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      Budget 2021: Everything we know so far

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      Wednesday’s autumn Budget is set against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, thanks to the lasting impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The Treasury has sought to build days of positive coverage of giveaways in the days before the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, gets to his feet in the House of Commons. Here’s the headline pledges so far with a sense of what they may mean in practice.Public sector payWhat’s new? On Monday the Treasury confirmed, as widely trailed, that it would be thawing the public sector pay freeze. The justification used for the freeze had been that private sector wages were fragile, dampened by employer’s nervousness due to Covid-19 restrictions. Now, the economy has opened up and the cost of living is climbing sharply. With even private sector pay growth struggling to keep pace with inflation, the argument to hold firm on public sector pay has become too hard to defend. Still, it’s not clear exactly what the settlement will look like and how it will measure up against rising inflation.This price growth, as measured by the Consumer Price Index could reach as high as 5 per cent early next year, the Bank of England’s chief economist has said. The small print: However, business minister Paul Scully avoided saying in interviews on Tuesday whether or not the pay rise would match the increased cost of living.He said on Sky News that it “could be anything”, and that the exact figure would be determined after reports from pay review bodies, next April. So, the government has not ruled out a real terms cut in pay: if pay doesn’t rise by more than the growth in prices.The bottom line: A real terms cut could increase the risk of industrial action among public sector workers.Minimum wageWhat’s new? The Chancellor will accept a recommendation from the Low Pay Commission to increase the National Living wage to £9.50 an hour from £8.91 from next April for workers aged 23 and over. The small print: However, it is important to compare what’s happening to the lowest earners in the UK in pre- and post-tax terms and what the impact will be for those people on Universal Credit. Before tax, a full-time worker on the minimum wage will now earn £1,074 more a year from next April. But there’s a ‘taper’ for those people on Universal Credit, so for every £1 earned above a threshold for the benefit, a worker loses 63p. If that effect is combined with the increase in taxes, particularly national insurance contributions planned from April next year, the £1,074 increase then drops to around £260 per year after tax. (This assumes the increase is above the earnings allowance for someone in receipt of Universal Credit).That’s compared to being around £1,000 per year worse off if you receive Universal Credit after the government scrapped a £20 per week uplift introduced amid the pandemic. There are also lots of Universal Credit recipients, around one in five according to government figures, who cannot work. They will therefore not see their lot improved by an increase in the minimum wage. The bottom line: This increase in the minimum wages means there are fewer low paid workers in the UK, part of a long-term trend if you compare hourly rates of pay over time. However, this does not address the concern that benefits are too low for those who are out of work, unable to work enough hours or who are unable to work at all. The basic rates of benefits are at their lowest level since 1990, according to Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank.NHS fundingWhat’s new? There will an additional £5.9 billion allocated to the NHS in the Budget. This is on top of the £12 billion expected to be raised from what will become the Health and Social Care Levy. This money is for physical infrastructure and other long-term spending such as new equipment. That means it is technically investment, rather than so-called day-to-day spending. The small print: It’s not going to be spent on costs such as near-term staff recruitment. That means it will not fix the huge backlog of delayed care due to the pandemic, which has been linked to chronic staff shortages across the health services, as NHS trusts across the country report challenges in hiring specialist workers.The bottom line: Along with the need to have MRI and Ultrasound machines is the need to have staff to operate them. That, and when scans and tests are completed, many surgeries will require intensive care treatment afterwards, a challenge if there are not enough specialist ICU nurses or too little space due to Covid-19 patients.What’s new? The government has topped up a pledge on transport to increase funding for trams, trains, buses and cycleways. The small print: Only a small share of this cash is, in fact, new money. The Chancellor’s £7bn pre-Budget pledge for new transport projects contains only £1.5bn of additional funding.The bottom line: It does not look like HS2 is set to deliver what was promised. The Independent revealed earlier this week that the eastern leg of the project is set to be scaled back. The high-speed trains will therefore have to slow down to run on old tracks between Yorkshire and the Midlands.Other announcements: Health research: £5 billion for research into healthcare including into genomic testing, cancer and obesity.Housing: £1.8 billion to build new homes on brownfield sitesEducation: £2.6 billion over three years for education for children with special needs and disabilities Childcare: £500m for childcare projects including family hubs, which Labour have criticised as similar but less ambitious than Sure Start centers, which were closed as a result Conservative spending cuts closed. More

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      in US Politics

      Lethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stalling | David Bond

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      OpinionPollutionLethal ‘forever chemicals’ taint our food, water and even blood. The EPA is stallingDavid BondThere is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.31 EDTLast modified on Sun 24 Oct 2021 06.32 EDTThis week the EPA announced a new roadmap to research, restrict, and remediate PFAS – a group of industrial “forever chemicals” that have been linked to cancer and are found in our food, water, and even our blood. President Biden is requesting $10bn in the infrastructure bill to address PFAS. But this new attention still falls short of what’s required to confront an unprecedented crisis that affects the health of the entire United States and countless people across the world.EPA unveils new strategy to address US contamination of ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreToday, toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are everywhere we’ve thought to look for them. As engineered, these synthetic chemicals glide through air and water with ease, evade all natural processes of decay, and inflict debilitating injuries even at exceedingly low levels of exposure. The petrochemical industry has its fingerprints all over the ubiquity of PFAS, yet that very ubiquity is now being used as an excuse against doing anything about it. PFAS are becoming too toxic to fail.The EPA’s hyped national PFAS testing strategy bemoans how “impossible” it is for the EPA “to expeditiously understand, let alone address, the risks these substances may pose to human health and the environment.” Overwhelmed by rampant PFAS contamination, the EPA is asking the petrochemical industry to study these chemicals one by one in the hopes of eventually building enough data to regulate them. Yes, one by one. The timeline proposed will take another century (or two) to make its way through the entire family of PFAS, which now number in the thousands.The manifold ways that PFAS makes a mockery of our regulation of toxins cannot be the end of our ability to prosecute petrochemical malfeasance. Rather, this should be the start to fixing everything that went wrong.The companies behind PFAS knew about its toxicity for decades, but that knowledge was hidden in corporate archives and subject to shamefully lax government oversight.When 3M and DuPont learned about alarming patterns of birth defects and cancers in their own workers at PFAS plants in the 1970s and 1980s, both companies smothered the evidence. In the 1970s, the navy and air force looked the other way when they found PFAS migrating off their bases and into nearby communities. By the 1990s, 3M and DuPont both realized that their PFAS operations were polluting municipal drinking water at levels they considered harmful. As revealed by investigative reporting and dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, corporate executives helped destroy the evidence while giving false assurances to residents and regulators alike.Over the past century, the petrochemical industry had countless opportunities to recognize the dangers of PFAS and install safeguards. Instead, they launched even more PFAS into the world. In defiance of their own internal scientific appraisals of the deadly effects of PFAS, 3M and DuPont integrated these chemicals into a widening array of industrial ingredients, firefighting equipment, and consumer goods. Incredibly, both companies also disposed PFAS waste into watersheds providing drinking water to more than 20 million Americans and irrigation to farms in 13 states.Over the past 50 years, 3M and DuPont manufactured more than enough PFAS to contaminate the drinking water of every single American. PFAS was sold to plastics plants, carpet and shoe factories, and oil and gas drilling sites across the US, where it was routinely discarded by the ton into the environment. Some industries even endorsed the distribution of PFAS-laden waste to farmers as a soil supplement.Now worried about impending liability, the petrochemical industry and the military are busy torching stockpiles of PFOA and PFOS (the two PFAS compounds closest to being regulated) despite growing concern that burning merely redistributes these inflammable toxins, especially into the poor communities of color where waste incinerators cynically base their operations. As the US and Europe move towards regulating some PFAS chemicals, the petrochemical industry is moving PFAS operations to more permissive regimes in Brazil, China, India, and Russia.Each time the question of containing PFAS came into view, 3M, DuPont, and now Chemours launched a perfluorinated blitzkrieg. They flooded the zone. And looking back, a rather demented product defense strategy becomes apparent: total contamination. Rather than controlling PFAS toxicity, the petrochemical industry universalized it.By the time sickened industrialworkers and farmers demanded action, lawyers pried open the corporate archive, and the EPA started issuing voluntary guidelines for a handful of PFAS compounds, it was almost too late to clean up the mess. The poison was out of the bag. An EPA review released this week identified more than 120,000 sites in the US alone that are probably contaminated with PFAS.There is no longer any population or place on earth untouched by PFAS contamination. We are living through a toxic experiment with no control group. This alarming reality trips up the comparative methods typically used to study toxicity and public health. It is also becoming a rather shameless legal argument in courtrooms across the country.When PFAS was discovered in my hometown of Bennington, Vermont, the plastics factory that emitted these chemicals for decades landed on a novel defense: that PFAS are so pervasive that it’s impossible to determine who is responsible. Residential trash with trace amounts of PFAS and the world at large, the company argued, were the real perpetrators of our PFAS troubles, not the plastics factory that accepted delivery of PFAS by the truckload for more than 30 years.And now American Chemistry Council lobbyists and defense attorneys for the petrochemical industry are hard at work nominating PFAS contamination to the welcoming committee of a brave new world of total contamination. It’s a planetary future they cast as inevitable, surprisingly democratic, and without any liable author. According to their victim-blaming PR campaign, anyone who has worn a Gore-Tex rain jacket or thrown away a McDonalds wrapper is just as guilty as the companies that illegally hid the toxicity of PFAS while spewing millions of pounds of this poison into our lives.PFAS are everywhere, but this disconcerting fact should not distract us from the petrochemical operations holding the smoking gun – smoking, in no small part, because they are still emitting PFAS. The omnipresence of PFAS does not lessen the threat they pose to our health, but it does mean we need bolder ways of prosecuting these environmental crimes against humanity.Yet instead of toughening regulation of the petrochemical industry, the EPA and many state agencies are throwing their hands up at the sheer ubiquity of the problem.Regulatory agencies are proposing natural “background levels” for a synthetic chemical conjured up a mere 75 years ago – in effect giving tacit approval for the history of gross negligence that got us here. That’s not all. The agencies shift blame for this predicament to residents by listing household items containing trace amounts of PFAS alongside factories that emitted it by the ton annually, as if those are equivalent sources; agencies refrain from sampling groundwater near industries suspected of using PFAS; agencies stack science committees with industry lobbyists while putting up roadblocks for independent scientists to participate; agencies applaud a pyrrhic victory of finally deciding to regulate PFOA and PFOS some 20 years after they learned about their toxicity while the petrochemical industry happily churns out a witches’ brew of new unregulated PFAS chemicals; and agencies endorse incineration as a PFAS disposal method while acknowledging that there is no evidence that combustion destroys these flameproof chemicals. And, of course, they make grand commitments to keep studying the problem in the hopes of taking action in, oh, a decade or so.Revealed: more than 120,000 US sites feared to handle harmful PFAS ‘forever’ chemicalsRead moreThe point is clear: by way of regulatory indifference, delay, and now despair, responsibility for the toxicity of forever chemicals is shifting from the corporations who profited from them to the communities who must now live with them.All is not lost. While PFAS inspires paralysis in state agencies, people living on the frontlines of this crisis – in rural towns next to military bases, working-class neighborhoods adjacent to plastics factories, communities of color near incinerators burning PFAS – insist we do everything we can, now. They demand an immediate stop to all releases of PFAS. They demand we compel the industry and the military to start cleaning up sources of PFAS contamination. They demand we ban PFAS as a family of chemicals, not only in the US but across the world. They demand we pass the PFAS Accountability Act, legislation that insists manufacturers retain liability for all the damage PFAS inflicts after they leave the factory. And they demand we hold polluters fully accountable for the decades of damage they’ve done.These communities insist polluters pay for water filtration systems for every affected home and business, medical monitoring for the lifetime of worry that people in polluted communities now carry, and independent scientific monitoring for the generations that PFAS will haunt affected areas.The EPA and state agencies must follow their lead. We cannot retreat into a broken system of indifference and carefully planned inaction. Nor can the ubiquity of PFAS become an excuse for those that profitably manufactured this mess. Any further delay would be an epic dereliction of duty.
      David Bond is the associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA) at Bennington College. He leads the “Understanding PFOA” project and is writing a book on PFAS contamination
      TopicsPollutionOpinionUS Environmental Protection AgencyDuPontUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Striketober’ is showing workers’ rising power – but will it lead to lasting change?

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      US unions‘Striketober’ is showing workers’ rising power – but will it lead to lasting change?A post-pandemic labor shortage has given workers leverage but experts doubt it will lead to a sustained rise in union membership Steven GreenhouseSat 23 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 23 Oct 2021 03.02 EDTUS labor unions have been on the defensive for decades but this October there has been a surprising burst of worker militancy and strikes as workers have gone on the offensive to demand more. Experts are predicting more actions to come but whether “Striketober” can lead to permanent change remains an open question.The scale of industrial action is truly remarkable. Ten thousand John Deere workers have gone on strike, 1,400 Kellogg workers have walked out, as well as a walkout threatened by more than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente workers, all inflamed by a profound disconnect between labor and management.America’s strike wave is a rare – and beautiful – sight to behold | Hamilton NolanRead moreMany frontline workers – after working so hard and risking their lives during the pandemic – say they deserve substantial raises along with lots of gratitude. With this in mind and with myriad employers complaining of a labor shortage, many workers believe it’s an opportune time to demand more and go on strike. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a strongly pro-union president in the White House and there’s more public support for unions than in decades.But some corporations are acting as if nothing has changed and they can continue corporate America’s decades-long practice of squeezing workers and demanding concessions, even after corporate profits have soared.This attitude doesn’t sit well with Chris Laursen, who earns $20.82 an hour after 19 years at Deere’s farm equipment factory in Ottumwa, Iowa. Laursen is upset that Deere is offering just a one-dollar-an-hour raise and wants to eliminate pensions for future hires even when Deere anticipates a record $5.7bn in profits this year, more than double last year’s earnings.“We were deemed essential workers right out of the gate,” Laursen said, noting that many workers racked up lots of overtime during the pandemic. “But then they came with an offer that was appallingly low. It was a slap in the face of the workers who created all the wealth for them.”Many Deere workers complain that the company offered only a 12% raise over six years, which they say won’t keep pace with inflation, even as the CEO’s pay rose 160% last year to $16m and dividends were raised 17%. Deere’s workers voted down the company’s offer by 90% before they went on strike at 14 factories on 14 October, their first walkout in 35 years.“We really showed up during the pandemic and kept building equipment for them,” Laursen said. “Now we want something back. The stars are finally lined up for us, and we had to bring the fight.”Thomas Kochan, an MIT professor of industrial relations, agreed that it was a favorable time for workers – many corporations have substantially increased pay in response to the labor shortage. “It’s clear that workers are much more empowered,” he said. “They’re empowered because of the labor shortage.”Kochan added: “These strikes could easily trigger more strike activity if several are successful or perceived to be successful.”Robert Bruno, a labor relations professor at the University of Illinois, said workers have built up a lot of grievances and anger during the pandemic, after years of seeing scant improvement in pay and benefits. Bruno pointed to a big reason for the growing worker frustration: “You can definitely see that American capitalism has reigned supreme over workers, and as a result, the incentive for companies is to continue to do what’s been working for them. It’s likely that an arrogance sets in where companies think that’s going to last for ever, and maybe they don’t read the times properly.”Kevin Bradshaw, a striker at Kellogg’s factory in Memphis, said the cereal maker was being arrogant and unappreciative. During the pandemic, he said, Kellogg employees often worked 30 days in a row, often in 12-hour or 16-hour shifts.In light of this hard work, he derided Kellogg’s contract offer, which calls for a far lower scale for new hires. “Kellogg is offering a $13 cut in top pay for new workers,” Bradshaw said. “They want a permanent two-tier. New employees will no longer receive the same amount of money and benefits we do.” That, he said, is bad for the next generation of workers.Bradshaw, vice-president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union local, noted that it made painful concessions to Kellogg in 2015. “We gave so many concessions, and now they’re saying they need more,” he said. “This is a real smack in the face during the pandemic. Everyone knows that they’re greedy and not needy.”Kellogg said its compensation is among the industry’s best and its offer will help the company meet competitive challenges. Deere said it was determined to reach an agreement and continue to make its workers “the highest paid employees in the agriculture industry”.There are many strikes beyond Deere and Kellogg. More than 400 workers at the Heaven Hill bourbon distillery in Kentucky have been on strike for six weeks, while roughly 1,000 Warrior Met coalminers in Alabama have been on strike since April. Hundreds of nurses at Mercy hospital in Buffalo went on strike on 1 October, and 450 steelworkers at Special Metals in Huntington, West Virginia, also walked out that day. More than 30,000 nurses and other healthcare professionals at Kaiser Permanente on the west coast have voted to authorize a strike.Sixty thousand Hollywood production employees threatened to go on strike last Monday, unhappy that film and TV companies were not taking their concerns about overwork and exhaustion seriously. But seeing that the union was serious about staging its first-ever strike, Hollywood producers flinched, agreed to compromises, and the two sides reached a settlement.Noting that Kaiser Permanente, a non-profit, had amassed $45bn in reserves, Belinda Redding, a Kaiser nurse in Woodland Hills, California, said, “We’ve been going all out during the pandemic. We’ve been working extra shifts. Our lives have been turned upside down. The signs were up all over saying, ‘Heroes Work Here’. And the pandemic isn’t even over for us, and then for them to offer us a 1% raise, it’s almost a slap in the face.”Redding is also fuming that management has proposed hiring new nurses at 26% less pay than current ones earn – which she said would ensure a shortage of nurses. “It’s hard to imagine a nurse giving her all when she’s paid far less than other nurses,” Redding said.Kaiser said that its employees earn 26% more than average market wages and that its services would become unaffordable unless it restrains labor costs.Many non-union workers – frequently dismayed with low pay, volatile schedules and poor treatment – have quit their jobs or refused to return to their old ones after being laid off during the pandemic. In August, 4.2 million workers quit their jobs, part of what has been called the Great Resignation. Some economists have suggested this is a quiet general strike with workers demanding better pay and conditions. “People are using exit from their jobs as a source of power,” Kochan said.As for unionized workers, some labor experts see parallels between today’s burst of strikes and the much larger wave of strikes after the first and second world wars. As with the pandemic, those catastrophic wars caused many Americans to reassess their lives and jobs and ask: after what we’ve been through, don’t we deserve better pay and conditions?Professor Bruno said that in light of today’s increased worker militancy, unionized employers would have to rethink their approach to bargaining “and take the rank and file pretty seriously”. They can no longer expect workers to roll over or to strong-arm them into swallowing concessions, often by threatening to move operations overseas.Bruno questioned whether the surge in strikes will be long-lasting. He predicts that the improvements in pay and job quality will be long-lasting, adding that that was more likely than unions substantially increasing their membership. He said that if workers see others winning better wages and conditions through strikes, that will raise unions’ visibility and lead to more workers voting to join unions.Despite the recent turbulence, Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at City University of New York, foresees a return to the status quo. “I think things will go back to where they were once things settle down,” she said. “The labor shortage is not necessarily going to last.” She sees the number of strikes declining once the labor shortage ends.In her view, union membership isn’t likely to increase markedly because “they’re not doing that much organizing.“There’s a little” – like the unionization efforts at Starbucks in Buffalo and at Amazon – “but it’s not as if there’s some big push.”A big question, Milkman said, was how can today’s labor momentum be sustained? She said it would help if Congress passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to unionize workers. That law would spur unions to do more organizing and increase their chances of winning union drives.“That would be a real shot in the arm,” Milkman said.TopicsUS unionsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal

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      US CongressJoe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal West Virginia senator objects to bill that would steadily retire the coal industry which continues to provide ample financial support to himOliver Milman@olliemilmanWed 20 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 20 Oct 2021 13.28 EDTIn the tumult of negotiations over the most consequential climate legislation ever proposed in the US, there is growing scrutiny of the fossil fuel industry connections of the man poised to tear down the core of the bill – the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.Manchin, a centrist Democrat, has objected to key provisions of a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would slash planet-heating emissions and help the US, and the world, to avert catastrophic climate breakdown. In a finely balanced Senate, Democrats need all 50 of their senators to vote for the bill, with no Republicans willing to vote for the climate measures.The legislation would steadily retire the coal industry that once formed the backbone of the West Virginia economy and continues to provide ample financial support to Manchin, who has spent the past four decades as a political heavyweight in his Appalachian home state, including acting as its secretary of state, governor and now US senator.Chart showing Joe Manchin has received the largest donations across multiple energy sectorsIn the current electoral cycle, Manchin has received more in political donations from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, more than double the second largest recipient. He is also the No 1 beneficiary of donations from the coal mining sector, leads the way in money accepted from gas pipeline operators, and is sixth in the ranking of senatorial donations from electricity utilities.This industry largesse has led to accusations that the senator has been unduly influenced by the companies that have helped stoke the climate crisis. Manchin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.But Manchin’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deeper than political donations. After initially working in his family’s furniture and carpet business, Manchin set up a coal brokerage firm called Enersystems in 1988, running it until he became a full-time politician.The majority of Manchin’s assets are in a coal brokerage firm’s stockDespite handing control of Enersystems to his son Joseph, Manchin’s links to the business have proved fruitful to the senator. His shares in Enersystems are worth between $1m and $5m, according to his latest financial disclosure document, with the senator receiving more than $5m in dividend income from the company over the past decade. The coal brokerage represents 71% of Manchin’s investment income, and about a third of his total net worth.The reconciliation bill contains a huge expansion in tax support for clean energy and electric vehicles and new curbs on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but the core of the climate measures is something called a Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP). The $150bn scheme would use payments and penalties to spur utilities to phase out fossil fuels from the US electricity system over the coming decade.The program, along with the clean energy tax credits, “are the best shot we’ve had in a generation to supercharge the clean energy transition and reduce fossil fuel pollution in marginalized communities”, said Patrick Drupp, deputy legislative director of the Sierra Club.Manchin has called the bill’s spending “reckless” and said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to increase their share of renewable energy when they are doing so already. This is despite the fact that barely any utilities across the US are adding solar, wind and other sources of clean energy at the rate envisioned by the bill to force emissions down quickly enough to stave off climate disaster.“His statement on this is demonstrably false. Utilities aren’t growing renewables that quickly, certainly not in West Virginia,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation. “It’s not a secret he has ties to the coal industry. One would hope anyone elected to Congress would not hold significant financial holdings in industries they would consider regulating, but that’s the system we have, unfortunately.”Recent analysis by Energy Innovation found that the CEPP is the “carbon reduction lynchpin” of the legislation, representing around a third of the emissions cuts that would come from the bill. “It’s really unfortunate that the CEPP is not on the table anymore,” said Orvis. “But this bill would still result in a huge cut in greenhouse gas emissions, it does a lot. There may be a way to fill the gaps left by CEPP.”Projected emission reductions of Build Back Better programs by 2030Joe Biden has set a goal for the US to cut its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, before zeroing them out by 2050. America is currently on track for a 17% to 25% cut in emissions by 2030, an analysis released on Tuesday by Rhodium Group found, leaving up to 2.3bn tons of emissions left to eliminate in order to meet the goal. John Larsen, director of Rhodium Group, said that with further cuts from the federal government and states, “the US’s ambitious 2030 climate target is within reach, even with a more limited policy package from Congress”. But he added: “The US and the world have little time or room for error to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”TopicsUS CongressOil and gas companiesCoalOilUS politicsFossil fuelsEnergy industrynewsReuse this content More

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      A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him

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      Climate crimesClimate crisisA US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisisSupported byAbout this contentChris McGreal in Imperial BeachSat 16 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTSerge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.Imperial Beach, CaliforniaExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”That’s where the laughter stopped.The lawyers found no evidence to back up their claim. But that did not stop the industry from continuing to use its legal muscle to try to intimidate Dedina, who leads one of the poorest small cities in the region.The mayor became a target after Imperial Beach filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and more than 30 other fossil-fuel companies demanding they pay the huge costs of defending the city from rising seas caused by the climate crisis.Imperial Beach’s lawsuit alleges the oil giants committed fraud by covering up research showing that burning fossil fuels destroys the environment. The industry then lied about the evidence for climate change for decades, deliberately delaying efforts to curb carbon emissions.The city’s lawsuit was among the first of a wave of litigation filed by two dozen municipalities and states across the US that could cost the fossil-fuel industry billions of dollars in compensation for the environmental devastation and the deception.Dedina says his minority majority community of about 27,000 cannot begin to afford the tens of millions of dollars it will cost to keep at bay the waters bordering three sides of his financially strapped city. The worst of recent storms have turned Imperial Beach into an island.One assessment calculated that, without expensive mitigation measures, rising sea levels will eventually swamp some of the city’s neighbourhoods, routinely flood its two schools and overwhelm its drainage system.Imperial Beach’s annual budget is $20m. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was paid more than $15m last year.“We don’t have a pot to piss in in this city. So why not go after the oil companies?” he said. “The lawsuit is a pragmatic approach to making the people that caused sea level rise pay for the impacts it has on our city.”InteractiveThat’s not how Exxon, the US’s largest oil company, saw it. Its lawyers noted that Imperial Beach filed its case in July 2017, at the same time as two California counties, Marin and San Mateo. The county and city of Santa Cruz followed six months later with similar suits seeking compensation to cope with increasing wildfires and drought caused by global heating.Exxon alleged that the sudden burst of litigation, and the fact that the municipalities shared a law firm specialising in environmental cases, Sher Edling, was evidence of collusion.Exxon filed lawsuits claiming the municipalities conspired to extort money from the company by following a strategy developed during an environmental conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 25 miles north of Imperial Beach, nine years ago.The meeting, organised by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists, produced a report outlining how legal strategies used by US states against the tobacco industry in the 1990s could be applied to cases against fossil fuel companies.Dedina was also targeted by one of the US’s biggest business groups at the forefront of industry resistance to increased regulation to reduce greenhouse gases, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a rightwing thinktank, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.The manufacturing trade group was behind the efforts to obtain data from Dedina’s phone and documents in 2018. In its public disclosure request to the mayor’s office, NAM called Imperial Beach’s lawsuit “litigation based on political or ideological objections more appropriately addressed through the political process”.Exxon is attempting to use a Texas law that allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence by questioning individuals under oath even before any legal action is filed against them. The company is trying to force Dedina, two other members of Imperial Beach’s government, and officials from other jurisdictions, to submit to questioning on the grounds they were joined in a conspiracy against the oil industry.“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,” the oil firm claimed. “ExxonMobil finds itself directly in that conspiracy’s crosshairs.”How cities and states could finally hold fossil fuel companies accountableRead moreA Texas district judge approved the request to depose Dedina, but then a court of appeals overturned the decision last year. The state supreme court is considering whether to take up the case.The target on Dedina is part of a wider pattern of retaliation against those suing Exxon and other oil companies.In an unusual move in 2016, Exxon persuaded a Texas judge to order the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to travel to Dallas to be deposed about her motives for investigating the company for alleged fraud for suppressing evidence on climate change. The judge also ordered that New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, be “available” in Dallas on the same day in case Exxon wanted to question him about a similar investigation.Healey accused Exxon of trying to “squash the prerogative of state attorneys general to do their jobs”. The judge reversed the deposition order a month later and Healey filed a lawsuit against the company in 2019, which is still awaiting trial.But similar tactics persuaded the US Virgin Islands attorney general to shut down his investigation of the oil giant.Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, said the attempt to question Dedina and other officials is part of a broader strategy by the oil industry to counter lawsuits with its own litigation.“These cases are frivolous and vexatious. Intimidation is the goal. Just making it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon. They think that if they make the case painful enough, Imperial Beach will quit,” he said.If the intent is to kill off the litigation against the oil industry, it’s not working. Officials from other municipalities have called Exxon’s move “repugnant”, “a sham” and “outrageous”, and have vowed to press on with their lawsuits.Dedina described the action as a “bullying tactic” by the oil industry to avoid accountability.“The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it,” he said. “They make more money than our entire city has in a year.”The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a “significant and dangerous sea-level rise” through the rest of this century that threatens its existence. Imperial Beach commissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year.Imperial Beach sits at the southern end of San Diego bay. Under one worst-case scenario, the bay could merge with the Tijuana River estuary to the south and permanently submerge much of the city’s housing and roads.The city has received some help with creating natural climate barriers. The Fish and Wildlife Service restored 400 acres of wetland next to the city as a national wildlife refuge which also acts as a barrier to flooding, and is expected to restore other wetlands together with the Port of San Diego. A grant is paying for improved equipment to warn of floods.But that still leaves the huge costs of building new schools and drainage systems, and adapting other infrastructure. Dedina said that without the oil companies stumping up, it won’t happen.“People ask, how did you go against the world’s largest fossil fuel companies? Isn’t that scary? No. What’s scary is coastal flooding and the idea that whole cities would be under water,” said the mayor.“Honestly, bring it on. I can’t wait to make our case. I can’t wait to take the fight to them because we have nothing to lose.”This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsClimate crisisClimate crimesCaliforniaUS politicsExxonMobilOil and gas companiesFossil fuelsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in UK Politics

      Government to blame for gas crisis, says industry chief who warns of winter ‘shutdown’

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      High gas prices will continue throughout winter and UK industry could be forced to “shut down” if supplies run out, the founder of the manufacturing giant Ineos has warned.Sir Jim Ratcliffe blamed the government for a lack of gas storage – warning that a sharp winter could lead to a widespread factory closures as demand outstrips supply.Appearing on ITV’s Peston, he was asked if the country could shut down due to a prolonged cold spell, he replied: “Yeah, in which case then, what you would do is you’d shut down industry.”Asked who was to blame for the gas shortage, Sir Jim said: “That’s [the] government. That’s a strategic issue for energy supplies in the UK – you need some storage, and we’ve got 10 days.”The Brexit-backing industrialist added: “I think it’s quite difficult to predict how long this sort of current situation’s going to last … I suppose if you were a betting man you’d assume it would probably run through at least through the winter because obviously our gas demand increases in the winter.”It comes as chancellor Rishi Sunak appeared to play down the level of support the government can provide for soaring gas costs – saying “it’s not the government’s job” to manage prices.Speaking in Washington after attending a G7 finance ministers, Sunak said: “We’re prepared to work with business and support them as required.”The chancellor added: “But in general I believe in a market economy, as it’s served us very well in this country. It’s not the government’s job to come in and start managing the price of every individual product.”Sunak is set to apply tough “value for money” tests to any financial support given to the steel sector and other major energy users, according to the Financial Times.Urging the government to provide short-term subsidies, major manufacturers, such as steel and chemical makers, have warned they may have to shut down plants this winter if energy levels continue to be high.Energy experts have also warned that a harsh winter could force the UK to restrict business’ energy supplies – shutting down factories in a throw-back to the three-day week of the 1970s.Sir Jim urged Sunak to provide enough support to make sure “the UK economy can’t be held to ransom because we haven’t organised our gas situation very well”.The UK has 10 days’ of storage, the Ineos founder said – labelling that figure “a bit pathetic really for a nation as important as the UK” given countries on the continent have four or five times that amount.“Four years ago when we had the, if you remember, the Beast From The East, we were within a day or two of running out of gas in the UK,” said Sir Jim.“If we had run out of gas it would have been a disaster for, you know, the older people who wouldn’t have been able to get heating in the house, for industry which would have had to shut down. But we were within days, and we did make that point.”Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the government should “come out of hiding” and work with business on the issue. “They’ve put their out-of-office on. Whilst other countries step up and act, the UK is staggeringly complacently sitting back.”The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said ministers and officials were engaging with industry “to further understand and to help mitigate the impacts of high global gas prices”.It comes as two more of the UK’s domestic suppliers collapsed. Colorado Energy and BP-backed Pure Planet were latest of the 11 suppliers to have folded since the beginning of September.Meanwhile, Sunak insisted that here will be a “good amount of Christmas presents available” this year despite the ongoing supply chain crisis.A build-up of cargo in Felixstowe has led to shipping company Maersk opting to divert vessels away from the Suffolk port, while similar logjams have been seen elsewhere in the world including in the US.“We’re doing absolutely everything we can to mitigate some of these challenges,” said Sunak. “They are global in nature so we can’t fix every single problem but I feel confident there will be good provision of goods for everybody.”It comes as the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and 41 other trade groups have urged Sunak to slash business rates and make fundamental changes to the system.Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves also called for reform, saying the system is no longer fit for purpose. “It penalises high-street shops in favour of online giants and deters businesses from investing in new green technologies,” she said. More

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      in US Politics

      Is America experiencing an unofficial general strike? | Robert Reich

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      OpinionUS newsIs America experiencing an unofficial general strike?Robert ReichAcross the country, people are refusing to return to backbreaking or mind-numbing low-wage jobs Wed 13 Oct 2021 06.16 EDTLast modified on Wed 13 Oct 2021 06.18 EDTLast Friday’s jobs report from the US Department of Labor elicited a barrage of gloomy headlines. The New York Times emphasized “weak” jobs growth and fretted that “hiring challenges that have bedeviled employers all year won’t be quickly resolved,” and “rising wages could add to concerns about inflation.” For CNN, it was “another disappointment”. For Bloomberg the “September jobs report misses big for a second straight month”.‘I have never felt so hopeless’: millions in US fear utility shutoffs as debts riseRead moreThe media failed to report the big story, which is actually a very good one: American workers are now flexing their muscles for the first time in decades.You might say workers have declared a national general strike until they get better pay and improved working conditions.No one calls it a general strike. But in its own disorganized way it’s related to the organized strikes breaking out across the land – Hollywood TV and film crews, John Deere workers, Alabama coal miners, Nabisco workers, Kellogg workers, nurses in California, healthcare workers in Buffalo.Disorganized or organized, American workers now have bargaining leverage to do better. After a year and a half of the pandemic, consumers have pent-up demand for all sorts of goods and services.But employers are finding it hard to fill positions.Last Friday’s jobs report showed the number of job openings at a record high. The share of people working or actively looking for work (the labor force participation rate) has dropped to 61.6%. Participation for people in their prime working years, defined as 25 to 54 years old, is also down.Over the past year, job openings have increased 62%. Yet overall hiring has actually declined.What gives?Another clue: Americans are also quitting their jobs at the highest rate on record. The Department of Labor reported on Tuesday that some 4.3 million people quit their jobs in August. That comes to about 2.9% of the workforce – up from the previous record set in April, of about 4 million people quitting.All told, about 4 million American workers have been leaving their jobs every month since the spring.These numbers have nothing to do with the Republican bogeyman of extra unemployment benefits supposedly discouraging people from working. Reminder: the extra benefits ran out on Labor Day.Renewed fears of the Delta variant of Covid may play some role. But it can’t be the largest factor. With most adults now vaccinated, rates of hospitalizations and deaths are way down.My take: workers are reluctant to return to or remain in their old jobs mostly because they’re burned out.Some have retired early. Others have found ways to make ends meet other than remain in jobs they abhor. Many just don’t want to return to backbreaking or mind-numbing low-wage shit jobs.The media and most economists measure the economy’s success by the number of jobs it creates, while ignoring the quality of those jobs. That’s a huge oversight.Years ago, when I was secretary of labor, I kept meeting working people all over the country who had full-time work but complained that their jobs paid too little and had few benefits, or were unsafe, or required lengthy or unpredictable hours. Many said their employers treated them badly, harassed them, and did not respect them.Since then, these complaints have only grown louder, according to polls. For many, the pandemic was the last straw. Workers are fed up, wiped out, done-in, and run down. In the wake of so much hardship, illness and death during the past year, they’re not going to take it anymore.In order to lure workers back, employers are raising wages and offering other inducements. Average earnings rose 19 cents an hour in September and are up more than $1 an hour – or 4.6% – over the last year.Clearly, that’s not enough.Corporate America wants to frame this as a “labor shortage.” Wrong. What’s really going on is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a healthcare shortage.Unless these shortages are rectified, many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon. I say it’s about time.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      in US Politics

      House passes bill to raise US debt ceiling through early December

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      US CongressHouse passes bill to raise US debt ceiling through early DecemberLegislation raises government’s borrowing limit to $28.9tnHard-fought House vote passes entirely along party lines Guardian staff and agenciesTue 12 Oct 2021 19.57 EDTLast modified on Tue 12 Oct 2021 21.57 EDTThe US House of Representatives gave final approval on Tuesday to a Senate-passed bill temporarily raising the government’s borrowing limit to $28.9tn, putting off the risk of default at least until early December.Kamala Harris: European colonizers ‘ushered in wave of devastation for tribal nations’Read moreDemocrats, who narrowly control the House, maintained party discipline to pass the hard-fought, $480bn debt limit increase. The vote was along party lines, with every yes from Democrats and every no from Republicans.Joe Biden is expected to sign the measure into law this week, before 18 October, when the treasury department has estimated it would no longer be able to pay the nation’s debts without congressional action.Republicans insist Democrats should take responsibility for raising the debt limit because they want to spend trillions of dollars to expand social programs and tackle climate change. Democrats say the increased borrowing authority is needed largely to cover the cost of tax cuts and spending programs during Donald Trump’s administration, which House Republicans supported.House passage warded off concerns that the world’s largest economy would go into default for the first time, but only for about seven weeks, setting the stage for continued fighting between the parties.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell wrote to Biden on Friday that he would not work with Democrats on another debt limit increase. McConnell was harshly criticized by Trump, the Republican party’s leader, after the Senate vote.Lawmakers also have only until 3 December to pass spending legislation to prevent a government shutdown.The Senate’s vote last week to raise the limit – which had been more routine before the current era of fierce partisanship – turned into a brawl. Republicans tried to link the measure to Biden’s goal of passing multitrillion-dollar legislation to bolster infrastructure and social services while fighting climate change.At a news conference on Tuesday, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said she was optimistic that Democrats could work out changes to reduce the cost of their social policy plans “in a timely fashion”.In another sign compromise was possible, progressive Democrats told reporters that most of them wanted to keep all the proposed programs in the multitrillion-dollar plan, while shortening the time period to cut its overall cost.Biden has suggested a range of more like $2tn rather than the initial $3.5tn target. At a briefing today, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters: “We are at a point where there are choices that need to be made, given that there are fewer dollars that will be spent.”Psaki said that the conversations are ongoing between White House senior staff and the president as well as key Democrats such as senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona about how to trim the bill and what a smaller package would look like.Psaki was asked if the president supported Pelosi’s strategy for the “Build Back Better” bill outlined in a letter she sent to caucus members on Monday, passing a bill with fewer programs that will receive more funding. Though she wouldn’t confirm if the president supported that specific strategy, Psaki noted that the bill would be smaller versus the $3.5tn Biden originally proposed and referred to comments Pelosi made during her press conference.“What [Pelosi] said in that press conference is that ‘if there are fewer dollars to be spent, there are choices that need to be made’, and the president agrees … If it’s smaller than $3.5tn, which we know it will be, then there are choices that need to be made,” said Psaki.“A bill that doesn’t pass means nothing changes,” Psaki said.Gloria Oladipo contributed reportingTopicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsUS economyEconomicsnewsReuse this content More