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Showing posts with label EXXON. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EXXON. Show all posts

Sunday, October 17, 2021

RSN: Jonathan Chait | Is Kyrsten Sinema Just the Glenn Greenwald of Senators?

 


 

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17 October 21

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Kyrsten Sinema participates in a coin toss at an Arizona State football game on November 3, 2018. (photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
Jonathan Chait | Is Kyrsten Sinema Just the Glenn Greenwald of Senators?
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
Chait writes: "The Senate's most peculiar and inscrutable member has inspired numerous theories, not all mutually exclusive. Here are the five most popular."

ALSO SEE: Kyrsten Sinema's Poll Numbers Should Terrify Her

The fate of Joe Biden’s presidency is increasingly subject to the whims of Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Yet as a decision deadline gets closer, the question of just what Sinema wants, and why she wants it, is becoming less and less clear. What kind of deal does she want? Does she want a deal at all? Does she even want a political career?

The Senate’s most peculiar and inscrutable member has inspired numerous theories, not all mutually exclusive. Here are the five most popular.

1. She’s the Glenn Greenwald of senators.

The evidence: Sinema used to hate Democrats and liberals from the left, self-identifying as a socialist and running as a Green Party member. Now she hates them from the right. The consistent theme in her career is a contempt for the hard, unglamorous work of programmatic liberalism.

The counterargument: Unlike Greenwald, between her career as a left-wing liberal-hater from the left and a liberal-hater from the right, she did have a brief stop as a relatively standard-issue Democrat.

2. She’s just a narcissist.

The evidence: Has worn a “Fuck Off” ring. Enjoys displays of flamboyant trolling, like doing a curtesy while performing an exaggerated thumbs-down to oppose a minimum-wage increase. Voted against the Trump tax cuts but now reportedly opposes rolling them back even in part.

The counterargument: Sinema doesn’t seem to merely want chaos. Her positions line up closely with what wealthy lobbyists desire. She wants low taxes for the wealthy, and doesn’t want to let the federal government negotiate down the cost of prescription drugs.

3. She wants to be an independent.

The evidence: Sinema has reportedly tried to fashion herself after John McCain, seeking out high-profile confrontations with her party, even aping McCain’s thumbs-down moment. Michelle Cottle makes the case for why Sinema can and should leave her party and run as an independent in 2024.

The counterargument: It’s not impossible to win as an independent, but it’s extremely hard. Senators Bernie Sanders and Angus King are both independents, but they caucus with the Democrats and rely on overwhelming Democratic Party support to hold their seats. If Sinema leaves the party, she’ll be running against an actual Democratic nominee who will win most of the nonconservative votes.

4. She wants to be a lobbyist.

The evidence: She is putting her career at risk for no apparent political benefit. The independent path is extremely dicey, and polling shows she would lose a one-on-one race to any one of several potential Democratic primary challengers by margins ranging from 30 to 40 points.

If she is sabotaging her chances of winning reelection while taking positions that line up perfectly with wealthy interests, maybe she just wants to work for them instead of the public?

The counterargument: You don’t actually need to work for wealthy interests as an elected official in order to get a job as a lobbyist. They’re happy to hire Democrats with liberal views and pay them to change their mind.

5. She’s drawn to flattery and repelled by criticism.

The evidence: Some people are highly sensitive to praise and criticism, and allow their worldview to be shaped by it. They meet new friends who seem impressed by them, and suddenly find the arguments made by these new friends compelling. Meanwhile, they have a new group of enemies who berate them, and they react by growing more skeptical about everything their critics think, even things they once believed themselves.

We’ve all seen this irrational process happen to people we know, including people who write about politics for a living. Why not Sinema?

The counterargument: It’s an insult to suggest Sinema would be so mentally weak as to engineer a moral and political catastrophe out of a petty weakness for flattery. She is indisputably a brilliant, moral, thoughtful, courageous, principled leader, as well as a world-class athlete and quite possible the greatest human being who has ever lived.



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Kyrsten Sinema Received the Legal Maximum of Donations From Several Known GOP Donors, New FEC Filings ShowSen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is opposed to the current prescription drug pricing proposals in both the House and Senate bills, two sources familiar with her thinking said. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)

Kyrsten Sinema Received the Legal Maximum of Donations From Several Known GOP Donors, New FEC Filings Show
Connor Perrett, Insider
Perrett writes: "Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, received the maximum donation allowed by law by several longtime GOP donors, according to a campaign fundraising report filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission."

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, received the maximum donation allowed by law by several longtime GOP donors, according to a campaign fundraising report filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission.

According to the FEC data, first reported by Mother Jones, Sinema raised $1.1 million between July and September this year, about the same amount she raised in previous fundraising cycles, according to the report, despite growing frustration among Arizona Democrats.

Included in the FEC disclosure are several GOP donors who have previously supported efforts to elect former President Donald Trump and to help Republicans get the majority in the Senate. The maximum individual contribution limit is $2,900 per election, with a maximum of $5,800 in a two-year period, according to FEC guidelines.

Among those who made the maximum donation was Minnesota billionaire Stan Hubbard, who regularly donates to the RNC and supported Scott Walker and eventually Trump's campaign for president through donations to a super PAC, Mother Jones reported.

Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the Cleveland Brown's and Pilot truck stops, and his wife, Susan, individually donated the maximum legal amount to Sinema on September 30, Mother Jones reported, citing the FEC data. According to the report, Haslam has given at least $425,000 to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC associated with Sen. Mitch McConnell that works to elect Republicans in the Senate.

Other GOP donors who backed Sinema include Marc Rowan, the CEO of the private equity firm Apollo who backed Trump's failed bid for reelection, and his wife, Carolyn, who individually donated the maximum legal limit. Private equity executive Anthony De Nicola, who also has backed the Senate Leadership Fund, also donated the maximum legal limit to Sinema, according to Mother Jones.

Progressives and other Democrats have grown frustrated with Sinema, who has made headlines in recent months for her reluctance to support key pieces of President Joe Biden's agenda. Sinema is currently fundraising in Europe, per The New York Times.

Both Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have been opposed to parts of a Democratic spending plan to invest in climate, education, and healthcare spending. While Manchin has been clear about wanting to cut the price tag of the proposal, it's largely unclear what Sinema would support, as Insider previously reported.

Sinema, however, has reportedly been opposed to raising tax rates for individuals and large corporations, said two Senate Democratic aides familiar with the matter. Her position threatens to deprive the package of over $700 billion in revenue to pay for Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda.

Sinema, a first-term lawmaker, is not up for re-election until 2024.


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A Dead Black Woman's Body Was Found in an Alabama Police Van, There Is No ExplanationThe grieving family of Christina Nance, 29 (above), who was found dead one week ago in an old unused police van outside the Huntsville Police Department, is demanding answers. (photo: GoFundMe.com)

A Dead Black Woman's Body Was Found in an Alabama Police Van, There Is No Explanation
Biba Adams, The Grio
Adams writes: "Nance's grieving relatives want Huntsville Police to release surveillance footage from their parking lot cameras."

Nance’s grieving relatives want Huntsville Police to release surveillance footage from their parking lot cameras.

The family of a young woman in Alabama, who was found dead one week ago in an old unused police van outside the Huntsville Police Department, is demanding answers.

Christina Nance’s grieving kin is asking the police department to release surveillance footage from the cameras mounted in the parking lot. Her sister, Latausha Nance, told WHNT that police officials told the family they weren’t sure how far back the camera’s captured footage went. Additionally, the news outlet said its reporters had not heard back from the department regarding the footage.

The Nance family also says they have not been told how long the 29-year-old woman’s body languished in the police department parking lot. On Monday, Latausha Nance said she last saw her sister two weeks before her body was discovered on Oct. 7. The sisters were in Latausha’s car.

“I just looked back at her,” the mourning sibling said, “and she was just smiling, and I said, ‘Christina, why are you smiling like that?’ and she just said, ‘Oh nothing, it’s nothing.’ That’s the last memory I have of my sister,”

A community protest is set for Friday in Huntsville, at the Madison County Jail.

In a GoFundMe.com post, Whitney Nance, another sister of Christina, wrote that her dead sibling “was very loved, a very good person, a funny and fun person to be around! If you knew her you would’ve love her spirit, she was very smart and loving.”

According to Newsweek, Whitney told a local outlet that Christina’s relatives “do not believe that our sister would just randomly walk to a van and climb in it. First of all, why wasn’t the van locked on police property?”

She also added that Christina had often visited the police department for help and had previously called family members to pick her up there. Police noted that she had been arrested for multiple nonviolent offenses over the past eight years.

Huntsville Police have said there is no sign of foul play in Christina Nance’s death; however, her family said they don’t know how she got into the van in the first place.

At a news conference Sunday, they made clear they won’t stop searching for the truth. The family successfully raised just over the $1,700 their online fundraiser sought.

“We really don’t know how our relative’s body was found inside a police van on police property, and we need some justice,” Frank Matthews, a cousin of the Nances, said Sunday. “We need some clarity, and Christina cannot speak for herself.”

An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause of Christina’s death. Her family contends that, depending on the results, they may consider conducting an autopsy of their own.



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Democrats Step Up Pressure on Biden on Student Loan ForgivenessRep. Pramila Jayapal. (photo: Getty Images)

Democrats Step Up Pressure on Biden on Student Loan Forgiveness
Alex Gangitano and Sylvan Lane, The Hill
Excerpt: "Democrats are once again pressing President Biden to act on student loan forgiveness, stepping up the pressure on the White House to deal with the issue even as it struggles to bring a divided party together around the president’s agenda."

Democrats are once again pressing President Biden to act on student loan forgiveness, stepping up the pressure on the White House to deal with the issue even as it struggles to bring a divided party together around the president’s agenda.

“Today would be a great day for President Biden and Vice President Harris to #CancelStudentDebt,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted on Thursday. Schumer regularly hits the White House on the issue on Twitter.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, similar tweeted on Thursday: “Student debt relief is good for people and good for the economy. @POTUS can and must lift the burden of student debt for 43 million Americans.”

Progressives want Biden to forgive up to $50,000 in federally held student debt per borrower. Doing so would wipe out all federal student debt for about 80 percent of the roughly 44 million Americans who collectively owe the federal government more than $1.5 trillion.

While Biden has ruled out canceling that much debt through executive action, he has opened the door to a smaller debt forgiveness plan with income requirements. He’s previously expressed a willingness to forgive as much as $10,000 per borrower, which would cover roughly 40 percent of federal student borrowers.

Broad-based student loan forgiveness has rapidly gained support among Democratic lawmakers amid the coronavirus pandemic. While progressives have long supported an ambitious level of forgiveness as a way to close the racial wealth gap, party leaders such as Schumer have come around to the idea since Biden’s election.

Debt relief advocates argue the issue could also help Democrats in next year’s midterms.

“I think moderates who are running in tough races, this is going to be the difference for them, whether or not student debt gets cancelled,” said Thomas Gokey, organizer and co-founder of the Debt Collective.

Polling, however, suggests most voters do not support forgiving loans for all student borrowers.

Just 27 percent of respondents to a March poll conducted by Grinnell College supported forgiving student loans “for all borrowers,” including just 41 percent of those who voted for Biden in 2020. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said they’d support forgiveness “only for those in need,” including 48 percent of Biden voters.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has expressed doubts about both Biden’s power to wipe out student loans on his own and the political wisdom of doing so.

“Suppose your ... child just decided they at this time did not want to go to college, but you're paying taxes to forgive somebody else's obligations. You may not be happy about that,” Pelosi told reporters in July.

The Biden administration has already wiped out roughly $9 billion in student loans held either by borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit colleges or those who qualified for pre-existing but dysfunctional forgiveness programs.

The Department of Education this week announced it would temporarily allow student borrowers to claim credit on all federal loan and repayment programs toward forgiveness, saying the action would “restore the promise” of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

The program cancels student loans for individuals who have worked in qualifying public service for 10 years and made 10 years worth of payments on federal loans, but left out hundreds of thousands of borrowers who qualified for the program under previous administrations.

Gokey dismissed the program, saying it would only benefit 20,000 people.

“So far, the only thing the White House has done has been the teeniest, tiniest little, they’ve wiggled their pinky, in this incredibly complicated public service loan waiver,” he said.

The Education Department also tapped Richard Cordray, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), to lead the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), which oversees companies contracted to collect student loan payments. Cordray recently announced the creation of a special enforcement office within FSA modeled after the aggressive approach the CFPB has taken to student loan servicers who allegedly harmed borrowers.

The dual threat of Cordray and new CFPB Director Rohit Chopra likely prompted Navient to exit the student loan market after years of federal and state lawsuits, said Brandon Barford, partner at research firm Beacon Policy Advisors. Even so, investigations into other firms could take months or years to show results to borrowers.

An administration official told The Hill that more action is coming.

“In the coming months we will unveil similar regulatory improvements to, income-driven repayment, borrower defense to repayment, and closed school discharges among others. We’re also reshaping the loan servicing environment to better emphasize borrower outcomes and protections. These steps take time but we are working to deliver a better and fairer student loan system for borrowers,” the official said.

But Barford expressed doubts that a broad-based wipeout is still in Biden’s plans.

“If they were going to do the loan forgiveness at any level unilaterally, I would think they would have done it already,” he said.

The administration also announced in August that it would no longer make those classified as totally and permanently disabled by the Social Security Administration apply for their federal student loans to be discharged.

“There’s been a big push from the White House to show all the debt they’re cancelling,” said Natalia Abrams, president and founder of the Student Debt Crisis Center. “We’ve seen small buckets of debt getting cancelled. It’s really important, it should happen, but a lot of this should have happened in previous administrations.”

Advocates were energized by a letter Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.) led with 19 other Democrats last week urging the administration to publicly release a memo that Biden requested from the Department of Education in April to determine his authority to cancel student debt.

Advocates argue that Biden has authority to cancel student loan debt under the Higher Education Act of 1965, which gave the Education secretary authority to back student loans.

“The reason you’re in student debt today is because Joe Biden woke up and made an active decision to keep you in debt,” Gokey responded. “We have to force him, he’s not going to do it on his own.”

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'Brutal Aggression': Venezuela Halts Talks With Opposition After Envoy Extradited to USColombian businessman and Venezuelan special envoy Alex Saab, has been put on a plane to the US to face money laundering charges. (photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP)

'Brutal Aggression': Venezuela Halts Talks With Opposition After Envoy Extradited to US
Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Venezuela's government is halting negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the US of a close ally of president Nicolás Maduro, who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country."

Alex Saab, an ally of president Nicolás Maduro, was extradited to face money laundering charges after a 16-month legal battle

Venezuela’s government is halting negotiations with its opponents in retaliation for the extradition to the US of a close ally of president Nicolás Maduro, who prosecutors believe could be the most significant witness ever about corruption in the South American country.

Jorge Rodríguez, who has been heading the government’s delegation, said his team wouldn’t travel to Mexico City for the next scheduled round of negotiations.

The announcement capped a tumultuous day that saw Colombian-born businessman Alex Saab placed on a US-bound plane in Cape Verde after a 16-month fight by Maduro and his allies, including Russia, who consider Saab a Venezuelan diplomat.

The Venezuelan government in September named Saab – who was arrested in June 2020 when his plane stopped in Cape Verde to refuel – as a member of its negotiating team in talks with the opposition in Mexico, where the two sides are looking to solve their political crisis.

Rodriguez, reading from a statement, called the decision to suspend negotiations “an expression of our deepest protest against the brutal aggression against the person and the investiture of our delegate Alex Saab Moran”.

The leadership of Venezuela’s opposition did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Venezuela, in a Twitter post by the ministry of communications, denounced the extradition as a “kidnapping”.

Hours after Saab’s extradition, Venezuela revoked the house arrest of six former executives of refiner Citgo, a US subsidiary of state oil company PDVSA, two sources with knowledge of the situation and a family member told Reuters.

The US Justice Department had charged Saab, who also has Venezuelan citizenship, in 2019 in connection with a bribery scheme to take advantage of Venezuela’s state-controlled exchange rate. The US also sanctioned him for allegedly orchestrating a corruption network that allowed Saab and Maduro to profit from a state-run food subsidy program.

Saab faces up to 20 years in prison. His lawyers called the US charges “politically motivated”.

Saab is expected to make his initial appearance in court on Monday in Miami, according to Justice Department spokesperson Nicole Navas Oxman, who expressed gratitude and admiration to the government of Cape Verde for its professionalism and “perseverance with this complex case”.

Cape Verde national radio reported the extradition on Saturday. The government of Cape Verde was not immediately available to comment.

In a Twitter post, Colombian president Ivan Duque called Saab’s extradition “a triumph in the fight against drug trafficking, money laundering and corruption by the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro”.

The previous Trump administration had made Saab’s extradition a top priority, at one point even sending a Navy warship to the African archipelago to keep an eye on the captive.

The former Citgo executives, who were arrested in November 2017 after being summoned to a meeting at PDVSA headquarters in Caracas, were taken from their homes to one of the headquarters of the intelligence police, two sources said.

The six former executives had been released from jail and put on house arrest in April.
The group is made up of five naturalised US citizens and one permanent resident. The US government has repeatedly demanded their release.

“My father cannot be used as a bargaining chip,” said Cristina Vadell, daughter of former executive Tomeu Vadell. “I’m worried for his health, even more given the country’s coronavirus cases.”

The ministry of communications and the attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


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Sunday Song: Tracy Chapman | Fast Car
Tracy Chapman, YouTube
Excerpt: "You got a fast car. I want a ticket to anywhere."

Lyrics Tracy Chapman, Fast Car.
Written by Tracy Chapman.
From the 1988 album, Tracy Chapman.

You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Anyplace is better
Starting from zero got nothing to lose
Maybe we'll make something
Me, myself I got nothing to prove

You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us out of here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won't have to drive too far
Just 'cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living

You see my old man's got a problem
He live with the bottle that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his
My mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said somebody's got to take care of him
So I quit school and that's what I did

You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way

So remember we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

You got a fast car
We go cruising to entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs

I remember we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

You got a fast car
I got a job that pays all our bills
You stay out drinking late at the bar
See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I'd always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me would find it
I got no plans I ain't going nowhere
So take your fast car and keep on driving

I remember we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

You got a fast car
But is it fast enough so you can fly away
You gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way

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A US Small-Town Mayor Sued the Oil Industry. Then Exxon Went After HimSerge Dedina: 'The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it.' (photo: John Francis Peters/Guardian UK)

A US Small-Town Mayor Sued the Oil Industry. Then Exxon Went After Him
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK
McGreal writes: "The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisis."

The mayor of Imperial Beach, California, says big oil wants him to drop the lawsuit demanding the industry pay for the climate crisis

Serge Dedina is a surfer, environmentalist and mayor of Imperial Beach, a small working-class city on the California coast.

He is also, if the fossil fuel industry is to be believed, at the heart of a conspiracy to shake down big oil for hundreds of millions of dollars.

ExxonMobil and its allies have accused Dedina of colluding with other public officials across California to extort money from the fossil-fuel industry. Lawyers even searched his phone and computer for evidence he plotted with officials from Santa Cruz, a city located nearly 500 miles north of Imperial Beach.

The problem is, Dedina had never heard of a Santa Cruz conspiracy. Few people had.

“The only thing from Santa Cruz on my phone was videos of my kids surfing there,” Dedina said. “I love the fact that some lawyer in a really expensive suit, sitting in some horrible office trying to find evidence that we were in some kind of conspiracy with Santa Cruz, had to look at videos of my kids surfing.”

That’s where the laughter stopped.

The lawyers found no evidence to back up their claim. But that did not stop the industry from continuing to use its legal muscle to try to intimidate Dedina, who leads one of the poorest small cities in the region.

The mayor became a target after Imperial Beach filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP and more than 30 other fossil-fuel companies demanding they pay the huge costs of defending the city from rising seas caused by the climate crisis.

Imperial Beach’s lawsuit alleges the oil giants committed fraud by covering up research showing that burning fossil fuels destroys the environment. The industry then lied about the evidence for climate change for decades, deliberately delaying efforts to curb carbon emissions.

The city’s lawsuit was among the first of a wave of litigation filed by two dozen municipalities and states across the US that could cost the fossil-fuel industry billions of dollars in compensation for the environmental devastation and the deception.

Dedina says his minority majority community of about 27,000 cannot begin to afford the tens of millions of dollars it will cost to keep at bay the waters bordering three sides of his financially strapped city. The worst of recent storms have turned Imperial Beach into an island.

One assessment calculated that, without expensive mitigation measures, rising sea levels will eventually swamp some of the city’s neighbourhoods, routinely flood its two schools and overwhelm its drainage system.

Imperial Beach’s annual budget is $20m. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was paid more than $15m last year.

“We don’t have a pot to piss in in this city. So why not go after the oil companies?” he said. “The lawsuit is a pragmatic approach to making the people that caused sea level rise pay for the impacts it has on our city.”

That’s not how Exxon, the US’s largest oil company, saw it. Its lawyers noted that Imperial Beach filed its case in July 2017, at the same time as two California counties, Marin and San Mateo. The county and city of Santa Cruz followed six months later with similar suits seeking compensation to cope with increasing wildfires and drought caused by global heating.

Exxon alleged that the sudden burst of litigation, and the fact that the municipalities shared a law firm specialising in environmental cases, Sher Edling, was evidence of collusion.

Exxon filed lawsuits claiming the municipalities conspired to extort money from the company by following a strategy developed during an environmental conference at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, 25 miles north of Imperial Beach, nine years ago.

The meeting, organised by the Climate Accountability Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists, produced a report outlining how legal strategies used by US states against the tobacco industry in the 1990s could be applied to cases against fossil fuel companies.

Dedina was also targeted by one of the US’s biggest business groups at the forefront of industry resistance to increased regulation to reduce greenhouse gases, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a rightwing thinktank, the Energy & Environment Legal Institute.

The manufacturing trade group was behind the efforts to obtain data from Dedina’s phone and documents in 2018. In its public disclosure request to the mayor’s office, NAM called Imperial Beach’s lawsuit “litigation based on political or ideological objections more appropriately addressed through the political process”.

Exxon is attempting to use a Texas law that allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence by questioning individuals under oath even before any legal action is filed against them. The company is trying to force Dedina, two other members of Imperial Beach’s government, and officials from other jurisdictions, to submit to questioning on the grounds they were joined in a conspiracy against the oil industry.

“A collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians are abusing law enforcement authority and legal process to impose their viewpoint on climate change,” the oil firm claimed. “ExxonMobil finds itself directly in that conspiracy’s crosshairs.”

A Texas district judge approved the request to depose Dedina, but then a court of appeals overturned the decision last year. The state supreme court is considering whether to take up the case.

The target on Dedina is part of a wider pattern of retaliation against those suing Exxon and other oil companies.

In an unusual move in 2016, Exxon persuaded a Texas judge to order the attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to travel to Dallas to be deposed about her motives for investigating the company for alleged fraud for suppressing evidence on climate change. The judge also ordered that New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, be “available” in Dallas on the same day in case Exxon wanted to question him about a similar investigation.

Healey accused Exxon of trying to “squash the prerogative of state attorneys general to do their jobs”. The judge reversed the deposition order a month later and Healey filed a lawsuit against the company in 2019, which is still awaiting trial.

But similar tactics persuaded the US Virgin Islands attorney general to shut down his investigation of the oil giant.

Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, said the attempt to question Dedina and other officials is part of a broader strategy by the oil industry to counter lawsuits with its own litigation.

“These cases are frivolous and vexatious. Intimidation is the goal. Just making it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon. They think that if they make the case painful enough, Imperial Beach will quit,” he said.

If the intent is to kill off the litigation against the oil industry, it’s not working. Officials from other municipalities have called Exxon’s move “repugnant”, “a sham” and “outrageous”, and have vowed to press on with their lawsuits.

Dedina described the action as a “bullying tactic” by the oil industry to avoid accountability.

“The only conspiracy is [that] a bunch of suits and fossil-fuel companies decided to pollute the earth and make climate change worse, and then lie about it,” he said. “They make more money than our entire city has in a year.”

The city’s lawsuit claims it faces a “significant and dangerous sea-level rise” through the rest of this century that threatens its existence. Imperial Beach commissioned an analysis of its vulnerability to rising sea levels which concluded that nearly 700 homes and businesses were threatened at a cost of more than $100m. It said that flooding will hit about 40% of the city’s roads, including some that will be under water for long periods. Two elementary schools will have to be moved. The city’s beach, regarded as one of the best sites for surfing on the California coast, is being eroded by about a foot a year.

Imperial Beach sits at the southern end of San Diego bay. Under one worst-case scenario, the bay could merge with the Tijuana River estuary to the south and permanently submerge much of the city’s housing and roads.

The city has received some help with creating natural climate barriers. The Fish and Wildlife Service restored 400 acres of wetland next to the city as a national wildlife refuge which also acts as a barrier to flooding, and is expected to restore other wetlands together with the Port of San Diego. A grant is paying for improved equipment to warn of floods.

But that still leaves the huge costs of building new schools and drainage systems, and adapting other infrastructure. Dedina said that without the oil companies stumping up, it won’t happen.

“People ask, how did you go against the world’s largest fossil fuel companies? Isn’t that scary? No. What’s scary is coastal flooding and the idea that whole cities would be under water,” said the mayor.

“Honestly, bring it on. I can’t wait to make our case. I can’t wait to take the fight to them because we have nothing to lose.”


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Friday, September 24, 2021

RSN: Charles Pierce | It Shouldn't Be This Easy to End the Republic

 

 

Reader Supported News
24 September 21

Live on the homepage now!
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WE NEED A FEW LARGER DONORS WHO CAN SEE THE FUTURE — With the launch of the new website this month is very bad month for fundraising. While aspects of the new site have some readers fuming it is a solid sustainable architecture for growth for years to come. RSN stays strong and continues to confront the most challenging issues head-on. We need a boost this month. Please and thank you.
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CNN got hold of a Trump lawyer's memo that describes a precise six-point plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (photo: J. Scott Appleshite/Getty)
Charles Pierce | It Shouldn't Be This Easy to End the Republic
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "CNN got hold of a Trump lawyer's memo that describes a precise six-point plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election."

CNN got hold of a Trump lawyer's memo that describes a precise six-point plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.


Anyone who read the novel Seven Days In May, or anyone who’s watched the superb movie, knows the main reason that the military coup driving the plot failed is that it got so tangled in its own complexities—codes involving horse races, secret flights of military transports, hijacking the president to a national security bunker, depending vitally upon a wishy-washy admiral in Europe—that the president and his allies finally were able to gum up the works and save the republic. The hero of the piece, Marine Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, even cites the complexity of the government as a sign that the coup plotters will fail.

What a complicated thing this government is, he thought. There sits the man with the codes that could launch a nuclear war and the Secretary of the Treasury doesn’t even know it.

The point is that it shouldn’t be this easy. CNN got hold of a memo from a lawyer in the employ of the last administration named John Eastman, which Eastman sent to then-Vice President Mike Pence, that described a precise six-point plan by which Pence could overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Eastman’s plan has an evil logic to it that cuts through any institutional safeguards in place through the simple expedient of believing that Pence was both a team player and a coward.

2. When he gets to Arizona, he announces that he has multiple slates of electors, and so is going to defer decision on that until finishing the other States. This would be the first break with the procedure set out in the Act.

3. At the end, he announces that because of the ongoing disputes in the 7 States, there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States. That means the total number of “electors appointed” – the language of the 12th Amendment -- is 454. This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe (here). A “majority of the electors appointed” would therefore be 228. There are at this point 232 votes for Trump, 222 votes for Biden. Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.

Ultimately, the whole plan is summarized by Point No. 6, which is fairly summarized as, “We’re lawless. So fcking what?”

The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission – either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court. Let the other side challenge his actions in court, where Tribe (who in 2001 conceded the President of the Senate might be in charge of counting the votes) and others who would press a lawsuit would have their past position -- that these are non-justiciable political questions – thrown back at them, to get the lawsuit dismissed. The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind.

Is there any doubt that this would have worked, at least temporarily, with the mob also howling outside the Senate chamber? At the very least, it would have thrown the government into utter chaos and prompted a constitutional crisis unlike anything we’d seen since 1861. Is there any doubt that the great mass of people in this country would have seen it as just Both Sides Arguing and gone back to sleep? (I believe there would have been fighting in the streets, which would then be cast as more evidence of our Sadly Divided Nation.) And before we all start blessing the name of Michael Richard Pence, we should remember that he actually agonized over what to do, going so far as to consult with Dan Quayle, who had to remind Pence what Pence’s duty to the republic actually was. We now have the game plan, in writing. It shouldn’t be this easy—and this, I promise you, was just a scrimmage. The real ball game still awaits.

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Exxon, Chevron Conceal Payments to Some GovernmentsExxon refinery. (photo: iStock)

Exxon, Chevron Conceal Payments to Some Governments
The Star
Excerpt: "U.S. oil majors Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp have failed to meet a core transparency standard set by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative."

U.S. oil majors Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp have failed to meet a core transparency standard set by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global anti-corruption body on which the companies have board seats, EITI said on Wednesday.

Exxon and Chevron have declined to publicly disclose taxes and other payments they have made to governments in the countries where they operate that are not EITI members, the group said in a spreadsheet detailing member company https://eiti.org/news/eiti-publishes-data-on-adherence-to-supporting-company-expectationsadherence to its standards.

Norway-based EITI, founded two decades ago, has about 55 country members. It implements voluntary global standards to promote open and accountable management of oil, gas and mineral resources to prevent corruption in all resource-rich countries.

Countries that Exxon has operated in that are not EITI members include Qatar, Pakistan and India, according to its company website. Non-EITI countries that Chevron has operated in include China and Angola.

ConocoPhillips, which is not on the EITI board, is another member that does not disclose payments to countries not in EITI, the group said. It has had operations in countries including Libya, Malaysia and China.

Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton said Exxon complies with all laws that are in effect today.

Conoco spokesperson Dennis Nuss said the company had no comment. Chevron did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

EITI's release, based on publicly available information, could add pressure to the companies, already under fire from shareholders, activists and lawmakers for greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.

It also highlights a widening governance rift between U.S.-based oil majors and those in Europe, which are widely seen to be doing better on climate and transparency.

European-based companies BP, Shell and Total all publicly disclose their taxes and payments to non-EITI countries, the group said.

EITI published the data for the first time since the standards were introduced in 2018, after pressure from civil society groups including Publish What You Pay-US (PWYP-US) and Oxfam America.

It is not mandatory that the companies, which as EITI members make annual payments to help fund the group's management, follow the group's standards.

But EITI Board Chair Helen Clark said in July, without elaborating, that the board's oversight committee would consider consequences for companies not meeting the group's expectations, possibly in October.

Clark said on Wednesday that publication of the companies not following expectations will help EITI members "engage in dialogue to improve corporate accountability and transparency." She said work remains to clarify the expectations, "but our hope is that it will encourage a 'race to the top' to meet or exceed them."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is set to consider next April implementing a measure of the 2010 Wall Street reform law known as Dodd Frank that would require disclosures from energy and mining companies on payments to all foreign governments.

PWYP-US said the U.S. companies supporting EITI were getting the reputational benefit of EITI participation without meeting the basic expectations for membership.

EITI's company members and particularly those on its board must ensure that group's credibility is not weakened by companies that are not being transparent, said Carly Oboth, PWYP-US interim director.

"Otherwise, it will be clear that this global transparency initiative has become a victim of corporate capture," Oboth said.

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House Committee on January 6th Capitol Attack Subpoenas Trump's Ex-Chief of Staff and Other Top AidesMark Meadows, Steve Bannon and Dan Scavino among advisers called to testify over president's connection to 6 January events. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

House Committee on January 6th Capitol Attack Subpoenas Trump's Ex-Chief of Staff and Other Top Aides
Hugo Lowell, Guardian UK
Lowell writes: "The House select committee scrutinizing the Capitol attack on Thursday sent subpoenas to Trump's White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a cadre of top Trump aides, demanding their testimony to shed light on the former president's connection to the 6 January riot."

Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon and Dan Scavino among advisers called to testify over president’s connection to 6 January events


The House select committee scrutinizing the Capitol attack on Thursday sent subpoenas to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and a cadre of top Trump aides, demanding their testimony to shed light on the former president’s connection to the 6 January riot.

The subpoenas and demands for depositions marked the most aggressive investigative actions the select committee has taken since it made records demands and records preservation requests that formed the groundwork of the inquiry into potential White House involvement.

House select committee investigators targeted four of the closest aides to the former president: deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, former Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon, and the former acting defense secretary’s chief of staff Kash Patel as well as Meadows.

“The select committee has reason to believe that you have information relevant to understanding important activities that led to and informed events at the Capitol on January 6,” the chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in the subpoena letters.

“Accordingly, the select committee seeks both documents and your deposition testimony regarding these and other matters that are within the scope of the select committee’s inquiry,” Thompson said.

The select committee is expected to authorize further subpoenas and schedule closed-door interviews with key witnesses – as well as the inquiry’s second public hearing – in the coming weeks, according to two sources familiar with internal deliberations.

The Trump aides compelled to cooperate with the select committee have some of the most intimate knowledge of what the former president was doing and thinking during the insurrection – and what he knew in advance of plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.

Several administration officials, such as Meadows and Scavino, remained by Trump’s side for most of the day on 6 January, while campaign aides such as Bannon strategized how to subvert the results of the 2020 election and reinstall Trump in the Oval Office.

Meadows also accompanied Trump back to the White House after the conclusion of the “Stop the Steal” rally that swiftly descended into the Capitol attack, from where Trump told Republican senator Ben Sasse he was “delighted” at seeing the images of the insurrection.

Patel, who was nearly appointed CIA director in the final weeks of the Trump administration four years after emerging from obscurity as a Hill staffer, may also hold the key to unlocking the full picture of the Capitol attack as one of the former president’s top lieutenants.

The subpoena authorizations came after the Guardian first reported on Tuesday that House select committee investigators were considering issuing the orders to Meadows and other Trump aides as the panel ramps up the pace of its investigation.

There is no guarantee that the subpoena targets will comply. Trump has suggested he will demand that the Biden administration invoke executive privilege over Trump-era executive branch records requested by the select committee and try to block damaging witness testimony.

But it appears unlikely that the White House Office of Legal Counsel would assert the protection in the case of 6 January materials, given it previously allowed Trump DOJ officials to testify to Congress and the protection does not extend to an individual’s private interests.

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Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert Improperly Used Campaign Funds for Rent, UtilitiesRep. Lauren Boebert, R-CO, at a news conference outside the Capitol on July 29. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert Improperly Used Campaign Funds for Rent, Utilities
Dareh Gregorian, NBC News
Gregorian writes: "Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., improperly spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on rent and utilities, her campaign acknowledged this week in a filing with the Federal Election Commission, but it said the money had been paid back."

The campaign was reimbursed for the $6,000 in prohibited "personal use" expenditures after Boebert "self-reported the error," her spokesman said.

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., improperly spent thousands of dollars in campaign funds on rent and utilities, her campaign acknowledged this week in a filing with the Federal Election Commission, but it said the money had been paid back.

The FEC had asked Boebert's campaign treasurer in a letter last month for more information about $6,000 in payments that had been listed in her quarterly filing as a "personal expense of Lauren Boebert billed to campaign account in error." The filing said the money had already been paid back.

The letter warned that "if it is determined that the disbursement(s) constitutes the personal use of campaign funds, the Commission may consider taking further legal action. However, prompt action to obtain reimbursement of the funds in question will be taken into consideration."

In a filing this week, the campaign said the money had been sent to a person named John Pacheco at the same address as Boebert's restaurant, Shooters Grill. The eatery in the town of Rifle is best known for its armed waitresses.

Boebert communications director Ben Stout said the "funds were reimbursed months ago when Rep. Boebert self-reported the error."

The FEC prohibits using campaign funds for personal expenses. It defines personal use "as any use of funds in a campaign account of a candidate (or former candidate) to fulfill a commitment, obligation or expense of any person that would exist irrespective of the candidate's campaign or responsibilities as a federal officeholder."

Penalty can include letters reminding candidates of their obligations to financial penalties.

Asked about the new filing, FEC spokesman Myles Martin said, "We cannot comment on specific candidates or committees."


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Rupert Murdoch Has Known We've Been in a Climate Emergency Since 2006, Documents ShowRupert Murdoch with his sons Lachlan and James. (photo: Max Mumby/Getty)

Rupert Murdoch Has Known We've Been in a Climate Emergency Since 2006, Documents Show
Geoff Dembicki, VICE
Dembicki writes: "Murdoch's News Corp has spent the past 15 years mitigating its own climate risk while giving media outlets like Fox News carte blanche to deny climate change altogether."

Murdoch’s News Corp has spent the past 15 years mitigating its own climate risk while giving media outlets like Fox News carte blanche to deny climate change altogether.

When Kevin Rudd was prime minister of Australia, he lived in fear of Rupert Murdoch. The Labour Party leader came to power in 2007 promising to address the climate emergency, but attacks from Murdoch-owned outlets were relentless to the point where Rudd said he’d “wake up every morning and wonder how they would seek to crucify us that day, with rusty nails.”

Papers such as the Australian, the country’s equivalent of the New York Times, ran high-profile pieces attacking Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, an attempt to force companies to pay for the climate-warming carbon they release into the atmosphere, including a front-page story about an industry report claiming the policy would cost 23,000 resource sector jobs. And it worked: Australian Parliament eventually voted against Rudd’s carbon-reduction effort, his public opinion rating tanked, his own Labour Party led a coup against him, and he resigned in 2010.

“If there was no Murdoch media here, or if, say, they only owned half the media instead of two-thirds of the media,” Rudd told VICE News, “we would have a carbon price today.”

What few people knew during all this is that the parent company of these Australian news outlets, Murdoch’s News Corporation, actually thought carbon pricing was a good idea. News Corp has meticulously documented its own carbon footprint since 2006 and sought to “take a leadership role on the issue of climate change” by reducing it, according to hundreds of pages of publicly available documents reviewed by VICE News.

Even as Murdoch-owned outlets tore down Rudd in 2010, News Corp was advocating “market-based mechanisms to support carbon reductions” in the U.S. and other places. This is according to documents submitted to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit group that has for two decades catalogued and rated environmental reporting from more than 300 companies including Apple, Coca-Cola, and Ford Motors.

No one forced News Corp to make disclosures to the CDP, which the group publishes in a database on its website. And far from altruism, News Corp’s disclosures are cast as corporate self-interest. In 2010, for example, a filing explained that doing so would give the company “valuable expertise when responding to mandated reporting requirements” under a potential carbon pricing system, should any country implement one.

News Corp also modeled the potential financial damage it faced due to extreme weather, wildfires, and other physical dangers intensified by climate change. “The company believes it is in a better position than others to mitigate those risks,” the documents read.

News Corp has submitted yearly reports on its environmental progress to CDP since 2006, often receiving “A” grades for its efforts from the organization. Ateli Iyalla, North American managing director of the CDP, said News Corp’s disclosures place it among the world’s more responsible media corporations. “They have a strong understanding of climate issues and climate risk,” he told VICE News.

VICE News reviewed more than a decade’s worth of those submissions, and the documents show a company that’s taking steps to protect its operations and thousands of employees from a climate emergency it knows is getting worse, while giving a massive media platform to people who say the emergency isn’t real.

The documents show that News Corp privately acknowledged climate change is making hurricanes worse, even as a Wall Street Journal Europe editorial writer claimed in 2012 that “‘climate change’ shouldn’t be blamed for Hurricane Sandy.” The company in 2019 briefed employees on the dangers they could face from Australia’s “climate-related” bushfires as the Australian ran an editorial saying, “Experts keep telling us there is no direct link between climate change and bushfires; we know many fires are lit by arsonists.”

Murdoch’s company in its 2020 disclosure cited severe droughts in California that lead to wildfires as a potential example of the “physical aspects of climate change.” But his top-rated Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, attacked Democrats for “insisting without evidence that climate change is causing California wildfires.”

In its 2020 disclosure to CDP, News Corp said it carefully evaluates the risk of sea-level rise and flooding when deciding to acquire new facilities. That disclosure states that “members of the board are periodically updated” about the company’s sustainability initiatives and the risks it faces from climate disasters. The board of directors includes Murdoch himself. It also includes his eldest son, Lachlan, who is co-chairman of News Corp as well as CEO of Fox Corporation, the current corporate owner of Fox News. Meanwhile, one of Fox News’ rising stars, Greg Gutfeld, said this May the climate crisis “does not exist.”

VICE News presented a detailed list of questions asking about these events to News Corp, Fox News, Dow Jones (which publishes the Wall Street Journal), Fox Corporation, and the Australian, but none of these outlets and companies responded.

Taking serious measures to reduce corporate emissions while spreading climate denial might seem like a huge contradiction. But there may be a simple, coherent strategy at work. Murdoch is saving tens of millions of dollars due to the green initiatives, and at the same time earning record profits by feeding his global audience rage-inducing content attacking “out-of-control” liberals and downplaying the crisis.

“If there’s a buck to be made,” Rudd said of Murdoch, “he’ll make a buck.”

Rupert Murdoch, now 90, seemed to abruptly decide in 2006 that the climate emergency was real. “Until recently, I was somewhat wary of the warming debate,” he said that year during a speech in Tokyo outlining political and economic challenges facing Asia and the world in the decades to come. But he had become convinced that “the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.” Murdoch had also made a financial calculation. “Being environmentally sound is not sentimentality,” he said. “It is a sound business strategy.”

The following year, Murdoch held an event in midtown Manhattan that was webcast to all News Corp employees. The company would be launching a Global Energy Initiative, he said, whereby it would use renewable energy and energy efficiency to become carbon-neutral by 2010. Murdoch wanted to shrink his audience’s emissions, too.

“We can set an example, and we can reach our audiences. Our audience’s carbon footprint is 10,000 times bigger than ours. That’s the carbon footprint we want to conquer,” he said. News Corp’s vast array of newspapers, TV stations, and movie studios could make the case for aggressive environmental change. “The challenge is to revolutionize the message. For too long, the threats of climate change have been presented as doom and gloom—because the consequences are so serious,” Murdoch explained.

He wanted to make the issue “dramatic, make it vivid, even sometimes make it fun. We want to inspire people to change their behavior.”

Some of News Corp’s papers seemed eager to follow their boss’s lead. “Go green with the Sun,” declared a weeklong series in 2006 on eco-friendly living run by the London-based media outlet, which had previously run stories skeptical of climate change. Australia’s Daily Telegraph that same year published multiple editorials criticizing the government for not taking climate change seriously enough. The New York Post during this period ran articles promoting New York’s Go Green Expo.

This was an era when awareness of climate change was reaching unprecedented highs, and even prominent Republicans like Sen. John McCain of Arizona were calling for a price on carbon. But there may have been a personal reason for Murdoch’s newfound enthusiasm. “The primary mover behind it was James—Murdoch’s son,” said David Folkenflik, NPR media correspondent and author of Murdoch’s Worldechoing an argument that other observers of the family have made. James at the time was chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting. “I don’t think it happens without him,” Folkenflik said.

(James Murdoch has an ownership stake in VICE Media Group through his holding company, Lupa Systems.) “James is traveling and not participating in interviews right now,” spokesperson Juleanna Glover wrote to VICE News.

During this period, Lachlan Murdoch was distancing himself from the company due to personal feuds with company executives in which Rupert sided against him. That gave James, a political moderate whose wife, Kathryn, was becoming increasingly involved in climate issues, more influence over his father, Folkenflik said. In 2006, James helped arrange to have Al Gore present his film An Inconvenient Truth at a five-day gathering of News Corp executives and employees entitled “Imagining the Future” at the Pebble Beach resort in California.

But even at that early stage, tensions were visible. After the screening, Andrew Bolt, then a columnist for News Corp’s Herald Sun paper in Australia who frequently questions the science of climate change, got up to speak, according to an account in the Bulletin:

“Bolt opened his comments by congratulating Gore on his performance, then began to attack claims made by Gore in his film. Soon, according to one onlooker, the pair were involved in ‘a full-on barney.’ Gore ended up shouting at Bolt. ‘It was brilliant,’ says one onlooker. ‘Embarrassing,’ recalls another.”

In an email to VICE News, Bolt said, “I most certainly did not congratulate him on feeding the audience fake news.” He went on, “Nor was there a ‘full-on barney.’ I calmly and politely asked him to explain three misrepresentations in his presentation, and he then went red and started shouting. This is more properly described as a meltdown.”

Editors at the Australian were apparently not in agreement with Murdoch’s climate ambitions either. Asa Wahlquist, a former environmental reporter at the paper, said during an academic conference in 2010 that she had frequent fights with editors over her climate change coverage, calling it “torture” and “unbearable.” The paper’s then-editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell said at that time that “any reading of the (Australian’s) editorials on climate change would make it clear that for several years the paper has accepted man-made climate change as fact.”

In the U.S., however, Murdoch was confident he could get Fox News anchors such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly interested in doing more climate coverage. “Probably Sean’s first reaction will be that this is some liberal cause or something, you know? But he’s a very reasonable, very intelligent man,” Murdoch said in 2007 in a rare sit-down interview with the environmental media outlet Grist. “He’ll see, he’ll understand it. As will Bill—he just likes to get debate going between people. And that has its benefits—someone says, ‘No there isn’t,’ someone says, ‘Yes there is,’ and they have it out for 10 minutes and it’s entertaining and creates more consciousness.”

Around this time, as Murdoch’s World recounts, Fox Studios created a public service announcement featuring the head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, as well as Kiefer Sutherland, star of the studio’s hit show 24. But while Sutherland proclaimed that “global warming is a crime for which we are all guilty,” Ailes’ contribution was much more muted. “I was very clear,” he says in the video, “that energy was gonna be one of the things that was going to determine leadership for countries in the future.”

“Ailes’ line is fascinating,” Folkenflik said. “He came up with something that sounded supportive but committed him to nothing. The real question is, what was Murdoch committing himself to?”

By some measures, News Corp was doing a lot. “The company has made 24 the first major television production to be carbon-neutral, helped to pioneer the use of lighter-weight eco-friendly DVD cases in the home entertainment industry, launched a global tree planting campaign tied to the DVD release of the film Avatar, built the world’s largest and most energy-efficient print plant in the U.K., commissioned a study on the most effective way to communicate to the public on climate change policy, and committed to build the largest commercial solar PV installation at a single site in the U.S.,” reads its 2010 filing to CDP.

“These are just a few examples of ways in which the company is taking action on the issue of climate change,” it explained, “and avoiding the risks faced by those companies that are slow to do the same.”

But viewers of Fox News were receiving a much different message. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 caused a backlash among grassroots conservatives, culminating in the far-right Tea Party movement, many of whose adherents were hardcore climate change deniers. One of the movement’s targets was a major piece of U.S. carbon-pricing legislation proposed by Democrats called cap and trade. “Stopping cap and trade is a key priority for the Tea Party activists,” reads a 2010 Fox News opinion piece, referring to legislation somewhat similar to what Prime Minister Rudd had proposed in Australia.

Several months later, with Republicans and some conservative Democrats declining to support the policy, cap and trade died in the Senate.

Fox News hosts like Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Neil Cavuto cheered the Tea Party movement on, in some cases broadcasting live from Tea Party events and encouraging viewers to join the protests. This was much different than the approach to coverage taken by outlets like CNN and the New York Times. “The mainstream media hates the Tea Party,” claimed Fox News VP of News Bill Sammon in 2010.

Around that time, Sammon sent an email to Fox News staffers telling them to stress scientific uncertainty in the network’s coverage of climate change. “Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data,” Sammon wrote in the email, which was later leaked, “we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”

As Fox News became more successful at denying climate change, Murdoch’s views also appeared to shift—at least in public. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here, and there will always be a little bit of it. At the moment, the North Pole is melting, but the South Pole is getting bigger,” he said in a 2014 interview with Sky News. The following year, Murdoch tweeted an aerial photo of Arctic ice. “Just flying over N Atlantic 300 miles of ice,” he wrote. “Global warming!”

Internally News Corp continued to take climate change seriously. By 2011 it had achieved its goal of becoming carbon-neutral across its global operations. To celebrate the occasion, James Murdoch gave a speech that was broadcast to the company’s employees. “Almost four years ago, our chairman, my father, asked us to ‘imagine the future’ for News Corp,” he said. “The goal was not superficial change, but to embed the principles of efficiency and sustainability in the core of our business.”

James Murdoch claimed that the company’s investments in green technologies—including a 4.1-megawatt solar power system in New Jersey—resulted in $180 of savings for every ton of carbon reduced. A project to more efficiently integrate News Corp’s data centers would reduce costs by $20 million per year, he said. And even smaller initiatives, such as putting heat-reflective coatings on the roofs of some facilities, could save $1.5 million annually.

“Really, the results speak for themselves,” he said. “Our company continues to grow—yet, for the first time, our absolute carbon footprint is shrinking. Imagine a future in which every company is on this same path.”

A year and a half after James’ 2011 speech, Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York City, killing 44 people, displacing thousands, and causing more than $19 billion in damage. The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by two climate experts making the link to climate change. But its other opinion coverage of the intense and unprecedented storm was dismissive of the connection. “The idea that you can take one weather event, any given weather event, and attribute this cause to it, is from the standpoint of the research, it’s sort of a nonsense question,” Wall Street Journal Europe editorial writer Anne Jolis stated in 2012.

“There are no signs that human-caused climate change has increased the toll of recent disasters, as even the most recent extreme-event report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds,” read a separate 2012 opinion piece in the paper by University of Colorado at Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr.

But that’s not how News Corp saw it. “In 2012, News Corporation was affected by Superstorm Sandy through filming interruptions, plant shutdowns, and box office closings in the Northeast U.S.,” its 2013 disclosure to CDP reads. “The storm indicated that News Corporation can be negatively impacted by climate-related weather impacts.”

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion coverage of Sandy wasn’t an isolated occurrence. When researchers with the advocacy organization Climate Nexus later analyzed 20 years of opinion pieces in the paper about climate change, they found a “consistent pattern that overwhelmingly ignores the science, champions doubt and denial of both the science and effectiveness of action, and leaves readers misinformed about the consensus of science and of the risks of the threat.”

There was a similar disconnect during the horrific Australian bushfires in early 2020, which razed an area larger than all of South Korea, resulted in at least 34 deaths, and killed millions of wild animals. It was obvious to scientists the fires wouldn’t have become so extreme without dry conditions brought on by global temperature rise, yet Murdoch-owned papers instead pushed a narrative that environmentalists and arsonists were to blame.

“Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as national arson arrest toll hits 183,” read a headline in the Australian at the height of the fires. After receiving complaints, the Australian Press Council later investigated the reporting that went into the story, and while it found that the article was not misleading, it “accepts that the publication’s initial representation of the data may have led readers to consider that an unusually high number of ‘arsonists’ had been arrested since the beginning of the 2019-20 fire season.” In reality, most of the major fires were sparked by lightning.

“Our coverage has recognized Australia is having a conversation about climate change and how to respond to it,” the company said in a 2020 email to the New York Times. “The role of arsonists and policies that may have contributed to the spread of fire are, however, legitimate stories to report in the public interest.”

The story on arsonists was the top-read item on the Australian’s website that day and was given an international platform by people like Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted to his more than 6 million followers: “Truly disgusting that people would do this! God Bless Australia.”

As with Hurricane Sandy, the Australian’s parent company, News Corp, knew full well there was a strong link between the disaster and climate change. “Climate-related events such as floods, cyclones (for example, those that regularly occur in Northern Queensland), and bushfires also have an impact on News Corp Australia's ability to operate efficiently,” reads its CDP filing for 2020. “The 2019-2020 Australian wildfires added additional strain on our logistics and on our effectiveness to deliver our products to our customers.”

News Corp explained in that same document that for years it has taken measures to protect its own employees from climate-related dangers. “Prior to each bushfire and cyclone season, the Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) team works with the business units in properties that may be exposed to these weather conditions to ensure safety for staff such as editors, photographers, and journalists while they are out in the field,” it reads. “The WHS team brief staff on risks and ensure protocols are in place to secure their safety.”

News Corp also fretted about the climate risks faced by employees in the U.S. “Climate projection models make it difficult to know exactly which businesses or locations are most prone to the physical aspects of climate change,” it wrote in its 2020 CDP filing. “However, it is clear from past severe weather events that some of News Corp’s businesses are susceptible to such extreme events. Extended and severe droughts in California and Colorado that lead to an increased frequency and intensity of wildfires are a concern, and could impact employees, facilities, and productions in the region.”

You wouldn’t know about the connection between climate change and disasters from watching Fox News’ coverage of the record-smashing 2020 wildfire season on the U.S. West Coast.

“Massive wildfires unprecedented in their scope continue to sweep across huge portions of the West tonight,” Tucker Carlson said in a September 2020 broadcast. “How did climate change do that? They didn't tell us, but they just kept saying it. In the hands of Democratic politicians, climate change is like systemic racism in the sky: You can't see it, but rest assured it's everywhere and it's deadly.”

The top executive at Fox knew that there was in fact a connection between climate change and extreme weather. As co-chairman of News Corp and member of its board of directors, Lachlan Murdoch was “periodically updated” about the company’s climate and sustainability reporting to the CDP, as News Corp’s 2020 disclosure states. And as CEO of Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corporation, he wrote in the 2020 Corporate Social Responsibility report: “We believe our main climate risk is related to business continuity in the event of more extreme weather events.”

In the summer of 2020, James Murdoch decided to step back for good from the Murdoch media empire. “My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” he said at the time. Earlier that year, James and Kathryn had released a statement criticizing News Corp and Fox’s “ongoing denial” of climate change “given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

But James Murdoch’s climate change legacy lives on at News Corp. His father said in 2019 during a shareholders meeting in New York that “there are no climate deniers around, I can assure you.”

The company’s 2020 disclosure to CDP explains that “our News Corp global real estate team reviews climate change risks when deciding where to purchase or lease new facilities around the world. These risks include hurricane/storm potential, water-stressed areas, and flooding risks.”

The company is attempting to reduce its emissions in line with meeting the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold that scientists say is our best shot at keeping the emergency under control. Meeting previous climate goals has saved the company at least $18 million, Murdoch said during the 2019 New York meeting.

These days, even News Corp’s stridently climate-change–denying Australian media outlets may be changing their tune. According to the New York Times, several Murdoch-owned papers as well as the 24-hour Sky News channel will next month publish “features and editorials” that promote net-zero emissions by 2050. The new editorial position “could be a breakthrough that provides political cover for Australia’s conservative government to end its refusal to set ambitious emission targets,” the Times said.

Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, is skeptical, tweeting that the apparent rebrand is “Murdoch’s attempt to ‘greenwash’ themselves in the lead-up to the Glasgow climate conference. It’s all politics.”

It’s clear that Murdoch’s empire isn’t earning huge profits by making earnest statements about climate change to its viewers. In Fox Corp’s third quarter financial update for 2021, Lachlan Murdoch told investors, “Fox News channel finished this last quarter as the most-watched cable network in primetime and finished March as the most-watched cable news network overall.”

Lachlan Murdoch attributed some of this success to the launch of Gutfeld!, a new late-night program hosted by longtime Fox host and panelist Greg Gutfeld, which Lachlan said is currently drawing an audience larger than NBC’s The Tonight Show.

In May, Gutfeld did a segment attacking President Biden’s climate policies. “By the way, if you want to make electric cars the choice for Americans, you don’t try to hit them with guilt and virtue-signaling and tying it to a climate crisis that does not exist,” he said.

Gutfeld assured his viewers that extreme weather in their communities has nothing to do with global temperature rise. “Because our own data says that is not actually happening,” he said. “That is not due to the climate crisis.”


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Whatever Happened to ... the Women Who Boldly Declared: 'No Sex for Fish'?Rebbeccah Atieno stands with one of the boats owned by the No Sex for Fish women. Once a proud boat owner herself, she says she lost her home when Lake Victoria swept through the village; her boat no longer functions. (photo: Julia Gunther/NPR)

Whatever Happened to ... the Women Who Boldly Declared: 'No Sex for Fish'?
Viola Kosome and Marc Silver, NPR
Excerpt: "No Sex for Fish is facing a precarious future."

In November 2019, we profiled a group with a bold name stating its aim: No Sex for Fish. Women in Nduru Beach, a Kenyan community on the shores of Lake Victoria, wanted to change the dynamics in the local fish business. Men did the fishing and often demanded sex with female fishmongers before giving them a supply of fish to sell at nearby markets. The practice has led to high rates of HIV. The women hated the practice but selling fish was their livelihood. Then they had a revolutionary idea: What if they owned their own boats and hired men to fish for them? In 2010, with support from international donors and charities, they got their boats. Eventually 30 women in Nduru Beach and neighboring communities became boat owners. We spoke to members and supporters of the collective to see how they're now faring.

No Sex for Fish is facing a precarious future.

At its peak, the women in this collective, living in Nduru Beach and neighboring communities, had obtained some 30 boats with their initial grant from PEPFAR, the U.S. HIV program, and subsequent funding from the charity World Connect, which supports small-scale local programs.

But when we visited in 2019, a number of the wooden boats had been damaged by time and use. The women were preparing a new grant application. With a new boat costing $1,000 or more, they simply couldn't afford replacements without help.

Then came two unforeseen blows that struck simultaneously in early 2020: catastrophic flooding and the global pandemic.

After heavy rainfall, rising waters swamped Nduru Beach, which sits on low-lying ground. Homes were submerged. The 1,000 or so residents had to be evacuated. Many of them had no choice but to live in a shelter set up in a local school. All of them, including the No Sex for Fish boat owners, lost their ability to earn a living in the midst of an economic downturn triggered by the pandemic.

Rebbeccah Atieno, a proud boat owner, says she lost her home and all her property when waters from Lake Victoria swept through the village, including her boat and with it her ability to support her family of six children. The widowed 37-year-old moved to a home on higher ground where she paid about $30 a month in rent before finding a place to stay for free. A kindhearted acquaintance who'd left the area to live in Nairobi invited Atieno to stay in her house in Amboo, a village a few miles from Nduru Beach, for the time being.

At one point, Atieno contracted malaria. "There was a time I was sick and down," she says. "I thought I would die. My worry was my children since there was no food for them to eat."

Atieno has recovered and says she now makes a living by helping people cultivate their rice farms in the morning, then selling groceries at her kiosk in a local market later in the day.

She struggles to get by.

"I do not know where I will get money to pay for school fees next term since my business is not giving me much," she says. Two of her children are in high school and four in elementary school.

Other members of the No Sex For Fish group face similar challenges.

Lorine Abuto, a mother of seven, is the only member whose boat survived the floods in good enough condition to take out into Lake Victoria. She hires men to fish for her but the aftermath of the floods, including tangles of weeds near the shore, has made it more difficult to reach schools of fish, and she sometimes has to buy fish from other sources. One morning in early September, she skillfully removed the scales of a Nile perch from a recent catch and sliced it in two, then put it on a mat to dry in the sun. She sells dried fish – and also fried fish – at a market near her new home a few miles from Nduru Beach.

A young child squealed with delight as a Hamerkop bird danced next to the mat where some fish were drying. Abuto scared the bird away.

"Nature separated some of us but our goal is still intact," says Abuto, referring to the women of No Sex for Fish. With Nduru Beach still uninhabitable, they have scattered to different parts of the region. The regular group meetings to discuss fishing issues and finances no longer take place.

"It is not easy for us because the fish stocks have dwindled and it is hard to get fish to sell, but we are coping with the situation," she says. The pandemic has made matters worse. Many Kenyans lost jobs or saw their income decrease, so people are reluctant to splurge on fish, she says. Some days, she says, she earns less than $3 – barely enough to feed her family.

Lorine Abuto hopes she will one day be able to live in Nduru Beach again. That's the dream of the displaced residents, says Tim Kibet, a retired Peace Corps employee from Kenya and now a part-time field agent with World Connect. Kibet is monitoring Nduru Beach and the neighboring villages that were part of the collective.

A return any time soon seems unlikely. In a visit last year, he says, "those homes were all submerged in water. Homes with mud walls started falling apart, some even came down. Only ones with brick could be standing by now."

And even though the waters have receded, he says, the Nduru Beach area is still wet and muddy.

Table banking was a life preserver

During this time of dislocation, the past success of No Sex for Fish has helped the members get by.

In their meetings, they had contributed some of their earnings to a fund to use for boat repairs, new nets and other fishing-related expenses.

When the floods hit, the group had managed to save some $6,000. The money served as an emergency fund during the months after they were evacuated and unable to earn any money from the fishing business.

"That they had the money was an incredible triumph for them," says Patrick Higdon, director of programs for World Connect. "And they spent it down to zero because of flooding and displacement."

In addition, there another $5,500 to draw upon from what's known as a "table banking" group – a community-based way to save money for the proverbial rainy day.

Prior to the crises of 2020, the members, many of them part of the No Sex for Fish collective, met regularly. Our NPR team sat in on a session.

The meeting took place in the living room of Justine Adhiambo Obura's home. She's the chairwoman of the No Sex For Fish group. The thick mud walls were decorated with lace hangings, family photos and a framed certificate declaring her the "Inspirational Woman of the Year 2014" in Kisumu County.

The 18 women and 1 man sat in a circle, tossing coins into a lockbox that landed with a clink. The box had three locks whose keys are kept "far away" in separate locations, said Obura.

Those in need could ask for a loan that they'd promise to repay at the next session. They might need cash to cover household expenses at a tough time — or pay for carfare to the clinic for a checkup. Several of the group members are HIV positive – one of the horrible legacies of the practice of trading sex for fish.

There was a tense moment when a man made a loan request and was told his wife had, unbeknownst to him, taken out a loan in his name and not yet paid it back.

But overall, there was a spirit of warm generosity. Some of the money contributed goes into a special goat fund. When there's enough money in the pot, a lucky member would be gifted with a kid that can one day provide milk or be used for breeding.

But those goats – and indeed much of the livestock owned by villagers – perished in the floods. And the table banking fund has been dispersed to cover the expenses involved in evacuating residents in the wake of the flooding. It's now down to about 10,000 Kenyan shillings — $90.

New grants, new dreams — from rice to tomatoes

In April and July of this year, World Connect disbursed two $3,000 replenishment grants to help the No Sex For Fish women in Nduru Beach start new businesses in the wake of the loss of their boats. Some are selling firewood and charcoal. Some are running food kiosks. At year's end, women who got funding from the grant will report on their efforts.

Despite the gloom in the wake of the floods, Obura is optimistic that the group and its members will come up with new ways to generate income in this interim period: "We are of the opinion of doing fish cage and rice farming in the future."

In Kusa Beach, another lakeside village with an affiliated chapter of No Sex For Fish, some of the members have already launched an ambitious new project.

That village is located on higher ground than Nduru Beach so the homes are intact. But their flood-damaged boats are out of commission.

So 15 women from Kusa Beach decided to put their hope in tomatoes — and received a grant of $3,700 from World Connect to get started.

This summer they planted five plots, hoping for a harvest to sell at market and also to process into tomato paste and powder. Four plots are doing well so far. The fifth has issues with salinity in the soil and water pumps.

"In two to three months the women will be able to evaluate their initial crop," says Kibet, the World Connect field agent from Kenya, who himself does some farming. World Connect's hope is that the tomato business will earn enough to pay for a second round.

They're busy spraying and weeding, he reports: "They look so determined. We'll see how it goes their first time."

You may be wondering – why tomatoes? Kibet wondered, too.

The answer, he says, has to do with local lore. Hippos live in Lake Victoria and sometimes come ashore to graze. The rising waters have made it easier for them to do so. And they can be very aggressive, not only consuming crops but sometimes even killing people.

The women told him: "Hippos don't like to eat tomatoes."

Kibet, who himself does some farming, is not entirely convinced: "I've still yet to see that!" But the women told him they didn't want anything to interfere with their agricultural project, and they were certain that tomatoes would not be enticing to any marauding hippos.


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A Single Fire Killed Thousands of Sequoias. Scientists Are Racing to Save the RestThe 2020 Castle Fire burned the Alder Creek sequoia grove with extreme intensity, killing many of the 1,000-year-old trees there. Without any green foliage, the trees can't survive or resprout. (photo: Lauren Sommer/NPR)

A Single Fire Killed Thousands of Sequoias. Scientists Are Racing to Save the Rest
Lauren Sommer, NPR
Sommer writes: "On a hot afternoon in California's Sequoia National Park, Alexis Bernal squints up at the top of a 200-foot-tall tree."

On a hot afternoon in California's Sequoia National Park, Alexis Bernal squints up at the top of a 200-foot-tall tree.

"That is what we would call a real giant sequoia monarch," she says. "It's massive."

At 40 feet in diameter, the tree easily meets the definition of a monarch, the name given to the largest sequoias. It's likely more than 1,500 years old.

Still, that's as old as this tree will get. The trunk is pitch black, the char reaching almost all the way to the top. Not a single green branch is visible.

"It's 100% dead," Bernal says. "There's no living foliage on it all."

The scorched carcasses of eight other giants surround this one in the Alder Creek grove. A fire science research assistant at UC Berkeley, Bernal is here with a team cataloguing the destruction.

It's not easy to kill a giant sequoia. They can live more than 3,000 years and withstand repeated wildfires and droughts over the centuries.

Now, with humans changing both the climate and the landscape surrounding the trees, these giants face dangers they might not survive.

Last year, the Castle Fire burned through the Sierra Nevada, fueled by hot, dry conditions and overgrown forests. Based on early estimates, as many as 10,600 large sequoias were killed — up to 14% of the entire population.

"This is unprecedented to see so many of these large old-growth trees dead, and I think it's a travesty," says Scott Stephens, fire scientist at UC Berkeley, as he surveys the damage. "This is pure disaster."

With extreme fires increasing on a hotter planet, scientists are urgently trying to save the sequoias that remain. Researchers from federal agencies and universities are teaming up to find the sequoia groves at highest risk. The hope is to make them more fire-resistant by reducing the dense, overgrown vegetation around them, before the next wildfire hits.

But one year later, the sequoia groves are again under threat. At the time of publication, wildfires burning in Sequoia National Park are within a mile of a grove with thousands of sequoias. Firefighters are battling to contain the blazes.

"It's hard to see these trees that have lived hundreds to potentially thousands of years just die," Bernal says, "because it's just not a normal thing for them."

Sequoias need fire, but fires are changing

Giant sequoias only grow in isolated pockets, tucked in the mountains of California. Losing even a few groves spells significant loss to the entire population.

Sequoias are one of the most fire-adapted trees on the planet. With tough, foot-thick bark, they're insulated from the heat. They tower above the rest of the forest and the bottom of the tree is bare, without low branches that might be ignited by trees burning around it.

Old-growth sequoias weathered the low-intensity wildfires that were once the norm in the Sierra Nevada. Fires regularly spread along the forest floor, either ignited by lightning or set by Native American tribes who used burns to shape the landscape and cultivate food and materials.

With the arrival of white settlers, fire began to disappear from these forests. Tribes were forcibly removed from lands they once maintained, and federal firefighting agencies mounted a campaign of fire suppression, extinguishing blazes as quickly as possible.

That meant forests grew denser over the last century. Now, the built-up vegetation has become a tinder box, fueling hotter, more extreme fires, like the Castle Fire, that kill vast swaths of trees.

"These trees have been here 1,500 years, so how many fires have they withstood: 80?" Stephens says. "And then one fire comes in 2020 and suddenly they're gone."

The Castle Fire's fierce heat was also fueled by the changing climate. In 2012, when a drought hit California, hotter temperatures amplified the toll it took on Sierra Nevada forests. While the largest sequoias could handle it, other kinds of conifers around them succumbed. Millions of trees were killed.

"The extra warmth that came with the drought pushed it into a whole new terrain," says Nate Stephenson, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "That's what really helped kill a lot of trees, and they became fuel for fires."

During his four decades of studying sequoias, Stephenson had rarely seen an old-growth sequoia die. When the first images emerged after the Castle Fire hit, he wasn't prepared.

"That's when I couldn't help it," he says. "I don't cry often, but I cried when I saw the photos. Because I love these trees."

Few seedlings sprout from the ash

The soil is still powdery black in the Alder Creek sequoia grove a year later. The UC Berkeley team is scanning it for signs of hope: a spot of green.

"Two tiny sequoias here growing from the regeneration from the fire," Stephens says, finding 2-inch-tall seedlings, impossibly tiny compared to what they could become.

The lifecycle of a sequoia hinges on wildfire, which is the trigger for releasing its seeds. The blast of heat opens the cones, sending a shower of seeds to the forest floor, which get established quickly on the newly cleared ground.

In some groves, researchers are finding hundreds of seedlings where the Castle Fire burned with low intensity, the kind of fire sequoias are accustomed to.

But in the Alder Creek grove, where the fire burned with ferocious heat, the team only finds a dozen seedlings the entire afternoon. Other groves look similarly bare.

Even under normal conditions, around 98% of sequoia seedlings die in their first year. This year could be even tougher with extreme drought gripping the landscape.

"I am very concerned that some areas will not have sequoias," says Christy Brigham, head of resource management and science for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. "All the adults are killed and there will not be enough seedlings to repopulate."

That's leading land managers to consider planting new sequoias, so the scorched groves don't disappear entirely. But in a changing climate, it's not a simple question. As temperatures rise, young trees planted today face surviving in a vastly different future. The most suitable habitat for sequoias could move somewhere else.

"That is one of the gifts of giant sequoias — is that they force us to think in deep time," says Brigham. "It forces us to confront the challenge of climate change."

Rush to save remaining sequoias

Federal land managers say that given the millennia-length timeframe, planting new sequoias is a back-up plan at this point. The more pressing need is saving the trees that are left.

A coalition of the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, universities, tribes and nonprofits is banding together to identify the groves most at risk. This summer, the Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition has been rapidly assessing conditions on the ground.

"We just saw what one wildfire did," Brigham says. "Can we find the places, do the plans, and get the funding and put the people on the ground fast enough to prevent loss like this in the future?"

Brigham estimates around 40% of the sequoia groves on national park land alone are at risk of severe wildfires, because the surrounding forests haven't burned in decades. Other groves at risk are found on Forest Service or private land.

Sequoia National Park has used controlled burns, also known as prescribed fire, since the 1960s to prevent forests from becoming overgrown. But Brigham says burning continues to be a challenge.

In the spring, when cooler conditions are better for controlled burning, projects are limited because of the threatened pacific fisher. The slender, mink-like animal was listed as endangered in 2020, and its habitat is protected during the spring denning season.

But burning in the summer can be tough because of air quality concerns, extremely dry vegetation or lack of personnel, since they're generally fighting wildfires.

"There are all these constraints on prescribed fire that we can't control," Brigham says. "As it gets hotter and drier, that window is smaller and smaller."

Brigham says she's hopeful that land managers can move quickly over the next year to prioritize the sequoia groves that need help the most. With extreme fires increasingly common, time is running short.

"It is not too late," says Brigham. "We can do better. People love these trees. So I just hope we can take that love and translate it into immediate action to protect the groves and long term action to limit climate change and its impacts."


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