 13 original corporate partners: IKEA Group, Swiss Re, BT Group, Formula E, H&M, KPN, Nestlé, Philips, RELX Group, J. Safra Sarasin, Unilever and YOOX Group. Mars, Inc. was the first US business to join. 36 major businesses from around the world have since joined the campaign. Elion Resources Group was the first Chinese company to join in 2015 and Infosys Technology company was the first Indian company to join the group. Swiss financial company UBS and Dutch Life Sciences and Materials sciences company Royal DSM have also joined and pledged.

Voters must ask themselves why our current President, self described as the “greatest businessman,” is refusing to join these concerned, responsible and true conservative world leaders, attempting to save the planet.

Check out two recent books helpful to understanding the fight to save our environment. The 2016 book “Getting to Green”: A bipartisan Solution, by Fredric C. Rich.

And “Climate of Hope,” a new book released last Monday, co-authored by Carl Pope and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

During the long campaign, Mr. Trump asked desperate voters in America’s rust belt, and in rural, mostly red states, many who have long ago fallen out of the middle class, to trust him. They overlooked his long history of cheating business partners, denigrating women, playing fast and loose with our “on your honor” income tax system and his single minded obsession with only doing what’s best for Trump. I guess they thought somehow, there was a slim chance he wouldn’t let them down like other politicians had done before. But they have only themselves to blame. He made a long list of totally unrealistic promises that only a mother would believe. He lied so much, it would have been easier just to highlight the rare occasion when he actually told the truth. He consistently lied about his tax returns and his business dealings with the Russian oligarchs. He insisted voters really didn’t care. It’s not surprising that the latest Gallop poll claims only 36% believe Trump is “honest and trustworthy.”

And this past weekend, on traditional income tax day April 15th, saw more than 120,000 folks take to the streets demanding that Mr. Trump produce his tax returns. Poll after poll reveals 75% of us, including many Republicans, want to see those returns. These tax records will be helpful in showing who Trump is loyal or beholden to and may explain the reasons he’s willing to forsake the survival of the world and future generations, even his own grand children, in order to reward the fossil fuel industry and polluters. His explanation, that he’s trying to create jobs, is an easily proven line of bull. More jobs have been created in the alternative energy industry than all jobs in fossil fuel combined. Jobs in the wind industry, which have just surpassed 100,000 are growing 10 times faster than the rest of the economy.

Even though 75% of voters want to maintain or improve the EPA, these Republi-cons in charge would like nothing better than to neuter the whole department; and will try to reverse the progress made by the Obama administration in protecting our air, land and especially our precious water. Concerned Americans must do their part to make sure that doesn’t happen. A good time to start is tomorrow, Earth Day. Join your friends and neighbors in one of the marches or demonstrations. Or just plant a tree. Although a large majority of Trump supporters are incapable or simply refuse to use scientific reason or engage in critical thinking when it comes to the environment and climate change, Republicans who consider themselves ‘True Conservatives,’ must speak truth to power to this uncurious, anti-science president. John Hanno

ecosolutions

What is Earth Day, and what is it meant to accomplish?

By Kathleen Rogers, for CNN April 21, 2017

Kathleen Rogers is President of Earth Day Network. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN)Forty-seven years ago, on 22 April 1970, millions of people took to the streets to protest the negative impacts of 150 years of industrial development.

In the US and around the world, smog was becoming deadly and evidence was growing that pollution led to developmental delays in children. Biodiversity was in decline as a result of the heavy use of pesticides and other pollutants.

The global ecological awareness was growing, and the US Congress and President Nixon responded quickly. In July of the same year, they created the Environmental Protection Agency, and robust environmental laws such as the Clear Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, among many.

One billion people

Earth Day is now a global event each year, and we believe that more than 1 billion people in 192 countries now take part in what is the largest civic-focused day of action in the world.

It is a day of political action and civic participation. People march, sign petitions, meet with their elected officials, plant trees, clean up their towns and roads. Corporations and governments use it to make pledges and announce sustainability measures. Faith leaders, including Pope Francis, connect Earth Day with protecting God’s greatest creations, humans, biodiversity and the planet that we all live on.

In the lead up to Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in 2020, Earth Day Network launched a campaign to bring climate and environmental literacy to the world.

Climate literacy is now recognized universally as the engine for driving individual behavioral change, building consumer support for a green economy, creating green technologies and jobs, and promoting policy reforms at all levels of government.

Recognizing the importance of an educated global population, the authors of the Paris Climate Agreement put climate education at its heart, calling on national governments to cooperate in taking measures to enhance climate education, training and access to information.

Environmental education has evolved since 1970, and new models are gaining traction. Once focused solely on teaching the science of the natural world, environmental education has since embraced the concepts of sustainable development, promoting the economic values associated with the transition to the green economy – including jobs and opportunities for entrepreneurship. These attributes are becoming part of a continuum of environmental learning.

An uphill battle

Different models for formal and informal climate education are sprouting around the globe. Some countries internalized the values of climate and environmental education years ago, recognizing that the jobs of the future belong to those who understand not just information about the environment, but also the potential for economic growth.

Finland, for example, already recognized for its top educational system, has been teaching environmental education and climate risks and opportunities for more than a decade.

More and more countries around the world, including Italy, Morocco, and Nicaragua, are now passing laws that will create a new generation of skilled green energy jobs in a way that we have never seen before.

At the same time, climate and environmental education face an increasingly uphill battle in the US.

Unlike many countries, the US allows individual states to control their own curricula. The result is 50 separate climate and environmental literacy plans, some of which avoid teaching about climate change at all.

Given the uneven landscape of political support for protecting our planet, Earth Day remains a critical point in time. Not a day of remembrance but a day of action.

Forty-seven years after the first Earth Day, the jury is still out on whether we will take the actions that are necessary to save ourselves. Education and action are the two most valuable steps we can take to protect our planet. Earth Day is the day to start.

EcoWatch

How Cities, Businesses and Citizens Can Save the Planet

Carl Pope April 19, 2017

It’s a big week for me. Monday was the official publication date of “Climate of Hope,” my new book co-authored with former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

The book’s premise is that climate solutions now constitute an enormous short term opportunity—healthier communities, greater prosperity, enhanced security—for both the U.S. and the world community. The key to seizing that opportunity is to understand that the climate crisis is a symptom of multiple market failures and political follies, not a single free-standing “problem;” that leadership in implementing solutions is already emerging not so much from national governments as from cities, businesses and citizen activists; and that this bottom up leadership is the key to continuing to accelerate the pace of progress and the prospects for avoiding catastrophic risks to the climate.

Climate of Hope is now out there being reviewed – not always favorably – so I thought I’d use this blog to give my perspective on why Mike and I believe this approach does, in fact, offer a solid pathway out of the climate crisis.

The main criticism thus far—and I expect this to continue—is that we are wrongly arguing that national governments don’t matter, and that cities and businesses alone can correct our climate follies. We don’t, make that argument, and they can’t do it alone. A number of our key approaches clearly require national action—like redirecting agricultural subsidies away from encouraging overproduction of cotton and corn towards supporting regenerative agriculture which can suck carbon out of the atmosphere, where it is a climate threat, and into the soil, where it becomes a fertility and water storage enhancing asset.

But others, like modernizing building codes to ensure that any house built after 2020 is hyper-efficient, powered by its own renewable generation, so its owners don’t have to pay a utility bill and don’t pollute the atmosphere when they turn on the lights, are intrinsically the business of local (and state) governments.

And in the U.S. political context some that sound national—like encouraging the rapid replacement of internal combustion cars with electric drive—may actually emerge from a combination of city and state action. Led by Los Angeles, a coalition of 30 U.S. cities recently announced they would jointly bid out purchase orders for up to 114,000 electric drive vehicles at a cost of $10 billion, while California and 12 partner states made clear they would move forward with their zero emission vehicle mandate. So the cities are providing electric-drive vehicles with the scale needed to bring down prices and improve performance, while the states are guaranteeing that the market for these vehicles will continue to grow far beyond what city fleets alone could guarantee.

Similarly, the center piece of the Trump administration assault on President Obama’s climate legacy, the suspension of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), assumes that the future of America’s electric sector depends on a top-down national mandate, because utilities will otherwise cling to their existing fossil fuel dependent facilities. But while the CPP envisaged cutting utility emissions by only 30 percent by 2025, citizen action and market forces had already slashed power plant carbon pollution by 25 percent at the end of 2016, and we are on track to cut these emissions by almost 50 percent, not 30 percent, by 2025, through market forces and public pressure.

On the other hand, cleaning up methane emissions from oil and gas drilling on public lands, another Obama rule Trump would like to quash, can’t be replaced by state and local initiatives—the federal government ultimately must become part of the solution. But just as during the Progressive era at the start of the 20th century it was cities and states and forged the new policy instruments that eventually became the New Deal, rather than waiting for Washington, just so Mike Bloomberg and I believe that political leadership on climate in the United States, and elsewhere, will come from below, not from national elites which remain in thrall to the fossil lobby and other entrenched interests. (Remember those crop subsidies? Shifting them to protect the climate would be good for farmers, but bad for pesticide and fertilizer interests.)

The essential message of Climate of Hope, however, is that every one of the separate market and political failures that threaten the climate has its own unique source and solution—each requiring a different approach and reform, all making us better off. CFC’s, for example, cooling and refrigeration chemicals were deployed to replaced ozone depleting predecessors with inadequate testing. Because of their extraordinary ability to prevent solar radiation from bouncing back into space, they loomed as a huge future climate risk. But just as an international treaty—the Montreal Protocol—got rid of the risk of ozone depleting chemicals—the ozone layer is now healing—an amendment to that same treaty is now going to replace HFCs with climate safe alternatives.

Carbon emissions from deforestation mostly stem from illegal logging—so ending corruption and cracking down on the trade in contraband timber are key climate solutions. Methane emissions from rice paddies require better irrigation and cropping practices in rural areas, while methane from urban trash can be prevented by cities deciding to compost garbage instead of dumping it in landfills. Nitrous oxide emissions are soaring because nations subsidize over-fertilization instead of helping farmers figure out how much fertilizer their crops can really utilize. Black carbon from diesels will end as soon as we require all the world’s fuels to be refined to eliminate sulfur contamination, something cities and ports are initiating. But black carbon from biomass cooking in developing countries demands giving poor families access to clean cooking fuels—either ethanol from crop wastes or LPG gas currently being wasted and flared.

That diversity of solutions requires a diversity of leaders—yes, presidents, prime ministers and diplomats, but also mayors, CEO’s, school board members, architects, procurement officers, rural co-op directors, governors, municipal utility executives, hedge fund managers, college trustees and rear admirals. And properly chosen climate solutions will make each of those jobs easier, and enable those who hold them to deliver better results.

EcoWatch

American Wind Energy Association

11 Reasons to Celebrate Wind Energy’s Record Year

By John Hensley April 19, 2017

11 Reasons to Celebrate Wind Energy’s Record Year

AWEA released its U.S. Wind Industry Annual Market Report, Year Ending 2016 today, which showcases strong, steady growth throughout the year.

Wind power became the largest source of renewable generating capacity and supplied record amounts of wind energy to many parts of the country. Strong wind project construction, a growing manufacturing sector and the increasing need for wind turbine technicians and operators allowed the industry to add jobs at a rate nine times faster than the overall job market, as wind employment grew to a record 102,500.

Technology advances resulted in more productive turbines, with recent generations achieving average capacity factors more than 40 percent, all while costs continued to fall. And the industry saw the installation of the country’s first offshore wind project off the coast of Rhode Island.

Here are the top 11 wind industry trends in 2016:

Record Wind Jobs

For the first time in history, there are more than 100,000 Americans employed in the U.S. wind energy industry. Strong wind construction activity throughout the year, combined with a strengthening wind manufacturing sector and growing need for personnel to operate and maintain more than 52,000 wind turbines, allowed the industry to add nearly 15,000 full-time equivalent jobs in 2016.

That brings total U.S. wind industry jobs to 102,500. Impressively, the U.S. wind industry added jobs more than nine times faster than the overall economy. Strong wind project installation, construction, and development activity, combined with strong wind-related manufacturing activity, and over 52,000 wind turbines to operate and maintain, led wind jobs to grow 16.5 percent. That’s compared to 1.8 percent for the overall U.S. job market.

Wind #1 Source of Renewable Generating Capacity

Wind energy passed hydroelectric power to become the number one source of renewable generating capacity in 2016. With federal policy stability secured, the U.S. wind industry installed 8,203 megawatts (MW) in 2016 and the industry now has 82,143 MW installed overall, enough wind power for the equivalent of 24 million American homes.

Generation Records Set

Wind energy delivered more than 30 percent of the electricity produced in Iowa and South Dakota in 2016. Kansas, Oklahoma and North Dakota generated more than 20 percent of their electricity from wind, while 20 states now produce more than five percent of their electricity from wind energy. ERCOT, the main grid operator for most of Texas, and SPP, which operates across parts of 14 states, competed for new wind power penetration records throughout 2016, both topping 50% wind energy on several occasions.

U.S. Manufacturing Sector Growth

Wind energy continues to fuel the domestic manufacturing sector, with more than 500 factories across 41 states producing components for the U.S. wind industry in 2016. Domestic wind-related manufacturing jobs grew 17 percent to more than 25,000 as three new factories began supplying the wind industry and five plants expanded production.

Technology Boosts Productivity

Technological advances allow wind turbines to reach stronger, steadier winds, and more sophisticated control systems are increasing the amount of electricity modern wind turbines generate. Wind turbines built in 2014 and 2015 achieved capacity factors more than 40 percent during 2016. At the same time, the cost of wind energy dropped more than 66 percent between 2009 and 2016.

Corporations and Utilities Want Wind

Fortune 500 companies, electric utilities and others signed 47 power purchasing agreements totaling more than 4,000 MW during 2016. In doing so, they cited the declining costs and stable price of wind power as factors. Utilities submitted Integrated Resource Plans detailing at least 14,000 MW in wind power additions in the past two years.

Record Wind Enters Queue

67 gigawatts of newly proposed wind projects were added to interconnection queues in 2016, the largest since the addition of 67.3 GW in 2009. This brings total wind capacity in the queues to 136.8 GW, the highest level in five years.

Improving the Transmission Grid

Transmission expansion to serve wind continues, particularly in MISO and SPP. A number of proposed interregional Direct Current transmission lines have now also cleared final permitting hurdles. In total, transmission projects that could support the delivery of nearly 52,000 MW of wind energy over the next five years are currently under development, though not all are likely to be built.

Wind Benefits Every State

More than 74 percent of U.S. congressional districts have operational wind energy projects or active wind-related manufacturing facilities, including 77 percent of Republican districts and 69 percent of Democratic districts. The industry invested more than $14.1 billion in new wind projects and supported 102,500 jobs across all 50 states.

Wind Reduces Emissions and Saves Water

Operational wind projects avoided 393 million pounds of sulfur dioxide and 243 million pounds of nitrogen oxide. These pollutants create smog and trigger asthma attacks, so reducing them saved $7.4 billion in public health costs last year. Meanwhile, operating wind projects avoided the consumption of 87 billion gallons of water, equivalent to 266 gallons per person in the U.S.

Offshore Wind Debut

The first offshore wind project in the U.S. began operating in late 2016. The five turbine, 30 MW Block Island wind farm is located three miles off the coast of Rhode Island, near Block Island.

DeSmogCanada

It’s Still Unclear How Alberta’s Tailings Will Be Cleaned Up Or Who Will Pay For It

By James Wilt April 21, 2017

For years, Alberta’s government has reassured the public that it has a plan to ensure the oilsands’ 1.2 trillion litres of hazardous tailings are permanently dealt with after mines shut down.

That assertion is becoming less convincing by the day.

Industry still hasn’t decided on a viable long-term storage technology to begin testing. The fund to cover tailings liabilities in case of bankruptcy is arguably extremely underfunded. And there are concerns from the likes of the Pembina Institute that the future costs for tailings treatment will be far greater than anticipated.

Martin Olszynski, assistant professor in law at University of Calgary, told DeSmog Canada such questions simply can’t be left unanswered.

“It would the height of unfairness if at the end of all this massive profit and wealth generation, Albertans were left on the hook for what will be landscape-sized disturbances that are potentially very harmful and hazardous to humans and wildlife,” he said.

Oilsands Tailings Plans Nonexistent

The history of tailings regulations is a short one in the province: there simply hasn’t been anything binding. Toxic tailings have been allowed to expand for decades without any real constraints. The last attempt by the province’s energy regulator to require companies “to minimize and eventually eliminate long-term storage of fluid tailings in the reclamation landscape” completely failed.

Every single company breached their own targets.

Directive 085, introduced by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) in July 2016, is intended to rectify that.

On March 17, the AER somewhat surprisingly rejected the first tailings management plan that was submitted under the new rules by oilsands giant Suncor for a series of reasons, including its uncertain timelines and reliance on the “unproven technology” of end pit lakes or water capping (the practice of sealing fine tailings under freshwater with the expectation ponds will evolve into healthy aquatic ecosystems).

“What this most recent rejection of Suncor’s proposal suggests to me is they haven’t done the work, and they’re not yet doing the work,” Olszynski says.

“And they need to do the work.”

Provincial Auditor General Warned of Risk of Oil Price Drop

In July 2015, provincial auditor general Merwan Saher issued a harsh indictment of the fund intended to ensure that Albertans won’t be on the hook for reclamation expenses when oilsands and coal mines shut down.

At the time, only $1.57 billion was held as security deposits in the Mine Financial Security Program for all of Alberta’s reclamation liabilities, worth an estimated $20.8 billion.

As of September 2016 that total is now $1.38 billion with oilsands companies responsible for $940 million of the total. The other $19 billion or so is expected to be paid by companies in the last 15 years of a project’s life, with reserves effectively serving as collateral — but that’s a risky approach, especially with declining oil prices.

There is a “significant risk that asset values…are overstated,” Saher said..

“If an abrupt financial and operational decline were to occur in the oilsands sector,” wrote the auditor general., “It would likely be difficult for an oilsands mine operator to provide this security even if the need for the security was identified through the program.”

Oilsands Accounting Expert Says Situation Is “Major Concern”

That very thing has happened.

Thomas Schneider, assistant accounting professor at Ryerson University who has written extensively on oilsands liabilities, said in an interview that “it’s a major concern” given the recent decline in asset values.

“The main asset securing the liabilities now as per the government and people of Alberta — and ultimately Canada I guess as I don’t know who’s going to have to pay for it if it doesn’t get cleaned up — are supposedly the assets in the ground,” he told DeSmog Canada. “That’s where it stands right now.”

The province’s $20.8 billion estimated liability is already based on shaky market grounds; the asset-to-liability approach considers “proven” (90 per cent likely to be commercially viable) and “probable” (only 50 per cent likely to be commercially viable) reserves as equally valuable, allowing companies to avoid putting in additional securities to the fund so long as assets are assessed at three times that of liabilities.

It’s a potentially troubling prospect in the era of massive write-downs of reserves by the likes of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.

Schneider says at this point in time, the government is supposed to re-evaluate the asset-to-liability ratio and require companies to cover off any missing securities with letters of credit or other financial instruments.

A government spokesperson didn’t respond to a question about whether the government has taken a recent look at the ratio.

No Definite Plan A and Definitely No Plan B For Oilsands’ Tailings

Companies and industry groups are putting a lot of work into developing new technologies to deal with tailings.

Nina Lothian, senior analyst at Pembina, said in an interview with DeSmog that there are pros and cons to every tailings technology — end pit lakes, centrifuges, atmospheric fines drying, consolidated tailings — with no clear best choice. Based on the recent rejection of Suncor’s plan, it’s clear the AER is expecting more from companies.

However, there’s the obvious related problem of if those plans fail.

The AER has established an unfortunate reputation in some circles for failing to implement required monitoring and enforcement actions to ensure compliance when it comes to pipeline safety and orphaned wells.

Lothian says that end pit lakes are considered a bit of a “silver bullet” by industry.

The Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, a joint effort by 13 companies, has long planned to build a Demonstration Pit Lakes Project, made up of over a dozen test water bodies and based off of learnings from Syncrude’s Base Mine Lake. The alliance’s website still notes that “phase one of the project could move to construction with potential operation by 2017.” However, when contacted by DeSmog, a spokesperson was unable to provide any information on the status of the Demonstration Pit Lakes Project.

Olszynski says that it will likely require 15 years of monitoring data to know if any particular plan worked. He says that as a result, we wouldn’t have solid results until 2032. But the alliance hasn’t even started building the project.

“For me, the big problem here is we’re well into 2017 at this point, we’re staring down the productive life of some of these sites, and we do not yet have a proven tailings mitigation technology,” he says.

Recent Mining Disasters and Abandonments Point to Potential Dangers

As to whether or not security deposits are meant to include the treatment of tailings, Lothian says Pembina has had no success in answering that question.

Neither Alberta Environment and Parks or the AER have provided clear responses to Pembina. Lothian says that submissions from companies under the Mine Financial Security Program include related reclamation costs like land contouring and revegetation, but there’s no indication of whether funds have been set aside explicitly for tailings treatment.

“We know from all this work with the tailings management plans how many billions of dollars are associated with the treatment side of things,” she says.

In 2011, University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach wrote in an Alberta Oil article: “As long as companies expect to pay the full costs of reclamation, there’s no reason to expect that deferring environmental security payments will appreciably increase investment.”

In other words, the “asset-to-liability approach” might not even have notably increased investments, and instead exposed Albertans to serious costs down the road if companies go bankrupt.

That’s assuming companies expect to pay the full costs of reclamation.

There have been numerous examples in recent years that indicate mining companies can get away without fines or charges for catastrophic tailings breaches, most notably the Mount Polley mine disaster in B.C. and Peabody bankruptcy in the U.S. (the latter of which left around $2 billion in unfunded liabilities).

Provincial Regulator Has Variety of Options to Pursue, Critics Say

But regulators like the AER could take a different approach to avoid such financial disasters.

That could include providing clarity around what the Mine Financial Security Program actually covers, revoking leases for non-compliance, update calculations to acknowledge the distinction between “proven” and “probable reserves” and tap into financial instruments such as letters of credit which Olszynski describes as “bankrupt-proof.”

It would ultimately be up to the AER as an independent agency to craft new calculations for required security deposits or improve communication of the scope of the Mine Financial Security Program. But such shifts would likely require pressure from the government.

In fact, Premier Rachel Notley appeared reasonably convinced of that fact when serving as opposition environment critic, asking during Questioning Period in 2010: “will this government commit to eliminate the existing lakes of poisonous sludge within 20 years and to exercise all authority necessary to make sure it happens?”

However, since forming government the Alberta NDP has said little publicly about tailings management that served as contrast to previous decisions; Environment Minister Shannon Phillips responded to the 2015 report by the auditor general by stating: “We need to analyze whether the asset calculation needs to be changed. We need to update this security program and conduct that detailed risk analysis.”

Nothing appears to have been changed or updated since then.

“This is a really common strategy, where industry just kicks the can down the road over and over again until they are able to get out of cleaning up the waste themselves at the end of operations,” said Jodi McNeill, policy analyst, from the Pembina Institute, in a recent webinar.

“There’s a lot of reason for us to be very concerned.”

EcoWatch

Why We Must March for Science

Dr David Suzuki April 20, 2017

Science isn’t everything. But it is crucial to governing, decision-making, protecting human health and the environment and resolving questions and challenges around our existence.

Those determined to advance industrial interests over all else often attack science. We’ve seen it in Canada, with a decade of cuts to research funding and scientific programs, muzzling of government scientists and rejection of evidence regarding issues such as climate change.

We’re seeing worse in the U.S. The new administration is proposing drastic cuts to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and others. Information about climate change and environmental protection is being scrubbed from government websites, and scientists are being muzzled. Meanwhile, the government is increasing spending on military and nuclear weapons programs.

There’s nothing wrong with challenging research, developing competing hypotheses and looking for flaws in studies. That’s how science works. But rejecting, eliminating, covering up or attacking evidence that might call into question government or industry priorities—evidence that might show how those priorities could lead to widespread harm—is unconscionable. It’s galling to me because I traded a scientific career for full-time communication work because good scientific information helps people make the best decisions to take us into the future.

Many scientists prefer to work quietly, letting their research speak for itself. But recent attacks are galvanizing scientists and supporters throughout the U.S. and elsewhere. The March for Science on Earth Day, April 22, has been building steam for months. The main march will take place in Washington, DC, but more than 425 marches are planned around the world. That kicks off a week of action, culminating in the Peoples Climate March on April 29—also focused on Washington but with satellite marches throughout the world.

The March for Science website says organizers are “advocating for evidence-based policymaking, science education, research funding, and inclusive and accessible science.”

The group’s 850,000-member Facebook page is inspiring, with “advocates, science educators, scientists, and concerned citizens” sharing personal testimonials about their reasons for marching and why science is important to them, along with ideas for posters and slogans, questions about the march, articles about science and exposés of climate disinformation sent to schools and science teachers by the anti-science Heartland Institute.

March participants are a wide-ranging group, from a neuroscientist who is marching “for the thousands of people suffering from spinal cord injury” to sci-fi fans who are marching “Because you can’t have science fiction without science!” to a scientist marching to honor “the many, many women and young girls interested or involved in science” to those marching “because we know climate change is real.”

Celebrating and advocating for science is a good way to mark Earth Day. I’ll be in Ottawa, where a march is also taking place. David Suzuki Foundation senior editor Ian Hanington and I will launch our new book, Just Cool It!, at an Ottawa Writers Festival event that also features award-winning Nishnaabeg musician, scholar and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Climate change is one area where anti-science rhetoric and actions at the highest levels of society are endangering human health and survival. Our book is a comprehensive look at the history and implications of climate science, the barriers to confronting the crisis and the many solutions required to resolve it.

It’s discouraging to witness the current attacks on science, and the ever-increasing consequences of climate change, diminishing ocean health and other human-caused problems, but seeing so many people standing up for science and humanity is reason for optimism. Of all the many solutions to global warming and other environmental problems, none is as powerful as people getting together to demand change.

Every day should be Earth Day, but it’s good to have a special day to remind us of the importance of protecting the air, water, soil and biodiversity that we all depend on for health and survival. Politicians are supposed to work for the long-term well-being of people who elect them, not to advance the often short-sighted agendas of those who pay large sums of money to get their way regardless of the consequences. Standing together to make ourselves heard is one of the best ways to ensure they fulfill their responsibilities.

EcoWatch

Climate Nexus April 20, 2017

We Now Know Who Funded Trump’s Inauguration

Exxon, Chevron and other fossil fuel interests wrote big checks to fund President Trump’s inaugural festivities, according to Federal Election Commission filings released Wednesday.

Contributions from the energy industry totaled more than $7 million, with Hess Corp CEO John Hess donating $1 million, Exxon, Chevron, BP and Citgo Petroleum each chipping in $500k. Coal company Murray Energy, which gave enthusiastically to the Trump campaign while simultaneously laying off workers, threw in $300k.

For many of these donors, the early months of the Trump administration have been particularly fruitful: Energy Transfer Partners CEO Kelcy Warren, who donated $250k, saw the president sign an executive memo ordering the construction of the ETP-owned Dakota Access Pipeline merely four days after the inauguration.

More than 1,500 corporate and individual funders for the inauguration raised $107 million all together—twice as much as Barack Obama’s inauguration raised in 2009, and more than any other inaugural event in history.

For a deeper dive:

New York Times, AP, InsideClimate News, The Hill, Politico

For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.

DeSmog

Clearing the PR Pollution that Clouds Climate Science

One Community’s Fight for Clean Air in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

By Julie Dermansky April 19, 2017

It doesn’t take carefully calibrated measurements to realize there is something wrong with the air around the Denka Performance Elastomer plant in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana.

From a small plane, I photographed the petrochemical manufacturing facility, until recently owned by DuPont, noting its proximity to the community around its fence line. The emissions were horrible. Breathing them while circling the plant twice left me with a headache that lingered for hours.

The surrounding communities and I were inhaling emissions of chloroprene and 28 other chemicals, which the plant uses to make the synthetic rubber commonly known as Neoprene.

Chloroprene is nasty stuff. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2010 toxicological review of the chemical resulted in the agency reclassifying chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen. Also according to the EPA, short term exposure to high concentrations of chloroprene can affect the nervous system, weaken immune systems, and cause rapid heartbeat, stomach problems, impaired kidney function, and rashes, among other health issues.

From Petrochemical Corridor to Cancer Alley

St. John the Baptist Parish lies in the middle of a stretch of land along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which contains more than 100 petrochemical factories. Once known as the Petrochemical Corridor, the area is now referred to as “Cancer Alley.”

According to the EPA’s latest National Air Toxics Assessment, which evaluates air contaminants and estimates health risks, residents near Denka’s plant in the town of LaPlace have a lifetime risk of cancer from air pollution 800 times higher than the national average. The population in six St. John the Baptist Parish census tracts closest to the Denka facility have the highest risk of air pollution-caused cancer in the country.

The DuPont plant emitted chloroprene for more than 40 years before selling the facility to Denka Performance Elastomer LLC, which continues to produce Neoprene. The only other plant in the United States that made Neoprene was another DuPont facility in Rubbertown, a heavily industrialized neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky. It closed in 2008, moving its remaining production to the LaPlace plant in Louisiana, after pressure from workers and environmental groups.

Emissions Reductions Not Enough

Robert Taylor, a homeowner, lives in Reserve, a small, predominantly African-American community adjacent to the plant. He is one of more than 32,000 people who have possibly been exposed to chloroprene emissions from the plant for decades. He founded Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, and is a spokesperson for the group.

In January, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), along with the EPA, issued an Administrative Order on Consent to which Denka agreed. It requires Denka to install emissions-reduction devices by the end of this year that are expected to decrease the plant’s chloroprene emissions by 85 percent. Yet that reduction will still fall short of bringing its chloroprene emissions to the level recommended by the EPA.

The Concerned Citizens group doesn’t believe the measures settled upon go far enough. The Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), which is helping the group, concurs.

The group wants Denka to ensure emissions will not exceed the standard recommended by the EPA. It also wants Denka to cut production while the new devices are installed.

Marylee Orr, LEAN’s director, thinks the requests are reasonable. “The community has already been subjected to the chloroprene emissions for over 40 years,” she said. “How much longer should they have to wait to get clean air?”

While Denka has agreed to make some changes to reduce its chloroprene emissions before the end of 2017, which the company said would cost $17.5 million, it has not cut production. That would lower chloroprene emissions right away.

Denka emphasized that its operations are in compliance with its existing permit, which is true. However, the permit the company took over from DuPont was granted long before the EPA classified chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen.

Wilma Subra, LEAN’s technical advisor, meets regularly with Concerned Citizens of St. John to go over the results of air monitoring tests that EPA started six months ago. The results show that Denka’s emissions have increased since the monitoring began, with emission spikes that are hundreds of times greater than EPA’s standard.

State Downplays Concerns About Emissions, Health Effects

DEQ Secretary Dr. Chuck Brown presented on the Denka plant situation at a St. John the Baptist Parish Council meeting last December. Brown told the council that he came to bring them facts and to clear up fear-mongering surrounding the plant’s emissions.

The Concerned Citizens group worries that despite the measures Denka is taking, by not meeting the EPA recommended 0.2 milligram standard for chloroprene emissions, the air quality would not reach an acceptable level. Brown took aim at these concerns.

“That number was set for guidance,” Brown stressed. Only after all Denka’s emission-cutting measures are operational will it be possible to determine what the limit should be, he said.

Brown went on to downplay the significance of the air monitoring tests. He pointed out that spikes in emissions don’t reflect long-term exposure.

”It’s not like there’s a smoking gun somewhere in St. John Parish,” Brown said. “Believe me, if we felt there was an imminent threat, we would be taking the appropriate measures to deal with that threat. We’ve got these measures in place. We’re going to evaluate effectiveness. We’re going to continue to go through this together.”

He expects the emissions levels to start trending downward soon.

Brown also downplayed the risk of cancer. Chloroprene, he told the council, is a “probable” — not a proven — carcinogen. The Louisiana Tumor Registry, the state’s cancer registry, “doesn’t show any elevated levels of cancer at all in any group of people,” Brown said.

Louisiana’s state health officer, Dr. Jimmy Guidry, followed Brown’s presentation at the council meeting. He called it promising news that the area doesn’t have an elevated cancer rate, and he doesn’t think the situation in the parish is a health emergency. Guidry did, however, acknowledge that “no one should have to breathe chloroprene.”

“They lie on people’s death certificates all the time”

But some contend that holding up the tumor registry’s results doesn’t give an accurate picture. “It’s impossible to tell from that data whether there is any increase in liver cancer, which is the type of cancer most clearly linked to chloroprene,” Sharon Lerner, The Intercept’s environmental crime reporter, wrote. Unless data is reported by zip code or census tract, detecting increases in particular types of cancer within the county is virtually impossible.

A new bill sponsored by state Rep. Katrina Jackson and supported by the Louisiana coalition known as the GreenArmy, could change that. The bill would require the state to track cancer by zip code and census tract.

“You can’t go by what the tumor registry says,” Geraldine Watkins, a member of the Concerned Citizens group who lives close to the Denka plant, told me.

“They lie on people’s death certificates all the time,” she said. “They will put down that someone died of pneumonia or a heart attack when they were in the hospital for cancer.” Watkins couldn’t think of a single household in her neighborhood where cancer hasn’t struck.

Members of the Concerned Citizens group who attended the council meeting were outraged by Brown’s presentation. “Brown mentioned Denka is spending $50 million, far more than what Denka has said it is spending,” Robert Taylor said. “Why is how much money Denka is spending a concern of Brown’s anyway? Shouldn’t his concern be the community’s well being?”

The Concerned Citizens group countered Brown’s presentation by making one of their own at a parish council meeting on March 28. They arrived wearing red t-shirts printed with “Only 0.2 will do,” emphasizing their point that chloroprene emissions not exceed the EPA’s recommendation.

While the parish council expressed support for the Concerned Citizens group, it passed a memorandum endorsing the agreement signed by the EPA, DEQ, and Denka, which ignored the group’s concern that the emissions measures don’t go far enough.

Uncertain Futures for Cancer Alley Communities, EPA Programs

Concerned Citizens member Kellie Tabb was disappointed with the council’s move, but not surprised. Tabb has suffered her share of health issues: part of one lung removed, a carcinoid tumor, and a rapid heartbeat. “For the council to acknowledge that the measures being taken don’t go far enough to protect us would mean they’d have to do something,” she said.

Tabb had hoped that once the EPA stepped in, the community would be protected. But at this point her hope for clean air in LaPlace has evaporated. Now she says she is searching for the means to leave the area before the chloroprene causes her cancer to return and kill her.

The group worries that proposed EPA budget cuts could end the area’s air-monitoring program. The agency did not respond to my questions about how those cuts might impact that work or its programs that exposed the chloroprene emissions issue in the first place.

It is no surprise that the EPA program reviewing the health risks of chemicals is unpopular with industry and that it is one of the programs likely to be on the EPA chopping block. Without it, the EPA will no longer be making sure chemicals on the market and in the air — deemed safe by their makers — are, in fact, safe.

Taylor told me the group isn’t done fighting back by a long shot, though it is clear the odds are stacked against them. The Concerned Citizens group is considering taking legal action.

Taylor likened the gas attacks in Syria to what is happening to his community. He understands the outrage against people being attacked with chemical weapons, but doesn’t understand the lack of outrage over communities like his being slowly poisoned.

At one Concerned Citizens group meeting, a member left in frustration after stating that she thinks it will take people dying in the streets before they get clean air. At this point, Taylor isn’t even sure that would be enough.

DeSmog

Destroying EPA Protections Will Disproportionately Hurt Children

By Farron Cousins April 18, 2017

President Donald Trump’s proposed 31 percent budget cut for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is devastating for anyone who isn’t financially connected to the fossil fuel industry. Reversing the course on projects that include reducing carbon emissions, protecting rivers and streams from industrial pollutants, and investments in renewable energy is not only bad for the planet, but it is a disaster for human health. And those most at risk of a potentially more toxic environment are children.

There are several reasons why children are more susceptible to pollution than adults, with the most obvious being that they spend more time outdoors and are more likely to come in direct contact with dirt, water, and plant life.

But the real danger to children lies in their biology.

As the Center for Disease Control explains, children require more food, oxygen, and water than adults in comparison to their body size. This means that a contaminant in any one of those areas will have a greater presence in the body of a child compared to the body of a full grown adult.

The CDC also says that some organ systems within the body do not fully mature until a child is in their teens, and a developing system is far more susceptible to pollutants than an established organ system, as different pollutants can delay or alter development.

The CDC lays out how different types of environmental contaminants effect children differently than adults:

“Exposure to the same chemical may cause different health outcomes in children compared with adults. A well-known example is the effect of lead on young children’s developing nervous systems. Lead does have effects on the nervous systems of adult workers, which result in peripheral neuropathies. For children, however, intellectual development is exquisitely sensitive to even small amounts of lead; this sensitivity is not seen in adults.”

The last few decades have seen a reduction in the amount of environmentally induced illnesses in children as a result of stronger federal safeguards to reduce pollution and exposure to harmful chemicals. As CNN notes:

“The Children’s Health Study, one of the largest and most extensive studies of air pollution’s long-term effects, found that living in areas with higher pollution levels caused measurable damage to children’s lungs including respiratory infections, higher risk for asthma and reduced lung growth and function.

But it also found that children’s lungs have improved over the past two decades as pollution levels in the study area have decreased. The ongoing study, conducted by the University of Southern California, has involved more than 11,000 area schoolchildren since 1992. Legislation such as the Clean Air Act, enforced and regulated by the EPA, has helped cut ground-level ozone — a component of smog — by more than 32 percent nationwide since 1980, according to the agency’s air trends data.”

These advances in child health could be undone if Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts for the EPA become reality.

However, it is important to also understand that the proposals do not necessarily do away with environmental protections (with the exception of gutting the Clean Power Plan). Instead, the budget and staffing cuts at the agency will prevent the EPA from effectively monitoring health and safety issues and governing corporate compliance with existing laws.

To put it bluntly, most of the safeguards will still be in place, we just won’t have anyone looking over the shoulders of a corporation to make sure they are obeying the law.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health have pointed out that the majority of studies on the effects of things like air pollution and other forms of toxic exposure have focused only on adult populations or the effects on developing fetuses, leaving the area of childhood and adolescence inadequately studied to determine the full effects that pollution has on this population.

Unfortunately, the health-related costs (both in terms of money and life) are often omitted from discussions of environmental safety regulations. Instead, the conversations tend to focus solely on the compliance costs that businesses face.

This is why the conversation has to change.

The health-related costs of addressing pollution and climate change far outweigh the economic costs that businesses face, and a far greater number of people will be affected if these budget cuts become a reality. Public health is more important than corporate profits, and the collective health of the public will always suffer when the environment isn’t properly protected.

ABC News

Overflowing landfills choke Puerto Rico amid economic crisis

By danica coto, associated press

TOA BAJA, Puerto Rico — April 21, 2017

At first glance, it looks like people have abandoned this rural community tucked into Puerto Rico’s soft rolling hills: the windows are shut, the doors closed and the gates locked.

But everyone is still here, just sealed inside their homes to shield themselves from the stench, flies and feral dogs of the nearby landfill that has expanded so much it is now just steps away their front doors in Villa Albizu near Puerto Rico’s north coast.

“You have no idea what it’s like to gulp in that smell 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” said Yahaida Porrata, whose house is roughly 10 steps from the landfill. “You have to shutter the house completely because you can’t breathe … If I had the money, I would have moved a long time ago.”

The majority of landfills across Puerto Rico are over capacity and groaning under tons of liquefied garbage seeping into the tropical soil and posing threats to people and the environment, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Nineteen of the island’s 29 landfills are violating federal laws, yet they still accept a large portion of the 8,500 tons of garbage that Puerto Ricans generate daily. The EPA has ordered local officials to close 13 of those landfills including the one in front of Porrata’s home because of the health risks they pose, but a decade-long economic crisis has prevented that from happening.

Puerto Rico is struggling to restructure a $70 billion public debt load that has forced the government to declare a state of emergency as its revenues dwindle. Officials say they are barely covering the costs of essential services such as education, health and public safety.

Municipalities say they simply don’t have the $3 million to nearly $30 million needed to implement the environmental and engineering measures to close a landfill. The government never required municipalities to set aside money for closures, according to the EPA. As a result, landfills keep expanding beyond their capacity as garbage piles up.

“This is a crisis,” said Carmen Guerrero, director of the EPA’s Caribbean environmental protection division. “This is one of the agency’s environmental priorities in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.”

The EPA has the authority to intercede when there’s an emergency situation, but it is Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board that is supposed to ensure that landfills comply. It is not clear why this hasn’t happened. Spokesman Aniel Bigio did not return multiple messages seeking comment.

Only two of the 13 landfills the EPA ordered closed have done so, while two others including the one in Toa Baja, where Villa Albizu is located, opened new areas that meet federal requirements. The EPA filed its most recent order of closure this month, and for the first time it was done unilaterally, meaning there is no room for negotiation with the municipality like in previous cases.

“The conditions are so critical and the threat so great to the population and environment that there was no other choice,” Guerrero said.

The order states the landfill in Toa Alta, just south of Toa Baja, must close by year’s end, something that residents there are celebrating. There are more than 100 homes and businesses within 400 yards (meters) of the landfill, which was originally built in a sinkhole that forms part of one of the largest and most productive groundwater sources in Puerto Rico. The landfill has since expanded 3 acres (1.2 hectares) outside its boundaries and lacks a system to collect liquefied garbage, control storm water runoff or monitor the groundwater to ensure it is not contaminating drinking water.

A water treatment plant that lies downstream from the landfill draws some 2 million gallons of water daily from a nearby river. The plant is closed and being renovated so it can draw up to 3 million gallons a day, raising concerns among residents in that area.

“This is the biggest environmental disaster I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Concetta Calise, who lives near the landfill and recently fought off a plague of flies. “I could not even open the door. It was horrible. I’ve never seen it like that before.”

But the mayor of Toa Alta, Clemente Agosto, told The Associated Press that he can’t meet the EPA’s deadline because the municipality can’t afford the estimated $15-$20 million to close the landfill. In addition, he said the municipality doesn’t have the money to pay for its garbage to be taken elsewhere if their landfill closes.

“We want to follow the law, but they have to give us time to find the economic means,” he said. “You just don’t throw a lock on it and that’s it.”

While he understands people’s frustrations, he said the municipality is in such dire financial straits he had to establish a four-day workweek to cut costs.

“We’re going to do everything in our power so that no one is affected by garbage collection or by operations at the landfill,” he said.

Residents in Toa Alta worry they will soon encounter worse problems than those Porrata faces in Toa Baja.

Porrata has a deep cough she can’t shake and her two teenage children have skin ulcers. They visit the doctor at least once a month, and Porrata has to wash dishes before and after using them because of the amount of dust that settles inside her house. Recently, she thought one of her children left powdered chocolate milk inside a cup only to find out it was dust.

She is forced to buy bottled water after the island’s water and sewer company warned them the tap water was not safe to drink.

“This has been a living hell,” she said. “I never saw this coming.”

Independent

Sweden’s recycling is so revolutionary, the country has run out of rubbish

Sweden’s recycling is so revolutionary, the country has to import rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. What lessons can we learn, asks Hazel Sheffield

Hazel Sheffield December 8, 20116

Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.

We can only dream of such an effective system in the UK, which is why we end up paying expensive transport costs to send rubbish to be recycled overseas rather than paying fines to send it to landfill under The Landfill Tax of 1996.

The UK has made strides in the proportion of waste recycled under an EU target of 50 per cent by 2020. This has underpinned hundreds of millions of pounds of investment into recycling facilities and energy recovery plants in the UK, creating many jobs. We’re not quite at that target yet. Recycling in the UK peaked at around 45 per cent of all waste in 2014.

Since then, provisional figures from the ONS have shown that figure has dropped to 44 per cent as austerity has resulted in budget cuts. The decision to leave the EU could be about to make this situation worse. While Europe is aiming for a 65 per cent recycling target by 2030, the UK may be about to fall even further behind its green neighbours.

Why are we sending waste to Sweden? Their system is so far ahead because of a culture of looking after the environment. Sweden was one of the first countries to implement a heavy tax on fossil fuels in 1991 and now sources almost half its electricity from renewables.

“Swedish people are quite keen on being out in nature and they are aware of what we need do on nature and environmental issues. We worked on communications for a long time to make people aware not to throw things outdoors so that we can recycle and reuse,” says Anna-Carin Gripwall, director of communications for Avfall Sverige, the Swedish Waste Management’s recycling association.

Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. “That’s a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. In the southern part of Europe they don’t make use of the heating from the waste, it just goes out the chimney. Here we use it as a substitute for fossil fuel,” Ms Gripwell says.

Sweden’s heating network is not without its detractors. They argue that the country is dodging real recycling by sending waste to be incinerated. Paper plant managers say that wood fibre can be used up to six times before it becomes dust. If Sweden burns paper before that point it is exhausting the potential for true recycling and replacing used paper with fresh raw material.

Ms Gripwall says the aim in Sweden is still to stop people sending waste to recycling in the first place. A national campaign called the “Miljönär-vänlig” movement has for several years promoted the notion that there is much to be gained through repairing, sharing and reusing.

She describes Sweden’s policy of importing waste to recycle from other countries as a temporary situation. “There’s a ban on landfill in EU countries, so instead of paying the fine they send it to us as a service. They should and will build their own plants, to reduce their own waste, as we are working hard to do in Sweden,” Ms Gripwall says.

“Hopefully there will be less waste and the waste that has to go to incineration should be incinerated in each country. But to use recycling for heating you have to have district heating or cooling systems, so you have to build the infrastructure for that, and that takes time,” she adds.

Swedish municipalities are individually investing in futuristic waste collection techniques, like automated vacuum systems in residential blocks, removing the need for collection transport, and underground container systems that free up road space and get rid of any smells.

In the UK, each local authority has its own system, making it difficult for residents to be confident about what they can recycle and where. “We need more of a coherent national strategy in England to the collection of recyclable materials, rather than the current approach, whereby it is largely left to individual local authorities to determine their own collection policies,” says Angus Evers, partner at Shoosmiths and a convenor of the UK Environmental Law Association’s Waste Working Party.

Local authorities will often start by recycling the highest volume materials because they are measured according to the proportion of waste recycled, so bigger items count for more. “Whatever we end up with in the UK, we need a system which collects all recyclable materials rather than cherry-picking the easiest and cheapest,” says Richard Hands, chief executive of ACE UK, the drink carton industry’s trade association.

Mr Hands points to his own drinks carton industry, which includes Tetra Pak, SIG Combibloc and Elopak. Through ACE UK, these brands have driven up carton recycling, more than doubling the number of local authorities collecting cartons from 31 per cent in 2011 to 65 per cent in 2016.

He says that the UK needs to build infrastructure around recycling plants so that it can stop sending waste overseas. Some local authorities already have a “no export” policy to achieve this. “Growing the UK waste industry will create jobs and generate UK-based revenue for the economy,” Mr Hands says.

Angus Evers says a better domestic recycling system should be a part of our strategy for leaving the EU. “The materials we currently export represent a huge drain of valuable resources going out of the UK that could be used in the UK economy to make new products and reduce our imports of raw materials. If we have aspirations to be less dependent on Europe, then we need to be more self-sufficient and recycle more,” Mr Evers says.

And what will Sweden do if we stop sending it rubbish to feed its heating system? Ms Gripwall says the Swedes will not freeze – they have biofuels ready to substitute for our exported waste.

The Nation

120,000 Americans Demanded Trump’s Taxes This Weekend, Organizers Say

Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns was his biggest violation of norms of conduct for presidential candidates—and most Americans are still mad.

By Joshua Holland April 15, 2017

On Tax Day, April 15, protesters in Goshen, NY, marched in a rally organized by the Orange County Democratic Women to demand that President Trump release his tax returns. (Courtesy of Orange County Democratic Women)

Donald Trump and his surrogates claim that the public doesn’t care about his tax returns. Polls consistently find that they’re dead wrong, and even most Republicans think he should release them.

On Saturday, at least 120,000 people took to the streets in dozens of towns and cities across the country to drive that point home, according to an unofficial estimate provided to The Nation by Joe Dinkin, national communications director for the Working Families Party, one of a coalition of 69 groups behind the protests.

As one might expect, there were big crowds in New York and DC and Los Angeles and in other big blue cities. But forecasts calling for scattered showers didn’t keep around 350 protesters from coming out in Goshen, New York, a bedroom community of around 15,000 mostly white people, 65 miles or so north of Manhattan.

In a scene that played out in small towns across the country, residents marched with homemade signs down Goshen’s main street, which is called Main Street and is lined with American flags and blooming fruit trees. Goshen’s no liberal enclave–it’s located in Orange County, which went for Trump by six points in 2016, and there’s only one Democrat on the town council. (One marcher told me that the community is more or less equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, “but Democrats don’t vote.”)

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that “someone should look into who paid” for the rallies–likely referring to a popular conspiracy theory on the right which holds that protests against Trump are funded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros. But in Goshen, that someone was a middle-aged woman named Joan Hutcher, treasurer of Orange County Democratic Women, who was passing around a jar stuffed with coins and crumpled bills to support the group’s work. She wore a t-shirt which read, “And You Thought I Was A Nasty Woman Before? Buckle Up Buttercup.” Before I could finish asking if her organization has seen an uptick in enthusiasm since Trump’s win, Hutcher cut me off by saying, “It’s been tremendous.”

“People are really wound up,” she said. “What you hear over and over again are things like, ‘I’ve never been active in politics but this is just not acceptable,’ or I’ve never done anything like this but I can’t take it anymore.’ People are really angry and really frightened.” She said that the Tax March was especially important to her “because his conflicts of interest seem overwhelming but we don’t really know. We have no idea.”

In one sense, the Tax March was narrowly focused, but the salience of Trump’s refusal to release his taxes goes beyond what they might reveal about his net worth or potential conflicts of interest. It was his biggest violation of long-agreed-upon norms of conduct for presidential candidates—as Kevin Kruse wrote for Esquire, he was the first candidate to refuse to release a detailed accounting of his finances since Watergate—and he got away with it. The same media that reported almost obsessively on Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, another process story, largely forgot about Trump’s taxes. We can’t know what’s in Trump’s head, but having gotten away with being the least transparent candidate in modern presidential history signaled that he could run the least transparent administration –and continue profiting from the family business–with impunity.

Legal experts say that his refusal to divest from the family business almost certainly violates the constitution’s emoluments clause. As David Cole wrote in The New York Review of Books:

Trump has somewhat gleefully asserted that the conflict-of-interest rules don’t apply to the president. He mixed together personal business and official diplomacy during several meetings and conversations with foreign officials during the transition. And despite his widespread private holdings in commercial real estate, condominiums, hotels, and golf courses here and around the world, he has refused to follow the lead of his predecessors by selling his assets and placing the proceeds in a blind trust. Instead, he has transferred management, but not ownership, of the Trump Organization. He retains his ownership in full. And he has assigned operational responsibility not to an independent arm’s-length trustee, but to his sons, Eric and Donald Jr.

And just this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s re-election committees “continued to direct funds to his companies in the first quarter of the year, paying close to $500,000 to Trump-owned hotels, golf clubs and restaurants.”

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

In all likelihood, what we know of these kinds of conflicts barely scratches the surface. One thing that makes it difficult to hold Trump accountable is the opacity of his holdings. In December, The Wall Street Journal offered an example of the labyrinthine nature of Trump’s holdings in the form of a helicopter Trump owns in Scotland. “To be more precise,” wrote Jean Eaglesham, Mark Maremont, and Lisa Schwartz, “he has a revocable trust that owns 99% of a Delaware limited liability company that owns 99% of another Delaware LLC that owns a Scottish limited company that owns another Scottish company that owns the 26-year-old Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, emblazoned with a red ‘TRUMP’ on the side of its fuselage.”

Trump’s taxes would probably reveal more hidden conflicts. Perhaps more important, enforcing the norm that presidents must be transparent about their personal finances—and the law barring them from profiting from the office—would signal that Trump isn’t an emperor and can’t just operate above the law with impunity.

After promising repeatedly to release his taxes at some point in the future, Trump’s made it clear that he never will. Congress has the power under a 1924 law to force his hand, but in February, 229 House Republicans voted to keep his tax returns from the public. Their refusal to provide oversight is why Democrats winning back the House in 2018 is so important. Ultimately, it’s also why tens of thousands of Americans felt that they needed to take to the streets last weekend.

Chicago Suntimes Editorial

Because of EPA, Chicago is cleaner and safer — let’s not go back

Chicagoans today, compared to our grandparents’ generation, can breathe a lot more easily because of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Our air is clearer. Our water cleaner. Our children healthier.

The battle over the EPA’s budget may be waging far away in Washington, but many of the agency’s big success stories can be found right here in the Chicago area. To go back now on that commitment to a cleaner environment would be foolish. To return to the days of ozone alerts and children eating peeled lead paint would be unconscionable.

In Washington, President Donald Trump wants to cut the EPA budget by 31 percent, hobbling an agency we rely on every day, even if we don’t know it. A fifth of the agency’s positions would be eliminated, and Trump wants to slash scientific research.

That would matter plenty to Chicago, a city on the precious Great Lakes that has moved on — but is still cleaning up — from a heavily polluted industrial past. A city that likes its fancy new Riverwalk, which would be folly if the Chicago River were still the open sewer it once was.

EDITORIAL

Reminders of why Chicago should support a fully functioning EPA are all around us.

Municipal sewage treatment plants throughout the region have been updated to EPA standards, making water cleaner. The EPA also took a lead role in ensuring that wastewater from sewage treatment plants is disinfected before it is discharged into Chicago area waterways.
The EPA has coordinated a multiyear effort to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. The EPA also plays a role in preventing new invasive species from being dumped into the lakes from the ballast water of oceangoing ships.
When the operators of BP’s oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana, wanted send more toxic pollution into the air, that was OK with the State of Indiana. But the EPA stopped it. In 2007, when the refinery got a permit to dump 54 percent more ammonia and 35 percent more suspended solids into Lake Michigan each year, the EPA stopped that, too.
Dangerous heavy metals from an H. Kramer and Co. smelter that got into residential yards in Pilsen will be cleaned up because of an EPA investigation. The EPA also cleaned up the site of the former Loewenthal Metals in Pilsen.
The EPA provides funding for beach monitoring, so we all know when it is safe to swim.
The EPA did a study showing mountains of petcoke stored on the South Side were causing chronic health problems. Only the EPA has the authority to install the monitors that measure the petcoke on surrounding neighborhoods.
The EPA played a major role in detecting lead in the municipal water supply of Flint, Michigan – work that led to a program to get lead out of drinking water in Chicago’s schools.
The EPA won a court fight in 1977 to reduce the amount of industrial waste getting into Lake Michigan and the Grand Calumet River from U.S. Steel’s Gary Works.
The EPA runs the Great Lakes National Program Office, which plans for the protection and restoration of the lakes for years to come.
With the Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA is paying to dredging and remove toxic sediments in the heavily polluted Grand Calumet River in Indiana. If not removed, those pollutants eventually will move into the lake.
It was the EPA that found that residents of East Chicago, Indiana, had lead in their drinking water. The EPA put 30 people on the ground to investigation environmental contamination from the former USS Lead site in East Chicago.

The U.S. EPA’s budget already has been squeezed in recent years. If its budget now is decimated, that will hobble the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency, too. The IEPA gets a fifth of its funding from the U.S. EPA.

Our city, region and state cannot afford such cuts. Too much work remains undone throughout the region.

As Joel Brammeier, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, put it: “Everybody has a basic belief they will have clean air and water without having to wake up in the morning wondering if that is going to happen.”

The proposed cuts to the EPA are huge. If they go through, you can bet Chicago will be wondering what might happen again.

The Verge

Inside the renegade Republican movement for tackling climate change

Will the GOP listen?

by Alesandra Potenza April 7, 2017

When Alex Bozmoski was in college, he didn’t believe climate change was real. He was “a very active conservative Republican,” he says, who “loved making noise.” In high school, he started a newspaper called The Right Idea; the logo was an eagle gripping a Christian cross. And at Georgetown University, after George W. Bush won the election in 2004, he carried a cardboard cutout of the president around campus until he was tackled by a liberal student and Bush was broken in half.

So when Bozmoski enrolled in a climate science class taught by Nathan Hultman, his primary goal was to heckle the professor. But every time he brought up something he had heard on a conservative radio talk show, Hultman asked him to back up those claims with actual scientific evidence. Soon, Bozmoski realized climate skepticism was unfounded, and that climate change is a very serious issue that his own political party was completely ignoring.

“I felt alienated that my tribe has been so out of the loop and not even working on it,” Bozmoski says. “To me, it seemed like just an easy way out, like a coping mechanism more than a governing strategy.”

“I felt alienated.”

So a few years after his college graduation, Bozmoski began traveling around the country, speaking to conservatives about climate change and free-market options to tackle it. He visited church groups, federalist societies, chambers of commerce, universities — alone or together with Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who introduced a bill to tax carbon emissions. (Inglis’ views on climate change cost him his House seat in 2010.) As Bozmoski did more of these talks, he says, “it became pretty clear that when people heard from us, a lot of conservatives were very motivated to get involved.”

In 2014, Bozmoski and Inglis founded republicEn, a group of about 3,000 people all over the US trying to create a grassroots movement of “conservative climate realists.” “We want to give them a voice,” Bozmoski says. “We want members of Congress to see that big chunks of their conservative constituency are deeply passionate about the environment and care deeply about taking responsible action to mitigate and adapt to climate change.”

It’s not just Bozmoski and Inglis — or even just their group. Around the US, conservative leaders and organizations are trying to get people on the right involved in conservation, renewable energy, and climate change action. They do it by appealing to whatever it is these constituents care about: economic growth, hunting wildlife, or national security. The goal is making sure the US is prepared to tackle one of the most serious challenges facing our country and our planet — global warming.

Some in the GOP are taking notice. In February, a group of Republican elder statesmen released a proposal to tax carbon emissions produced by burning fossil fuels. And in March, a group of more than a dozen GOP lawmakers introduced a climate change resolution to the House of Representatives, calling for action against the looming threat of rising sea levels and warming temperatures. “It’s important that we take climate change very, very seriously because the threats that are posed by that are very serious,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), who signed the resolution, told The Atlantic. “I’m just not a person that believes we should be turning a blind eye to it.”

“I’m just not a person that believes we should be turning a blind eye to it.”

Unfortunately, many other Republicans are turning a blind eye to it. The GOP has a track record of opposing environmental regulation and a party platform that supports burning fossil fuels. Certain Republican members of Congress don’t even believe that global warming is caused by human activity. (It is, according to the vastest majority of scientists.) At the same time, Republican president Donald Trump, who called climate change a “hoax,” ran a campaign on the promise to bring back highly polluting coal. Last week, he signed an executive order to start dismantling the cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s environmental legacy. And his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is a known climate change denier.

The GOP’s stance is at odds with what many Republicans feel. A poll from last year showed that 71 percent of liberal / moderate Republicans and 47 percent of conservative Republicans believe that our planet is warming — and that number is increasing. (The percentage of conservative Republicans who believe in climate change has jumped 19 percentage points since 2014, more than any other group.) The majority of Republicans also support more funding for energy sources like wind and solar, and believe heat-trapping pollutants like carbon dioxide should be regulated.

So why are Republican lawmakers looking the other way when it comes to global warming? They don’t live in Miami, says the city’s mayor Tomás Regalado, a member of the Republican Party. Residents there experience regular flooding from rising sea levels, and certain banks are very hesitant about granting loans for mortgages for 30 years, he says. “This is a real issue that people have experienced here,” Regalado says. “We have a problem, and [Republicans] have to recognize that this is not only a philosophical debate, it’s a real economic issue.”

The next town over, called Coral Gables, is facing similar problems. Streets and parks are flooded during high tides. “You look out your door, you see an octopus in your basement … or the mullets swimming around our parking lots, you get it,” says Mayor Jim Cason, also a member of the Republican Party. Cason isn’t waiting for Washington to step in — his administration has already been working on a sustainability plan for the town, and is updating building codes to increase the height of the most vulnerable facilities when they need repairs. But when I ask him whether he’s doing all this because his constituents are worried about climate change, and demanding action, Cason says residents actually aren’t expressing much concern. “Basically silence,” he says.

“you see an octopus in your basement”

Bozmoski believes that’s exactly why Republican lawmakers aren’t acting on climate change. “I think the answer boils down to one phrase that we hear over and over from members of Congress: ‘My constituents rarely call me about climate change. I rarely get phone calls about this. It is not on the mind of our constituents,’” Bozmoski says. It’s also true that the fossil fuel industry overwhelmingly gives campaign donations to Republicans rather than Democrats. But in poll after poll, climate change does seem to be at the bottom of the list when Americans wonder what to worry about. And for conservatives, “it’s not a national movement right now,” Bozmoski says. So that’s the movement he’s working to create.

He travels around the country, telling people about global warming and ‘republicEn’s’ free-market vision for tackling it: no to subsidizing renewables; yes to a carbon tax; no to American export taxes; yes to government’s investment in basic research to find new forms of energy. To energize this still-infant grassroots movement — “we’re a scrappy bunch” — Bozmoski also talks about the science of climate change. If you don’t believe in the science, you’re out. “Moving past the science is not how we’re going to deal with this,” Bozmoski says. “The climate science is so central to the urgency of action that you can’t lose it and not lose the urgency.”

Other conservative groups, however, try to steer away from talking directly about climate change. “With older conservatives, if you say anything about climate, they immediately shut you down,” says Michele Combs, the founder and chair of Young Conservatives for Energy Reform. “The younger generation do not feel that way; they grew up recycling. It doesn’t have that stigma.” So Combs approaches the problem from another angle: energy reform. Her group, which counts 100,000 members, hopes to sway the national discourse over energy policy, by encouraging the use of renewable energy. To help conservatives embrace renewables, she often invites retired military generals to speak at her events.

The US Army has been vocal about wanting to boost clean energy. The advantage is twofold: US troops who rely less on oil can spend less time convoying that oil in foreign countries and risking to be blown up; and reducing greenhouse gases is paramount for addressing climate change, which the military sees as a serious national security threat. (Rising sea levels and more extreme weather events will lead to a more unstable, conflict-prone world, according to a Defense Department report.) When these respected military leaders speak to conservatives, it generally works, says Brian Smith, who used to work on renewable energy for the Defense Department and now volunteers at Young Conservatives for Energy Reform. “I think it resonates with most people,” he says.

Combs says that climate change action is not the end goal of her group, but more of a side effect. “We come in with the clean energy, because cleaner energy is going to take care of the problem,” she says. A similar approach — when it comes to conservation — is taken by some conservative groups like Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. The sportsmen’s organization focuses on preserving wildlife habitats, and protecting clean air and water on public lands, but it doesn’t address climate change directly. Conservation is what hunters have been doing for more than 150 years, says Land Tawney, the president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, it resonates with hunters much more than a politicized term like climate change.

“I call them the flat-Earth society.”

The group works for keeping public access to public lands, so they’re not sold for private development. It also advocates for oil and gas development to be done in a safe way, so that core habitats and migration routes are kept pristine. If animals can move more freely and expand their ranges, they will be able to better adapt to warming climates, by moving to higher latitudes for example. This is, of course, just a step toward addressing climate change. “All the conservation work that we’re doing has an effect on that,” Tawney says. “You’re really still working on it but you’re not directly working on it.”

That’s not how all hunters approach climate change. Randy Newberg, a hunter and advocate for hunting on public lands, has no qualms about acknowledging the problem. “If you spend as much time in the hills as I do, I don’t know how you could deny that climate is changing,” he says. Deniers exist, “but honestly, I call them the flat-Earth society,” he adds. Many hunters see climate change as a serious threat to the wildlife and public lands they want to protect for future generations. That’s what’s been driving the conservation movement for decades in the US, and it should not be a liberal or a conservative issues, says Newberg, who identifies as an Independent. “Maybe I’m naive and too idealistic for today’s political world,” he says, “but I struggle to understand how is it that clean air and clean water and productive lands are a partisan issue. To me, they’re an American issue.”

For now, the White House hasn’t been very responsive, but it might be just too early to tell, says Bozmoski. Some proposals coming out of Washington — like the carbon tax and the climate change resolution — seem to bode well. “It really stokes our optimism on the Eco Right, that our family has gotten bigger and more powerful,” Bozmoski says. At the same time, he says, it will take time for Republicans to come together and put forward a climate change policy — they will need to get over the divisions within their own party and develop an actual policy. That’s what groups like republicEn are there for, Bozmoski says. And he has high hopes. “The prospects for a coalition of lawmakers moving forward with a solution is better now than it has been in any point since 2010,” Bozmoski says. “There’s no more pussyfooting around climate change out of fear.”

Huffington Post Politics

REUTERS April 17, 2017

Trump Advisers To Meet Tuesday To Discuss Paris Climate Agreement

Trump in the past has said the United States should “cancel” the deal.

President Donald Trump’s top advisers will meet on Tuesday to discuss whether to recommend that he withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a White House official said on Monday.

The accord, agreed upon by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015, aims to limit planetary warming in part by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. As part of the deal, the United States committed to reducing its emissions by between 26 and 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.

Trump in the past has said the United States should “cancel” the deal but he has been mostly quiet on the issue since he was elected.

A White House official said Trump’s aides would “discuss the options, with the goal of providing a recommendation to the president about the path forward.”

White House officials, led by the National Economic Council, have recently been asking publicly-traded energy companies for advice on whether to stay in the agreement.

Major publicly traded coal companies such as Cloud Peak Energy and Peabody Energy confirmed to Reuters that they have told White House advisers it is in their interests for the United States to remain in the Paris agreement to ensure there was a global role for high-efficiency coal plants.

“By remaining in the Paris Agreement, albeit with a much different pledge on emissions, you can help shape a more rational international approach to climate policy,” Cloud Peak CEO Colin Marshall wrote in the letter dated April 6.

The advisers expected to attend Tuesday’s meeting included Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Perry, a former Texas governor, at his confirmation hearings in January softened a previous position that the science behind climate change was “phony.”

Last week, Pruitt, a former Oklahoma Attorney General, said the United States should “exit” the agreement because it was a “bad deal” for the country.

The meeting comes ahead of a summit of the Group of Seven wealthy nations in late May, which White House spokesman Sean Spicer said was the deadline for the decision.

Politico on Friday first reported a possible meeting of Trump advisers.

Change.org

An interview with Earth Day Initiative — and what you can do to help the planet.

Since its beginnings in 1970, Earth Day has become an annual to protect and consider the welfare of the planet on which we all live.

But we all know that concern for and commitment to the planet calls for more than one day. It takes sustained dedication and hard work — by environmentalists, elected officials, and everyday people who want the Earth and other non-human animals to prosper.

That’s why we recently sat down with John Oppermann, the Executive Director of Earth Day Initiative — an organization that promotes year-round environmental awareness and solutions through partnerships with schools, community organizations, businesses, and governments — to chat about the current state of environmental issues, how civic engagement has changed over the last few months, how we can all positively contribute regularly, and much more.

Check out the interview below, and be sure to check out environmental related petitions on Change.org, in addition to looking into the ways you can participate in Earth Day activities this Thursday, April 20th — and year round!

A.J. — Barack Obama and Donald Trump differ on their understanding and approach to environmental issues. What’s your take on the new administration, and how do you understand Earth Day Initiative’s role in this current milieu?

John Oppermann — There’s obviously a big divide in the two administrations’ views on the urgency of our environmental challenges. The Obama administration recognized the importance of coordinated action, working with businesses, government, and civil society to address our looming challenges, which obviously includes climate change. Obama also took a more global perspective of the issue,saw what was happening around the world, and made efforts to place America as a leader in the transition to clean energy and the fight against climate change. He made sure that we as a country were placed in the driver’s seat on a movement that he recognized was moving forward with or without us.

I think the current administration lacks an understanding of both the challenges that face us and the gift we’ve been given in the form of functioning institutions set up to protect our natural resources and environment. We’ve seen a lot of discussion on the lack of respect for science and the use of alternative facts to support one’s alternative reality. But I think equally important is the lack of respect for what we have done as a society. Fifty years ago we set up an institution to protect the environment we live in and depend on. We now take for granted the fact that we have clean air, clean water, and mechanisms for addressing environmental disasters as they arise. The rest of the world does not necessarily have that. Other countries are suffering from the terrible effects of uncontrolled pollution and mismanagement of natural resources. Just as some of these countries are waking up to the importance of protecting the environment, we’re at risk of forgetting what we came to realize 50 years ago.

Across the globe, particularly in the West, we’ve seen an increase in civic engagement around a host of issues. Will you say more about the changes you’ve noticed as it relates to the environment, and how is engagement different now than in the past?

It’s also an interesting time in that I see a lot of parallels to the time around the first Earth Day in 1970. A sort of perfect storm came together around that time with a mix of widespread activism, high-profile environmental disasters, and a general heightened awareness of humankind’s place in the global ecosystem. Just as that perfect storm helped turn out 20 million people for the first Earth Day and very quickly led to sweeping efforts to address environmental issues, including the creation of the EPA, I think the perfect storm of increased public engagement, high-profile climate-related natural disasters, and heightened awareness of our environmental challenges could lead to real progress in addressing those challenges. As scary as some of the latest headlines are, in terms of both environmental catastrophes and policies, we have reason to be hopeful that those headlines will push us to real positive action.

What are some of the biggest challenges you all face at Earth Day, and more generally, what do you think are the most pressing issues we face on a global scale?

The biggest challenge we face is complacency. While people seem to be very engaged right now, we must stay engaged all the time. People tend to get engaged in fits and starts. Environmental catastrophes spark people to take action. We should absolutely use those moments to galvanize people to do good on a broad range of environmental issues, but we really need people to be engaged all the time — not just in the wake of a catastrophe. Otherwise we risk backsliding into our past mistakes. We see this not just in the environmental field but across a broad spectrum of issues. We forget the constant threat of letting xenophobia go unchecked, of not standing up for the most vulnerable communities in our society, or letting powerful interests capture our governing institutions so that they start to serve their own interests more than society’s. The cliche that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it is a cliche for a reason. The reason is because it’s true. So if we don’t constantly keep in mind the lessons of history and appreciate that we have environmental protections in place for a reason, we really are at risk of losing those protections.

Will you say more about the ways environmental issues intersect with other social concerns?

Environmental challenges and the way we address them definitely intersect in predictable ways with socioeconomic factors. Powerful and influential people are able to manage environmental challenges in ways that people who are less powerful and less fortunate are not able to. One thing that I think very much sets the current climate movement apart from the earlier environmental movement is that activists are making a conscious effort to build more inclusive coalitions. Climate activists are trying to make sure that the movement takes on more environmental justice issues that affect minorities, as well as traditionally disadvantaged groups. The earlier environmental movement was criticized for very quickly becoming a white and upper middle class movement, and the hope is that that mistake is not repeated.

You’re a professional activist and environmentalist, but how might the everyday person — the armchair environmentalist — play a role in bringing about substantive change in their own communities?

Every year the most common question we get is “What’s one thing I can do for the environment?” Earth Day acts as an annual touchstone for people to think about how they can do something to green their lifestyles, support an environmental cause, or just somehow make a positive impact. I think the challenge is people get bogged down by lists of dozens of things they could do to green their lifestyles. So we’re making it simple with a new campaign that we’re launching as a countdown to the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. It’s aimed at cutting through the noise by asking people to do just one thing. We’re focusing in on the intersection between impact and convenience by asking people to sign up for clean energy via their utility bills. In some states you can sign up without even entering credit card information — you just enter your utility account number. It’s incredibly easy. By taking just a few minutes to sign up, you then have an ongoing impact, as every month your utility bill goes to support clean energy. You’re making a micro investment from dirty energy and supporting clean energy on an ongoing basis. And the way things are going right now, clean energy can use all the help it could get. People can check it out at countto50.org.

Earth Day is coming up. What’s on your agenda?

We’re looking forward to a few high-profile efforts to galvanize people around environmental action with the launch of our own Count to 50 campaign, the March for Science on April 22, and the People’s Climate March on April 29. It’s a lot of energy packed into the span of a couple of weeks. The fact that so much of this centers around Earth Day is heartening. It illustrates just what a pivotal moment that first Earth Day in 1970 was when people stood up and called for real action to protect our communities and the ecosystems we rely on. The fact that, 50 years later, this is the one time of year when such a broad swath of people take a moment to think about how we can live more sustainably together shows what a difference those organizers and environmentalists in 1970 made. It was the birth of the modern environmental movement. Now it’s time for the next movement.

A.J. Walton is the Senior Communications Manager at Change.org

ThinkProgress

Natasha Geiling, Reporter at ThinkProgress April 20, 2017

Scalia returns from the grave to pollute America’s water

A leaked draft of the Clean Water Rule rewrite circulating around Washington has Scalia’s legacy all over it.

On Tuesday, February 28, surrounded by Republican lawmakers, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to begin the process of rolling back the Obama administration’s Clean Water Rule.

That rule was finalized in 2015, so Trump couldn’t unilaterally undo it with the stroke of a pen. Instead, he asked the appropriate agencies to rewrite the rule and redefine “navigable waters” — a term that has plagued courts for decades — according to the definition put forth by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2006. And while that might seem like a small change, legal experts say that directive could vastly reduce the federal government’s ability to protect the nation’s streams, rivers, and wetlands from pollution.

A draft of the Trump administration’s proposed rewrite of the rule obtained by ThinkProgress confirms it is indeed taking an extremely narrow position in its definition of “navigable waters,” by applying Scalia’s opinion almost word-for-word to the rule rewrite. The draft, which has been circulating throughout the EPA and Capitol Hill for weeks, defines waters of the United States to mean only waters that have been used for interstate or foreign commerce, or interstate waters and wetlands, and requires such waters to be “relatively permanent.”

That would break considerably from a different opinion, also offered in 2006, by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who argued that waters could fall under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act if they have a “significant nexus” to navigable waters.

“There is no way to quantify the impact except to say it would represent the most dramatic reduction in federal protection for streams, wetlands, ponds, lakes and other water bodies in the history of the Clean Water Act,” Pat Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School, told ThinkProgress in an email, after reviewing the draft. “It has no basis in science, law, history or sensible water quality policy.”

Under the Clean Water Act, the federal government can regulate pollutants from “point sources” into “navigable waters,” though Congress did not explicitly define what constituted navigable waters. That lack of definition has created a regulatory vacuum, especially in situations where it’s not clear whether a particular body of water is “navigable” in a literal sense — wetlands, seasonal streams and rivers, or tributaries. Courts have attempted to fill that gap through their own interpretation of the phrase, but a mishmash of rulings has left courts and the government without a universally agreed upon definition.

Instead, regulatory bodies and lower courts have relied on two opinions from a 2006 court case, Rapanos v. United States, which pitted a Michigan developer, John Rapanos, against the federal government. Years earlier, the government brought criminal charges against Rapanos, alleging that he had violated the Clean Water Act by dumping sand into wetlands without a permit. Rapanos was convicted, but appealed, arguing that the wetland was miles from anything that could be considered a “navigable waterway” under the Clean Water Act.

The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where a plurality of justices sided with Rapanos, denying the EPA’s interpretation of navigable waters as any waters that connect to traditionally navigable waters. That decision produced two opinions that have shaped water law and policy for almost a decade. Scalia’s interpretation, on one hand, relied on a dictionary definition of “waters” to define navigable waters as being relatively permanent waters, or having some kind of continuous surface connection to permanent waters.

Kennedy’s interpretation, on the other hand, defined waters under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act as waters that had a significant nexus to traditionally navigable waters. Kennedy also took issue with Scalia’s requirement that bodies of water be relatively permanent — under that definition, he argued, a number of rivers in the Western part of the country, which run dry for part of the year, would not qualify for federal protection under the Clean Water Act.

“It would represent the most dramatic reduction in federal protection for streams, wetlands, ponds, lakes, and other water bodies in the history of the Clean Water Act.”

Several legal experts told ThinkProgress that the leaked draft of the rules would constitute an unprecedented reduction in the scope of the Clean Water Act. In addition to codifying Scalia’s opinion that the Clean Water Act should only apply to permanent and continuous waters, the Trump administration’s rewrite of the rule also explicitly defines what counts as a tributary, something that was not spelled out in the Clean Water Rule. According to the draft rule, the Trump administration considers tributaries a continuously flowing body of water that has “relative permanence” — a fairly vague term that could open the rule up to legal challenges if it were finalized.

“If this rule were adopted, it would be an outrageous contraction of the scope of the Clean Water Act that is contrary to Congress’ clear intent, and this arbitrary reversal would never withstand review in court,” Karl Coplan, a professor at Pace Law School, told ThinkProgress.

But finalizing a rule based on Scalia’s interpretation in the Rapanos case could lead to legal trouble down the road for the administration. Lower courts have generally been split in their decisions about giving deference to Kennedy’s definition, or Kennedy and Scalia’s definition together. No court has upheld the Scalia opinion on its own — it’s always been taken in conjunction with the Kennedy test.

Read: Why the EPA’s clean drinking water rule is so controversial thinkprogress.org

That means the Trump administration’s rewrite directly contradicts how the Court of Appeals has been interpreting the Rapanos decision, and throws into question how favorably the Court of Appeals would view the Trump administration’s rule if it were ever challenged in court. And if the challenge were to reach the Supreme Court while Kennedy was still on the bench, convincing a majority of justices to side with the administration’s rule would mean convincing Kennedy to disagree with his own opinion in favor of a definition he rejected more than a decade ago.

“If the Trump administration proposes a new rule along the lines of what is in the current draft I would bet good money that it would be overturned in court, and I say that without even knowing how they might embellish the record or try to defend this new approach,” Mark Squillace, professor at the University of Colorado Law School, told ThinkProgress in an email after reviewing the draft.

Perhaps further complicating matters concerning the Trump administration’s rewrite of the rule, industry groups close to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt are reportedly pushing for the EPA to outsource rewriting the rule to private law firms. That would allow Pruitt to bypass career EPA employees who worked on promulgating the Obama administration rule, and would mean less public scrutiny of the decision-making process. Legal experts told Politico that such a move would be “likely legally doable,” but “almost unheard of.”

On April 19, amid rumors of outsourcing the rule-making process and Pruitt’s reported intention to rewrite the rule as quickly as possible, 26 environmental and conservation organizations sent Pruitt a letter asking the agency to reconsider basing the rewritten rule on Scalia’s opinion.

“We especially fear the damage that a final rule would inflict on the nation’s waterways if, as Executive Order 13,778 forecasts, it relies on a legal test that a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court rejected and that would weaken the federal rules so that they protect fewer resources than they have in several decades,” the letter read.

If the Trump administration moves forward and finalizes a rule based on Scalia’s opinion, the rule is certain to face a suite of challenges from environmental groups in court. And while the draft of the rule could certainly change before being finalized, Ann Powers of Pace Law School said that drafting a rule based on Scalia’s opinion certainly represents a step towards rolling back clean water protections for much of America’s wetlands and waterways.

“This is not a done deal tomorrow, but it is certainly a critical step in the path to undoing a great deal of protections for our national wetlands,” Powers said. “It would be very unfortunate if this were to be implemented.”

Thanks to Kiley Kroh.

Popsugar

Trump Office of Science and Technology Policy Jobs

Trump Doesn’t Appear to Be Hiring Anyone Who Studies Climate Science

Eleanor Sheehan April 20, 2017

President Donald Trump is demonstrably unconcerned with the environment. Following through with his campaign commitment to discrediting climate science to promote the fossil fuel industry, Trump’s administration has yet to fill the majority of positions at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The ofice currently employs only 44 out of the 114 positions that it did in Barack Obama’s administration, according to a list obtained by Motherboard — and none of them are climate scientists.

The OSTP was established in 1971 to encourage the president to make more informed policy decisions about science. While Obama was president, the office was responsible for orchestrating the administration’s response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the 2011 nuclear spill in Fukushima, and the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, reports The New York Times. However, in President George W. Bush’s administration, the office only employed 50 people.

Related
Read: New Head of the EPA Does “Not Agree” Humans Have Led to Climate Change

Of the positions Trump has filled at the OTSP, none of those include titles with the word “climate.” The positions at the OTSP center around technology and assist Trump’s innovation effort, which is currently spearheaded by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. There are a few positions that employ scientists, but the titles are vague and it’s unclear what they do. Some of those jobs include “natural disaster resilience assistant director” and “senior policy adviser for oceans and the environment.”

Though Trump’s team has been atypically slow in staffing the White House, the OSTP’s vacancies seem to be intentional considering his stance on climate change. If Trump’s climate-science-denying Environmental Protection Agency director is any indication of how his administration plans to address global warming, it’s safe to say those positions will not be filled any time soon — if ever.

Salt Lake Tribune

Letter: Toward a safer, cleaner future

April 19, 2017

More scientists seem aware of the political reality of climate change, as there’s a March for Science this Earth Day. Why have they waited until the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is over 400 parts per million, while the threat has been known since before it was 300 ppm? Don’t get me wrong, protest has a role in policy debate. A huge effort was required to change the previous administration’s stance on Keystone XL, but most scientists were silent. Many said they didn’t want to jeopardize funding.

The March for Science’s stated mission is championing for robust funding, but time is up for researching climate change. There’s a scientific consensus. When James Hansen addressed Congress in 1988, we could have protected our planet by reducing emissions 1 percent per year, but after decades of silence, it’s increased to 7 percent. To safely make this transition, many economists and politicians support legislation putting a modest price on greenhouse gas pollution that steadily rises and to refund the collected fees equally to every American citizen.

Perhaps the marchers could take public stances by sending letters to the editor and to our representatives to generate the political will for this step towards a safer, cleaner energy future.

Kevin Leecaster Salt Lake City

ThinkProgress

Kiley Kroh Senior Editor at ThinkProgress. April 20, 2017

Dow Chemical gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, now wants pesticide risk study buried. The chemical manufacturer also pushed for a potentially dangerous insecticide not to be banned.

Andrew Liveris, president and CEO of Dow Chemical Company, is quite pleased with the new atmosphere in the White House. Liveris, who also heads Trump’s American Business Council, has praised the president’s business sense and cheered the administration’s regulatory rollback, saying Trump and his team have “managed to move the ball in 45 days on regulatory reform more than in the previous eight years.”

Dow Chemical also joined several other major corporations in ponying up for Trump’s inauguration — giving $1 million to the organizing committee. Donors at that level “received tickets to a luncheon with Cabinet appointees and congressional leaders,” CNBC reported.

Two months later, Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, announced that he would not follow the recommendation of the agency’s own scientists to ban the use of chlorpyrifos, an insecticide that has been linked to severe health consequences, particularly in children and farm-workers.

Chlorpyrifos is manufactured by Dow AgroSciences, a division of Dow Chemical. Dow has argued against a ban, claiming the science regarding potential health impacts is inconclusive. In announcing his decision to reject the ban, Pruitt said his agency was “returning to using sound science in decision-making — rather than predetermined results.”

Since then, Dow has already moved on to its next request. Last week, lawyers representing Dow sent letters to three of Trump’s cabinet heads asking them to ignore government studies regarding the harmful effects of a group of pesticides on endangered species, according to an Associated Press exclusive published Thursday.

“Over the past four years, government scientists have compiled an official record running more than 10,000 pages indicating the three pesticides under review — chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion — pose a risk to nearly every endangered species they studied,” the AP reported. “Regulators at the three federal agencies, which share responsibilities for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, are close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used.”

Read: EPA rejects calls to ban pesticide linked to brain damage, the agency sided with the chemical company manufacturing the product, putting farmworkers most at risk. thinkprogress.org

As with its fight against the potential human health impacts of chlorpyrifos, Dow sought to cast doubt on the scientific findings regarding the threat its pesticides pose to endangered species. For years, environmental groups have pressured the EPA to more closely scrutinize the harmful effects of pesticides on humans and endangered species.

“Dow Chemical wants to suppress the science showing that chlorpyrifos is harmful to everything it contacts. It damages children’s brains, contaminates drinking water, poisons workers, and threatens to wipe out Pacific salmon and other endangered species,” Patti Goldman, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Northwest regional office, said in an emailed statement to ThinkProgress. “Each time independent scientists reveal the dangers of this pesticide, Dow commissions its own ‘science’ and tries to delay the inevitable — banning this outdated and harmful pesticide.”

Dow Chemical has devoted a significant sum of money to influencing policy and lawmakers — spending $13.6 million on lobbying in 2016 alone, according to the AP report. The chemical giant gave $250,000 to both the Republican and Democratic party conventions last year, according to Federal Election Commission records, and its corporate PAC spent more than $1 million in the 2016 campaign cycle, acording to OpenSecrets.

“Dow actively participates in policymaking and political processes, including political contributions to candidates, parties and causes, in compliance with all applicable federal and state laws,” Rachelle Schikorra, director of public affairs for Dow Chemical, told the AP. “Dow maintains and is committed to the highest standard of ethical conduct in all such activity.” Thanks to Ned Resnikoff.

Business Insider

An infamous chemicals company wants Trump to kill a pesticides study that’s bad for business

Michael Biesecker, Associated Press April 13, 2017

WASHINGTON (AP) — Dow Chemical is pushing the Trump administration to scrap the findings of federal scientists who point to a family of widely used pesticides as harmful to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.

Lawyers representing Dow, whose CEO also heads a White House manufacturing working group, and two other makers of organophosphates sent letters last week to the heads of three Cabinet agencies. The companies asked them “to set aside” the results of government studies the companies contend are fundamentally flawed.

The letters, dated April 13, were obtained by The Associated Press.

Dow Chemical chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris is a close adviser to President Donald Trump. The company wrote a $1 million check to help underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities.

Over the last four years, government scientists have compiled an official record running more than 10,000 pages showing the three pesticides under review — chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion — pose a risk to nearly every endangered species they studied. Regulators at the three federal agencies, which share responsibilities for enforcing the Endangered Species Act, are close to issuing findings expected to result in new limits on how and where the highly toxic pesticides can be used.

The industry’s request comes after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced last month he was reversing an Obama-era effort to bar the use of Dow’s chlorpyrifos pesticide on food after recent peer-reviewed studies found that even tiny levels of exposure could hinder the development of children’s brains. In his prior job as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt often aligned himself in legal disputes with the interests of executives and corporations who supported his state campaigns. He filed more than one dozen lawsuits seeking to overturn some of the same regulations he is now charged with enforcing.

Pruitt declined to answer questions from reporters Wednesday as he toured a polluted Superfund site in Indiana. A spokesman for the agency later told AP that Pruitt won’t “prejudge” any potential rule-making decisions as “we are trying to restore regulatory sanity to EPA’s work.”

“We have had no meetings with Dow on this topic and we are reviewing petitions as they come in, giving careful consideration to sound science and good policymaking,” said J.P. Freire, EPA’s associate administrator for public affairs. “The administrator is committed to listening to stakeholders affected by EPA’s regulations, while also reviewing past decisions.”

The office of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Natural Marine Fisheries Service, did not respond to emailed questions. A spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, referred questions back to EPA.

As with the recent human studies of chlorpyrifos, Dow hired its own scientists to produce a lengthy rebuttal to the government studies showing the risks posed to endangered species by organophosphates.

The EPA’s recent biological evaluation of chlorpyrifos found the pesticide is “likely to adversely affect” 1,778 of the 1,835 animals and plants accessed as part of its study, including critically endangered or threatened species of frogs, fish, birds and mammals. Similar results were shown for malathion and diazinon.

In a statement, the Dow subsidiary that sells chlorpyrifos said its lawyers asked for the EPA’s biological assessment to be withdrawn because its “scientific basis was not reliable.”

“Dow AgroSciences is committed to the production and marketing of products that will help American farmers feed the world, and do so with full respect for human health and the environment, including endangered and threatened species,” the statement said. “These letters, and the detailed scientific analyses that support them, demonstrate that commitment.”

FMC Corp., which sells malathion, said the withdrawal of the EPA studies will allow the necessary time for the “best available” scientific data to be compiled.

“Malathion is a critical tool in protecting agriculture from damaging pests,” the company said.

Diazinon maker Makhteshim Agan of North America Inc., which does business under the name Adama, did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Environmental advocates were not surprised the companies might seek to forestall new regulations that might hurt their profits, but said Wednesday that criticism of the government’s scientists was unfounded. The methods used to conduct EPA’s biological evaluations were developed by the National Academy of Sciences.

Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said Dow’s experts were trying to hold EPA scientists to an unrealistic standard of data collection that could only be achieved under “perfect laboratory conditions.”

“You can’t just take an endangered fish out of the wild, take it to the lab and then expose it to enough pesticides until it dies to get that sort of data,” Hartl said. “It’s wrong morally, and it’s illegal.”

Originally derived from a nerve gas developed by Nazi Germany, chlorpyrifos has been sprayed on citrus fruits, apples, cherries and other crops for decades. It is among the most widely used agricultural pesticides in the United States, with Dow selling about 5 million pounds domestically each year.

As a result, traces of the chemical are commonly found in sources of drinking water. A 2012 study at the University of California at Berkeley found that 87 percent of umbilical-cord blood samples tested from newborn babies contained detectable levels of chlorpyrifos.

In 2005, the Bush administration ordered an end to residential use of diazinon to kill yard pests such as ants and grub worms after determining that it poses a human health risk, particularly to children. However it is still approved for use by farmers, who spray it on fruits and vegetables.

Malathion is widely sprayed to control mosquitoes and fruit flies. It is also an active ingredient in some shampoos prescribed to children for treating lice.

A coalition of environmental groups has fought in court for years to spur EPA to more closely examine the risk posed to humans and endangered species by pesticides, especially organophosphates.

“Endangered species are the canary in the coal mine,” Hartl said. Since many of the threatened species are aquatic, he said they are often the first to show the effects of long-term chemical contamination in rivers and lakes used as sources of drinking water by humans.

Dow, which spent more than $13.6 million on lobbying in 2016, has long wielded substantial political power in the nation’s capital. There is no indication the chemical giant’s influence has waned.

When Trump signed an executive order in February mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations, Dow’s chief executive was at Trump’s side.

“Andrew, I would like to thank you for initially getting the group together and for the fantastic job you’ve done,” Trump said as he signed the order during an Oval Office ceremony. The president then handed his pen to Liveris to keep as a souvenir.

Rachelle Schikorra, the director of public affairs for Dow Chemical, said any suggestion that the company’s $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural committee was intended to help influence regulatory decisions made by the new administration is “completely off the mark.”

“Dow actively participates in policymaking and political processes, including political contributions to candidates, parties and causes, in compliance with all applicable federal and state laws,” Schikorra said. “Dow maintains and is committed to the highest standard of ethical conduct in all such activity.”

Associated Press reporters Jack Gillum in Washington and Sophia Tareen in East Chicago, Indiana, contributed to this story.

MSNBC

The Rachel Maddow Show/ The MaddowBlog

Debate over pesticides enters Donald Trump’s ‘swamp’

By Steve Benen April 20, 2017

At first blush, it may seem like an obscure, technical debate. The Associated Press reports that a four-year review conducted by government scientists of three pesticides – chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion – found that they “pose a risk to nearly every endangered species they studied.” Federal agencies are poised to issue findings on how to limit use of these pesticides.

The story takes on a broader political significance, however, when we consider what one of the pesticide manufacturers is up to. The AP explained:

Dow Chemical is pushing the Trump administration to scrap the findings of federal scientists who point to a family of widely used pesticides as harmful to about 1,800 critically threatened or endangered species.

As one might imagine, Dow is pointing to its own research, which is in conflict with the information compiled by government scientists.

If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s controversial far-right choice to lead the agency, decided two weeks ago to side with Dow Chemical – against the advice of the EPA’s researchers – on the use of chlorpyrifos, one of the insecticides in question.

Now, apparently, Dow Chemical wants Team Trump to side with the company once more.

And while I’m not privy to the administration’s deliberations, it seems Dow Chemical has reason to be optimistic about its chances. Not only is the Trump administration ideologically predisposed to agree with corporate interests over environmental interests, but in this case the ties between the company and the president run deep.

The AP reported added, “Dow Chemical chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris is a close adviser to President Donald Trump. The company wrote a $1 million check to help underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities…. When Trump signed an executive order in February mandating the creation of task forces at federal agencies to roll back government regulations, Dow’s chief executive was at Trump’s side.”

At a certain level, this is a classic elections-have-consequences moment. American voters were given a choice in presidential candidates, and just enough of them sided with the Republican who’d create conditions like these. The country is now stuck, at least for four years, with the consequences.

But stories like these also shed new light on what Trump meant when he vowed to “drain the swamp.” The phrase, a staple of Trump’s campaign rhetoric, has become a laughable cliché, but let’s not forget its purpose: the GOP candidate took aim not only at D.C., but also at the city’s culture and legal corruption. Trump assured voters that he – and he alone – would change how the system in the capital worked.

We now know that meant making things quite a bit worse. Dow Chemical wrote a $1 million check to Trump’s shady inaugural committee; Dow Chemical’s CEO became a presidential adviser; and now Dow Chemical wants its friends on Team Trump to “set aside” scientific research.

I’d recommend caution before entering Donald Trump’s Swamp. It’s likely to soon be filled with some potentially harmful pesticides.

Explore: The MaddowBlog, Culture of Corruption and Donald

EcoWatch

Lorraine Chow April 19, 2017

Widely-Opposed Pipeline ‘Confirms Worst Fears’ After Two Spills Into Ohio Wetlands

Energy Transfer Partners’ new Rover Pipeline has spilled millions of gallons of drilling fluids into Ohio’s wetlands. Construction of the $4.2 billion project only began last month.

According to regulatory filings obtained by Sierra Club Ohio, on April 13, 2 million gallons of drilling fluids spilled into a wetland adjacent to the Tuscarawas River in Stark County. The next day, another 50,000 gallons of drilling fluids released into a wetland in Richland County in the Mifflin Township. The spills occurred as part of an operation associated with the pipeline’s installation.

Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners is the same operator behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

The U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved the Rover Pipeline’s construction in February. The 713-mile pipeline will carry fracked gas across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and Michigan and Canada, and crosses three major rivers, the Maumee, Sandusky and Portage, all of which feed into Lake Erie. The pipeline is designed to transport 3.25 billion cubic feet of domestically produced natural gas per day.

Completion of the Rover Pipeline is planned for November 2017. Energy Transfer spokeswoman Alexis Daniel told Bloomberg that the spills will not change the project’s in-service date.

“Once the incidents were noted, we immediately began containment and mitigation and will continue until the issues are completely resolved,” she said.

Environmental groups are fighting to stop the pipeline’s construction.

“Construction just began just a few weeks ago, yet Energy Transfer has already spilled more than 2 million gallons of drilling fluids in two separate disasters, confirming our worst fears about this dangerous pipeline before it has even gone into operation,” said Jen Miller, director of the Ohio chapter of the Sierra Club.

“We’ve always said that it’s never a question of whether a pipeline accident will occur, but rather a question of when. These disasters prove that the fossil fuel industry is unable to even put a pipeline into use before it spills dangerous chemicals into our precious waterways and recreation areas.

“Construction on the Rover Pipeline must be stopped immediately, as an investigation into Energy Transfer’s total failure to adequately protect our wetlands and communities is conducted.”

LA Times Editorial

Surprise us, Mr. President, and embrace the Paris climate agreement

Donald Trump has been president for only three months and already he’s given up or reversed course or been stymied on a wide range of campaign promises. Given how awful some of those ideas were — ending Obamacare, declaring China a currency manipulator, ordering a blanket federal hiring freeze (done, but since lifted) — it is not necessarily a bad thing for the country that he’s fallen down on the job.

Now, we’re mildly heartened to learn that Trump also may be moving away from his ill-advised campaign pledge to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement of 2015, under which nearly 200 nations pledged to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Climate change, of course, is viewed skeptically by the new president. He once described the idea that human activity is heating up the oceans and atmosphere in potentially catastrophic ways as “a total, and very expensive, hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese” in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. He appointed a climate skeptic, Scott Pruitt, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a department Trumps hopes to reduce by 31%, according to the budget proposal he sent to Congress. The administration also is pushing plans to roll back Obama-era limitations on methane emissions from oil and gas wells on public lands (an effort that, fortunately, may die in the Senate), and to consider weakening the aggressive fuel-efficiency standards for motor vehicles established under Obama.

Trump also has drawn a target on the Clean Power Plan, which was designed to significantly reduce emissions from primarily coal-fired power-generating plants responsible for a third of the nation’s greenhouse gases.

That the Trump administration is even debating the issue rather than blindly carrying out its ill-conceived campaign promise offers a hopeful sign.

His hostility to the science of climate change poses a global risk. The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of carbon and other greenhouse gases. It was instrumental in crafting the Paris agreement, a milestone in international environmental cooperation even if experts say its goal of capping the rise in temperatures by 2100 to less than 2 degrees Celsius isn’t ambitious enough if the world is to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

It’s slightly encouraging that there seems to be an internal debate underway between a set of Trump advisors who want the president to keep his promise to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement and another set urging him to stick with the pact but loosen the Obama goal of reducing by 2025 U.S. emissions by up to 28% of 2005 levels. That the Trump administration is even debating the issue rather than blindly carrying out its ill-conceived campaign promise offers a hopeful sign that the president’s position could change, and that he might still join the rest of the world in trying to address the potentially existential threat of global warming. For the United States to back off from the Paris accord now not only would imperil the chances of global success, but would marginalize the U.S. as a leader in a defining issue of our era.

At the same time, if the U.S. were to stay in the Paris agreement while weakening the United States’ commitments, that still would be a losing proposition for the nation, and the world, given that emissions need to be even more sharply curtailed than already planned. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels is a difficult challenge, but it needs to be done. Yes, there will be economic hits to the oil and gas industries, but alternative renewable energy already has become a significant part of the global economy and it is growing quickly. Given the worldwide damage that will be caused by rising seas — one estimate puts it at $1 trillion a year by 2050 — insuring jobs today at the expense of the future is the definition of penny-wise, pound-foolish.

The president is in a position to prove his critics wrong — to demonstrate that he can weigh (actual, not alternative) facts and frame positions based on reality and in the best interests of the nation. We invite him to do so by sticking with the Paris agreement and the Clean Power Plan, and by directing the government to find ways to reduce U.S. emissions even further. Those are steps that a sagacious and respected world leader would take. We hope Trump moves in that direction, away from his reckless campaign stance on this enormously important issue.

The Buffalo News

Even at Wyoming County food bank, unwavering support for Trump

Jerry Zremski April 16, 2017

PERRY – The crowd at a monthly food pantry in this Wyoming County town of about 4,500 turned out to be a perfect microcosm of the most pro-Trump county in New York, where 72 percent of voters pulled the lever for the rebellious Republican candidate for president.

Waiting to gather their food from a nonprofit that might have to shut down if President Trump’s budget becomes law, seven out of 10 people interviewed last week said Trump was still their man, their president, no matter what his budget says.

“I’d vote for him again 20 more times if I could,” said Hal McWilliams, 59, a self-employed contractor from Portageville. “Build the wall! …Democrats do everything in their power to destroy this country. Hillary Clinton was everything I am against. She was out to destroy the culture that made this country: Hard work, guns, freedom.”

Voters talk like that in every corner of this county of rolling farmland just east of East Aurora, where the 40,000 human residents are, according to federal statistics, outnumbered by the cows by a margin of about 2 1/2 to 1.

You will hear some strikingly different comments, though, from the people who run that food bank, from some of the county’s 16 town supervisors – all Republicans – and from some of the farmers who tend to those cows.

Many of them speak of Trump’s actions as president with varying measures of concern, none more so than Connie Kramer, executive director of Community Action for Wyoming County. The nonprofit, which runs that monthly food bank, projects it would lose about 90 percent of its funding if Congress were to approve Trump’s proposed budget.

“That is our core funding, and that definitely would cause us to look at the viability of the agency and whether it could continue,” Kramer said.

Praise for the president

Community Action runs a host of programs, from job training to rental assistance to housing weatherization, all funded by the Community Services Block Grant and other federal programs that Trump wants to eliminate or dramatically cut.

That seemed to be of little concern to most of the people packing their pickups with fresh produce and other items at last week’s food bank.

Told that the food bank was in danger, McWilliams shrugged and said: “I grow most of my own food anyway.”

Meantime, Reggie Clark, a 51-year-old chef from Castile, said he thinks Trump will back off from his budget cuts, which is possible, given that members of Congress oppose many of them.

What matters more to Clark is what he sees from the new president day in and day out.

“He’s about action,” said Clark, who didn’t vote for Trump but said he would do so if he could vote again now. “I believe he’s doing pretty much everything he promised to do.”

That’s what Keith and Bobbi Muhlenbeck think, too.

“We love him,” said Keith Muhlenbeck, 46. “We support him in everything he’s doing. He’s a businessman who knows how to get things done, and you can tell he has America’s best interests at heart.”

Washington pundits might be criticizing Trump for his recent reversals on a number of policy issues, including trade with China and the future of the Export-Import Bank. But Bobbi Muhlenbeck sees the president as a tough talker who stands his ground.

“I like that he doesn’t back down,” said Muhlenbeck’s wife, 49.

Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad found that out the hard way, her husband noted, citing Trump’s decision to bomb a Syrian air base to retaliate for Assad’s use of chemical weapons on his own people.

“This country used to stand for something, and now we’re a joke,” he said, arguing that former President Barack Obama projected weakness – something Trump obviously doesn’t do.

“There’s iron in the glove now,” he said.

As for Trump’s proposed budget cuts, Muhlenbeck doesn’t worry that the food bank his family depends on will be forced to shut down.

“I’m sure they’ll find the money somewhere,” he said.

A troubled county

The Muhlenbecks, who live on government disability payments due to assorted ailments and injuries, were among about 200 people who lined up in a parking lot outside the Cornerstone Outreach Center for free groceries last week.

The line at the food bank should come as no surprise, given the state of the Wyoming County economy. Heavily dependent on agriculture, the local job market swings with the seasons. The unemployment rate sank to a mere 4.3 percent last August, but then shot up to 7.7 percent in February.

Beyond the farms, the county lost a quarter of its manufacturing jobs over the past decade, and locals complain that young people continue to move away in pursuit of the jobs they can’t find here. The Census Bureau estimates that the county has lost 3.3 percent of its population in this decade alone, continuing a 20-year trend that has seen the county shrink by 7.2 percent.

In other words, Wyoming County is much like the struggling rural counties of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin that made Trump president.

While Wyoming County has long been heavily Republican, Trump exceeded the vote total of the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, by 8 percentage points here, as voters embraced his promise of bringing back jobs that had disappeared.

Locals – especially farmers – came to see Democrats as job-killers, several Wyoming county residents said last week. Farmers in particular pointed to an Obama-era regulation that expanded Clean Water Act protections to small wetlands and streams, a move that could have limited how farmers use the ponds and creeks on their own property.

“When you talk about why Trump did so well here, it’s things like that,” said Daniel Leuer, supervisor of the Town of Middlebury.

Trump quickly moved to repeal that Clean Water rule, and it’s those sorts of moves that make him popular here, said Rep. Chris Collins, R-Clarence, whose district includes Wyoming County.

“These folks don’t like government,” said Collins, a strong Trump supporter who himself fought that Clean Water rule for years.

Besides, people in Wyoming County could relate to Trump far better than they could Clinton, his Democratic opponent, said Tom Marquart of Marquart Brothers Farming, a dairy and produce farm in Gainesville.

“Hillary and Trump, they live in a different world, but at least he knows what the other world is,” said Marquart, who thinks Trump inherited “a big mess” and is doing his best to clean it up.

Despite Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, even some of the Bhutanese refugees who work as farm laborers here voted for Trump, said Pat Standish, founder of Angel Action, a Community Action effort that enlists volunteers to work on everything from early childhood education to emergency help for families in need.

“One of them told me that Trump loved the country more than his party,” Standish said.

Concerns about Trump

Now, though, the reality of the Trump presidency is starting to shake some Wyoming County community leaders.

The failed Republican health care bill would have cost the Wyoming County Community Health System $800,000 a year, the state hospital association projected, making matters far worse for an already-strapped rural hospital.

“We’re just hanging by a thread here,” A.D. Berwanger, supervisor of the Town of Arcade and the chairman of the county Board of Supervisors, said of the local hospital in Warsaw.

Meantime, Supervisor James R. Brick of the Town of Perry noted that his town and others could benefit from federal funding to expand their water systems. That’s something that could be included in the billion-dollar infrastructure bill Trump promised but hasn’t delivered.

Trump has, however, moved forward with plans to build a wall at the Mexican border. That could be troublesome, said Leuer, the Middlebury supervisor, because Mexico is a huge trading partner that buys dairy products from Wyoming County.

That’s just one reason some local farmers are starting to worry a bit about some of Trump’s policies.

Pat McCormick, a Wyoming County farmer who serves as a top official with the New York Farm Bureau, said farm labor shortages – a growing problem for several years – could grow worse because of Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrant workers. He also worries that Trump’s Department of Agriculture is not fully staffed and not prepared to deal with a Canadian government action that’s limiting the shipping of milk north of the border.

“I don’t agree with everything he’s done,” McCormick said of the new president.

Then there’s the matter of Trump’s budget cuts, which would cost 5,302 families in the county their home heating aid while probably shuttering Community Action, a nonprofit that essentially serves as an adjunct to the county Department of Social Services.

“Community Action is a key human services agency for us,” said Ellen Grant, supervisor of the Town of Bennington. “If they don’t have the funds to continue to operate, a lot of the services are going to fall back on our Social Services office.”

“Trump is a go-getter”

Those realities seemed not to matter much to the Trump supporters at last Thursday’s food bank.

Frances Daley, 90, of Castile, said she doesn’t agree with some of Trump’s budget cuts. But she quickly added: “I think he’s doing a good job. He’s more down to earth and speaks to the people. The Congress needs to cooperate with him more.”

A middle-aged woman, who identified herself only as Sherri, agreed that Trump is doing well – despite the roasting he’s taken in the mainstream media for the failed attempt to repeal Obamacare, the palace intrigue inside the White House and a continuing stream of controversial tweets.

A resident of Java, Sherri complained that the Obama administration fought her effort to get Social Security disability payments and otherwise produced a stagnant economy all across the nation.

In contrast to Obama, “Trump is a go-getter,” she said. “There’s no bull … with him. He’s up front on everything.”

Not everyone in line at the food pantry agreed.

“I think he’s going to ruin the country,” said Carol Green, 53, a Clinton voter from Warsaw who worried that Trump sets a poor example for young people.

Yvonne Barnhardt of Silver Springs, who was collecting groceries for her 87-year-old mother, was fully aware of Trump’s budget cuts.

“He’s taking away stuff we might need,” said Barnhardt, 55.

Barnhardt didn’t do anything to stand in the way of a Trump presidency, though.

She’s not registered to vote. “I never thought about it,” she said as people in front of her in the line snagged their free groceries.

EPA staffer leaves with a bang, blasting agency policies under Trump

Washington Post

EPA staffer leaves with a bang, blasting agency policies under Trump

By Joe Davidson – Columnist April 7, 2017

When Mike Cox quit, he did so with gusto.

After 25 years, he retired last week from the Environmental Protection Agency with a tough message for the boss, Administrator Scott Pruitt.

“I, along with many EPA staff, are becoming increasing alarmed about the direction of EPA under your leadership … ” Cox said in a letter to Pruitt. “The policies this Administration is advancing are contrary to what the majority of the American people, who pay our salaries, want EPA to accomplish, which are to ensure the air their children breath is safe; the land they live, play, and hunt on to be free of toxic chemicals; and the water they drink, the lakes they swim in, and the rivers they fish in to be clean.”

Cox was a climate change adviser for EPA’s Region 10, covering Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Idaho. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, he’s been very involved in Bainbridge, Wash., coaching youth sports and serving on local boards and commissions. For two decades, the fit 60-year-old rode his bike eight miles to the ferry, then uphill to his Seattle office.

He can get away with being so blunt because he sent the letter on his last day on the job. Yet his views reflect the disgust and frustration among the agency employees he left behind. Interviews with staffers point to a workforce demoralized by President Trump’s and Pruitt’s statements that conflict with science. They are worried about a new, backward direction for the agency and nervous about proposed, drastic budget cuts.

They are also fearful.

Twice during an hour of interviews for this column, EPA workers in different parts of the country asked to communicate with me by using encryption software. All who spoke feared retaliation and would not allow their names to be used.

“It is pretty bleak,” one staffer, an environmental engineer, said about employee morale.

“It’s in the dumps,” said another.

“Pretty much everybody is updating their resumes. It’s grim,” added a third.

They and their colleagues are dedicated to EPA’s mission to “protect human health and the environment.” They fear that Trump administration policies will do the opposite.

Like Cox, they are upset with an administrator casting doubt on the central role carbon dioxide plays in climate change. “You will continue to undermine your credibility and integrity with EPA staff, and the majority of the public, if you continue to question this basic science of climate change,” Cox wrote.

Of course, Pruitt’s position is no surprise for a man who was appointed by a president who called climate change a hoax.

To see the effects of climate change, Cox invited Pruitt to “visit the Pacific Northwest and see where the streams are too warm for our salmon to survive in the summer; visit the oyster farmers in Puget Sound whose stocks are being altered from the oceans becoming more acidic; talk to the ski area operators who are seeing less snowpack and worrying about their future; and talk to the farmers in Eastern Washington who are struggling to have enough water to grow their crops and water their cattle. The changes I am referencing are not impacts projected for the future, but are happening now.”

Trump’s proposed EPA budget is the vehicle for his science-doubting policies.

His 31 percent budget decrease would be the largest among agencies not eliminated. It would result in layoffs for 25 percent of the staff and cuts to 50 EPA programs, The Washington Post reported Sunday. Lost would be more than half the positions in the division testing automaker fuel efficiency claims.

An EPA environmental engineer is “almost hopeful” for a partial government shutdown, which could happen after April 28 if Congress doesn’t approve a spending measure, because “it’s better than getting axed right away.”

Cox challenged the “indefensible budget cuts,” asking Pruitt “why resources for Alaska Native Villages are being reduced when they are presented with some of the most difficult conditions in the country; why you would eliminate funds for the protection and restoration of the Puget Sound ecosystem which provides thousands of jobs and revenue for Washington State; and why you would reduce funds for a program that retrofits school buses to reduce diesel emission exhaust inhaled by our most vulnerable population — children.”

The EPA did not respond to requests for comment on Cox’s letter, but Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team, did.

Now that Trump is moving toward “radically downsizing the EPA,” Ebell said, “employees who are opposed to the Trump Administration’s agenda are either going to conduct themselves as professional civil servants or find other employment or retire or be terminated. I would be more sympathetic if they had ever expressed any concern for the people whose jobs have been destroyed by EPA’s regulatory rampage.”

They are conducting themselves as the professional civil servants they are, even as they are distressed over the direction of the agency. They complain quietly, sometimes openly, but without rebellion.

“We still have to go on until they shut the lights off,” said one EPA manager. “People here are committed to the mission and not necessarily to a paycheck.”

Coping takes different forms.

Black humor and burying themselves in a project’s scientific minutia will work for some.

“For the rest of us,” added one longtime regional staffer, “there probably will be a significant rise in alcoholism.”

Tell us how federal employees are dealing with Trump administration policies and proposed budget cuts. Send information to joe.davidson@washpost.com.

New EPA documents reveal even deeper proposed cuts to staff and programs

By Juliet Eilperin, Chris Mooney and Steven Mufson March 31, 2017

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a new, more detailed plan for laying off 25 percent of its employees and scrapping 56 programs including pesticide safety, water runoff control, and environmental cooperation with Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

At a time when the agency is considering a controversial rollback in fuel efficiency standards adopted under President Obama, the plan would cut by more than half the number of people in EPA’s division for testing the accuracy of fuel efficiency claims by automakers.

It would transfer funding for the program to fees paid by the automakers themselves.

The spending plan, obtained by The Washington Post, offers the most detailed vision to date of how the 31 percent budget cut to the EPA ordered up by President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget would diminish the agency.

The March 21 plan calls for even deeper reductions in staffing than earlier drafts. It maintains funding given to states to administer waste treatment and drinking water. But as a result, the budget for the rest of EPA is slashed 43 percent.

The Trump administration says the EPA cuts reflect a philosophy of limiting federal government and devolving authority to the states, localities and, in some cases, corporations. But environmental groups say the Trump administration is answering the call of companies seeking lax regulation and endangering Americans’ air and water.

Former EPA official: Cuts would target most vulnerable communities

In a memorandum at the front of the March 21 document, the EPA’s acting chief financial officer David A. Bloom said the agency would now “center on our core legal requirements,” eliminating voluntary activities on scientific research, climate change and education, and leaving other activities to state and local governments.

John Konkus, the agency spokesman said: “EPA will work with the President and Congress to redesign the way we do business to focus on achieving our core responsibilities – working with the states to ensure clean and breathable air, protecting water quality and investing in infrastructure, restoring our communities, ensuring timely review of chemicals and products to ensure safety for American families, all of which will have a positive impact on the environment and the economy.”

The $5.7 billion EPA budget will likely undergo massive rewriting by congressional lawmakers, but the document is a declaration of intent by the Trump administration — one that sets the agency fundamentally at odds with the environmental policies of the past eight years and in some cases nearly three decades.

Because of the sweeping cuts to scientific programs, the administrator’s own Science Advisory Board budget would be cut 84 percent. As the document explains, it would not need much money due to “an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.”

Reductions in research funds will curtail programs on climate change, water quality, and chemical safety, and “safe and sustainable water resources,” the document said.

Ken Kopocis, who headed EPA’s Office of Water in 2014 and 2015, said in an interview that the $165 million proposed cut to the agency’s nonpoint source pollution program would deprive farmers of critical funds to help curb agricultural runoff.

Several congressional Republicans have expressed support for reorienting the EPA’s mission, though lawmakers are likely to restore some of the funding.

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said in a statement Friday, “There is room to cut wasteful programs in EPA’s budget and at the same time, realign how taxpayer money is best allocated” by “giving states greater say in how they protect and manage their resources.”

In a recent interview, Sen. James M. Inhofe said he would like the department to focus on more traditional environmental concerns rather than addressing climate change.

“What I want them to do is to do what they are supposed to be doing – be concerned about the environment, the water, the air,” he said. “I’d like to see an EPA there to actually serve people and make life better for them.”

Inhofe said some of the members of the scientific advisory boards scheduled for cuts had political biases. “They’re going to have to start dealing with science, not rigged science.”

But S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, said eliminating the money for such advisory boards would inevitably compromise the agency’s science capabilities.

“This is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said. “If they have less research and less peer review, they’re going to have less of a foundation on which to base human health-based air quality standards.”

The list of programs completely eliminated grew in the latest plan.

A program to teach and monitor the proper handling of pesticides would be nearly eliminated, and instead rely fees paid by the industry.

Many people in industry might enlist lawmakers’ help in opposing those plans. CropLife America executive vice president Beau Greenwood, whose group represents U.S. pesticide manufacturers and distributors, said in an interview Friday that while the industry is “willing to put skin in the game to ensure the agency has sufficient funding” for reviewing its products, it already provides more than $46 million a year under the Pesticide Registration Improvement Extension Act.

“Extra fees on top of extra fees is something that we would oppose,” Greenwood said.

The latest EPA budget plan would abolish programs that study known environmental hazards including lead, poor indoor air quality, and radiation.

Others programs that help protect Americans from cancer would also face the axe — including the $ 1.34 million indoor air radon program which works to protect the public against the invisible gas that is the leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers. Radon kills 21,000 people annually, according to the EPA.

The EPA’s radiation program, currently funded at $2.34 million, which sets standards for safe levels of ionizing radiation in the environment caused by radioactive elements such as uranium, is also slated for elimination — but it is unclear how fully eliminating its activities is possible.

The document also recommends a $28.9 million cut in the enforcement of clean up projects for Superfund sites, places where hazardous materials require long-term response plans.

In each case, the budget document says that these programs can be eliminated because they do not represent core agency priorities or can be deferred to states.

The budget document also proposes the elimination of regional programs focused on restoring watersheds and coastal and marine habitats. These include programs for the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Champlain, Long Island Sound, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, the Great Lakes, and South Florida.

The document notes that these are areas where EPA is working with localities to restore damaged ecosystems and watersheds. It says that EPA’s regulatory heft isn’t needed and that localities must take responsibility.

“In some ways, the common thread …. is, unless there’s an explicit legal mandate that EPA has to do something, that EPA shouldn’t be doing it,” said Stan Meiburg, a longtime EPA career employee who served as acting deputy administrator of the agency late in the Obama years.

Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post’s senior national affairs correspondent, covering how the new administration is transforming a range of U.S. policies and the federal government itself. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998.

Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment.

Steven Mufson covers energy and other financial matters. Since joining The Post, he has covered the White House, China, economic policy and diplomacy.