Environment

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      In America’s ‘Voltage Valley’, hopes of car-making revival turn sour

      by

      When Lordstown Motors, an electric vehicles (EV) manufacturer in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, declared bankruptcy last month, it was the latest blow to a region that has seen decades of extravagant promises fail to deliver.The 5,000 new jobs executives vowed to create in 2020 generated fresh hope for the shuttered General Motors Lordstown plant, which once functioned as an economic engine for the area and a critical piece of the nation’s industrial heartland.Local leaders rebranded Mahoning Valley “Voltage Valley”, claiming the EV revolution would revive the region’s fortunes. Donald Trump, then the president, trumpeted a major victory. “The area was devastated when General Motors moved out,” he said. “It’s incredible what’s happened in the area. It’s booming now. It’s absolutely booming.”But Lordstown Motors’ failure and its decision to sue its major investor, the electronics giant Foxconn, over a soured investment partnership, have dented Voltage Valley’s fortunes. Years of similar failures have given some residents here “savior fatigue” and have largely given up hope that the Lordstown plant can ever be fully rebooted.“I really want the plant to do well and succeed, but we’ve experienced so many ‘Hey we’re gonna come in and save the day’ promises that never happen,” said David Green, the regional director of United Auto Workers (UAW), who started working at Lordstown in 1995.Green said he was especially skeptical of Foxconn. The company has put up nets to prevent workers fromkilling themselves at one of its Chinese plants, he said, and has failed to live up to other promises of job creation across the US: “This is the savior company? I don’t have warm feelings toward them.”Still, some local leaders are optimistic. They insist Foxconn, which is attempting to scale up autonomous tractor production at Lordstown and lure a different EV startup, will save the plant.“I think Foxconn will be successful,” said Lordstown’s mayor, Arno Hill. “They are fairly confident they are going to be here for a while.”Hill and other leaders said Lordstown Motors was not the only new employer in town. GM partnered with LG Corporation to build an EV battery plant that employs about 1,300 people next door to Lordstown, and a new TJX warehouse has hired about 1,000 workers. A new industrial park is planned in the region, as are two gas plants.The feelings of those not in the business of promoting the region are more nuanced. In nearby Warren, where many Lordstown employees have lived since GM originally opened the plant in 1966 opening, mentions of Foxconn saving Lordstown or the Mahoning Valley drew a mix of eye-rolls, scoffs and blank looks from residents in the city’s downtown.“There are words, but I have seen no action,” said Leslie Dunlap, owner of the FattyCakes Soap Company, and several other Warren businesses, as she worked at a farmers’ market. “People here have lost faith in big companies.”Warren’s fortune is tied to that of the plant – when the latter’s employment numbers dipped, “people stopped spending money here, started selling houses, walking away from properties,” Dunlap said.Residents on a recent Tuesday afternoon said they were “cautiously optimistic” about the region’s economic future. Warren’s downtown shopfronts are full. But the city also bears the scars of rust belt decline with vacant industrial buildings and blighted neighborhoods.A few miles down the road at Lordstown, the lots around the well-kept offices where a few hundred Foxconn employees work are repaved. But the rest of the 6.2m sq ft factory looks like a depressing relic. Weeds sprout from the cracked pavement of the vast, unused blacktop lots surrounding it.Lordstown employed 11,000 people at its peak, but between the mid-1990s and 2016, the workforce in Trumbull county, where Lordstown sits, dropped by 63%. Just a few thousand remained when Lordstown closed in 2018.Some still hold a shred of hope that GM will repurchase the plant – it is nextdoor to an EV battery factory, and batteries are expensive to ship. It makes sense, said Josh Ayers, the bargaining chairman for UAW 1112.“I have a pit in my stomach every time I drive past Lordstown,” he said. “Foxconn is in there but I don’t see a future for them.”Regardless of the plant’s potential, local labor leaders say they have largely moved on and trained their attention on GM’s nearby Ultium electric-vehicle plant. A small explosion, fires and chemical leaks at the plant recently injured employees who work there, for as little as $16 per hour – less than the amount the local Waffle House offers, and low enough that some employees need government assistance, Ayers noted.Some local leaders tout the region’s job openings. Ayers said they exist because turnover is high. “People used to run through walls to work at Lordstown,” he said. “Nobody is running through walls to work at Ultium.”It is not the first time that a politician’s promises have left locals disappointed.‘This plant is about to shift into high gear’As the Great Recession battered the nation in late 2009, Barack Obama traveled to General Motors’ mammoth Lordstown plant to promise laid-off autoworkers a brighter future.Obama’s 2009 GM bailout became a lifeline: ramping up production of the Chevrolet Cobalt would bring back over 1,000 workers, the president told the anxious crowd.“Because of the steps we have taken, this plant is about to shift into high gear,” Obama bellowed over loud cheers. The plan soon fizzled, however, and by 2019 GM had shed the plant’s workforce and sold it to Lordstown Motors.In 2014 Obama declared Youngstown the center for 3D-printing technology, though the industry has brought few jobs. The failure to revive the area, in part, helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.Mahoning Valley was once steel country, and residents here trace their economic troubles back to 1977’s Black Monday, when two steel plants abruptly closed and 5,000 workers lost their jobs. Since then, the promises to pull the region out of its slow tailspin have been plentiful.An eccentric businessman from nearby Youngstown briefly revived the Avanti car company until slow sales and poor management killed it by 1990, leaving its workforce jobless.A glass company that recently received tax incentives to build a large plant “never made one fuckin’ bottle”, UAW’s Green said.Perhaps most infamously, Trump, in a July 2017 Youngstown speech, promised residents auto jobs “are all coming back. Don’t move, don’t sell your house.” A year later, GM idled the plant and, as residents here are keen to highlight, it did so after receiving billions in taxpayer assistance, including $60m in state subsidies in exchange for a promise to keep the plant open through 2027.In 2019, Trump tweeted that he had been “working nicely with GM to get” the Lordstown deal done. But Lordstown Motors floundered almost from the start, suffering from scandals over inflated sales figures and battery range. By 2022, a new savior arrived: Foxconn. It agreed to buy the plant and a 55% stake in Lordstown Motors for $230m. That relationship soured, and Foxconn quit making the payments this year. The deal collapsed.In a sign of how little impact this “booming” transformation has had, the name “Foxconn” hardly registered with some Warren residents. They squinted as they tried to recall where they had heard it. Others pointed to other ventures they felt could have more impact – a proposed science-fiction museum and businesses at the farmers’ market.Outside the county courthouse, an employee who did not want their name printed said they knew of the Lordstown Motors collapse, but it was not top of mind for anyone they knew: “Lordstown is not where the money is. I don’t know where it’s at.”‘Foxconn didn’t come through’About 450 miles from Lordstown, in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Foxconn in 2017 promised to build a hi-tech factory campus that would employ 13,000 people in exchange for $4.5bn in tax incentives. Residents were forced from their homes to make way for the factory, but very little was built.Kelly Gallaher is among those who fought the project, and she sees a replay in Lordstown as Foxconn promises big things while its deal falls apart. Mount Pleasant residents tried to warn Lordstown on social media when Foxconn showed interest in the plant, she said.“Lordstown needed a savior angel, and they weren’t in a position with any other backup choices. But it isn’t a surprise that Foxconn didn’t come through,” Gallaher said.Guy Coviello, the chief executive of the Youngstown/Warren Chamber of Commerce, dismissed such concerns. Foxconn is not asking for incentives or making big promises, he said, claiming that the problems in Wisconsin were largely “political ballyhooing”.The idea that autonomous tractors will save Lordstown is not landing with many residents. But one thing everyone around Lordstown seems to agree on is the notion that the region’s manufacturing heyday is never returning – for no other reason than automation has made it impossible. Manufacturers simply don’t need the labor force they once did.Mahoning still has much to offer. Its population loss is stabilizing, the cost of living is low, it is near other major population centers and it offers a huge workforce, Ayers said.Those selling points may bring more investment. But after so many broken promises, any floated idea is met with skepticism. Reflecting on Obama’s speech, Green said the president’s reassurance was a “great feeling that day”.“What a stark contrast to 10 years later.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US Republicans oppose climate funding as millions suffer in extreme weather

      by

      Swaths of the US are baking under record-breaking heat, yet some lawmakers are still attempting to block any spending to fight the climate crisis, advocates say.Nearly 90 million Americans are facing heat alerts this week, including in Las Vegas, Nevada, which may break its all-time hottest temperature record; Phoenix, Arizona, which will probably break its streak of consecutive days of temperatures over 110F; and parts of Florida, where a marine heatwave has pushed up water temperatures off the coast to levels normally found in hot tubs.Stifling heat is also blanketing parts of Texas, which for weeks earlier this summer sweltered under a record-shattering heat dome which one analysis found was made five times more likely by the climate crisis. Despite this, the state’s Republican senator Ted Cruz is rallying his fellow GOP members of the Senate commerce committee to circulate a memo attacking climate measures in Biden’s proposed 2024 budget, Fox News reported on Wednesday.The memo specifically calls on Republican members of the Senate appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee to reject spending provisions focused on climate resilience and environmental justice efforts for scientific agencies. In one example, the memo objects to a Nasa request to fund its Sustainable Flight National Partnership, which seeks to help zero out planet-warming pollution from aviation.“If the goal is to make imperceptible changes in CO2 emissions as part of the administration’s zealous effort to micromanage global temperatures, then Nasa should abandon such wasted mental energy. Nasa should not become a plaything for anti-fossil fuel environmentalists,” the memo says.It should come as no surprise that Cruz, who has accepted massive donations from oil and gas companies, is defending the fossil fuel industry’s interests, said Allie Rosenbluth, US program co-manager at the environmental advocacy and research non-profit Oil Change International.“What is really devastating for communities who are experiencing extreme heat, wildfires, flooding and drought across the US is that because of these bought-out politicians, they are not getting the support that they need to be resilient in the face of climate impacts at the federal level,” she said.House Republicans are fighting climate spending, too. To avoid a government shutdown, lawmakers must pass a slew of spending bills before current funding expires on 30 September. But Republican members of the GOP-controlled House appropriations committee are slipping in anti-climate provisions, which aim to block renewable energy funding and imperil federal efforts to tackle the climate crisis, into their spending bill drafts.Last week, the Clean Budget Coalition – a group of non-profits such as the League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense Fund and Public Citizen – identified at least 17 of these “climate poison pills” in appropriation bill drafts. Among them are amendments that would prevent the federal government from purchasing electric vehicles or building EV charging stations; block funding for the Green Climate Fund, which helps developing countries meet their climate goals under the Paris agreement; and prohibit funding for a Department of Energy initiative aiming to send 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments to flow to disadvantaged communities.Elizabeth Gore, senior vice-president for political affairs at Environmental Defense Fund, said these proposals will impede lawmakers’ chance to reach a budget deal before their fall deadline.“This is not a starting point for any reasonable negotiations,” she said in a release.Early last month, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. David Shadburn, senior government affairs advocate at the League of Conservation Voters, said that from his perspective, that agreement didn’t include nearly enough government funding, but now, Republicans are trying to cut funding even more.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We wanted to see more spending. We thought the deal was insufficient,” he said. “But a deal is a deal and yet what Republicans immediately did was go back on it.”All Republican representatives can submit proposals to the House appropriations committee and no member is required to sign off on specific proposals. So it’s not clear who is responsible for each “poison pill”. But Shadburn noted that not a single Republican member of the House voted for the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which included the most climate spending of any bill in US history and that Republican representatives have also repeatedly attempted to overturn the bill’s climate provisions.“The entire House Republican conference is on the record here … [including] those representing places that are seeing extreme weather,” he said.House Republicans also recently proposed an array of amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act aiming to limit the Pentagon’s deployment of electric vehicles, Shadburn said.One of them, which would force the defense department to terminate contracts for electric non-combat vehicles, came from Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, whose state is preparing for triple-digit heat this week. Another, which would authorize soldiers and civilians at the US army Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona to use fossil fuel-powered vehicles, came from Representative Paul Gosar from Arizona, where heat last Friday was comparable to “some of the worst heatwaves this area has ever seen”, according to the National Weather Service.“In addition to the extreme heat in the south-west and elsewhere, there’s massive flooding in Vermont and New York … yet the House this week is spending their time debating just how many climate attacks they should include in the defense authorization,” said Shadburn. “It just shows how unserious they are about doing anything significant to tackle the climate crisis.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      People in Florida: have you been struggling to insure your property?

      by

      Farmers Insurance became the latest property insurer to pull out of Florida on Tuesday despite repeated efforts by the state’s legislature and its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, to try to calm the volatile market that is making home ownership less affordable.Farmers said in a statement that the decision was based on risk exposure in the hurricane-prone state.We’d like to hear from people living in Florida who have been struggling to get insurance for their properties, and how this has been affecting their finances and plans for the future. More

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Sweltering weather has left swaths of the US baking. A ‘heat tsar’ could help, experts say

      by

      Record-breaking temperatures. Millions under heat alerts. Hikers dying on hot trails.As large swaths of the US bake under sweltering heat, some advocates and officials say the Biden administration should consider appointing a “heat tsar” to manage a response.The Earth saw its two hottest days in recorded history this week as parts of the south-west roasted, and as a stretch of the south endured a brutal heat dome that was parked over Texas for weeks.Heat kills more Americans than any other form of extreme weather. The threat is increasing amid the climate crisis and will accelerate, especially if the world doesn’t urgently stop burning fossil fuels.In response, Phoenix, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; and Miami-Dade county, Florida have all appointed chief heat officers – or “heat tsars” – over the past three years, as have at least six global cities.“It’s been very valuable for us in the city to have a permanent office dedicated to heat,” Kate Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix, whose administration created the nation’s first-ever office of heat response and mitigation in 2021, helmed by chief heat officer David Hondula. “Before, it wasn’t always clear who was in charge.”Rising temperatures have been brutal in Phoenix, the hottest city in America. Last year, Maricopa county reported 425 heat-associated deaths, a 25% increase from the previous year.It’s a trend affecting regions across the US, leaving governments scrambling to prepare. A federal body could help them share best practices, said Gallego.“We have probably 30 ideas about how to respond to heat,” she said. “If New Orleans already knows 25 of them but they benefit from five new ones, that could be incredible. It’s the same for mayors in Texas, who have lost too many lives already.”Gallego says that such a federal body could be helpful for historically temperate regions like the Pacific north-west, where hundreds died in a record-breaking 2021 heat dome.She recalled rare floods in Phoenix in 2014, her first year in office.“We didn’t have huge expertise in responding to flooding, but the federal government does, and they were able to provide consulting through Fema that helped me understand where to get an emergency supply of sandbags, for instance, or what tools are available if your fire station gets flooded,” she said.Traditionally hot regions also sorely need more federal support, said Jane Gilbert, who has served as Miami-Dade county’s first chief heat officer since May 2021. That support is needed with collecting data on deaths and injuries to capture the true toll of heat waves.“Heat could be the cause of … cardiac arrest, of a worker falling off a ladder, a psychotic break in a homeless person, of kidney failure in an outdoor worker, but it’s not necessarily coded as heat-related, so we don’t have good data on emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths,” she said, adding that federal officials could help compile research and convene experts to navigate the problem.The Biden administration has taken steps to improve heat preparedness. Last summer, it unveiled Heat.gov, an interagency heat-focused website. The site, which tools such as heat index guides, a heat and health tracker, and a climate and health forecast, has improved communication between federal agencies and local officials, Gilbert said.While the National Weather Service has traditionally based heat alerts on how often certain thresholds are crossed in certain areas, for instance, it is beginning to consider health impacts of heat, thanks to input from the CDC, she said. To kick off these efforts, it’s piloting a program this summer in Miami-Dade county that lowers heat alert thresholds. Heat advisories will be issued at 105F (40.5C) instead of the previous level of 108F, and excessive heat warnings will be issued at 110F (43C) instead of 113F (45C) – changes Gilbert said could help keep people safe.But Juley Fulcher, health and safety advocate at consumer advocacy non-profit Public Citizen, said while Heat.gov has produced useful tools, it has not led to policy changes or increased material support.“Interagency actions in Washington, have a history of not functioning as well as we might like them,” she said. “If there is that kind of concerted effort, there has to be some concerted funding put toward it [and] you can’t just take somebody who has a job that takes up 100% of their time and say, ‘here’s 20% more work to do.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA heat-focused office could see ongoing policies through to completion, she said. For years, Fulcher has pushed for a federal rule to protect workers from heat, which her organization found could save hundreds of lives each year. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration began creating the rules in 2021, but the process could take “a couple of years” to finish, she said. A heat office could ensure the rule’s completion is a priority, and could go even further to protect workers, distributing more educational materials to employers and conducting more research on risks.Federal officials could help boost preparedness in other ways too, said Gallego, the Phoenix mayor. Currently, she is pressuring the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make heat eligible for the same relief available after other disasters like hurricanes – something a heat tsar could also see through.Without those formal structures, said Gilbert, officials’ responses may be less sophisticated. Until her role was created, Miami-Dade’s response to extreme heat mirrored plans for extreme cold.“With the unsheltered population, it was about getting people into shelters overnight when it’s coldest, but with heat, the biggest time of day that we need to worry about is from noon to 7pm,” she said. Now, responders are focused on getting people into daytime cooling centers, and are being trained to distribute cold packs and cooling towels.In another example, Cecilia Sorensen, director of the Global Consortium on Climate and Health Education at Columbia University, said that amid the Pacific north-west’s unprecedentedly deadly 2021 heat dome, the region had no disaster protocol plan for heat.“They activated their only disaster protocol, which was related to earthquakes,” she said. “That got all the right people on the phone to be able to coordinate, but that’s an example of … unpreparedness.”Sorensen agreed that municipalities need help responding, but added that a new office or “tsar” might not be the answer.“Each geographic area is is very unique,” she said. “And so much of the work to really prepare communities to be resilient involves engagement of community members and other stakeholders, and I don’t think the federal government can really convene at that level.”Instead, she suggests that officials focus on boosting existing bodies that can support municipalities. In 2021, the Biden administration established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity within the US Department of Health and Human Services. But a lack of congressional funding and authorization has left it without full-time staff or funding, she said.“We should fund the office that’s supposed to be doing this work, rather than creating a whole new system in the executive branch,” she said.But Gallego said heat is an urgent enough threat to warrant its own office.“It’s time that the federal government had a new tool to address heat. Our entire planet is experiencing climate change and we need to adapt to that fact,” she said. “If the federal government created a one stop location for heat, they could save so many lives.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Rightwing war on ‘woke capitalism’ partly driven by fossil fuel interests and allies

      by

      The American right wing’s widening fight against what it calls “woke capitalism” is partly driven by fossil fuel interests or industry allies, according to a new report published on Thursday.Conservatives often use the term “woke capitalism” to refer to environmental, social and corporate governance – or ESG – criteria used to screen investments based on their environmental and social implications.Just this year, Republican lawmakers in 37 states introduced a stunning 165 pieces of anti-ESG legislation, according to the new report from the strategic research and advisory firm Pleiades Strategy.“The trend has been rampant,” said Connor Gibson, who co-authored the report.The 165 proposals sought to employ a variety of tactics, ranging from imposing limits on public contracts and restricting pension managers to forcing disclosures and combatting federal investment rules.The researchers examined news articles, fiscal notes and statehouse testimony related to each bill. They found that the majority of them bear strong resemblances to model bills crafted or circulated by four influential rightwing thinktanks: the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute and the Foundation for Government Accountability.Each of the four organizations is affiliated with the far-right thinktank coalition State Policy Network, whose members have also fought to pass punitive anti-pipeline protest laws and which has received funding from groups linked to fossil fuel billionaires Charles and the late David Koch.Advocacy for many of the bills was also led by fossil fuel-tied groups, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which has accepted at least $8.8m from organizations linked to the Kochs since 2012, and has also received funding from ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron. The TPPF began attacking ESG as far back as 2020 and says it was behind a pioneering anti-ESG bill passed in Texas in 2021.The American Petroleum Institute, the nation’s largest oil and gas lobbying organization, has also worked to shape anti-ESG policies. And representatives from several other fossil fuel interest groups have supported the efforts as well, the researchers say.Despite their well-connected champions, just 22 of the 165 proposed anti-ESG bills progressed through statehouses, the report says.“The dark-money-funded attacks on the freedom to invest responsibly hit deep opposition from business, labor and environmental advocates in statehouses across the country this year,” said Frances Sawyer, founder of Pleiades Strategy and co-author of the report. “Our report shows that the effort to weaponize government funds, contracts and pensions to prevent companies and investors from considering real financial risks is not a winning platform.”Many of the bills that did pass were watered down before they became law, the report says. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have real negative consequences.Opponents of the successful pieces of legislation fear they could cost taxpayers millions, collectively. And the implications for climate policy could be even larger, because the legislation could have a chilling effect on future climate policy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe laws could create an environment that discourages support for shareholder resolutions that aim to lower emissions, said Sawyer. It could also make it harder for states to take advantage of the clean energy investments offered by the Inflation Reduction Act, she said, due to fears that those funds would drive competition with the industries the bills favor.“The full extent of those costs, we don’t know,” she said.Anti-ESG legislation has increasingly popped up in statehouses over the past two years. In 2021, North Dakota lawmakers passed a law calling for a study of the implications of state funds making investments “for the purpose of obtaining an effect other than a maximized return to the state”.The same year, Texas lawmakers passed a law prohibiting state funds from contracting with or investing in companies that “boycott” fossil fuel stocks, based on a policy passed four years earlier that aimed to prevent Texas from doing business with entities that support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS, movement, for Palestine.Similar legislation began to appear in statehouses across the country. Last year, Idaho, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Kentucky all passed various forms of anti-ESG legislation.The legislation is unpopular, the authors say, but they still expect to see more of it in the coming years as more policymakers take the energy transition more seriously.“We think this is the latest iteration of climate denial and obstruction and delay,” said Gibson. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Power companies quietly pushed $215m into US politics via dark money groups

      by

      US power companies have made political donations of at least $215m to dark money groups in recent years, according to a new analysis of 25 for-profit utilities, amid growing concerns around how they wield influence.Such secretive donations to barely regulated non-profit groups have helped utilities increase electricity prices, hinder solar schemes and helped elect sympathetic legislators in recent years.While dark money giving to tax-exempt groups is legal, a number of utilities have faced criticism for it. In Arizona and Alabama, power companies faced blowback after they used dark money to aid the election of friendly regulators. In Michigan, regulators barred another company from using dark money entirely after it spent $43m on politics in just three years.Sometimes, power company dark money giving hides illegality. In 2021 in Ohio, FirstEnergy Corporation pleaded guilty to using dark money groups to bribe politicians in exchange for bailouts.In another instance of ethically questionable actions, Florida Power and Light (FPL) used dark money to interfere with ballot initiatives, and the elections of five politicians who in part aimed to tackle the high prices of electric bills and environmental and climate goals.“We are captive payers. To be funding lobbying against clean energy and climate that customers actually want goes against the public interest,” said Jean Su, a senior attorney at environmental group Center for Biological Diversity.Customers can also lose out.This was a scenario in Arizona when, in 2014, power company Arizona Public Service gave $10.7m to dark money groups that donated to key regulatory commission races. The two Republican commissioners backed by the groups won. In 2017, they went on to support the power company’s request for a $95m-a-year increase in electric bills, which ultimately was passed down to customers.It took a subpoena from a regulator to finally prove in 2019 that the company had been behind the political spending.That’s because the groups which receive the donations can be mysterious. They often bear generic or patriotic-sounding names, rarely disclose their funding sources and transfer large amounts of money between themselves. Regulations mandating public disclosure of dark money utility political spending are rare at the state level. Federal regulators stopped requiring public, line-by-line accounting of power company political spending in 2002.Floodlight and the Guardian used public records and self-disclosure data from the Center for Political Accountability (CPA), a non-profit that tracks corporate dark-money, to piece together how much for-profit power companies might be spending. Dark money is difficult to unearth, and the total will be an undercount.There are 44 regulated for-profit utilities across the US, according to the Edison Electric Institute, their trade association. Twenty-three of them self-disclosed giving nearly $100m to so-called dark money 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) groups between 2014 and 2020.Some offered more detail than others. Many companies do not report the total amounts they donate, but rather just the amount that cannot be deducted from taxes. Others don’t disclose the dark money giving of their subsidiaries. FirstEnergy in Ohio did not self-disclose at all.Overall, the total amount of dark money uncovered by regulators and the Department of Justice – about $115m – was greater than the total amount the companies disclosed.The Edison Electric Institute defended the spending. “Electric companies are subject to the same strict laws and regulations that apply to all businesses,” said Brian Reil, spokesman for the industry group. State regulators add even more scrutiny, he said.Critics argue the dark money spending is kept private, in part to ensure the disruptive transition to green energy happens on the companies’ terms or not at all, and to hinder oversight.A rare instance where a utility was held to account for its dark money spending happened this past spring in Ohio.Back in 2016 two nuclear reactors operated by the FirstEnergy Corporation were hemorrhaging money. The company sought help from Larry Householder, a Republican state politician who had just been re-elected and was eyeing the speaker’s gavel.Over meetings and private jet flights in 2017, Householder and FirstEnergy made a deal: the company would financially support Householder and his political loyalists in statewide elections, and in return, FirstEnergy would get a bailout for its nuclear plants. The conspirators created dark money groups, among them Generation Now and Partners for Progress, and started flooding them with cash.But the FBI was listening.David Devillers, the former US attorney for the southern district of Ohio, said in an interview that dark money groups were “the perfect money laundering animal”. With tens of millions from FirstEnergy, Householder won the speakership in January 2019. He later passed a bill that provided $1.3bn in taxpayer-funded bailouts for FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants.The bill faced backlash and a ballot initiative to repeal it emerged. But Householder used $38m in dark money to fight it. Racist and misleading television ads warning of a “Chinese takeover of Ohio’s electric grid” saturated the airwaves, telling Ohioans not to sign the ballot petition against the bailout.In total, FirstEnergy contributed about $60m in dark money to Householder. FirstEnergy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud and was forced to pay a $230m fine. Householder was found guilty this March, and could face up to 20 years in prison when sentenced in late June.“FirstEnergy has taken significant steps to put past issues behind us,” said Will Boye, a spokesman for the company.Several groups are calling on the federal government to look more deeply into how power companies wield dark money. The Center for Biological Diversity has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate how power companies pay for their political activity. Another group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed an FEC (Federal Election Commission) complaint last October against half a dozen dark money groups linked to FPL.During the 2018 and 2020 election cycles in Florida, FPL employed a consulting group that created at least a half-dozen dark money organizations that spent tens of millions of dollars on political attack ads, private investigators and spoiler candidates to challenge politicians in important races – according to leaked documents obtained by Floodlight, and reporting in the Orlando Sentinel and the Miami Herald.South Miami’s former mayor Philip Stoddard witnessed the power of the company’s dark money network first-hand. When in office he was critical of FPL’s handling of a nearby nuclear plant and was pushing for more rooftop solar.During his re-election in 2018, a dark money group called A Better Miami Dade published mailers, robocalls and ads to discredit him, according to public records and the group’s former president, Stephen Cody.The group spent over $200,000 trying to defeat Stoddard, public records show.Even after Stoddard won, another group called the South Florida Anti-Corruption Task Force filed a complaint against Stoddard at his university job, according to Rick Yabor, the groups president. A private investigator paid by the group also began digging into Stoddard’s personal life.Stoddard spent last year tracing a complex financial web that winds from the utility through dozens of dark money groups, many of which had direct financial ties to A Better Miami Dade.“I want to shut down this scam,” Stoddard said in an interview. “This is being used to corrupt the political system.”If the IRS accepts a whistleblower complaint Stoddard has made, FPL’s former political consultants could face up to $200m in liabilities and Stoddard could get a share of the recovered back taxes.While leaked records indicate FPL probably donated tens of millions of dollars to dark money groups between 2014 and 2020, its parent company has only self-disclosed about $1.4m in dark money giving. A spokesman for the company declined to confirm a total.Through a spokesman, FPL declined to comment for this story.But despite the recent exposure of dark money’s noxious effects in states like Ohio and Florida, experts caution that these networks are rarely brought to task.While the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is responsible for overseeing non-profit groups, experts uniformly describe dark money as the “wild west”. Between 2015 and 2019, the IRS didn’t revoke any tax-exempt group’s status for violating political spending rules. And the numbers of IRS agents whose job it is to police the groups has dwindled from nearly 1,000 to fewer than 600, according to congressional testimony.“There’s very little revenue for the IRS in regulating charities and there’s enormous political risk that seems to have been damaging to the IRS’s capacity to do other things,” Brian Galle, a law professor at Georgetown University who focuses on taxation and non-profits, said. He said it was largely a result of the current tax code, which is written to protect the privacy of individuals filing their taxes.“When we wrote [the code] it didn’t really occur to us that this was going to create problems for the political system,” Galle said. “It comes from an era where we emphasized individual privacy, maybe more, because we didn’t understand the stakes for politics.”
      This article was amended on 15 June 2023. An earlier version misattributed a fact about the dwindling number of IRS officials overseeing tax exempt groups to a law professor. The fact was presented by another law professor during congressional testimony. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      As the US becomes more divided, companies find they can’t appeal to everyone

      by

      Bud Light, Target – and now Cracker Barrel? “We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackBarrel has fallen,” the conservative group Texas Family said in a tweet last Thursday, in response to the southern-food restaurant chain marking Pride month on social media. “A once family-friendly establishment has caved to the mob.”The conservative backlash against American brands appears to have reached new heights over the last few weeks as companies show their support for Pride month and other LGBTQ+ issues. It is part of a wider backlash against corporate involvement in social, environmental or political issues that appears to be gathering steam.Corporate celebration of Pride month over recent years has seemed less radical amid growing criticism that parades and other events celebrating LGBTQ+ rights have actually become too corporatized. Critics have also pointed out that those same businesses are more than happy to fund politicians that oppose LGBTQ+ rights when it suits them. But conservatives have put those sponsorships back in the spotlight and are now more emboldened than ever to turn their fury against them.At the political vanguard is Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, the presidential candidate who is in the middle of a legal battle with Disney after the company publicly criticized his “don’t say gay” bill to curb discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity in schools.But the attack on “woke” corporations from conservative consumers and the politicians who court their support goes far further than Pride.Multiple Republican states, including Texas, West Virginia and Florida, have divested from investment firm BlackRock for the company’s support of environmental, social and governance portfolios that focus on sustainability and environmental impact.It is a notable change for Republicans, who for decades have been the party of business and fought the idea of government interference. Their hero, Ronald Reagan, once said “man is not free unless government is limited”.But a shift has been happening. Since 2019, the percentage of Republicans who say large corporations have a positive impact has fallen by a quarter, according to a 2021 Pew poll. A Gallup poll showed a similar drop in Republicans who were happy with the “size and influence of major corporations”, dropping from 57% to 31% in a year.Much of this comes from conservative distaste of “woke capitalism”, with companies coming out in support of progressive issues, such as LGBTQ+ rights, racial equity and concern over the environment, over the last decade. The shift has a strong business case. Younger Americans, who are more diverse and also more liberal, have come of age as consumers and companies have been trying to cater to them by promoting issues they care about. That comes with a price.“Millennials and younger generations are pushing this, and they have the idea that companies have a social responsibility beyond their business,” said Amna Kirmani, a professor of marketing at the University of Maryland. “Conservatives think that companies should stay out of sociopolitical issues and instead focus on their business.”In other words, companies can’t appeal to everyone in such a divisive political landscape, as they are quickly finding out. Now that two major corporations have pulled back on marketing efforts that promote LGBTQ+ issues in the face of a rightwing backlash, some experts say conservative resolve against companies promoting the issues has been strengthened.Bud Light had been trying to revive its brand to appeal to younger Americans when it turned to TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman, for a sponsored post on social media.“Our number one job at Bud Light is to grow meaning and relevance with new drinkers – that is how we transform and really preserve this brand for the next 40 years,” Alissa Heinerscheid, the company’s vice-president of marketing, told Ad Age in September.The backlash to the brand’s partnership with Mulvaney was intense, eventually leading to sales in Bud Light dropping by at least 23% compared to last year.Anheuser-Busch, the maker of Bud Light, put Heinerscheid and another marketing executive on leave. Brendan Whitworth, chief executive of Anheuser-Busch inBev, said in a statement in April amid the boycott that the brand “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together.”Just a few weeks later, Target announced it would remove some of its Pride month merchandise from some of its stores after a series of “volatile circumstances” in which a handful of customers confronted workers and damaged displays in stores.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It has really emboldened a lot of conservative activists to keep shouting because in these two cases, there were serious consequences,” Kirmani said. “Boycotts happen all the time, most of them are not successful.”The ire against Bud Light and Target quickly spread to Kohl’s, which received bomb threats for displaying Pride month merchandise, and Chick-fil-A, which had hired an executive to lead diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the company. The attack on Chick-fil-A surprised many given the company’s long history of supporting rightwing causes. Backlashes also pointed to Nike, North Face, the US navy and the LA Dodgers baseball team for social media posts and campaigns that celebrated Pride month.Eric Bloem, vice-president of programs and corporate advocacy at the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, said that it stresses to companies that they need to be prepared to defend their values when faced with attacks. Nike and North Face, he pointed out, stood by their decision to work with transgender models (Nike had worked with Mulvaney) after they faced backlash. Meanwhile, Bud Light and Target backed off.“The message that it sends is that it fuels extremist behavior … and that they can make Pride toxic. Once they are able to make Pride toxic for one company, they’re going to move on to the next,” Bloem said.Both Kirmani and Bloem said the conservative backlash against companies comes from a minority of people with extreme views. A survey from the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Glaad showed that 75% of participants said they are comfortable seeing LGBTQ+ people in advertising.“Let’s be clear that this is a coordinated attack against the LGBTQ+ community by a small group of extremists,” Bloem said. “There’s over 525 pieces of anti-LGBTQ+ pieces of legislation that have been pushed at the state level. These pieces of legislation are banning books, access to gender-affirming care for youth, they’re preventing trans youth from participating in sports. All of this is part of the larger context.”The wider context also suggests this fight isn’t going to end soon. The attacks on Target and Bud Light had real impact and DeSantis is not the only 2024 Republican presidential runner taking on “woke” corporations.Outlier candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a 37-year-old tech entrepreneur, has made his fight against corporate liberalism the centerpiece of his campaign. He is positioning his company, Strive Asset Management, as an alternative to investment firms like BlackRock.Ramaswamy may not be a frontrunner but he is gaining airtime and his message has the support of Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy and others. His views may be out of touch with younger voters, and many other Americans, but it’s one that captures an angry base that has found a cause to fight for. “Courage Is Contagious” is Ramaswamy’s campaign slogan. As corporate America is finding out, it is also going to be contentious. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Alarm at rightwing push to reverse clean-energy success in Texas and beyond

      by

      In the scramble before the end of Texas’s legislative session last week, a must-pass bill was amended to impose new costs upon renewable energy. This came amid a barrage of anti-solar and wind power measures pushed forward by Republicans to reshape a state that has become the US’s powerhouse of clean energy.But the conservative lawmakers had help.Sections of the bill that impose new burdens upon clean energy providers were directly crafted and edited by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (or TPPF), a conservative group that has led the backlash to renewables and to make what it calls “the moral case for fossil fuels”, according to a copy of the draft language seen by the Guardian.Several dozen edits were made to the bill’s amendments by Brent Bennett, a TPPF policy staffer, the document shows, and Texas lawmakers subsequently passed parts of this language along with the key TPPF desires – to impose new transmission costs on renewables and require them to source fossil fuel “backup” power when the sun isn’t shining or wind isn’t blowing.The passage of the bill, which funds the ongoing operation of the Public Utility Commission of Texas, was the flagship victory for TPPF even as a raft of other Republican bills that would have “shut down the renewable energy industry in Texas”, as energy analyst Doug Lewin put it, faltered.The burgeoning influence of TPPF, an organization substantially funded by fossil fuel interests and publicly lauded by Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, is the catalyst to a rightwing attempt to crimp the stunning progress of renewable energy in the state, which now produces more than a quarter of all wind-powered electricity in the US.The group’s agenda is now extending far beyond Texas, bankrolling efforts to halt offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts and to prop up coal power on native American land in Arizona while spearheading efforts to crack down on sustainable finance in energy-producing states like West Virginia.“We are very influential, we are meeting with policymakers to share recommendations and we’re having success around the country,” said Jason Isaac, a former state representative and now director of TPPF’s energy initiatives. Isaac said that TPFF regularly helped craft “certain aspects” of bills in Texas related to the state’s electricity grid or environmental, social, and corporate governance (or ESG) issues.“I think conservatives are slowly but surely moving away from variable generation and towards reliable generation,” he said of the group’s quest against renewables. Isaac claimed renewables have been unfairly propped up by a “cult-like fascination” among politicians who have pursued what he called a “dangerous and deadly” agenda to reduce planet-heating emissions.The aggressive push against renewables in Texas has alarmed environmentalists who fret it will undermine the state’s nation-leading wind industry and threaten the revenues solar and wind generates for local communities and farmers. More broadly, the template used by TPPF in Texas could hobble efforts by Joe Biden’s administration to tackle the climate crisis.“We are seeing a rush of these bills attempting to wind the clock back on renewables and TPPF really are at the point of the spear on this,” said Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas. “They are transparent advocates for the fossil fuel industry and I think they pose an incredible threat to renewables. TPPF have gained incredible traction, they really are shifting the narrative in Texas.“They’ve won over the top politicians in the state, which is very dangerous. Texas is going to be critical if the US going to get to net zero emissions, so we should take this threat seriously.”TPPF’s impact can now be found thousands of miles from its base in Austin, Texas, with the group filing a lawsuit in 2021 on behalf of six east coast fishing businesses – collectively called Nantucket Residents Against Turbines – targeting a major windfarm currently under construction off the coast of Massachusetts. Slated to come online by the end of the year, Vineyard Wind will be the first major offshore wind project to be built off the US east coast.The lawsuit claimed federal agencies did not sufficiently analyze how the project, which is set to deliver enough electricity to power 400,000 homes, would affect wildlife – specifically the endangered North Atlantic right whale – and thereby violated the Endangered Species Act and slew of other environmental policies.Meghan Lapp, a seafood dealer and longtime offshore wind critic who was a plaintiff in the suit, told Reuters in 2021 that TPPF got involved in the suit at her request. As it announced its involvement in the case, the thinktank also took the unusual step of releasing a trailer called “A Heavy Wind”.The case was ultimately unsuccessful after a federal judge dismissed it last month, but the idea that wind turbines kill whales has been seized upon by conservatives, especially since December, when dozens of whales began washing up on the Atlantic coast in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) calls an “unusual mortality event”.Noaa has said there is no evidence that offshore wind power is killing off whales, with fishing practices, boat strikes and the climate crisis among the primary dangers to marine mammals, but congressional Republicans have called on the White House to pause offshore wind development, while Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, aired a critical series of segments called “The Biden Whale Extinction”.The assault on renewables by TPPF and its Republican allies has stunned conservatives who remain supportive of the longstanding bipartisan enthusiasm for clean energy.The reversal has been particularly stark for Texas which, blessed with the capacious, flat terrain and amenable climate for abundant wind and solar energy, was championed as a bastion for renewables by previous Republican governors George W Bush and Rick Perry, even as they embraced the ubiquitous oil industry.More than 40% of Texas’s electricity came from carbon-free sources last year, with the state now producing more wind and solar than the next three states – California, Iowa and Oklahoma – combined. This imperious status now seems uncertain.“I don’t recognize the state sometimes any more from our elected leaders. It’s like we are in a twilight zone where up is down and day is night,” said Matt Welch, state director of Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation.“I fear we’re losing our lead in the nation and the world as the source for clean energy advancement. It’s just amazing we’ve rolled up the welcome mat and told wind and solar operators they’re just not welcome here any more.”The Texas Public Policy Foundation was founded in 1989 by James R Leininger, a San Antonio-based physician who made his fortune selling hospital beds, and initially focused on the issue of charter schools before branching out into other topics such as energy. The thinktank is a member of the State Policy Network, a network of far-right non-profits across the country that fight climate-focused legislation.In 2021, the most recent year for which records are available, donations for the thinktank totaled $25.6m. Publicly available data shows that – like many State Policy Network affiliates – its largest known funder is Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist who made his fortune from fossil fuels. Entities tied to Koch have contributed at least $8.8m to the group since 2012, according to an analysis by researcher Connor Gibson.Tax filings show that the group has received donations from fossil fuel companies including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Chevron, but, as a non-profit, the full extent of TPPF’s fossil fuel funding is unknown.Issac said, however, it has been “many years” since large oil firms such as Exxon have donated to TPPF as these companies now ostensibly support decarbonization and environmentally responsible corporate governance, which conflicts with the foundation. He insisted that the foundation is committed to “free enterprise and individual liberty” and the eradication of “market distorting” subsidies, not just for renewables but also fossil fuels.But Welch said that Republican lawmakers, backed by TPPF, have ditched any ideological consistency by heaping onerous restrictions on renewable energy development on private property, in some cases attempting to impose requirements absent from oil and gas drilling, and trying to slash subsidies for the industry at the same time as offering state support for the buildout of new gas plants.One proposed bill that didn’t get sufficient backing in the latest Texas legislative session would have placed stringent new rules for wind and solar projects, including written permissions from neighboring property owners and setbacks of up to half a mile from the edge of a property for wind turbines. Another would have cut all subsidies for renewable energy.“On a Tuesday these lawmakers will be adamantly for private property rights, but on a Thursday they will want to stop the growth of renewable energy even though it’s on somebody’s private land,” Welch said, adding that TPPF was once full of “mini Milton Friedmans for years until recently, and now all of a sudden they throw that out the window.“It’s been a shocker. It’s so hypocritical,” he said. “I used to be an acolyte of TPPF but they are now driven by oil and gas billionaires who want to stop alternative forms of energy to benefit their own bottom line. They’ve sold their soul to the almighty dollar.”Renewable energy remains broadly popular with the Texas public for delivering cheap, clean power along with an injection of cash for entities such as school districts, but affection has somewhat curdled among some of the state’s Republican leadership. A devastating winter storm in 2021, which left millions of Texans without power and led to several hundred deaths, was a major accelerant of this trend.In the days following the crippling event, known as winter storm Uri, Abbott and other leading Republicans pushed the blame for the power blackouts upon renewable energy, with misleading pictures of frozen wind turbines from Europe quickly circulating social media as the supposed cause of the grid’s breakdown.Subsequent studies have made clear the primary cause of the blackouts were frozen gas pipelines and a lack of infrastructure resiliency to extreme weather, rather than renewables per se, but the perception of faulty wind and solar has stuck, eagerly fanned by TPPF.“I still believe [renewables] deserve a lot of the blame,” said Isaac. “The storm was helpful in educating people who just assumed when they flip a switch the lights come on that there are issues with grid reliability, that solar panels covered in snow don’t produce electricity.”Isaac said the foundation accepts that the climate is changing but disputes that this is harmful to people, claiming that the benefits of burning of fossil fuels “far outweighs” any negatives, including deadly air pollution, which he asserts isn’t an issue for the US and its “near natural” air quality. Scientists have, in fact, found that the climate crisis poses huge and growing risks to humanity, with airborne pollutants from burning coal, oil and gas linked to an array of different health problems.While the most severe of the anti-renewables bills pushed forward in Texas didn’t pass the legislature this year, Isaac said that TPPF remains undaunted and will continue to agitate against what he called “the false panacea of variable power”. Supporters of clean energy said they expect further battles ahead to prevent Texas’s progress in solar and wind from being unwound.“With the growth trajectory of renewable energy, TPPF can either get on the train or lay down in front of the tracks,” said Welch. “I suspect they won’t rest on their laurels. They’re going to come for renewables again and again and again.” More