08 November 21
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The public and the voters want what is in the Build Back Better Act, what is left of it anyway so it still has a path forward, but with the big capitulation by House Progressives the corporate friendly Democrats are now in control of the agenda. Progressives in the House and Senate can complain, urge and explain all they want but they have given away all their leverage and with it any meaningful control of what the legislation will look like. Joe Biden got his photo-op and millions of Americans will get the crumbs.
The problem in blunt terms is that Joe Biden ultimately refused to confront Joe (Maserati) Manchin, the corporate wing of the party refused to relent and the Progressive wing of the party caved, big-time. This was a stunning abdication of the faith and trust placed in Progressive lawmakers by a growing majority of Democratic voters who want and desperately need meaningful progressive change.
What makes the Progressive capitulation all the more frustrating and tragic for the American people is the Progressives had by far the stronger hand. The overwhelming majority of Democrats on Capitol Hill absolutely supported human infrastructure bill and the Progressive Caucus alone had more than sufficient numbers to withstand the pressure and hold out for the people they serve. It was not that they could not hold out, it is that they chose not to. Nancy Pelosi once counseled Ro Kahanna saying, “Power is never given. It’s always taken.” It’s a lesson that so called House Progressives clearly have not learned.
It bears noting that six Progressive House Members apparently did understand what they were there for, namely to push for Progressive change and did hold firm in their demand for meaningful Progressive legislation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Courage is always isolated on Capital Hill. If your Representative is not on that list you might want to get a hold of their office and weigh in.
This is a Democratic Party, majority of Progressives included that has proven once again beholden and subservient to the powerful corporate interests that control it.
Beware the return of the Build Back Better Act, something by that name will eventually get passed. The name alone has significant political marketing value. The Democratic leaning cable networks can and will sell it effectively. But it won’t be anything like what it might have been or was until cowardice ruled the day. Never forget what you lost, what was taken from you.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
'No matter how many brutal setbacks we're forced to swallow, we will always have a reason to keep fighting.' (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
My rage against the senator might consume me if I couldn’t set it down here
It was hard not to feel like this was game over, a sensation I’d grown accustomed to after a decade working in the American climate movement. It was the same feeling I’d had after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks, and the defeat of the Waxman-Markey bill, and the election of a president willing to drown the world to buoy his ego. But though each of those moments felt crushing, the news on the 15th felt worse.
After all, we have many fewer years left now to act. And we are so close this time, so excruciatingly close.
My rage might consume me if I couldn’t set it down here: not only is Joe Manchin devastating the constituents he claims to work for, consigning them to a future of constant, devastating floods. Not only is he shilling for an industry that has ravaged his home state, snaring West Virginians in a resource trap. Not only is he making a choice that could single-handedly warm the planet by several tenths of a degree, precipitating millions of avoidable deaths and dimming the prospects of my entire generation.
The truly maddening thing is that he refuses to look his decision in the face, hiding instead behind the debunked and convenient lies furnished by his donors, who maintain that they can burn coal into mid-century without risking a catastrophe. Whether he genuinely believes these fantasies is anyone’s guess. But for the sake of our lives and those of his grandchildren, I pray he changes course.
A few days after the news broke, I gathered with dozens of young people outside the yacht where Joe Manchin makes his DC home. Our signs echoed our disbelief: how was he so sanguine, risking the fate of human civilization? As a practicing Catholic, how could he spurn the pope, who just this month called for an urgent transition away from fossil fuels? It is hard to overstate how surreal it felt, knowing that the fate of our children, and our children’s children, and the many generations beyond them, rested on the whims of a single man enjoying his evening on the second boat from the end of the wharf, the one called “Almost Heaven”. As a friend put it, “Almost Hell” would feel more apt.
Since then, many young people have taken to the streets and gone on indefinite hunger strike, pleading with him not to torch the world we were meant to inherit. When one of the strikers – seven days into her fast – confronted Manchin outside a donor luncheon, he offered the weakest of moral sidesteps: “All the emissions are coming from Asia.” (In fact, the US has contributed more to global emissions than any other country. And China, unlike Manchin, has thrown its weight behind a detailed plan for decarbonization.)
As young people work feverishly to overcome this intransigence and prevent our future from slipping through our fingers, it’s worth asking a basic question: what exactly does hope look like now?
It feels increasingly clear to me that I don’t have hope. It’s not that I’ve succumbed to fatalism. I just no longer think that hope is something you can “have”. The past two weeks have made unmistakably vivid to me that hope is a kind of discipline; it is something you do. I have felt the daily effort of it: gritting my teeth and wrenching some glimmer from the gloom.
On most days, this has looked like calling my best friend and grasping together at the latest straw. Maybe Manchin could be convinced to support a carbon tax! He has since rejected the idea, threatening to bring down a crucial methane fee along with it. Maybe a call from Pope Francis could remind him that Catholic virtue demands not setting fire to the planet! If such a call has been placed, no one has reported on it. Maybe the Biden administration’s plan B will actually work. Maybe we can meet our Paris targets with all carrots and no sticks, plowing $550bn into clean energy without actively drawing down on fossil fuels.
This last one remains to be seen, though our reasons for confidence are shaky. But hope is not something we do because we know we’re going to win. Hope is something we do for each other. It’s a gift we grow together then spread outward, a communal act of unconditional grace. It is looking past the headlines at the people we love and telling them we haven’t given up.
In this way, hope is like any other co-constructed human story – marriage, or money, or God. The more people tell it, the more power it wields. So I’m going to tell it again, for its own sake, with our opponents at center stage:
The fossil fuel industry is scared. They are hanging on by a political thread. There is a single old man standing between them and the regulation they despise, and his entire party is telling him to stand down. Meanwhile their grift keeps getting exposed. Their rationalizations are ringing false. Their cultural capital is running dangerously low. And you need only watch last week’s public excoriation of the CEO of Shell to understand how their historical legacy is taking shape. Like the fuels they drill from the dirt, their grounds for hope are finite, costly and getting harder and harder to reach.
Ours, on the other hand, cannot be exhausted. Our hope is stubborn, and furious, and born in one another. We are its source and its horizon. And we know what we’re capable of. It was young people who led the charge to defeat Donald Trump; young people who compelled the Biden administration to feel our climate urgency, while electing the progressive caucus that’s given that urgency teeth.
No matter how many brutal setbacks we’re forced to swallow, we will always have a reason to keep fighting. We are our reason to keep fighting. And unlike Manchin’s fading coal industry, we are never, ever going away.
'According to attorneys representing the plaintiffs, the men served a combined nearly 2.5 years in jail before their charges were dismissed, among many other negative impacts on their personal lives.' (photo: Shutterstock)
Omar Abdullah was fired from the Raleigh Police Department on Oct. 28, weeks after it was announced that a group of 15 Black men received a $2 million settlement from the city as part of a federal civil rights lawsuit.
The group named Abdullah and the city of Raleigh in the suit and alleged that the now-former cop wrongly arrested them between December 2019 and May 2020 for heroin trafficking based on the claims of an informant who said the men had sold him the drug.
The scheme began unraveling when the evidence in the cases repeatedly turned up brown sugar instead of heroin when tested. The men’s suit also claimed Abdullah’s fellow officers had knowledge of the frame-ups.
The Raleigh police confirmed Abdullah’s release from the force in a brief statement on Monday, Nov. 1, saying “Omar Abdullah was terminated from the Raleigh Police Department on Oct. 28, 2021.”
Abdullah, who was employed with the police department since 2009, was placed on administrative duty on Aug. 26, 2020, and then administrative leave about a week later. His leave cam just around the time that the Wake County District Attorney’s office began investigating reports that false evidence was being used to arrests.
Abdullah repeatedly paid informant Dennis Williams Jr. to provide officers with information about local heroin dealers but reportedly brought forward cases that were full of holes.
Some of the evidence included “ videos and audio recordings of drug buys with critical clips missing and a substance that lab tests revealed months later wasn’t drugs at all,” even going as far as planting some of fake dope himself, the lawsuit also said.
According to attorneys representing the plaintiffs, the men served a combined nearly 2.5 years in jail before their charges were dismissed, among many other negative impacts on their personal lives. In some cases, men continued to linger in jail for months after lab tests proved the supposed heroin was sugar.
The Raleigh News & Observer reported that one man identified in the suit as Curtis Logan was arrested on Jan. 2, 2020. Although the supposed 20 grams of heroin it was claimed he sold for $400 instead of the street value of $2,000 turned out to be sugar when tested six week later, Logan wasn’t released from jail until June 1, the newspaper reported.
“Many Plaintiffs lost their jobs, missed birthdays and funerals, others had their homes and children investigated by Child Protective Services, and others were unable to continue to pay their bills and were forced to move during the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads a letter from the group’s attorneys, Tin Fulton Walker & Owen, written to Raleigh Police Department Chief Estella Patterson and Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman.
“All were traumatized because of their wrongful detention or incarceration and the fabricated allegations against them,” it continued. “The RPD VICE unit’s actions also resulted in the unlawful detention of numerous women and children and at least one illegal SWAT (SEU) raid of a family’s home.”
Neither Abdullah any other Raleigh officers have been charged in the scandal and that’s not sitting well with at least one parent. Robin Mills said she’s “unsatisfied” with the outcome of the case thus far. Her son Marcus was among the group wrongly imprisoned.
“They did what they needed to do from a civil perspective, but now we’re talking about criminal. And there’s no way the kidnapping of over a dozen Black men is not criminal.”
DA Freeman’s office isn’t ready to pursue charges. In a text obtained by News and Observer she wrote, “We want to ensure that every detail has been considered prior to closing the matter due to the serious nature of the allegations.”
It continued, “As I’ve stated previously a conclusion that there is insufficient evidence of criminal intent by Detective Abdullah is not the same thing as saying there are not grave concerns by me of the way this matter unfolded.”
In a response to a local news outlet, Freeman said there will be no charges “at this time,” but that “the matter remains open with our office.”
On the other hand, informant Williams was indicted in August on five counts of obstruction of justice, including making false statements and producing fake drug evidence, local station WRAL reported.
In a bid to boost efficiency, mills are built close to large palm tree plantations, with trucks lining up to deliver the palm fruits that will then be converted into palm oil.
The surprising claim has allowed the country to subtract over 243 million tons of carbon dioxide from its 2016 inventory — slashing 73 percent of emissions from its bottom line.
Across the world, many countries underreport their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.
The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data. But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate.
“If we don’t know the state of emissions today, we don’t know whether we’re cutting emissions meaningfully and substantially,” said Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. “The atmosphere ultimately is the truth. The atmosphere is what we care about. The concentration of methane and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is what’s affecting climate.”
At the low end, the gap is larger than the yearly emissions of the United States. At the high end, it approaches the emissions of China and comprises 23 percent of humanity’s total contribution to the planet’s warming, The Post found.
As tens of thousands of people are convening in Glasgow for what may be the largest-ever meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), also known as COP26, the numbers they are using to help guide the world’s effort to curb greenhouse gases represent a flawed road map.
That means the challenge is even larger than world leaders have acknowledged.
“In the end, everything becomes a bit of a fantasy,” said Philippe Ciais, a scientist with France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences who tracks emissions based on satellite data. “Because between the world of reporting and the real world of emissions, you start to have large discrepancies.”
The UNFCCC collects country reports and oversees the Paris agreement, which brought the world together to progressively reduce emissions in 2015. The U.N. agency attributed the gap that The Post identified to “the application of different reporting formats and inconsistency in the scope and timeliness of reporting (such as between developed and developing countries, or across developing countries).”
When asked if the United Nations plans on addressing the gap, spokesman Alexander Saier said in an email it is continuing its efforts to strengthen the reporting process.
“However, we do acknowledge that more needs to be done, including finding ways to provide support to developing country Parties to improve their institutional and technical capacities.”
The gap comprises vast amounts of missing carbon dioxide and methane emissions as well as smaller amounts of powerful synthetic gases. It is the result of questionably drawn rules, incomplete reporting in some countries and apparently willful mistakes in others — and the fact that in some cases, humanity’s full impacts on the planet are not even required to be reported.
The Post’s analysis is based on a data set it built from emissions figures countries reported to the United Nations in a variety of formats. To overcome the problem of missing years of data, reporters used a statistical model to estimate the emissions each country would have reported in 2019, then compared that total to other scientific data sets measuring global greenhouse gases.
The analysis found at least 59 percent of the gap stems from how countries account for emissions from land, a unique sector in that it can both help and harm the climate. Land can draw in carbon as plants grow and soils store it away — or it can all go back up into the atmosphere as forests are logged or burn and as peat-rich bogs are drained and start to emit large amounts of carbon dioxide.
A key area of controversy is that many countries attempt to offset the emissions from burning fossil fuels by claiming that carbon is absorbed by land within their borders. U.N. rules allow countries, such as China, Russia and the United States, each to subtract more than half a billion tons of annual emissions in this manner, and in the future could allow these and other countries to continue to release significant emissions while claiming to be “net zero.”
In other words, much of the gap is driven by subtractions countries have made on their balance sheets. Many scientists say countries should only claim these greenhouse gas reductions when they take clear action, as opposed to claiming natural forest regrowth unrelated to national policies.
And some of this carbon absorption isn’t even happening — or at least not on the scale that countries assert.
Malaysia, for example, released 422 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2016, placing it among the world’s top 25 emitters that year, according to data compiled by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. But because Malaysia claims its trees are consuming vast amounts of CO2, its reported emissions to the United Nations are just 81 million tons, less than those of the small European nation of Belgium.
The Post found that methane emissions comprise a second major portion of the missing greenhouse gases in the U.N. database. Independent scientific data sets show between 57 million and 76 million tons more of human-caused methane emissions hitting the atmosphere than U.N. country reports do. That converts to between 1.6 billion and 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions.
Scientific research indicates that countries are undercounting methane of all kinds: in the oil and gas sector, where it leaks from pipelines and other sources; in agriculture, where it wafts upward from the burps and waste of cows and other ruminant animals; and in human waste, where landfills are a major source.
European Union officials estimate that rapid reductions in methane could trim at least 0.2 degrees Celsius from overall global temperature rise by 2050. More than 100 nations have now signed onto the newly formed Global Methane Pledge, an initiative launched by the United States and the E.U., which aims to cut emissions 30 percent by the end of the decade. But some of the world’s biggest methane emitters, including China and Russia, have yet to join to pact.
President Biden told delegates meeting in Glasgow that cutting methane emissions is essential to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
“One of the most important things we can do in this decisive decade — to keep 1.5 degrees in reach — is reduce our methane emissions as quickly as possible,” Biden said.
A new generation of sophisticated satellites that can measure greenhouse gases are now orbiting Earth, and they can detect massive emissions leaks. Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) lists Russia as the world’s top oil and gas methane emitter, but that’s not what Russia reports to the United Nations. Its official numbers fall millions of tons shy of what independent scientific analyses show, a Post investigation found. Many oil and gas producers in the Persian Gulf region, such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, also report very small levels of oil and gas methane emission that don’t line up with other scientific data sets.
“It’s hard to imagine how policymakers are going to pursue ambitious climate actions if they’re not getting the right data from national governments on how big the problem is,” said Glenn Hurowitz, chief executive of Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy group.
[Russia allows methane leaks at planet’s peril]
Meanwhile, fluorinated gases, which are exclusively human-made, also are underreported significantly. Known as “F-gases,” they are used in air conditioning, refrigeration and the electricity industry. But The Post found that dozens of countries don’t report these emissions at all — a major shortcoming since some of these potent greenhouse gases are a growing part of the world’s climate problem.
Vietnam, for example, reported that its emissions of fluorinated gases plunged between 2013 and 2016, to 23 thousand tons of CO2 equivalent. Asked about the 2016 estimate — which is 99.8 percent lower than what’s indicated in one key scientific emissions data set used by The Post — Vietnamese officials said more recent reports assume fluorinated gases do not escape from air conditioning and refrigeration systems. But they do: U.S. supermarkets lose an average of 25 percent of their fluorinated refrigerants each year.
Many problems causing the gap in emissions statistics stem from the U.N. reporting system. Developed countries have one set of standards, while developing countries have another, with wide latitude to decide how and what and when they report. The difference in reporting reflects the reality that the developed nations are historically responsible for most of the greenhouse gases that have built up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and that they have greater technical capacity to analyze their emissions than poorer nations.
Even when countries do report their emissions, the U.N. data can be peppered with inaccuracies. The data set, for instance, shows that in 2010, land in the Central African Republic absorbed 1.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide, an immense and improbable amount that would effectively offset the annual emissions of Russia.
When The Post pointed out the Central African Republic’s figure to the UNFCCC, the agency acknowledged that “the reported data may require further clarification, and we will reach out to the Party for additional information and update the data in the GHG (greenhouse gases) data interface accordingly.” The Central African Republic did not respond to The Post’s requests for clarification.
“The commitments of the Paris agreement without measurements of actual atmospheric emissions are like the parties going on diets without ever having to weigh themselves,” said Ray Weiss, an atmospheric scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
At the verge of the abyss
The emission reports are so unwieldy that the United Nations does not have a complete database to track country emissions. Some 45 countries have not reported any new greenhouse gas numbers since 2009.
Algeria, a major oil and gas producer, has not reported since 2000. War-torn Libya, another key energy exporter, doesn’t report its emissions at all. The central Asian nation of Turkmenistan, the economy of which is powered by oil and gas, hasn’t reported an inventory since 2010 — though it has been repeatedly faulted in recent years for major leaks of methane.
Australia is removing substantial carbon dioxide emissions from megafires, which have worsened due to climate change, from its annual totals. A study by Ciais and his colleagues found that the country also underreported its 2016 emissions of nitrous oxide gas, a powerful warming agent that principally comes from farming, by a factor of four to seven.
Drawing on emissions data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, The Post found a similar gap: three times as much nitrous oxide as Australia’s reports to the United Nations.
Australia’s Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources disputed the idea that it is not including wildfires’ carbon emissions, saying in a statement it uses “a smoothing process … designed to draw out trends in anthropogenic net emissions” from its forests over time.
The work of Ciais and his colleagues, the Australian department’s press office wrote in an email, “is an exploration of newly emerging modelling techniques,” and “there is considerable uncertainty about how these results should be interpreted.”
The largest of the outside inventories considered in The Post’s analysis — a research team’s estimate based on the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research — reports up to 57.4 billion tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Other major scientific inventories present similar totals. Yet the most recent country U.N. reports only amount to 41.3 billion tons when land and forest claims are taken into account.
The gap does not amount to 16 billion tons, however, because many of the country reports are outdated, some of the U.N. information is incorrect and no countries take responsibility for emissions from international air travel and shipping. The Post’s analysis accounts for these problems, finding a gap between 8.5 billion and 13.3 billion tons.
Climate negotiators have known for decades that this data-gathering process is flawed, but instead they have focused on persuading global leaders to engage in serious talks and take real steps to rein in emissions.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that you’re finding all kinds of discrepancies or that countries are playing some games there,” said Dan Reifsnyder, a former U.S. official who co-chaired negotiations for the Paris agreement. “If you want to think about strengthening the whole process, the whole climate process, this is a very, very fertile area to explore.”
While the Paris agreement calls for a more transparent system by the end of 2024, it could take until 2030 to get to robust reporting — an eternity compared with the tight time frame the world needs to get it right. The world has already warmed at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels, leaving a very narrow path to avoid crossing the dangerous warming thresholds of 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius.
Scientists say that emissions, which are still rising, must be halved in this decade and not after, in what will have to be the biggest collective action among the world’s countries in human history. Ultimately, it’s not the politics, the accounting or the pledges that will determine how much the planet warms but the hard numbers of atmospheric science: the parts per million of greenhouse gases in the air.
In a recent interview, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said he hoped nations would recognize the implications of their actions.
“There is a growing consciousness that we are really at the verge of the abyss,” he said. “And when you are at the verge of the abyss, you need to be very careful about your next step.”
What makes up the gap
The Post analysis of country reports submitted to the United Nations found a significant underreporting of greenhouse gas emissions, ranging from 8.5 billion tons to 13.3 billion tons. The majority of the gap stems from how countries account for carbon dioxide emissions from land. Land can absorb carbon as plants grow and soils store it away, or it can release carbon into the atmosphere as forests are logged or burn and as peatlands are drained.
Note: Independent global emissions measurements come from the Global Carbon Project, Minx et al., the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Meteorological Organization.
A giant gap
In early 2020, Phillipe Ciais, the French emissions expert, could not access his lab at the University of Paris-Saclay, a research cluster outside the French capital. The lab sat idle while the coronavirus pandemic raged, so Ciais hunkered down at home and did what he always does: a prodigious amount of research.
That year alone, more than 100 scientific papers emerged with his name on them, many devoted to cracking some of the hardest problems in climate science: What is the world really emitting? And how much is the planet — in the form of its land, forests and soils — helping to blunt the force of the world’s pollution?
In the spring of 2020, the lockdown sent carbon dioxide emissions plummeting — along with oil prices. Ciais realized it was a unique moment to study country emissions.
Ciais started adding together U.N. emissions reports and comparing them with satellite and atmospheric measurements of forest growth, methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the world’s largest emitters.
He expected a gap and wondered what it would look like. But when he saw what instead was a chasm, he instantly realized the implication for the politics of the Paris agreement.
“It's already hard to make sense of the pledges,” he said. “If the baseline is underreported, the percentage of emission reductions that you get will be flawed.”
Ciais’s 2021 study, conducted with Zhu Deng of Tsinghua University in Beijing and 31 other researchers, is still undergoing peer review, but it, along with his data set, is publicly available.
The data uses some of the same country reports The Post analyzed, along with the Global Carbon Project’s already-published atmospheric data sets. But it only looks at individual countries, not the whole world as The Post has done. Still, it shows major gaps between how those countries report their emissions and what is actually in the atmosphere. In particular, Ciais found that some of the world’s top emitters, including both wealthy and developing countries — Russia and Indonesia, the E.U. and Brazil — are underestimating emissions of key gases.
In one of the most striking cases, Ciais’s study found that methane leakage from fossil fuel operations in the oil states of the Persian Gulf could be as much as seven times more than what they officially report.
Ciais’s research has also found that the “carbon sinks” — the land absorbing CO2 — that countries claim as a subtraction from their total emissions actually represent just a fraction of the amount that the world’s forests absorb. But, for Ciais, this finding is a mixed blessing: On the one hand, the Earth is working harder to mitigate carbon pollution than we may realize. On the other hand, droughts, wildfires and other major disturbances tied to climate change quickly can release much of this carbon again.
Greenhouse gases released by humanity’s ceaseless activity are hard to catalogue: They are invisible, and they are produced by nearly every aspect of our lives. The homes we live in, the vehicles we drive, the foods we eat, the products we buy all contribute to the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas burden either directly or indirectly.
The bulk of emissions comes from burning fossil fuels, which can be tallied with reasonable precision. But more than a third are not easily tracked, including the emissions that arise when forests are chopped down or lost to fire, peatlands are drained, or excess fertilizer is spread on agricultural fields.
It is no wonder to Ciais that the world’s leaders have a hard time accounting for the complex give-and-take of carbon and nitrogen between the Earth and its atmosphere. But the system the United Nations has established to tally these emissions makes it even harder.
A key problem is that the U.N. reporting guidelines don’t currently require any atmospheric or satellite measurements, known as a “top-down” approach. Rather, the guidelines ask scientific bookkeepers in each country to quantify levels of a particular activity. This includes the number of cows, whose burps makes up 4 percent of total greenhouse gases, the amount of fertilizer used or how much peatland was converted to cropland in a given year. Then, countries multiply those units by an “emissions factor” — an estimate of how much gas each activity produces — to determine a total for everything from belching cows to tailpipe emissions.
But those counts easily can be wrong, and so can the emissions factors. When that happens, emissions reporting becomes little more than guesswork, a case of “garbage in, garbage out.”
Basements and ballrooms
Malaysia’s skewed data vividly illustrates the high stakes countries face as they confront the growing pressure to reduce emissions while managing the very real economic consequences that process triggers.
In the past decade, some in the Southeast Asian nation have gone to great lengths to counter the scientific conclusion that its oil palm industry is releasing huge amounts of carbon. The E.U. has restricted palm-oil biofuels on the grounds that it is helping drive deforestation, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection has banned palm oil imports from two of Malaysia’s biggest producers in the past year and a half after concluding that their plantation laborers were subjected to abusive working conditions.
In 2016, the last year Malaysia has reported its numbers to the United Nations, the world’s experts on peatlands convened in Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak, for the 15th International Peat Congress on the vast tropical island of Borneo.
Jenny Goldstein, then a new faculty member at Cornell University, walked into the five-star Pullman Kuching Hotel and found herself in the midst of a propaganda war to make the controversial oil palm industry look good.
There were more participants from the palm oil industry than scientists at the normally staid academic conference. Industry meetings were held in a giant hotel ballroom, while the scientific presentations took place in the basement — rooms so small that some scientists had to sit on the floor.
Out of curiosity, Goldstein ventured upstairs.
“There were almost all men sitting in these ballrooms listening to presentations about how great Malaysian peatlands have been managed for oil palm,” recalled Goldstein, now a global development professor at Cornell. In the basement, world peat experts were presenting cutting-edge research on the massive carbon bombs peatlands contain.
Sarawak boasts a rich ecosystem of peat swamp forests that are home to orangutans, crocodiles and 100-foot-high ramin trees springing from the soggy earth. But across Sarawak and other regions of Malaysia, 4,000 square miles of these forests — close to the size of Connecticut — have been drained in recent decades. Much of this land is sown with plantations for palm oil, commonly used in products ranging from biofuels to processed foods, soaps and makeup.
When peatland is drained, it releases a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. Emissions then continue for decades, until all the peat is gone.
The conference was a historic occasion, held in the tropics for the first time in its 62-year history, and hosted by the Malaysian Peat Society with the Sarawak government’s support.
The leader of the conference, Sarawak Tropical Peat Research Institute Director Lulie Melling, has asserted that oil palm developers can plant on peatland without releasing huge amounts of carbon. She holds a PhD in environmental science from Japan’s Hokkaido University.
Melling said in an interview with The Post that other peat scientists, who have studied peat in other parts of the world, don’t understand the unique qualities of the peat in her region.
“It’s like comparing cheesecake with Swiss cheese,” she said.
She has often cast the scientific debate in nationalist or anti-colonialist terms. Earlier this year, she told the New Sarawak Tribune, an English-language newspaper, that the Tropical Peat Research Institute was at the “front line on behalf of the state to inform the public that agriculture practices on peatlands have minimal impact on their roles as carbon sources.”
“I single handedly, backed by my small laboratory, pioneered and published the groundbreaking research work on peat use and [greenhouse gas] emission to rebut the maligned western detractors on the use of peat as arable land,” she said.
Melling’s pro-industry stance took scientists at the conference by surprise, Goldstein said, as did her use of vulgar language in public remarks.
Melling has said she uses suggestive language to make her science memorable.
“I first dabbled with humour to get my point across in 2007, when I organised a soil science seminar entitled, Big hole, small hole & KY Jelly,” she said in an April 2016 interview with TTG Associations, an Asian Pacific trade group.
In the wake of the conference, some scientists were stunned to read in news reports that the event had presented new evidence that palm oil development can proceed without major environmental disruption. “Malaysia challenges the world over palm oil peatland,” said the English-language Jakarta Post.
In response, 139 scientists — including Goldstein — objected to the articles, noting an abundance of peer-reviewed studies on peatland emissions. The letter was published by scientific journal Global Change Biology.
“The oil palm industry is basically an arm of the government,” Goldstein said.
A biting heat
Nicholas Mujah Ason has seen both the cause and the effect of global warming: the sea of palm oil plantations surrounding him and the rainforest that never cools.
Mujah, who has lived in the state of Sarawak most of his life, has been fighting the development since the early 1980s, when he was first jailed for protesting the encroachment of loggers.
“It's not that we hate palm oil,” he said. “We hate how palm oil has been planted into our land.”
His family has lived deep in the rainforest for eight generations, and the 62-year-old has been involved in multiple legal actions as the secretary general of the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association, an Indigenous rights group.
More recently, Mujah’s home village has been plagued by flash floods because peatland that once absorbed the rains has been drained. It’s now hard to say when the summer begins because it’s hot year-round — and the heat stings.
“It’s not like a normal heat that we faced before,” he said. “You’ll feel the biting heat, and your skin will be burned.”
Malaysia’s government has downplayed the palm oil industry’s climate impact across several categories in its U.N. reports.
In 2016, Malaysia claimed that it had not converted a single acre to cropland.
“This is patently untrue,” said Susan Page, an expert on peatlands at the University of Leicester who also signed the letter objecting to presentations at the 2016 International Peat Congress.
In fact, in a peer-reviewed study funded by the Malaysian government itself, scientists documented the expansion of an oil palm plantation atop carbon-rich peatland in Sarawak in the very same year as Malaysia’s latest report. The study estimated that 138 tons of carbon dioxide were released per hectare — a unit equivalent to 2.47 acres — in converted areas. In other words, a giant pulse of emissions occurred due to land conversion. At The Post’s request, the geospatial intelligence firm Esri measured the total expansion at 494 acres.
It was happening all across the country that year. Drawing on a satellite-based data set from Ciais and his colleagues, including Wei Li of Tsinghua University in China, Esri found a net addition of about 410,000 acres of palm oil plantations in 2016, though it is unclear how many of these were on peatland.
The scientific evidence suggests the country is also underestimating emissions from drained peatland, which occur in the years after the land is converted. Using an outdated estimate of how much peatlands emit, the nation calculated that its croplands atop drained peat emitted just 29 million tons of CO2 in 2016.
John Couwenberg, a peatlands expert from the University of Greifswald in Germany, said Malaysia’s estimate is “way too low.” He reworked the numbers for The Post and got a total of 111 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions. A 2017 study agreed, finding a figure of nearly 100 million tons of carbon dioxide per year for all of Malaysia. In other words, Malaysia’s peatland emissions could easily be about three times as high as the country is claiming.
And then comes the biggest problem of all.
Malaysia claims an annual forest carbon sink of over 243 million tons from just about 68,000 square miles of forested area. That‘s not far from what neighboring Indonesia claims for a forest more than five times its size.
U.N. technical reviewers have questioned what they called Malaysia’s “unusually large figure” for forest carbon storage and said they were unable to reproduce it despite using three separate methods. Several scientists told The Post that the figures would only make sense if all of Malaysia’s forests were growing at a rate similar to that seen in young saplings — which they aren’t.
“It sounds like there is an error because it is completely impossible to think of the entire area of forests across Malaysia accumulating the equivalent of young tropical forests,” said Jérôme Chave, a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who has published data on carbon storage in Malaysian forests.
The Malaysian government said its reports comply with U.N. guidelines and are subject to rigorous review but did not respond to detailed questions about the country’s land sector reporting.
“The information including the one that you are asking were all subjected to an intense review processes (it took us 7 months) conducted by the UNFCCC experts themselves who are members from all over the world,” said Mohamad Firdaus Nawawi, an official with the country’s Ministry of Environment and Water, which prepares the documents, by email.
“When you walk over peatlands, your feet sink down into thousands of years of carbon,” said Hurowitz, the Mighty Earth chief executive. “Sarawak has sent its peatland destruction advocates to scientific, government and corporate events for years to present a wildly distorted picture of destroying these ultrarich carbon ecosystems.”
Under the Paris agreement, Malaysia has pledged to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy 45 percent below what it was in 2005 by the end of the decade. Thus far, the country claims the forestry sector is making the biggest contribution to its emissions cuts — which underscores just how problematic the country’s numbers truly are.
“It’s not surprising to me that governments are trying to hide pollution,” Hurowitz said, “but it’s shameful they’re getting away with it.”
Tolerating disarray
Jackson, the Stanford professor, is driven by a sense that data can save the planet from peril. He chairs the Global Carbon Project, the world’s most ambitious scientific effort to gather data that explains the global carbon cycle — how the planet absorbs and releases carbon dioxide. Scientists analyze the same kind of data that countries are supposed to report to the United Nations, but they bring skepticism and a tool that the world body doesn’t apply: direct measurements of gases in the atmosphere.
Jackson believes that the atmosphere is the ultimate check on what countries report — and what they pledge. The gap in the data is an urgent problem.
Earlier this year, the United Nations published a “synthesis report,” which forecasts the effect of countries’ climate promises on future emissions and the planet’s temperature.
The report describes those promises as “covering” the vast majority of global emissions, showing numbers more than 10 billion tons above what countries actually report when all sectors are included, according to The Post’s calculations. The United Nations declined to provide its data set to support the number, but did explain a number of steps by which countries numbers’ had been adjusted.
“It is surprising to see that the authors of the U.N. report did not use the original data reported by each country,” said Ciais, who also contributes to the Global Carbon Project.
Saier, the UNFCCC spokesman, defended the approach in an email, saying that “there is indeed a small upscaling.”
In a sense, the UNFCCC adjusted the country numbers to match what science says is being emitted: It closed the gap that The Post found.
From a political perspective, there may not be any other option. Without requiring satellite or atmospheric measurements, richer and poorer countries alike are likely to underreport for years to come.
After all, in the end there is no way to make the Paris agreement, emissions cuts or accurate emissions reports mandatory. Every country reports what it reports and promises what it promises.
“I think that’s part of the reason this is all tolerated, is the sense that, at least the countries are providing something and participating and thinking about it,” said Jackson.
“That’s why people tolerate this disarray, because the alternative is for them to walk away.”
But Jackson is an optimist.
“I believe information is powerful. Data and information have not nudged the climate world as quickly as I wished it had,” he said. “But I’m still naively hoping to leave the world better for my kids than I found it.”
The lethal injection chamber at the Ellis Unit, a maximum security prison in Huntsville, Texas, in 1991. (photo: Paul Harris/Getty Images)
A new religion case forces the Supreme Court to confront the legacy of one of its cruelest decisions.
As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, one of the Constitution’s “clearest command[s]” is that “one religious denomination cannot be officially preferred over another.” But that’s exactly what the Court permitted in Ray.
After witnessing the bipartisan backlash to this decision — the conservative National Review’s David French labeled it a “grave violation of the First Amendment” — the Court eventually started to slink away from it. In Murphy v. Collier (2019), decided only a few months after Ray, the Court temporarily blocked the execution of a Buddhist inmate in Texas — unless that state “permits Murphy’s Buddhist spiritual adviser or another Buddhist reverend of the State’s choosing to accompany Murphy in the execution chamber during the execution.”
Most recently, in Dunn v. Smith (2021) the Court seemed to suggest that all people who are being executed, regardless of their faith, must be allowed to have a spiritual adviser present. Although there was no majority opinion in Smith, even some of the dissenting justices conceded that they’d been beaten. “It seems apparent that States that want to avoid months or years of litigation delays,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a brief dissenting opinion, “should figure out a way to allow spiritual advisers into the execution room.”
And yet, while the Court’s treatment of Domineque Ray, the inmate in Ray, appears to be discredited, the Court has yet to tie up several loose ends left over from that decision, including questions about which procedural barriers can be erected between death row inmates and their spiritual advisers, and questions about what such advisers may do to comfort a dying prisoner.
These issues are front and center in Ramirez v. Collier, which will be argued before the justices on Tuesday. Texas permits John Ramirez, the death row inmate at the center of this case, to have his pastor present during his execution. But the state neither permits the pastor to lay hands on Ramirez nor to audibly pray over him.
The fundamental question in Ramirez, in other words, is whether a death row inmate is allowed to actually receive spiritual comfort during his execution — or whether Ramirez’s pastor must simply stand there, doing little to ease a dying man’s final moments.
Ramirez wants this to be a case about religious liberty. Texas wants it to be a case about process.
Federal judges have a ghoulish duty. Whenever an execution draws nigh, judges are inundated with motions from capital defense lawyers trying to save their client’s life — or at least to ensure that the execution is performed as humanely as possible.
Because the Supreme Court is the nation’s court of last resort, many of these disputes eventually reach the justices. And so the justices must contend with a steady stream of emergency death penalty cases, often with only a few hours to review them.
The burden of spending years deciding who lives and who dies weighs differently on different justices. Some proclaim, as Justice Harry Blackmun did a few months before his retirement in 1994, that they “no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” Blackmun — and more recently, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — concluded, after decades of hearing last-minute capital appeals, that the death penalty is unconstitutional.
“Factual, legal, and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants,” Blackmun wrote.
In Ray, five conservative justices took the polar opposite approach. They attempted to quell the tidal wave of emergency death penalty motions by cutting off many inmates’ ability to file them in the first place. Domineque Ray’s error, these justices claimed, was that he waited too long to bring a lawsuit insisting that his imam be present at his execution.
It was a singularly unpersuasive claim — so unpersuasive that many observers accused the Court of offering a pretextual excuse to deny relief to a Muslim. Ray had filed his lawsuit just five days after a prison warden formally denied Ray’s request to have his imam comfort him during his execution. The Court’s explanation for its decision was quite literally unbelievable.
No doubt with the Court’s decision in Ray in mind, Texas spends the lion’s share of its brief in Ramirez accusing Ramirez of making minor procedural errors that supposedly doom his case. The brief spends an entire subsection, for example, arguing that Ramirez should lose because, when he filed a grievance asking to have his pastor present at his execution, he didn’t specifically state that the pastor should be allowed to speak.
Indeed, Texas spends only about a dozen pages of a 62-page brief arguing that its policy of forbidding a death row inmate’s spiritual adviser from speaking or touching the inmate can be justified under federal civil rights law.
The specific law at issue in this case is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. It forbids prisons from imposing a “substantial burden” on an inmate’s faith, unless that burden is “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and the prison uses “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
That should be a difficult burden for Texas to carry in this case. Among other things, as Ramirez’s lawyers argue in his brief, until fairly recently, Texas permitted pastors to touch and speak to death row inmates while they were being executed. It even quotes from a book, authored by a former Texas criminal justice official, that recount past executions where chaplains placed their hands on the dying man’s knee. So it’s tough for Texas to argue that its current policy uses the “least restrictive” method of executing inmates, when it used to have a less restrictive policy.
To the extent that Texas even tries to defend its current policy, much of its defense rests on unlikely scenarios that could only occur if Texas’s own death chamber is run by rank incompetents. Texas argues, for example, that Ramirez’s pastor must not be allowed to touch him “in the event the inmate escaped his restraints, smuggled in a weapon, or otherwise became a threat in the chamber.” The fear is that “a spiritual adviser standing close enough to touch the inmate would be in harm’s way or in a position to assist the inmate.”
Texas, in other words, offers only a weak defense of its actual policy. It rests most of its argument on a hope that a majority of the justices will repeat their performance in Ray and rely on a procedural reason to deny Ramirez the relief he seeks.
So how is this case likely to come out?
The case for pessimism, if you are Ramirez’s lawyers, is fairly straightforward. In Smith, only the three liberals, plus conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, took a clear position in favor of religious freedom on death row. Roberts, Thomas, and Kavanaugh all dissented. That means that either Justice Samuel Alito or Justice Neil Gorsuch (or maybe both) silently voted in favor of the inmate in Smith.
But Alito and Gorsuch are both die-hard supporters of the death penalty. If you are a capital defense attorney and you are counting on their vote, you’re normally in trouble.
That said, there are also a few reasons for Ramirez’s lawyers to be optimistic that they can secure five votes.
One notable difference between Ramirez and Ray is that Ray arose on the Court’s shadow docket, a mix of emergency motions and other expedited requests that are typically decided in short order without full briefing or oral argument. Ramirez, by contrast, will be heard on the Court’s regular docket and will receive an oral argument.
That distinction matters because the Supreme Court ordinarily reserves full briefing and argument for cases that have either divided lower court judges or that involve unusually important questions of federal law. It’s unlikely that the Court would have agreed to hear Ramirez’s case if it thought that the correct answer turned on a minor procedural error that is unique to just this one case.
Although Smith did not produce a majority opinion, four justices — including Barrett — joined an opinion by Kagan that lays out a possible path forward in Ramirez. Kagan argued that states with restrictive policies governing spiritual advisers can simply adopt the practices used in other states. “In the last year, the Federal Government has conducted more than 10 executions attended by the prisoner’s clergy of choice,” Kagan noted — the implication being that states could copy the federal government’s procedures and do the same.
A state that fears a particular member of the clergy may present a security risk “can do a background check on the minister; it can interview him and his associates [and] it can seek a penalty-backed pledge that he will obey all rules,” Kagan wrote. But it can’t root its policy in speculative fears that a pastor may help an inmate stage a daring escape in the middle of their execution.
So while the outcome of this lawsuit is not entirely certain, Ramirez has good reason to hope that, in his final moments, he will receive spiritual comfort.
A protest against the teaching of critical race theory. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
Critical race theory has become a new wedge issue for the right. A number of right-wing groups, many funded by billionaires, are funding the backlash.
The anti-CRT movement has descended with a vengeance this year into suburban school board meetings and Fox News programming. And while the movement may present itself with a local face, many of its most effective advocacy groups are propped up by wealthy, well-connected backers—right down to its connections to the billionaire Koch family.
The Daily Beast has identified eight recently created anti-CRT groups which operate at local levels across the country but bear ties to ideological right-wing aristocrats and political operatives. Their backers include former officials in Donald Trump’s administration, an executive at a notorious D.C. lobbying firm, as well as Koch entities and The Federalist Society.
In Virginia, one of the key leaders against critical race theory is Ian Prior. If Prior’s name sounds familiar, that’s because you may have been one of the tens of thousands of Americans who to receive emails from Prior in one of his many different former roles: press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Justice Department official during the Trump administration, communications director for the Karl Rove super PAC American Crossroads, and now, a GOP operative behind two organizations that have inflamed attacks on so-called critical race theory in Virginia’s public schools.
Prior runs Fight for Schools, a state-level PAC which emerged this year to challenge educational decisions in Loudoun County and mobilize behind Youngkin. The candidate turned to Prior’s group for fundraising and voter outreach efforts, and state election disclosures show that the organization raised hundreds of thousands of dollars during the campaign.
Over the last several months, Prior—whose children attend Loudoun County schools—has appeared on Fox News at least 15 times to discuss critical race theory, according to a Media Matters analysis. He has been introduced on those shows as a “Loudoun County parent” and a “father” who went “from concerned parent, like many of you, to legal activist,” Media Matters reported. In one such appearance last month, Prior was identified by the host as a “parent,” while the graphic on the screen labeled him “vice president at Mercury Public Affairs”—a D.C. lobbying firm with a history of representing controversial foreign clients.
Fight for Schools—which this spring launched an effort to recall half a dozen Loudoun County school board members—also reported significant financial backing from 1776 Action, a “dark money” nonprofit led by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson. The group also coordinated local events in Virginia with The Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank with connections to the Koch empire and Tea Party organizing efforts. And while Prior denies being present for the most controversial of those Loudoun County events—a June 22 protest that turned violent and ended with the arrests of two parents—that event was organized by another one of his groups, Parents Against Critical Theory.
PACT’s incorporation documents with the state of Virginia show Prior as its signatory, via his Parents Against Critical Theory LLC. However, he does not appear on the group’s website, which claims its founder is Scott Mineo, another Loudoun County parent who spoke at the June 22 protest. (Mineo has also reportedly posted anti-Black and anti-Muslim remarks on Facebook.) And, like Fight For Schools, PACT also received significant financial backing from Carson’s 1776 Action, and has coordinated events with the Heritage Foundation.
A separate group that recently launched a seven-figure anti-CRT ad campaign appears to be an arm of another conservative dark-money juggernaut.
According to Virginia state incorporation records, the group—the Free to Learn Coalition—appears connected to the Concord Fund, aka the Judicial Crisis Network, a nonprofit which has poured millions of dollars into efforts to stack the Supreme Court with conservatives. JCN is effectively controlled by Leonard Leo, a wealthy conservative activist and Federalist Society executive.
And another prominent new anti-CRT organization, the 1776 Project, was founded by right-wing operative Ryan Girduksy. Girdusky, who once co-wrote a book with current Matt Gaetz spokesperson Harlan Hill, has implied support for the Great Replacement Theory—a casus belli for white nationalists.
The 1776 Project has hauled in nearly half a million dollars since its inception this spring.
National groups now appear poised to exploit CRT as a wedge issue for suburban conservative voters.
In June, Politico reported that Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action—the advocacy group affiliated with the Heritage Foundation—called critical race theory one of “the top two issues” her group is focused on, along with enacting stricter voting laws. Anderson worked in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, as did Russ Vought, the former head of the OMB under Trump who recently created a group called Citizens for Renewing America, which in June published a parents’ toolkit titled “An A to Z Guide on How to Stop Critical Race Theory and Reclaim Your Local School Board.”
One of Heritage’s local collaborators, “No Left Turn,” also has ties to controversial right-wing extremists. Its founder, Elana Fishbein—who appeared on Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham’s Fox News shows earlier this year—has said schools are “indoctrinating” kids with CRT, “literally making them your brownshirt.”
And a Koch network alum, Nicole Neily, has started a group called Parents Defending Education, which aims to fight CRT through legal action. Although the group has said it is a “grassroots” effort, Neily has worked at a number of Koch operations, Popular Information’s Judd Legum reported. Her previous employers include the Independent Women’s Forum and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which in 2013 was identified as “the Kochs’ leading media investment to date” by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Maurice Cunningham, a political science professor at University of Massachusetts at Boston and the author of Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, told The Daily Beast that “white backlash groups” such as PDE trade on “a long inglorious but successful history in this country.”
Kyle Herrig, president of left-leaning watchdog Accountable.US, said the well-funded movement has turned students into “political props.”
“Extremist groups spreading lies about accurate and inclusive education aren’t backed by educators or the facts—they’re backed by billionaires and Republican political operatives. Students are in school to learn, not to be political props for wealthy special interests playing partisan games,” Herrig told The Daily Beast.
But Cunningham noted a difference from the Tea Party movement.
“The Tea Party was actually more spontaneous,” he said. “Back then, very quickly you had grassroots groups like the Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express pop up, whereas this movement is very much from the beginning a top-down operation—-a conscious, well researched, plotted-out effort where you have these smaller groups as offshoots of a very well-planned strategy.”
Cunningham singled out Parents Defending Education, pointing to what he estimated was a million-dollar payroll and connections to a law firm who has represented Trump in the past.
“You can’t tell for sure where the money is coming from, but there’s a lot of it,” he said.
To Cunningham, the anti-CRT crusade appears to have combined two conservative movements in one—a racially-charged incarnation of the broader anti-education movement that has been simmering in conservative circles over the last several years, gaining traction through “free speech” campus initiatives spearheaded by right-wing youth groups like Turning Point USA.
“I immediately thought this looks like the orchestrated attacks on college professors over the last few years, national groups amplifying these false talking points out of context, and suddenly the threats came in,” Cunningham said.
Surveys suggest that such a two-pronged strategy has potential to motivate conservative voters.
After all, Trump rode racial resentment to victory in 2016, and also polls highest among white voters without a college degree. In 2017, a Pew Research survey found that Republican support for higher education fell more than 20 points in just two years. Brandon Busteed, who also observed the trend while serving as director of education and workforce development at Gallup, called it the most pronounced partisan-linked shift in Gallup’s history.
Phil Hackney, an expert in nonprofits at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said the strategy is “as old as politics.”
“With respect to education, I’ve been watching this since at least the early 2000s, when many groups in the charter school movement were getting money from the same folks. They would look for individuals who represent common citizens, in order to create distance between the money and the voices,” Hackney told The Daily Beast. “It’s a very common strategy, as old as politics: Distort the moneyed interests people might distrust, and separate them from the ‘common-man’ voice of the movement.”
Cunningham opened the scope even further.
“The folks who fund this also oppose public education, the distribution of public goods, and the power of collective action. It ties up in a nice package with a big bow: To undermine democracy,” Cunningham said, pointing to Turning Point chartering dozens of buses to the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally.
“Scratch the surface of these groups, and you just find it’s the same damn people,” he said.
A seawall stretches for hundreds of miles along the coast of Guyana, in northern South America. It protects the low-lying coastal lands where the majority of Guyana's population lives. The region is acutely threatened by rising sea levels, as well as other symptoms of climate change, yet Guyana is embracing the oil industry. (photo: Ryan Kellman/NPR)
Today, the weathered old seawall is a cheerful place. Vendors sell beer and coconut water, blasting local radio stations as they look out over muddy waters. Kids play, couples flirt. Exhausted workers catch a cool breeze after another 90-degree day in the capital city of Georgetown.
But for climate expert Seon Hamer, standing beneath a wild almond tree next to the wall, the view is not as peaceful as it seems.
"All of this," he says, "could be gone."
Hamer has seen the climate models. In the worst-case scenario, they predict that rising sea levels would eventually reach far inland and this capital city would be completely submerged.
Climate change is causing catastrophes worldwide, but for Guyana, which is one of the poorest countries in South America, the risks are especially existential.
Nonetheless, the country is hitching its future to the same fossil fuels that are accelerating climate change.
A few years ago, ExxonMobil struck oil off Guyana's coast, and it keeps finding more crude. Drillships continue to work just over the horizon, in the direction of Hamer's unsettled gaze.
By the latest estimates, there could be more than 10 billion barrels beneath Guyana's waters, providing a potential windfall to its citizens. That's bigger than Mexico's proven reserves — for a country with a tiny fraction of Mexico's population.
So Guyana is emerging as the world's newest oil producer at a time when world leaders are under pressure to reduce their countries' reliance on oil, coal and natural gas, one of the main objectives at the COP26 talks in Glasgow, Scotland.
The possibility — and perils — of sudden oil wealth
The seawall that stretches along Guyana's coast can be traced back to Dutch colonizers, who reclaimed the low-lying, marshy plains to expand their land.
Guyana later became a British territory (today, it's the only English-speaking country in South America). But Dutch ghosts allegedly still wander their old settlements — and the Dutch decision to reclaim this land from the sea is haunting modern-day residents.
Guyana's Indigenous minority is concentrated far inland, but most of the population, largely descended from enslaved Africans and indentured people from India, live along the coast. Their lands are kept dry through an aging network of drainage canals and a system of sea defenses.
Guyana is under increasingly dire threat: Waters are rising several times faster than the global average, and already, high tides periodically sweep over the top of the seawall, while salt water is contaminating wells near the coast.
The sea is not the only peril.
"We've seen a lot more high-intensity, short-duration rainfall," says Garvin Cummings, the head of Guyana's Hydrometeorological Service.
That shift in rain patterns is overwhelming Guyana's drainage systems, with calamitous results.
It happened again this May, when the country was pounded by days of relentless rains and creeks started to swell.
"We wake up, like, 5 o'clock in the morning and there was the water, rising, rising," says Chandroutie Persaud, who lives in Wash Clothes, a farming community southeast of the capital city, along Mahaicony Creek.
Her family laid boards around inside their home and around their yard, lifting possessions up higher and higher, day after day.
Finally, they declared defeat. Persaud and her husband abandoned the first floor of their home; their son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren moved to a shelter.
Rice fields turned into ponds, deeper than a 6-foot-tall man could stand in. Livestock sickened and died and rotted in the waters. Fruit trees, cultivated carefully for years, drowned. And those waters stayed, not for days or for weeks, but for months — up to four months in some areas.
Four months of getting around by boat, relying on donated food to survive and staring out at the water destroying your livelihood.
"What gone done gone," says Vadim Harikrishna Indarpaul, a contractor and home farmer who lives nearby. "There's nothing we could have saved."
The overwhelming flooding just lasted too long, he says. "It was really cruel to us," he says. "Really, really."
From role model to embracing oil
Guyana's extreme vulnerability to climate change has made it a longtime champion of climate action.
In fact, Guyana is one of very few countries that had been acting as a carbon sink, capturing more emissions than it released, thanks to its remarkable success preserving its lush inland rainforests.
It even struck a deal to get compensated for its work fighting climate change. Norway, an oil-rich country interested in offsetting its own emissions, paid Guyana to conserve forests, and thus capture carbon.
The agreement was groundbreaking and was seen as a potential model for other countries to monetize the battle against climate change.
But now Guyana is trading in its green halo in exchange for something far more profitable: oil revenue.
Companies had long suspected there was oil off Guyana's shores — the country is located right next to oil-rich Venezuela — but no one ever found any.
Then Exxon decided to take a gamble and look in deeper waters. The discovery the company announced in 2015 was extraordinary: One Exxon executive compared it to a "fairy tale." Since then, even more oil has been found in Guyana's waters.
Guyana is determined to develop this oil as fast as it can.
"We have a small window to get as much as possible out," says Bharrat Jagdeo, the country's former president and current vice president — and the head of its delegation to the ongoing COP26 climate talks.
'There's nothing fair in this'
Jagdeo is no climate denier. He was the one, as president, who struck that deal with Norway to get paid for forest carbon.
But he has also embraced the oil industry. And it's no mystery why: For helping to save the planet, Guyana managed to earn about $150 million after more than a decade of work. The oil industry is bringing in twice that per year, and it's just getting started.
It's an awkward time for a country to enter the oil industry. In order to prevent the worst effects of climate change, global oil consumption needs to drop immediately. If that happens, oil investments made today might not be profitable – they could become what's called stranded assets, very expensive and suddenly useless.
Jagdeo, who spoke to NPR before he headed to Glasgow, Scotland, for the current climate talks, is acutely aware of that. He says he supports a rapid end to the oil industry. But he doesn't actually believe the world can pull it off.
"It's not happening, and we don't see that happening any time soon," he says. "I'm not positive that we will see any major shift."
So as global leaders call for the end of oil, Guyana is going the other way, subsidizing large-scale oil investments and preparing to sell crude to a world still addicted to it.
It's an uncomfortable position. But it's not a unique one. Around the world, oil producers and consumers are calling for a shift away from fossil fuels, while still relying on them in vast quantities.
Jagdeo argues that blocking new development would only protect the profits of existing producers such as Saudi Arabia or the U.S. — countries that "will never give us a cent," as Jagdeo puts it.
He points out that in the 2015 Paris Agreement, rich countries promised $100 billion a year to help developing countries tackle climate change. That promise has not been kept.
And countries like Guyana face huge expenses, from raising seawalls to helping farmers prepare for worsening floods.
Guyana didn't turn to oil just because rich countries didn't deliver on their promises — the oil money would have appealed even if the aid had come through.
But, Jagdeo says, the unmet aid pledge makes it particularly frustrating to hear calls for Guyana and other would-be new producers to leave their oil in the ground, while countries such as Saudi Arabia continue to pump and profit.
"There's nothing fair in this," he says.
A bad deal for Guyana?
Jagdeo hopes to wring billions of dollars out of the oil industry and use those funds for Guyana's development and climate adaptation.
The money is substantial. Jagdeo predicts that direct oil revenues to the government will top $1 billion in a few years – more than half the entire national budget – while some analysts predict it could be 10 times higher.
Across the entire economy, Guyana's GDP is already increasing rapidly, and the country's foreign minister has said he expects it to quintuple.
But tying a country's fortunes to oil has always been risky. The sudden infusion of oil cash typically makes a developing country's economy worse, rather than better. It's called the resource curse.
The new wealth can drive corruption and conflict, and a new oil power is positioned for a lot of pain when its big moneymaker experiences one of its periodic price crashes.
There's another concern, too. Guyana's deal with Exxon was unusually favorable for Exxon. The terms were designed to attract exploration from reluctant oil companies at a time when Guyana was seen as a risky bet.
Now that oil has been struck, the sweetheart deal is feeling a little sour. Groups from the International Monetary Fund to the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as think tanks like IEEFA, have all noted elements of the contract that advantage Exxon over the government. And many Guyanese politicians agree the terms are inadequate (though they disagree about who is to blame).
Under the contract, Guyana's share of the revenues are relatively small at first. Over time, they should hypothetically grow to the billions, but it could take years. That delay could be risky, given that the world could manage to rapidly slash its use of oil. And many critics worry that Guyana will struggle to get its fair share of revenue.
"All kinds of games and shenanigans could be played," says Vincent Adams, the former head of Guyana's Environmental Protection Agency. He says his country simply lacks the petroleum expertise to adequately defend its interests against experienced oil giants like Exxon: "We have no way, no way of monitoring and verifying."
ExxonMobil, in a statement to NPR, says the contract's terms are "competitive with other agreements signed in countries at a similar resource-development phase," citing third-party research.
"Our work and the support of the government of Guyana are the basis of a long-term mutually beneficial relationship that has created significant value for the people of Guyana," an Exxon spokesperson wrote.
Doubting, skeptical, but going along
Ordinary Guyanese also have misgivings about the Exxon deal. They agree that Guyana needs money, but many are skeptical that the oil deal will actually benefit them.
"The oil and gas sector doesn't do nothing for Guyana," Avery Sobers, a taxi driver taking a break along the seawall, states flatly. "The money does not come back and spend in this country."
Others are concerned about environmental risks.
"Getting the oil money is now," says Indarpaul, the contractor who spent months living in floodwaters. But once the oil has been drilled, he says, "[if] the country's gone ... the money couldn't fix back the country."
Still, Indarpaul doesn't see that as a reason to stop the drilling entirely. And this ambivalence, falling short of firm opposition, is widespread in Guyana — a murky mix of hope, need and weary cynicism.
Annette Arjoon-Martins is a conservationist and a pilot, with a bird's-eye view of how climate change is affecting Guyana. Already one Indigenous community she's worked with has had to move to higher ground.
She criticizes the oil development for not helping Indigenous Guyanese and for giving too small a share of funds to Guyana. She also thinks Exxon should be doing more to partner with local environmental groups like hers to monitor for damage to ecosystems.
But she doesn't call for a halt to the production.
"Look, if the First World countries would pay us to keep the oil in the ground and compensate us from what we would lose if we didn't extract it, well, that would be the ultimate fix for me as a Guyanese," she says.
But that's not on the table. And Guyana needs the money, Arjoon-Martins says.
Even Seon Hamer, who's haunted by the vision of rising seas, stops short of calling for Guyana to shut down the drilling.
He stands by the seawall, looking out over water filled with sediment carried from deep in the Amazon, and thinks of all the things that oil revenue could pay for. Education and health care. Renewable energy. Sustainable transportation. More resilient agriculture.
Then he sums up the kind of calculation that's being made around the world, in the agonizing clash between the future and the present.
"We have to get funds, basically," he says. "And ... the oil industry would provide a lot of that funds in the near future."
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