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600+ environmental orgs say this is what they want in a Green New Deal

by Joan Ames Posted on January 10, 2019

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The urgency to get to a fossil fuel-free future is growing. Now comes the discussion over just how to get there.

The Green New Deal is taking shape — not so much in Congress (at least not yet), but certainly among the nation’s environmental groups, many of which came together to outline want they do and don’t want to see in any future climate legislation.

On Thursday, more than 600 organizations submitted a letter to House representatives with a list of steps they say are required “at a minimum” for the U.S. to help keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

The message was signed by green movement heavyweights like 350.org, Greenpeace, Sunrise Movement, and Friends of the Earth — as well as many local grassroots groups, including Communities for a Better Environment in California and WE ACT for Environmental Justice in New York.

The recommendations include:

A complete shift to 100 percent renewable power generation by 2035.
An end to all fossil fuel leasing, extraction, and subsidies. That includes putting a stop to the export of crude oil and other fossil fuels.
Greater investment in renewable-energy-powered public transportation and better incentives for electric vehicles, with a goal of phasing out fossil fuel-powered cars and trucks by 2040.
More input from Native American tribes, workers, and the communities most impacted by fossil fuels. The letter says these groups should have the first say in what the transition away from fossil fuels looks like because a lot of energy infrastructure disproportionately impacts the places where they live.

Despite the sign-off from many environmental organizations, the letter may not strike a chord with all renewable energy advocates. It takes a stand on several topics that have ignited debate within the green community.

The letter demands a halt to nuclear energy, garbage incineration, and biomass energy. Such a move would throw a wrench in the green energy targets for several states which count these sources as “renewable.” Although there’s been some excitement for next-gen nuclear energy, these energy alternatives have posed health risks associated with toxic emissions and uranium contamination.

The letter also says the Clean Air Act should be used to rein in greenhouse gases. Traditionally, the act is associated with air pollution, not CO2. That said, carbon is often released with co-pollutants, and communities breathing the worst air say Congress should tackle pollution and climate change with one fell swoop.

The letter closes with a vow by the signing organizations to “vigorously oppose … corporate schemes that place profits over community burdens and benefits, including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, [and] carbon capture and storage.” (Carbon trading programs, like California’s popular cap-and-trade system, have been called out for making air quality worse in some communities, and critics of carbon capture say it takes the focus away from creating an economy that isn’t dependent on fossil fuels).

Browsing the 600+ organizations that endorsed the letter, there are still some big names missing, including the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council.

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600+ environmental orgs say this is what they want in a Green New Deal

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House Democrats Demand Investigation of Comey Firing

by KrystynaK18 Posted on May 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Every Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee signed a letter Thursday afternoon to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), demanding an investigation into President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey. The letter calls for hearings featuring testimony from Comey and from two high-ranking Trump administration officials who were involved in Comey’s termination: Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

In explaining why such hearings are necessary, the letter highlights the disjointed and contradictory explanations put forth by the White House over the past two days.

“The dismissal of Director Comey demands a clear and compelling explanation,” the letter states. “To date, the Administration has provided none.” It goes on to note that the administration’s initial justification for Trump’s actions—Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails—would have necessitated Comey’s firing months ago. And it notes that while the White House initially portrayed Rosenstein as the person behind the decision, Trump himself acknowledged in an interview with NBC Thursday that “I was going to fire him regardless of Rosenstein’s recommendation.”

The demand by the judiciary committee’s 17 Democrats echoes calls from Senate Democrats, who have requested hearings over Comey’s abrupt dismissal and the appointment of a special prosecutor of oversee the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election.

It’s possible that at least some House Republicans will be more willing to investigate the firing than their colleagues in the Senate. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the chairman of the House oversight committee, on Wednesday asked the inspector general for the Justice Department to look into the circumstances surrounding Comey’s firing. “Previously I asked Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz to review the FBI’s actions in advance of the 2016 election,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “Today I sent a letter urging IG Horowitz to expand the scope of his review to include the decision to fire Director Comey. I look forward to receiving the IG’s findings.” But Chaffetz did not go so far as to schedule a hearing.

Here’s the Democrats’ letter:

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House Democratic Letter (PDF)

House Democratic Letter (Text)

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House Democrats Demand Investigation of Comey Firing

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Government Official Who Negotiated Trump Hotel Deal Says Deal Is Fine

by MaritzaHeinrich Posted on March 23, 2017

Mother Jones

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A top government official who negotiated a controversial deal to lease a historic Washington, DC, property to Donald Trump has announced that he sees no problem with the arrangement—despite a clause in Trump’s contract that prohibits any elected officials from benefiting from the deal.

Since before Trump’s inauguration, ethics experts and Trump critics have cried foul over the 60-year lease Trump signed with the General Services Administration in 2013 to take over the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Long before he ran for president, Trump beat out a handful of large hotel chains to redevelop the property, which had long languished under poor management, costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year.

In late November, George Washington University law school professor Steve Schooner wrote in Government Executive magazine that the lease Trump signed includes a clause that prohibits any elected officials from benefiting from the deal. For months, the GSA has been silent on the question of whether Trump’s election causes a breach of the contract.

Today, Kevin Terry, a GSA contracting officer who oversaw the original contract negotiations with Trump, released a letter declaring that there was no reason for concern. In the letter, which is reprinted in its entirety below, Terry takes the position that there is no violation of the clause because the Trump Organization has been rearranged to steer any profits from the hotel away from Trump’s bank accounts while he’s in office. Trump owns more than 76 percent of the project; his children own the remainder.

According to Terry’s letter, the Trump Organization has presented documents to the GSA showing that although any profits (or losses) are accrued among the partners based on their ownership, any profits that would have gone to Trump himself will be kept separate and unavailable for Trump’s personal use until he is out of office. Under the terms of the original agreement, Trump could have withdrawn money with ease, but the new corporate structure (established before Trump’s inauguration) would prevent this, Terry wrote.

Schooner, who raised the original concerns, was scathing in his response to Terry’s letter. “Disgusting,” he wrote in an email to Mother Jones. He is bothered that Terry’s analysis does not take into account—or even acknowledge—the inherent conflict of interest in the decision.

“It is deeply troubling that the contracting officer’s letter makes no reference to the underlying conflicts of interest, which, of course, undercuts any suggestion that he (the contracting officer) engaged in independent analysis,” says Schooner, who teaches government contracting law. “The CO’s decision favors the President, who, in effect, is his supervisor, just as it favors the GSA (in terms of maintaining the status quo); but it also pleases his (the CO’s) ultimate supervisor – the head of the agency – who serves at the President’s pleasure.”

In December, congressional Democrats said they had been briefed by GSA officials who believed Trump would be in violation of the lease when he was inaugurated. Today, Reps. Elijah Cummings and Peter DeFazio, the top Democrats on the House Government Oversight and House Transportation and Infrastructure committees, respectively, condemned Terry’s decision, calling it is a reversal from what the GSA had previously told them.

According to Terry’s letter, while Trump is in office, his share of the hotel’s profits will be available for the hotel to use in its operations. The Democratic lawmakers said that was not an acceptable arrangement. “This decision allows profits to be reinvested back into the hotel so Donald Trump can reap the financial benefits when he leaves the White House,” Cummings and DeFazio said in a statement. “This is exactly what the lease provision was supposed to prevent.”

Terry’s letter is defensive and makes a dig at critics of the deal.

“To date, most of the review and reporting on the clause has focused on only a few select words, and reached simplistic ‘black and white’ conclusions regarding the meaning and implications of the clause,” Terry wrote. “However, it has been less widely reported that other legal professional and former government contracting officials have reviewed the language and come to different conclusions.”

Not all attorneys agreed with Schooner’s interpretation of the contract’s clause about elected officials. Some argued that the contract was written in a way that barred elected officials from becoming new parties to the deal but did not seem to prohibit someone from becoming an elected official after signing the contract. In a letter to the GSA that was included with Terry’s announcement, Trump’s personal attorney, Sheri Dillon, made a similar argument.

But that’s apparently not the reasoning that Terry used in making his decision that there was no breach of contract. Instead, he relied on the belief that Trump would have to wait until he left office to receive any profits from the hotel.

Terry’s letter points out that the property was a money-loser for the federal government before the Trump lease, but that the Trump Organization has been paying $250,000 a month in rent since it signed the lease. According to Terry, Trump has paid $5.1 million so far.

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Contracting Officer Letter March 23 2017 Redacted Version1 (PDF)

Contracting Officer Letter March 23 2017 Redacted Version1 (Text)

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Government Official Who Negotiated Trump Hotel Deal Says Deal Is Fine

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Democrats to White House: What Did Trump Know, and When Did He Know It?

by JanisWhatley Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Michael Flynn may have lost his job as national security adviser, but congressional Democrats have made clear that they aren’t going to let the Trump administration sweep the scandal under the rug. The ranking Democrats from six separate House committees sent a detailed letter to the White House’s top lawyer Wednesday afternoon demanding answers regarding what administration officials knew about Flynn’s communications last year with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, when they knew it, and what they did in response.

The letter is directed at Donald McGahn, the White House counsel. As The Washington Post reported on Monday, McGahn was personally informed last month by then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates that Flynn may have lied to members of the Trump administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the nature of his conversations with Kislyak—and that Flynn could even be vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow. The Democrats’ letter points out that despite that warning, White House officials continued to claim for weeks that Flynn did not discuss US sanctions during his talks with Russia’s ambassador.

“These reports raise grave concerns about the honesty and integrity of White House officials with the public,” the letter says. “The National Security Advisor provided false information to the public, which was then repeated by several senior White House officials. Even after learning that this information was inaccurate, no White House officials corrected those falsehoods.”

The letter presses McGahn for a clear timeline of events. It asks whether Trump himself or other members of his team were aware of Flynn’s discussion of sanctions with Kislyak prior to McGahn’s January 26 meeting with the Department of Justice, and whether anyone ordered Flynn to engage in those discussions. The letter points to a tweet from Trump on December 30, 2016—just a day after Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador—in which Trump lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision not to retaliate against US sanctions. “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) – I always knew he was very smart!” Trump wrote.

The Democrats also asked McGahn to explain why Flynn was allowed to receive classified briefings after the administration learned of his apparent deception. Referencing White House statements that Flynn had lost Trump’s trust, the letter states that “these reports raise more than ‘trust’ issues—they also raise significant national security concerns.”

The letter was sent by top Democrats on six committees: Elijah Cummings(Oversight and Government Reform), John Conyers (Judiciary), Adam Smith (Armed Forces), Bennie Thompson (Homeland Security), Adam Schiff (Intelligence), and Eliot Engel (Foreign Affairs).

Read the letter below:

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Democrats Letter to White Counsel Donald McGahn (PDF)

Democrats Letter to White Counsel Donald McGahn (Text)

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Democrats to White House: What Did Trump Know, and When Did He Know It?

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Should oil companies have a seat at the climate negotiating table?

by ShannonDanis Posted on June 2, 2015

Should oil companies have a seat at the climate negotiating table?

By on 2 Jun 2015commentsShare

U.N. negotiators are meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week to continue to hash out the global climate deal that will (hopefully) be signed in Paris later this year. And, just in time for these negotiations, a new coalition is calling on governments to get some carbon-pricing mechanisms in place. This coalition, however, has an unusual membership: CEOs of major, Europe-based oil companies.

Chief executives of the U.K.’s BP and BG Group, British/Dutch Shell, Italy’s Eni, Norway’s Statoil, and France’s Total sent a letter to the U.N. stating that “we need governments across the world to provide us with clear, stable, long-term, ambitious policy frameworks. … We believe that a price on carbon should be a key element of these frameworks.” Earlier in the letter, the six companies “acknowledge that the current trend of greenhouse gas emissions” would fail to “limit the temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.”

“The challenge is how to meet greater energy demand with less CO2,” the letter continues. “We stand ready to play our part.”

Of course, not everyone is eager for the companies who for years resisted regulations like carbon pricing to plop down at the negotiating table.

“I think what these corporations are looking to do is to change the conversation from one of global emissions standards and top-down governmental enforcement of standards to one … where these corporations can buy and sell pollution and find different ways to continue to do what they’re doing, which is contributing to climate change in a very real way,” said Jesse Bragg of Corporate Accountability International, a group that’s trying to keep corporate players away from the climate negotiations.

“We need long-term solutions,” he told Grist. “So the solution here is find ways to keep it in the ground and replace our energy needs with renewables. And any conversation about finding ways to use more natural gas and oil is a distraction from the actual solution.”

CAI and a number of prominent environmental groups, including Greenpeace USA, 350.org, and the League of Conservation Voters, recently petitioned the U.N. to keep polluting corporations away from climate change negotiations. The groups say that the industry “interferes at all levels,” including by providing sponsorship for the talks themselves.

The U.N. climate change leadership, however, has called for more cooperation between polluting industries and proponents of a climate deal. “Bringing them with us has more strength than demonizing them,” Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in May.

Not all green groups are cynical about the intention of the letter; some are enthusiastic about the progress it represents. “This is a symbolic moment, and demonstrates an important if not universal shift,” said Mark Kenber, CEO of The Climate Group, an international NGO. “It helps increase the likelihood of a positive outcome at COP21 by sending a signal to the wider business community, and showing that the direction of travel is towards comprehensive and effective regimes regulating carbon emissions.”

Even CAI sees the letter as an encouraging sign: “Many of the NGOs I’ve spoken with see this as a sign of them running scared, in a way,” said Bragg. “In terms of the movement, this is a good sign because it means that this work is having an effect and creating a need for them to respond and regroup and create a strategy … In that letter, the gas and oil industry took a couple shots at the coal industry, trying to differentiate themselves: ‘At least we’re not coal.’”

Some major oil companies were conspicuously absent from the letter, including U.S.-based ExxonMobil and Chevron. An industry source told Reuters that the two companies knew about the initiative, but didn’t want to sign on. “It’s clear that there is a difference of views on each side of the Atlantic,” Patrick Pouyanne, CEO of the French oil company Total, told reporters. He said the European companies were still chatting with Exxon and Chevron, and hoped they too would sign the letter soon.

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Elizabeth Warren Says Gay Men Should Be Able To Donate Blood

by RamonAlaniz Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Warren and a host of Democratic lawmakers are demanding the Obama administration stand up for gay rights.

A coalition of 80 senators and House members spearheaded by the Massachusetts senator—alongside Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Reps. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.)—sent a letter Monday to Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, protesting the long-standing prohibition that bars men who have had sex with men from donating blood in the United States.

In 1983, the federal government instituted a lifetime ban for any man who has had sex with another man—even once—at any time after 1977. That rule went into effect during the early days of AIDS panic when the disease was largely unknown. Now, technology exists that can detect HIV within a few weeks of infection.

Last month, an HHS panel that handles blood policy advocated tossing out the lifetime ban—but argued for replacing it with a measure that would keep any sexually active gay man from contributing to the blood supply: a ban on donations from any man who had sex with another man within the past year.

To the Democrats in Congress, that slight improvement isn’t nearly enough. The letter calls both the lifetime ban and the one-year deferral policies “discriminatory” and “unacceptable.” The lawmakers urged an end to the lifetime ban by the “end of 2014,” while also pushing for a less-stringent restriction than the one-year celibacy requirement.

“The recommendation to move to a one-year deferral policy is a step forward relative to current policies; however, such a policy still prevents many low-risk individuals from donating blood,” the letter says. “If we are serious about protecting and enhancing our nation’s blood supply, we must embrace science and reject outdated stereotypes.”

The letter may have been better directed at the Food and Drug Administration. That agency’s Blood Products Advisory Panel met earlier this month to consider the one-year deferral proposed by HHS, but the panel of experts seemed more inclined to let the current policy stand rather than loosen the restrictions.

Here’s the full letter:

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Letter to HHS on blood donation ban (PDF)

Letter to HHS on blood donation ban (Text)

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Elizabeth Warren Says Gay Men Should Be Able To Donate Blood

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This Quirky Indie Rocker Can Help You Win at Scrabble

by SantiagMorrice Posted on October 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Stephin Merritt, the singer for the Magnetic Fields, refuses to play Scrabble with me.

I can’t help but be a tiny bit disappointed. The ubiquitous word game, after all, is the reason I’m sitting down with him in this San Francisco bakery-cafe. Merritt is in town promoting 101 Two-Letter Words, a collection of poems—illustrated by the loveably oddball New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast—that he wrote to help himself remember the shortest words in Scrabble’s official dictionary.

But when I challenge him to a match, Merritt shakes his head. “The last time I attempted Scrabble with an interviewer,” he says in his slow, gravelly voice, “I accidentally stole 12 tiles from the Bryant Park public Scrabble set.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise that he doesn’t want his attention divided. Merritt isn’t known for doing things halfway. His band’s best-known record, the aptly named 69 Love Songs, is a three-volume epic that ranges from gospel to punk. On another album, i, every song title begins with the letter I.

He’s also not fond of repetition. In addition to his work with the Magnetic Fields, Merritt has written several Chinese operas, a score for a silent film version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and music for the audiobook of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. This poetry collection is his first. “I think I would get bored easily if I did the same thing again and again,” Merritt says, so “I don’t.”

The idea for 101 Two-Letter Words, which hit bookshelves at the end of September, came to him while he was on tour playing Scrabble and Words With Friends to kill time in hotels and airports. His opponents included a copyeditor, a journalist, and the novelist Emma Straub. He found himself losing often. So, in a ploy to remember strategically important words like “aa” (a type of lava) and “xu” (a unit of currency), he began composing quatrains for each.

Roz Chast/W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

“After a few,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “I thought I’d better write all of them down, and how better to do that than to write a book? I never finish anything without a deadline anyway.”

Merritt says he doesn’t have a favorite poem from the book, as he’s “not a person who has favorite things.” But he does, disproving his own claim, have a favorite illustration: The poem for “be” reads “‘Be yourself,’ all thinkers say; how odd they think alike. ‘Be yourself,’ says Lao Tzu; ‘Be yourself,’ says Wilhelm Reich.”

To accompany it, Chast has drawn what Merritt describes as “an ugly American tourist couple with his/her shirts.” His shirt says, “Be yourself.” Hers says, “I’m with stupid.”

“It blew me away,” Merritt says.

Roz Chast/W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

The book owes much of its aesthetic to Edward Gorey, whose unsettling illustrated books Merritt grew up on.

“As a child with dark, morose-looking eyes, I looked like an Edward Gorey character,” he tells me. “I guess I knew that I was going to meet some horrible end. Impaled by a candlestick or something like that. Sucked into the pneumatic tube in the department store.”

Merritt never considered setting the poems to music, he says. Each song would have been only about 15 seconds long—not enough to jog his memory. But some aspects of his creative process are consistent, no matter the medium. He prefers to work in the nearest gay bar (loud, drunk straight people annoy him), with a cocktail in one hand and his notebook in the other, trying to tune out the television and let his brain wander. If he’s at home, he says, there are too many other pressing things for him to do.

Stephin Merritt performs in New York. WFUV/Flickr

I ask him whether thematic constraints, such as writing only love songs or focusing on two-letter words, help stimulate his thinking. He frowns. “It puzzles me that people keep asking me that, he says, because doesn’t everyone give themselves thematic constraints in their work? Isn’t that what a work is?”

“Yes, definitely,” I counter. “But not everyone makes an album where every song begins with I.”

“No,” he says. “I think most people make albums where everything is more similar than I do. People make albums with only five instruments on them, doing more or less the same thing again and again for the entire album, and no one bats an eyelash. If I did that, I would be bored, and so would the audience. Everyone has constraints; I just have unusual constraints, I think. The Rolling Stones have sounded like Muddy Waters for 50 years, and no one has said, ‘Don’t you find that limiting?'”

With this book, Merritt says, he didn’t even choose his own constraints. He had a specific set of words he wanted to learn, and there happened to be 101 of them. He adds that he’s always been drawn to small things: He plays the ukulele, he drives a Mini Cooper, and his pet chiuahua Irving (after Irving Berlin) slept in his shirt while he wrote some of the poems.

Merritt has a theory about the origins of this affinity: “I’m 5-foot-3.”

So, I ask, have the poems succeeded? Is he now better at Scrabble?

Without a doubt, he says. And his mother is too, ever since he gave her a copy.

“It’s not like I have a moral crusade to help people improve their game,” he adds. “But why not? It makes the world a little more fun.”

Originally posted here – 

This Quirky Indie Rocker Can Help You Win at Scrabble

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Our Letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee

by Posted on April 30, 2013

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Our Letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee

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