peabody coal 2 bak
main blank 8/17
merri ok
SEE IDSO CO2 BS
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showed up as one of 4 orgs in 3% paper?
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wiki denlal 3 26
U.S. fossil fuel companies have known about global warming since at least the 1960s.[152] In 1966, a coal industry research organization, Bituminous Coal Research Inc., published its finding that if then prevailing trends of coal consumption continued, "the temperature of the earth's atmosphere will increase" and "vast changes in the climates of the earth will result. [...] Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London."[153] In a discussion following this paper in the same publication, a combustion engineer for Peabody Coal, now Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal supplier, added that the coal industry was merely "buying time" before additional government air pollution regulations would be promulgated to clean the air. Nevertheless, the coal industry publicly advocated for decades thereafter the position that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial for the planet.[153]
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OMFG 2 26 12TH DN
UCS AND --- SUED TO SHUT DN BS COMM BUT STILL LOST ON EPA REGS
9:31
President Trump accepted the Washington
9:33
Coal Club's inaugural award on
9:36
Wednesday, declaring him the quote
9:38
undisputed champion of beautiful, clean
9:42
coal, unquote.
9:44
Trump accepted the award, a statue of a
9:47
coal miner from Peabody Energy President
9:49
and CEO Jim Gretch during a White House
9:52
event where Trump announced he directed
9:54
the Pentagon to purchase electricity
9:56
from coal fired plants and said he'd
9:59
asked the energy department to provide
10:01
$175 million in federal funds for
:{:{10:05}:
upgrades at several US coal plants.
10:09
I've saved 74 coal power plants from
10:13
crushing restrictions and closures that
10:16
would have been forced to shut down in
10:18
the very immediate future. And today,
10:20
I'm proud to announce that the Tennessee
10:22
Valley Authority is taking action to
10:24
save two major coal plants in Tennessee.
10:27
Tennessee Valley Authority. In response,
10:30
the Natural Resources Defense Council
10:33
wrote, quote, "While Americans are
10:35
demanding clean, affordable energy, the
10:38
Trump administration's using our tax
10:40
dollars to prop up the nation's
10:42
dirtiest, least efficient power plants.
10:45
It's no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are
10:48
handing Trump an award today." unquote.
10:51
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:{:{A 2018 TPPF video }::{promoting the continued operation of a coal-fired power plant on the Arizona Navajo reservation has been rebranded with the Life:Powered name. The video showed images of smokestacks with a voiceover by a young Navajo girl saying, “Papa says it’s the heart of the land. I can hear it beating.”}::{ [22:(style="background-color:#ff9966ff"):}:]}:
The video’s closing text reads:
“Extreme environmentalist politics will eliminate jobs, destroy families, and spike electric bills in the Navajo Nation and across America. The Navajo don’t need to be told what to do. They’ve been protecting the environment for centuries.” [22 [vid]
Local environmental groups responded with claims that the plant’s consumption of billions of gallons of groundwater has led to contamination and depletion of the reservation’s water supply. The executive director of a Navajo non-profit organization told the Statesman: [22]
“The pro-coal supporters have made it all about jobs. There’s more to it than that. What’s happening on Black Mesashows that jobs and revenues is not all that it’s made out to be. When you lose your own potable water source, that’s life or death right there.” [22]
Peabody Energy, a TPPF donor, operates the Navajo Generating Station, which will be shuttered at the end of 2019. [22]
Another TPPF }
on the topic of “Energy Poverty” featured Caleb Rossiter of the :{CO2}: Foundation :{:{promoting wider adoption of fossil fuel-generated electricity in the developing world. }:[22]
Life:Powered plans to target future messaging in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and Alaska in opposition to renewable energy and carbon reduction initiatives. [22]
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https://www.desmog.com/**2012/02**/23/what-passes-brain-trust-heartland/
Has beens, also-rans, deniers-for-hire on retainer at “think tank”
Update: 13th scientist disavows Heartland connection (See: Watkins at bottom of this post)
The Heartland Institute maintains a stable of 13 scientists on retainer for the express purpose of attacking the work of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to budget information released last week in the Heartland document dump.
The scientists, ranging from one of the world’s least credible deniers-for-hire (Dr. S. Fred Singer) to a sessional lecturer on the evolution and history of the domestic dog (Susan Crockford), include no top climate scientists currently publishing in the peer-reviewed literature.
The best paid “expert” on the Heartland list is Craig Idso,a former Director of Environmental Science at Peabody Energy (the largest coal company in the world). Heartland pays Idso $11,600 a month through his Center for the Study of CO2 & Global Change, which like theHeartland Institute, has charitable status and therefore operates with an effective subsidy from the American taxpayer. (Funny how quick libertarians are to fleece old Uncle Sam when THEY get to kick the money back to their rich friends.)
Coming in at $5,000 a month is Idso’s principal partner in the regular IPCC attack, Fred Singer, who for the last 20 years has denied pretty much any health threat with a corporate sponsor: the health impacts of second-hand smoke; coal’s role in creating acid rain; the danger of asbestos; or DDTCFCs in creating the ozone hole; and, of course, the human cause and potential consequences of climate change. (See Naomi Oreskes excellent book, Merchants of Doubt for the full, devastating story ot Singer’s lucrative denial business.)
Together, Idso and Singer developed what they call the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which Heartland funds as “the most comprehensive and authoritative rebuttal of the United Nations’ IPCC reports.”
Number 3 on the list of Heartland’s beneficiaries, at $1,667 a month, is the Australian Robert Carter, a geologist at James Cook University in Queensland and a staff member for theInstitute of Public Affairs, an Australian think tank which, like the Heartland Institute,takes funding from the tobacco and oil industries.
The fourth, fifth and sixth experts on Heartland’s anonymous donor dole, all at $1,000 a month, are Madhav Khandekar, Indur Goklany andRobert Ballin**g. Khandekar is another think-tank double-dipper, a retired Environment Canada researcher who also shows up on the experts list at the Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute, which subsidized an earlier IPCC attack called the Independent Summary for Policymakers. Khandekar has also been an “expert” on other discredited climate change denial organizations, includingFriends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project.
Goklany, a Senior Advisor at the U.S. Interior Department, is currently under scrutiny over whether the funding he has accepted from Heartland violates U.S. law against federal employees taking payments that could put them in conflict with their governmental duties.
And Robert Balling is a geography professor at Arizona State who turns up as an expert on several industry funded(taxpayer subsidized) policy hothouses masquerading as “think tanks” and educational organizations. Balling was a trendsetter among climate-change deniers for hire, working as early as the late 1990s for the coal barons of the Western Fuels Association on its Greening Earth Society project.
Coming in with a lower profile and a lower monthly retainer ($750 a month) are Anthony Lupo, and Canadian “Terrestrial Animal” specialists Crockford (the dog expert from the University of Victoria) and Mitch Taylor, a contract lecturerat the Lakehead University who has argued that polar bears are in no danger from climate change.
The weather forecaster Joe D’Aleo gets just $500 a month, (kid-stuff compared to the $88,000 that Heartland is kicking over to D’Aleo’s meteorological colleague Anthony Watts). D’Aleo, co-founder of The Weather Channel, predicted in the 2008 Farmers Almanac that the world was entering a cooling phase. (No word whether he updated that prediction after 2009 was the second hottest year on record and 2010 tied for the hottest.)
It must be disappointing to be Willie Soon, at just $125 a month. Soon is an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But his credibility has sustained a series of terrible blows. It was reported last year, for example, that he took took more than $1 million in funding from oil and coal companies, including the Koch Foundation, Southern and Exxon. He’d earlier been reportedly taking money from the American Petroleum Institute and he and Sallie Baliunas had a paper discredited in the journal Climate Research (it was so bad, the editor resigned in protest).
Also budgeted at $125 a month are Craig Loehle, a pulp and paper industry scientist, and David Watkins, who appears to be a water resources specialist in the civil and environmental engineering department at Michigan Tech. There being no obvious public record of Watkins having said anything embarrassingly silly about climate science, it’s not immediately clear what his name is doing on the Heartland list.
Update: David Watkins, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director at Michigan Tech contacted the DeSmogBlog today to say:
I have had no contact with the Heartland Institute, have not received [nor have been offered] any funding from them, and have no idea how I ended up in their 2012 budget. M(y) university administration is trying to contact Heartland to find out how this misuse of my name occurred.
Apologies to Dr. Watkins for any embarrassment we might have caused him by repeating the erroneous, and potentially damaging, contention that he was accepting money from Heartland. Read the official response from Michigan Tech University.
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https://www.benzinga.com/markets/asia/22/03/25989426/war-in-ukraine-causes-coal-to-go-parabolic-our-top-name-thats-poised-to-profit-from-the-coal-boom
War In Ukraine Causes Coal To Go Parabolic: Our Top Name That's Poised To Profit From The Coal Boom.
David Pinsen , Portfolio Armor, Benzinga Contributor FOLLOW
March 04, 2022
War In Ukraine Causes Coal To Go Parabolic: Our Top Name That's Poised To Profit From The Coal Boom.
Coal Goes Parabolic
Before the current war in Ukraine, there was already upward pressure on coal, due to a combination of the lockdowns limiting production in 2020 plus a misguided focus renewable energy, as Noah Rothman noted last October:
The sloppy, blinkered effort to transition away from fossil fuels to hypothetical sources of power that cannot meet the energy consumption needs of the planet due to the constraints imposed on them by the laws of physics is an obstacle to meeting “newly minted environmental, social and governance standards for clean energy.”
:{:{}:
}:
And a prime beneficiary of that was Peabody Energy Corporation BTU +14.71% (Get Free Alerts for BTU), whose shares spiked that in October after the company announced that its coal revenue in Q3 would be the highest in seven quarters and it offered bullish forward guidance. BTU shares spiked again last month, as the company posted another monster quarter in Q4. Russia's invasion of Ukraine--and the extraordinary sanctions levied against Russia in response--will likely add fuel to this quarter.
Get the inside access traders just like you are using to profit more and win bigger. Don't miss out on Benzinga Pro! Click Here to Start a FREE 14-day trial! (No Credit Card Required)
As Bloomberg energy reporter Javier Blas noted on Thursday, Russia is a major coal exporter (#3 in the world in 2019), and high quality coal has nearly doubled in price as some buyers are eschewing Russian commodities, which is limiting global supply.
:{:{}:
}:
A Top Name Again
Our system gauges stock and options market sentiment to estimate which securities are likely to do well over the next six months. Peabody was one of our system's top names last summer, and appeared in a portfolio we shared here at the time.
It was a top name again last October, and it's a top name again now. On Thursday, it appeared in our top ten alongside the ProShares Ultra Bloomberg Crude Oil ETF UCO +12.51%, and the steel company Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc. CLF +2.09%, which are benefiting from similar reductions in global supply from Russia (the #3 oil exporter and #5 steel exporter in 2019). Our top name on Thursday, Tesla, Inc. TSLA -0.12% is also, of course, an indirect beneficiary of higher oil prices as an electric vehicle company.
Screen capture via Portfolio Armor on 3/3/2022.
A Roller Coaster Ride For BTU Shareholders
Despite benefiting from strong demand for its commodity, Peabody Energy has tested the stomachs of its shareholders over the last several months. After spiking on its Q3 earnings in October, the stock lost more than half its value over the next two months.
Chart
For investors want to hold BTU while limiting their downside risk, below is a way to do so.
Limiting Your Downside Risk In BTU
As of Thursday's close, this was the optimal collar to protect against a greater-than-25% drop in BTU between now and October while not capping your upside at less than 30% over the same time frame.
The net cost of this collar was negative, meaning you would have collected a net credit of $1,300 when opening this hedge on Thursday, assuming, to be conservative, that you placed both trades at the worst ends of their respective spreads (buying the puts at the ask and selling the calls at the bid). In practice, of course, you can often buy and sell options at some price between the bid and ask, so your net credit would likely have been larger than $1,300 had you done that.
This article was submitted by an external contributor and may not represent the views and opinions of Benzinga.
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desmog1119
originally posted on the Energy and Policy Institute.
In the latest sign of the U.S. coal industry’s declining ability to compete in the power sector, Peabody Energy is now struggling to find electric utility companies who are willing to accept a “clean coal” award that it presents annually.
In an email obtained through a public records request, a Peabody executive explained that it’s “hard these days for utilities to take the praise publicly.”
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https://www.ecowatch.com/interior-adviser-national-monuments-bp-2599866546.html
Interior Adviser to Join BP After Pushing to Open National Monuments to Fossil Fuel Development
:{:{:{}:
A Department of the Interior (DOI) official who played an important role in opening public lands to fossil fuelinterests has left the federal government to accept a job at BP, The Washington Post reported Monday.
Former DOI Deputy Chief of Staff Downey Magallanes led the review that resulted in Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke's plan to shrink the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah by 85 and 46 percent respectively, Think Progress pointed out.
"Her prior work on behalf of oil, gas and coal, her family's ties to the coal industry, and the fact that she is headed to BP all point in one direction: that she came to Interior with an agenda to promote fossil fuel development over the interest of the American public," Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance legal director Stephen Bloch told The Washington Post in an email.
Documents made public in March and June confirmed that allowing access to coal, oil and gas reserves was a large part of the decision to reduce the monuments' size, as was enabling mining, Think Progress reported.
Magallanes also worked on regulatory reform and offshore oil drilling, according to The Washington Post.Her father worked as a lobbyist for Peabody Energy Corp. for 14 years, according to The Hill.
The Trump administration's ethics pledge bans former employees from lobbying either their former agencies or anyone in the executive branch for five years after departure, but anonymous sources told The Washington Post that Magallanes will work with Congress. BP has confirmed she will be part of its government affairs team.
Magallanes met three times with BP officials between Jan. 30 and Aug. 31, 2017 while working for DOI, according to an official calendar obtained using the Freedom of Information Act.
On March 16, 2017 she met with BP government and regulatory affairs division officials and on April 25 she met with both BP Exploration (Alaska) and members of the Western Energy Alliance including Colorado-based BP government affairs official Sam Knaizer.
Magallanes' departure was announced by E&E news Aug. 24, according to Think Progress.
"Downey was an incredible asset and I trusted her to carry out some of the Administration's highest priority projects," Zinke said in a statement reported by The Washington Post. "She will be missed in our office and I wish her all the best."
Magallanes also spoke with excitement about her work at BP, which will begin after Labor Day.
"I am grateful to Secretary Zinke and President Trump for giving me the chance to serve in the Department of the Interior," she said in an email to The Washington Post. "I look forward to this incredible new opportunity with BP."
Meanwhile, Native American and environmental groups are fighting in court to reverse the shrinking of the Utah monuments.
"We'll be working to undo that mischief long after she's gone," Bloch told The Washington Post.
[twit]
RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB
- Zinke and Alexander: Pillaging National Parks for Fossil Fuels Is ... ›
- Uranium Company Urged Trump To Carve Up Bears Ears, Then He ... ›
- The Plot to Loot America's Wilderness | The Nation ›
- As Interior Secretary Swaggers Through Parks, His Staff Rolls Back ... ›
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nola 818 why worry?
When climate science deniers and fossil fuel evangelists met Tuesday in New Orleans for the Heartland Institute's second "America First" conference on U.S. energy, they had every reason to celebrate the unprecedented influence they enjoy in the Trump administration.
Instead, they found plenty of reasons for dread.
With carbon tax proposals floating, climate lawsuits advancing, big corporations embracing the need for action and states and cities getting into the act, many of those gathered grappled with the reality that a fossil future was not secure—despite a largely pliant White House and Congress.
Contrarian scientists, policy professionals and lawyers affiliated with conservative interests contemplated the spread of the climate action agenda as if it were a malignancy. While speakers at the live-streamed sessions universally praised President Donald Trump and his regulatory rollbacks, the overwhelming diagnosis was that more aggressive policy surgery was needed.
High on their list of targets was the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse gases are a danger to human health and welfare. That determination, affirmed by the Supreme Court, is what empowers the agency to regulate global warming pollution.
But the acting EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, has said he considers the endangerment finding "settled law" and does not wish to revisit it.
"Complete nonsense," said Atlanta lawyer Harry Macdougald,who was part of the legal team that unsuccessfully challenged the endangerment finding in court during the Obama administration. "It is a direct threat to the president's energy dominance agenda. And the next Democratic administration—and there will be one—will turn the screws."
Corporations 'Jumping on Climate Change'
Another theme running through the sessions was exasperation with corporations that have decided to take climate action on their own—or at least have refused to challenge the consensus science that human activity is the driver for global warming.
"A number of regulated utilities across the country—no reason to name names, but there are about a dozen of them—have announced they are going to ... reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050 from their generating fleet, which is the Barack Obama plan and the Hillary Clinton plan," said Frederick Palmer, a senior fellow with the Heartland Institute and a former vice president for the coal company Peabody Energy. "So it's as if Donald Trump wasn't elected president of the United States as far as they are concerned."
Palmer, who sits on the National Coal Council, a federal advisory committee to the U.S. energy secretary, said the council will soon release a study calling for action to bar coastal states from prohibiting coal export terminals, as Washington State has done. "We've got to get the left coast figured out," he said.
Palmer also called for a federal moratorium on the retirement of coal plants, as a national security imperative. He wasn't the only one to suggest that conservatives may have to scrap laissez-faire principles to keep fossil fuel energy flowing.
Joe Leimkuhler, vice president for drilling for LLOG Exploration, a Covington, Louisiana producer focused on the Gulf of Mexico, called for more royalty relief for offshore drilling to help the industry survive in an era of low prices.
Craig Richardson, executive director of E&E Legal, a conservative legal group that repeatedly sued the Obama administration's regulatory agencies, said he now sees his group as "trying to be a supportive arm of this new administration." But he lamented what he and others called "virtue signaling" by corporations "jumping on climate change."
Richardson complained about ExxonMobil leaving the conservative advocacy group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), over a clash on climate policy. (Last year, Heartland wanted ALEC to approve a resolution calling on the EPA to withdraw the endangerment finding. Exxon was among several corporations and utilities that convinced ALEC to shelve a vote on the resolution.)
Heartland co-founder Joseph Bast provoked laughter by recounting carmaker GM's response to the Trump administration proposal unveiled last week to freeze fuel economy standards. Quoting the vision statement of GM CEO Mary Barra—that the company is working toward a future of "zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion"—Bast said: "That is impossible, and it's absolutely ludicrous. Zero of each of those things mean zero cars. It means zero respect for people's personal choices of transportation. It would mean a devastating impact on the economy."
...
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oddly in wa exam, nope actually about murray and tough times for coal
One of the biggest U.S. coal companies donated $100,000 to a super PAC dedicated to electing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump the day before warning of mass layoffs at the company.
Murray Energy, which is reportedly fighting off bankruptcy, issued 4,400 layoff notices in six states on June 29 in anticipation of workforce reductions in September. On June 28, the PAC associated with the company made a $100,000 donation to the Trump Victory fund, according to a Federal Election Commission filing. Company CEO Bob Murray held a fundraiser for Trump the same day in Wheeling, W.Va.
The donation is among the $225,966 that Murray Energy PAC has donated in the 2016 election cycle, which comes as the coal business deteriorates.
When asked if the contribution was a wise use of resources by the company given the current state of the coal business, Murray Energy declined to comment. However, Murray has endorsed Trump and continues to back him, the company said.
"Mr. Murray fully supports Mr. Trump for president over Hillary Clinton, who has said that, if elected president, she is 'gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies outta business,'" the company said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. "Mr. Murray believes that Mr. Trump is totally committed to the survival of the United States coal industry and to the jobs, livelihoods and families in it."
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said that she wants to retrain coal workers and move them into other fields, but many in Appalachia see her potential presidency as a continuation of Obama's "war on coal." She was booed by crowds in West Virginia, a major coal state that she lost handily, and can expect to lose many working-class votes in coal country to Trump.
The two biggest coal companies in the country, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy, already have declared bankruptcy this year, and Murray seems to be on the precipice of doing the same.
The twin blows of increased natural gas production, which is a cheaper and cleaner burning fossil fuel, and regulation from President Obama's administration have hit coal mining.
The company blames its reduced budget for political advocacy on these two factors. According to OpenSecrets.org, the company has spent $125,000 on lobbying in 2016, down from a peak of more than $1 million in 2011.
"Murray Energy Corporation has been forced to substantially reduce its lobbying spending, as well as all of our other expenditures, due to the total destruction of the United States coal industry as caused by the Obama administration and by the increased utilization of natural gas to generate electricity," the company said.
"Indeed, the Obama administration is waging a regulatory rampage against the United States coal industry whereby they are issuing regulations faster than we can read them."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/coal-company-donated-100-000-to-trump-pac-announced-4-400-layoffs-the-next-day
==
Coal company donated $100K to Trump PAC before layoffs
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/coal-company-donated-100-000-to-trump-pac-...
1.
Peabody Energy Summary | OpenSecrets
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00110478
2.
Coal Mining | OpenSecrets
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E1210
2.
Trump coal backer wins big under Perry's power plan - POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/.../trumps-coal-backers-energy-power-rick-perry-244535
1.
The Daughter Of An Ex-Coal Executive Helped Lead Trump's National ...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../coal-trump-monuments-review_us_5a3dbe56e4b0...
1.
Coal Companies' Secret Funding of Climate Science Denial Exposed ...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/elliott.../coal-companies-secret-fun_b_9663368.html
1.
CABINET: Zinke donors include oil and gas firms using public land ...
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060048348
1.
How Coal Giant Peabody's Ideas Ended Up in Trump's Coal Study ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/.../how-coal-giant-peabody-s-ideas-ended-up-in-trump-s...
1.
Missing: donor | Must include: donor
Obscure Coal CEO Rains Money on Trump While Outflanking Rivals ...
https://www.bloomberg.com/.../obscure-coal-ceo-rains-money-on-trump-while-outfla...
1.
Peabody Energy shares rocket after Trump wins presidency - CNBC.com
https://www.cnbc.com/.../peabody-energy-shares-rocket-after-trump-wins-presidency....
1.
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/protesters-arrested-outside-peabody-meeting
may 2014
Peabody Energy is getting protests from all sides.
More than 50 people gathered outside the corporation’s annual meeting Thursday in Clayton, including Washington University students, St. Louis activists, rural southern Illinoisans and American Indians from Black Mesa, Ariz.
Ten protesters were arrested outside the Ritz-Carlton, where the meeting was held.
The complaints they expressed were as different as their backgrounds, but the group is unified in its opposition to coal.
Judy Kellen, from Rocky Branch, Ill. addresses protesters outside Peabody Energy's annual shareholder meeting.
CREDIT (MOLLY GOTT.)
Judy Kellen and her husband live on a farm outside Rocky Branch, Ill. The 74-year-old said the noise and pollution from Peabody’s proposed strip mine will push several elderly couples out of the area. Kellen recently bought stock in the company, so that she could attend the meeting and address Peabody’s CEO Greg Boyce.
"I wanted to tell Mr. Boyce that there’s got to be a better way to do this than running so many people out of our homes," she said.
Kellen said she didn’t get the opportunity. She and a handful of other shareholders who intended to voice concerns were escorted to a separate room. Organizers said two of the shareholders were arrested when they tried to get into the main shareholder’s gathering.
But Peabody spokesman Vic Svec said they could have asked their questions from the overflow room.
"It allows for full participation of the meeting, people are allowed to ask questions, to have a discussion, and to hear all proceedings and to participate fully," he said. "But [the overflow room] is to allow for an orderly meeting."
Several Washington University students also took part in Thursday’s protest. Julie Ho was involved in a 17-day sit-in demanding the school break ties with the corporation. That effort culminated in the arrest of seven students who attempted to get into a university board of trustees’ meeting to ask Peabody’s CEO to resign from the board.
Eight protesters were arrested outside Peabody Energy's annual shareholder meeting in Clayton on Thursday. Two more were arrested inside the hotel.
CREDIT (COURTESY MOLLY GOTT.)
"We’re here to come together as a united front against Peabody," Ho said. "So we’re here for all the same reasons that we were at Wash U, but we think this fight is very intimately connected to what we’re doing."
Ho is also active in Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), which has been instrumental in the "Take Back St. Louis" campaign.That effort gathered more than 36,000 signatures for a ballot initiative to ask citizens to ban corporations who produce “unsustainable energy” from getting tax incentives from the city of St. Louis.
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A lawsuit prevented the measure from getting on last month’s ballot. Peabody’s Svec said “scores” of businesses oppose the initiative, while the city of St. Louis is seeking a state law to prevent the measure or similar initiatives.
:{:{}:
}:
"This isn’t about Peabody," Svec said. "It’s about keeping the city in the 21st century."
Zach Chasnoff, with MORE, told protestors Thursday that those efforts are subverting democracy.
"Your government does not answer to the people. Unless you count corporations as people," Chasnoff said through a bullhorn to a chorus of boos.
At least two opponents traveled fromBlack Mesa, Ariz., to try to attend the shareholders meeting. Marshall Johnson called himself an “original shareholder” who works with the organization “To Nizhoni Ani” in opposition of Peabody’s coal mining in the area. He said 40 years of coal mining and climate change resulting from pollution have depleted the Navajo Aquifer.
"They are in discussion on how to improve their profits, while they are jeopardizing our way of life," Johnson said, pointing to the Ritz where the meeting was being held. "That’s how we are shareholders; the original shareholders."
Peabody reached an agreement with the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe in the 1960s. Svec said a minority opposed to mining in the area should instead bring their concerns to the tribes.
As for being attacked from several organizations at once, Svec said it’s part of being a big company.
"What you don’t hear from are the vast majority who wake up every day and want to have low cost electricity and want the air to become a little cleaner," he said. "And that’s the business that we’re about and it was that business that we were engaged in today despite the fact that attention seems to flow to those who were conducting unlawful activities."
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Peabody Coal: vs Take Back St. Louis
Peabody Coal: vs Take Back St. Louis
7/14Missouri Governor Nixon signed SB 672, with Amendment 135.980 from the state legislature — where Peabody spent almost half a million dollars in the last two elections) which bans the City of St. Louis from restricting through ballot initiative public financial incentives for coal mining companies for two years, basically stopping giving incentives to coal companies and help create a green economy. While the case was pending, the mayor’s office pushed a curious amendment to an obscure state bill. In the middle of a bill about county prosecutors and sewer districts, you’ll find a provision that specifically prohibits the city of St. Louis from passing, by ballot measure, any restrictions on tax breaks for coal mining companies. There’s only one coal mining company in St. Louis known to receive city tax breaks: Peabody Energy.
This story began when ordinary citizens joined together and took a stand against both climate change and their city’s destructive practice of granting enormous tax breaks to big business while cutting funding for public services. They talked to thousands of residents who were upset that St. Louis keeps giving away tens of millions of dollars of badly needed public money to Peabody Energy (the world’s largest private-sector coal company). They collected over 22,000 signatures — more than 10 percent of all the voters in St. Louis — on a petition for a ballot initiative. The city’s elections board verified the signatures, and began preparing to print ballots. The coal company’s lawyers rushed to court and asked a judge to block the election on the grounds that the law would unfairly discriminate against the coal company and its business partners, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. At the trial, Take Back St. Louis provided evidence about the environmental damage caused by burning coal, and the damage to the fabric of St. Louis caused by the city’s penchant for giving away public dollars to big business. The other side didn’t put any witnesses on the stand.
The judge also opined that the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution - which was passed after the Civil War to protect the rights of newly-freed slaves - prevents the people of St. Louis from voting on the initiative. The opinion cites the infamous Citizens United decision to suggest that coal companies have the same rights as people, which effectively means that corporate tax breaks are off-limits for voters. Before the people even had an opportunity to vote, the judge decided that fossil fuel energy companies and their major business partners are entitled to judicial protection from the democratic process. It is unusual in itself that this ruling would occur before residents even had a chance to vote on the initiative. Usually, initiatives go before voters and legal proceedings happen if the initiative passes. CA Prop 49 on corporate personhood was also pulled from the ballot, though for arguably less evil reasons.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2014/02/13/st-louis-judge-cites-citizen-united-protect-tax-breaks-peabody-energy
With the quick stroke of a pen, a circuit court judge in St. Louis has singlehandedly silenced more than 22,000 city residents, who had sought to bring a ballot initiative to end tax breaks to fossil fuel companies to a citywide vote in April.
Last summer, volunteers with the Take Back St. Louis coalition gathered over 22,000 signatures to put onto the ballot a measure that would amend the city’s charter to include a “Sustainable Energy Policy” and end taxpayer-funded support of fossil fuel companies.
According to Take Back St. Louis, the “proposed charter amendment would end public financial incentives, such as tax abatements, to fossil fuel mining companies and those doing $1 million of business with them per year, and requires the city to create a sustainable energy plan for renewable energy and sustainability initiatives on city-owned vacant land.”
On Tuesday, Judge Robert Dierker sided with Peabody Energy (in a decision you can read here) to grant a temporary restraining order that would, in essence, keep the initiative off the April 8th ballot.
First declaring the initiative “facially unconstitutional,” Judge Dierker proceeded to cite the Citizens United decision in explaining why the policy would represent a “patent denial of equal protection” to fossil fuel energy companies. Specifically, Judge Dierker wrote:
business entities (which, after all, are a species of associations of citizens coming together in the exercise of economic freedom) are entitled to constitutional protection as citizens and may not arbitrarily be denied basic legal rights. See Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm., 558 U.S. 310 (2010).
The proposed initiative and judge’s decision have implications far beyond the city of St. Louis. Peabody Energy, the largest privately-owned coal mining company in the world, is headquartered in St. Louis, and received tax breaks of over $61 million from the city in 2010. The Take Back St. Louis coalition was hoping to target future giveaways, arguing that the public funds would be much better spent on underfunded local services like schools.
“We fundamentally disagree with this temporary ruling, and quoting Citizens United is an insult to home rule powers and our local democracy. Saying that Peabody Energy has equal rights with St. Louis public school students who lack supplies due to corporate tax breaks is what is a violation of rights in our city,” said Reginald Rounds with the Take Back St. Louis campaign. “We, and the 22,000 registered voters in the City of St. Louis who signed to put this on the ballot, will continue to fight for our right to have a sustainable local economy, not one run by coal corporations and other polluters.”
:{:{Peabody Energy’s lawyers filed the restraining order motion two weeks ago, and seem to have a sympathetic ear with Judge Dierker, who is an outspoken opponent of public interest law. In 2006, Judge Dierker authored “The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault,” a book which he promoted extensively on Fox News.}:
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Also providing testimony in the hearing were two representatives from the mayor’s office, who oppose the citizen-driven initiative, spotlighting what Take Back St. Louis reps call “collaboration” between the mayor’s office and Peabody.
Take Back St. Louis has vowed to fight the temporary restraining order, and the legal battle could prove a crucial precedent for how the controversial Citizens United ruling can be applied to local resistance against taxpayer handouts to fossil fuel companies.
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