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    Justice department sues Michigan and Hawaii over climate suits against big oil

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    The US justice department on Wednesday filed lawsuits against Hawaii and Michigan over their planned legal action against fossil fuel companies for harms caused by the climate crisis, claiming the state actions conflict with federal government authority and Donald Trump’s energy dominance agenda.The suits, which legal experts say are unprecedented, mark the latest of the Trump administration’s attacks on environmental work and raise concern over states’ abilities to retain the power to take climate action without federal opposition.In court filings, the justice department said the Clean Air Act – a federal law authorizing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate air emissions – “creates a comprehensive program for regulating air pollution in the United States and ‘displaces’ the ability of states to regulate greenhouse gas emissions beyond their borders”.The justice department argues that Hawaii and Michigan are violating the intent of the act that enables the EPA authority to set nationwide standards for greenhouse gases, citing the states’ pending litigation against oil and gas companies for alleged climate damage.Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, last year tapped private law firms to go after the fossil fuel industry for negatively affecting the state’s climate and environment.Meanwhile, Hawaii’s governor, Josh Green, another Democrat, plans to target fossil fuel companies that he said should take responsibility for their role in the state’s climate consequences, including 2023’s deadly Lahaina wildfire.When burned, fossil fuels release emissions such as carbon dioxide that warm the planet.Both states’ laws “impermissibly regulate out-of-state greenhouse gas emissions and obstruct the Clean Air Act’s comprehensive federal-state framework and EPA’s regulatory discretion”, the justice department’s court filings said.The justice department also repeated the Republican president’s claims of a US energy emergency and crisis. “At a time when states should be contributing to a national effort to secure reliable sources of domestic energy”, Hawaii and Michigan are “choosing to stand in the way”, the filings said.A spokesperson for the office of the Democratic Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, deferred to Nessel when asked for comment.“This lawsuit is at best frivolous and arguably sanctionable,” Nessel said in a statement, which noted that Michigan had not filed a lawsuit. “If the White House or big oil wish to challenge our claims, they can do so when our lawsuit is filed; they will not succeed in any attempt to pre-emptively bar our access to make our claims in the courts. I remain undeterred in my intention to file this lawsuit the president and his big oil donors so fear.”Green’s office and the Hawaii attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.But legal experts raised concern over the government’s arguments.Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said usual procedure was for the justice department to ask for a court to intervene in pending environmental litigation – as is the case in some instances across the country.While this week’s suits are consistent with Trump’s plans to oppose state actions that interfere with energy dominance, “it’s highly unusual”, Gerrard told the Associated Press. “What we expected is they would intervene in the pending lawsuits, not to try to pre-empt or prevent a lawsuit from being filed. It’s an aggressive move in support of the fossil fuel industry.“It raises all kinds of eyebrows,” he added. “It’s an intimidation tactic, and it’s telling the fossil fuel companies how much Trump loves them.”Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has previously consulted on climate litigation, said this week’s lawsuits look “like DoJ grasping at straws”, noting that the EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, said his agency was seeking to overturn a finding under the Clean Air Act that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.“So on the one hand the US is saying Michigan, and other states, can’t regulate greenhouse gases because the Clean Air Act does so and therefore pre-empts states from regulating,” Carlson said. “On the other hand the US is trying to say that the Clean Air Act should not be used to regulate. The hypocrisy is pretty stunning.”The Trump administration has aggressively targeted climate policy in the name of fossil fuel investment. Federal agencies have announced plans to bolster coal power, roll back landmark water and air regulations, block renewable energy sources, and double down on oil and gas expansion. More

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      Fifteen years after Deepwater Horizon, Trump is setting the stage for disaster | Terry Garcia

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      Last month, I joined nearly 500 former and current employees of National Geographic, where I was executive vice-president and chief science and exploration officer for 17 years, urging the institution to take a public stance against the Trump administration’s reckless attacks on science. Our letter pointed out that the programs being dismantled are “imperative for the success of our country’s economy and are the foundation of our progress and wellbeing. They make us safer, stronger and more prosperous.” We warned that gutting them is a recipe for disaster.In the face of this danger, none of us can remain silent.I say this from the unique perspective of having been closely involved in the two most significant environmental disasters in US history: the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon oil spills. Fifteen years ago this Sunday, an enormous explosion tore through the BP Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and unleashed an environmental catastrophe that devastated the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion triggered the release of more than 3m barrels of oil that polluted 1,300 miles of coastline from Louisiana to Florida. Eleven lives were lost, ecosystems were ravaged and the economic toll soared into the billions.I served on the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, which investigated the root causes of the disaster, and before that I led the federal government’s implementation of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Restoration Plan. I have witnessed first-hand the human and economic toll exacted by these events. Men and women who, for generations, had made a living from the sea were suddenly confronted with the possibility that an entire way of life would be lost.Despite such painful lessons of the past, we find ourselves once again hurtling toward disaster. The Trump administration’s personnel and programmatic cuts at science, environmental and safety agencies, and the wholesale rollback of environmental regulations, threaten to unravel decades of progress in safeguarding our country. These actions aren’t just misguided – they’re a dangerous rejection of the hard-won knowledge gained from former crises and a gamble we cannot afford to take.Among the many alarming moves by the Trump administration are plans to weaken offshore drilling safety measures implemented in response to the Deepwater Horizon calamity, such as the reversal of the Biden administration’s ban on drilling in sensitive coastal areas, including the Arctic, and the closure of regional offices responsible for oil spill response. Eliminating these measures demonstrates a callous disregard for lessons learned at a staggering human and economic cost.Disturbingly, these actions are but a small part of a larger effort to weaken environmental regulation and oversight under the guise of restoring government efficiency. Take the recent rollback of dozens of Environmental Protection Agency health and safety regulations and the reported plan to eliminate the agency’s scientific research office. The administration claims these moves will unleash US energy and lower the cost of living, when in fact the only thing they’re guaranteed to achieve is undermining fundamental protections that keep our air and water clean. The mass layoffs and plans to dismember the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), where I was deputy administrator from 1997 to the end of 1999 and prior to that its general counsel, have nothing to do with cost savings – they’re an outright assault on science. Targeting programs that monitor ocean health, track ecosystem changes and study climate impacts – essential to understanding and mitigating looming threats – will leave us blind to and defenseless against the dangers ahead.Cuts to science funding amplify the harms, jeopardizing our ability to innovate solutions, assess risks and respond effectively to crises. In 2010, we lacked even basic data about ocean conditions in areas around the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well. This absence of critical knowledge hindered response and recovery efforts, including understanding the impacts of using oil dispersants in the deep ocean. After the spill, robust government support for science enabled researchers to develop new response and cleanup technologies, better understand long-term ecological impacts, and provide critical insights that helped shape environmental and safety policy. Without government support, these advances would have been impossible – and they will be impossible in the future as funding is slashed.The Trump administration’s insistence that its actions will reduce bureaucratic burdens or spur economic growth is false and deliberately misleading. It’s gaslighting on a national scale. The only sure result is that the burden of risk will be shifted on to communities, small businesses and ordinary Americans. The destruction of habitats and livelihoods is not an abstract consequence of environmental disasters. They devastate families, cripple economies, poison food supplies and leave communities struggling for decades. Businesses are boarded up, and community members suffer life-altering health consequences. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, losses in commercial and recreational fishing, tourism and property values amounted to tens of billions of dollars; cleanup and restoration costs exceeded $60bn – far surpassing what preventive measures would have required.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump and his industry allies will paint such an event as an unforeseeable tragedy, a terrible mishap, a sad accident. Don’t buy it.As we mark this somber anniversary, we cannot allow the cautionary tales of Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon to fade into history, only to be repeated when the next horror strikes. Science and environmental protections are our first line of defense against catastrophe. Now is the time to demand that our government stop the madness and commit to strong environmental and safety regulations, rigorous scientific research, and adequate funding for the agencies tasked with protecting our health and shared resources. The price of ignoring science and dismantling regulations is far too high.

      Terry Garcia was National Geographic’s executive vice-president and chief science and exploration officer for 17 years. He also served as the assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and deputy administrator of Noaa, as well as its general counsel More

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      Will global climate action be a casualty of Trump’s tariffs?

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      Donald Trump’s upending of the global economy has raised fears that climate action could emerge as a casualty of the trade war.In the week that has followed “liberation day”, economic experts have warned that the swathe of tariffs could trigger a global economic recession, with far-reaching consequences for investors – including those behind the green energy projects needed to meet climate goals.Fears of a prolonged global recession have also tanked oil and gas prices, making it cheaper to pollute and more difficult to justify investment in clean alternatives such as electric vehicles and low-carbon heating to financially hard-hit households.But chief among the concerns is Trump’s decision to level his most aggressive trade tariffs against China – the world’s largest manufacturer of clean energy technologies – which threatens to throttle green investment in the US, the world’s second-largest carbon-emitter.‘A tragedy for the US’The US is expected to lag farther behind the rest of the world in developing clean power technologies by cutting off its access to cheap, clean energy tech developed in China. This is a fresh blow to green energy developers in the US, still reeling from the Trump administration’s vow to roll back the Biden era’s green incentives.Leslie Abrahams, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC, said the tariffs would probably hinder the rollout of clean energy in the US and push the country to the margins of the global market.Specifically, they are expected to drive up the price of developing clean power, because to date the US has been heavily reliant on importing clean power technologies. “And not just imports of the final goods. Even the manufacturing that we do in the United States relies on imported components,” she said.The US government’s goal to develop its manufacturing base by opening new factories could make these components available domestically, but it is likely to take time. It will also come at considerable cost, because the materials typically imported to build these factories – cement, steel, aluminium – will be subject to tariffs too, Abrahams said.“At the same time there are broader, global economic implications that might make it difficult to access inexpensive capital to build,” she added. Investors who had previously shown an interest in the US under the green-friendly Biden administration are likely to balk at the aggressively anti-green messages from the White House.Abrahams said this would mean a weaker appetite for investment in rolling out green projects across the US, and in the research and development of early-stage clean technologies of the future. This is likely to have long-term implications for the US position in the global green energy market, meaning it will “cede some of our potential market share abroad”, Abrahams added.Instead, countries like China are likely to divert sales of their clean energy tech away from the US to other countries eager to develop green energy, Abrahams said. “So on the one hand, that should help to accelerate adoption of clean energy in those countries, which is good for emissions, but for the US, that is future market share that we’re ceding,” she said.‘Clean energy is unstoppable, with or without Trump’It’s important to distinguish between the US and the rest of the world, according to Kingsmill Bond, a strategist for the energy thinktank Ember.“The more the US cuts itself off from the rest of the world, the more the rest of the world will get on with things and the US will be left behind. This is a tragedy for the clean energy industry in the US, but for everyone else there are opportunities,” he said.Analysis by the climate campaign group 350.org has found that despite rising costs and falling green investment in the US, Trump’s trade war will not affect the energy transition and renewables trade globally.It said the US was already “merely a footnote, not a global player” in the race to end the use of fossil fuels. Only 4% of China’s clean tech exports go to the US, it said, in a trade sector where sales volume grew by about 30% last year.“Trump’s tariffs won’t slow the global energy transition – they’ll only hurt ordinary people, particularly Americans,” said Andreas Sieber, an associate director at 350.org. “The transition to renewables is unstoppable, with or without him. His latest move does little to impact the booming clean energy market but will isolate the US and drive up costs for American consumers.”View image in fullscreenOne senior executive at a big European renewable energy company said developers were likely to press on with existing US projects but in future would probablyinvest in other markets.“So we won’t be doing less, we’ll just be going somewhere else,” said the executive, who asked not to be named. “There is no shortage of demand for clean energy projects globally, so we’re not scaling back our ambitions. And excluding the US could make stretched supply chains easier to manage.”Countries likely to benefit from the fresh attention of renewable energy investors include burgeoning markets in south-east Asia, where fossil fuel reliance remains high and demand for energy is rocketing. Australia and Brazil have also emerged as countries that stand to gain.“In times like these, countries will be increasingly on the hunt for domestic solutions,” Bond said. “And that means clean energy and local supply chains. There are always climate reasons to go green, but there are national security reasons now too.”The challenge for governments hoping to seize the opportunity provided by the US green retreat will be to assure rattled investors that they offer a safe place to invest in the climate agenda.Dhara Vyas, the chief executive of Energy UK, the UK industry’s trade body, said: “Certainty has always been the thing that investors say they need. The UK is seen as a stable country with a stable government, but now more than ever we need to double down on giving certainty to investors.”“Investors do like certainty,” Bond agreed. “But they also like growth and opportunity, so that’s why there is some confidence that they will continue to deploy capital in the sector.”‘The US still matters’Although the green investment slowdown may be largely limited to the US, this still poses concerns for global climate progress, according to Marina Domingues, the head of new energies for the consultancy Rystad Energy.“The US is a huge emitter country. So everything the US does still really matters to the global energy transition and how we account for CO2,” she said. The US is the second most polluting country in the world, behind China, which produces almost three times its carbon emissions. But the US’s green retreat comes at a time when the country was planning to substantially increase its domestic energy demand.After years of relatively steady energy demand, Rystad predicts a 10% growth in US electricity consumption from a boom in AI datacentres alone. The economy is also likely to require more energy to power an increase in domestic manufacturing as imports from China dwindle.In the absence of a growing energy industry, this is likely to come from fossil fuels, meaning growing climate emissions. The US is expected to make use of its abundance of shale gas, but it is planning to use more coal in the future too.In the same week that Trump set out his tariffs, he signed four executive orders aimed at preventing the US from phasing out coal, in what climate campaigners at 350.org described as an “abuse of power”.Anne Jellema, the group’s executive director, said: “President Trump’s latest attempt to force-feed coal to the US is a dangerous fantasy that endangers our health, our economy and our future.” More

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      Trump signs orders to allow coal-fired power plants to remain open

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      Donald Trump signed four executive orders on Tuesday aimed at reviving coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel that has long been in decline, and which substantially contributes to planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.Environmentalists expressed dismay at the news, saying that Trump was stuck in the past and wanted to make utility customers “pay more for yesterday’s energy”.The US president is using emergency authority to allow some older coal-fired power plants scheduled for retirement to keep producing electricity.The move, announced at a White House event on Tuesday afternoon, was described by White House officials as being in response to increased US power demand from growth in datacenters, artificial intelligence and electric cars.Trump, standing in front of a group of miners in hard hats, said he would sign an executive order “that slashes unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal”.He added that “we will rapidly expedite leases for coal mining on federal lands”, “streamline permitting”, “end the government bias against coal” and use the Defense Production Act “to turbocharge coal mining in America”.The first order directed all departments and agencies to “end all discriminatory policies against the coal industry” including by ending the leasing moratorium on coal on federal land and accelerate all permitted funding for coal projects.The second imposes a moratorium on the “unscientific and unrealistic policies enacted by the Biden administration” to protect coal power plants currently operating.The third promotes “grid security and reliability” by ensuring that grid policies are focused on “secure and effective energy production” as opposed to “woke” policies that “discriminate against secure sources of power like coal and other fossil fuels”.The fourth instructs the justice department to “vigorously pursue and investigate” the “unconstitutional” policies of “radically leftist states” that “discriminate against coal”.Trump’s approach is in contrast to that of his predecessor Joe Biden, who in May last year brought in new climate rules requiring huge cuts in carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants that some experts said were “probably terminal” for an industry that until recently provided most of the US’s power, but is being driven out of the sector by cheaper renewables and gas.Trump, a Republican, has long promised to boost what he calls “beautiful” coal to fire power plants and for other uses, but the industry has been in decline for decades.The EPA under Trump last month announced a barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits, including seeking to overturn the Biden-era plan to reduce the number of coal plants.The orders direct the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, to “acknowledge the end” of an Obama-era moratorium that paused coal leasing on federal lands and to require federal agencies to rescind policies transitioning the nation away from coal production.The orders also seek to promote coal and coal technology exports and to accelerate development of coal technologies.Trump has long suggested that coal can help meet surging electricity demand from manufacturing and the massive datacenters needed for artificial intelligence.“Nothing can destroy coal. Not the weather, not a bomb – nothing,” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, by video link in January. “And we have more coal than anybody.”Energy experts say any bump for coal under Trump is likely to be temporary because natural gas is cheaper and there is a durable market for renewable energy such as wind and solar power no matter who holds the White House.Environmental groups were scathing about the orders, pointing out that coal is in steep decline in the US compared with the increasingly cheap option of renewable energy. This year, 93% of the power added to the US grid will be from solar, wind and batteries, according to forecasts from Trump’s own administration.“What’s next, a mandate that Americans must commute by horse and buggy?” said Kit Kennedy, managing director of power at the Natural Resources Defense Council.“Coal plants are old and dirty, uncompetitive and unreliable. The Trump administration is stuck in the past, trying to make utility customers pay more for yesterday’s energy. Instead, it should be doing all it can to build the electricity grid of the future.”Clean energy, such as solar and wind, is now so affordable that 99% of the existing US coal fleet costs more just to keep running than to retire a coal plant and replace it with renewables, a 2023 Energy Innovation report found. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values | Editorial

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      The Trump administration did not take red lines on Ukraine to its talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday: it cares about the bottom line. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, underscored that when he said the two sides would create a team, not only to support Ukraine peace talks but also to explore the “incredible opportunities” to partner with Moscow geopolitically “and, frankly, economically” that might result.Kyiv and other European capitals are still reeling at the full extent of Donald Trump’s cynicism when it comes to world affairs, and callous disregard for the people caught up in them. But it should be no surprise that business dealings were high on the agenda. Vladimir Putin would dearly love to end his country’s economic isolation. Russia is making the case that American energy firms and others could profit handsomely by doing business with it again.For Mr Trump, his two key interests – money and power – are not only interrelated but fungible, just as US goals and his personal interests often appear indistinguishable to him. (This is a man who launched his own cryptocurrency token days before returning to the White House, and as he sought to ease regulation of the industry).When he talks of the future of Ukraine or Gaza, he speaks not of human rights and security, lives and homes, but of laying US hands on $500bn of minerals and a “big real-estate site” respectively. He believes in cutting deals, not making peace. At the heart of his foreign policy team is Steve Witkoff, not a diplomat but a billionaire real-estate developer and golf buddy. Mr Witkoff was first appointed as Middle East envoy and then dispatched to negotiate with Moscow. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, was also in Riyadh – while Ukraine and European allies have been denied a seat.Mr Trump’s merging of wealth and strength were obvious even before he took office the first time. He suggested he could use Taiwan as leverage with China on issues including trade. John Bolton, who became his national security adviser, later said (though Mr Trump denied it) that the president pleaded with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to ensure he would win the next election, “stress[ing] the importance of … increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome”.Mr Trump’s Middle East policy is not only pleasing to his evangelical Christian supporters. His repugnant proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, allowing the construction of an American-owned “Riviera”, is shocking but in many ways builds upon ideas long held by businessman friends as well as Israeli settlers. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a former real-estate developer charged with overseeing Middle East policy in Mr Trump’s first term, suggested last year that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, incidentally, became a major investor in Mr Kushner’s private equity firm after he left the administration.)Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to capitalise on Mr Trump’s economic transactionalism by offering access to Ukraine’s resources, notably minerals, in exchange for security. He got Mr Trump’s attention – but the terms of the resulting US demand make it look less like diplomacy than extortion. The US president prices up everything and knows the value of nothing. Others must now endeavour to show him that his plans will not come as cheaply as he believes.

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      Trump picks oil and gas industry CEO Chris Wright as next energy secretary

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy.Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump’s plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades.He is also likely to share Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year.Wright, who does not have any political experience, has written extensively on the need for more fossil fuel production to lift people out of poverty.He has stood out among oil and gas executives for his freewheeling style, and describes himself as a tech nerd.Wright made a media splash in 2019 when he drank fracking fluid on camera to demonstrate it was not dangerous.US oil output hit the highest level any country has ever produced under Biden, and it is uncertain how much Wright and the incoming administration could boost that.Most drilling decisions are driven by private companies working on land not owned by the federal government.The Department of Energy handles US energy diplomacy, administers the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – which Trump has said he wants to replenish – and runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, such as the Loan Programs Office.The secretary also oversees the aging US nuclear weapons complex, nuclear energy waste disposal and 17 national labs.If confirmed by the Senate, Wright will replace Jennifer Granholm, a supporter of electric vehicles and emerging energy sources like geothermal power, and a backer of carbon-free wind, solar and nuclear energy.Wright will also likely be involved in the permitting of electricity transmission and the expansion of nuclear power, an energy source that is popular with both Republicans and Democrats but which is expensive and complicated to permit.Power demand in the United States is surging for the first time in two decades amid growth in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies.Trump also announced on Saturday that he had picked one of his personal attorneys, Will Scharf, to serve as his White House staff secretary. Scharf is a former federal prosecutor who was a member of Trump’s legal team in his successful attempt to get broad immunity from prosecution from the supreme court.Writing on Twitter the day after Trump’s election, Scharf greeted the news that Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted the former president for his attempt to subvert the 2020 election, was winding down the Trump case and planned to resign with the words, “Bye Jack.” More

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      Environmental groups alarmed as Doug Burgum picked for US interior secretary

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      Donald Trump’s nomination of North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, as the interior secretary has prompted swift backlash from environmental advocacy groups alarmed at the incoming administration’s plans to use federal lands for oil and gas drilling.Trump also announced in a statement on Friday his intention to make Burgum chair of a National Energy Council he intends to form to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE” and to focus on “the battle for AI superiority”.Burgum, a former businessman, has been governor since 2016 of North Dakota, which is the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country. Burgum, if confirmed by the Senate, would manage US federal lands including national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as oversee relations with 574 federally recognized Native American tribes.Major concerns have loomed over the country’s wildlife refuges and public lands as Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term. Throughout his campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said “drill, baby, drill” and has vowed to carve up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska’s northern tundra for oil and gas drilling.The Sierra Club, the country’s largest non-profit environmental organization, said: “It was climate skeptic Doug Burgum who helped arrange the Mar-a-Lago meeting with wealthy oil and gas executives where Donald Trump offered to overturn dozens of environmental rules and regulations in exchange for $1bn in campaign contributions.”The April meeting at Trump’s club earlier this year prompted Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the country’s top ethics watchdog, as well as House Democrats, to investigate the dinner over constitutional and campaign violations.“If that weren’t disqualifying enough, he’s long advocated for rolling back critical environmental safeguards in order to let polluters profit. Doug Burgum’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deep and, if confirmed to this position, he will surely continue Donald Trump’s efforts to sell out our public lands to his polluter pals. Our lands are our nation’s greatest treasure, and the interior department is charged with their protection,” the Sierra Club continued.Similarly, the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation policy organization focused on land and energy issues across the western states, said: “Doug Burgum comes from an oil state, but North Dakota is not a public lands state. His cozy relationship with oil billionaires may endear him to Donald Trump, but he has no experience that qualifies him to oversee the management of 20% of America’s lands.”It went on to add: “If Doug Burgum tries to turn America’s public lands into an even bigger cash cow for the oil and gas industry, or tries to shrink America’s parks and national monuments, he’ll quickly discover he’s on the wrong side of history.”The Center for Biological Diversity equally condemned the nomination, saying that Burgum would be a “disastrous secretary of the interior who’ll sacrifice our public lands and endangered wildlife on the altar of the fossil fuel industry’s profits”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBurgum was not always aligned with Trump’s extreme climate agenda. He has said he believes that climate change is real and in 2021 had called for North Dakota to be carbon neutral by 2030, advocating for a plan that retained the state’s fossil fuel industries while investing in carbon capture and storage technologies to offset emissions.At the time, environmental groups supported Burgum’s pledge, but noted the impracticality of relying on unproven carbon capture technology rather than a transition away from fossil fuels.“Could be worse for sure,” said Jared Huffman, a progressive Democrat of California and senior member of the House natural resources committee who has championed climate action. “I look forward to trying to work productively with him.”Burgum’s views on matters outside of climate and energy, however, have long been reactionary. He signed a number of bills targeting LGBTQ+ people in North Dakota, including ones that banned gender-affirming care for minors, restricted drag shows, and banned trans people from using bathrooms and shower facilities that match their gender identity in prisons, domestic violence shelters or state university families. More

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      A coal plant bulldozed an Ohio town displacing residents. Now its owners include a big Trump donor

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      Nestled beneath two precipitous spires billowing smoke from what has been called the deadliest coal plant in the United States lies the husk of the small but once-thriving town of Cheshire, Ohio.When residents here were routinely shrouded in a toxic, blue-tinged fog of pollution from the plant two decades ago, a unique yet telling solution was settled upon: the company causing the pollution would purchase the entire town to move people en masse from their homes.For the several hundred people who lived here beside a nook of the Ohio River on the eastern border of the state, the wrenching dismemberment of their community in 2002 is still raw. Yet looming stubbornly over the remnants of this ghost town is the imposing Gavin coal plant, as its owners battle federal regulators who allege ongoing violations of clean air and water rules.“Rather than deal with the source of pollution they thought it better to buy out and bulldoze a whole town,” said Neil Waggoner, an Ohio-based campaigner at the Sierra Club, which estimates Gavin’s pollution causes about 244 premature deaths a year, making it America’s most lethal coal plant, it said in a report last year based on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and census data. “It’s extraordinary. In many ways, it’s dystopian.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe tale of the Gavin power station, one of the largest coal complexes in the US and the country’s sixth highest such emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide, is one that illustrates deep seams of support for coal in this part of the midwest but also – with a looming presidential election – salient politics.Since 2017, the Gavin plant has been part-owned by Blackstone, a private equity firm whose billionaire chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, is one of the leading backers of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, having donated $3m to a Trump-aligned Super PAC in 2020. Individuals connected to Blackstone are also among the most generous financial supporters of JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate.Both Trump and Vance have lambasted moves by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and a catalyst of the climate crisis, with particular ire aimed at a recent EPA rule that requires coal-fired power plants to slash CO2 emissions by 90% within a decade or face closure.Trump has vowed to kill off the rule he’s called “a regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America” if he returns to the White House, while Vance has complained of “wanton harassment of fossil fuel companies” and joined with other Senate Republicans in attempts to block the regulation.The EPA edict poses an existential threat to the Gavin plant, which spews out 13m tons of carbon dioxide a year, along with a host of other toxins. Faced with the costly task of capturing the plant’s emissions, Lightstone Generation, the joint venture operator, is also wrestling with EPA allegations from this year that it violated clean air laws and failed to properly contain a vast nearby dump of coal ash – the leftover waste from burning coal that can leach arsenic, mercury and other cancer-causing toxins into rivers and streams – fed by a mile-long conveyor belt from the power plant.“Blackstone is used to playing that political game and it’s in their interest to keep the status quo so coal plants don’t face accountability,” said Alissa Jean Schafer, climate director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which outlined in a recent report that Gavin’s operators face upwards of $40m in costs to remedy its pollution issues, recommending it join a spate of coal plants that have closed in Ohio and nationwide.“There is a trend of private equity walking away from polluting assets without being liable for the environmental cleanup,” Schafer added. “They want to squeeze as much profit as possible while they can from this outdated, dangerous coal plant.”View image in fullscreenBlackstone’s Schwarzman, who has previously warned of energy shortages and “real unrest” around the world if fossil fuels are phased out too quickly, has allied with Trump, who weakened rules around coal ash disposal and coal plant emissions when he was president. “You can imagine folks at Blackstone want to see similar rollbacks under a second Trump presidency, and you can imagine Vance towing the line,” said Schafer.A Blackstone spokeswoman said the Gavin plant is a “legacy investment” that has spent more than $1bn to update its air quality control technology, complies with federal and state limits on emissions, and is in the process of closing a coal ash pond. “All political donations by our employees are strictly personal,” she added.The reach of the Gavin plant, built in 1974 and named after Gen James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, is prodigious. It chews through about 20,000 tons of coal a day, enough to electrify 2m homes. A pair of enormous 800ft-tall rust-colored smokestacks, jutting imperiously above the treeline on the approach to Cheshire, waft a cocktail of emissions for hundreds of miles, with environmentalists blaming it for causing hazy skies as far away as the Shenandoah national park, in Virginia.The immediate surroundings of the largest power plant in Ohio, however, are denuded. The blue plumes are gone but the plant itself still gives off a pungent sulphur smell, a violent whiff akin to rotting eggs that stings the nose. The small cluster of Cheshire streets at the foot of the plant contain patches of grass where homes once sat, like a mouth that’s had most of its teeth knocked out.View image in fullscreenA church, a school and even the traffic lights here have been removed, along with the houses that were torn down. Just a few scattered buildings remain. During the exodus, some people lifted their entire wood-paneled homes on to trailers and moved them away. In all, 221 residents, the vast majority of the population, departed in just six months in 2002.“I couldn’t even watch my house being torn down, it was terrible,” said Jennifer Harrison, who grew up near Cheshire and moved to the town with her now late husband in 1980. “We spent the first 23 years of our married life and raised our kids here. I just can’t think about it too much, it’s horrible.”Harrison, who served as Cheshire’s town clerk and lived a short distance from the Gavin plant, remembers getting blurry eyes and tasting sulphur in the air in the late 1990s – a problem that worsened to the extent that a blue-hued haze of pollution would settle upon the town, particularly on humid days. It became so bad that residents had to stay indoors, the miasma so strong it would eat the paint off cars.“We had what we called ‘touchdowns’, where this plume would come from the smokestack and touch down in town,” she said. “It was like clouds on the ground. People got sores on their mouths, they got breathing problems, it affected lives.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIronically, the problems worsened once the EPA, in 2000, cited the Gavin plant for violating the Clean Air Act for contributing to acid rain as far away as New York. In response, pollution controls installed by the plant triggered what American Electric Power (AEP), the plant’s owner until 2017, called a “totally unexpected” increase in sulphur trioxide that mixed with water vapor from scrubbers used to filter pollution from the smokestacks.This combination allowed a sulphuric acid mist to flood into Cheshire, causing what the EPA documented as “irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat; shortness of breath; and asthma-like symptoms” among residents in 2001. “We had to fight them continually,” Harrison said of the plant’s owner. “We had to become a pain in their ass just to finally get anything done.”AEP, facing mounting legal pressure over the toxic air, eventually offered a deal thought to be a US first: $20m to buy the town of Cheshire, with homeowners offered three times the asking price for their houses – around $150,000 each – in return for locals relocating and agreeing to not sue the company over any future adverse health impacts.Elderly residents who wished to stay in their homes were allowed to do so, with some holdouts remaining until they died, when their homes were bulldozed too. AEP, which had revenues of $14.5bn in 2002, was able to subsume a town founded in 1811, with lawyers taking around a quarter of the total buyout fund.Harrison, who was involved in the effort to pursue AEP through the courts, said she was initially “shocked” at the offer but came to realize it was the only viable choice. “We probably should’ve held out for more but the lawyers told us that was the final deal,” she said.“We felt if we didn’t take the deal we’d be stuck here forever and they wouldn’t fix the problem. Most of the people let them buy the property and got out of town because at that point our properties were worthless.”What was lost was a slice of Americana, a close-knit place of white picket fences, a church, village picnics and a trusted community. “Everyone knew everyone, you could hear your kids out playing on their bikes and know someone was looking out for them,” said Harrison. “It was very Norman Rockwell.”The grief of this loss stirred anger among some Cheshire residents, not so much at the coal plant in a stretch of Appalachia where the harms of coal have long been sold as a price worth enduring, but rather at town council leaders like Harrison who struck the buyout deal. Friendships were severed, angry words shouted and graffitied dollar signs were sprayed onto the Harrison family home.“It was really unsettling,” said Megan Lawhon, Harrison’s daughter who turned 18 the day before the buyout was agreed to. She’s now a high school teacher. “People blamed us for a lot of untrue things, said we were greedy for taking the buyout money. I find it really hard to even come back here.”Gesturing to the Gavin plant, Lawhon added: “The culprit is just still sitting here. It’s like a family member has been murdered and the killer was just allowed to pay out some money and that’s it. And everyone here accepts that’s just the price of living in Appalachia, that there is no other option. We just die with a smile on our faces.”Advocates for the Gavin plant point out that it generates about half of the economic activity in Gallia county, in which Cheshire sits. There remains a certain cynicism that anything, such as a clean energy boom that Biden has sought to spur, can replace the jobs and investment that coal has long conferred to the Ohio River valley.In 2020, Trump, who has offered unfulfilled promises to resurrect the ailing coal industry, amassed 77% of the vote in Gallia county. A barn sitting beside the Gavin plant features a large picture of the former president shaking his fist with the words: “The audits prove Trump won!”“I know if Kamala [Harris] and that other gentleman [Tim Walz] had their way this coal plant would be shut down right now and we’d be going back to the 1800s,” said Mark Coleman, who is mayor of Cheshire. Coleman lives on the outskirts of the town, which had its boundaries expanded to now cover a population of 124.“If that plant closed our area would be gone. I’ve lived here all my life, this has always been part of it, my dad was a coal miner. The problem was fixable and Gavin did fix it, we haven’t seen a blue plume in years. I was more frustrated with the people who sold out.”View image in fullscreenLightstone, Gavin’s operator, still owns the relic of Cheshire and has shown no willingness to sell the land to usher in new residents. Neither Blackstone nor ArcLight Capital, the two joint venture partners that form Lightstone, answered questions on Cheshire’s future.Coleman said attracting new businesses here is tough; a plan for a Dollar General was recently dashed, and even getting a street paved is difficult. Drug addiction, like in much of Appalachia, stalks this place. Cheshire’s future appears moribund, a marooned corner of a region where old certainties have evaporated.“Our town has lost its identity, it’s sad,” Coleman said. “It’s hard to get things started back up again. Time has healed wounds, but at the same time we don’t go out to dinner with everyone. People have drifted apart.”The mayor has not heard from Vance about Cheshire’s situation. The vice-presidential candidate didn’t respond to questions from the Guardian about his links to Blackstone and the Gavin plant, or what his plan is for communities exposed to coal-related pollution.“If JD Vance really feels a connection to Appalachia, which he has ridden hard, you’d think he’d at least ask some questions about all this,” said Lawhon.“But I’d be surprised if he even knew about us. I mean if it’s going to cut into profits, the environment won’t ever be a priority. Which means that this whole thing could happen again somewhere else in the United States, and somebody’s going to have to fight the exact same battle we did.” More

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      in US Politics

      Corporations are forcing Americans to pay more for less – in their own words | Matt Stoller

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      In 2022, the Biden administration and the oil industry were in a brutal fight over oil prices. The president was demanding that domestic oil producers invest and drill more to address spiking costs, but Texas frackers were recalcitrant. “Whether it’s $150 oil, $200 oil, or $100 oil, we’re not going to change our growth plans,” the Pioneer CEO, Scott Sheffield, said, echoing comments from other leaders at different domestic firms. Profits would go to investors, not to more rigs to address pain at the pump.The oil barons won the fight. Profits in the oil industry jumped from virtually nothing in 2020 to the hundreds of billions in 2021, and then doubled again in 2022. And yet, economists did not see any sort of plot at work. “Don’t blame the oil companies for their high profits,” said the economist Olivier Blanchard. “It is not price gouging, just how markets work.”Three weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission released information showing how naive such statements really were. Sheffield, it turns out, allegedly helped engineer a price-fixing scheme to reduce oil production and increase prices for Americans at the pump. His goal was to end fierce competition in the industry, which had, as he put it, “lowered the price by $20 to $30 per barrel over the past 10 years”. The FTC banned Sheffield from his corporation’s board and has reportedly referred allegations against Sheffield to the Department of Justice for possible criminal investigation.The magnitude of this alleged plot is stunning. Oil prices are controlled by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), a cartel composed of nations with known oil reserves. Because Opec is made up of governments, price-fixing law doesn’t apply. But these laws do apply to domestic US firms engaged in shale oil production, who competed fiercely with Opec from 2014 to 2016 for market share, bringing down prices in the interim.In 2017, tired of this price war, Texas oilmen and Opec officials began sitting down to dinners, and by 2021, Texas had de facto joined Opec. Companies like Pioneer, Devon Energy and Continental Resources publicly pledged to hold back production. As the FTC found, Sheffield was also privately sending hundreds of text and WhatsApp messages to Opec officials, seeking to align US producers with the global cartel.Class-action lawyers are on top of the scandal, but there’s also increasing political interest. At a hearing last week, the US representatives Rosa DeLauro and Matt Cartwright began criticizing “big oil” for this scheme, and Representative Mark Pocan even called for jail time for the oil executives allegedly involved. The top Democrat on the powerful energy and commerce committee, Frank Pallone, just launched a wide-ranging investigation across the industry.The US consumes 7bn barrels of oil a year, meaning that if the dollar amount went up by $20-30, as Sheffield calculated, that’s roughly $400-700 a person in America, a transfer from consumers to oil men and their private equity backers. That’s a not small amount of what inflation wrought in 2021, which was about $4,700 per capita in increased prices. (I suspect the amount is actually more than $20-30 a barrel, since price spikes tend to be larger than the average over long periods of time. But we’ll leave it at what Sheffield calculated.)What is perhaps most shocking about this scandal is not that it happened, but that it happened in plain sight. Oil CEOs weren’t hiding. In 2021, as prices rose on the end of Covid lockdowns, Sheffield publicly threatened rivals who might increase production, saying “all the shareholders that I’ve talked to said that if anybody goes back to growth, they will punish those companies”.For years, there has been a debate between macro-economists like Blanchard about the source of post-Covid inflation. Many economists chalked up price hikes to workers demanding more money and saw the way to address it as scaring workers into accepting less money by throwing a bunch of them out of work. “We need five years of unemployment above 5% to contain inflation,” said Larry Summers. That’s what their models told them.By contrast, 85% of Americans, along with a few iconoclastic scholars and writers, said “corporations being greedy and raising prices to make record profits” was the cause of inflation. Why? Well it might have been because they noticed that CEOs were routinely telling investors that they were raising prices to increase margins, not to meet wage demands. Or it might have been because they experienced large and unexplained price increases in meat, rent, hotels, groceries and restaurants. Indeed, when the CEO of Wendy’s recently said Wendy’s was considering using AI to engage in dynamic pricing, the public outrage was palpable.It’s time to declare the debate over. In 2021, the total corporate profit increase was $730bn, or a little over $2,100 a person. That’s a large chunk of the inflationary increase in costs. Moreover, the price-fixing in the oil industry, which contributed roughly $200bn of that, isn’t an anomaly.Take post-Covid rent hikes. One software and consulting pricing firm for landlords, RealPage, specialized in telling its clients to hike rents more than they otherwise might. As of December of 2020, RealPage had nearly 32,000 clients, including “10 largest multifamily property management companies in the United States”. There are multiple antitrust suits accusing the private equity-owned firm of organizing a massive price-fixing conspiracy to inflate rents across the board.Beyond rent, the Biden administration or private plaintiffs now have credible antitrust claims against firms engaged in price-fixing in meat, hotels and large online sellers like Amazon. Corporations in a range of industries have made comments similar to those of Sheffield.Alex Cisneros, an executive for Red Roof Inn, told a trade outlet that Red Roof Inn was using a software package called STR from CoStar to systematically hike prices across the hotel industry. “Red Roof’s franchisees for the most part are making more money with less occupancy,” Hotel News Now explained. “Red Roof is now providing more data to franchisees to educate and get them comfortable commanding higher rates.”According to a lawsuit, an unnamed executive at Smithfield, a pork processor, summarized the advice he got from Agri Stats, a consulting firm that coordinates production in the industry, as: “Just raise your price.”Rent, meat, oil and hotels are big sectors, so criminal activity in the form of price-fixing to boost profits should bust through the illusions economists have about how our markets really work. There are also a number of concrete steps policymakers can take to respond to this price-fixing.The first is to arrest or sue the offending executives for criminal activity.The second is to strengthen price-fixing and merger laws, allow more private class-action suits, force judges to speed up cases and increase the budget of antitrust enforcers to make collusion more difficult.The third is to reform the Federal Reserve so policymakers there stop using macro-economic models that avoid considerations of profits and price-fixing.And the fourth is, frankly, political. One key reason there is action on these schemes is because Biden has prioritized antitrust enforcement. He hasn’t put enough into antitrust, and he doesn’t talk about it very often. But he should, or else Americans are likely to fall into the trap of thinking that what is good for big business is good for their pocketbooks, when the opposite is so often the case.
      Matt Stoller is a writer and former policymaker who focuses on the politics of market power and antitrust More