CITIES sub-nat'l
6/17 includes sub-national city, state, county oops, see LOCAL. and City/cty
see climate lawsuits
SEE BLUE CITIES 8 25
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note polarization less b/c mayors have to be pothole practical/accountable.
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exxon-texas-courts-critics-climate-crimes
guard uk
exxonMobil is attempting to use an unusual Texas law to target and intimidate its critics, claiming that lawsuits against the company over its long history of downplaying and denying the climate crisis violate the US constitution’s guarantees of free speech.
The US’s largest oil firm is asking the Texas supreme court to allow it to use the law, known as rule 202, to pursue legal action against more than a dozen California municipal officials. Exxon claims that in filing lawsuits against the company over its role in the climate crisis, the officials are orchestrating a conspiracy against the firm’s first amendment rights.
A US small-town mayor sued the oil industry. Then Exxon went after him
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/16/imperial-beach-california-exxon-mobil-climate-crisis)
The oil giant also makes the curious claim that legal action in the California courts is an infringement of the sovereignty of Texas, where the company is headquartered.
Eight California cities and counties have accused Exxon and other oil firms of breaking state laws by misrepresenting and burying evidence, including from its own scientists, of the threat posed by rising temperatures. The municipalities are seeking billions of dollars in compensation for damage caused by wildfires, flooding and other extreme weather events, and to meet the cost of building new infrastructure to prepare for the consequences of rising global temperatures.
Rule 202 in effect allows corporations to go on a fishing expedition for incriminating evidence. They are able to question individuals under oath and demand access to documents even before any legal action is filed against them.
Exxon wants to use the provision to force the California officials to travel to Texas to be questioned by the firm’s lawyers about what the company describes as “lawfare” – the misuse of the legal system for political ends.
Exxon claims in a petition to the Texas supreme court that it is entitled to question the officials in order to collect evidence of “potential violations of ExxonMobil’s rights in Texas to exercise its first amendment privileges” to say what it likes about climate science.
“The potential defendants’ lawfare is aimed at chilling the speech of not just ExxonMobil, but of other prominent members of the Texas energy sector on issues of public debate, in this case, climate change,” the company claims in its petition.
The oil giant’s critics say Exxon’s attempt to use claims of free speech to curtail the first amendment rights of others follows a pattern of harassment toward those who challenge the company’s claims about the climate crisis.
Patrick Parenteau, a law professor and former director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont law school, has described the company’s move as “intimidation” intended to make “it cost a lot and be painful to take on Exxon” whether or not the company wins its case.
Greg Abbott made the unusual move of writing to the state supreme court to advocate on the behalf of Exxon. Photograph: Bob Daemmrich/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
In a highly unusual move, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, has written to the all-Republican court – half of whose members he appointed – in support of Exxon. He accused the California litigants of attempting “to suppress the speech of eighteen Texas-based energy companies on the subject of climate and energy policies”.
“When out-of-state officials try to project their power across our border, as respondents have done by broadly targeting the speech of an industry crucial to Texas, they cannot use personal jurisdiction to scamper out of our courts and retreat across state lines,” Abbott wrote.
In backing its claim, Exxon’s petition to the Texas supreme court gives the example of the Oakland city attorney, Barbara Parker, who in 2017 “issued a press release seeking to stifle the speech of the Texas energy sector or, as she likes to refer to it, ‘BIG OIL’”.
The press release said: “It is past time to debate or question the reality of global warming … Just like BIG TOBACCO, BIG OIL knew the truth long ago and peddled misinformation to con their customers and the American public.”
Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment)
The company also names the then San Francisco city attorney, Dennis Herrera, because he accused fossil fuel companies of launching a “disinformation campaign to deny and discredit” the reality of global heating, and pledged to hold the companies responsible “to account”.
Exxon has, in addition, targeted an environmental lawyer in Boston, Matthew Pawa, who represents some of the California municipalities. The firm describes him as “an outspoken advocate of misusing government power to limit free speech” and alleges that Pawa “recruited” the California cities and counties to sue Exxon.
“Those lawsuits are an affront to the first amendment,” the company claims.
Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor and co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, said Exxon had a long history of attempting to bully its critics into silence.
“Now that the arguments have moved into the legal sphere, this feels to me like an extension of the sort of harassment, bullying and intimidation that we’ve seen in the scientific sphere for the last two decades,” she said.
Oreskes said that the legal strategy is also part of a broader public relations campaign to paint the company as a victim of radical environmentalists and opportunistic politicians when Exxon argues that it should be heralded for its efforts to combat the climate crisis.
“Exxon Mobil has for a long time now tried to make themselves out to be the victim, as if somehow they’re the innocent party here,” she said.
The Texas supreme court is considering the case after a lower court backed Exxon’s attempts to use rule 202 against the California officials. The ruling was later overturned on appeal.
The appeal court sympathised with Exxon by acknowledging “an impulse to safeguard an industry that is vital to Texas’s economic well-being” and saying that “lawfare is an ugly tool by which to seek the environmental policy changes” pursued by California municipalities. But the appeal court said the defendants did not have sufficient direct connection to Texas for the case to be heard in the state.
Exxon has ‘a track record of promoting half truths, misrepresentations and in some cases outright lies’
Naomi Oreskes
Exxon has tried to head off climate litigation before with lawsuits claiming that the attorney generals of Massachusetts and New York were violating the company’s rights by investigating it. Those moves were blocked by the Massachusetts supreme court and by a federal court.
If the Texas supreme court allows its rule 202 bid to proceed, Exxon might expect a more sympathetic hearing for its claims in a state court system that has shown deference to big oil.
Exxon is facing a barrage of other lawsuits across the US. A number accuse the company and other fossil fuel firms of breaching consumer protection laws by propagating misinformation about climate science.
Oreskes said Exxon went further than most other oil companies in seeking to hide the evidence of its own scientists collected about global heating and in running a disinformation campaign.
“They’re pushing their freedom of speech as an issue because more than any other company, it’s been proven by people like me and others that they have a track record of promoting half truths, misrepresentations and in some cases outright lies in the public sphere,” she said.
“This is so well documented that unless they can come up with some strategy to defend it, they’re in potentially pretty serious trouble.”
This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story
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YMAIL 2 24ExxonKnews
Chicago last week brought the newest lawsuit against Big Oil companies for spreading disinformation about the climate-warming hazards of burning fossil fuels — adding the third largest city in the U.S. to the growing list of state and local governments pushing for oil and gas majors to be held accountable in court.
The case charges BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and the American Petroleum Institute with conspiring together and through front groups to run “tobacco-industry-style campaigns to deceive and mislead the public about the damaging nature of their fossil fuel products.” The fallout of those campaigns, according to the complaint, was a long delay in climate action that has come at an increasingly unbearable cost to Chicago residents — particularly in its low income neighborhoods and communities of color.
City officials say their legal action is necessary for the city to help shift the financial burden of adapting to climate disasters away from those communities and back onto the companies most responsible.
“There is no justice without accountability,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson in a statement. “From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as are the costs of surviving them. That is why we are seeking to hold these Defendants accountable.”
Ted Boutrous of law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, an attorney for Chevron and chief architect of Big Oil's legal arguments in these cases, said in a statement that “addressing climate change requires a coordinated international policy response, not meritless local litigation over lawful and essential energy production.”
The city is charging the companies with 10 counts of failure to warn, negligence, fraud, conspiracy, and public nuisance, and it asks for compensatory damages and the disgorgement of profits made in the course of the industry’s fraud, among other remedies. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Cook County court, also requests a jury trial, where the companies could face more evidence of their deception gained through the discovery process.
That deception, Chicago argues, includes the oil majors’ ongoing campaigns to “falsely present themselves as corporate leaders in the fight against climate change, claiming to invest substantially in low-emission technologies and zero-emission energy sources, while their business continues to be overwhelmingly focused on fossil fuel production and sales.”
As one example, the complaint cites a recent BP ad targeting Illinois Facebook users that claims “We agree - the world needs fewer emissions. That's why we're working to make all forms of energy cleaner and better.” BP is simultaneously reneging on its climate pledges and increasing its production of oil and gas.
“At the end of the day, the climate crisis that we’re enduring was known by fossil fuel companies — they were warned decades ago by their own scientists of the potentially severe or even catastrophic consequences of their approach,” said Chicago Alderman Matt Martin, who applauded city leaders’ decision to file suit. “These companies should no longer be allowed to shift the burden of paying for the impacts resulting from that conduct onto Chicagoans.”
The harm to Chicago from climate change
It might be difficult to imagine what climate change looks like for a Midwestern city far from rising seas and hurricanes — but Chicago is susceptible to a spate of climate threats.
Chicago’s complaint cites more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, shoreline erosion, toxic algae blooms in Lake Michigan, and extreme heat events like a four-day heat wave in 1995 that killed more than 700 Chicagoans.
The 1995 heat wave was a “watershed moment,” said Daniel Horton, who leads the Climate Change Research Group at Northwestern University. “Since that time the city has done a number of things to improve community resilience, but we expect more heatwaves in the future as the world continues to warm — so we have to constantly update our policies and prepare for extreme heat,” he added.
Many victims of that heat wave were elderly, low-income, and Black, residing in apartments without air conditioning. Those groups are still most at risk from extreme heat and air pollution in Chicago, which can coincide to produce “profound public health consequences,” said Horton, like they did when wildfire smoke from Canada gave the city the worst air quality in the world in June. The same demographics were also hit hardest during a severe rain event in July, which wreaked havoc on Chicago’s West Side, and are most susceptible to the city’s more-regular flooding.
“When you’re talking about the legacy of environmental racism all across the city, too often with regard to both severe weather and other aspects of the climate crisis, the communities bearing the brunt of that devastation are lower income communities of color,” said Alderman Martin.
Chicago is an “incredibly segregated city,” explained Horton, where Black and Hispanic communities are far more likely to live in places that are hotter, have poorer air quality, and are most flood-prone. The city can make decisions to ease the burden on those communities — like figuring out “where to increase our green infrastructure, building more of a green canopy and reducing the heat island effect, deciding where to build cooling centers in neighborhoods that have more vulnerable citizens or people without access to air conditioning or the ability to pay for it,” he said. The more the city invests in community adaptation, the higher the price tag — in its complaint, the city said it is already spending $188 million on climate projects in low-income communities — and that’s the kind of thing Chicago wants oil companies to help pay for.
“There’s surviving, and then there’s thriving,” Horton said. “I like to think surviving isn’t the goal.”
“Another powerful player”
More than 25% of all Americans are now represented by governments taking oil companies to court for climate deception. Chicago’s lawsuit brings “another powerful player into the game,” remarked Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School.
“There’s strength in numbers, and the more entities like Chicago and California that have the resources to do battle, the better, from the plaintiffs’ side of it,” Parenteau said.
Chicago is suing as similar cases across the country move toward trial in state court. Massachusetts' consumer fraud case against Exxon is currently in the pre-trial discovery phase, and the City and County of Honolulu is in the process of agreeing what discovery will look like once it starts. Delaware is requesting that the state’s Supreme Court review a lower court’s ruling regarding which parts of its case can be heard at trial. In Italy, the trial for twelve Italian citizens’ lawsuit against oil giant Eni just kicked off.
Parenteau had a long list of reasons why new communities like Chicago would choose to sue now — growing evidence of what the companies knew and how they lied, more attribution science linking specific companies’ emissions to specific damages, the state of California filing suit, plaintiffs winning the fight to keep their lawsuits in state court, and other legal successes against oil majors across the world.
Or it could be simpler than all that. “These cities are beginning to realize just how much money they’re facing to deal with climate effects, and the recalcitrance of the oil companies that are sitting on piles of money and making more every year,” he said. “Maybe it’s too much for them to ignore.”
Thanks for reading ExxonKnews!
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https://www.courthousenews.com/big-oil-must-face-california-city-and-county-lawsuits-over-climate-change/
cn seems legit
sAN FRANCISCO (CN) — The Ninth Circuit affirmed Tuesday that lawsuits seeking to hold the world’s largest energy companies financially liable for climate change and the rising sea levels that threaten California’s coastal communities should stay in state court, setting the stage for a legal offensive comparable to one that won multibillion-dollar awards against Big Tobacco.
The rulingcomes after a three-judge panel took a second look at a jurisdictional dispute between the energy companies and four municipalities after being ordered to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court.
San Mateo County, Marin County and the cities of Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach in San Diego County sued Chevron, BP and three dozen other oil, gas and coal companies in separate state courts in July 2017, claiming the fuel companies created a public nuisance by hiding for nearly 50 years that fossil fuel consumption was heating and damaging the earth.
After the cases were removed to federal court, the local governments fought to remand them to state court, arguing state law claims of public nuisance should be decided by California’s judicial system.
The energy giants objected, insisting the claims are governed by federal law because they implicate “uniquely federal interests,” including matters of interstate and international commerce and environmental policy.
In March 2018, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria remanded the cases to their respective state courts.
A unanimous three-judge Ninth Circuit panel upheld Chhabria’s ruling two years later, finding the federal court lacks jurisdiction to consider state law claims. Writing for the majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta, a George W. Bush appointee, rejected the oil companies’ argument that because they provided fuel to the U.S. government through service contracts, they were “acting under” a federal officer’s directions.
The U.S. Supreme Court granted the energy companies’ petition for certiorari and sent the cases back to the Ninth Circuit to reconsider its ruling in light of the high court’s 2021 decision in BP p.l.c. v. Mayor & City Council of Baltimore, where it held that a federal appeals court can review a federal judge’s entire remand order. In that case, the city of Baltimore sued 26 oil companies for creating the greenhouse gases responsible for rising sea levels.
But Ikuta and her fellow panelists, U.S. Circuit Judges Morgan Christen and Kenneth Lee, declined to change their minds, sticking to the long-standing principle that federal courts should narrowly limit their reach to protect the jurisdiction of state courts.
“Our adherence to this doctrine does not change merely because plaintiffs raise novel and sweeping causes of action,” she wrote. “We therefore reject the broad interpretations of removal jurisdiction urged on us by the energy companies and affirm the district court’s remand order.”
The panel also rejected the argument that the energy companies’ conduct occurred on federal land and must be governed by federal law. The judges found that while some of the companies operated on federal land, such as the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve run by Chevron predecessor Standard Oil, the companies fail to account for how much of their conduct took place on federal enclaves. “The connection between conduct on federal enclaves and the counties’ alleged injuries is too attenuated and remote to establish that the counties’ cause of action is governed by the federal law applicable to any federal enclave,” Ikuta wrote.
The companies had also argued that the cases should stay in federal court because a portion of their fossil-fuel extraction took place on the Outer Continental Shelf, which falls under federal jurisdiction. “We reject this argument, because the connection between such conduct and the injuries alleged by the plaintiffs here is too attenuated to give rise to jurisdiction,” Ikuta wrote, reasoning that the counties’ lawsuit claim only local injuries, and focus on the companies’ “concerted campaign” to hide the harmful effects of fossil fuels from the public. “These allegations do not refer to actions taken on the Outer Continental Shelf,” she wrote.
The cities and counties praised the opinion as “clear and reasoned” in a statement.
“We appreciate the panel’s thorough review of this matter and are eager to return to the state courts where we filed our cases more than four years ago,” the plaintiffs said an email sent through the law firm Sher Edling LLP. “It is time to go to trial to hold these defendants accountable for deceiving consumers about the dangers associated with the use of their products, and to protect our taxpayers from having to bear the enormous costs resulting from that deception.”
The same Ninth Circuit panel found U.S. District Judge William Alsup lacked jurisdiction when he dismissed similar lawsuits brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland. The judges remanded the cases to Alsup so he can reconsider if alternative grounds justify keeping the two lawsuits in federal court, though their ruling Tuesday means those cases will likely end up in state court as well.
In an email, BP head of corporate communications Megan Baldino said the company could not speak about pending litigation. Chevron spokesman Braden Reddallsaid in an email that the company “respectfully disagrees” with the panel’s decision.
“Plaintiffs’ claims are based on allegations about worldwide carbon emissions and address global climate change — national and international issues that can be governed only by federal, not state, law. The court acknowledges that cases such as this one “raise novel and sweeping causes of action,'” Reddall said, noting that like Alsup, the Second Circuit had dismissed nearly identical claims as “sprawling” and overly ambitious. “Although the court has decided that plaintiffs’ claims for now can proceed past this preliminary stage, Chevron looks forward to additional challenges that should put an early end to this meritless lawsuit.”
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guk
...In many cases, API was prepared to carry out the dirty work that individual companies did not want to be held responsible for. In 1998, after countries signed the Kyoto Protocol to help curb carbon emissions, API drew up a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign to ensure that “climate change becomes a non-issue”. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.
Much of this is the basis of several lawsuits against API. The first was filed last year by theMinnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, who accuses the group of working alongside ExxonMobil and Koch Industries to lie about the scale of the climate crisis. The suit alleges that “previously unknown internal documents” show that API and the others well understood the dangers for decades but “engaged in a public-relations campaign that was not only false, but also highly effective” to undermine climate science.
The city ofHoboken in New Jersey is also suing API, claiming that it engaged in a conspiracy by joining and funding “front groups” that ran “deceptive advertising and communications campaigns that promote climate disinformation and denialism”.
The lawsuits allege that API funded scientists known to deny or underplay climate changes, and gave millions of dollars to ostensibly independent organisations, such as the Cato Institute and the George C Marshall Institute, which denied or downplayed the growing environmental crisis.
“API has been a member of at least five organizations that have promoted disinformation about fossil-fuel products to consumers,” Ellison alleges in Minnesota’s lawsuit. “These front groups were formed to provide climate disinformation and advocacy from a seemingly objective source, when, in fact, they were financed and controlled by ExxonMobil and other sellers of fossil-fuel products.”
It wasn’t always this way....
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https://www.climatedocket.com/
oct 7 2020
Karen Savage
To prove its allegations that California communities are conspiringagainst it in a series of climate liability suits, Exxon asked the Texas Supreme Court to force officials from those communities to provide documents and testimony about the lawsuits.
In a petition filed Friday, Exxon asked the court whether the state has personal jurisdiction over the officials, who are from the cities and counties of San Francisco, Santa Cruz and San Mateo, the cities of Oakland, Imperial Beach, as well as Marin County. Attorney Matthew Pawa, who formerly represented some of the municipalities, is also named.
It is Exxon’s latest attempt to obtain information from Pawa and the California officials. The company alleges they are involved in a large-scale conspiracy to penalize the company for its “views” on climate change.
In the lawsuits, the municipalities allege the company has known for decades that their products overwhelmingly drive global warming, and instead of warning the public, engaged in long campaigns to cloud its understanding of the science. The communities are now grappling with costly climate impacts such as wildfires, extreme temperatures and sea level rise and are seeking compensation for related damages, as well as for infrastructure upgrades needed to protect their communities from future impacts.
Exxon, which first filed the discovery request in Jan. 2018, contends the suits are an attempt to “suppress Texas-based speech about climate and energy policies.” It wants the officials to turn over documents and submit to depositions that could be used as evidence in future legal action.
Tarrant County District Judge R.H.Wallace, Jr. initially allowed Exxon to proceed with discovery, ruling against the California municipal officials, who have argued that the Lone Star State does not have jurisdiction over them.
That ruling was reluctantly overturned by a state appellate court in June.
“The law simply does not permit us to agree with Exxon’s contention that the potential defendants have the purposeful contacts with our state needed to satisfy the minimum-contacts standard that binds us,” wrote a three-judge panel of the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Bonnie Sudderth urged the Texas Supreme Court to reconsider what is required in order for the state to have jurisdiction over defendants.
Exxon is now asking the high court to do just that.
“Review is necessary to safeguard Texas’s sovereign interest in adjudicating lawsuits that affect the speech of its citizens and a core component of its economy,” Exxon attorneys wrote in the petition.
Exxon further argues thatmunicipal officials “attacked protected speech and associational activities in Texas” when they filed climate liability suits against the company.
The municipalities “seek to wrest Texas policy decisions from Texas citizens by diminishing the pocketbooks and stifling the speech of its industry,” Exxon’s attorneys told the court. “That is precisely the type of intentionally targeted conduct thatgives rise to personal jurisdiction.”
In addition to the California suits, Exxon is a defendant in nearly all of the dozens of climate change-related lawsuits filed against fossil fuel companies by communities across the nation since 2017.
The oil giant made similar allegations of free speech violations in a lawsuit filed to stop investigations by the New York and Massachusetts attorneys general, who were digging into allegations that Exxon deceived the public about the risks posed to their climate by their products.
That case was emphatically dismissed in 2017 by U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni, who said Exxon’s claims were “implausible” and brought “on the basis of extremely thin allegations and speculative inferences.” Caproni called allegations by the company that the investigations were politically motivated a “wild stretch of logic.”
Both AGs later filedlawsuits against Exxon for fraud. A New York judge ruled last year that the state failed to prove its allegations. A suit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey is proceeding in state court.
The court is expected to decide whether it will accept the petition for review in the coming months.
FILED UNDER: CALIFORNIA CLIMATE LAWSUITS, LIABILITY LITIGATION
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ew 920
city of Hoboken on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against multiple Big Oil players—including ExxonMobil, incorporated in New Jersey—joining an increasing number of state and local governments using litigation in efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for defrauding the public about foreseen climate crisis damages and to make companies "pay their fair share" of the costs of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to a warming planet.
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World Mayors Call for Car-Free Streets, End to Fossil Fuel Subsidies as Part of ‘Green and Just Recovery’
7/20 ew
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/03/keystone-xl-future-pipeline-permits
On April 15, Judge Brian Morris nullified water-crossing permits in Montana that were granted for the Keystone XL, a major setback for the long-embattled tar sands oil pipeline. The ruling came just days after Keystone XL owner TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, obtained billions of dollars in subsidies from the Alberta government as global oil prices plummeted.
The oil and gas industry has taken notice. Seemingly just a ruling on Keystone XL — the subject of opposition by the climate movement for the past decade — the ruling could have far broader implications for the future of building water-crossing pipelines and utility lines.
In his decision, Judge Morris cited a potential violation of the Endangered Species Act when he ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do a deeper analysis of potential impacts to protected species. Morris required the Corps to demonstrate whether or not it could construct the pipeline without harming endangered species, such as the Pallid Sturgeon or the American burying beetle. Instead, the Army Corps “failed to consider relevant expert analysis and failed to articulate a rational connection between the facts it found and the choice it made,” Morris ruled, when the Corps gave Keystone XL the initial green light.
The original July 2019 complaintin that case — filed by Northern Plains Resource Council, Bold Alliance, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Center for Biological Diversity — also argued that the Army Corps had violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in using an obscure regulatory lever to fast-track the review process.
Known as Nationwide Permit 12, the permit only requires a short environmental analysis compared to the more robust environmental impact statement required under NEPA for other major infrastructure projects. But Morris also wrote that the decision applied not just to Keystone XL, but to all major federal projects aiming to utilize Nationwide Permit 12, calling for it to be “vacated pending completion of the consultation process and compliance with all environmental statutes and regulations.”
Just two days after this decision, Army Corps regulatory program Chief Jennifer Moyer wrote in an email obtained by the Associated Press that the agency should suspend the program indefinitely “out of an abundance of caution” until the issue is resolved legally.
The Trump administration has already requested a procedural halt on implementing Morris’ decision until its potential appeal weaves its way through the legal system.
“The Court has eliminated Nationwide Permit 12 for use by any utility line project anywhere in the country, which has extraordinary and immediate implications for numerous projects,” the U.S. Department of Justice attorneys wrote on behalf of the Army Corps.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), the lobbying and advocacy voice of the oil and gas industry, has also filed an affidavit in favor of putting a procedural halt to Morris’ ruling.
“The ability to provide reliable energy is even more important now during this sensitive and challenging time brought on by COVID-19,” Robin Rorick, Vice President of Midstream and Industry Operations for API, wrote in the affidavit. “The Court’s Order could threaten API’s members’ ability to continue numerous energy and infrastructure projects, affecting the health of numerous companies and job security in an already-strained economy.”
API also joined North America’s Building Trades Unions and Interstate Natural Gas Association of America in denouncing the ruling along similar lines.
'Single and Complete'
Nationwide Permit 12 historically was used for small “single and complete” projects crossing water parcels half an acre in size or smaller.
But in the aftermath of protests and civil disobedience actions taken against Keystone XL, the Obama administration began using that permitting process to split pipelines into hundreds or thousands of half-acre pieces. The process was a way around the more robust and democratic National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulatory process, which involves both a public commenting and public hearing phase. Nationwide Permit 12 was also used to push through the Dakota Access pipeline, as well as the southern leg of the Keystone XL, both greenlighted by President Barack Obama.
During the Obama era, environmental groups decried this as a form of “segmentation” and a way out of complying with NEPA, which they routinely challeneged in court with some success—though not enough to undo the legal lever. The bedrock environmental law is now under further attack by President Donald Trump, with the administration trying to remove climate change contribution as a factor analyzed under the law for major projects and aiming to narrow the scope of and time it takes to complete these environmental impact reviews.
[vid]
Since March 2017, the Trump administration has utilized Nationwide Permit 12 over 37,000 times, the AP reported. As it stands today, the Army Corps’ decision to halt use of the Nationwide Permit 12 fast-track tool has put 360 permit applications on hold.
“The reason that matters is that the public and the communities and everybody that lives there has the chance to get involved in the process,” Eric Huber, Senior Managing Attorney with the Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program, told DeSmog. “Otherwise, these special permits just allow a pipeline company to go out and start construction without notice to anybody or to take private property and just proceed and blast this through regardless of how the local community thinks of it.”
External corporate attorneys, too, have taken notice and expressed their own concerns about the ruling.
“The decision puts in limbo thousands of infrastructure projects nationwide that rely on [Nationwide Permit] 12 for the construction, maintenance, or repair of utility lines and poses particularly acute problems for the oil and gas industry, which relies on the permit to facilitate projects ranging from large interstate pipelines to smaller gathering lines at exploration and production sites,” wrote attorneys fromBrownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a firm with close ties to the Trump administration, in one such reaction to the ruling.
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck’s fossil fuel industry lobbying clients include the American Petroleum Institute, American Public Power Association, Freeport LNG, Talos Energy, Jordan Cove LNG, WPX Energy, and the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association.
Another firm heavily involved in fossil fuel industry litigation and lobbying,Steptoe & Johnson, also weighed in on the ruling and wrote that it could have the impact of “extending permitting time frames for these types of projects” going forward. The firm’s fossil fuel industry lobbying clients include American Gas Association, Gas Technology Institute, and Peabody Energy.
Permian Highway Pipeline in Texas
The legal precedent set in the Keystone XL case is already playing out in federal courts.
On April 30, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuitin the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas against the Army Corps of Engineers over another controversial pipeline. The complaint says the Army Corps did not comply with NEPA in issuing a Nationwide Permit 12 to the 428-mile Permian Highway gas pipeline. It also argues the agency is not currently in compliance with the order in the Keystone XL case because it has continued to allow pipeline construction under the contested Nationwide Permit 12 program.
“It is outrageous that the Corps approved this project without public notice or opportunity to comment on their permits,” Rebecca McCreary, a Sierra Club attorney, said of the Permian Highway pipeline in a press release. “Nationwide Permit 12 allows for no public hearings or participation by the local communities before the Corps permits construction to start, nor is there public notice or comment on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permits allowing harm to the endangered species along the route. The Corps should stop this project immediately.”
Owned by Kinder Morgan, Permian Highway is a pipeline slated to carry gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in Texas’ Permian Basin east across the state. Kinder Morgan told DeSmog it was aware of the lawsuit, but declined to comment on it and the broader Nationwide Permit 12 issue.
Permian Highway has already seen issues with spills into water systems, with one late March incident spilling 36,000 gallons of drilling slurry — including a carcinogenic additive — into groundwater.
[twt]
Responding, the Hays County Commissioners Court voted on April 22 to rescind road permits given by the Texas county to allow Kinder Morgan to drill underneath county roads as it builds the pipeline. And Kinder Morgan, too, has suspended construction on this portion of the pipeline as it “determines the best path forward” in the aftermath of the spill, the company told Houston Chronicle.
The City of Austin, City of San Marcos, Hays County, Travis County, and others also filed their own Endangered Species Act lawsuit in February, arguing that the pipeline could threaten protected Golden Cheeked Warblers, two salamander species, and their habitats.
Keystone XL Decision Looms
In the Keystone XL case in Montana, Morris recently deniedthe Army Corps a procedural stay in the case. TC Energy, for its part, wants the decision struck down as it applies both to its own pipeline and for the permitting program at large.
“If TC Energy does not receive authorization from the Army Corps by early July, its construction plans will be significantly impacted,” Gary Salsman, a TC Energy vice president for the Keystone XL project, wrote in his April 29 affidavit. “Currently, TC Energy is evaluating potential options that would be available to it in that circumstance, each of which have significant adverse consequences.”
Those “potential options,” Salsman wrote, include a potential construction delay across Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska; a change in construction plans this year to avoid the waters it is currently slated to cross that are impacted by the vacating of Nationwide Permit 12; or ending construction all together. He added that if construction does not begin in 2020, it could cost the company $750 million to $1.3 billion.
Morris could make a decision on how broadly his Nationwide Permit 12 decision applies as soon as May 8. Regardless of the outcome, Morris' next move will likely face an appeal from either side.
TAGS:
Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck
National Environmental Policy Act
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theconv 420
Income inequality is getting worse in US urban areas
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colorado cities sues too
https://www.drillednews.com/post/as-more-communities-sue-for-climate-damages-state-houses-consider-bills-to-stop-them
drilled
As More Communities Sue for Climate Damages, State Houses Consider Bills to Stop Them
Proposed legislation in Kansas, backed by a top business lobby, could make it harder for local communities to sue fossil fuel corporations.
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120 icn
...But so far, the industry's efforts to get the climate suits out of the state courts have been largely unsuccessful, setting the stage for the federal appeals. In all but two of the 13 cases, federal district court judges have agreed that the lawsuits should be heard in state courts guided by various state laws.
A federal judge in San Francisco has been the exception, rejecting lawsuits filed by San Francisco and Oakland on the grounds that state courts were not the proper place to deal with global issues like climate change.
"The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case," U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup wrote inhis opinion.
Meanwhile, six other California lawsuits, filed by the cities ofImperial Beach, Santa Cruz and Richmond; and the counties of San Mateo, Marin and Santa Cruz, remain in state court after U.S. District Court Jusge Vincent Chhabria ruledthat was the proper jurisdiction.
Similarly, U.S. District Judge Ellen L. Hollander in Maryland, ruling on Baltimore's climate suit, wrote that the industry's desire for federal jurisdiction was nothing more than a "hijacking" of state authority.
To allow the case to move forward in federal court "enhances federal judicial power at the expense of plaintiffs and state courts," Hollanderwrote.
She went on to explain that the public nuisance claims alleged by the city could only be decided in a state court. The city, she noted, "nowhere even alleges that the defendants violated any federal statutes or regulations."
The industry didn't like that slap down, and sent its lawyers to the Supreme Court for help, as it did after two other similarly adverse rulings. They argued before the high court that state cases should not be allowed to move forward until the federal appellate courts resolve the jurisdictional questions about where climate nuisance claims belong.
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120 bill mck RS
And with Washington effectively gridlocked, the fight has moved elsewhere. When Trump pulled out of the climate accords, for instance, he explained that he’d been elected to govern “Pittsburgh, not Paris.” The next day the mayor of Pittsburgh said his town was now planning on 100 percent renewable energy, a pledge that’s been made by places as diverse as Atlanta, San Diego and Salt Lake City. Next year, representatives of thousands of regions, provinces, cities, parishes, arrondissements, districts and counties will descend on San Francisco for a Paris-like gathering of subnational actors, summoned by California Gov. Jerry Brown. According to Brown (who is as sadly compromised as most other leaders – he continues to allow wide-scale fracking and oil production across the state), Trump’s decision to leave the path of gradualism “is a stimulus … In a way, it’s a rising of … awareness.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-extraordinary-way-red-states-are-steamrolling-blue-cities
no lnx
The extraordinary way red states are steamrolling blue cities
Written by Maresa Strano, Lydia Bean / Washington Monthly December 4, 2019
The Florida Legislature is strongly opposed to gun control. Even in the aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, state legislators opposed strict restrictions on the sale and use of firearms. But there’s another kind of control that they do believe in: the control of gun control.
In 1987, Florida passed a bill that prohibits localities from enacting their own gun ordinances. This was an act of “preemption”—the name for when a higher level of government, like a state, withdraws or limits the authority of a lower level government, like a city or town.
For a while, the bill was not fully enforced. Cities like Miami and Tallahassee created and maintained additional gun regulations, designed to minimize violence in their more urban communities. But that, like so much about America’s political landscape, changed in 2011. That year, the legislature passed an updated version of the law, backed by the National Rifle Association, that imposed harshpenalties on local officials who enacted or enforced gun ordinances, including a $5,000 fine and up to $100,000in damages.
Three years later, two gun-rights organizations sued the city of Tallahassee, its mayor, and several city commissioners for not purging a pair of inherited ordinances that outlawed firing guns in public parks, one of which had been on the books since 1957. Because the law also forbids the use of public funds in gun ordinance cases, the defendants (including eventual Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum) had to secure pro-bono legal representation. This summer, a circuit court judge struck down the fine, and Governor Ron DeSantis, who narrowly bested Gillum for the office in 2018, appealed the decision.
The escalation of state preemption laws is happening everywhere. For the last decade, preemption has spread to all states and across virtually every salient policy area—from environmental and labor protections to immigration and housing rights. The vast majority of preemption bills stem from special interests and industry groups with anti-regulatory agendas.
These laws are extraordinarily damaging to our society. They result in increased racial and gender inequality. They correlate with lower life expectancy. They inhibit citizens from meaningfully engaging in politics. Like gerrymandering and dark money, we should consider preemption to be a serious threat to democracy.
The seeds of modern preemption were planted in the 1980s, when the tobacco industry began to push for state laws barring tobacco taxes and smoke-free ordinances. Over the next two decades, other industry groups and special interests adopted big tobacco’s strategy. During the crime wave of the 1990s, for example, the National Rifle Association aggressively lobbied states to stop American cities from enacting local firearms regulations.
The tobacco industry and the NRA are members of the modern conservative coalition, comprised of industry groups and trade associations, small-government libertarians, and social conservatives. These groups were the first to recognize state preemption as a powerful mechanism to rein in progressive cities and spread conservative policies. To wield it effectively, however, they had to gain control of state governments. In 2010, as the Republican Party swept into power in statehouses across the country, conservatives gained newfound ability to preempt localities.
As a result, the last decade has seen an unprecedented swell in the number of preemption bills introduced and passed by state legislatures. As of 2019, twenty-five states have passed laws preempting local minimum wage ordinances (up from ten states in 2010). Twenty-three states have banned ordinances requiring paid sick days (up from one state in 2010). Between 2014 and 2019, an astounding forty-four states removed or prevented employment and labor protections for Uber and Lyft drivers.
Some of these laws are notorious. North Carolina’s House Bill 2, or “the Bathroom Bill,” famously mandated that individuals use the bathroom corresponding to the gender assigned to them at birth. A direct attack on the transgender community, HB 2 was passed to stop the City of Charlotte from increasing its anti-discrimination protections. The same bill also explicitly preempted local regulation of employment standards, such as increasing the minimum wage and mandatory paid sick days.
But other preemption bills have targeted issues that, to the average American, appear to have no political salience. These include regulations of wireless alarm systems, Styrofoam products, milk and frozen desserts, and even beekeeping. Sixteen states have preempted local regulation of residential fire sprinklers in the last decade.
Why sprinklers? By 2009, a national, nonpartisan grassroots movement led by members of the fire service had successfully fought to get nearly 400 localities to require that new residential buildings have fire sprinklers. In response, the National Association of Home Builders, the group that represents large developers, turned to preemption. The developers saw such ordinances as pricey nuisances and, determined to avoid any additional profit loss (however negligible), successfully pressured many state legislatures to thwart the firefighter’s movement.
The increase in volume, sweep, and frequency of preemption laws is hardly driven by grassroots concerns. Instead, it reflects a pattern in which industries have used preemption to promote their putatively pro-business, anti-regulation agendas with no regard for public health and safety, nor the public will. They have found happy advocates in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization bankrolled by industry lobbyists that drafts conservative state legislation and shares it across the nation.ALEC provides the templates for many of the preemption bills circulating today. A recent report from the Local Solutions Support Center and State Innovation Exchange noted thataboutone in five of the over 1,000 ALEC bills introduced each year are signed into law.
Still, this is not an exclusively red state problem. In Democratic strongholds like California, special interests use preemption just as aggressively to hamper local policy innovations. Last year, the California Legislature passed a bill prohibiting local governments from imposing taxes on sugary drinks. The decision undercut local lawmakers, who had passed soda taxes in a variety of jurisdictions to curb type 2 diabetes and obesity and to raise funds for schools and other public services.
Why would California’s democratic-controlled legislature pass such a regressive law? In short, they were blackmailed. To gain leverage over an unsympathetic legislature, the beverage industry mounted a lavishly funded ballot initiative campaign that would have changed the vote threshold for localities to approve tax increases from fifty-one percent to two-thirds. If passed, the resulting logjams would have hindered funding for vital public services, including fire, transit, and law enforcement. When beverage companies offered to scrap the initiative in exchange for the preemption bill, legislators accepted.
Old preemption gave deference to judicial determination. It respected citizen initiative and the role of local governance. It allowed municipalities to work with states in pursuit of the right regional policies. That has all vanished. Now, preemption “is being used as a blunt instrument to destroy local democracy,” said Mark Pertschuk, director of Grassroots Change and Preemption Watch.
In many states, aggressive preemption is dismantling any illusion of cooperation between state and local government. In 2016, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1487, known as “the mother of all local preemption bills,” which allows the state to strip funding from localities that pass any regulations that deviate from state law. Texas’ 2017 law banning sanctuary cities, like Florida’s law banning gun control, threatened officials who “adopt, enforce, or endorse” a sanctuary city policy with fines of up to $25,500 per day and removal from office (the law has since been struck down).
Punishing local officials and governments for flouting preemption may seem harsh, but fair. In most cases, localities are still treated as creatures of the state. They cannot violate its laws. But preemption laws have produced a“chilling effect” on local policymaking and innovation, particularly in large, diverse cities in red states, where local action and creative problem solving is needed most. As Andrew Gillum told the New York Times: “It is intended to put everyone across this state and across this country where these efforts are taking place on notice: Don’t come near it…And if you do, we’ll come after you personally, we’ll come after your government, we’ll come after the very survivability of your community by cutting off resources to you.”
Such an aggressive approach to preemption might still be justified if preemption were advancing the public’s interest. Defenders argue that is indeed the case: preemption is necessary to prevent regulatory patchworks, which hinder economic prosperity.“A statewide company has to follow so many different ordinances that they end up choosing to leave those communities due to lack of uniformity,” said one Georgia lawmaker.
But what preemption is being used for shows such arguments are, at best, disingenuous and, at worst, patently untrue. The Arizona legislature’s decision to preempt Tempe’s ordinance regulating dark money in local politics has no real relationship to economic growth. It does not cut red tape. And today’s preemption is making life economically worse for the vulnerable. Nationwide, preemption presents one of the greatest barriers to raising wages and living standards for low-wage workers. More than 60 percent of U.S. workers now live in states where minimum wage ordinances are preempted, and more than 40 percent of workers live in states where paid sick time ordinances are preempted. In 2000, those percentages were less than 2 percent and 0 percent, respectively....
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/can-uber-and-lyft-survive-if-californias-worker-protections-go-nationwide/
passage of California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), the landmark state law that reclassifies contract rideshare drivers as employees, marked a historic win for gig economy drivers demanding better working conditions. Now Los Angeles is taking the first step toward securing a $30 minimum wage for Uber, Lyft, and other rideshare drivers in the city.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to proceed with an independent study on the average wages and business expenses of the city’s rideshare drivers, and review policies around the country. The motion also asked the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would set the minimum wage to $30, suggesting that drivers will need an additional $15 per hour to pay for business expenses like gas. Currently, the city’s minimum wage for most businesses is $14.25, but will be raised to $15 citywide by 2021. In the state of California, the minimum wage is $12 an hour, and will reach $15 by January 2023....
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ew 1019
94 World Mayors Call for Green New Deal, Blast Slow National Actions
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an 919
California sues Trump admin for revoking authority to adopt strict emissions standards — backed by over 2 dozen cities
Jessica Corbett / Common DreamsSeptember 22, 2019
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, backed by top legal officials representing more than two dozen cities and states, sued the Trump administration Friday for revoking the Golden State’s authority to...
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City leaders launched Seattle on the path to a Green New Deal this week, passing a resolution that starts laying out an ambitious plan for how the city can cut its greenhouse gas emissions in ways that protect the climate and improve the lives of its residents.
It's a nonbinding resolution, and like the national Green New Dealmanifesto that's being promoted by Democrats in Congress, presidential hopefuls and the young activists in the Sunrise Movement, it's still mostly aspirational.
But it begins to sketch out a roadmap for Seattle's future as the city tries to both adapt to climate change and cut emissions in line with what the world's scientists say is needed.
The resolution envisions free public transit, a limit on new fossil fuel construction, 100 percent electric vehicles for ride sharing, and an infrastructure plan that takes sea level rise into account, among other ideas.
The big question confronting city officials and environmentalists now is how to begin implementing—and paying for—many of these initiatives. There are hints within the resolution, which mentions a congestion pricing plan to support low-income transit, using proceeds from a soda tax to promote healthy foods, and developing "green zones" to provide financing in neighborhoods that have historically borne the brunt of pollution.
some climate activists see Seattle's measure as the first step toward moving from symbolic gestures to specific goals and potential ways to implement them.
"It lays out the goals and timeline and ways to get there," said Alec Connon, an organizer with the environmental advocacy group 350 Seattle. "No policies have changed, but it is a clear statement of intent from Seattle leaders that they're understanding the sheer severity and urgency of the climate emergency."
The move by Seattle highlights how local and state governments are setting ambitious targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the absence of federal action, particularly at a time when scientific warnings are becoming increasingly urgent and the Trump administration is backing out of federal efforts aimed at curbing climate change.
This spring, Washington became the fifth state or territory—following Hawaii, California, New Mexico and Puerto Rico—to pass legislation committing to 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. Other states, including New York, have adopted aggressive policies to meet goals set by the Paris climate agreement, which the Trump administration abandoned in 2017.
"Climate change is one of the gravest threats we face, and the solutions to climate change must also be solutions that address income inequality and racial inequity," Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said in a statement after the City Council unanimously passed the resolution Monday. "While they debate the Green New Deal in the other Washington, we must continue to do more in Seattle."
Translating Goals Into Policy
While a nonbinding resolution can set out goals, the city will have to find ways to translate those goals into actual policy to make a difference.
"The bigger story is, 'Does Seattle take that next step?' Whether that's developing a tax or finding ways to earmark funding and go deeper into the implementation process," said Barry Rabe, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
When asked if the city of Seattle had any specific plans on how it would fund the goals in the resolution, Jessica Finn Coven, the city's director of the Office of Sustainability and Environment said, "the answer is yes and no."
Last week, Durkan proposed a tax on home heating oil to help as many as 18,000 Seattle homes transition from oil to some form of cleaner energy. So, when it comes to funding the specific goal of transitioning away from using oil to heat homes, there is a specific mechanism on the table, Finn Coven said.
For the broader proposals in the resolution, she said, city lawmakers are researching their options and working with constituents and community leaders to determine how to move forward.
[pix "Climate change is one of the gravest threats we face and the solutions to climate change must also be solutions that address income inequality and racial inequity,” Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan said. "While they debate the Green New Deal in the other Washington, we must continue to do more in Seattle.”
Connon said he hopes to see policies soon now that the resolution has passed, and he believes there are promising funding options available to help the city pay for some of the initiatives laid out in the measure, such as congestion pricing and implementing new taxes.
As an example of one viable option used in another city, Connon points to a move by Portland, Oregon, where voters last November passed a measurethat imposes a tax on large retailers to help pay for the city's clean energy efforts.
Another way Seattle could pay for its green goals would be a levy, Connon said. Earlier this spring, nearly 70 percent of Seattle voters backed a $2.2 billion education levy.
"There's no reason the city couldn't do a Green New Deal levy to help kick this off," he said.
'Cities Continue to Push the Needle'
Seattle is one of a handful of U.S. cities that have mitigation goals for urban heat islands, have adopted or advocated for stringent building energy codes and have set targets for energy efficient transportation plans that take into mind low-income communities, according to a report released last month by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).
When it comes to reducing energy use and trying to spur renewable energy, "cities continue to push the needle," said David Ribeiro, senior research manager at ACEEE.
The ACEEE report found that 75 large U.S. cities had taken more than 200 actions on renewable energy and energy efficiency. Seattle ranked No. 3 in the report, behind San Francisco and Boston.
"In the case of Seattle, they are a city that's already leading on clean energy," Ribeiro said. "They have aggressive goals; they have aggressive policies; they have good planning processes."
Ribeiro said it's hard to know whether Seattle's Green New Deal resolution will push more cities to follow suit. Los Angeles recently released a "Green New Deal" sustainability plan focused heavily on energy efficiency and renewable energy.
"I think it's all a matter of the interest of the residents and business owners in that city," Ribeiro said.
Published Aug. 14, 2019
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/02/02/climate-misinformation-researchers-california-communities-suing-fossil-fuels
Just in case fossil fuel companies had forgotten when and how much they knew about the impacts their products have had on the climate, a reminder came at them in court this week.
On January 29, six researchers studying climate misinformation filed one of eight friend-of-the-court briefs in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting the California communities suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages.
The dozens of companies, which include a variety of oil, gas, and coal producers and refiners, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Peabody, are trying to get the cases moved from state to federal court, where similar climate liability lawsuits from San Francisco, Oakland, and New York City have not fared so well. The Court of Appeals is lumping together six suits from California counties and cities while deciding where they should be tried.
Some of the top academics examining fossil fuel companies’ actions and communications around climate change were involved in filing the brief, which rather concisely summarizes the major take-aways from their research in its table of contents.
To sum up even more, fossil fuel companies:
- knew the risks of burning their products on the climate.
- worked proactively to cover up that knowledge and discredit climate science.
- tried to protect their own assets from climate impacts by using the very same science they sought to undermine in public.
The researchers filing the brief include Naomi Oreskes (co-author of *Merchants of Doubt*) and Geoffrey Supran of Harvard University, Robert Brulle of Brown University, Justin Farrell of Yale University, Benjamin Franta of Stanford University, and Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, UK. They’re joined in this brief by the Center for Climate Integrity, an initiative that provides legal, scientific, and policy support for affected communities seeking climate damages from polluters.
The other seven supporting briefs filed the same day came from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat from Rhode Island and vocal climate champion), climate and consumer advocacy nonprofits, climate scientists and scholars, states, and government groups. [vid]
Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes at a December 2016 rally calling on scientists to stand up for science.]pix
The reason social scientists and science historians decided to get involved in this legal battle, they write, is because these lawsuits in California center around the fact that the fossil fuel companies “affirmatively and knowingly concealed the hazards that they knew would result from the normal use of their fossil fuel products through misrepresentation about those products and deliberately discrediting scientific information related to climate change.”
In order to make things easy for the courts, these researchers created what is basically a highlight reel of these industry misrepresentations and disinformation campaigns in their 55-page brief.
It draws from fossil fuel industry records, such as the 1965 speech by the American Petroleum Institute CEO on the “catastrophic consequence” of carbon pollution.
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2018 wrap
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26122018/climate-change-solutions-obstacles-2018-year-review-oil-lawsuits-clean-energy-urban-planning
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desmog
San Francisco this week, Fossil Free California hosted a panel discussion on the most recent municipal litigation against the fossil fuel industry.
Last year, San Francisco and Oakland sued the world’s five largest investor-owned fossil fuel producers over predicted climate change costs to these cities.READ MORE
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ew 918
London and New York Mayors Call on Other World Cities to Divest from Fossil Fuels
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25062018/atlanta-city-council-renewable-energy-100-percent-clean-power-climate-change
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2.5 Million Homes, Businesses Totaling $1 Trillion Threatened by High Tide Flooding
Study Finds Coastal Municipalities May Lose Huge Sums in Property Tax Revenue
WASHINGTON (June 18, 2018)—Accelerating sea level rise in the lower 48 states, primarily driven by climate change, is projected to worsen tidal flooding, putting as many as 311,000 coastal homes with a collective market value of about $117.5 billion today at risk of chronic flooding within the next 30 years—the lifespan of a typical mortgage—according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released today. Roughly 14,000 coastal commercial properties assessed at a value of roughly $18.5 billion also are at risk during that timeframe. By the end of the century, homes and businesses currently worth more than $1 trillion could be at risk: as many as 2.4 million homes—roughly the equivalent of all the homes in Los Angeles and Houston combined—valued at approximately $912 billion and 107,000 commercial properties assessed at $152 billion.
The analysis uses property data from the online real estate company Zillow combined with a peer-reviewed methodology developed by UCS for assessing areas at risk of frequent flooding. Using three sea level rise scenarios developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), UCS determined how many residential and commercial properties along the entire lower 48 coastline are at risk of becoming chronically inundated from high tides, flooding an average of 26 times per year or more, in the coming decades even in the absence of major storms. The core results in the report are from the high sea level rise scenario—an appropriately conservative projection to use when estimating risk to homes, which are often the owner’s single biggest asset.
“What’s striking as we look along our coasts is that the significant risks of sea level rise to properties identified in our study often aren’t reflected in current home values in coastal real estate markets,” said Rachel Cleetus, an economist and policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at UCS, as well as a report co-author. “Unfortunately, in the years ahead many coastal communities will face declining property values as risk perceptions catch up with reality. In contrast with previous housing market crashes, values of properties chronically inundated due to sea level rise are unlikely to recover and will only continue to go further underwater, literally and figuratively.”
The consequences of chronic flooding of properties in specific communities could translate not just into eroding property values, but also into unlivable houses and falling tax revenues that fund schools, roads and emergency services in those places. The properties at risk by 2045 currently house roughly 550,000 people and contribute nearly $1.5 billion toward today’s property tax base. These numbers jump to about 4.7 million people and $12 billion by 2100. Municipalities are looking at even deeper revenue declines when commercial property, sales, and other business tax losses are factored in.
“For some communities, the potential hit to the local tax base could be staggering,” said Kristy Dahl, senior climate scientist at UCS and report co-author. “Some smaller, more rural communities may see 30, 50, or even 70 percent of their property tax revenue at risk due to the number of chronically inundated homes. Tax base erosion could create particular challenges for communities already struggling with high poverty rates.”
According to the analysis, states with the most homes at risk by the end of the century are Florida, with about 1 million homes or more than 10 percent of the state’s current residential properties, New Jersey with 250,000 homes, and New York with 143,000 homes. States that could lose the most in home property values by 2100 are Florida at $351 billion, New Jersey at $108 billion, and New York at nearly $100 billion. Decreases in property values also mean a lower property tax base. Florida, New York and New Jersey will see the biggest hits to their annual property tax revenue with municipalities losing about $5 billion, $1.9 billion and $1.7 billion total respectively.
“Not all affected communities will share the same experience,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, senior analyst in the Climate and Energy Program at UCS and report co-author. “Some may see sharp adjustments to their housing market in the not-too-distant future; some could see a slow, steady decline in home values; and others could potentially invest in protective measures to keep impacts at bay for a few more decades. In any case, by knowing how much time they have before a significant number of properties will be regularly flooded, communities can start planning and implementing responses now, while they still have a range of options from which to choose.”
Economic consequences could also hit some communities harder than others. Nearly 175 communities would expect to see 10 percent or more of their homes at risk of chronic flooding by 2045, with nearly 60 of those communities experiencing poverty levels above the national average. Additionally, of the roughly 75 communities with 30 percent or more of their property tax base at risk, about one-third of these have poverty rates above the national average. The places that could be hit hardest in this way include communities in: Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, and North Carolina. Similarly, communities with large African American or Hispanic populations—many located in California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Texas—could also be at an inherent disadvantage in taking steps to prevent or recover from chronic flooding, due to longstanding social and economic inequities.
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UCS
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11062018/cities-pollution-carbon-footprint-climate-action-renewable-energy-investment-sustainability-report
hope atlanta so fla
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leadership in addressing climate change in the United States has shifted away from Washington, D.C. Cities across the country are organizing, networking and sharing resources to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and tackle related challenges ranging from air pollution to heat island effects.But group photos at climate change summits typically feature big-city Democratic mayors rubbing shoulders. Republicans are rarer, with a few notable exceptions, such as Kevin Faulconer of San Diego and James Brainard of Carmel, Indiana.Faulconer co-chairs the Sierra Club’s Mayors for 100 Percent Clean Energy Initiative, which rallies mayors around a shared commitment to power their cities entirely with clean and renewable energy. Brainard is a longtime champion of the issue within the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Climate Mayors network.In our research at the Boston University Initiative on Cities, we found that large-city Republican mayors shy away from climate network memberships and their associated framing of the problem. But in many cases they advocate locally for policies that help advance climate goals for other reasons, such as fiscal responsibility and public health. In short, the United States is making progress on this issue in some surprising places[vid] miami, Florida Republican Mayor Tomás Regalado urged voters to support a $400 million bond in November 2017. About half of the money will be used to protect the city from sea level rise and flooding.Climate network members are mainly DemocratsIn our initiative’s recent report, “Cities Joining Ranks,” we systematically reviewed which U.S. cities belong to 10 prominent city climate networks. These networks, often founded by mayors themselves, provide platforms to exchange information, advocate for urban priorities and strengthen city goverments’ technical capacities.The networks we assessed included Climate Mayors; We Are Still In, which represents organizations that continue to support action to meet the targets in the Paris climate agreement; and ICLEI USA.We found a clear partisan divide between Republican and Democrat mayors. On average, Republican-led cities with more than 75,000 residents belong to less than one climate network. In contrast, cities with Democratic mayors belonged to an average of four networks. Among the 100 largest U.S. cities, of which 29 have Republican mayors and 63 have Democrats, Democrat-led cities are more than four times more likely to belong to at least one climate network.This split has implications for city-level climate action. Joining these networks sends a very public signal to constituents about the importance of safeguarding the environment, transitioning to cleaner forms of energy and addressing climate change. Some networks require cities to plan for or implement specific greenhouse gas reduction targets and report on their progress, which means that mayors can be held accountable. SF Environment