Grist
oddly/ blank 1219
roberts quite good
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an 7 26 grist
On a 200-acre farm and cattle ranch in Bandera, Texas, Mollie Engelhart grows organic produce, sells raw milk, and writes a daily column about the power of regenerative agriculture. She’s a farmer and a Make America Healthy Again mom who doesn’t like being called a MAHA mom. She prefers to think of herself as “MAHA-aligned.”
In May, Engelhart opened her ranch to a couple hundred pro-MAHA politicians, activists, and leaders for a two-day MAHA farming retreat. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was there. Engelhart’s brother, Ryland, is one of the more well-known figureheads of the movement.
*This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.
Her biggest issue with the MAHA label is what she considers the “blue team or red team” politicization of it. Like many MAHA-aligned supporters, she voted for President Donald Trump in the last election largely because of RFK Jr.’s endorsement and their joint promise to clean up America’s chemical-laden food system. Back then, she had faith Trump would make good on that promise. But in the last year and half, that faith has frayed.
“I think that one hundred percent the MAHA movement is very disappointed and disenchanted, and I am not the only one,” said Engelhart. “MAHA voters are homeless.”
MAHA’s disenchantment with the Trump administration has much to do with its open support of Bayer, the manufacturer of the popular pesticide Roundup, which just won a Supreme Court case over the claim that the company failed to adequately warn users about the cancer risk of its weedkiller. First, the administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case. Then, in February, the president signed an executive order that classified glyphosate-based herbicides like Roundup key to national security and called for increased domestic production of the chemical. In March, it was reported that top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency met with Bayer CEO to discuss “litigation” issues. The following month, the administration sent a lawyer to argue on behalf of the chemical company in a Supreme Court hearing.
Tens of thousands of plaintiffs had sued Bayer, alleging that the active ingredient in Roundup has caused cancer and other health issues and that the company failed to follow state laws when it did not include a warning about cancer risk on its label. But now, the court’s ruling means that states cannot mandate more information on the product’s label than required by federal law, and any such claims against Bayer will have limited pathways of legal recourse.
Just hours after the decision was released, Trump signed an executive order framed as boosting regenerative agriculture and American farm resilience. (Broadly speaking, the term “regenerative agriculture” refers to farming methodologies that boost soil health and its potential for carbon capture, though there is no federal standard or definition like there is for “organic,” leaving it open to interpretation — and, in some cases, greenwashing.) The contradictions between the two actions have sparked a new barrage of criticisms from MAHA voters. “It does seem a little schizophrenic,” said Engelhart. “None of us can be a one-issue voter anymore…I don’t think that anybody is just going to blindly go and vote for one party or another,” she added.
That sentiment is already showing up in the data, though the picture is far from clear-cut. Polling results from last October found that roughly 74 percent of MAHA-supporters identified as Republicans, with 59 percent also identifying as Make America Great Again supporters — the president’s most loyal base. Meanwhile, a POLITICO poll conducted this spring revealed that 47 percent of self-identified MAHA respondents who voted for Trump believe the administration has not done enough to “Make America Healthy Again.” And a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 28 percent of MAHA voters somewhat or strongly disapprove of the way the administration is handling food and vaccine policy, which may affect turnout in the midterm elections that could decide control of Congress. Limiting pesticide use, however, remains one of the movement’s defining causes, with 94 percent of MAHA adherents in favor of reducing exposure to harmful chemicals.
South Dakota farmer Jonathan Lundgren was at the White House on the day that the Supreme Court ruling was announced. Days earlier, he’d been invited to the Rose Garden for a dinner recognizing farmers and was asked to join Trump in the Oval Office for the signing of the regenerative agriculture executive order. Lundgren raises bees, sheep, and poultry, and grows flowers and apples on a 50-acre regenerative farm in Estelline, South Dakota. Like Engelhart, he shirks the political implication of identifying as MAHA, but considers himself aligned with the pro-regenerative agriculture and anti-pesticide faction of the movement.
“They needed some farmer faces to kind of give the whole thing a spin,” he said. Lundgren called the executive order “meaningful,” though it’s not lost on him that it doesn’t introduce new funding or regulations.
Experts say it doesn’t do much at all. “It may sound great, but fundamentally, there’s nothing really new or substantive or meaningful in the EO that I can see that actually changes the equation for how the administration treats regenerative agriculture,” said Mike Lavender, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
Inside the Oval Office meeting, Lundgren watched on as Kennedy’s team swiftly mobilized to try to soften the MAHA backlash to the Supreme Court ruling with the president’s executive order, which culminated in an explosive argument between a Department of Health and Human Services official and a top farming lobbyist who was concerned that the order would imply that there are safety issues in the U.S. food supply. Lundgren himself stopped using Roundup about eight years ago when he noticed that agrochemicals were “causing more problems than they were solving” on his farm. But he can’t escape the downwind effects of nearby farms that spray it. Right now, he’s watching scores of bees slow down before outright dying, and his orchard’s leaves cup from herbicide drift. Then there’s the human toll.
“We’re sick this time of year, and it’s a direct result of all of these pesticides being applied. My family is sick. That ain’t right,” Lundgren told Grist. His daughter is grappling with asthma and allergy flare-ups while his farm staff battles recurring headaches and fatigue. “It’s so intense that we call it in my community ‘The Spray Flu.’”
He says these dual actions by the administration, as well as the EPA’s recent approval of yet another batch of pesticides that contain PFAS, often called “forever chemicals,” have changed how he plans to vote in the midterms.
“We’re in a weird state right now that has never really happened before, where food safety and the health of our children is weighing very heavily on American politics,” said Lundgren. “This is far broader than the farming community. I think that this is consumers; I think this is parents; I think this is society at-large.”
Others argue that, despite the administration’s recent pro-regenerative ag messaging, Trump’s track record of anti-climate and pro-chemical policies has not helped the movement to clean up the food system, but hindered it.
Kelly Ryerson, a leading MAHA mom and co-founder of the farming organization American Regeneration, agrees that, when taken together, the ruling and the order reveal a disconnect. “It’s inconsistent, to say the least,” said Ryerson. “If Trump is going to be doing things like the Supreme Court situation, it’s certainly not what anyone voted for…it’ll be really hard to come back from this now.”
For Ryerson, a registered independent who voted for Trump, the two actions have shifted how she plans to approach the midterms. “I don’t care if they’re a Republican or Democrat, I’m going to support the candidate that wants to decrease toxic exposures,” she said.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-tried-to-appease-mahas-fury-over-roundup-it-backfired/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.
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RANDOM
GRIST 7 26
Inside the government’s push to divert Puerto Rico solar funds to a bankrupt utility
Solutions
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The Supreme Court has also implied that corporations have Constitutional rights.Exxon has claimed in federal court that its lying about climate change is protected by its rights under the First Amendment (Grist.org, 6/19/18)!
...The effort to suppress global warming dissidents is not new. Grist Magazine writer David Roberts said, “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards – some sort of climate Nuremberg.” Professor Richard Parncutt has called for the execution of prominent “GW deniers.” Climate Progress Editor Joe Romm called for deniers to be strangled in their beds. James Hansen, who has headed NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has likewise called for trials of global warming deniers.
The global warming agenda is a desperate effort to gain greater control over our lives. Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) explained that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” That’s the political goal of the global warmers.
PROTO CLIMATE LOCKDOWN GREEN POLICE? TOTALITARIAN TYRANT BS GUBMINT
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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AN GRIST 1 26
On Saturday, hours after U.S. forces in Caracas killed at least 80 people and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump sounded less like a wartime commander than a developer surveying a newly acquired property. The country’s future, he told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort, belonged to “very large United States oil companies,” which would soon be pumping “a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”
The land in question includes the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — at some 300 billion barrels, roughly 17 percent of global totals. But after years of political turmoil and U.S. sanctions, Venezuela accounts for barely 1 percent of global crude production. “It’s true that they know the oil is there,” said Samantha Gross, the director of the Energy Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “But the aboveground risks are huge.”
Chevron is the only major U.S. firm still operating in Venezuela, after other oil giants pulled out in 2007 when former president Hugo Chávez nationalized the industry. By continuing to operate as a minority partner under the state oil company’s terms, Chevron preserved its infrastructure, personnel, and legal foothold — giving it geopolitical leverage in the ongoing tug-of-war between the United States, China, and the Maduro government. “We play a long game,” CEO Mike Wirth explained in November at a U.S.-Saudi investment summit in Washington.
Today, Chevron is uniquely positioned in the aftermath of the invasion: Its leadership and board have long orbited Republican circles, with deep ties to the Trump administration and a history of big GOP donations. “Chevron’s in [Venezuela],” Trump said on Saturday, but “they’re only there because I wanted them to be there.” The company did not respond to requests for comment.
When Trump returned to office, his administration revoked Biden-era licenses that had allowed the oil major to operate in Venezuela despite the sanctions. Though told to stop producing by April, the company made no attempt to wrap up contracts, pull out personnel, or wind down supply chains. Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin American energy program at Rice University, said in March that it appeared “Chevron is very confident it can obtain an extension.”
Behind the scenes, executives were busy meeting with Trump and top officials, spending almost $4 million on lobbying in the first half of the year to keep their Venezuelan foothold alive. In March, Wirth joined Trump in the Oval Office, hashing out how to tweak or extend Chevron’s license. The president finds Wirth’s TV appearances entertaining, regularly calling him after cable news appearances. The CEO followed that blitz up with private sit-downs with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and staffers from the National Security Council, making the case for his company’s continued presence in the country.
By July, the gamble had paid off. The administration issued a new license, letting Chevron resume operations in Venezuela. As it did so this fall, the company saw record-breaking production and earned $3.6 billion in its last reported quarter. Though Venezuela accounts for just 100,000 to 150,000 barrels daily — a sliver of Chevron’s production — that oil is heavy, the kind the company’s Gulf Coast refineries are designed to process. Having access to Venezuelan crude can help those facilities run more efficiently, increasing supplies and reducing costs.
Just before Chevron celebrated its renewed lifeline, it scored another victory: After years of wrangling with the Federal Trade Commission, it finally acquired Hess Corporation, one of the biggest independent oil producers in the United States. Last year, the agency had banned CEO John Hess from joining Chevron’s board as part of its anti-trust review, alleging that he had colluded with OPEC representatives to fix oil prices.
That victory, however, did not occur in a vacuum. The Hess family is a major donor to the Republican party and contributed more than $1 million to Trump’s first inauguration. (Chevron, for its part, donated $2 million to the president’s 2025 ceremony.) Hess — whom Trump has called “a friend of mine for a long time” — petitioned the FTC to revisit its decision. The agency later reversed course, unlocking the deal. On July 18, Chevron officially closed its $53 billion merger, and Hess took his seat on the board.
This bought Chevron’s entry into what many analysts call the decade’s most consequential oilfield, in Guyana, Venezuela’s neighbor. In 2015, Exxon Mobil announced a huge reserve off the tiny country’s shoreline. That discovery catapulted Guyana — a nation of fewer than 1 million people — into the petroleum spotlight. Hess’ 30 percent stake in the project was a key part of Chevron’s recent acquisition.
Thanks to Trump, one of the largest remaining political obstacles to the Guyana project was just removed. Maduro had challenged Guyana’s control over the offshore area. Venezuela has periodically claimed the territory since the 1960s under a long-running border dispute. As production in the region ramped up in 2019 and as Venezuela’s own industry faltered, Maduro escalated his attacks, sending naval ships into Guyanese waters and vowing Venezuela would take “all necessary actions” to stop its development — rhetoric remarkably similar to what Trump used to justify his own actions against Maduro this week.
But though Trump claims he spoke with oil companies before and after the invasion, taking over the Venezuelan government may have been more than the industry bargained for. “There aren’t oil companies just running to get rid of tens of billions of dollars right now to rebuild the Venezuelan industry,” David Mares, the former Institute of the Americas Endowed Chair for Inter-American Affairs at the University of California San Diego, told Grist. “It’s not even clear there’s a legitimate government in place to make the contracts they sign for legal.”
Then there’s the question of Venezuela’s tangled debt. Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the state oil company, has racked up more than $150 billion in liabilities over decades of defaults and expropriations. Creditors — from energy companies like ConocoPhillips to so-called “vulture funds” that bought defaulted contracts at deep discounts — have pursued arbitration against the country, and won court rulings for damages that remain unpaid. China has been the country’s largest foreign lender, loaning it more than $60 billion over the years. Only some of that has been repaid, mostly in the form of oil exports. As Mares notes, “As soon as Venezuelan oil starts to flow, some of those claimants can attach the proceeds, and they’re going to demand their money back.”
Experts warn that returning to even modest levels of production would require upgrading Venezuela’s aging infrastructure, a process that would require massive investment and political stability — conditions that have eluded Caracas for years and seem unlikely to materialize anytime soon. “There is no realistic prospect of immediately increasing Venezuela’s crude output,” Gus Vasquez, the head of oil pricing in the Americas for commodity markets analyst Argus Media, wrote in an emailed statement. “Venezuelan oil infrastructure would take years and possibly hundreds of billions to bring up to something close to its former capacity. Repairing refineries would be even harder.”
Chevron’s existing assets give the company a very different calculus than newcomers would face. But the timing could not be worse: Global crude oil prices have steadily declined over the last several years, recently dropping below $60 a barrel — approaching the break-even point for many American operators. That’s been driven by global supply surpluses and by weakening demand, as renewable energy prices drop. “I think what we’re seeing is that the days of the oil and gas industry being the growth engine of economies is well behind us,” said Trey Cowan, an oil and gas energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Despite these structural shifts, Gross notes, “Trump has a very old-school way of thinking about resource economics,” as a blunt lever of power. As companies like Chevron have found, aligning with his priorities can bring financial and regulatory advantages, even if they are not supported by broader market conditions. This week, the company’s stock jumped 6 percent.
On TruthSocial on Tuesday, Trump announced that Caracas would be “turning over” between 30 and 50 million barrels of “sanctioned oil” that will then be sold. “[T]hat money will be controlled by me,” he wrote. Trump hopes to lower oil prices to $50 a barrel, which would squeeze shale producers and destabilize the U.S. oil industry. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy issued a brief announcement elaborating, as Chevron entered talks with the administration to increase its operations and resell oil to other refiners. The statement declares the U.S. will sell the sovereign nation’s crude on the global marketplace and describes the proceeds as going to “U.S.-controlled accounts at globally recognized banks,” an unusual setup that bypasses the U.S. Treasury. The money is vaguely promised to serve both Americans and Venezuelans, and the arrangement will be indefinite. “You’re going to see, probably, a growth in Chevron activities there quickly,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said on Thursday.
Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into the Trump administration’s communications with oil companies, which they claim occurred 10 days before the invasion, while Congress was not briefed. “The suggestion that taxpayers could pay the cost of rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure raise serious concerns about how the Trump administration engaged with the oil companies prior to his decision to use military force,” they wrote. Gross says to the extent Trump can be described as a populist, it is largely a performance — one “he might play on TV” — but she added that typically, “When you see populist governments take over oil industries, it doesn’t usually turn out well.”
In all the turmoil, what no one appears to be asking is what is good for Venezuela. “The saddest part of this is that unwinding the Maduro regime does not seem to be a part of what Trump policy is aiming for,” said Cynthia Arson, former director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center’s Latin American Program. In its statements after the strike, the White House has largely overlooked questions about a democratic transition, sidelining concerns about human rights abuses and the treatment of political prisoners.
Even when oil starts flowing, a new Venezuelan government will likely struggle to meet public expectations while attracting foreign investment. Before Chávez, the country’s oil contracts typically gave the government around 50 percent of revenue, helping fund social programs and the middle class. U.S. oil majors, by contrast, often offer royalties around 12 percent.
The contrast highlights just how fragile and uncertain the path ahead is: Years of economic collapse, which have driven millions abroad, have left those remaining struggling with profound political and social upheaval that can’t be solved by oil alone. “If good things happen, they’re going to take time,” Gross said. “Bad things could actually happen pretty quickly.”
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/how-chevron-played-the-long-game-in-venezuela/.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
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Exxon Mobil's insane argument against action on climate change | Grist
2/16
Exxon Mobil has devised a bizarre new argument to wriggle away from its shareholders’ demands: Humanity can’t fix the problem we created, so we shouldn’t even try. Yep — as it turns out, Exxon Mobil’s shareholders care a lot more about climate change than the company itself does.
The planet’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company challenged a resolution about climate change regulations from its own shareholders on Friday, arguing that it’s a practical improbability that the emissions-restricting goals set forth by the recent climate accord in Paris will actually be achieved. Therefore, Exxon Mobil says, it shouldn’t have to address the impact that the regulations would have on its business.
“It’s a little bit like a toddler putting their fingers in their ears and saying, ‘If I can’t hear you then what you’re saying isn’t true,'” Shanna Cleveland, manager of the Carbon Asset Risk Initiative, told InsideClimate.
The resolution, originally brought by the New York State Comptroller and four other Exxon Mobil shareholders earlier this week, had asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to force the company to address how its business would be impacted by climate mitigation efforts. Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, whose office manages a state pension fund that has a large stake in the oil and gas giant, told Reuters that investors “need to know how Exxon Mobil’s bottom line will be impacted by the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what the company plans to do about it.”
For decades, other investors have been filing resolutions asking Exxon Mobil to take action on climate change, with most of them falling on deaf ears. Among their demands: Transparency about its anti-climate action lobbyists, a board member devoted to climate issues, and even a request for it to take “moral responsibility” for its contribution to climate change.
With Exxon Mobil blatantly ignoring climate science on one hand and giving up on emissions regulations on the other, the company seems to have flipped from willful ignorance to purposeful complacency. We’re not sure which one is worse, but either way: Exxon Mobil is clearly a nightmare for the planet.
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With climate change emerging as a big worry for voters across party lines, Republicans seem to be changing…their messaging strategy. They’re admitting that climate change is real, but not that anything needs to be done about it. Per the Washington Examiner: "‘I agree with the science,’ said [Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming], the chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, in a rare sit-down interview in his office ‘…Is it a concern? Yes. But it's not a crisis.’"
David Roberts
@drvox
What GOP polling is telling them they must say, via Senate EPW chair Barrasso: "I agree with the science. I disagree with the solutions Democrats are proposing in terms of this alarmist view. Is it a concern? Yes. But it's not a crisis."
Wyoming Republican John Barrasso is ‘closing the distance’ on climate change
Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a state run on fossil fuels, is “closing the distance” between himself and Democrats on policy proposals to combat climate change.
washingtonexaminer.com
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