Author Archives: AntwanHockensmi

New emails show the Justice Department is helping Big Oil fight climate lawsuits

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on January 14, 2020

Three years ago, a first-of-its-kind legal case argued that fossil fuel companies were liable for climate change — and should pay up to help cities adapt. That case, filed in July 2017 by two counties and one city in California against 20 fossil fuel companies, alleged that emissions from those companies will be responsible for an estimated 7.4 feet of sea-level rise in coming years.

What happened next is reminiscent of what occurred in the 1990s, when states filed lawsuits against tobacco companies in droves and the public rapidly soured on the industry. More California cities filed climate liability lawsuits against Big Oil, seeking reparations for climate change and its effects. Then other cities and counties from across the country filed their own suits. Oil companies went to court over claims that they lied to investors and the public about climate change, damaged fisheries, and impinged on young people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

At every turn, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell fought tooth and nail against the wave of lawsuits, arguing that the plaintiffs should look to the federal government, not the private sector, for financial assistance related to climate change. Now, a new investigation from InsideClimate News has revealed that the federal government has been working with some of those oil companies to oppose the wave of lawsuits.

Some 178 pages of emails between U.S. Department of Justice attorneys and industry lawyers — obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council — show the government has been planning to come to the aid of these lawsuit-afflicted companies since early 2018. Not only did the DOJ work on an amicus — “friend of the court” — brief in support of major oil companies shortly after the San Francisco and Oakland lawsuits were filed, but the department was also working with Republican attorneys generals from 15 states to come up with a plan to help those companies. Department of Justice attorneys had several phone calls with lawyers defending BP, Chevron, Exxon, and other oil companies, and even met some of them in person.

Curiously, the Department of Justice did not reach out to the plaintiffs in the cases, like the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, to collaborate. The department’s environmental division, which bills itself as “the nation’s environmental lawyer,” opted to covertly work with industry groups rather than the communities it’s supposed to represent.

“The Trump administration’s position is ‘We’re going to side with the fossil fuel interests in the nuisance cases over these cities,’” Phillip Gregory, co-council for the young people’s climate case, Juliana v. United States, told Grist.

“It’s very unusual for the federal government to be so aligned with industry on a damages case,” he said, particularly when the government isn’t implicated in the case. If the lawsuits were successful, oil companies, not the federal government, would be compelled to pay the damages.

Still, it’s unclear whether the DOJ crossed a line. “It wouldn’t pass the sniff test if the DOJ was trying to address substantive issues,” Justin Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, told InsideClimate News. “If the meetings were about the logistics, there’s nothing improper.”

To Gregory, the DOJ’s actions appear nothing if not political. “The Trump administration wants to control all dealings concerning fossil fuels, even though the fossil fuels are harming the youth of America,” he said. “It’s very capable of looking out for the fossil fuel industry — capable and willing.”

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New emails show the Justice Department is helping Big Oil fight climate lawsuits

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Prison Rates are Down. Thanks to Lead, They’re Going to Stay Down.

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest numbers on incarceration rates, and the headline news is that we’re sending fewer people to prison. But there’s an interesting wrinkle in the numbers that few news outlets have picked up on, even though it’s a trend that’s been obvious in the numbers for a long time. Here it is:

That’s from Rick Nevin, and you know what’s coming next, don’t you? Lead. It explains a lot of what’s going on here.

The US started phasing out gasoline lead in 1975, which means that children born after 1975 were exposed to steadily less lead. And the effect was cumulative: the later they were born, the less lead they were exposed to and the less crime they committed when they grew up. However, children born before 1975 were unaffected by all this. They were born in a high-lead era, and since all that matters is exposure during early childhood, the damage had already been done.

In 2013, this means that the statistics show a reduction in crime rates in adults under the age of 40, and the younger the cohort the lower the crime rate. Unsurprisingly, this also means they’re incarcerated at lower rates. The chart above shows this fairly dramatically.

But it also shows that incarceration rates have stayed steady or increased for older men. Those over the age of 40 had their lives ruined by lead when they were children, and the effect was permanent. They’re still committing crimes and being sent to prison at the same rate as ever. It’s hard to explain both these trends—lower prison rates for kids, higher prison rates for the middle-aged—without taking lead into account.

This is one of the reasons that the lead-crime hypothesis is important. In one sense, it’s little more than a historical curio. It explains the rise and fall of crime between 1960 and 2010, but by now most environmental lead has been cleaned up and there’s only a limited amount left to worry about. So it’s interesting, but nothing more.

But here’s why it matters: if the hypothesis is true, it means that violent crime rates aren’t down because of transient factors like drug use or poverty or harsh penal codes. The reduction is permanent. Our children are just flatly less violent than the lead-addled kids who grew up in the years after World War II. And that in turn means that the decline in incarceration rates is permanent. We don’t need as much prison space as we used to, and we don’t need punitive penal codes designed to toss kids behind bars for 20 years at the first sign of danger.

In other words, we can ease up. Our kids are less violent and our streets are less dangerous. Nor is that likely to change. The lead is mostly gone, and it’s going to stay gone. We’re safer today not because of broken windows or three-strikes laws or 20-year sentences for dealing cocaine. We’re safer because we’re no longer poisoning our children in ways that turn them into hair-trigger thugs. And guess what? If we cleaned up the ambient lead that still remains, we’d be even safer 20 years from now.

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Prison Rates are Down. Thanks to Lead, They’re Going to Stay Down.

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The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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In early July, Chris Davis issued a call to arms. “You see an illegal, you point your gun right dead at them, right between the eyes, and say ‘Get back across the border, or you will be shot,'” the Texas-based militia commander said in a YouTube video heralding Operation Secure Our Border-Laredo Sector, a plan to block the wave of undocumented migrants coming into his state. “If you get any flak from sheriffs, city, or feds, Border Patrol, tell them, ‘Look—this is our birthright. We have a right to secure our own land. This is our land.'”

Davis’ video was publicized by local newspapers and the Los Angeles Times. But the militia never materialized in Laredo, and Davis walked back his comments. (The video has been taken down.) Over the last few weeks, a smaller force under Davis’ watch has appeared along the southern border, spread thinly across three states. The fizzling of this grand mobilization was another reminder that the current immigration crisis has been missing a key ingredient of recent border showdowns: Bands of the heavily-armed self-appointed border guardians known as Minutemen.

During the past four years, the Minuteman groups that defined conservative immigration policy during the mid- to late-2000s have mostly self-destructed—sometimes spectacularly so. Founding Minuteman leaders are in prison, facing criminal charges, dead, or sidelined. “It really attracted a lot of people that had some pretty extreme issues,” says Juanita Molina, executive director of the Border Action Network, an advocacy group that provides aid to migrants in the desert. “We saw the movement implode on itself mostly because of that.” An analysis by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors right-wing extremist groups, found that the number of Minuteman groups in the Southwest had declined from 310 to 38 between 2010 and 2012.

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The Meltdown of the Anti-Immigration Minuteman Militia

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We Just Experienced the Hottest May on Record

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on June 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last month was the hottest May globally since records began in 1880, new figures show.

The record heat, combined with increasingly certain predictions of an El Niño, means experts are now speculating whether 2014 could become the hottest year on record.

Data published by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Monday showed the average land and ocean surface temperature last month was 0.74C above the 20th century average of 14.8C, making it the highest on record.

Previously, the warmest May was 2010, followed by 2012, 1998 and 2013.

Worldwide, March-May was the second warmest ever by NOAA’s records—2010 holds the record for that period. April 2014 was also the hottest April ever by NOAA’s records.

There are two other main global temperature records in addition to NOAA’s, one kept by NASA and the other by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre in the UK. The three are combined by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization, which ranks 2010 as the warmest on record, and says that 13 of the 14 warmest years on record occurred in the 21st century.

Some forecasters are now predicting a 90 percent chance of El Niño—the weather phenomenon that can cause drought in Asia and Australia and lead to higher temperatures—happening this year, opening the possibility that 2014 will be the hottest year yet.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., told the Guardian‘s environment network partner, ClimateCentral: “I agree that 2014 could well be the warmest on record, and/or 2015, depending on how things play out.”

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We Just Experienced the Hottest May on Record

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