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      Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aims

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      Criticism intensifies after big oil admits ‘gaslighting’ public over green aimsFury as ‘explosive’ files reveal largest oil companies contradicted public statements and wished bedbugs upon critical activists Criticism in the US of the oil industry’s obfuscation over the climate crisis is intensifying after internal documents showed companies attempted to distance themselves from agreed climate goals, admitted “gaslighting” the public over purported efforts to go green, and even wished critical activists be infested by bedbugs.The communications were unveiled as part of a congressional hearing held in Washington DC, where an investigation into the role of fossil fuels in driving the climate crisis produced documents obtained from the oil giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP.“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they wish bedbugs on you, then you win,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of Sunrise. The organization accused Shell of a “legacy of violence and of ignoring the wellbeing of communities across the globe”.Pakistan floods ‘made up to 50% worse by global heating’Read moreThe revelations are part of the third hearing held by the House committee on oversight and reform on how the fossil-fuel industry sought to hamper the effort to address the climate crisis. Democrats, who lead the committee, called top executives from the oil companies to testify last year, in which they denied they had misled the public.The new documents are “the latest evidence that oil giants keep lying about their commitments to help solve the climate crisis and should never be trusted by policymakers”, said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity.“If there is one thing consistent about the oil and gas majors’ position on climate, it’s their utter inability to tell the truth,” Wiles added.Ro Khanna, co-chair of the committee, said the new documents are “explosive” and show a “culture of intense disrespect” to climate activists. The oil giants’ “climate pledges rely on unproven technology, accounting gimmicks and misleading language to hide the reality,” he added. “Big oil executives are laughing at the people trying to protect our planet while they knowingly work to destroy it.”Several of the emails and memos within the released trove of documents appear to show executives, staffers and lobbyists internally contradicting public pronouncements by their companies to act on lowering planet-heating emissions.Exxon, which recently announced profits of $17.9bn for the three months until June, more than three times what it earned in the same quarter a year ago, has publicly said it is “committed” to the Paris climate agreement to curb global heating.However, the documents released by the Democratic-led House committee include an August 2019 memo by an executive to Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, on the need to “remove reference to Paris agreement” from an announcement by an industry lobby group that Exxon is a member of.Such a statement “could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals”, the executive warned. A separate note on a 2018 Exxon presentation also admitted that biofuels derived from algae was still “decades away from the scale we need”, despite the company long promoting it as a way to lower emissions.Shell, meanwhile, has committed to becoming a “net zero” emissions business by 2050, and yet the documents show a private 2020 communication in which employees are urged to never “imply, suggest, or leave it open for possible misinterpretation that (net zero) is a Shell goal or target”. Shell has “no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio” over the next 10 to 20 years, it added.A Shell tweet posted in 2020 asking others what they could do to reduce emissions resulted in a torrent of ridicule from Twitter users. A communications executive for the company wrote privately that criticism that the tweet was “gaslighting” the public was “not totally without merit” and that the tweet was “pretty tone deaf”. He added: “We are, after all, in a tweet like this implying others need to sacrifice without focusing on ourselves.”The UK-headquartered oil company, which in July announced a record $11.5bn quarterly profit, also poured scorn on climate activists, with a communications specialist at the company emailing in 2019 that he wished “bedbugs” upon the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led US climate group.Previous releases of internal documents have shown that the oil industry knew of the devastating impact of climate change but chose instead to downplay and even deny these findings publicly in order to maintain their business model.The hearings have been attacked by Republicans as a method to “wage war on America’s energy producers” and the oil companies involved have complained that the documents don’t show the full picture of their stance on the climate crisis.Exxon supports the 2015 Paris climate deal, a spokesman said, claiming that the “selective publication of dated emails, without context, is a deliberate attempt to generate a narrative that does not reflect the commitment of ExxonMobil and its employees, to address climate change and play a leading role in the transition to a net-zero future.”A Shell spokesman, meanwhile, said the committee chose to highlight only a small handful of the nearly half a million pages it provided to the body on its “extensive efforts” to take part in the energy transition.“Within that pursuit are challenging internal and external discussions that signal Shell’s intent to form partnerships and share pathways we deem critical to becoming a net-zero energy business,” he said.TopicsClimate crisisUS politicsFossil fuelsOilnewsReuse this content More

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old

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      The Nation That Never Was review: a new American origin story, from the ashes of the old Kermit Roosevelt III, descendant of Theodore, sees lessons for today’s divided nation in Reconstruction and the civil rights era As with the climate, in politics we are running out of time. America’s retreat from democracy cannot persist. Though Native Americans, Black people, women and plenty others of us were excluded from America’s compact of equality and opportunity, many are still nostalgic for once upon a time. Some see even so flawed a quest for “a more perfect union” as admirable enough to deem it beyond reproach. After all, the argument goes, the American experiment always included and valued most. So that’s alright. All do not think that way.‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American historyRead moreKermit Roosevelt III illuminates tumultuous today by examining the contentious beginning. With The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, he thoughtfully explains our growing confusion as to what the creation meant and means.How can so many, looking back to the intentions of the founders, be so misled now? How have we misinterpreted what America has always been about? Citing an evolution as profound as “an eye for an eye” metamorphosing to “God is love”, Roosevelt’s investigation gives lie to every originalist argument today. One might even be tempted to view the United States’ contradictory impediment of slavery like Christianity’s “blessing” of original sin, the absence of which, theologians say, precludes salvation.Roosevelt is a Penn law professor and a great-great grandson of the “trust-busting” 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt. He is careful to give credit where credit is due. He notes his book was prefigured by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s powerful 2019 essay, Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.Created for the New York Times’ groundbreaking 1619 Project, Hannah-Jones’s piece relates: “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie … despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, Black Americans … have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves – Black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.”Roosevelt endorses this sentiment by stating that the Declaration of Independence was not conceived as a document dedicated to impartiality. Au contraire. As he puts it, it protected the rights and interests of “insiders” from the striving and ambitions of “outsiders”, a push and pull, he says, that remains in effect.The nub of the Declaration, Roosevelt asserts, is that when supposedly free people are oppressed, it is incumbent upon them to rebel. Ironically, it was only with the arrival of the civil war, rebelling southern states invoking the supposed tyranny of efforts to end their oppression of others, that America was redeemed.The result was not just a second revolution. It presented us with a second constitution, one that in important ways undid the slavery-supporting first constitution.And yet despite the indifference of that document to individual rights, Roosevelt writes: “We tell ourselves a story that links us to a past political regime – Founding America, the America of the Declaration of Independence and the Founders’ Constitution – to which we are not the heirs … We are more properly the heirs of the people who destroyed that regime”, who “defeated it by force of arms”.Abraham Lincoln appreciated this. So did Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Yet each strategically choose to give credence to the more broad appeal of the founding myth. Both the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech do this. So many, their authors understood, find embracing an origin story based on the ideal of universal inclusion more palatable than our tainted reality.Moreover, the second constitution, contingent and evolving, requires both “the blood of patriots and tyrants” Thomas Jefferson proscribed to sustain liberty and the “eternal vigilance” he also recommended. To ward off neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, far-right Christians and the like takes the fortitude of activists like Black Lives Matter combined with the sacrifice of a Bobby, Martin, Malcom or John. There is no less grievous way.Realizing our promise, Roosevelt insists, requires completing the reform of Reconstruction and the civil rights era. Relics supporting the privilege of “insiders” – the electoral college, encumbrances of voting rights, pay-to-play election financing – all must be banished.The Nation That Never Was makes one all too aware of the ways insiders protect their advantage. Always they urge patience in what they see as a benevolent, color-blind system. Professing that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”, even King grew weary waiting.So have I. Concerned about the modest size of a newly protected historic district, Harlem residents were reassured by the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission that they needn’t worry.“This is our opening salvo. We’ll be back to do more…”Their return only took 44 years.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead moreRoosevelt is at his poignant, tragicomic best when calling-out perennial efforts to rationalize and justify the biases of white supremacy into public policy and law. Did the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, really believe his 2013 ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act? He said racially motivated voter suppression was a problem of the past, that “the nation is no longer divided” into states with a recent history of voter suppression and those without.Plessy v Ferguson, the overturning of Roe v Wade, depriving the franchise to so many inhabitants. American history is not a saga of anomalous outrage. Every incident of persisting misogyny, homophobia or racism brings to the fore the problem Roosevelt seeks to address.No matter how familiar Laozi’s truism, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”, some people today are just like those in all the other volumes I’ve reviewed here. Wether in Wilmington’s Lie, Learning From the Germans, The Other Madisons or The Groundbreaking, the common obstacle to change and healing is reluctance to even admitting that anything bad ever happened – much less that an injustice stands unamended.
      The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story, is published in the US by University of Chicago press
      TopicsBooksUS politicsRaceCivil rights movementAmerican civil warHistory booksPolitics booksreviewsReuse this content More

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery

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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders ‘cancer-free’ after thyroid surgery‘By the grace of God, I am now cancer-free’, Sanders, 42, formerly Trump’s press secretary, says after successful operation Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Donald Trump White House press secretary turned Republican candidate for Arkansas governor, said on Friday she was “cancer-free” after undergoing surgery for thyroid cancer.In a statement, Sanders, aged 42, said the cancer was discovered during a check-up this month.“Today I underwent a successful surgery to remove my thyroid and surrounding lymph nodes and by the grace of God, I am now cancer-free,” she said. “I want to thank the Arkansas doctors and nurses for their world-class care, as well as my family and friends for their love, prayers and support. I look forward to returning to the campaign trail soon.”Sanders added: “This experience has been a reminder that whatever battles you may be facing, don’t lose heart. As governor I will never quit fighting for the people of our great state.”In May this year, Sanders strolled to victory in the Arkansas Republican primary to succeed Asa Hutchinson, a relative moderate in Trump’s GOP, as governor next year.She will face the Democrat Chris Jones in November. All major polling and predictions sites rate Arkansas “solid Republican”.Sanders’s father, Mike Huckabee, was governor of Arkansas and twice ran from the Christian right for the Republican presidential nomination.His daughter became Donald Trump’s second White House press secretary after the resignation of Sean Spicer, the party operative who endured a hapless spell in the role.Under Sanders, White House press briefings were first combative then dwindled as Trump sought to bypass what he deemed hostile media coverage.As the Guardian said when Sanders left the White House in 2019, as press secretary she “provided stability after Spicer’s series of wayward gaffes and, unlike other Trump officials, stayed in his good graces with her unswerving, often ostentatious shows of loyalty.”02:43Earlier that same year, she told the Christian TV network CBN that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president”.Sanders featured in Robert Mueller’s report on Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow. The special counsel showed that her claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”, James Comey, was a lie.As reported by Mueller, Sanders called the remark a “slip of the tongue” made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.After leaving Trump’s employ, Sanders took aim at Arkansas politics, releasing a typically loyal memoir, Speaking for Myself, in September 2020.Among other anecdotes about her time working for Trump, the book did reveal the odd potentially embarrassing story. In one such passage, Sanders said Trump joked about her “tak[ing] one for the team” when North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un apparently took a liking to her during summit talks.TopicsUS politicsArkansasnewsReuse this content More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activist

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to kick teenage gun control activistFar-right congresswoman tweets footage of her seeming to kick Marianna Pecora during exchange in Washington on Thursday Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted footage to Twitter in which she appears to kick an 18-year-old activist pressing her on gun control outside the Capitol in Washington.The activist, Marianna Pecora, indicated she could press charges.The encounter, in which Pecora and others asked about gun control in light of recent mass shootings in the US, happened as the Georgia congresswoman left the Capitol on Thursday. Greene has championed gun rights.January 6 panel could release report on Trump and Capitol attack before midterms – liveRead moreIn her tweet, Greene wrote: “These foolish cowards want the government to take away guns and the rights of parents to defend their children in schools.“You have to be an idiot to think gun control will create a utopian society where criminals disarm themselves and obey the law. ‘Gun-free’ zones kill people.”Pecora is deputy communications director for the group Voters of Tomorrow.On Twitter, she said: “Our team is in DC this week to lobby for youth rights. All the members of Congress we’ve met with so far (both Republicans and Democrats) have been nothing but respectful – except for Marjorie Taylor Greene. She kicked me.”In the footage, Pecora and others argue with Greene and film with their phones. Pecora walks in front of Greene, who appears to tread on her heel. Greene repeats “excuse me” and appears to kick Pecora’s leg from behind.Pecora then protests and Greene waves her off.Nick Dyer, Greene’s communications director, says: “You’re blocking a member of Congress. You can’t block members of Congress.”On Twitter, Pecora said she “started out Hispanic Heritage Month by getting kicked by [Greene]. I’ve never been prouder to be a Mexican-American.”She also wrote: “First month living in DC and I get featured in” the Washington Post.Pecora told the paper: “It’s honestly, like, really disheartening to think that a bunch of kids can hold themselves with better composure than a sitting member of Congress.”The Post said Dyer “voiced objections to the description of the video and described a version of events unsubstantiated by video evidence”.Greene has initiated other public confrontations, including harassing the gun control campaigner David Hogg, also 18 at the time, and the New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, incidents that achieved online infamy of their own.Pecora pointed to a message from Santiago Mayer, the Mexican-born founder of Voters for Tomorrow whom Greene said should “move to another country”.Mayer wrote: “To answer the most prevalent question about pressing charges: we’re talking to our legal team and keeping our options open. Love y’all.”TopicsUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Russian Military Rout in Ukraine has Major Implications for the MENA Region

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America

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      The Divider review: riveting narrative of Trump’s plot against America Peter Baker and Susan Glasser offer a beautifully written, utterly dispiriting history of the man who attacked democracyThe US labors in Donald Trump’s shadow, the Republican party “reborn in his image”, to quote Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. Trump is out of office but not out of sight or mind. Determined to explain “what happened” on 6 January 2021, when Trump supporters attacked the Capitol, the husband-and-wife team examines his term in the White House and its chaotic aftermath. Their narrative is riveting, their observations dispiriting.Trump chief of staff used book on president’s mental health as guideRead moreThe US is still counted as a liberal democracy but is poised to stumble out of that state. The stench of autocratization wafts. Maga-world demanded a Caesar. It came close to realizing its dream.In electing Trump, Baker and Glasser write, the US empowered a leader who “attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home” and “venerated” strongmen abroad. Whether the system winds up in the “morgue” and how much time remains to make sure it doesn’t are the authors’ open questions.Trump spoke kindly of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un. He treated Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine as a plaything, to be blackmailed for personal gain.In a moment of pique, Trump sought to give the Israeli-controlled West Bank to King Abdullah of Jordan. For Benjamin Netanyahu, the former and possibly future prime minister of Israel, he had a tart “fuck him”.At home, the US is mired in a cold civil war. Half the country deems Trump unfit to hold office, half would grant him a second term, possibly as president for life. Trump’s “big lie”, that the 2020 election was stolen, is potent.The tectonics of education, religion and race clang loudly – and occasionally violently. The insurrection stands as bloody testament to populism and Christian nationalism. The cross and the noose are icons. The Confederacy has risen.Baker is the New York Times’s chief White House correspondent. Glasser works for the New Yorker and CNN. Their book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Those who were in and around the West Wing talk and share documents. Baker and Glasser lay out receipts. They conducted more than 300 interviews. They met Trump at Mar-a-Lago, “his rococo palace by the sea”, to which we now know he took more than 300 classified documents.“When we sat down with [him] a year after his defeat,” Baker and Glasser write, “the first thing he told us was a lie.”Imagine that.Trump falsely claimed the Biden administration had asked him to record a public service announcement promoting Covid vaccinations. Eventually, he forgot he had spun that yarn. It never happened.Baker and Glasser depict a tempestuous president and a storm-filled presidency. Trump’s time behind the Resolute Desk translated into “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms, abrupt dismissals”. The authors now compare Trump to Napoleon, exiled to Elba.Congress impeached him twice. He never won the popular vote. His legitimacy flowed from the electoral college, the biggest quirk in the constitution, a document he readily and repeatedly defiled. Tradition and norms counted little. The military came to understand that Trump was bent on staging a coup. The guardrails nearly failed.The führer was a role-model. Trump loudly complained to John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”“Which generals?”“The German generals in world war II.”“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?”It’s fair to say Trump probably did not know that. He dodged the Vietnam draft, suffering from “bone spurs”, with better things to do. He is … not a reader.In Trump’s White House, Baker and Glasser write, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as some sort of owner’s manual.A week before Christmas 2020, Trump met another retired general, the freshly pardoned Michael Flynn, and other election-deniers including Patrick Byrne, once a boyfriend of Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent. Hours later, past midnight, Trump tweeted “Big protest in DC on January 6th … Be there, will be wild!”In that moment, the fears of Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who saw the coup coming, “no longer seemed far-fetched”. Now, as new midterm elections approach, Republicans signal that they will grill Milley if they retake the House.Baker and Glasser also write of how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump sought refuge from the Trumpian storm, despite being his senior advisers. They endeavored to keep their hands clean but the muck cascaded downward.Not everyone shared their discomfort. Donald Trump Jr proposed “ways to annul the will of the voters”. Rick Perry, the energy secretary, pushed for Republican state legislatures to declare Trump the winner regardless of reality.“HERE’s an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY,” a Perry text message read.Trump’s increasing tirade against FBI and DoJ endangering lives of officialsRead moreIn such a rogues’ gallery, even the wife of a sitting supreme court justice, Ginni Thomas, stood ready to help. Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, was a child who yearned for his parent’s affection. He would say and do anything. And yet he managed to spill the beans on Trump testing positive for Covid before debating Biden. Trump called Meadows “fucking stupid”. Meadows has since complied with subpoenas issued by the Department of Justice and the January 6 committee.Baker and Glasser conclude by noting Trump’s advanced age and looking at “would-be Trumps” who might pick up the torch. They name Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson.On Thursday, Trump threatened violence if he is criminally charged.“I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before,” he said. “I don’t think the people of the US would stand for it.”As Timbuk 3 once sang, with grim irony: “The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”
      The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 is published in the US by Penguin Random House
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS Capitol attackUS politicsRepublicansThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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      Why Biden blames Trump’s MAGA as a threat to democracy: Politics Weekly America | podcast

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      After Joe Biden delivered a landmark speech a couple of weeks ago warning that the extremism of Donald Trump’s Republican supporters now threatened the country’s democratic foundations, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the journalist Luke Mogelson, who has written a book chronicling the transformation of America in the run-up to January 6

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      Biden vows to tackle ‘venom and violence of white supremacy’ and decries Trump over Charlottesville – live

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      “White supremacist will not have the last word and this venom and violence cannot be the story of our time,” Biden said. Biden listed off a series of attacks against Jewish people, trans people, Asian Americans…He specifically mentioned the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and violence against Asian Americans amid the pandemic, and bomb threats at HBCUs. “All forms of hate fueled violence have no place in America,” he said, adding that we must “silence it, rather than remain silent.”Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who served more than four years in prison for leaking a report on Russian interference in the 2016 US election, has said she finds accusations that Donald Trump mishandled sensitive documents “incredibly ironic”, given her prosecution under his administration.An FBI search of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last month found more than 300 classified documents.Speaking to NBC News, Winner, 30, said: “It is incredibly ironic, and I would just let the justice department sort it out.”Winner added that it “wasn’t hard to believe” Trump held on to classified documents.Reflecting on her own prison sentence, she said: “What I did when I broke the law was a political act at a very politically charged time.”Winner also said she did not believe Trump should go to prison. She did not comment further on whether the former president should face charges under the Espionage Act, as she did in 2017.“This is not a case where I expect to see any prison time,” Winner said, “and I’m just fine with that.”Winner was released early, on good behavior, in June 2021.The US is expected to announce a new $600m arms package to help the Ukrainian military, Reuters reports:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}Two of the people familiar with the deliberations said the package could be announced later this evening
      Several sources said it was expected the package would contain munitions, including more High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). Two of the sources said the package would include ammunition for howitzers
      The White House declined to comment.
      Washington has sent about $15.1bn in security assistance to the Kyiv government since Russia’s invasion.Here’s a 2017 interview by my colleague Lois Beckett with Susan Bro: More