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      ‘I’m not voting for either’: fracking’s return stirs fury in Pennsylvania town whose water turned toxic

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      Fracking has burst back on to the national stage in the US presidential election contest for the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. But for one town in this state that saw its water become mud-brown, undrinkable and even flammable 15 years ago, the specter of fracking never went away.Residents in Dimock, a rural town of around 1,200 people in north-east Pennsylvania, have been locked in a lengthy battle to remediate their water supply that was ruined in 2009 after the drilling of dozens of wells to access a hotspot called the “Saudi Arabia of gas” found deep underneath their homes.The company behind the drilling, Texas-based Coterra, was barred from the area for years for its role in poisoning the private water wells Dimock relies upon and, in a landmark later move in 2020, was charged with multiple crimes. But it has now been ushered back into the area following a deal struck by the state’s Democratic leadership.The re-starting of drilling around Dimock late last year comes as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris clamor to cast themselves to Pennsylvania voters as supporters of fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, whereby water, sand and chemicals are injected deep underground to extract embedded oil and gas.“If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one,” Trump said of Harris, who previously supported a ban, during the duo’s televised debate last month. The former US president has run a barrage of ads in the state accusing Harris of wanting to shut down the fracking industry. But during the same debate, Harris insisted “I will not ban fracking”, with the vice-president boasting of new fracking leases granted during Joe Biden’s administration.This bipartisan embrace of fracking has stirred fury among residents of Dimock whose well water is still riddled by toxins linked to an array of health problems and, most spectacularly, contains so much flammable methane that people have passed out in the shower, wells exploded, and water running from the tap could be set on fire by match, according to official reports and accounts from locals.View image in fullscreen“Sure as hell, I’m not voting for either of those two assholes,” said Ray Kemble, a bearded military veteran and former trucker, as he puffed on a cigar in his home. Reams of documents and photos chronicling the long fight against fracking lay on the table next to Kemble, along with a bottle of his murky tap water, three Sherlock Holmes-style smoking pipes and a briefcase filled with handguns.Shortly after a gas well was drilled a few hundred feet from Kemble’s home, he said his drinking water turned from dark brown to green and finally jet back, with the liquid smelling like he had taken “every household chemical you can think of, dump it into a blender, take two asses of a skunk and put that in there, put it on puree, dump it out, and take a whiff”.“The water is still not fixed,” said Kemble, who blames the loss of most of his teeth to the presence of uranium, along with other contaminants such as copper and arsenic, in his water.“When a politicians’ lips are moving they are lying,” he said. “It’s a fricking nightmare. We are back to square one from before the moratorium came into effect – there’s massive drilling like crazy. I don’t care who you are, rich, poor, or whatever, without water and clean air and clean soil, we’re all freaking dead.”Kemble, a Republican who has printed cards featuring the Gadsen flag snake coiled around a gas well, has found unlikely allies in this saga, with figures such as Yoko Ono and Mark Ruffalo voicing concern for Dimock’s plight. His neighbor Victoria Switzer, a former school teacher turned artist whose paintings adorn a soaring timber-framed home beside a bucolic creek, is a rare liberal in this staunchly conservative county but also shares Kemble’s frustration.View image in fullscreen“I like Kamala, but I was unhappy when she said she wouldn’t ban fracking,” said Switzer, who said her water bubbled “like Alka-Seltzer” after the drilling started. Like Kemble, she now gets bottled water deliveries each week from Coterra.“But then the other guy [Trump] just says, ‘We’ll drill more, we’ll get rid of the regulations’ – so that should scare us. People are held hostage by the fossil-fuel industry here.”Although 1.5 million people across Pennsylvania live within half a mile of oil and gas wells, compressors and processors, not all feel as sharply affected by fracking and to win the state’s crucial 19 electoral votes, according to prevailing political thinking, means not threatening an industry that directly employs around 16,000 people, around 0.5% of all jobs in the state.“Fracking has become a big part of the election but there really isn’t much opposition to it now, it’s become part of life in Pennsylvania,” said Jeff Brauer, a political scientist at Pennsylvania’s Keystone College. “A fracking ban would be very unpopular and Kamala Harris knows she can’t be against fracking if she’s going to win here. She had to clean that up.”View image in fullscreenBut how popular is fracking? Polling shows a complicated picture rather than overwhelming support, with two 2020 surveys showing slightly more Pennsylvania voters want to ban fracking than keep it, while a separate 2022 poll found the reverse. Unusually, Pennsylvania’s constitution enshrines the right to “clean air, pure water and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment”, unlike neighboring New York, which is among a handful of states to ban fracking.“The idea you have to court some fictional rural fracking supporter with Trump signs in their yard is ludicrous,” said Josh Fox, a film-maker and activist whose 2010 documentary Gasland showed people in Dimock and elsewhere holding up jars of muddy brown drinking water and turning their tap water into a roaring flame by lighting it.“Democrats have been foolish to give up the votes of people fighting for their lives. It’s clear they are afraid of the oil and gas industry,” he said. Fox added he will still vote for Harris but that “Democrats have thrown away a chance to tell people in rural Pennsylvania they will fight to protect their children from toxins. It’s a legacy of moral failure going back to Obama.”In Dimock, particular ire is reserved for Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, who in his previous role as state attorney general in 2020 convened a grand jury and charged Coterra, then known as Cabot, prior to a merger, with eight felonies for endangering the town’s drinking water. “There were failures at every level,” Shapiro claimed, pointing to testimony of children in Dimock waking up with severe nosebleeds because of the pollution exposure.View image in fullscreenYet, the denouement of the case in a local courtroom in 2022 unveiled a deal in which all the felony charges were dropped, with Coterra pleading no contest to a single misdemeanor in return for the company agreeing to build a new $16m water pipe for residents. Crucially, on the same day, the state department of environmental protection – which had found Coterra tainted 19 private wells and barred drilling in the Dimock area for more than a decade – allowed the company back into the region.“I was shocked. I was a fan of Shapiro but he betrayed us. He betrayed me,” said Switzer, who took part in a press conference with Shapiro, prior to knowing details of the deal, where she praised the then attorney general.“I wish I could retract that. I would’ve called out that traitor Shapiro if I’d known,” she said. “We walked into a trap that allowed the drilling to restart. I mean, when I heard he was in the mix to be vice-president I almost threw up.”View image in fullscreenA spokesman for Shapiro said he is an “an all-of-the-above energy governor, and he is taking action to invest in affordable and reliable renewable energy while continuing to support the key energy resources that have helped Pennsylvania become the leader it is today”. The settlement with Coterra is “historic”, the spokesman said, and that the governor “will never forget the people of Dimock”. Coterra did not respond to a request for comment.The water line should emerge by the end of 2026, although construction of it, unlike the new drilling, has yet to start. Coterra is not allowed to drill directly in the heart of Dimock but can do so at its edges, and already has three towering well complexes boring 7,000ft down into a section of the Marcellus shale, a thick formation of layered, radioactive rock, which contains about 1.3tn cubic feet of gas worth an estimated $3.9bn.From these wellheads sprout 11 drilling lines, known as laterals, that bend underground horizontally and snake for several miles underneath about 80 Dimock properties, with one running directly under Switzer’s house. “They are cutting up the valley like Swiss cheese,” she said.The rumbling from a new oil pad two miles away keeps Switzer awake at night, as does the hundreds of trucks shuttling the vast cocktail of water, sand and chemicals used in fracking. “I can’t sleep now, so I find it harder to take than I once did,” she said. “We came here to enjoy nature, and this has just torn our lives apart.”View image in fullscreenThis new drilling requires Coterra to monitor local water supplies, plug the older gas wells that dot this rolling landscape and provide water to residents. Still, avoiding further contamination as the drills pierce the water table, via failures in the drill casings or leaks of the substances used to pry open the shale for its gas, cannot be fully assured.“The operations are on a much larger scale now, using millions of gallons more water, so no company can guarantee there will be no further leaks. Once wells are drilled they will leak,” said Anthony Ingraffea, an environmental engineer at Cornell University who has advised affected residents.“The nine square miles of Dimock is a goldmine of natural gas. It’s the most productive in the world,” Ingraffea said. “Coterra will be happy getting hold of that in return for a water pipeline that I don’t think will ever be built. It’s teasingly cruel to do this to people. When you look at people in Dimock, you see pain and uncertainty in their eyes.”View image in fullscreenMuch of the newly drilled gas will be shipped overseas and marketed as a “clean” fuel in a process that, in fact, emits more planet-heating pollution than coal. The fracking itself, which is exempt from certain clean water regulations, will also pose fresh health risks, with studies showing that Pennsylvanians who live near fracking are at heightened risk of childhood lymphoma, asthma, pre-term births and low birth weights.The Environmental Protection Agency, however, only regulates 29 out of more than 1,100 shale gas contaminants potentially found in drinking water, with a 2016 federal report acknowledging that wells in 27 Dimock homes contain unhealthy levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic and copper, with 17 of these homes at risk of exploding because of the build-up of flammable gas.For Kemble, the resumption of drilling is the final straw after years of him and his neighbors suffering cancers he believes is a result of the air and water pollution. Kemble said he has rigged up cameras at his home and fears he could be targeted for his activism.Despite the pressure around being outspoken, Kemble said: “I’m still here … but one of these wells will blow up like Old Faithful in Yellowstone one day. There’s already the constant smell, nosebleeds, headaches. I eat Tylenol like they are candy.”View image in fullscreenKemble, who hauls water from a hydrant to a huge water tank that he then has to filter into his house, recently donated his home to a new research non-profit that will test the property’s water, soil and plants for contamination, to help inform potential new laws. He will soon leave Dimock, his home of 30 years, like others have done before him, because of the water.“This is my final fuck you to everybody, there’s going to be a scientist behind every tree here,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, all the stories and all the fucking crap. I want the hell out of here.”

      The Guardian receives support for visual climate coverage from the Outrider Foundation. The Guardian’s coverage is editorially independent More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris urged to flesh out climate plan amid warnings about Trump

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      As the US south-east struggles to rebuild after two deadly and climate-fueled hurricanes, some environmental advocates are demanding Kamala Harris flesh out a strong climate plan.Since Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged parts of the country, the vice-president has slammed Donald Trump’s climate record by airing a new campaign ad showing the oft-criticized moment the former president redrew a hurricane’s path with a marker, and taking aim at Trump’s spread of climate misinformation and history of withholding disaster aid.Harris has also raised the alarm about Trump’s plans to slash environmental regulations. Yet she has not said much about her plans to deal with the climate crisis, instead pledging not to ban gas-powered cars in a Michigan speech and touting “record energy production” from the oil and gas industries during her vice-presidency on her website.The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, said that Harris had failed to build upon the strongest moments during her TV debate with Trump when she referenced the mounting costs of climate-driven disasters and their toll upon Americans’ ability to get home insurance.Since then, he said, the campaign had been “understating the depth of the danger”.“The American public need to know there are storm clouds ahead,” said Whitehouse, who chairs the Senate budget committee. “We will have to see if Harris and Walz are elected how they will move forward on policy but at the moment most Americans are not well informed of how serious this is going to get.”The lack of a climate focus from the campaign has been “frustrating” but was probably a calculation that there is little political benefit to bringing up such a glaringly obvious divide with Trump, according to Paul Bledsoe, who was an adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House on climate.“That might be the right political decision,” he said.But others are skeptical that Harris’s climate approach will deliver electorally. Though polls show that voters place more importance on other issues, such as the economy and immigration, they also indicate that a strong majority of US voters would prefer to vote for a candidate who supports climate action. Many surveys indicate there is broad support for renewable energy even in fossil fuel-heavy areas.“Pundits say she can’t risk losing any potential voters in Pennsylvania,” said Edward Maibach, the director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. “Taking a strong pro-climate action stance would almost certainly not cost her votes in [Pennsylvania] because more than half of voters in the state want to see the president take more, not less, climate action.Many national climate policies – from job training for fossil fuel workers to full fossil fuel phaseout by 2050 – also enjoy majority support.“I’m not convinced it’s good electoral strategy, because climate is an issue where voters trust Democrats more than Republicans so it actually would be a good issue to lean into to highlight the difference,” said Michael Greenberg, founder of the controversial activist group Climate Defiance, which endorsed Harris last month after meeting with her top climate aide.A major hurdle for Harris’s campaign, polls show, is that undecided voters feel they don’t know what she stands for, said Collin Rees, campaign manager at advocacy group Oil Change US.“It’s actively electorally harming her to not be more detailed,” he said.If Harris wins the election, Bledsoe said, “she will need to level with the American people about how emissions reductions need to happen or these storms, heatwaves and floods will get far worse”.But Rees said her approach has left space open for Trump to convince voters that climate policies are harmful, and that he is skeptical that Harris would make such a shift if elected.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I don’t know that there’s ever been an issue in history where somebody didn’t talk about it on the campaign trail … but then turned around and prioritized it after they were elected,” Rees said.Further irking advocates have been Harris’s attempts to appeal to conservatives. Last week, she pledged to create a bipartisan council of advisers if elected. The same day, she boasted her endorsements from former vice-president Dick Cheney and George W Bush’s attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who helped craft a legal case justifying torture.“We’re talking about courting neocons who support endless war when the military is one of the largest triggers of the climate crisis,” said Rees. “She’s courting members of a party that we know is not serious on climate even though we are all around us seeing the climate emergency.”Other Harris allies are sanguine about the absence of climate from her campaigning, pointing to her record as a prosecutor in taking on big oil and their expectation that she will push for aggressive climate action if she claims the White House.“She needs to talk about what will win this election, there’s only so much time for subjects and people have a limited bandwidth,” said Jay Inslee, the Democratic governor of Washington and a prominent climate advocate. “I’m not critical of the way she’s run her campaign, they’ve made decisions on how to use limited communication time and I’m confident when she’s in the White House she’ll be an effective leader on clean energy.”But the issue is not only one of messaging, but also of substance, said Rees.“I don’t think climate has to be the only issue or the top issue, but right now she’s denigrating climate policy, boasting about oil and gas exports, playing to the right,” he said. “But the terrible disasters of Helene and Milton provide an opening to show how climate is very closely connected to people’s lives and economic struggles. I don’t think it’s too late.”The youth-led environmental justice group Sunrise Movement, which also endorsed Harris, is also demanding she “change course”, noting Trump is gaining ground in swing states.“In 2020, Joe Biden won because he ran on bold climate action and economic justice, showing that you can both win swing voters and the Bernie Sanders base,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the group’s communication director. “In the last 20 days, we’re giving everything we’ve got to contact millions of people and turn out young voters to elect Harris. What we’re asking is that the Harris campaign help us do that.” More

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      in US Politics

      Our dystopian climate isn’t just about fires and floods. It’s about society fracturing | Bill McKibben

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      Even as the good people of Florida’s west coast pulled the soggy mattresses from Helene out to the curb, Milton appeared on the horizon this week – a double blast of destruction from the Gulf of Mexico that’s a reminder that physics takes no time off, not even in the weeks before a crucial election. My sense is that those storms will help turn the voting on 5 November into a climate election of sorts, even if – as is likely – neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump spend much time in the next 25 days talking about CO2 or solar power.That’s because these storms show not only the power of global heating (Helene’s record rains, and Milton’s almost unprecedented intensification, were reminders of what it means to have extremely hot ocean temperatures). More, they show what we’re going to need to survive the now inevitable train of such disasters. Which is solidarity. Which is something only one ticket offers.I confess that I’ve been all in to beat Trump for any number of reasons – Third Act, the group I founded to organize Americans over age 60 for action on climate and democracy, has been flooding the swing states with hundreds of thousands of postcards, and our silver wave door-knocking tour hits Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead But if there was one way to sum up what this election means to me, it would be: solidarity. In the 40 years since Ronald Reagan’s election, we’ve gone a long way down the path of hyper-individual, everyone for themselves. Joe Biden has tried to wrench the wheel back towards the FDR America-as-group-project model with tools like the spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, but it’s a work in progress. The climate crisis, above all, requires the return of that solidarity.That’s because there’s no way to keep it from getting worse without joint public action: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us we have five years left to cut emissions in half, which means it will not be accomplished one Tesla at a time; it requires aggressive public action of the kind the current White House is coordinating, as it sets up battery factories and shepherds new transmission lines through various regulatory fences.But there’s also no way to survive it, even in its current form, without intense cooperation. To give one example: Florida’s insurance system is clearly breaking down, as one storm after another drives private insurers out of the state.As the Tampa newspaper put it in June: “As the crisis escalates, state leaders are desperately trying to convince insurance companies to stick around. States are offering them more flexibility to raise premiums or drop certain homes from coverage, fast-tracking rate revisions and making it harder for residents to sue their insurance company.” But as that seawall begins to fail, “a flood of new policyholders are joining state-backed insurance ‘plans of last resort’, leaving states to assume more of the risk on behalf of residents who can’t find coverage in the private sector.”Indeed, so many people are swamping the “state-backed insurance plans” they’re becoming overloaded with risk. Ten months ago, the Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his budget committee colleagues wrote to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to ask for proof that Florida’s public Citizens Insurance could survive disasters like the one now bearing down on Tampa. DeSantis may have given his most eloquent response in May, when he signed a bill essentially outlawing the phrase “climate change” in Florida statutes. “I’m not a global warming person,” he explained.Meanwhile, across the upland terrain drenched by Helene, rightwing forces have been relentlessly spreading rumors: most prominently, that the Federal Emergency Management Administration (Fema) spent all its money on migrants and has none left for Americans. This is not true. (Indeed, its closest approach to truth came during the Trump years when Fema did divert relief funds to “tighten the border”.) But it’s one more way to divide people, to use their very real trauma for political gain.The dystopian future is not just about the endless fires and floods; it’s also about a society that pulls apart in their face, where people can’t work together because they’ve been so divided by disinformation and hate. It feels like Harris and Tim Walz are offering, above all, one last chance at an America where people actually work together on things, a United States. They even imagine a world where the world keeps working together, imagine that – one where we have, say, effective climate negotiations. That these things seem farfetched to us now is probably the strongest proof of how much they’re needed.

      Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College. He is the founder of Third Act, organizing people over 60 for progressive change More

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      in Elections

      Biden to Sign Bill Allowing Chip Projects to Skirt Key Environmental Review

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      The legislation, which would weaken federal environmental reviews for certain semiconductor manufacturing projects, has divided Democrats.More than two years ago, President Biden signed a law that aimed to ramp up the nation’s production of semiconductors by offering generous subsidies and tax credits to companies. Since then, chip manufacturers have invested billions of dollars into new plants across the country.But industry groups, along with federal officials, have long warned that lengthy federal environmental reviews could delay manufacturing projects for months or years, which could slow the country’s ability to scale up its chip manufacturing capacity.In the coming days, Mr. Biden is set to sign a bill that would weaken federal environmental reviews for certain semiconductor manufacturing projects that receive subsidies through the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. The bill, which has divided Democrats, underscores the challenges facing Mr. Biden as he tries to advance his economic agenda alongside his ambitious climate goals.The legislation would exempt qualifying chip projects from reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires federal agencies to assess the potential environmental effects of proposed major federal actions before they can proceed. The House passed the bill last week, and the Senate unanimously passed it in December.Proponents say the legislation would help to expedite the construction of chip manufacturing facilities, which would strengthen the U.S. economy and help to reduce the nation’s dependence on other countries for critical chips that can power items as varied as smartphones, cars and weapons systems. They say that projects will still have to comply with various federal, state and local environmental regulations and permitting requirements.Democrats who oppose the bill, however, say it would allow companies to skirt an important step aimed at reducing potential harms to the environment and workers. They argue that taxpayer-funded projects should be subject to a more holistic federal environmental review process, which would allow for more transparency and community input.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Jane Fonda rallies disaffected young US voters: ‘Do not sit this election out’

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      Young people’s understandable unhappiness with the Biden administration’s record on oil and gas drilling and the war in Gaza should not deter them from voting to block Donald Trump from again becoming president of the United States, the Hollywood actor and activist Jane Fonda has warned.“I understand why young people are really angry, and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”View image in fullscreenFonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by the Guardian, CBS News and Rolling Stone magazine.Making major social change requires massive, non-violent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it”, or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”View image in fullscreenScientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling, and fracking, and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state and local. “The Pac focuses down ballot – on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”Forty-two of the 60 candidates the Pac endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the Pac is providing money, voter outreach and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state”, she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California”.Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency”. She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our Pac candidates” as well.View image in fullscreenHer Pac has a strict rule: it endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said:polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “we’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris-Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well”. But she “was very disturbed that the No 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour-and-a-half to come up and was not really addressed”, she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”Given her years of anti-nuclear activism – including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979 – it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: no nuclear reactor of any kind – the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them – has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”The reason that solar – and wind and geothermal – energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it”. Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20bn a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet – but they run the world.”The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.“I think she’s awesome, amazing and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central valley and Kern county and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”View image in fullscreenClimate activism is also “so much fun”, she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘everything’s gonna be fine’, but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is: I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.”

      Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent for the Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now More

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      in US Politics

      Biden’s green policies will save 200,000 lives and have boosted clean energy jobs, data shows

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      The environmental policies of Joe Biden’s administration will save approximately 200,000 Americans’ lives from dangerous pollution in the coming decades and have spurred a surge in clean energy jobs, two independent reports outlining the stakes of the upcoming US presidential election have found.The first full year of the Inflation Reduction Act, the sprawling climate bill passed by Democratic votes in Congress in 2022, saw nearly 150,000 clean energy jobs added, according to a new report by nonpartisan business group E2.Nearly 3.5 million people now work in these fields in the US, more than the total number of nurses nationwide, with 1m of these jobs centered in the US south, a region politically dominated by Republicans.Clean energy jobs grew by 4.5% last year, nearly twice as fast as overall US employment growth, and account for one in 16 new jobs nationally, the report found. New roles in energy efficiency led the way, followed by an increase in jobs in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, electric car manufacturing and battery and electric grid upgrades.But the future of the IRA, which provides tax credits and grants for new clean energy activity, is a flashpoint in the election campaign, with Donald Trump vowing to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”.The former president and Republican nominee has accused Harris, his Democratic opponent, of waging a “war on American energy” and called for an end to incentives encouraging Americans to drive electric cars.Harris, who has promised in unspecified ways to build upon the IRA, has attacked Trump for “surrendering” on the climate crisis as well as in the US’s attempts to compete with China, the world’s clean energy manufacturing powerhouse.Bob O’Keefe, executive director of E2, said the IRA has helped lead “an American economic revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations”.“But we’re just getting started,” Keefe added. “The biggest threats to this unprecedented progress are misguided efforts to repeal or roll back parts of the IRA, despite the law’s clear benefits both to American workers and the communities where they live.”Should Trump return to the White House, he will need congressional approval to completely repeal the IRA, although his administration could slow down and even claw back funding allocated but not yet released for clean energy projects, such as the $500m pledged for a green overhaul of a steel mill in JD Vance’s home town of Middletown, Ohio.A new Trump administration would have more discretion, though, over the future of air pollution regulations set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Biden. “One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies, they make it impossible to do anything,” Trump has complained while on the campaign trail.Any major rollbacks will have a heavy toll upon public health, however, with a new analysis of 16 regulations passed by the EPA since Biden’s term started in 2021 finding that they are on track to save 200,000 lives and prevent more than 100m asthma attacks by 2050.The analysis, conducted by the Environmental Protection Network, a group founded by retired EPA staff, calculated the public health benefits of the suite of new rules that aim to limit pollution flowing from cars, power plants and oil and gas operations.Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser at the EPA and a co-author of the report, said the findings were “jaw-dropping”. He added: “The EPA’s accomplishments have been nothing short of lifesaving over the last four years. These are real people who wouldn’t be alive if not for the non-partisan work of the EPA to start doing its job again after the last administration.”It’s unclear what Trump’s exact plan for the EPA would be should he regain power but he attempted to radically cut the agency’s budget when he was president, only to be rebuffed by Congress, and oversaw the elimination and weakening of a host of pollution rules.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump has directly promised oil and gas industry executives a fresh wave of deregulation should he return to the White House, in return for $1bn in campaign contributions.Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials but disavowed by the Trump campaign, demands the dismantling of parts of the agency, a rollback of environmental rules and a politicization of decision making.“This would put polluters in charge of air regulations and put millions of Americans at needless risk of cancer, heart disease and asthma,” said Symons.“Several of the authors of Project 2025 used the years of working at the EPA under Trump as a training ground for more reckless plans should they get their hands on the agency again. This plan would be a wrecking ball to the EPA.”Asked to comment, the Trump campaign criticized the Biden-Harris administration on inflation and what it called its “war on energy”.“Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate for the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which actually created the worst inflation crisis in a generation. She proudly helped Joe Biden implement all of his disastrous policies including his war on American energy that is driving up prices astronomically for American consumers,” said Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign national press secretary.“President Trump is the only candidate who will make America energy dominant again, protect our energy jobs, and bring down the cost of living for all Americans,” Leavitt added.An EPA spokesperson said: “We appreciate the work of the Environmental Protection Network and look forward to reviewing their report. EPA remains committed to protecting public health and the environment by implementing science-based pollution standards that address climate change and improve air quality for all Americans.” More

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      The Stakes: how JD Vance’s home town has won millions in climate investment that he calls a ‘green scam’

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      This is the first part of the standfirst This is the second part of the standfirst Headline what’s at stake?
      View image in fullscreenA hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.Its future, however, may hinge upon $500m in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.View image in fullscreenIn a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’,” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370bn bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.View image in fullscreenThe steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, who he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior – the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class”, Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10bn in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer”, and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China”.America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories”, Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J Trump.”Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.Such plans have major implications for Vance’s home town. The Middletown plant’s $500m grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds”.Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs and out-of-town malls.“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.View image in fullscreenClimate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500m investment in US manufacturing in his own home town,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his home town, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that big oil can profit.”Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio”, according to Messer.“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them – how else will this empty floodplain produce $1m for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry – he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with polls showing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump – with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden – in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.View image in fullscreen“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.View image in fullscreen“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just 4 miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightwards shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.” More

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      ‘Democrats are losing’: a battle on EVs could cost Kamala Harris votes in Michigan

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      As the critical swing state of Michigan hangs in the balance, experts warn that Democrats’ poor messaging over the shift to electric vehicles could lose them the state in November’s election.“I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration, which is happening right now,” Donald Trump told the Republican national convention in a speech this summer that would reach tens of millions of people.Despite his burgeoning friendship with Tesla’s Elon Musk, Trump has remained a consistent critic of EVs and battery-powered vehicles more generally. The messaging has resonated with many United Auto Workers (UAW) members, eroding Joe Biden’s support among union members in Michigan by as much as 25 points since the 2020 election.The claim that EVs require less labor is probably not true: multiple studies and industry executives have said it takes about as much or more labor to produce EVs. Still, the Biden-Harris campaign has not pushed that essential point, and in the process is losing the messaging war over EVs, imperiling Democrats’ chances in tightly contested Michigan as union support sputters, according to Bernie Porn, an Epic-MRA Michigan pollster.“Biden and Democrats are doing a lousy job on messaging [on EVs],” said Porn. “Democrats are losing support … but they’ve been silent.”Autoworker votes are critical to Michigan and other must-win upper midwest industrial swing states – Trump won there by a narrow 10,000 votes in 2016.Biden retook the state with broad union support four years later, but by late 2023, union members here preferred Trump over Biden by a 47-40 margin, Epic-MRA found. Following the UAW endorsement early this year, Biden’s support among unions bounced up to 52% – but still 13 points below the last election.About 55% of state residents are also opposed to the EV transition, polling found.Trump’s claim that the EV transition represents the US auto industry’s death knell began to deeply worry union members as Biden guided the nation into the EV transition via the billions of dollars of investment in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act.Trump regularly claims EVs require up to 40% less labor to make than gasoline cars, a statistic repeated by Brian Pannebecker, who backs Trump and is a former UAW member.Even with the evidence that EVs take the same or more time to produce, skepticism among many autoworkers persists, he said.“Of course we’re not going like that,” Pannebecker said. “We’d be suicidal or stupid if we did.”But Trump’s claims are not true, and the job-creating power of EVs is “the biggest secret in politics”, said Mike Murphy, a Republican with the EV Politics Project, a non-profit that pushes for stronger EV policy.Its recent focus groups and polling found people across the political spectrum are more supportive of EVs when they learn that it creates jobs, and EV Politics Project is planning to air a television commercial that hits on that point in the coming weeks.“I don’t know why the Biden-Harris administration has been so bad at telling the story,” Murphy added. “They need to go on the offense.”Democrats could point to recent General Motors statements on the issue.“We’ve done our own analysis at General Motors, and there are other studies that have affirmed that the employee base needed in the future for EV production is very similar to what’s needed for a comparable [internal combustion] vehicle today,” GM executive Gerald Johnson said.GM is building a massive new battery plant in Michigan, which has the most announced battery production nationwide. At least seven plants have opened or are in the works, and UAW leadership has been supportive of the EV expansion.A spokesperson for UAW said support for the EV transition among union members was strong, dismissing opposition within its ranks as rooted in partisan politics.Parsing EV productionThe idea that EV production requires fewer hours can be traced back to several out-of-context comments made by auto executives and companies underestimating the time demands in 2017, a Heatmap analysis found.Trump has run with the comments, and the messaging has bounced around the echo chamber without much media scrutiny. On its face the claim makes sense – EVs require fewer parts in their powertrain, so it takes less time to assemble.The powertrain is what propels the car, and in gas-powered vehicles it contains over 1,000 parts that make up the engine and transmission. An EV powertrain is seemingly simpler – just a few hundred components with batteries, electric motors and power management systems.But industry observers say the claims about labor hours seem to omit battery packs. And when every component and the complexity of the EV powertrain production process is factored in, it takes about the same or more time to put it together, a recent Carnegie Mellon study found.The research used shop floor level data and interviews with autoworkers at nine plants to determine how long it takes to make each EV powertrain part. The researchers found EV powertrains require about two to three times more labor to produce than gas – up to 11 worker hours per gas powertrain compared with up to 24 worker hours for a battery powertrain.“You need to unpack the black box of the production process to figure out whether the assembly time reduction was outweighed by an increase in fabrication complexity,“ said Christophe Combemale, a study co-author. “We can say very strongly at the moment the evidence suggests it takes as many or perhaps more labor hours to produce [an EV powertrain].”Recent University of Michigan research took a different approach. It examined output at three factories where EV production replaced gas production. It found output is higher at gas plants, meaning more hours are required to build EVs – a former California GM/Toyota plant produced 80 vehicles per person per year, while a Tesla plant now in the facility averages 30.Researchers at the Boston Consulting Group came to a similar conclusion in an analysis that looked at an entire car’s assembly. It also noted time-consuming complexities in EV production, like the battery pack’s heavy weight, which requires the rest of the car to be much lighter than a gas-powered vehicle. The Tesla Model S battery pack weighs more than half a ton, which is offset by using aluminum instead of steel, as is standard with gas vehicles, the paper notes.However, aluminum is “trickier to work with in a factory” because it is comparatively weak, the paper states, demanding expensive adjustments like spot welding to shore up its strength. The installation of the charging unit, additional wiring, battery loading and alignment all require time not needed in gas assembly.“This is a significant change for an industry that has spent more than 100 years developing and improving engine manufacturing and vehicle assembly to the highest degrees of efficiency,” the paper states.CaveatsAs the nascent EV production process matures, automakers will find efficiencies that will reduce the manufacturing time. Meanwhile, while the EV market is growing, sales have been slower than expected, and some Michigan plants have recently laid off workers or scaled back employment figures.In his critique of EVs, Pannebecker, the Trump-backing former UAW member, pointed out the most obvious caveat to research showing they take more hours: batteries and their components largely are not made in the US at the moment, so they are not of use to the UAW.“No matter which way you look at it, it’s a losing proposition for autoworkers,” Pannebecker said.As much as 80% of lithium ion batteries are estimated to be produced in China, but that is changing. A slew of battery plants are scheduled to come online in the US in the coming years in addition to more than 30 already operating, and five of those will be in Michigan.Even if those plants are built, Pannebecker noted, many of them are not unionized and only pay $15-$18 an hour. Near Youngstown, Ohio, an Ultium battery plant near the once-storied GM Lordstown plant suffers from high turnover because of the low pay that workers there say is in line with a local Waffle House.But that is also changing. Late last year and early this year the UAW made battery plants a priority in its negotiations with automakers, and the plants’ workers can now unionize.Meanwhile, the Chips and Science Act aimed at reshoring the semiconductor industry that produces critical components to EVs is also helping shift component production to the US. Combemale said there is some potential for autoworkers to be retrained or take on jobs in semiconductor plants or other higher tech settings than a shop floor.Still, this broad narrative does not seem to be reaching many Michiganders, whether in a union or not. The most recent polling shows only 56% of Michigan union members approve of the EV transition – far below the 74% of Democrats who approve of it. Meanwhile, union members’ families disapprove by a 51-45% margin, and support among independent voters is even lower.But it’s not too late to change the messaging for this election, and into the future, said EV Politics’ Murphy. Part of the problem may be generational within union ranks – older guys are less supportive because they won’t be around as the EV transition progresses, Murphy said.Democrats need to stop making EVs an environmental issue, which will “divide the voters in half”, Murphy said, and instead push the job creation narrative. His focus groups found an up to 19-point improvement on EV approval rating when messaging focused on the latter.“It’s a very powerful way to reframe the argument,” Murphy said. “It’s one of the best bragging rights they’ve got. This isn’t hard, it’s just a story no one knows.” More