01 February 22
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He also dangled pardons for Jan. 6 rioters.
In a Sunday statement, Trump criticized Democrats and “RINO Republicans” like “Wacky Susan Collins” who are supportive of reforming the more than century-old Electoral Count Act. Collins and other centrists in the Senate are in the early stages of reform that could increase the threshold for objections to various states’ electoral votes, among other reforms, according to the Hill.
“Actually, what they are saying, is that [former Vice President Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away,” Trump said. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
Despite more than a year of pushing conspiracy theories of widespread electoral and voter fraud, there is no legitimacy to Trump’s claims, and all evidence has shown that President Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the election.
During a Saturday rally in Conroe, Texas, Trump promised pardons for supporters who rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the same morning he gave a speech calling on supporters to “fight like hell” to keep him in the White House and march to the Capitol to protest the certification of the election.
“If I run [in 2024] and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly,” Trump said Saturday. “We will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”
Trump also singled out prosecutors, including those who are investigating his businesses in New York and his attempt to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into changing the vote totals to hand him Georgia’s electoral votes, calling them “mentally sick.” The prosecutors in the places he mentioned–New York Attorney General Tish James, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg–are all Black.
“If these radical, vicious racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal, I hope we are going to have in this country the biggest protest we have ever had in, D.C, in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere,” Trump said. “Because our country and our elections are corrupt. They’re corrupt.”
Willis wrote a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Sunday asking for assistance in securing government buildings in Atlanta after Trump’s comments, the Washington Post reported.
“We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Willis said. She maintained that “my staff and I will not be influenced or intimidated by anyone as this investigation moves forward.”
Rep. Liz Cheney, the conservative Republican who’s been targeted by Trump for voting to impeach him twice and joining the House committee investigating Jan. 6, said in a Monday tweet that Trump’s statements over the weekend show he feels no remorse for what happened last year.
“Trump uses language he knows caused the Jan 6 violence; suggests he’d pardon the Jan 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy; threatens prosecutors; and admits he was attempting to overturn the election,” Cheney tweeted. “He’d do it all again if given the chance.”
Travis McMichael, left, speaks with his attorney Jason B. Sheffield, center, during his sentencing. (photo: Stephen B. Morton/Getty Images)
A federal judge has rejected a plea agreement that would have averted a hate crimes trial for the man convicted of murder for shooting Ahmaud Arbery
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Lisa Godbey Wood came just hours after prosecutors gave notice that son and father Travis and Greg McMichael had agreed to plead guilty to hate crime charges that they chased, threatened and killed 25-year-old Arbery because he was Black.
But Travis McMichael's sentencing hearing Monday afternoon turned emotional and contentious as federal prosecutors urged the judge to approve the deal even after Arbery's parents pleaded passionately for her to deny it.
Travis McMichael would have received 30 years in federal prison to be served alongside the penalty of life in prison without parole imposed by a state court judge for the murder conviction. By pleading guilty, he would have given up the chance to appeal his federal sentence.
But Arbery's family objected to a provision that sought to transfer Travis McMichael immediately to federal custody from state prison. Arbery's parents argued that conditions in federal prison wouldn't be as tough for the McMichaels.
Arbery's mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said she felt strongly that Travis McMichael should serve his entire sentence in a Georgia state prison.
“Please listen to me,” Cooper-Jones told the judge. “Granting these men their preferred choice of confinement would defeat me. It gives them one last chance to spit in my face.”
Wood said she was rejecting the deal because its terms would have locked her into a specific sentence. She said the Arbery family should have a say at sentencing in whatever punishment is ultimately given.
Now the question is whether Travis McMichael will withdraw the guilty plea he entered Monday, and whether Greg McMichael, who had been offered the same deal the judge denied, will still plead guilty as planned. The judge gave them both until Friday to return to the federal courthouse in Brunswick and give their answer.
The plea deals would likely have forced the McMichaels to spend decades in prison, even if they won appeals to their state convictions
The McMichaels armed themselves and chased Arbery in a pickup truck after they spotted him running in their neighborhood outside the port city of Brunswick on Feb. 23, 2020. A neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the chase in his own truck and recorded cellphone video of Travis McMichael blasting Arbery with a shotgun.
A national outcry erupted when the graphic video leaked online two months later. Georgia was one of just four U.S. states without a hate crimes law at the time. Legislators quickly approved one, but it came too late for state hate crime charges in Arbery’s killing.
Despite being convicted of murder in a Georgia state court trial last November, the McMichaels and Bryan still face federal hate crimes charges that accuse them of violating Arbery's civil rights and targeting him because he was Black.
Travis McMichael told the judge in a loud, clear voice Monday that he was willing to plead guilty to killing Arbery out of racial animosity.
Prosecutor Tara Lyons asked the judge to set aside the Arbery family's misgivings about the deal, saying Travis McMichael's admission would send a powerful message.
“He is pleading guilty to a federal hate crime and publicly confessing to the world that this crime would not have happened had Ahmaud Arbery not been Black,” Lyons said.
Lyons said she understood the Arbery family's anger and distrust of the criminal justice system. But federal prosecutors said they had consulted with attorneys for Arbery's parents before signing off on any deals.
"The Justice Department entered the plea agreement only after the victims’ attorneys informed me that the family was not opposed to it,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a statement.
Lee Merritt, an attorney for Arbery's mother, said that was misleading. He told reporters outside the courthouse that the family had previously rejected an identical plea deal proposed by prosecutors.
“The family no longer wanted to engage them concerning that point," Merritt said. "They had had their answer. They (federal prosecutors) took that as a deferral.”
No notices have been filed in court of a plea deal for Bryan. For now, he appears to be headed to trial next week — with or without the McMichaels, depending on whether they choose to follow through with their guilty pleas.
Wood continued preparations for trial proceedings, saying she planned to summon the first 50 potential jurors to the courthouse on Feb. 7 for questioning on whether they can serve as fair, unbiased jurors in such a highly publicized case.
During the state trial in Glynn County Superior Court, the defense argued that the white men had authority to chase Arbery because they reasonably suspected he had been committing crimes in their neighborhood. Travis McMichael testified he opened fire only after Arbery attacked him with fists and tried to grab his shotgun.
The federal judge ordered that a jury pool be chosen from throughout the Southern District of Georgia, which covers 43 counties, to improve odds of seating a fair and unbiased jury.
At least six historically Black universities and colleges around the U.S. received bomb threats on Monday and Tuesday morning. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Howard gave an "all clear" notice at 7:30 a.m. ET, after the latest threat triggered a shelter-in-place order around 3 a.m.
Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, Fla., said it also received a threat early Tuesday morning.
"The vicious and racially motivated targeting of Florida's first HBCU is extremely unsettling for our community," university president A. Zachary Faison, Jr. tweeted. "Law enforcement is currently investigating this threat and your safety is our paramount concern."
Morgan State University in Baltimore, Md., said access to campus was closed on Tuesday morning due to a bomb threat. It asked all on campus to shelter in place.
Bomb threats were made against at least six HBCUs on Monday, forcing officials to order lockdowns and cancel classes. By early afternoon, many of them issued all-clear notices.
The schools receiving threats included Albany State University, Bethune-Cookman University, Bowie State University, Delaware State University, Howard University and Southern University and A…M College, according to spokespeople, statements and social media posts.
Threats are being investigated by local and state police, along with federal law enforcement.
"The FBI is aware of the series of bomb threats around the country and we are working with our law enforcement partners to address any potential threats," the bureau said in a statement. "As always, we would like to remind members of the public that if they observe anything suspicious to report it to law enforcement immediately."
Washington, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department and Howard University's police force issued an "all-clear" for the campus at 6:22 a.m. following a bomb threat made about two hours earlier, according to a university spokesperson.
Carlos Holmes, a spokesperson for Delaware State University, said police had completed their search of the entire campus by early afternoon and hadn't found a bomb.
Bethune-Cookman University and Southern University and A…M College both went into lockdown, with Southern also canceling classes. Bethune-Cookman later lifted its lockdown, and Southern issued an all-clear.
Albany State University closed its campus and postponed classes and operations. Law enforcement later issued an all-clear.
Bowie State University said its campus was also closed but that students would attend classes online and employees would work virtually. It lifted its shelter-in-place order by early afternoon.
U.S. Rep. James Langevin's announcement this month that he plans to retire has set off a scramble to determine his successor. (photo: Paul Morigi/Flickr)
Rep. James Langevin’s retirement calls into question the Democrats’ current redistricting map.
But U.S. Rep. James Langevin’s announcement this month that he plans to retire has set off a scramble to determine his successor and called into question the wisdom of the maps currently slated for passage. The open-seat race for Langevin’s former district may give the GOP an opening in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to Congress in over two decades.
Local Republican officials have expressed hope that the combination of an open-seat race, the potential for a Republican wave in 2022, and the expected entrance of a strong candidate — former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung — could be enough to tip the race in their favor. Rhode Island GOP Chair Sue Cienki told the Providence Journal that the seat as currently drawn represents “a winnable race with the right candidate.”
Democrats, for their part, appear to have been caught flat-footed by Langevin’s announcement. With no obvious successor, a laundry list of potential candidates have been floated for the seat. The wide open nature of the race has stoked fears that a messy, drawn-out primary could ensue, weakening the eventual winner before the general election.
The Rhode Island General Assembly, which is run by Democratic supermajorities in both chambers, could neutralize the problem by making modest changes to the proposed congressional maps. But changes that would shore up the Democratic-leaning 2nd Congressional District infringe on the territory of David Cicilline, a senior U.S. representative and junior member of House leadership who holds the dark-blue district containing the majority of the Providence metropolitan area and the liberal eastern parts of the state.
Langevin, who first won election in 2000, has not faced a competitive race during his 20-plus years in office. While the 2nd District has long been viewed as safe Democratic territory, it moved right during the Trump era, with Langevine facing the closest reelection battle of his career in 2020. Langevine ultimately won the race with a comfortable 17-point margin, but the district’s steady rightward shift could move the race into competitive territory as soon as the next election cycle. The 110,000 votes Langevin’s most recent opponent, Robert Lancia, won in 2020 would have been enough to capture the district during the last GOP wave election in 2014, when Langevin won the seat with only 106,000 votes.
Even before the shifts of the Trump era, the district maintained an independent streak that is common among Northeastern electorates. Rhode Island’s second-largest city, Cranston, anchors the 2nd District and hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in over a decade, despite breaking heavily for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden on the presidential level. Fung, the city’s popular former mayor — whose third and final term ended at the beginning of 2021 — is widely seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination should he choose to enter the race. During Fung’s ill-fated race for governor in 2014, he managed to eke out a win in the parts of the state that constitute the 2nd Congressional District.
Despite the building potential for a competitive race, there is no sign that the Rhode Island legislature intends to use its authority to adjust the boundaries on the proposed redistricting maps. The advisory commission’s suggested map hews closely to the current district boundaries, leaving Cicilline with the lion’s share of the state’s Democratic voters. (The commission, whose recommendations are nonbinding, is composed of appointments by state legislative leaders.)
According to FiveThirtyEight’s redistricting tracker, the currently proposed 2nd District, which contains the western half of Providence County and Kent and Washington counties, maintains a notable Democratic lean. Meanwhile, the 1st District retains its hold on much bluer territory around the northern and eastern Providence metropolitan area and in the liberal counties of Bristol and Newport to the southeast. This split leaves the 1st District substantially more Democratic — at D+32 (FiveThirtyEight’s competitiveness metric), its lean is nearly double that of Rhode Island’s D+17 2nd District. Only a handful of districts nationwide are safer for Democrats.
Through any number of modest changes to the current map, which already messily bisects the city of Providence and the state as a whole from north to south, the legislature could make the 2nd District substantially more favorable for Democrats. Cranston’s 80,000 residents — Fung’s base of support — could easily be offset by drawing other parts of Providence and its northern and western suburbs into the 2nd District, or some of Cranston could be moved into the 1st District. Democrats could also reverse the changes they made in the last redistricting cycle, when they moved the southern parts of Providence, where many of the state’s voters of color reside, into Cicilline’s district and exchanged them for large portions of the northwestern part of the state.
Keeping a clear majority of the state’s Democrats in his district gives Cicilline an advantage in future statewide races. As one of the state’s two members of the House of Representatives, Cicilline would be heir apparent should either of the state’s sitting senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, choose to forgo reelection in the next decade. And if Rhode Island were to lose a representative because of population decline in the next census, Cicilline would be more likely to keep the seat.
In statehouses across the nation, redistricting battles are going better for Democrats than many analysts had previously expected. The 2022 midterms will likely play out on maps that are comparable or even slightly more favorable to Democrats than current maps, though experts anticipate that Republicans will retain a moderate advantage overall. With just five seats separating the GOP from control of Congress’s lower chamber, the smallest of factors could tip the balance of power in Washington next year.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Proposals banning abortion, discussions of sexuality, and white racial ‘discomfort’ aim to establish Florida as capital of Trumpistan
And last Wednesday, an anti-masker physician, hand picked by the governor and apathetic about the value of Covid-19 vaccines, was backed unanimously by a Republican senate panel as the next surgeon-general following a walk-out by Democratic politicians frustrated by Joseph Ladapo’s evasiveness.
To hear DeSantis tell it, the “freedom state” of Florida is merely following the will of a populist citizenry in defying the perceived tyranny of the federal government, determined to protect liberty in the face of a deadly pandemic that has claimed more than 64,000 of their fellow residents, and standing up against the “indoctrination” of children.
Yet as the possible 2024 presidential candidate presses ahead with turning Florida into what critics see as his own conservative fiefdom – a de facto Trumpistan of the south with an “Orwellian-sounding” election police force – DeSantis is finding opposition beginning to harden.
More of the state’s 21 million people, which elected him in 2018 by barely 32,000 votes, appears displeased at the creeping authoritarianism and is keen to show DeSantis – who will be seeking re-election in November – that Florida is not the solidly red state he believes it to be.
Those voices come from parents, doctors, LBGTQ+ activists, proponents of voting rights and others who will be affected if many of the Republican bills, as expected, become law.
“People do not like the authoritarian nature of this governor and the way that he has weaponized fear between his constituents to try to curry favor with his base,” said Brandon Wolf, development manager and spokesperson for Equality Florida.
“And I think you’re going to see that show up at the polls. I know people get concerned that maybe Florida is gone forever. But let me tell you we fully intend to mobilize and show up for our communities in the election cycle.”
Wolf pointed to several areas where he said DeSantis’s moves were gaining little traction.
“Florida is a beautifully diverse state. I live in downtown Orlando, which has folks from all walks of life, different races, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, gender identities. We all live in this wonderful tapestry that is central Florida,” he said.
“I can tell you that the things that concern people here are not the conversations that are happening in Tallahassee. That rent went up 29% in 2021, that Florida is leading the country in increases in housing prices, people are concerned the governor has essentially made Covid-19 a political battleground.
“Yet the legislature is singularly focused on legislating as if they won by a margin of 99 to one in 2018, as if they have a total mandate by which they can control people’s lives. It’s disgraceful and disappointing.”
The issues that Republicans see as a priority for Florida are red meat to DeSantis’s conservative base. They include the 15-week abortion ban bill, which received a chaotic hearing on Thursday, and moves to give parents more say over classroom curriculum and control of school libraries. In Polk county this week, education officials went from school to school pulling 16 books flagged by a conservative parents’ group as inappropriate, including Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 bestseller The Kite Runner.
They include bills to strengthen the governor’s fierce anti-immigrant stance by locking out from state or local government business any company involved in the transportation of undocumented migrants.
And two healthcare bills have been introduced in the Republican-dominated Florida legislature that opponents say further vilifies and isolates the LBGTQ community. One, touted as the vulnerable child protection act, would criminalize professionals who provide gender-affirming medical care to minors; the other would allow any medical professional the right to refuse treatment or procedures including gender affirming surgery or abortions on moral grounds.
“It doesn’t deny their right to access that procedure, but also protects the individual who has a conscience reason they don’t want to perform it,” the bill’s sponsor, Republican state senator Dennis Baxley, told the Sun-Sentinel.
The proposal that has caused perhaps the most outrage is the parental rights in education bill, the so-called Don’t Say Gay bill that would prohibit elementary schools from discussing sexuality and gender identity other than in an unspecified “age or developmentally appropriate” settings, and would allow parents to sue.
“It’s going to effectively erase LBGTQ students and families and LBGTQ history by banning classroom discussion,” said Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic state representative who opposed the measure vigorously in the legislature.
“If a fourth-grader wants to come into the classroom, they’ve written an essay about their two dads, they want to present that essay to the class to talk about who they are or who their family is, the school is going to shut it down?”
Wolf, meanwhile, sees a straight line from the flurry of reactionary legislative action to DeSantis’s own political ambitions.
“These bills don’t live in silos. It’s easy if you look from the outside to see this scattershot of legislation and see them as individualized, that an abortion ban may not be tied to the Don’t Say Gay bill, which may not be tied to the license to discriminate in healthcare bill,” he said.
“But the truth is they are all connected. And the thing that connects them is the concerted attempt by Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies to push themselves to the right of Donald Trump and set DeSantis up to run for president in 2024.
“In Florida you are free, but only free to do and say as you are told.”
Lauren Book, a state senator representing parts of Broward, Florida’s bluest county, led a walkout of Democratic colleagues at this week’s confirmation hearing for the polarizing Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general, after he repeatedly refused to say if vaccines were effective in the fight against Covid-19. His views appear to echo those of DeSantis, who has feuded often and loudly with the Biden administration over the pandemic, and banned mask and vaccine mandates in Florida.
“21 million Floridians deserve more than a mouthpiece for the governor, than talking sound bites that sound good and suit a narrative,” Book told CNN. Her criticism was echoed by a group of prominent Florida physicians, who accused DeSantis and Ladapo of “espousing policies contrary to the evidence”.
Jabari Hosey, president of the education advocacy group Families for Safe Schools, said that the actions of DeSantis and Republican allies, particularly in banning Covid safety measures, do not match the wishes of the majority of parents and guardians of Florida’s 2.7 million school-age children.
“He’s representing a small, loud group of parents,” he said. “We feel omitted and it’s kind of a punch to the gut when he’s selecting small, far-right groups of folks that kind of determine his legislative decision making.
“Creating these bills like Don’t Say Gay is a dog whistle, and also a suppression tactic, a way to force us not to talk about these things and therefore not accept them. It’s scary for us, parents who don’t agree with this, and we just really believe we are the majority and we want to move forward, not backwards.”
Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces attending military exercises. (photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Legislation with bipartisan support might bring more natural gas online, further imperiling climate targets.
The House and Senate bills contain not just debilitating sanctions on Russian enterprises but also ample language about how the conflict could be used to whip up business for U.S. corporations, citing “mutually beneficial opportunities for increased investment and economic expansion between the United States and the Baltic states.” As has been true of the State Department’s communications about the potential conflict, the legislation mentions bolstering U.S. “support for the Baltic region’s physical and energy security needs,” a phrase that in recent history has tended to mean boosting fossil fuels. The Senate bill, introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, has 40 Democratic co-sponsors, joined by independent Angus King. The House version has 13 Democratic co-sponsors, led by Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Greg Meeks.
The bills call for annual trade conferences “in coordination with the governments of Baltic states, to foster investment opportunities in the Baltic region for United States businesses.” They also encourage foreign direct investment in the region. The legislation specifically mention U.S. participation in the Three Seas Initiative and Business Forum, an ongoing effort between the U.S. and 12 Baltic and Eastern European governments launched in 2015 by right-wing governments in Croatia and Poland with the aim of furthering “economic growth, security and a stronger and more cohesive Europe.” U.S. involvement in the Initiative has been strongly encouraged by the Atlantic Council, a think tank that accepts considerable donations from Chevron, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Crescent Petroleum, the U.S. State Department, and the natural gas export firm Cheniere, and has convened multiple meetings for U.S. ambassadors to the region. “As the United States looks to confront Russian and Chinese economic and geopolitical competition in Europe and across the world, the Three Seas Initiative offers an opportunity to strengthen the economies of U.S. allies in Central and Eastern Europe and reduce their dependence on Moscow and Beijing’s economic overtures,” the Atlantic Council writes on its website.
A Democratic staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told me the bills’ investment measures have less to do with Russia than China, a country the U.S. fears that Russia and other countries in the region might turn to in the near future. Investment provisions, the staffer wrote via email, were included “with an eye geared towards countering Chinese economic coercion in Lithuania, but it proved to be a good vehicle for that while also expressing support for Baltic allies.”
On “energy security” provisions, the staffer noted a core concern of the bills was to ensure that “Russia can’t shut off the gas if we try to hold them accountable for a re-invasion. So energy security is a key part of alliance cohesion on sanctions” and “other tools.
“U.S. support for making any country less dependent on Russian energy resources, especially former Soviet bloc countries, is in fact in our national security interest,” the staffer said, noting that the “best way to improve countries’ energy security is by helping catalyze domestic (energy) resource mobilization. In most instances, that means helping countries develop domestic renewable energy resources and providing technical assistance and development financing to include energy storage. Doing so ensures the reliability of renewable energy generation.” The staffer added that no fossil fuel companies were consulted in drafting the bill and that “bolstering energy security in the region does not directly translate to increasing fossil fuel consumption.”
The U.S. has a long history of invoking “national security interests” to justify U.S. fossil fuel exports. So it’s hard to know how seriously to take the assertion that the Ukraine Defense Sovereignty Act would instead prioritize renewables. Though the estimated $211 billion worth of “Priority Projects” listed on the Three Seas Initiative’s website, for instance, includes a number of clean energy and electrification projects—a solar photovoltaics park in Hungary, hydropower in Estonia, and railways in many countries—the initiative also appears to be backing a prodigious buildout of fossil fuel infrastructure across the region: new liquefied natural gas terminals in Latvia and Estonia, an oil and gas terminal in Croatia, and an expansion of the North-South Gas Corridor between Hungary and Slovakia, including several LNG terminals. The Corridor has been described by the Atlantic Council as the Initiative’s “main goal.”
All of the past three U.S. administrations have encouraged gas demand in Europe as a cudgel against Russia, including the Obama administration, through its Global Shale Gas Initiative, and more recently, the Biden administration, with its support for efforts like the Southern Gas Corridor, from Azerbaijan to Italy. Last fall, the White House announced its intention to “support efforts to increase capacity for gas supplies to Ukraine from diversified sources.”
Gas interests in the U.S. and abroad have a tremendous amount to gain from the escalation of tensions with Russia. It’s increasingly hard to shake the feeling that a potential conflict in Ukraine may be treated as a cash grab. That feeling might be easier to shake if the person the State Department had dispatched to stoke gas production in advance of a potential Russian invasion and ensuing sanctions—State Department Senior Adviser for Energy Security Amos Hochstein—had not until fairly recently been an executive at the gas export firm Tellurian. During the Obama administration, Hochstein spent his years at State attempting to boost demand for shale gas across the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. He served on the board of Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas company Naftogaz until shortly before the 2020 election.
The Wall Street Journal, as reliable a mouthpiece as any for the most reactionary arms of capital, has been quick to blame the increased threat of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe on misguided “green opposition” to fossil fuels. Any concerns raised about the sustainability of global warming, the paper’s editorial board claimed this week, are “a gift to Putin.” The only way to halt Russian aggression is to cease American “energy disarmament” and double down on fossil fuels. (The editorial board then suggested any attempt to curb fuels to save the planet was as misguided as Allied disarmament after World War I, which made Hitler harder to nip in the bud: “You have to go back to the disarmament of the 1920s to recall a time of such willful self-delusion.”)
Meanwhile, Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s lobbying association, has been eagerly telling reporters how ready and willing his industry is to provide Europe with additional capacity, for national security purposes, of course. So have other trade groups. Asked by CNN’s Erin Burnett whether there were alternatives to Russian gas for Europe, Toby Rice—CEO of gas producer EQT—didn’t hesitate: “Yeah absolutely, it’s the United States. And the United States LNG industry powered by American shale is a solution that could prevent this type of crisis that we’re seeing over there in Europe from happening.”
A joint statement from the U.S. and the European Union released Friday backs up that sentiment. After plenty of throat clearing about shared commitments to reaching net-zero emissions, the statement explains that the U.S. and EU “are working jointly towards continued, sufficient, and timely supply of natural gas to the EU from diverse sources across the globe to avoid supply shocks, including those that could result from a further Russian invasion of Ukraine. The United States is already the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU.” Lurking in the background of all this, as well, is the contested development of the European Union’s sustainable finance taxonomy, which could soon classify gas as “green,” despite protests from several member states. This could allow financial institutions to market their Environmental, Social and Governance, or ESG, credentials while continuing to back fossil fuel projects that would likely stay active for decades to come.
There is no easy, short-term solution to Europe’s problems should Russia indeed cut off supplies. The continent will not bring massive amounts of renewables online overnight. But it won’t bring new fossil fuel infrastructure online overnight, either. The situation really could get pretty dire: If Russia were to cut off all gas flows in early February with temperatures around or warmer than averages over the last several years, energy storage would run low but not out.
According to the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, existing infrastructure is technically equipped to handle a redirection of gas from producers like Norway and Qatar, and the EU could be importing significantly more than it is now with spare capacity. But gas markets typically run on long-term contracts, leaving Europe to bid over a relatively small share of gas—including from the U.S.—that isn’t already bound for demand centers in Asia, in what is already a very tight and expensive market. Governments would need to spend a sizable amount of money subsidizing rising bills, and coordinate across the bloc to share and transport supplies from import hubs like the Iberian peninsula.
The worst-case scenario—a decidedly catastrophic one—is a total, enduring cutoff of Russian gas to Europe combined with extremely cold temperatures through the rest of the winter, which would leave storage empty by March. A temporary shut-off in extreme cold could be navigated with less-than-ideal emergency measures like tapping underground storage, though if supplies were cut off for successive winters that could trigger a much deeper crisis.
It’s understandable that U.S. and EU policymakers would want to avoid getting anywhere close to this scenario. European politicians were already under pressure to deal with high fuel prices. But financing billions of dollars’ worth of fossil fuel infrastructure that won’t come online for several years is an awfully indirect and shortsighted way to handle this problem. What happens over the next several weeks or months, then—while it’s still cold enough for a gas cutoff to represent a major threat—could be a pretext to greenlight a new generation of fossil fuel infrastructure that’s plainly out of step with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The notion that there will be a conflict with Russia and, consequently, a grave energy crisis, has taken on an air of inevitability in U.S. coverage of tensions in the region, especially. That may well not be the case. And there are options for avoiding the scenarios above: The United States could, for example, agree not to let Ukraine join NATO, closing off the option of the 82nd Airborne landing along the Russian border to fight a civil war in Eastern Ukraine.
Instead, U.S. policymakers are currently rattling the sabers ever louder, despite potentially grave consequences for Europe and ordinary Russians. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken hasn’t shown much of a willingness to compromise. The stakes of this ordeal for the U.S., to be clear, are about whether it’s able to expand its own sphere of influence—i.e., NATO—further eastward. The possible effect of further Russian aggression on Ukrainian lives isn’t morally neutral, to be sure, but choosing to escalate the showdown over NATO expansion, or lay down punishing sanctions, could put lives at risk.
How this situation proceeds isn’t entirely up to the U.S., of course—Vladimir Putin is hardly a good-faith actor. But repeated signals from European intelligence agencies, including from Ukraine, suggest a Russian invasion isn’t imminent and the panic U.S. officials are projecting is unwarranted.
As Paris Agreement architect and European Climate Foundation head Lawrence Tubiana pointed out this past week in the Financial Times, one of the best things Europe could do to foster genuine energy security over the medium and long term would be to invest heavily in demand-side measures like energy efficiency and weatherization, all the while bringing massive amounts of renewables online. Like the U.S., Europe’s wealth means it’s well positioned to make a speedy transition away from fossil fuels.
Building new fossil fuel infrastructure now would instead shift more of the burden for emissions reductions onto much poorer parts of the world, positioning Europe to burn through an even more outsize share of the remaining global carbon budget than it already is. While investing in renewables won’t solve this winter’s energy problems, new fossil fuel infrastructure won’t, either. What new fossil fuel infrastructure will do—particularly if rushed through under the fog of (potential) war—is lock in emissions for decades to come. Peace is still the best option, and U.S. willingness to compromise on its expansionary ambitions and lower the temperature would make that much more likely.
Chickens on a farm. (photo: Getty Images)
The staggering toll of food waste on animals.
The biggest benefit of reducing food waste is self-evident — over 10 percent of US households experience food insecurity, and diverting food that’s safe and edible but destined for those landfills to those in need could help millions lead healthier, better lives.
But there’s another benefit of reducing food waste that’s starting to get more attention, and the EPA recently shined a spotlight on it in a new report: “Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of U.S. Food Waste.”
“This uneaten food results in a ‘waste’ of resources—including agricultural land, water, pesticides, fertilizers, and energy—and the generation of environmental impacts—including greenhouse gas emissions and climate change,” the authors write in the report.
According to the EPA, food waste accounts for 2 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions — about half that of aviation. While meat, dairy, and eggs compose just a little over a quarter of US food waste by weight, the EPA report authors argue that there are disproportionate environmental benefits to reducing animal product waste. That’s because animal products typically require much more land, water, and energy — and emit more of the greenhouse gases carbon and methane — than plant-based foods.
But there’s another potential major benefit to reducing animal product wastage: preventing hundreds of millions of animals from entering factory farms in the first place.
The animals we raise and kill — only to throw away
According to USDA data from 2010, Americans throw out 26 percent of meat, poultry, and fish at the retail and consumer level. Harish Sethu, a data scientist and author of the blog Counting Animals, says America’s meat waste problem means we’re raising about a billion chickens, more than 100 million other land animals (mostly turkeys, pigs, and cows), as well as capturing around 25 billion fish and 15 billion shellfish (mostly shrimp), only to have them wind up in a landfill.
While the data is over a decade old, the situation is likely worse now, as US meat production rose 10.3 percent from 2011 to 2018 while food waste only decreased by 1 percent.
In 2015, the USDA and EPA set a goal of halving food waste by 2030 from 2010 levels. If the US can hit this target, it could help reduce the number of land animals condemned to a lifetime of suffering on a factory farm each year, and the number of fish and shellfish whose lives end in capture and slaughter — though the full extent of the benefit will require more research.
Claudia Fabiano, an environmental protection specialist on food waste at the EPA, told me that reducing US food waste likely wouldn’t cause a drop in US food production, in part because American farmers would compensate by exporting more of their product abroad.
According to Bruce Taylor, however — a chemical engineer and the president of food waste consultancy Enviro-Stewards — reducing meat waste should have some effect on domestic meat production. He pointed to his work with the major pork producer Smithfield Foods as an example. In one processing facility, Taylor figured out how to reduce the amount of pork going to rendering — to be used for other purposes, like pet food — by 30 percent.
Taylor says that if sausage demand goes up as a result, then it’s a wash. “But if people eat the same amount of sausage, then less animals are required to make the same amount of sausage, and eventually the market would correct itself,” he added. “Somebody would end up selling less.”
WRAP, a food waste nonprofit based in the UK, found that when British households reduced food and drink waste 21 percent from 2007 to 2012, they also purchased less food and drink.
“Reducing the amount of food people in the UK waste in their homes appears to have had a knock-on effect in reducing the amount of food people need to purchase,” Tom Quested, lead analyst at WRAP, told me in email. “Furthermore, research focusing on the EU suggests that this effect could ripple all the way up the supply chain, reducing the amount of food we need to grow.”
We hear a lot about eating less meat — I even wrote a newsletter series about how to do it. But I think it’s time for an additional slogan to enter the conversation: Waste less meat.
How to waste less meat at home
While cutting food waste at the production level is the most important step, reducing food waste at the consumer level is also critical because it accounts for about half of all food waste, and once food has reached the consumer, emissions from production, processing, packaging, and shipping are baked into the product.
So how can you waste less meat and other animal products? Understand when your food will actually go bad, use your freezer liberally, and plan ahead.
“A lot of people think their food is bad when it’s actually still perfectly good to eat,” Dana Gunders, executive director of food waste nonprofit ReFED, told me. “The dates on food are really an indicator of when something is of top quality or it’s freshest, but they’re not telling you the food is bad or that you can’t eat it.”
Her general rule of thumb? “If it looks fine, smells fine, and tastes fine, it’s okay to eat.” She encourages readers to visit SaveTheFood.com, a consumer guide from environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, for more information. (I also recommend this backgrounder by Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson on sell-by and best-by dates.)
Can’t eat it soon? Put it in the freezer. “Freezers are a magic pause button,” Gunders said.
“A lot of people are in the habit of freezing meat but you can freeze milk if you’re going away on vacation — it may separate a little but it’ll be okay. Eggs you can freeze if you crack them out of their shell and scramble them but don’t cook them.” When it comes to cheese, it’s best to shred it before freezing and then use it in cooking after thawing.
Lastly, plan ahead. “If you can, sketch out an accurate plan of your week and when you’ll eat at home, and have that in mind when you’re shopping,” Gunders said. “That’s really critical because shopping is where you commit to the food regardless of whether you eat it or not.”
Preventing food waste on the farm
Reducing waste at the farm level is vital because if meat companies can reduce their mortality rates — the percent of farm animals that die before they can be slaughtered — then they can conceivably reduce the number of animals they need to breed in the first place.
The biggest impact can be made in the chicken industry, simply because of its scale. Five percent of the 9 billion chickens raised for meat in the US — around 450 million chickens — die on the farm or in transportation on the way to the slaughterhouse. Two of the biggest solutions to bring that number down are changing breeding and transportation practices.
Nearly all the chickens raised for food in the US come from a handful of breeds that grow incredibly large, incredibly fast, which not only means the birds are in constant pain, but it can also lead to leg deformities and other health issues that cause premature death, like heart attacks and starvation or dehydration due to the inability to walk and get feed and water.
“Slower-growing breeds usually are more robust and have lower mortality figures,” Ingrid de Jong, a senior scientific researcher of poultry behavior and welfare at Wageningen Livestock Research in the Netherlands, told me in email.
After they leave the farm, millions of chickens in the US die on the way to the slaughterhouse. They’re often overcrowded into trucks, which can cause life-ending injuries, as can exposure to weather extremes on the road. Under the federal “28-hour law,” these trucks can move farmed animals across state lines for 28 consecutive hours without having to unload them for rest, water, or food. As bad as that is, the law is weakly enforced by federal agencies, exempts poultry, and only covers the length of transport, not transport conditions, according to Dena Jones of the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute.
Jones reviewed USDA records and found one cold-related transport incident from poultry company Pilgrim’s Pride that resulted in the death of more than 34,000 birds — the largest she had ever seen. “Because so many birds are raised for meat in the US — and the life of a single bird has almost no value to the industry — even 34,000 is viewed as inconsequential,” Jones told me in email. “I’ve monitored these records for more than a decade, and I’ve not noticed any improvement in the situation.”
Despite lack of progress on reducing the waste and suffering of animals in transport, there has been some movement on changing breeding practices. Over 200 food businesses, including Burger King, Starbucks, and Subway, have pledged to source chicken from poultry companies that use slower-growing breeds. However, only two of the top 10 chicken companies — Perdue Farms and Wayne Farms — say they’ll supply it.
Preventing food waste in the store and in the factory
Grocery stores, restaurants, and food manufacturers can also do a lot to reduce food waste.
Federal legislation to standardize expiration labeling — which is done by retailers and manufacturers — would go a long way to reduce consumer confusion and waste. Harvard’s Food Law and Policy Clinic recommends requiring manufacturers that choose to use a date label for quality reasons to use the phrase “best if used by,” and reserve “expires on” for more high-risk foods.
Gunders of ReFED says getting food companies to use new technologies that more accurately predict consumer demand would help prevent surplus purchasing. Passing laws that ban food from entering landfills would be a big lever for change, and seven states and several municipalities have put in place such policies to varying degrees. This incentivizes businesses to donate more unsold food and work harder to prevent waste.
Fabiano of the EPA told me there’s one thing grocers could do to reduce seafood waste specifically. “We are so used to seeing these decadent displays of seafood on ice, but that seafood was generally shipped frozen and is just sitting there and defrosting,” she said. “So once you buy it that way, you do not have very long to consume that fish.” The solution? Selling more seafood frozen, which would make it last longer.
Bruce Taylor of Enviro-Stewards chalks up a lot of food waste in processing facilities to sheer inertia. Employees become used to inefficient processes and faulty machinery, and it can take an objective observer — him, in this example — to come in and notice waste, put a dollar value on it, and suggest small engineering changes that can save companies money and improve efficiency. In one example, his employees at a lobster processing factory pulled what was left off each lobster at the end of the processing line, which amounted to around $350,000 a year of edible meat being wasted.
“Everyone can see what’s happening, they just don’t know what it’s costing them,” he said.
Cutting food waste will be an increasingly critical part of reaching the world’s climate goals as the global population is expected to surpass 9 billion by 2050, requiring a projected 50 percent increase in food production from 2010 levels. Decreasing food waste should help reduce the need for increased production and slow down deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other environmental challenges.
That growing global population will also likely be eating more meat, and in the short term at least, much of it will likely come from factory farms. Food waste reduction will be an important tool in mitigating the number of animals churned through the system — and the system’s immense environmental and ethical toll.
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