UTAH OFFICIALS HIRE LAW FIRM IN BID TO OVERTURN BEARS EARS BOUNDARY RESTORATION
President Joe Biden and Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland at the October announcement of restoration of boundaries of three national monuments set by President Barack Obama and reduced when Donald Trump came into office.
Foes of President Joe Biden’s October restoration of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to the boundaries set by President Barack Obama in 2016 and massively shrunk a year later after Donald Trump moved into the White House aren’t giving up. Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes, a Republican, announced Sunday that the firm of Consovoy McCarthy, which has repeatedly argued cases before the Supreme Court, has won a contract "to assist with research and analysis about potential litigation" to fight the monuments’ restoration to the full extent designated by Obama.
In a statement, Reyes said, "Two months ago, President Biden ignored the views of Utah’s state and local leaders and unilaterally expanded the boundaries of both the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. As Utahns know better than anyone, these magnificent lands deserve appropriate long-term protections. Unfortunately, President Biden has undermined that goal. His actions create more uncertainty and prolong the political tug-of-war over Utah’s public lands."
What this means, according to a statement on the website of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which along with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition was a key player in making Bears Ears happen, is a contract that will:
Reyes’ move, backed by Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, drew about 100 protesters to the Utah state capitol rotunda last Friday to denounce the hiring of the law firm as a waste of money, especially since the state has in the past spent liberally to fight protections for public lands with little success. At the protest, Brooke Clarkson, co-editor of the book New World Coming: Frontline Voices on Pandemics, Uprisings, and Climate Crisis, raised a theme that has been common in the fight over Bears Ears. “Our state officials want to stay on the path that Trump took, and continue to disrespect the Hopi Tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni and the Ute Indian Tribe.”
Hikers look around the House on Fire Indian ruins in Mule Canyon, which is part of the Bears Ears National Monument.
Beyond the obvious, the most galling part of this move to put part of what is now protected monuments back into play as sources of coal, natural gas, and uranium is the fact that the courts could by now have resolved the whole matter by ruling in two cases initiated four years ago to fight the Trump reductions.
The majority of lawyers weighing in on the subject have argued that, starting with the Antiquities Act of 1906, laws and court precedents governing designation of national monuments are clear about presidential authority in the matter. Native American Rights Fund staff attorney Matthew Campbell told E&E News, "The law is clear that the president has broad authority to create national monuments to protect objects of historic and scientific interest, and Bears Ears easily falls under the Antiquities Act’s scope."
Shrinking monuments, other lawyers argue, is the sole prerogative of Congress under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. They thus expected a federal court ruling on the lawsuits would repudiate Trump’s reductions.
But when Biden came into office, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for the District of Columbia, an Obama appointee, stayed both lawsuits to await his decision on the monuments’ boundaries. When the president announced the restoration, she administratively closed the cases, removing them from the active docket. That’s not a flat-out dismissal, and the cases could be made reactivated. The way it now stands, however, without a court ruling, a Trump victory in 2024 could mean the monuments get shrunk again.
Attorney General Reyes is pinning his hopes on the possibility a Supreme Court majority willing to overturn precedent on gun laws, reproductive rights, and voter rights might do the same to presidential authority over designating monuments. In March, Chief Justice John Roberts implicitly urged lawyers to raise the question of whether presidents have abused a provision of the Antiquities Act that requires monuments to be the "smallest area" needing protection. "Somewhere along the line, however, this restriction has ceased to pose any meaningful restraint," he wrote.
Extremist climate science deniers seek to replace retiring Ohio Sen. Rob Portman
Josh Mandel
Democrat Tim Ryan, who represents Ohio’s 13th congressional district and failed in his 2016 bid to unseat Nancy Pelosi as House Minority leader and in his 2020 effort to get the presidential nomination, is a favorite to win the Democratic primary against Morgan Harper, an attorney who supports the Green New Deal. Harper lost her 2020 bid to unseat Rep. Joyce Beatty for the third district. Whoever wins that race will take on whoever wins the Republican primary. In a state that has previously elected Republicans to the Senate the media have labeled “moderate”—nowadays a much misused term—the top Republican primary candidates seem determined to outdo each other for extremism, which doesn’t make them outliers in the 21st Century GOP.
Current leaders in the 11-candidate GOP primary field are author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, and former Ohio Republican Party chair Jane Timken.
Vance once called Donald Trump “an idiot” and “cultural heroin,” but he has since repudiated that stance, telling Time’s Molly Ball that Trump is “the leader of this movement, and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.” That flip-flop from no-Trumper to Trumpian troll came after billionaire founder of PayPal Peter Thiel plopped $10 million into a super PAC for him. In a rambling speech at the National Conservatism Conference in October, Thiel sneered, “When you have to call things science, you know, they aren’t. Like climate science or political science.” For his part, Vance has noted that Democratic support for environmental justice is nothing more than a favor to China.
Mandel ran for Senate in 2012, losing to Sherrod Brown. He dropped out of the GOP primary in 2018 because of his wife’s health. At Spectrum News in October, he said, “You’ve got these crazy lefties in Washington, like Pelosi and Schumer who are trying to empower the Chinese and empower the Indians and empower the Europeans so they can have natural resource development, but then they don’t want to do it in America.” As far as the climate crisis, Mandel has adopted a newer version of denial now favored by people and propaganda operations who not so many years ago said climate change was not happening, a hoax. “The climate’s been changing for millions of years,” he said. “And the left is trying to advance this argument that all of a sudden it’s due to factories in Ohio that employ tens of thousands of Ohio workers. It’s a bunch of garbage.”
Timken, who agreed with Donald Trump’s withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, isn’t quite as much of a numbskull in her public climate statements as these two candidates, not expressing outright denial, but given to opposing policies that would make a difference. She told an interviewer in August: "There has been such a movement in climate change that I think that we need to have rational understanding of climate. We cannot force this Green New Deal onto our country, which I call the Trojan horse to socialism. They want to dictate our energy policy ... at the expense of the people who suffer the most from it in higher gas prices, higher home heating prices."
Although victory for any of these three would be bad news for Ohioans, none would be out of place in a Senate where 60% of Republicans still reject climate science.
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Lariah Edwards
How environmental justice work takes a toll on people of color: Lariah Edwards of the George Washington School of Public Health and the Environmental Defense Fund writes:
Cost of rooftop and utility-scale solar and energy storage plummet: The cost of photovoltaic solar installations is measured per watt. A 6.6-kilowatt capacity PV system is needed to match the 9,000 kilowatt-hours of energy usage by the average U.S. household each year. That used to be a very pricey affair. But in the first quarter of 2021, the average cost of residential solar was reported at $2.65/watt according to a study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). This was down 65% from $7.53/watt in 2010 and waaaaay down from the estimated $42/watt (in 2021 dollars) that solar cost in 1978 when I began working at NREL’s predecessor, the Solar Energy Research Institute. Utility-scale solar was $0.89/watt in the first quarter of this year compared to $5.66/watt a decade ago. The cost of residential PV fell 3.3% and commercial rooftop PV systems dropped 10.7% from 2020 to 2021, the report found. Meanwhile, BloombergNEF's annual battery price survey released late last month found that lithium-ion battery pack prices fell 6% on average globally between 2020 and 2021 and an inflation-adjusted 89% from 2010 to 2021. The drop includes batteries for electric vehicles, buses, and energy storage, with a pack price of $132/kilowatt-hours in 2021.
Line Barfod of the Red-Green Alliance
Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance Won Copenhagen’s Election by Fighting for Affordable Housing: In an interview with David Broder at Jacobin, mayoral candidate Line Barfod explains how they did it.
Biden sets sights on federal carbon neutrality by 2050: In his Wednesday announcement about the United States “leading by example in tackling the climate crisis,” the president issued an executive order for the federal government to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 65% in 2030 and attain carbon neutrality by 2050. That will require transforming the government’s entire fleet of 600,000 cars and trucks into zero emission vehicles by 2035. Under the order, the nation’s 300,000 federal buildings must produce no net emissions by 2045, with a 50% cut by 2032. All electricity procured by the government must come from clean sources by 2030, while all procurement decisions must meet net zero emissions by 2050. The executive order will tackle about 15% of all U.S. carbon emissions, according to RMI (formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute), a non-profit, clean energy organization.
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“[Climate denial has evolved into] a softer, more insidious type of misinformation, one that focuses on denying urgency and action, one that targets the solutions more than anything else. Key elements of this strategy include promoting confusion, doomist perspectives, conspiracy theories, and fabricating lies to convince the public that there is no real need for climate change policy.” —Stella Levantesi and Giulio Corsi
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Maskoke (Creek) linguist and organizer Marcus Briggs-Cloud is the director of Ekvn-Yefolecv, an independent Maskoke ecovillage on traditional homelands in Alabama.
• For Indigenous communities, protecting traditional knowledge means reimagining how it is preserved, by Claire Elise Thompson: From digital libraries to fully immersive schools, Indigenous leaders are reclaiming and spreading cultural knowledge to ensure it doesn't get lost.
• U.N. climate boss: 'We need to understand' young people's frustration,’ by Maxine Joselow and Brady Dennis: In an interview, Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, says, “We need to understand the anger and the frustration of so many young people around the world. And I think that one of our main tasks now is to try to give them some tools so that they can transform that anger and frustration into solutions.” Espinosa said that leaders must empower young people to become part of efforts to shape climate policy so that they do not feel “completely helpless.”
• ‘It’s a Proud Day’: Oregon Landowners Celebrate Demise of LNG project, Even as Legal Questions Go Unanswered, by Nick Cunningham: A coalition of Oregon landowners, environmental groups, and Native tribes fended off Jordan Cove for more than a decade. But the legal implications of the project’s demise outside of Oregon are unclear.
• Conservatives Have a New Bogeyman: Critical Energy Theory—Inside ALEC’s new campaign to push anti-climate legislation across the country, by Kate Aronoff: The group’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, which met on Friday, voted to back two pieces of model legislation that portray climate policy—even climate policy that doesn’t exist yet—as unfairly discriminating against fossil fuel companies. The “Resolution Opposing Securities and Exchange Commission and White House Mandates on Climate-Related Financial Matters” encourages states to take up legal challenges against forthcoming rules from federal financial regulators around climate risk and disclosures, potentially aiming to trigger a similar wave of lawsuits from states that followed the Clean Power Plan during the Obama administration.
• The Achilles’ Heel of Biden’s Climate Plan? Coal Miners, by Noam Scheiber: Unions representing other workers affected by climate legislation have struck deals, but opposition from coal miners has persisted, complicating the path to enactment.
• The win-wins of climate and biodiversity solutions, by Paul C. West: To achieve the most benefits for both biodiversity and the climate, we must start by protecting the Earth’s remaining intact ecosystems. Protecting all remaining habitat is, of course, important, but destroying intact areas disproportionately affects species loss compared to further destroying fragmented areas. And clearing and degrading intact areas is also a double whammy for climate. The existing carbon stock is emitted and the habitat’s ability to act as a sink is lost.