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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

by CheryleKaufmann Posted on March 15, 2019

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When the EPA and the Department of Interior announced plans to scrap Obama-era regulations to curb methane leaks last year, they were transparent about their rationale — they wanted to help the oil and gas industry. The EPA estimated that its revised regulation for new wells would save companies $380 million every year. The Department of Interior touted that its updated rule would “reduce unnecessary burdens on the private sector.”

Now at least one member of the Big Oil club is balking at the Trump administration’s efforts.

At a conference in Houston earlier this week, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell’s U.S. division, told Reuters that methane leaks are “a big part of the climate problem” and that she wants the EPA to establish more aggressive regulations that plug leaks. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, packs more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. (And leaks mean Shell “has less product to sell,” Watkins wrote in a LinkedIn post).

“We don’t usually tell governments how to do their job,” Watkins reportedly said, “but we’re ready to break with that and say, ‘Actually, we want to tell you how to do your job.’”

Watkins’ comments reflect shifting attitudes in the oil and gas industry. Shell, for instance, has fracking and refining operations in more than 70 countries. But Shell wants to invest up to $2 billion in “New Energies”, and it announced plans to become the world’s biggest power company by 2030 as part of a move, away from its core oil and gas business. An executive at ExxonMobil also said this week that methane regulation has “an important role to play” in “helping industry as a whole rise to the challenge” of producing energy while minimizing the effect on the planet.

“The big oil and gas companies see the writing on the wall in terms of climate change,” said Lauren Pagel, interim executive director at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “They spent so many years denying climate change is happening, denying that they caused climate change, they spent a lot of years in denial, and this is their new tactic — that they can be part of the solution.”

The two regulations in the Trump administration’s crosshairs are aimed at curbing methane leaks from wells on public lands and new oil and gas sites on private land. The Department of Interior published the final rule rescinding methane leaks on public lands in September, and the EPA is in the process of rolling back regulations for new drilling.

Methane leaks from well sites and pipelines undermine the industry’s argument that natural gas can help the country shift to a cleaner economy. A recent study estimated that 13 million metric tons of natural gas — enough to fuel 10 million homes — is lost through leaks each year. That’s roughly 2 percent of all natural gas produced in the country.

Leaking natural gas also poses numerous health risks. It contains benzene and a slew of other hazardous pollutants and volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to increased cancer risk and respiratory illnesses. An Earthworks report found that some 750,000 asthma attacks in children are attributable to smog from oil and gas pollution nationally. It estimated that 12.6 million people live within a half mile of an oil and gas facility.

Pagel said that as long as oil and gas companies are in business, strict regulations, such as those to decrease methane emissions, are required to protect public health and the environment.

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

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NPR investigation finds FEMA aid favors the rich and white

by JVHGrady07773 Posted on March 7, 2019

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Who gets public money after natural disasters — and who doesn’t?

A new NPR investigation and analysis of previously unreleased Federal Emergency Management Agency data shows that, regardless of need, post-disaster government funds tend to favor the privileged over the poor.

The story opens with the tale of two Houston families, both of which lost their homes due to storm-related flooding in 2017: a newly married, financially comfortable homeowning couple who received $30,000 in FEMA funds and more than $100,000 in tax refunds, and a family of renters consisting of a single mom and three kids, who were only given $2,500 in federal aid for a rental deposit.

The disparities in the two families’ financial situations only snowballed after the flood. While the wealthier couple was able to qualify for a low-interest loan to rebuild, the single mom landed in hot water with FEMA for choosing to use her funds on a vehicle for her family members to commute to work and school, and was not able to qualify for other sources of federal aid due to her low credit score.

“Cities are often very unequal to begin with,” says James Elliott, a sociologist at Rice University, told NPR. “They’re segregated and there are lots of income disparities, but what seems to happen after natural hazards hit is these things become exacerbated.”

Here are some of the investigation’s main takeaways:

FEMA funds are calculated based on risk reduction — which means people with more money are more likely to get help. Federal disaster aid is allocated based on a cost-benefit calculation meant to minimize taxpayer risk. Thus, money is not necessarily given out to those who need it most; it’s doled out to those whose property is worth more, which means the system tends to favor those who live in whiter and higher-income neighborhoods.
FEMA funding favors homeowners over renters. Due to FEMA’s cost-benefit calculation, poorer people, people of color, and people who are more likely to rent are less likely to get the much-needed cash after a major disaster. “Put another way, after a disaster, rich people get richer and poor people get poorer,” the investigation states. “And federal disaster spending appears to exacerbate that wealth inequality.”
FEMA’s flood program has the biggest racial gap. NPR examined one particular federal program that buys out homes that have been flooded or otherwise impacted by natural disasters. Their investigation found that of more than 40,000 records in the FEMA database, most buyouts went to whiter communities (more than 85 percent white and non-Hispanic), even though natural disasters.
Experts predict climate-driven disasters will become more frequent and severe. The Fourth National Climate Assessment, released last year, detailed the impending impacts of climate change across the country. Already, nearly 50 percent of U.S. counties experience a natural disaster each year, compared to fewer than 20 percent in the early to mid-20th century. “Hardworking Americans who are working class are going to find their communities stressed even more than they are now,” Andrew Light, an editor of the federal climate report told NPR. “If you’re already a community at risk, you’re going to be at more risk.”

As you might imagine, FEMA officials are none too pleased about the NPR investigation. A FEMA spokesperson provided the following statement:

“FEMA does not choose which properties participate in buyouts or acquisitions. Each state (grantee) works with their local governments to determine communities and residents who are interested in taking part of buyouts of repetitive loss properties. […] Each county floodplain manager and local officials know best the needs of their communities. We trust and support local and state officials during the buyouts process.”

Check out the entirety of the NPR FEMA investigation here.

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NPR investigation finds FEMA aid favors the rich and white

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4 black women leaders on climate, justice, and the green ‘Promised Land’

by CharoleXSH Posted on February 27, 2019

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Black leaders have long been pioneers in protecting communities and the environment — from Harriet Tubman, who in the mid-1800s used her knowledge of the natural world to guide escaped slaves north, to landfill protesters in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982 who galvanized the modern environmental justice movement. Yet despite these contributions to the larger green movement, black activists and scholars are not always given their due.

It’s well documented that black neighborhoods and other communities of color are disproportionately affected by a changing climate, amplifying existing disparities related to race, gender, and class. And while environmental justice advocates have been active on the grassroots level for many years, resolutions like the Green New Deal are now shining a national spotlight on the need for a more socially holistic, dare we say “woke,” approach to shaping climate policy.

Grist’s Justice Desk reporters spoke with four leading black activists and scholars in the environmental movement about what this moment means for their communities:

Adrienne Hollis, Lead Climate Justice Analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists
Jacqueline Patterson, Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program
Leslie Fields, Director- Environmental Justice and Community Partnerships at the Sierra Club
Mary Annaïse Heglar, Director Of Publications at the Natural Resources Defense Council

This discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Grist: What does environmental justice mean to you? How does identity inform your work?

Adrienne: Environmental justice means protecting everyone; Minorities [and] communities of color have traditionally been disproportionately impacted by environmental threats [but have] traditionally had no voice in the environmental arena. I’m from Mobile, Alabama. I grew up in the shadow of paper mills during a time when there were certain places we as black people couldn’t go — certain beaches were off limits to us and the like. I bring that perspective to my work.

Mary: To me, environmental justice is just plain justice. I can’t imagine a type of justice that doesn’t include the environment. As a black woman from the Deep South, I’m drawn to tell the stories of the most vulnerable communities because I was very aware that if someone else is suffering, that’s not far away from me. If it’s not your problem now it will be at some point.

Leslie: I really love E.J. because you can be a kid, you can be a grandmama, an abuela, a professional person — anybody can do it. That makes it messy and complicated but that’s also what makes really beautiful: anybody can get involved to preserve their natural and cultural environment. The people in their communities, they know what they’re doing. We try really hard to do what we can to support them and they have the solutions on the ground. The problem is when they don’t get to lead.

Grist: Climate is increasingly on the national radar, including its justice lens. What are some of the challenges and successes you’re seeing at this moment?

Jacqueline: I am inspired by some of the work that’s happening at the local level connecting various social justice issues with environmental issues. The NAACP [along with groups Positive Impact and GRID Alternatives] worked with the Department of Corrections to do training in solar installation for folks while they were incarcerated. That resulted in people having skills to be placed in jobs as they came out of incarceration.

Leslie: There are so many communities [where issues] just keep piling on like Cancer Alley or Houston Ship Channel or down on the border. It’s all globalized. The impacts are very severe and then climate disruption is the threat multiplier, exacerbates all inequalities. What’s annoying with the mainstream environmental groups is that they have the privilege of not worrying about these other things because they’ve already got their good housing, they’ve already got good representation, they already got their good jobs.

Mary: I think that part of the problem with the environmental movement is it thinks of itself as a silo [from other movements]. I think of it as different heads of the same dragon. We need to build a more inclusive [environmental] movement that allows black people to bring their whole selves to the movement. So if I’m going to join the environmental movement, I need to be able to talk about Black Lives Matter. I need to be able to talk about reproductive rights. We need to be able to talk about all these other things that come to the forefront for me as a whole human being.

Adrienne: One of the big problems that I see is funding. There’s very little to no money going to groups that are trying to protect vulnerable communities.

Grist: Mary, your article “Sorry, Y’all, but Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat” really stuck with us. Can you say more about why you wrote this article now?

Mary: I was reading Martin Luther King and I saw like all of these parallels because I now see the world through climate-colored glasses. To me, the parallels are blinding.

Jacqueline: This is all part of the same dispossession, displacement, exploitation pattern that is happening with black and brown peoples, indigenous peoples, and the earth itself. I think making all those ties [in the article] was brilliant. We really do need to continue to hammer home that racism [as well as] the exploitation of the earth [are] part and parcel of the same dominating forces.

Mary: I’m also encouraged by the youth activists, the strikers all over the world, as well as the women of color in Congress right now because they are not taking any prisoners on their way to get climate action. I love it.

Leslie: We have to find balance and we have to take care of ourselves for the long haul. I’m optimistic about all these great young people who are gonna take us to the Promised Land. We got you to the mountaintop, you all got to take us to the Promised Land, speaking of Martin Luther King Jr.

Adrienne: I do have hope that, well, I didn’t think they were gonna take us all the way to the Promised Land but I’m glad that there are fresh voices and they are being heard. Unless things change (and I hope they do) — they’re going to be in this fight for a long time even after the older among us are gone.

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4 black women leaders on climate, justice, and the green ‘Promised Land’

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It takes more than a hurricane to sway some voters in this Texas election

by FranzisVangundy Posted on October 30, 2018

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John Culberson, a United State congressman who represents west Houston, has long questioned “the data” on climate change, which scientists say contributes to more intense and frequent storms. When Hurricane Harvey drenched coastal Texas in the summer of 2017, Culberson’s denials didn’t protect him. Harvey flooded many of his constituents’ homes, as well as, according to one of his staffers, parts of the building that houses his district office.

A few months after the storm, Daniel Cohan, an environmental engineering professor at Rice University, penned a Houston Chronicle op-ed asking whether candidates for Congress were “ready to face climate change.” The piece was largely directed at Culberson, who has represented the Texas 7th congressional district, where Cohan lives, since 2001.

Read about other midterm races where voters are concerned about climate.

Cohan’s op-ed was intended to “debunk the misperceptions of voter apathy on climate.” Sure enough, based on data from The Cook Political Report and Yale’s 2018 Climate Opinion Maps, a lot of people in frequently flooded Houston are worried about global warming. But while the issue played a big role in the Texas 7th’s Democratic primary — the candidate who finished second, Laura Moser, warned that climate change could threaten “the very existence of our city” — it’s unclear how much these concerns will translate into political pressure on Culberson during this year’s midterm elections.

To date, Culberson is still not talking about climate change — even as his lead in the polls dwindles as election day nears. His opponent Lizzie Fletcher isn’t doing much to highlight the topic, either, at least in the general election. In its endorsement of Culberson’s opponent, the Houston Chronicle described Fletcher as a centrist who “backs offshore drilling.”

Nevertheless, environmentalists like Cohan have been working for months to bring the issue of climate change front and center. When he wrote his Chronicle piece, in January, Cohan had just moderated an event in west Houston called the “Houston Climate Forum.” The goal was to get politicians and voters talking about policies to slow global warming. Eight candidates attended, including Fletcher and Beto O’Rourke, the fawned-over Democratic Senate candidate trying to unseat Ted Cruz. More than 10,000 people tuned in online to watch, according to the event’s organizers.

U.S. Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is recognized during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.David J. Phillip / AP

“Candidates [were] trying to one-up each other, showing how strong they would be on climate change,” Cohan recalls.

Alas, no Republican candidates showed up to the forum.

Story continues below

A year after Harvey, climate concerns remain stubbornly on the left side of the political spectrum, at least in Houston. They haven’t become a bipartisan rallying cry like, say, health-care reform. Cohan is still hopeful, but he acknowledges climate change might not play an outsized role in November’s midterm elections — in Houston or beyond. “There have been so many other hot-button issues, from the treatment of immigrants to Trump scandals,” he says.

If warming can’t crash the conversation in a seemingly climate-changed place like Houston, it suggests the issue has much headway to make up nationwide. And if the Texas 7th is a barometer for conservative political will on climate, the fact that Culberson still won’t talk about it means much of the right probably isn’t ready to take action.

According to Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, Culberson doesn’t have to talk about climate change because there aren’t enough swing voters in the Texas 7th who care about the issue. Those that do care already know how they’re voting.

“For the people for whom that’s important, they know Lizzie Fletcher is a Democrat and that John Culberson is a Republican,” Jones points out.

The Texas 7th is affluent, well-educated, and largely residential. While the east side of Houston has become infamous for its toxic oil and gas infrastructure, the west side serves as a comparatively clean bedroom community for the countless white-collar energy industry employees who work in the region. It is also generally spared from the worst of the health effects associated with Texas’ petrochemical economy.

“It’s two completely different worlds,” says Rosanne Barone of the two sides of the 7th. She’s a program director at Texas Campaign for the Environment and assessed the impact of pollution across Houston. “The worst offenders are on the east side.”

Still, signs abound that west Houston is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change, in the form of freak storms and floods. It has suffered extensive flooding from Harvey and at least two other storms in the past five years. In fact, Rep. Culberson has used last year’s hurricane as a major talking point during his campaign, name-dropping the storm in more than half of his emails to voters this year.

Lizzie Fletcher (far left) poses with Daniel Cohan (center) and others at January’s Houston Climate Forum.Courtesy Daniel Cohan

Despite those invocations, Culberson hasn’t budged on the issue of global warming, which many scientists believe will fuel the continual flooding of his district. On his official website, one of the few references to climate change is a 2009 press release questioning the “scientific integrity” of climate data. Culberson’s office didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. (Neither did Fletcher’s campaign.)

“He hasn’t been one of the snowball throwers calling climate change a hoax,” Daniel Cohan says of Culberson. “But he takes a wait-and-see attitude, falsely indicating that the science isn’t clear.”

That’s a problem, according to the Rice professor. The science is clear, he says, and “not something theoretical.” Houstonians regularly witness the effects of climate change, he explains, as they patiently wait for waters to recede from their flooded homes, cars, and roadways.

While Culberson’s unwillingness to discuss climate might be problematic for his specific district, it’s not strange for Republican congressional candidates in 2018. Few GOP members appear to take climate change seriously.

Nationwide polling helps explain why. Self-identified “liberal” voters rank global warming as one of the issues that are most important to them. But its ranking drops off precipitously as you move to the right along the political spectrum, according to a poll conducted by Yale and George Mason University. For the next-most liberal group — “moderate/conservative Democrats” — the issue drops to 16th. It keeps falling among increasingly conservative groups.

The exception may be voters who are still grappling with Harvey, whom Jones notes are “not an insignificant number” and could be swung by talk of climate policy. In a University of Houston survey this summer on the storm’s impact on four south Texas counties, eight percent of respondents said that they were still living in temporary housing. Twenty-two percent of survey respondents said they had to abandon their homes during Harvey, and almost half said their residence had flooded at some point since 2001. People whose homes flooded during Harvey were indeed more likely to say they believed the scientific consensus on climate change — but that was a view shared by more than 60 percent of the overall respondents.

Even then, the polling broke down along “generational and partisan divides,” the study researchers wrote. Just 35 percent of Houston Republicans accepted the science on climate change, compared to 80 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of non-affiliated voters.

“People are so rigid in their partisanship,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who has studied these trends. “Even in the wake of the most profound storm that the city and region has ever faced, it’s difficult to move people’s perceptions.”

If anything, intense partisanship in the era of Trump might cause Republicans to dig their heels even further on climate policy. In one study, published in April, researchers asked participants about proposals to mitigate warming. Republicans were less likely to support ideas once they learned Democrats also supported them. (Democrats were also less likely to support Republican proposals, but the effect was less dramatic.)

Former Democratic congressional candidate Laura Moser speaks at January’s Houston Climate Forum.Courtesy Daniel Cohan

Still, environmentalists say the increasing frequency and severity of floods, storms, and wildfires — not to mention the alarming U.N. climate report released earlier this month — will continue pushing global warming to the center of United States politics. “We’re seeing more and more that people generally do care about climate change and climate policy, and more people associate it with extreme weather,” says Jack Pratt, a senior political director at the Environmental Defense Fund.

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Oil and gas is a major industry in Houston, accounting for one-quarter of drilling jobs in the United States, according to recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s a factor that some experts point to as a reason why climate-change activism hasn’t gained much traction in the region. But while it can be, as Upton Sinclair famously pointed out, “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” those blinders could eventually fall.

“When you see water coming into your home, the evidence suggests that the storm was more severe,” Cohan says, about the link between climate change and more extreme weather events.

As the effects of warming worsen, it will get harder for Republican politicians to avoid discussing it. And with the U.N. now warning that climate change could destabilize the planet as early as 2030, the real question is whether this shift will happen in time.

Daniel Cohan thinks there’s a growing interest in climate policy on the right. He points to support for the Paris climate accord among GOP voters and the formation of the recent bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Though Cohan readily concedes the caucus hasn’t put forth any concrete policies since forming in 2016).

For him, even the fact that Culberson isn’t outright denying climate change is a sign of progress. “He’s not running on a platform of standing up for the oil-and-gas industry against climate policy,” Cohan says, “which a Republican could do.”

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It takes more than a hurricane to sway some voters in this Texas election

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Fuming residents are fighting back against a neighboring oil refinery

by MarisolMontano Posted on October 4, 2018

Nestled between two major highways, the Houston ship channel, and a Valero refinery, the neighborhood of Manchester stews in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals. Houston, known as the Petro Metro, is home to a quarter of the petroleum refining capacity in the United States. An elementary school next to a chemical plant; a public park next to a refinery. These are the kinds of places that exist in Manchester.

The southeastern Houston community is brimming with industrial facilities — over a dozen, including oil refineries, chemical facilities, and a metal recycling plant. Like most of Houston, many of these hazardous facilities make up a large part of the local economy. And as many locals see it, they may also account for many of the community’s health problems.

Yvette Arellano, a community organizer for the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, told Grist they’ve heard local mothers give tear-filled accounts of their children suffering from constantly red eyes and unable to eat because of nausea from the fumes. Manchester residents are actually at a 22 percent higher risk of cancer than the overall Houston urban area, according to a 2016 report.

“The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has two goals: economic health and public health,” said Arellano, “public [health] coming second.”

Manchester is not the only community bombarded with potentially harmful chemicals. According to a new report by the Environmental Justice Health Alliance, nearly 40 percent of the country lives within three miles of at least one of the 12,500 high-risk chemical facilities (federally regulated by the EPA’s Risk Management Plan Rule) in the United States. This area is what is known to some activists as the “fenceline” zone.

People of color and people at or near poverty levels tend to make up a higher number of these communities, facing disparate levels of exposure to toxic chemicals. And location matters when it comes to exposure — there are 11,000 medical facilities and 125,000 schools — which 24 million children attend — within “fenceline” zones.

“These communities have been paying with their health and well being,” said Michele Roberts, co-coordinator at the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform and a contributor to the report.

Residents of Manchester, Texas, line up to speak at a public forum about hydrogen cyanide emissions from the nearby Valero Refinery.Courtesy of t.e.j.a.s.

Back in Manchester, concerned residents are pushing for change. Over the past several months, residents and environmental justice advocates have been facing an uphill battle against the nearby Valero refinery. Local residents’ latest grievance is the company’s request to amend a permit that would allow the refinery to emit 452 tons of hydrogen cyanide, a known neurotoxin historically used as a chemical warfare agent, yearly into the community’s air. Though the poisonous chemical compound is illegal to store and illegal to produce, it is not illegal to emit.

Local exposure to the chemical is not new. The refinery has always emitted hydrogen cyanide, but activists say the new permit will allow for emissions of almost nine times the amount that is currently being released. Valero did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

The refinery originally sought a permit that would allow for 512 tons of hydrogen cyanide emissions per year — a number they lowered after a public uproar at the first permit hearing back in June. But concerned residents say that’s still not good enough.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Yvette Arellano, a community organizer for the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, told Grist. “This should not be permitted at all.”

As Manchester residents grapple with a plethora of health concerns, momentum in the community is growing. Several undocumented mothers are spearheading a coalition against Valero behind the scenes, teaming up with environmental justice groups like t.e.j.a.s. Other Manchester residents are voicing their concerns at public hearings — around 50 residents and advocates were present at the first meeting earlier this summer.

To address the toxic air that may already be wafting into residents’ spaces. T.e.j.a.s. and members of the Manchester community are working together to roll out an air quality monitoring app, giving them the vital information they can use to push hazardous facilities to clean up their act. T.e.j.a.s. and many community members are also supporting the Toxic Alert Bill, which would set up an emergency alert system for residences near chemical plants in the case of a spill or an explosion.

“Communities are taking their narrative into their own hands,” Roberts said. “They’re speaking for themselves and being supported by environmental justice collectives that can help them get what it is that they actually want and need for their community.”

According to Arellano, in the current fight over hydrogen cyanide emissions, Valero might seek an exception so that they do not have to report that they’re even emitting the chemical. Manchester residents are now calling for more information in order to keep refineries, as well as chemical and storage facilities, accountable. Arellano says that though some residents want to leave the community, others simply want the plants to close.

“The residents were here first,” Arellano said. “This is their community.”

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Fuming residents are fighting back against a neighboring oil refinery

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Weathering the next Florence

by GabriellePumphre Posted on September 27, 2018

As the country watched floodwaters rise across the Carolinas in the wake of Hurricane Florence this month, Puerto Ricans were still reeling from a storm that tore through the island a year ago.

The grim statistics from Hurricane Maria are well known: thousands of deaths, the largest power outage in U.S. history, and $90 billion in damages — a heavy toll for an island already in dire financial straits. But we still don’t know the extent of the wreckage from Hurricane Florence’s record-shattering rainfall.

Increasingly, there’s little space to breathe between catastrophes. And as climate change brings higher sea-level rise, more punishing winds, and heavier rains, super-charged storms are likely to get worse. But these natural disasters are partly human-made, which means that humans can also work to avoid future disasters.

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How do we prepare for a future filled with Florences and Marias? And when the next big hurricane does inevitably hit, how do we rebuild, not just our houses, but also our sense of community?

Grist surveyed experts in hurricane preparedness and relief efforts for their suggestions on making our coastal towns more resilient. Here’s how they responded, edited for length and clarity.

“Aid delayed is aid denied.”

Richard Burroughs, professor of coastal science and policy, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Waves, storm surge, wind, and rain coexist on dynamic natural coasts: We know how nature works. Adding in people with their homes, businesses, roads, and recreation always causes problems. The fixed structures and people are periodically overwhelmed by the hurricanes.

Adequate hurricane preparation consists of identifying zones of high risk and incentivizing people and businesses to move away from those zones. Insuring people so that they can stay in high-risk areas will ultimately fail because natural forces coupled with sea-level rise will win in the end. I recognize that major cities will not get up and move, but for other areas retreat is the preferred option.

Puerto Rico is a very important case where Hurricane Maria further exposed the vulnerability of not just individuals but whole governmental systems. Since hurricanes test both our physical infrastructure and the resilience of government, all Americans have a special stake in effectively addressing the issues Puerto Rico is facing. Houston and New Orleans have a lot to learn from San Juan and vice versa.

Maria Lopez cries while walking from her house that was flooded by Hurricane Maria.HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP / Getty Images

As the Puerto Rico case illustrates, we are woefully slow in making decisions related to individual claims because we have dispersed responsibility among many governmental agencies. After a flood, FEMA inspectors, National Flood Insurance Program adjusters, Small Business Administration loss verifiers, private flood insurance adjusters, and others may assess damage to the property. It’s both time-consuming and costly. The challenge for us all is to coordinate responses so that payouts can occur in a timely fashion. Aid delayed is aid denied.

“We need to have those communities at the table”

Mikki Sager, vice president of The Conservation Fund

We work with a tremendous number of community groups, particularly in areas rich in natural resources, but that have a lot of economic challenges, persistent poverty, and social and environmental justice issues. When we are trying to prepare for hurricanes, we have to look at the socio-economic aspect.

The Centers for Disease Control has social vulnerability index maps and data. The mid-Atlantic down across to Texas has huge areas of persistent poverty that are also the most vulnerable to climate change. The challenge that we face is that, for many reasons, the most vulnerable folks are not part of conversations about how to address the impacts of a natural disaster. We need to have those communities at the table. And we need to increase the flow of funding, both public and private, to help them set priorities for rebuilding.

We also need to increase the capacity of local government, businesses, and families in those vulnerable areas. Historically, especially here in the South, low-income folks and people of color have been pushed to the low-lying areas, to the wetland areas, to the floodplains.

We have several communities in the southeastern part of North Carolina right now that are still underwater, totally cut off. They don’t have access to the most basic supplies, but community groups and faith groups are pulling together funding to go out and buy tarps so that houses can start to dry out when the water has receded.

In Puerto Rico, we provided a grant for a group called Americas for Conservation and the Arts to focus on engaging the community and restructuring their food systems, putting it back to where it was [before Hurricane Maria]. They are doing some amazing work because they have local community folks leading the process. They’re both organizing and engaging the community in coming up with a solution, leaning heavily on what has worked in the past, and working towards addressing the economic issues, the social justice issues, and the environmental issues simultaneously through that project.

“It’s just really hard to establish [community cohesion] when the physical environment is pockmarked.”

Kofi Boone, associate professor of landscape architecture at North Carolina State University in the College of Design

Before a hurricane or a flood comes, we still have a very big pre-disaster education job to do to help communities understand what floodplains are and how they work, where they’re located, and what those risk factors happen to be.

After Hurricane Matthew, we all had a chance to work with the town of Princeville, which is the oldest chartered black town in North Carolina. That town was built in the floodplain of the Tar River, primarily because that was the available land that African American people could buy at the end of the Civil War. You find that a lot, where the most vulnerable populations have existed for generations in places that have had a series of crises and disasters, and so the recurring trauma and disruption that happens every time a flood comes prevents them from building wealth, equity, and a tax base.

There really isn’t a mechanism to encourage a community-level conversation to talk about the impacts that all of those individual actors have on the long-term sustainability of communities. It’s just really hard to establish a sense of community cohesion and maintain social networks when the physical environment is pockmarked.

I think it’s also about finding ways for people to do what they can. And a lot of the time, when we talk about [hurricane resilience] we’re thinking about you know, billion-dollar, 10-year long-range things when sometimes it’s the day-to-day stuff that makes the difference to a community that’s had this recurring trauma from losing, property, losing loved ones like over and over and over again.

James Howell Jr. sizes up how to protect his home from the approaching Hurricane Florence. The house was damaged by Hurricane Matthew in 2016. Howell said the furniture on his porch is there because he had to go out and rebuild the living room.AP Photo / Emery Dalesio

There is a need for healing and remembering what makes them special and why they’re important. It’s one thing if all you know about Princeville was that it’s in the low-lying area and it floods all the time. It’s another when you think about it as the first free black town in the United States that’s situated in a district that gave birth to many generations of political leaders, not just in North Carolina, but around the country. It alters how you see yourself.

“Everybody’s working together and everybody’s well informed”

Hanadi Rifai, director of the Hurricane Resilience Research Institute (HURRI) at the University of Houston

Education and coordination, especially with disadvantaged communities, would help areas be more resilient.

We always talk about education because the most important thing is for people to be continually reminded and educated about what could happen to them. Coordination — amongst all organizations, communities, and agencies at the state and federal level — is one of the most important things. When everybody’s working together and everybody’s well informed, they’re able to be more responsive not only in evacuating people but also in getting people back into their homes after the event has passed.

It’s especially important with disadvantaged populations — meaning, people that perhaps don’t have the resources and the means to undertake actions they need to.

Being able to sustain economic development and economic growth, and balancing the risks and rewards of having industrial, commercial, and economic activities would be really important for coastal communities. We talk a lot about hazards from industrial activities, chemicals, and storage of byproducts. If we’re able to get our coastlines more aware of that and find ways that we can manage the risks from those types of activities, we would truly have more resilient coasts. When the event comes, you can recover quickly and you don’t have these lingering environmental effects left to deal with which may prevent things from going back to normal for a while.

“It’s like when you buy a car and see that label about fuel economy. We need a similar thing for buildings.”

Jeremy Gregory, research scientist and executive director of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT.

The key thing is building structures that are not just designed to withstand normal weather events, but built to last longer and withstand more extreme events. Part of the challenge with that is a lot of structures built a long time ago aren’t adequately prepared to sustain the increasing severity of storms.

We’re not even talking about entirely rebuilding structures. Sometimes it’s just about making sure that homes have a good connection between the roof and the walls and that you have protection for windows and doors. Because after the wind breaks that pressure seal, then a lot of the damage comes from the water.

Kenan Chance’s home is surrounded by flood water as the Lumberton river continues to rise in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence in North Carolina.RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post via Getty Images

So it’s really the flooding that’s a lot worse than the wind, but a lot of times that’s wind level is what we design for. Heating and cooling units for buildings are often placed on the ground, down low.

A lot of the research that we do is about the quantitative, life cycle costs of a building, considering the hazards that it’s exposed to. People need to understand that the building they are investing in not only has an initial cost, it’s also going to have some costs due to hazards. As the  severity of storms increase, those costs are going to go up. And so we need to make that more transparent. It’s kinda like when you buy a car and see that label about fuel economy. We need a similar thing for buildings.

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Weathering the next Florence

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The private intelligence firm keeping tabs on environmentalists

by ReginalJobe Posted on September 15, 2018

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The flyer shows a mob of balaclava-clad activists dressed in black, lobbing bottles at an undefined target. They could be protesting anything, but for attendees at a petroleum industry conference in Houston earlier this year, it was pretty clear what the violent demonstrators were targeting: the fossil fuel industry.

The scary image of protesters was distributed by Welund North America, a private intelligence firm that promises to help oil and gas operators mitigate the threat posed by an increasingly sophisticated activist movement. On the back of the flyer an anonymous testimonial reads, “Since subscribing to Welund we’ve dramatically increased our ability to pre-empt and better manage activist engagements and minimize reputational damage.” Logos — presumably of Welund’s clients — listed on the flyer include a who’s who of Big Oil and Gas: Royal Dutch Shell, Kinder Morgan, Duke Energy, Dominion, and Chevron. Welund has even secured contracts with the Canadian government.

In the past year, Welund has presented at several energy industry conferences and has also partnered with the Texas Independent Producers and Royalty Owners Association — or TIPRO — to promote its intelligence-gathering services. The company bills itself as a leader in “understanding the activist threat” and in the past has provided intelligence on social movements and activist groups, including Greenpeace, Occupy Wall Street, and animal rights advocates.

Welund and its top North American officials ignored repeated requests for interviews and did not to respond to detailed written questions. But publicity materials and other documents reviewed by Mother Jones shed light on the company’s strategies.

Welund is part of a deeply controversial cottage industry of private intelligence firms that has flourished in recent years. According to one estimate, the global industry is now worth about $20 billion, and the agencies — sometimes with just a handful of employees — are popping up everywhere from Israel to Africa to the United States. Recent revelations have shown that Black Cube, an Israeli firm, gathered intelligence on Obama administration officials in an effort to undermine the Iran nuclear deal. Christopher Steele, the co-founder of Orbis Business Intelligence, another private firm, was responsible for the famous Trump-Russia dossier.

Welund, a U.K.-based company founded by a former MI6 special agent in 2007, has traditionally kept a low profile. Even its name, which is derived from Norse mythology, is little known beyond a small subset of industry and government contractors. Welund, which established a North America office in 2016, seems to rely heavily on its ties to industry and law enforcement. The firm’s vice president of operations, Travis Moran, is a former U.S. Justice Department special agent who previously worked as a senior counterterrorism investigator at Dominion Energy, one of the largest suppliers of electricity and natural gas in the United States.

The company depicts the environmental movement as one of the energy industry’s most dangerous adversaries — comparable to the challenges posed by international industrial espionage. “What we’re talking about here is an existential threat,” Moran told the audience of oil and gas executives in Houston.

The industry seems to agree. In November 2017, when Welund partnered with TIPRO to provide free access to its intelligence platform, the petroleum group’s president described activism as “one of the most disruptive and costly threats to the energy industry — in lost productivity, damage, legal and reputational risk.”

Welund’s effort to court the oil and gas industry comes at a time when battles over energy development have reached a fever pitch. Beginning in 2008 with the campaign to block approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which was designed to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, activists have focused on fossil fuel infrastructure as a target of both legal action and political protest. The movement claimed a major victory in 2015 when President Barack Obama rejected the Keystone project. (That decision was promptly reversed by President Donald Trump during his first few days in office.)

“The anti-fossil fuel movement is the No. 1 challenge threatening our industry, especially when they have sympathizers in the White House, Ottawa, and elsewhere in public office,” wrote the editor of the Pipeline and Gas Journal, an industry trade publication, shortly before the 2016 election.

Welund specializes in profiling these activist threats and maintains a “live archive” of original content that, it says, is used by dozens of international corporations, law enforcement agencies, and government bodies. Its subscriber-only intelligence platform appears to be largely composed of open source data — that is, news reports, online information, and strategic analysis — according to the firm’s contracts with the Canadian government. At industry gatherings, the company has emphasized the importance of continuously following social media to develop effective counter campaigns. The firm promises to closely monitor activists, and one of its Canadian contracts referred to the use of open and “other sources.” Canadian officials declined to say what those “other sources” included.

At the Houston conference, Moran described activists as traveling “professionals” who have more experience than the companies they are protesting. “We keep track of them,” Moran said. “You’ll see them at the Marcellus. You’ll see them at Bayou Bridge. That’s what they do.” The Bayou Bridge Pipeline is a controversial project in Texas and Louisiana; the Marcellus shale formation is the epicenter of fracking in the eastern United States.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

The firm has also presented alongside Gryphon Sensors, a subsidiary of defense contractor SRC, which is a pioneer in the field of commercial drones. Moran, whose Twitter handle is “dronin_on,” is a strategic partner at Gryphon and an advisory board member of the Texas-based Energy Drone Coalition, which focuses on the use of drone technology by the energy industry. According to Gryphon, its mobile drone security system, which can track hundreds of targets simultaneously, is “perfect for … law enforcement and critical infrastructure protection.”

In recent years, anti-pipeline advocates have been targeted by law enforcement agencies and private security contractors employed by the industry. In late 2012, the FBI opened an investigation into anti-Keystone activists. More recently, according to the Intercept, private security contractors and FBI informants infiltrated the activist camp at the heart of the Native-American-led protest movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.

None of those controversies involved Welund, which cautions energy firms against using covert or illegal methods to obtain intelligence, arguing that such tactics are likely to do more harm than good. In Houston, Moran referred to the PR mess Energy Transfer Partners found itself in after contracting with private security firms that used aggressive tactics in encounters with protesters campaigning against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Moran advised companies enlisting the services of private security contractors to “make sure you have a policy that they understand.”

Industry now has a staunch ally in the White House, but activists have continued to engage in high-profile civil disobedience campaigns and legal challenges designed to thwart or delay pipeline development, often at great cost to the oil and gas firms.

Environmentalists have also made life difficult for energy companies in Canada — as well as for the government agencies those firms often work with. In 2016, protesters disrupted a National Energy Board hearing in Montreal, resulting in several arrests and forcing the regulatory body to cancel two days of hearings on TransCanada’s Energy East pipeline, which was slated to run from Alberta to refineries and shipping terminals in New Brunswick and Quebec. TransCanada eventually terminated the project.

And that’s exactly what Welund is seeking to prevent. The company appears to have worked on behalf of clients involved in some of the most controversial projects currently moving forward: Dominion’s Atlantic Coast Pipeline, designed to carry fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale in West Virginia to processing facilities in Virginia and North Carolina; and the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which would greatly expand the capacity for shipping tar sands oil from Western Canada.

Dominion, Moran’s former employer, is facing strong headwinds as it seeks to complete its pipeline. Activists have already set up an encampment in an old growth forest known as Miracle Ridge that is in the project’s pathway and is scheduled to be cleared this year. This follows weeks of tree sits — including one by a 61-year-old-woman that garnered national attention — protesting the nearby Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Kinder Morgan, apparently also a Welund client, was facing similar opposition when it decided to abandon its Trans Mountain project. In March, the company’s CEO described the anti-pipeline movement as “much more intense” and “more organized” than ever before. Two months later, in an unprecedented move, the Canadian government agreed to intervene and purchase the pipeline for $3.4 billion. The sale closed this summer, and construction has been underway on about 600 miles of pipeline connecting Alberta’s tar sands with export terminals near Vancouver.

Opposition to the project has persisted, including from British Columbia Premier John Horgan, whose government has joined a First Nations lawsuit challenging the decision to approve the pipeline. The conflict has sometimes been described as Canada’s Standing Rock.

“People can just expect resistance to this project to grow,” Greenpeace activist Mike Hudema told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Already we’ve seen over 200 people risking arrest and getting arrested to try and oppose this project, and those numbers are going to continue to increase as it moves forward.” In late August, a Canadian court ruled that the NEB had not properly consulted with First Nations groups and temporarily halted the project.

Welund did not respond to questions about its apparent work for Dominion and Kinder Morgan and whether that work related to the Atlantic Coast or Trans Mountain pipelines. Dominion declined to comment for this story. Kinder Morgan said it does not comment on security-related issues.

Last year, as Canada’s National Energy Board was evaluating Kinder Morgan’s application to build the Trans Mountain Pipeline, the agency signed a contract with Welund to monitor social media activity and provide the government with weekly updates on activist threats, according to documents obtained through a public records request.

The contract, which came just months after protesters shut down the NEB hearings on the Energy East pipeline, focused on helping the agency manage threats to “personnel, critical assets, information and services” as it prepared for upcoming public events, many of them related to the Trans Mountain project. The contract included access to Welund’s intelligence platform, email advice and warnings from Welund researchers, the Welund weekly banking digest, something called the “Welund Weekly Activist Overview,” and up to 50 hours of “bespoke services,” which focused on information specific to the safety and security of the agency’s staff and activities, according to the NEB. (Welund had already been providing the NEB with some form of intelligence and analysis for some time.)

Within the Canadian government, Welund’s services were touted by Lee Williams, who at the time was the head of security at the NEB. In a June 2016 email, Williams introduced his counterpart at the National Research Council — a Canadian government body that oversees research and development and often works closely with the private sector — to a Welund representative.

“We’ve been using their services for almost a year,” Williams wrote, “and find both their web content and bespoke services very beneficial.” A few months later, the NRC’s security branch entered into a $28,250 contract with Welund. In one document related to the contract, an NRC employee highlighted the firm’s “domestic and international military and counter-terrorism experience” and targeted data collection “through open and other sources.”

Williams has since left the NEB, according to government records. In recent promotional materials, Welund has listed a person named Lee Williams as a company contact. A Welund employee confirmed that a Lee Williams currently serves as an executive with the company but didn’t know whether he is the same Williams who worked for the NEB. Company spokespeople did not respond to written questions about Williams. Welund’s Williams did not return repeated phone calls and text messages. The NEB said it does not comment on HR-related employee matters.

The National Research Council declined to be interviewed for this story but said that Welund had a one-year service contract with the agency to provide country-specific risk assessments and alerts. This information, according to an emailed statement from the NRC, was used to assess the safety of travel and to brief employees in advance of international trips.

In response to a public records request for specific Welund materials — including copies of the weekly activist overview — provided to the NEB as outlined in the contract, the agency said it had no additional records in its possession.

Karen Ryhorchuk, an NEB spokesperson, said the agency sometimes conducts security assessments in advance of public events in order to safeguard personnel, assets, information, and services. Welund, she said, assisted the NEB in managing security threats and risks. “Information provided to the NEB by Welund was from [publicly] available, open source data from conventional media and social media outlets,” Ryhorchuk wrote in an email.

The NEB’s contract with Welund expired at the end of 2017 and has not been renewed. But early this year, the agency awarded a similar contract to Falling Apple Solutions, which was founded by Eppo van Weelderen, a retired Lieutenant-Colonel in the Canadian army. Falling Apple has the same Alberta address as Welund, and van Weelderen is listed as one of Welund’s directors. According to the NEB, the contract with Falling Apple, a self-described engineering and project management firm, was terminated after only three months. When I reached van Weelderen by phone and told him what I was writing about, he hung up.

Meanwhile, privacy advocates are growing increasingly alarmed about the Canadian government’s use of intelligence firms — especially after a recent request by the NEB for contractors who could evaluate security threats by monitoring social media on an even broader scale. In June, Ron Deibert, a political science professor at the University of Toronto and director of the Citizen Lab, which studies the intersection of technology and human rights, wrote an open letter warning that the hoovering up of massive amounts of data in the name of protecting critical infrastructure could have a chilling effect on free speech.

“The system proposed … is inherently oriented toward mass data collection and analysis, and will, by definition, have significant collateral impacts on the rights and interests of individuals who pose no security threat,” he wrote. The NEB ultimately withdrew the proposal.

For its part, Welund may disagree with the heavy-handed methods employed against the Dakota Access protesters, but it still holds a rather ominous view of environmental activism. “It’s threatening your operations, it’s threatening your finances, it’s threatening your reputation, and it’s threatening your viability,” Moran said in Houston.

The Houston conference was mostly celebratory, with discussions of greatly expanding oil production and pipeline capacity. There were presentations refuting the science of global warming and information sessions with representatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Bureau of Land Management. David Blackmon, editor of Shale Magazine, gave a talk titled, “The Trump-Driven Sea Change in Federal Energy Policy.” Chris Wallace of Fox News delivered the keynote address.

But, when Moran took the stage, the tone was decidedly darker. Showing the audience an image of a masked tree-sitter protesting a pipeline project, he warned them about the financial impact of activism. “If you’re not aware of this, if you’re not aware of how effective they can be … if you’re not ahead of the game,” he said, “this can be your fate.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the H.D. Lloyd Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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The private intelligence firm keeping tabs on environmentalists

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For undocumented immigrants, the Trump admin makes fires and hurricanes even tougher to deal with

by DollyMoris Posted on April 24, 2018

Seven months after Juan and Jonathan Leija were forced to evacuate their flooded homes during Hurricane Harvey, the cousins face challenges that go beyond just recovering their lives. Building back isn’t easy for anybody, but the Leijas are doing it as looming policy decisions threaten to uproot them again.

Juan and Jonathan are Dreamers — young adults who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era policy that granted clemency to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. In September, President Donald Trump announced he was canceling the program, leaving it up to Congress to pass legislation on the issue — which it hasn’t been able to agree on.

Undocumented immigrants were hit especially hard by last year’s devastating hurricanes and wildfires. Immigrant populations were already struggling with higher rates of poverty and less access to medical care. Then storms, fires, and mudslides wiped out homes and disrupted industries like agriculture that employ a largely immigrant labor force. Despite the dire need for relief, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal disaster aid. Some were afraid to even go to emergency shelters or reach out for help out of fear of exposing their own or a relative’s immigration status. Post-disaster, many immigrants have turned to jobs in construction and face injury and exploitation rebuilding communities that were leveled.

Juan Leija.

“Yesterday was the first time since Harvey that it rained really hard,” Juan told Grist in March. “It definitely brought flashbacks and it triggered a little bit in me. And just to add onto it, tomorrow a year from now my DACA expires.”

While undocumented immigrants like Juan work to pick up the pieces after disaster, the Trump administration is placing targets on their backs. In addition to ending DACA, Trump has revoked Temporary Protected Status for countries at a faster pace than any other president and has intensified immigration raids, even in sanctuary cities, over the past year. For some immigrant Americans, it’s political insult to climate change-induced injury — and suggests that it may be a while before they find a measure of stability in the U.S. again.

When Hurricane Harvey struck the Houston area, it brought with it a year’s worth of rainfall over in less than a week. The storm affected 13 million people across Texas and Louisiana, killing 88. Causing $125 billion in damage, Harvey was the second costliest storm (behind Hurricane Katrina) to hit the U.S. since 1900.

Ten days after Harvey made landfall in Texas, President Trump announced an end date for DACA the following March.

“I was angry. I was confused. I was sad. I was anxious,” Juan Leija recalls. “I thought it was really heartless for him to do that after a national travesty.”

Harvey hit Juan’s family’s home hard. The Houston house they rent flooded up to his thighs. Juan is 6’1’’ and says the water level was probably above his mom’s waist. The family evacuated. They waded through water for two miles before reaching a friend’s home. For the next four months, Juan, his two siblings, his mother, and her boyfriend squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment.

The Leijas joined hundreds of Texas families struggling to rebuild after the storm. While Harvey swamped all of Houston, its impacts were not felt equally.

AFP Contributor / Contributor / Getty Images

“In terms of the extent of hardship or suffering, we definitely found disparities across racial, ethnic lines, and across income lines,” said Shao-Chee Sim, a researcher at the Texas-based advocacy group Episcopal Health Foundation, who helped lead a study of adults living in Harvey-damaged counties.

The survey found that, after Harvey, 64 percent of immigrants suffered unemployment and income losses compared to 39 percent of their U.S.-born neighbors. Immigrants were also more likely to have fallen behind on their rent as a result of the storm and were more than twice as likely to have had to borrow money from a family member or payday lender in order to make ends meet.

When Juan’s cousin Jonathan’s mobile home flooded, it was a huge setback. “Basically, we had to remodel everything,” he said. “That was going to cost money that we didn’t have.”

Undocumented immigrants — including Dreamers — are ineligible for aid provided in the wake of natural disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Families with mixed immigration status, however, do qualify because parents can apply for relief on behalf of their U.S. citizen children. Even so, many eligible families avoided applying due to worries over providing personal information in an aid application. FEMA is, after all, an agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“In an immigrant community there is a huge concern about asking for aid because there is a fear — and a legitimate one — about, ‘will this come back to hurt my chances of gaining status at some point in the future?’” Kate Vickery, executive director of Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, said. “The answer has always been complicated, but under the Trump administration, it is pretty grim.”

Jonathan Leija’s younger siblings are U.S. citizens, and the family decided to apply for FEMA assistance. The officer who came to inspect their home canceled four separate appointments before finally showing up.

Jonathan, who is studying construction management at Lone Star Community College, north of Houston, missed class twice in order to be home for appointments that never happened. Before Harvey hit, Jonathan had to withdraw from school for a semester to save up money for tuition. Dreamers don’t receive federal financial aid, so he took up jobs roofing and working at a tire shop so that he could get back to class. The storm posed more delays and after all the missed appointments, his family’s FEMA application was denied.

Still, Jonathan counts himself lucky. A nonprofit organization that builds affordable housing and has been working to help Houston homeowners recover, Avenue CDC*, sent contractors to repair the damage. That kind of help can be a godsend for undocumented immigrants who work in industries hit hard by flooding and fires. Immigrant-rights advocates are anticipating that those who lost employment because of last year’s disasters might seek out construction work as part of the rebuilding efforts.

Vickery, with Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, warns that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately part of what she calls the “second responder wave.” “They are the labor force doing the cleanup,” she explained.

The rebuilding booms that follow disasters come with their own threats. More than a third of day laborers informally employed in construction in the first few weeks after Harvey said they were injured on the job, according to a study conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Two-thirds of the respondents said that their workplace was unsafe. Eighty-five percent of day laborers who worked in hurricane-affected areas reported not receiving any training for the worksites they entered, and nearly two-thirds did not even have a hard hat to wear. Aside from all the safety risks, the study also found that more than a quarter of workers had experienced wage theft.

“The vulnerability of being a worker in a disaster recovery area if you don’t have status is a huge issue,” Vickery said.

Advocates in California are also concerned about the risks workers are facing after the state’s massive fires last year.

“A lot of people going into that labor might not have worked in construction. Those people need training,” said Christy Lubin with the Graton Day Labor Center.

Months after the blazes, many immigrants employed in affected industries — including agriculture, hospitality, and domestic work — have lost their homes and their jobs.

“A lot of people see wildfires in the hillsides of California or mudslides in affluent communities like Montecito as largely affecting wealthy homeowners,” said Lucas Zucker with the grassroots organization Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). “The reality is those wealthy homeowners employ domestic workers who are largely undocumented. They get no attention and really have nowhere to turn.”

The Thomas Fire.Marcus Yam / Contributor / Getty Images

In Santa Paula, an hour and a half northwest of Los Angeles, Marisol, a mother of three, and her family are still recovering from the Thomas Fire, which burned down their home in December. Marisol’s husband had worked on a horse ranch and wasn’t allowed time off to help his family after the wildfire. He lost his job as a result. Fearful of applying for aid that would require them to disclose their undocumented status, Marisol (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) and her husband are trying to get back on their feet with fewer resources available to them — and while U.S. immigration enforcement efforts intensify.

Like the Leija cousins, Marisol came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child — but she didn’t qualify for DACA because she doesn’t have a high school diploma, something she’s still working toward now. Her children, however, were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

“I don’t like to think about the consequences if me and my husband aren’t here,” Marisol told Grist through an interpreter as she fought back tears.

Undocumented folks and immigrant-rights groups have felt overwhelmed by the barrage of executive actions and policies targeting immigrants since Trump came into office. Deportations were already high under the Obama administration, but they jumped in the first year of Trump’s presidency. The number of people living in the United States who were deported rose nearly 25 percent, from roughly 65,000 in 2016 to more than 81,000 people in 2017.

For some migrants who received Temporary Protected Status because of a natural disaster that affected their home country, the experience of disaster and displacement is becoming a cycle — especially as climate change exacerbates extreme weather events. TPS is the only U.S. policy offering sanctuary to people displaced by environmental calamity, and Trump has been chipping away at the program by removing five countries designated for TPS, including Haiti and El Salvador, within the past year. More than 320,000 people could become undocumented as a result.

“We’ve kind of been in perpetual crisis mode for the last year as we’ve dealt with the disaster of the Trump administration on our communities to the literal disaster of wildfires and mudslides,” says CAUSE’s Zucker. “Immigrant families are basically caught in the middle of being under siege by the government and in desperate need of the government basically unwilling to provide that assistance.”

Marisol and her family in California got some much-needed financial help from an “UndocuFund” created by CAUSE and other groups, which provides grants to families affected by the raging wildfires and mudslides in California last year. But needs are still outpacing donations, and there are more than 800 disaster survivors awaiting assistance.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Juan and Jonathan Leija are determined to keep moving forward. If Jonathan’s DACA status expires before Congress passes measures to replace the program, he’ll likely lose his job at the tire shop where he currently works. That will mean he will have to find another way to pay his way through school.

DACA protest.Mark Wilson / Staff / Getty Images

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said. “I’m still going to find a way to go to school, to finish it.”

Without DACA, Juan may be unable to find lawful employment even after graduating — but he doesn’t hesitate to speak out. Since before DACA was implemented, one of the Dreamers’ rallying calls has been  “Undocumented and Unafraid.” He still wants to replace fear with hope.

“I don’t want Dreamers to feel like they have to get back to the shadows.”

*An earlier version of this story incorrectly named another nonprofit.

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For undocumented immigrants, the Trump admin makes fires and hurricanes even tougher to deal with

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The EPA is making ‘transparency’ look a helluva lot like censorship.

by Brook30Mlem Posted on March 27, 2018

An investigation by the Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle uncovered more than 100 releases of industrial toxins in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The storm compromised chemical plants, refineries, and pipelines along Houston’s petrochemical corridor, bringing contaminated water, dirt, and air to surrounding neighborhoods. Carcinogens like benzene, vinyl chloride, and butadiene were released. In all but two cases, regulators did not inform the public of the spills or the risks they faced from exposure.

The report also found that the EPA failed to investigate Harvey’s environmental damage as thoroughly as other disasters. The EPA and state officials took 1,800 soil samples after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After Hurricane Ike slammed into Texas in 2008, state regulators studied 85 soil samples and issued more than a dozen violations and orders to clean up.

But post-Harvey, soil and water sampling has been limited to 17 Superfund sites and some undisclosed industrial sites. Experts say this is a problem because floodwaters could have picked up toxins in one place and deposited them miles away.

“That soil ended up somewhere,” Hanadi Rifai, director of the University of Houston’s environmental engineering program, told the AP. “The net result on Galveston Bay is going to be nothing short of catastrophic.”

Seven months after Harvey, the EPA says it’s investigating 89 incidents. But it has yet to issue any enforcement actions.

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The EPA is making ‘transparency’ look a helluva lot like censorship.

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NBC meteorologist has seen fire and he’s seen rain, and he will NOT moderate debate with climate denier James Taylor.

by JensStocks Posted on March 23, 2018

An investigation by the Associated Press and the Houston Chronicle uncovered more than 100 releases of industrial toxins in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.

The storm compromised chemical plants, refineries, and pipelines along Houston’s petrochemical corridor, bringing contaminated water, dirt, and air to surrounding neighborhoods. Carcinogens like benzene, vinyl chloride, and butadiene were released. In all but two cases, regulators did not inform the public of the spills or the risks they faced from exposure.

The report also found that the EPA failed to investigate Harvey’s environmental damage as thoroughly as other disasters. The EPA and state officials took 1,800 soil samples after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After Hurricane Ike slammed into Texas in 2008, state regulators studied 85 soil samples and issued more than a dozen violations and orders to clean up.

But post-Harvey, soil and water sampling has been limited to 17 Superfund sites and some undisclosed industrial sites. Experts say this is a problem because floodwaters could have picked up toxins in one place and deposited them miles away.

“That soil ended up somewhere,” Hanadi Rifai, director of the University of Houston’s environmental engineering program, told the AP. “The net result on Galveston Bay is going to be nothing short of catastrophic.”

Seven months after Harvey, the EPA says it’s investigating 89 incidents. But it has yet to issue any enforcement actions.

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NBC meteorologist has seen fire and he’s seen rain, and he will NOT moderate debate with climate denier James Taylor.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Crown, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Wiley | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on NBC meteorologist has seen fire and he’s seen rain, and he will NOT moderate debate with climate denier James Taylor.