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California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

by ChangFbvhjauy Posted on September 16, 2016

Best coast

California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

By and on Sep 16, 2016Share

California took a giant step to fight climate change last week, passing ambitious legislation to slash its greenhouse gas emissions. Hailed as world-leading, historic, and other excited adjectives, it sets a goal of cutting emissions below 1990 levels by 2030.

If you know about this triple-dog-dare legislation that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law, you’ve probably heard that it’s not only going to continue California’s tradition of feeling smug about how green it is compared to other states, it’s going to usher in a glorious new era of renewable energy innovation. Maybe you also heard that it’s further proof that Californians are crazy, because the state is just too big, hot, and suburban to meet such a formidable challenge.

The thing is, both of these statements may be true. The state had already passed a slightly less ambitious carbon-cutting plan in 2006, targeting 1990 levels by 2020. And California hasn’t hit that goal yet.

Is the state’s climate policy working? Are the new goals realistic? Can it survive political attacks? Is this whole thing equitable? So many important questions! We have answers. Here’s a short primer to help you understand the state’s carbon-cutting plans.

California’s efforts haven’t lowered the state’s emissions any faster than overall U.S. emissions.

Brown effectively doubled down on the state’s climate targets. That raises the question: Is the previous plan working?

“We’re always hearing from California that we are leaders in carbon-dioxide emissions and that we’ve  been leading the U.S. as a whole in policy making,” says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University. “But as a whole, our greenhouse gas emissions have been lowering at about the same rate as the U.S.”

Sweeney made the following graph to show what he’s talking about. It’s good for comparing rates of change, and bad for comparing absolute numbers. At first glance, it looks like California is — absurdly — emitting more than the U.S. as a whole. The point here is that, since 2000, the emissions of both have risen and fallen at about the same rate.

James Sweeney

California’s relative averageness is a problem for champions of its climate policy. Are the state’s rules having any effect?

They are, but here’s the thing: Other states have managed deep cuts in emissions by switching from coal to natural gas plants. California was already pretty green to start. It had low-carbon hydroelectricity, cleaner industry, and mild weather, so most of the low-hanging fruit was already picked.

It didn’t help California when drought sapped its hydropower capacity, or when one of the state’s last two nuclear power plants shut down in 2012. “A bunch of dirty power plants were turned on to replace that,” said Greg Dalton, founder of the California climate symposium Climate One.

California Air Resources Board

Dalton also points out that the climate plan, though a decade old, took a while to overcome early obstacles. In the beginning it was slowed by lawsuits, and regulators had to produce reams of documents to figure out how to count carbon. The state only recently phased in its regulations for gasoline, and it’s just starting to look at agriculture.

So the state could pick up momentum and make bigger reductions. Still, California has now said it will drive down emissions much faster than the rest of the United States, and it’s never done that before.

Are California’s goals realistic?

California had already committed to bringing its emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. It’s looking like the state will hit that target, said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. But the new law sets a much more ambitious goal. Can it get there?

It’s possible in theory, according to a model created by Jeffrey Greenblatt of Berkeley Lab. As you can see in this graph from that model, California could dip under its 2030 emission target if it follows the green path:

Greenblatt

But at the moment, it seems California is following the blue path. To get to that “S3” green curve, the state would need to keep its last remaining nuclear power plant running until 2045 (it’s scheduled to shut down in 2025), build 3 gigawatts of batteries and power storage (way more than currently planned), replace 30 percent of gasoline with low-carbon biofuel (still unclear if that will be viable), and do a bunch of other equally tough stuff. If California makes this happen, the state will look very different 15 years from now.

California’s climate plan is popular

Some 70 percent of Californians support the state’s climate regulations. And the rules are not only popular, they are durable. At the depths of the last recession, voters handily defeated a measure that would have suspended regulations until California’s unemployment numbers improved.

The laws don’t appear to have hindered the economy. When California was phasing in transportation fuel rules that increased gas prices about 10 cents a gallon, critics predicted chaos breaking loose at gas stations. “But no one really noticed,” Dalton said.

The policy has survived multiple legal attacks. There’s currently another lawsuit pending against it, and the legislature will need to pass more supporting laws, but if past is prologue California is likely to push past these challenges.

The new law attempts to address concern on the left about the climate plan

Some Democrats and social justice advocates point out that the climate policy could hurt poor people and minorities because it has raised the price of electricity and fuel while allowing pollution to continue in black and Latino neighborhoods.

California’s policy relies on a cap-and-trade system that requires  businesses to clean up their dirty facilities, or keep polluting and buy climate credits to spur emissions reductions elsewhere. That’s the economically efficient way, but it doesn’t help the people who live downwind of a polluting plant and inhale lungfuls of particulate matter often released with carbon. Brentin Mock at City Lab highlights the body of research, including the graph below, that suggests plants are more likely to keep polluting if they are surrounded by non-white people.

Cushing et al.

To address this environmental-justice problem, the legislature has introduced a new provision that directs regulators to crack down on specific polluters. Until now, regulators had just laid out the rules and then stepped back to let the market sort out a response. This new law would allow the government to step in and say, “This facility in this particular neighborhood has to install better filters.”

Of course, concern is not limited to the left. Politicians on both sides of the aisle understand that if regulations become too onerous they would push industry out of the state. Environmentalists share this concern: The policy won’t be a success if it just shifts greenhouse gas production out of state.

Some countries have lowered their emissions by moving manufacturing abroad — the industry and the pollution winds up in poorer countries. That’s a pretty terrible way to reduce carbon because it hurts the economy, dumps pollution on people with fewer resources (though they also get some jobs), and does nothing to slow climate change.

So California is trying to push industries, but not so hard that industries pack up their factories and move them to China. There’s a vigorous ongoing debate over how much the regulations are affecting the economy and the environment (a version of this debate is planned for Sept. 20).

So far California’s manufacturing sector has remained fairly steady as the climate policies have phased in. And the example of Sweden, shows that you can successfully slash emissions while industry grows.

All in all, California’s new climate law is cause for both alarm and celebration. The reality is that California, and the rest of the world, need to clear a bar this high. It’s just what needs to be done. It’s only “ambitious” because the goal is so far out of reach.

A goal this ambitious shows just how far away American cities actually are from cutting carbon emissions to a level that will protect them in the long run. The good news is, now that California is trying to do this impossible-seeming thing, it just might figure it out.

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California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

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Inside the camp that’s fighting to stop the Dakota Access pipeline

by LakeishOrlando Posted on September 16, 2016

A view of the camp from Route 1806. Xian Chiang-Waren

Grist on the Ground

Inside the camp that’s fighting to stop the Dakota Access pipeline

By on Sep 16, 2016Share

At sundown, Montgomery Brown meets me by the information tent. He has a paper plate piled with brownies in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. The 25-year-old youth organizer and Navy-trained combat medic from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has been up since daybreak.

Brown and I walk past hand-painted “NO MEDIA” signs. We wander through a kitchen, where volunteers are chopping vegetables and boiling pots of soup over an open fire, past kids chasing each other in a game of tag. Clusters of towering white teepees and neon, synthetic tents hug the ground. They are grouped into small encampments for a half mile in every direction, around central fires that burn day and night and send plumes of smoke into the sky.

“Every time I walk around this camp,” Brown says, “… I hear those kids laughing and playing — it just reaffirms that I’m not just fighting for myself or my family. I’m fighting for everybody.”

Welcome to the camp that is ground zero for the pushback against America’s new mega-pipeline. Less than a mile upstream on both sides of the Missouri River, Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, has broken ground on a new 1,172-mile pipeline that would transport more than 500,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil per day across the heartland. Called the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL for short) or the Bakken Pipeline, it is the largest crude pipeline proposed in the American West since the defeat of Keystone XL, and it is on track to be operational this winter.

The pipeline, the tribe and its lawyers say, endangers Standing Rock’s only source of drinking water by cutting across the Missouri. Construction, according to tribal historians, has also unearthed sacred burial sites and artifacts across swaths of land near the reservation’s borders. On Sept. 9, a federal judge denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s motion for an injunction against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but, within an hour, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the Army stepped in to urge Dakota Access LLC to halt pipeline construction in the area within a 20-mile radius of Lake Oahe. On Sept. 12, Standing Rock appealed the court’s decision and added additional claims to their suit against the Army Corps. (Follow Grist’s coverage of the pipeline here.)

What began in April as a small group of about 20 members of the Standing Rock Sioux gathering in prayer and keeping constant vigil on the riverbank has swelled to a sprawling encampment of more than a thousand. The outpouring of support — and people — into the camp has grown into a bona fide movement that’s rallying to protect both native treaty rights and the integrity of our planet’s resources. The inhabitants promise to defend the Missouri River from the pipeline no matter what.

Here’s a glimpse of what life on the camp is like.

Montgomery Brown, 25, has helped to organize and chaperone youth events, including a nearly 2,000 mile intertribal relay run to Washington, D.C.Xian Chiang-Waren

“We all drink water.”

They’ve arrived at all hours of the day for the past three weeks, from all corners of the country. Members of more than 280 indigenous tribes are at the camp, which is located just steps away from the border of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. There are Black Lives Matter groups and grassroots organizers. From afar, the occupation has received support from mainstream environmental groups (Sierra Club, 350), politicians (Bernie Sanders, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), and even celebrities (Leonardo DiCaprio, Rosario Dawson, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, Shailene Woodley).

Some of the people gathered here have not, traditionally, been allies. Members of the Crow Nation haven’t been welcome guests in Sioux territory since 1876, when they allegedly scouted for Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. On Aug. 27, Crow Nation representatives bearing peace pipes and hundreds of pounds of buffalo meat arrived at the camp gates and were met formally by Standing Rock leaders. A murmur went through the crowd — this was history.

“There has never been anything like this in Indian country before, ever,” said LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a tribal historic preservation officer for the Standing Rock Sioux. Recently, Allard found herself at lunch with a member of the Crow and a member of the Pawnee — a meeting that would have been inconceivable until now.

It helps that the unifying thread of the protest — water — is so undeniably universal. The Missouri River provides water for Standing Rock Reservation, as well as for other towns, agricultural operations, and natural habitats downstream. Standing Rock’s lawyers say a spill would cause an “existential threat” to the tribe’s resources and way of life. Recent spills in the region include a 1-million-gallon crude spill into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, and a 2015 spill of 50,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River in Montana.

“We have an understanding as a people that we’re all related, at some point,” said tribal council member Robert Taken Alive. “We all drink water.”

Origins

The story of the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance actually begins three miles away, on the southern side of the Cannonball River, at a significantly smaller encampment called Sacred Stone Camp. The camp is owned by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who has known since 2014 that the proposed route for the Dakota Access Pipeline would cut through her property, near her water well and a family member’s grave. At the beginning of April, she and around 20 others began to camp and pray that others would join them to halt the pipeline.

In July, she got word that construction would begin and sent out a video message on Facebook for help. Her prayer was answered.

“People just started coming,” Allard said as she sat by the Sacred Stone Camp fire in late August. “People hawked everything they could, and I thought, Oh my God we’ve got to take care of these people. People would come and their cars broke down, and they were here to stay.” Allard began using her paycheck to feed and shelter the volunteers that drove into camp. Soon, though, their numbers grew to the point that Sacred Stone could not accommodate them, and activists sent the overflow to the camp across the river.

The intentions of the original group at Sacred Stone is likely the reason that the first thing one learns upon arriving at camp is that most campers do not consider themselves environmental “protesters.” They call themselves “protectors” of the earth and its resources. They are not interested in fighting, but in defending. “We’re not here for violence or vengeance,” said Robert Eber, who identifies himself as “the maintenance guy,” and says he’d been at Sacred Stone since day one. “We’re here for love and healing, for all of mankind.”

Now, the camp across the river has evolved into a small city. Tidy donations tents are stocked with piles of warm clothing, blankets, women’s sanitary items, baby food, and firewood. There’s a daytime school for children to attend. When the state pulled water and port-a-potties from the camp, the tribe replaced them within an afternoon. Each day, hundreds of campers are fed for free.

Dale American Horse, Jr., 26, locked himself to construction equipment on Aug. 31, putting his “body on the line” to block Dakota Access.Xian Chiang-Waren

Unrest

In the prairie, days are parching hot and the nights are cold. Torrential rains drive people into their cars or into the lobby of the nearby Prairie Knights Casino. Planes fly over the camp throughout the night. A security checkpoint staffed by state troopers on Route 1836, the road from Bismarck to Standing Rock, reroutes cars on a poorly marked detour through unpaved county roads. The state withdrew emergency relief services after hearing rumors of pipe bombs.

At the camp, the message that tribal leaders pipe through the loudspeakers each day is one of peace and unity. Leaders frequently caution activists not to treat law enforcement or construction workers with hostility. Still, tensions have steadily escalated.

Twenty-eight people were arrested in August during a peaceful demonstration. Dakota Access LLC subsequently sued the arrestees, including Standing Rock Tribal Chair David Archambault, for trespassing — a rich irony for these descendants of America’s natives, to be arrested on the land where their ancestors were pushed during the forced migrations of the 19th century.

On Aug. 31, seven more activists were arrested, including two men who locked themselves to construction equipment. On Sept. 6, two activists locked themselves to excavators at different construction sites in actions that were not sanctioned by tribal leadership. Several people, including presidential candidate Jill Stein, who arrived at the scene, spray-painted construction equipment with phrases like “decolonize” and “black snake kills,” the latter a reference to a Lakota prophecy about a black snake that would come to America with the power to destroy the world, or unify it.

On Sept. 13, in the midst of a global day of actions in solidarity with Standing Rock, more than 20 people, including two journalists, were arrested for criminal trespass. Dozens of law enforcement officials in riot gear and armed with assault rifles were present.

Robert Eber, “the maintenance guy,” was distressed by the images he had seen on Facebook of young people defacing bulldozers and standing atop construction equipment wearing bandanas. He worried the public would assume that the camps were encouraging violence. “We have no guns,” he said. “We’re armed with prayer.”

The seventh generation

The “black snake” isn’t the only prophecy making the rounds at camp: According to Crazy Horse, a revered mid-19th century Oglala Lakota chief who led tribes to victory at Little Bighorn, the Lakota people would undergo generations of spiritual genocide and environmental degradation following American colonization of the West. Then, a seventh generation would wake up and rise — a generation that would lead the healing and restoration of the planet, rejuvenate a forgotten spirituality, and create harmony among people of all colors and creeds.

“You see it happening,” said Allison Renville, a political activist and 32-year-old member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Sioux tribe. Young people, when asked why they had come to camp, frequently referenced a sense of fulfilling destiny.

The younger generations at camp are there to fight a pipeline, but some also say they have come to heal from the wounds that genocide inflicted, and to embrace their heritage. At dinner around the campfire one night, a young Abenaki man explained to some non-native outsiders that his generation was seeking to reclaim environmental and earth-based wisdom from the elders before they passed. “Ceremony seems to have skipped a generation or two,” he said. “We’re bringing it back.” By the last week of August, some of the camp’s young people had built two sweat lodges near the river, in accordance with tradition.

“It’s all the young people that did this,” says LaDonna Brave Bull Allard. “When the young people stood up, people stood up with them.”

Along with prayer and fate, the young people at camp are using more visible tools for resistance. They have used hashtags and Facebook Live to broadcast the camp’s message. In July, Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Montgomery Brown, and Joseph White Eyes, all in their 20s, organized and chaperoned a nearly 2,000 mile, intertribal relay run from North Dakota to Washington, D.C. (among three other runs), to deliver a petition of more than 160,000 signatures against the pipeline to the White House and to the Army Corps of Engineers in person.

“If this pipeline goes through, it is gonna affect our generation the most,” said Bobbi Jean Three Legs to a packed crowd at a youth concert on the evening of Sept. 8. “If anything, it’s going to affect the kids that aren’t born yet. We don’t want that.”

Whether the Dakota Access Pipeline actually goes through is still up in the air. Energy Transfer Partners, which has already invested $1.6 billion in the project, has publicly vowed to see the project through to completion. The Standing Rock tribe and its supporters, in turn, have vowed to stay at camp until the pipeline project is called off altogether.

No matter the outcome, this fight is just the beginning for many at camp. One dusty afternoon, as we hid from the sun under a brown tarp near the main artery of the camp, a tribal council member told me that the camp “had already won” a significant battle just “by coming together.” After all, the Dakota Access Pipeline is just one of many threats to tribal nations, clean water, and a warming planet. This generation of protectors has a future to defend.

Ed. note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the year in which the Battle of the Little Bighorn took place.

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Inside the camp that’s fighting to stop the Dakota Access pipeline

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Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

by LucaHanlon Posted on September 9, 2016

Former ACLU attorney Laura Murphy reviewed the company’s policies and platform after allegations from non-white customers that they were denied housing based on race.

Those include Kristin Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who wrote in the New York Times about being denied three Airbnb reservations in a row when planning a trip to Buenos Aires: “Because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture … it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.”

In an email to users, co-founder Brian Chesky outlined the steps Airbnb plans to take to address discrimination. As of Nov. 1, Airbnb users must agree to a “stronger, more detailed nondiscrimination policy.” That includes “Open Doors,” a procedure by which the company will find alternate accommodations for anyone who feels they’ve been discriminated against.

But not everyone believes Airbnb’s policy change will fully address the problem.

Rohan Gilkes, who was also denied lodging on Airbnb, says the new changes don’t go far enough. Instead, he told Grist, they need to remove users’ names and photos entirely: “It’s the only fix.”

Meanwhile, Gilkes is working to accommodate people of color and other marginalized groups: His new venture, a home-sharing platform called Innclusive, is set to launch soon.

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Pipeline construction is on hold as Standing Rock Sioux Tribe loses one battle, wins another.

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Accused of Tax Dodging, Apple Says It’s the World’s Largest Taxpayer

by MapleHogan4 Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a landmark ruling handed down on Tuesday, the European Commission ordered Apple to pay $14.5 billion in back taxes to Ireland. The commission found that Ireland’s tax arrangement with Apple, set up in 1991, was a sweetheart deal that violated the European Union’s antitrust statutes and amounted to illegal state aid.

The ruling, while significant, is just a speeding ticket for the tech giant. Apple’s stock is valued at $570 billion, and it holds more than $230 billion in cash, more than 90 percent of which is kept offshore, beyond the reach of the IRS. The EU ruling implies that the company has been holding as much as $115 billion in profits tax-free in Ireland. That’s more than half of the profits Apple has stashed in its offshore subsidiaries, according to its latest financial filings.

Apple has a long and colorful history of tax minimization, having been deemed both a “pioneer” and a “poster child” of stashing corporate profits beyond the reach of tax collectors. In 2003, Apple paid an effective tax rate of just 1 percent on its profits from selling iPhones and iPads outside of the United States. By 2014, that effective tax rate was just 0.005 percent—or $50 in tax for every $1 million in profit.

Despite Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, Apple’s arrangement with the country allowed it to split its international profits between its Irish branch and a head office that existed only on paper. The company paid the already-low Irish rate on the profits it attributed to Ireland and allocated the rest to this phantom, stateless company, which is untaxable. According to CNN Money, Apple made 16 billion euros (roughly $22 billion) in international profits in 2011, attributing less than 50 million (just below $70 million) to its Irish branch. The rest was funneled through the tax-immune, employee-free “head office”. Via this arrangement, Apple has been able to shift up to two-thirds of its global profits to Irish-registered companies, paying an effective tax rate of one percent or less.

Nevertheless, Apple has roundly condemned the European Commission ruling, with CEO Tim Cook penning an open letter decrying it. Cook said that the “vast majority” of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States, and claimed that Apple is the largest taxpayer in the United States, Ireland, and the world.

Verifying those claims isn’t easy. A 2014 report on corporate taxation by Citizens for Tax Justice omitted Apple due to the company’s “implausible geographic breakdowns of pretax profits.” In other words, it is very likely that profits Apple claimed in Ireland were actually earned in the United States, making it difficult to confirm Apple’s tax assertions. In particular, CTJ raised an eyebrow at Apple’s US tax rate. Apple claimed to have paid a 36.5 percent effective tax rate on its American profits from 2008 to 2012, even though the highest corporate tax rate is 35 percent. Using Apple’s 2015 filings, CTJ found that the company claimed its most recent tax rate was 46.7 percent. (Apple did not respond for a request comment.)

An Irish Times list of the country’s top taxpayers in 2016 gave the number one spot to the pharmaceutical group Medtronic, though Apple placed in the top ten. And as to Cook’s claim that the “vast majority” of Apple’s profits are taxed in the United States, Matthew Gardner, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, says that statement contradicts information in Apple’s own annual report.

Ireland may not be the only beneficiary of the European Commission ruling, which allows for other countries to partake of the penalty, including cash-strapped EU countries like Greece, as well as the United States. According Gardner, the decision provides a jumping-off point for the United States to recoup back taxes from Apple, which he estimates has avoided close to $70 billion in US taxes.

Yet the official US reaction to the ruling has been largely negative. The Treasury Department expressed disappointment, saying that the assessment was “unfair” and “contrary to well-established legal principles.” Last week, the department warned the European Commission against pursuing American companies for tax avoidance, on the grounds that clawback penalties could harm American efforts to collect taxes from domestic companies with international operations. Even though Apple’s $14.5 billion tax bill represents more than a third of Ireland’s total tax revenue and more than the entirety of Ireland’s annual health spending, Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan has promised to appeal the ruling.

Google, Facebook, and Microsoft also hoard profits in Ireland, benefiting from its so-called “double Irish” tax structure, an arrangement which Ireland has promised to phase out by 2018. European competition regulators are currently investigating tax deals awarded to McDonald’s and Amazon by Luxembourg, as well as Anheuser-Busch InBev’s arrangement in Belgium. Tax deals given to Fiat/Chrysler (incorporated in Luxembourg) and Starbucks (incorporated in the Netherlands) were found illegal by the European Commission in October.

Even if the EU ruling stands, tax havens will not go away overnight. Fortune 500 companies have an estimated $2.4 trillion in offshore holdings, avoiding up $695 billion in US taxes. While President Obama has criticized corporate inversions, the process by which corporations move their headquarters offshore, Congress has been slow to act. The Treasury Department’s reaction indicates that that is unlikely to change.

Still, European regulators aren’t waiting around for American support. EU bodies are actively investigating possible anti-competitive behavior and tax avoidance by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix, with penalties expected to be announced sometime in the fall. Google is facing tax probes in Spain, Italy, and France, all of which claim the company should have declared more profits and paid more taxes. As James Wentworth, the vice president for Europe at the US-based Computer & Communications Industry Association, a tech lobbying group, tells the Wall Street Journal, “It’s an avalanche coming.”

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Accused of Tax Dodging, Apple Says It’s the World’s Largest Taxpayer

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The Supreme Court Just Blocked North Carolina’s Sweeping Voting Restrictions

by MarianMessina Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Supreme Court turned down North Carolina’s request on Wednesday to implement a restrictive voting law that a lower federal court blocked last month. The law would have imposed strict ID requirements, shortened early voting periods, and eliminated same-day voter registration, among other barriers to voting. Critics had said the 2013 law was racially discriminatory, and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals last month agreed, observing that the state legislature had targeted voting restrictions at African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”

The state waited 17 days after that decision to file an “emergency” request with the Supreme Court for a stay of the ruling, which would have allowed the state to proceed with the November election under the restrictive rules. The eight-member court deadlocked 4-4 on Wednesday on whether to grant that request, falling short of the majority required for a stay of the lower court’s ruling. The February death of Justice Antonin Scalia once again affected the outcome of a highly politicized case, as his vote with the court’s four-member conservative bloc would have allowed North Carolina to proceed with its law.

The North Carolina law was one of the most dramatic and restrictive voting measures enacted in any state since the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibited discrimination against minorities in voting. The Supreme Court itself paved the way for its passage in 2013 with its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the section of the Voting Rights Act that required preclearance by the Department of Justice to enact changes affecting minority voting rights in areas with a long history of discrimination. North Carolina was one of those areas, and it initiated its voting law the day after the Shelby County decision came down.

Allison Riggs, a senior attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who helped argue the case before the appeals court, issued the following statement after the decision:

The Supreme Court acted in the best interest of North Carolina voters, allowing elections this fall to proceed absent the cloud and concern of racially discriminatory voting laws. This decision opens the door for fair and full access to the democratic process for all voters. Hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians will now be able to vote without barriers. The voting booth is the one place where everyone is equal and where we all have the same say.

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US Supreme Court

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The Supreme Court Just Blocked North Carolina’s Sweeping Voting Restrictions

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California’s big climate bills are a win for environmental justice

by MarlaTranter Posted on August 25, 2016

where there’s a bill, there’s a way

California’s big climate bills are a win for environmental justice

By on Aug 25, 2016Share

California Gov. Jerry Brown is expected to sign a pair of climate bills approved by state lawmakers this week. Together, SB32 and AB197 will not only tackle the state’s greenhouse emissions but also assure greater accountability for working class communities of color that too often carry the burden of local polluting industries.

SB32 creates a new target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 (over below 1990 levels). But aggressive climate action doesn’t necessarily benefit all communities equally.

Take Coachella, California. Aside from its famously annoying music festival, Coachella, as part of Riverside County, is best known for having some of the worst air quality in the nation.

Coachella — a working class Latino community where one in three residents survives below the poverty line — is stuck with a disproportionate pollution burden, even while California gets all the credit for cutting overall greenhouse gasses.

Eduardo Garcia, an assembly member from Coachella, authored AB197. The bill assures permanent legislative oversight of the Air Resources Board, an agency that environmental justice activists say doesn’t focus enough on reducing the harmful effect of local polluting refineries and factories. Together, the two bills finally begin to bridge the gap between big climate solutions and local air problems, helping underserved communities breathe a little easier.

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California’s big climate bills are a win for environmental justice

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Why some enviros are cheering the death of a solar project

by ErnestMabe Posted on August 24, 2016

#notallsolarprojects

Why some enviros are cheering the death of a solar project

By on Aug 24, 2016Share

California’s San Bernardino County narrowly rejected a controversial solar panel project over concerns that it would threaten groundwater and wildlife in the region.

Soda Mountain Solar was slated to be built just a half-mile from the Mojave National Preserve. The 3-2 vote against certifying the project is a big win for environmentalists who claimed constructing the facility would use up tons of water — a precious resource in drought-stricken California — without any benefit to locals.

The Soda Mountain installation was initially proposed by Bechtel — a contractor probably best know for Iraq war profiteering — and later sold to Regenerate, when it gained support from the Bureau of Land Management. It was touted as a promising part of Obama’s Climate Action Plan’s goal of producing 20,000 megawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2020.

But local residents and chambers of commerce, leading environmental scientists, conservationists, and even National Park Service officials opposed the project, as it would endanger Mojave’s bighorn sheep and desert tortoises without lowering electricity prices for locals, who already get about 30 percent of their power from wind and solar. Regenerate wasn’t even able to find a potential public utility to purchase the 287 megawatts of renewable energy it would have produced.

It’s important to move forward on renewable energy projects — and the vast Mojave, with its constant sunshine, might seem like the best place to fast-track solar power. But when those projects threaten a way of life for local residents and unique wildlife, the cost is too steep.

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Why some enviros are cheering the death of a solar project

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Climate activists arrested while protesting offshore drilling

by RonaldCatchpole Posted on August 24, 2016

Climate activists arrested while protesting offshore drilling

By on Aug 24, 2016Share

Four activists were arrested Tuesday in Louisiana for refusing to leave the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management office, the agency responsible for selling offshore drilling rights.

The activists were part of a group petitioning to end all new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including the auction of 23.5 million acres in federal waters off the coast of Texas scheduled this week in the New Orleans Superdome. For the first time, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will close the auction to to the public and stream it live online to prevent disruption from protestors.

The activists delivered a petition with  184,000 signatures, according to the Associated Press, and demanded to meet with President Obama, who was in Baton Rouge touring damage from the worst disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Sandy.

“In the midst of a climate-fueled disaster, which will most gravely impact those already marginalized in our society, moving forward with this auction is a terrible idea,” wrote the activist group Bold Louisiana in a statement. “Selling fossil fuels at the New Orleans Superdome — the site of one of the most visible and tragic instances of climate injustice in recent memory — is nothing short of insulting.”

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Climate activists arrested while protesting offshore drilling

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Harley-Davidson is officially a clear air outlaw

by Parab3olum234 Posted on August 19, 2016

Bad to the ozone

Harley-Davidson is officially a clear air outlaw

By on Aug 19, 2016Share

If you’ve ever wondered why a flock of motorcycles smells like a smog bomb made love to a junkyard, the secret is out. This week, Harley-Davidson agreed to pay $12 million in fines to the Environmental Protection Agency for evading clean air laws.

From 2008 to 2015, Harley-Davidson sold a device called a Screamin’ Eagle engine tuner (available in regular and pro variety), which allowed anyone to hack into their Hog’s emissions control software and dial it back to the simpler times of the 1950’s, when the kids were all excited about a hot new dance craze called the Twist, and America’s major cities were blanketed in a thick gray haze of Beijing-level air pollution.

As part of the settlement, Harley is required to stop making the tuners, to buy back and destroy all the ones currently for sale, and to spend $3 million on an as-yet-unspecified special project to reduce air pollution.

It’s no coincidence that Harley-Davidson was busted so soon after the Volkswagen emissions scandal, with the EPA taking a closer look at the so-called defeat devices auto companies have used to cheat emissions tests.

Odds are good that Harley’s won’t be the only wheels on the road that will be forced to clean up their act.

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Harley-Davidson is officially a clear air outlaw

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Texas is still gunning for your reproductive rights

by TKXEdythebk Posted on August 18, 2016

y’all things considered

Texas is still gunning for your reproductive rights

By on Aug 18, 2016Share

One might think that when the U.S. Supreme Court sends a clear message — like, “no, it’s still not at all chill to mess around with a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion” — state legislatures would take that and run with it. But this is America! And never one to be bossed around, Texas continues to try to flout the June Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade.

As we’ve established before, reproductive rights are a key sustainability issue. Around the world, women are disproportionately threatened by climate change. Ensuring that women are able to decide when, how, and even whether to have children is pretty much the best means of empowering them to face the coming challenges.

And that means keeping a close eye on what’s going on with those rights in Texas, both our third-most populous state and one severely threatened by climate change (being both southern and coastal), where an antiquated-at-best, misogynistic-at-worst mentality still holds sway with way too many legislators.

The Supreme Court ruled in June that Texas’ highly restrictive abortion clinic regulations (known as HB2) were unconstitutional. The rules, which required facilities that provide abortions to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers, would have closed all but eight abortion clinics in the entire state.

The court ruling was a wonderful moment for the pro-choice movement — and, indeed, for women in general. But as we wrote at the time, it only addressed part of the problem. Since 2011, Texas women have had to endure a slew of restrictive legislation surrounding their reproductive rights. June’s ruling, while a promising step in the right direction, may have intensified that flood.

In July, Gov. Greg Abbott published new rules regarding the disposal of fetal remains, dictating that they would have to be cremated or buried to “affirm the value and dignity of all life,” as Texas Monthly reported. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) then awarded a massive contract to an anti-abortion organization as a provider in the state’s already much-weakened Healthy Texas Women program, which is the state’s publicly funded healthcare program for low-income women.

As the Houston Chronicle reported, $1.6 million of the meager $18 million chunk of state cash for the Texas Healthy Women program this year will go to the Heidi Group — an organization behind “crisis pregnancy centers” that work to steer pregnant women in need away from abortions. As Nancy Cardenas with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health puts it: “The Heidi Group does not provide health services.”

And yet its share of program funding is now the second-largest (after the Harris County Public Health Department). That’s more or less the equivalent of asking your weed dealer to take over the legal team handling your divorce.

We asked the HHSC why, exactly, it provided this contract to the Heidi Group, and got the following response:

“The Heidi Group has partnered with healthcare providers across the state to offer quality women’s healthcare services including family planning and birth control. The group’s proposal was one of the most comprehensive of any of the applicants that applied for the grants. The group’s services will cover more than 60 counties in seven regions through approximately 20 clinic sites. The Heidi Group is a Medicaid provider.”

That doesn’t assuage the concern of activists like Cardenas, who told me: “If we just look at basic facts, they are not licensed medical providers. [The Heidi Group’s founder] Carol Everett has a history of being very disingenuous when it comes to reproductive health access.”

Everett has publicly made the following claims: 1) That she can’t condone “killing babies” after “coming to Christ”; 2) that disposal of fetal tissue could disseminate HIV and other STDs into the water supply; and 3) that abortion  in the United States is a profit-based industry that attempts to trick young girls into getting knocked up. She actively and destructively spreads misinformation about reproductive health.

The Heidi Group’s inexplicable role in Texas’ public health program is a slap in the face to both women’s rights and sustainability. The women who will be most disadvantaged by the decimation of reproductive health services are exactly those most affected by climate change (which, let’s remember, is already hitting Texas hard): low-income women, women of color, and women in rural areas.

“We have to keep in mind that when cuts are made to reproductive healthcare services, they don’t affect groups the same way,” Cardenas told me. “And this rings especially true when we’re talking about the Latinx community in Texas.”

Latina women in Texas suffer from some of the highest rates of cervical cancer in the nation. And regular gynecological exams and cervical cancer screenings are some of the invaluable reproductive health services that end up falling by the wayside when money allotted for public health is given to an organization that traffics in ideology instead.

Says Cardenas: “I think the state is angry. I think our governor is angry … [and] I think they are trying to overcompensate at this point.”

The Supreme Court decision was a boon for women in Texas by saving them from having just a handful of abortion providers sprinkled across the largest state in the lower 48. But as events of this summer have shown, it’s hardly been a solution to all their problems.

The obstacles that Texas has hurled in the way of reproductive healthcare access are not dissimilar to a herd of raccoons: Even if you (say, Ruth Bader Ginsburg) can pick one off with a shotgun, there are plenty more to hurl garbage around your yard.

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Texas is still gunning for your reproductive rights

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