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Trump is sneaking environmental rollbacks past a nation in quarantine

In the weeks since the novel coronavirus began its exponential spread across America, schools have closed; churches, synagogues, and mosques have canceled services; and non-essential businesses have shuttered. The U.S. economy has ground to a halt. But the Trump administration and some state governments are still going full steam ahead on rolling back environmental protections.

So what’s been happening while we’ve been sheltering in place? A whole lot. “Consistent” isn’t generally a word used to describe this president, but Trump has been nothing if not consistent in his commitment to ensuring unfettered freedom for big polluters.

On Tuesday, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency put the nail in the coffin of President Obama’s 2012 rule aimed at curbing auto emissions. That rule would have required automakers to improve the fuel economy standards of their cars and light fleet trucks to by 5 percent on average a year. Trump’s new rule will only require them to raise those standards by 1.5 percent annually. For an idea of how easy Trump has made life for automakers, the industry has said it would boost standards 2.4 per year sans regulation.

Trump says the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles rule will make new cars cheaper and bolster auto manufacturers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. But loosening restrictions on automakers will lead to a billion more tons of carbon dioxide emitted and 80 billion more gallons of gasoline consumed cars over the course of their lifetimes. California is currently in a courtroom tussle with the EPA over a waiver that would allow the state to sidestep Trump’s rule and continue imposing stricter tailpipe emissions rules on vehicles driven in its jurisdiction.

Speaking of the EPA, the agency, helmed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, is steadily moving forward with other rollbacks. Among them, a rule that could hobble future federal health regulations by limiting the studies regulators can use in the rulemaking process. Wheeler says the agency’s new rule to require disclosure of the raw data behind scientific studies used by the government to make regulations will increase transparency. Health experts argue it’ll exclude key studies that rely on confidential medical data.

Not content to move ahead with rollbacks that were already in the works, the EPA is also using the coronavirus as an excuse to let polluters loose on the playground. Last week, the agency announced it was going to let facilities like power plants and factories regulate themselves during the pandemic. The EPA will not issue fines for some air, water, and hazardous waste violations, and that loosening of restrictions will take retroactive effect going back to March 13. Companies should “act responsibly,” according to the EPA. Fat chance.

At the Department of the Interior, a similar saga is playing out. Last week, the department refused to extend the public comment period on its proposed reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a 1918 rule protecting more than 800 avian species. The agency also kept moving along plans this month to consider drilling projects on previously protected lands in Alaska and New Mexico, and is continuing oil and gas drilling lease auctions apace.

States are getting in on the deregulatory action, too. Over the past two weeks, Kentucky, South Dakota, and West Virginia quietly passed laws that would penalize pipeline protesters. Under the new state laws, fossil fuel infrastructure like the Dakota Access Pipeline are designated “critical infrastructure” or “key infrastructure assets.” Causing damage above a certain dollar amount or tampering with those assets could now lead to felony charges.

Meanwhile, the governors of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Illinois have already temporarily banned or officially discouraged reusable bags in grocery stores, and Maine’s plastic bag ban is being postponed until January 2021. Republican officials arguing against efforts to limit plastic pollution are taking talking points from the plastics industry. The president of the Plastic Industries Association recently said, “As the coronavirus spreads across the country, single-use plastics will only become more vital.” But the science behind the assertion that plastic bags spread the virus is thin, and a recent study showed the virus is still viable on plastic surfaces after 72 hours.

It’s clear that the coronavirus crisis has handed Trump and conservative state lawmakers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do away with environmental protections they find too burdensome. Too bad social distancing isn’t effective for pollution.

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Trump is sneaking environmental rollbacks past a nation in quarantine

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Should Biden and Sanders steal Elizabeth Warren’s climate plans?

Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on Thursday morning, 390 days after officially announcing her run. Several months ago, the senator from Massachusetts was widely regarded as a frontrunner with momentum to spare. But her support started to waver in the lead-up to the first contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Ultimately, she never placed higher than third in any of the state caucuses and primaries she competed in.

Warren’s slogan, “I have a plan for that,” is an apt description of her biggest contribution to the presidential race — especially when it comes to climate policy. Over the course of her campaign, she released more than a dozen proposals to address climate change — more plans than any other candidate. Warren left no stone unturned in her quest to come up with an answer to what is arguably the biggest threat facing the nation.

Her plans offered solutions to problems as big as warming oceans and as small as inaccessible national parks. She had a plan to green the military (think zero-emissions vehicles and combat bases that run on clean energy) and a plan to base trade agreements with other countries on their emissions goals. The strength of Warren’s climate game lay not just in the quantity of her plans but also in their quality.

Warren’s candidacy may be dead, but her 14 plans could live on. And there’s reason to believe they might. After Washington governor Jay Inslee dropped out of the race in August, he encouraged the remaining candidates to crib from his climate plans, which he called “open-source.” Warren adopted planks of his sweeping climate platform and even hired one of his climate advisers. There’s nothing stopping the remaining candidates from similarly picking over Warren’s plans now that she’s out of the race.

“Any candidate who wants to win Warren voters should think seriously about embracing Elizabeth’s climate platform,” a Warren aide told Grist.

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, the two remaining candidates with a viable path to the nomination, both have comprehensive climate plans. Sanders’ plan earned him an A+ from Greenpeace, which ranks candidates based on their dedication to phasing out fossil fuels and passing a Green New Deal. Biden’s plans got him a B+. But both stand to benefit from adopting some of Warren’s plans, which got more and more ambitious in the lead-up to her decision to drop out. Here are three plans that deserve to outlive Warren’s campaign.

“Stop Wall Street From Financing the Climate Crisis.” This plan is aimed directly at making sure Wall Street doesn’t leave Americans high and dry by continuing to invest in oil and gas infrastructure that could lose all their value in the transition to clean energy. Climate change, Warren says, destabilizes the American financial system by jeopardizing Wall Street’s investments and inflicting physical property damage (think the wreckage of coastal cities in the wake of catastrophic hurricanes or Western towns post-wildfires). She proposed using the regulatory tools in the Dodd-Frank Act — enacted in the wake of the 2008 crash — to regulate Wall Street and address those risks.

Warren’s plan for public lands. In April 2019, Warren became the first front-runner to release a sweeping public lands plan aimed at reducing emissions from public lands. She set the bar for similar plans from other candidates by advocating for an executive order banning new fossil fuel leases on federally owned lands on her first day in office. Most interestingly, she introduced the framework for a conservation workforce that would put a smile on FDR’s face: the “21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps,” which would “create job opportunities for thousands of young Americans caring for our natural resources and public lands.”

“Fighting for justice as we combat the climate crisis.” This plan has a lot in common with environmental justice plans from other candidates. It would direct at least $1 trillion to low-income communities on the frontlines of climate change. But it differs in one important respect: It uses wildfire wisdom from tribes to help the U.S. prevent deadly wildfires like the one that razed Paradise, California in 2018. In addition to investing in wildfire prevention programs and improved mapping of active wildfires, she aimed to incorporate “traditional ecological practices” and explore “co-management and the return of public resources to indigenous protection wherever possible.”

Will Biden and Sanders poach Warren’s climate plans? Time will tell. Her campaign certainly hopes they will. “The urgency of the moment calls for it,” the Warren aide said.

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Should Biden and Sanders steal Elizabeth Warren’s climate plans?

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New York to EPA: Get a lawyer. Again.

On Monday, newly minted Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state carbon trading program that aims to reduce greenhouse gases from the power sector.

New Jersey’s former governor (and bona fide bully) Chris Christie had pulled the state out in 2011, saying the initiative increased the tax burden for utilities and failed to adequately reduce greenhouse gases. Murphy said that Christie’s decision to withdraw had cost the state $279 million in revenue.

The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities will begin drawing up a game plan to re-enter the pact.

Nine eastern states already participate in RGGI: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Now, New Jersey is joining the fray, and Virginia may soon follow.

“With this executive order, New Jersey takes the first step toward restoring our place as a leader in the green economy,” Murphy said. Jersey shore knows what it’s doing!

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New York to EPA: Get a lawyer. Again.

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New Jersey’s new governor is bringing back cap-and-trade.

On Monday, newly minted Governor Phil Murphy signed an executive order to rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state carbon trading program that aims to reduce greenhouse gases from the power sector.

New Jersey’s former governor (and bona fide bully) Chris Christie had pulled the state out in 2011, saying the initiative increased the tax burden for utilities and failed to adequately reduce greenhouse gases. Murphy said that Christie’s decision to withdraw had cost the state $279 million in revenue.

The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Board of Public Utilities will begin drawing up a game plan to re-enter the pact.

Nine eastern states already participate in RGGI: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Now, New Jersey is joining the fray, and Virginia may soon follow.

“With this executive order, New Jersey takes the first step toward restoring our place as a leader in the green economy,” Murphy said. Jersey shore knows what it’s doing!

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New Jersey’s new governor is bringing back cap-and-trade.

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Hurricane Harvey could be the strongest storm to hit the country in over a decade.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative announced yesterday that it plans to curb power plant emissions by 30 percent between 2020 and 2030.

The participating states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont — will finalize the agreement on Sept. 25. According to the Washington Post, Massachusetts wanted to set the bar higher by “reducing carbon emissions 5 percent a year. But Maryland balked and threatened to pull out of the pact, saying it would lead to higher energy costs for consumers.”

The agreement caps the emissions from the power generation only (unlike California’s system, it does not include other industry, transportation, or agriculture), and allows those electricity generators to buy and sell emissions rights. This latest move simply lowers the cap.

Even though Washington, D.C., tends to suck up all the oxygen in the conversation, local and regional leaders are trying different approaches to suck all the carbon out of the economy. In these statehouses, it’s a lot less hot air, and a lot more action.

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Hurricane Harvey could be the strongest storm to hit the country in over a decade.

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Corey Lewandowski Opens Lobbying Shop to Cash in on Trump. Here’s What He Once Said About Lobbyists.

Mother Jones

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In February, Corey Lewandowksi, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign manager, was interviewed by Trump’s future campaign chairman (and now senior White House adviser) Stephen Bannon about the role lobbyists play in Washington. Lewandowski’s response was unambiguous and venomous. Trump’s election, he declared, would mark the end of influence-peddling by political insiders. Here’s how he put it:

This is the fundamental problem with the ruling class in Washington, DC—the party bosses, the K Street crowd, the lobbyists who control all these politicians. They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything. They will spend whatever it takes because they know that if Donald Trump becomes the nominee and ultimately the president of the United States, the days of backroom deals are over. He will only be responsible to the American people. And so what you have is a series of people who’ve made a very, very good living by controlling politicians through their donations and making sure they get the legislation done—or not done—in Washington, DC to best benefit their clients. And those days are coming to an end.

But maybe not just yet.

On Wednesday morning, Lewandowski announced that he and another former Trump campaign veteran, Barry Bennett, are opening up a lobbying and political consulting firm in the swamp their ex-boss vowed to drain.

Without a hint of irony, the first sentence of Lewandowski’s press release points out that his offices will be just one block from the White House. He didn’t note that this is also one block from K Street, the ground zero of Washington influence-peddling, or Swamp Central. The next sentence touts Lewandowski’s close relationship with Trump. As in, we’re going to cash in on my insider connection to the guy in the White House.

For Lewandowski, this is actually a return to lobbying. As Mother Jones reported in March, Lewandowski was a registered lobbyist in the mid-2000s. In fact, Lewandowski lobbied for green energy subsidies. (One of his former clients told Mother Jones that Lewandowski was helpful to the funding of a publicly owned solar project in Massachusetts.) And he did this, as he headed up the New Hampshire chapter of government-bashing Americans for Prosperity.

It’s not clear if Lewandowski will once again register as a lobbyist. The firm’s announcement describes it as a full-service government relations and political consulting firm. But even if he sticks to the “consulting” side of things, his new gig might still make Trump campaign reunions awkward. On Tuesday, Kellyanne Conway, who led the Trump campaign in its final months, lashed out at Washington culture and “political consultants” in particular.

“Draining the swamp is not just about lobbying and politicians, it’s also about consultants,” Conway told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, adding that she viewed political consultants as a “staff infection.” By the way, Conway has long been a political consultant.

This is the fundamental problem with the ruling class in Washington, D.C. – the party bosses, the K Street crowd, the lobbyists who control all these politicians. They will do anything to maintain their power. They will do anything. They will say anything.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/coreylewan751913.html

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Corey Lewandowski Opens Lobbying Shop to Cash in on Trump. Here’s What He Once Said About Lobbyists.

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Two Former Chris Christie Aides Found Guilty of All Charges in Bridgegate Scandal

Mother Jones

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Two former aides to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were found guilty of all charges in the George Washington Bridge lane-closing trial.

Bridget Kelly and Bill Baroni were charged with organizing a plan that included shutting down the highly trafficked lanes as an act of political revenge against a Democratic mayor who did not endorse Christie during his re-election bid.

The verdict on Friday comes as Christie prepares to make a public appearance this weekend in New Hampshire in support of Donald Trump. In September, federal prosecutors accused the embattled governor of knowing about the lane closings—an allegation Christie has vehemently denied.

“Let me be clear once again, I had no knowledge prior or during these lane realignments, and had no role authorizing them,” he said in a statement reacting to Friday’s verdict. “No believable evidence was presented to contradict that fact. Anything said to the contrary over the past six weeks in court is simply untrue.”

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Two Former Chris Christie Aides Found Guilty of All Charges in Bridgegate Scandal

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FBI Taking Another Look at Clinton Emails

Mother Jones

The FBI has come across emails that may be related to the closed Hillary Clinton email server investigation, according to a letter FBI Director James Comey sent several congressional leaders on Friday. The emails appear to have come from devices belonging to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide.

“In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” Comey wrote. “I am writing to inform you that the investigative team briefed me on this yesterday, and I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation.” He added, “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant, and I cannot predict how long it will take us to complete this additional work.”

Immediately on Twitter, Clinton foes started crowing. So did Donald Trump at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, minutes after the news broke. “They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States of America,” Trump said, as the crowd chanted, “Lock her up!” Trump continued, “Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office. I have great respect for the fact that the FBI and the Department of Justice are now willing to have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made.”

Trump added that the FBI’s decision not to recommend charges “was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood” and that now “perhaps finally justice will be done.”

A little more than an hour after news of the FBI letter broke, the New York Times reported that the new information came to light after the FBI seized devices belonging to Abedin and Weiner.

Shortly after the New York Times report, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta issued a statement calling Comey’s decision to make the announcement 11 days before the election “extraordinary”:

Upon completing this investigation more than three months ago, FBI Director Comey declared no reasonable prosecutor would move forward with a case like this and added that it was not even a close call. In the months since, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been baselessly second-guessing the FBI and, in both public and private, browbeating the career officials there to revisit their conclusion in a desperate attempt to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

FBI Director Comey should immediately provide the American public more information than is contained in the letter he sent to eight Republican committee chairmen. Already, we have seen characterizations that the FBI is ‘reopening’ an investigation but Comey’s words do not match that characterization. Director Comey’s letter refers to emails that have come to light in an unrelated case, but we have no idea what those emails are and the Director himself notes they may not even be significant.

It is extraordinary that we would see something like this just 11 days out from a presidential election.

The Director owes it to the American people to immediately provide the full details of what he is now examining. We are confident this will not produce any conclusions different from the one the FBI reached in July.”

Read Comey’s full letter below:

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This story has been updated with information from the New York Times report and Podesta’s statement.

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FBI Taking Another Look at Clinton Emails

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Karl Rove’s Group Injects Scare Tactics Into New Hampshire Senate Race

Mother Jones

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New Hampshire voters came home last night to find an alarming warning in their mailboxes. Voting for Democrat Maggie Hassan in her Senate race against incumbent Sen. Kelly Ayotte, they were told, would essentially mean voting for terrorists to target their children. The large glossy mailer warns on the front that radical Islamic terrorists are searching for their next city to target:

The crosshairs motif continues on the inside, which bashes Hassan for supporting the Iran nuclear deal and emphasizes—over a silhouette of a woman and a young girl walking hand in hand—that terrorists are “searching for soft targets…”:

The back of the mailer shows yet another crosshairs over an American flag outside a home, paired with a warning that terrorists are an imminent threat and support for Hassan could put “our families at risk”:

Where did the money come from to create the provocative mailer? We’ll probably never know. According to the fine print at the bottom, the mailer was sent by One Nation, a politically active 501(c)(4) nonprofit, also known as a dark money group. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, One Nation was taken over earlier this year by operatives from American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s outside money operation.

Federal Election Commission records show that One Nation paid about $44,000 for the mailer, but as a nonprofit organization, One Nation will never have to disclose who donated the money to fund the mailer. It’s not clear whether One Nation has sent similar mailings in other states, though FEC records show the group is spending money on mailers in Nevada, Indiana, and North Carolina.

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Karl Rove’s Group Injects Scare Tactics Into New Hampshire Senate Race

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Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

Mother Jones

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People across America reacted with shock Thursday to a video of racially charged comments by Donald Trump’s campaign chairwoman for Ohio’s Mahoning County, who denied that racism existed there before Barack Obama became president—remarks that quickly led her to resign. But one group was probably less surprised to hear this kind of racially divisive language: the black residents of Mahoning County.

Mahoning County, in the heart of the Rust Belt, has received outsize attention this year for the exodus of once-loyal blue-collar Democratic voters into the Trump camp. The overwhelming focus of this attention has been economic: In this poster child of industrial decline, the prevailing narrative goes, residents opposed to free trade have flocked to Trump and his promise to restore the Rust Belt to better times. But the comments by Kathy Miller, Trump’s Mahoning chairwoman, reveal a different story that African American residents have been telling all along—one of political shifts driven by issues of race and racism.

“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” Miller, a real estate agent, told the Guardian recently a video-taped interview posted Thursday. “Now, you know, with the people with the guns and shooting up neighborhoods and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”

Miller continued, to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reporter, “And if you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you.”

Mahoning County is ground zero for Trump’s rise. It’s the home of Youngstown, famous for its decline from a booming steel town in the first half of the 20th century to a downtrodden playground for the mob in the second half. Now Youngstown is a struggling, down-and-out city where signs of rehabilitation are dwarfed by the lingering effects of the economic collapse and the poverty of many of the city’s black residents. Following white flight to the suburbs, Youngstown is nearly half black. Thanks to the strong influence of labor unions, for decades the region has been a Democratic stronghold. But in the Ohio Republican primary in March, Trump won the region handily, with the help of many Democratic voters who switched parties to support Trump.

I visited Youngstown in June. Most of the people I spoke with traced Trump’s appeal to the economy and particularly to the issue of trade. Union officials worried that if Hillary Clinton didn’t match Trump’s zeal in opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, she would lose Democratic votes in the region, and with them the state of Ohio. And that is essentially the story I wrote.

But a few people voiced a different view of Trump’s appeal in Youngstown. For them, Miller’s comments reflect what they’ve long said: that Trump’s popularity in Youngstown has a lot to do with race. Unsurprisingly, those people were black.

“I have some other strong personal feelings about this that nobody wants to talk about,” Jaladah Aslam, a former public sector union employee and former local Democratic Party official, told me this summer. “This whole racist rhetoric plays well with some people here.”

Aslam recalled footage she had seen of a clash between supporters and protesters at a Trump rally. “I saw a man screaming at this one guy, ‘Go back to Africa,’ and I’m like, ‘Really? We’re talking like that again?'” she said. “That means that people never gave up that thinking.” When it comes to Youngstown and its environs, Aslam believes nasty rhetoric toward African Americans never went away; it just went out of sight.

Aslam was born and raised in Youngstown. In the late 1990s, she left the city limits and bought a house in the suburb of Austintown Township. Her first summer in the neighborhood, she was in her backyard when she overheard a visitor at her neighbor’s house a few yards over. “I don’t believe this shit,” her neighbor’s friend said. “The nigger has the new pool in the neighborhood.” The incident alerted her to the way some locals think and talk about black people when they don’t think black people are listening: “In their mind, why should somebody of color have anything nice?”

Trump’s rise reminded Aslam of that summer day nearly two decades ago. “It comes back to me in the moment of Trump because it reminds me of that thought process, it reminds me people feel that way,” she said. “And unfortunately, there are a lot of people who feel that way in Youngstown. There are a lot of people who are comfortable with what Trump says about Hispanics and Muslims.”

Aslam’s hunches are borne out by academic research. Last year, a doctoral student at Cleveland State University found that the American metropolitan area where the N-word showed up most frequently as an internet search term was Youngstown. He published his findings in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, noting that research out of Harvard shows that search data “does actually correlate with other measures of racism” and that “the private use of coarse racial terminology is the first stage of prejudice.”

Youngstown might not be an obvious epicenter of American racism, but its history helps explain its racial tensions. There’s academic research demonstrating that support for far-right nationalist political parties in Europe correlates with a perceived loss of power at the hands of immigrants or other ethnic groups—a fact that helps explain Trump’s rise in Youngstown and the dynamic Aslam sensed for years. At 45 percent black and 9 percent Latino, Youngstown is a majority-minority city.

“The Trump phenomenon is basically a middle-class white movement because they feel disenfranchised, they feel like they are losing out,” Rufus Hudson, an African American former Youngstown city council member who serves on the local Democratic Party’s executive committee, told me when I visited. “I think there’s that quiet undertone that after eight years of Barack Obama, there’s people that think, ‘We’re falling behind, we’re not getting our fair share.'” With Miller’s remarks this week, all of a sudden it wasn’t so quiet anymore.

“Growing up in this community, there has always been a racist undertone here,” Hudson said. “I actually didn’t realize that until I moved away. When I moved to Houston, and I lived down there for 10 years and then I come back, and it’s like, wow, I mean, it’s like kind of in your face.” He nodded toward the car he drives, a Lexus. As a black man driving a nice car, he said he had been pulled over 17 times in the area but had never been issued a citation.

By Thursday evening, the Trump campaign had found a new Mahoning County chair, a black state GOP official from Youngstown named Tracey Winbush. Upon joining the campaign, she immediately deleted her entire Twitter history of about 17,000 tweets. Many of them had been critical of Trump. In February, following Trump’s first win of the Republican primary campaign, she tweeted out an article bearing the headline, “A Racist, Sexist Demagogue Just Won The New Hampshire Primary.”

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Trump Ohio Deputy’s Racial Remarks Reveal a Hidden Reason for His Rust Belt Success

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