EU Gives 32 Gas Permits as Study Says Methane Undercounted by 40%

Cheniere’s Sabine Pass LNG export facility in Cameron, LA. Roy Luck/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

By: Steve Horn | February 26, 2020

On Feb. 12, the European Parliament voted to provide what could amount to over $26 billion in financing to 32 different natural gas projects, a decision one climate advocacy group called “climate hypocrisy.” The decision came just a week before a new study published in the journal Nature concluded that accounting for global methane emissions from oil and gas drilling has been underestimated by a whopping 25-40%.

The list of natural gas projects is known as Projects of Common Interest (PCI), with many proposals set to import gas obtained from hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the United States and move it to European Union markets. The Parliament weighed in 443 to 169 in favor of the plan, with 36 abstaining.

Energy projects on the PCI list are eligible to receive up to 50% of their financing from the Connecting Europe Facility.

“This climate hypocrisy has to end,” Colin Roche, an activist with Friends of the Earth Europe, said in a press release. “Following unprecedented disasters like Australia’s wildfires, history will look unkindly on those who today backed building more fossil fuel pipelines and terminals.”

Roche also called the prospect of the 32 new projects “incompatible” with the European Parliament’s Green New Deal. That Green New Deal however, explicitly includes natural gas as a bridge toward renewable energy.

Further, Roche called for a moratorium on EU taxpayer money going toward gas infrastructure. While the Parliament’s vote to approve the plan angered climate activists, the gas industry celebrated.

“The projects in question aim at completing the missing links in the regional infrastructure of Central, Eastern and South Eastern Europe,” James Watson, Secretary General of the European Gas Industry Association, said in a press release. “These regions are the least developed when it comes to interconnecting the energy infrastructure of the EU Member States… This is an opportunity one should embrace with open arms.”

The vote came just two days after the U.S. Department of Energy authorized permits for four new Gulf of Mexico-based liquefied natural gas terminals set to export gas to the global market. The Trump Administration even pointed to the European markets as the destiny for the LNG in a press release announcing the permits.

“The Trump Administration recognizes the importance and increasing role U.S. natural gas has in the global energy landscape,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette said. “The export capacity of these four projects alone is enough LNG to supply over half of Europe’s LNG import demand. With today’s authorizations, we are paving the way for more U.S. natural gas exports to bring energy security and prosperity to our allies around the world.”

In December, Congress also tucked a provision into the budget bill to give $1 billion in subsidies for projects on the PCI list.

The European Commission PCI list approval comes two days after European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly concluded that the environmental and climate assessment done by the European Commission on the PCI list was inadequate. O’Reilly, called for further study of the issues in response to a complaint made by an activist with the organization Food and Water Europe and asked for a response by the end of March.

That same day, the outlet EURACTIV also reported that the European Commission may soon launch “a strategy to curb methane emissions” through the office of Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson. That strategic plan may come out later this year, an anonymous source within the Energy Commissioner’s office told EURACTIV.

Methane is a greenhouse gas 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, the key time period during which scientists say radical action must be taken on the climate crisis.

A January investigation by the business publication Bloomberg, doing an analysis of LNG projects approved during the tenure of President Donald Trump, concluded that the facilities could emit greenhouse gases equivalent to that of 24 coal-fired power plants per year. That’s more than the entire state of Kentucky’s coal power plant fleet.

“The emissions from these projects can’t be squared with the sorts of drastic, drastic reductions we need in order to avoid catastrophic climate change,” says Nathan Matthews, a senior Sierra Club attorney, told the publication.

Bloomberg’s reporting team does not account for the greenhouse gas costs of transporting the fracked gas from point A, the wellhead, and point Z, the LNG import facility somewhere on the other side of the world. The numbers also only accounted for 11 of the “freedom gas” terminals approved by Trump, with the tally now up to 15 after the Feb. 10 decision.


One project on the PCI list in particular, Shannon LNG, has attracted global attention from the likes of actor Mark Ruffalo, Pope Francis, and the singer Cher.

Shannon LNG is a subsidiary of New Fortress Energy, which is owned by Wes Edens, the owner of the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, USA Today and a major donor to the Democratic National Committee. Edens also sits on the Host Committee for the forthcoming Democratic National Committee in Milwaukee, where the victory of the party’s presidential primary race will receive the crown as the party’s nominee to occupy the White House.

The terminal aims to intake gas obtained from fracking in fields such as Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale basin. And much of that gas will be moved to its export terminal by rail on trains owned by Edens, which itself has attracted opposition among local activists.


On Feb. 5, Ruffalo spoke out against the PCI list before the European Parliament.

“It is going to be fracked gas taken from my community, it’s going to poison our people and it is the antithesis of moving forward with the European Green Deal,” Ruffalo told the Parliament. “And what I’m asking you to do…is to dump those projects, scrap them, and put that money into real renewable energy and clean energy projects.”

The PCI list also includes the EastMed Pipeline, slated to vacuum up gas drilled offshore from the eastern Mediterranean Sea and move it to Cyprus, through Greece and into Italy.

Climate advocates have expressed similar concerns about methane leakage for tapping into that offshore gas. One of the main companies which has lobbied in the United States and European Union for more access to the offshore reservoir is ExxonMobil.



Steve Horn is a San Diego, CA-based climate reporter and producer for The Real News Network. He has worked as a staff investigative reporter for the publications Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News and works as the Escondido reporter for The Coast News Group’s Inland Edition in northern San Diego County. He worked from 2011-2018 as an investigative reporter for the…

On This Day: Bomb explodes in Capitol
On March 1, 1971, a bomb exploded in a restroom in the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol, causing $300,000 damage but no injuries. The Weather Underground, a leftist radical group that opposed the Vietnam War, claimed responsibility.

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President John F. Kennedy addresses the first group of Peace Corps volunteers headed for Ghana and Tanzania in this August 8, 1961, file photo. The Peace Corps was established by Kennedy's executive order on March 1, 1961. UPI File Photo | License Photo

March 1 (UPI) -- On this date in history:

In 1565, the city of Rio de Janeiro was established.

In 1692, the notorious witch hunt began in the Salem village of the Massachusetts Bay colony, eventually resulting in the executions of 19 men and women.

In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery.

In 1781, the American colonies adopted the Articles of Confederation, paving the way for a federal union.

In 1803, Ohio was admitted to the union as the 17th state.

In 1867, Nebraska was admitted to the union as the 37th state.

In 1872, Yellowstone National Park was established by an act of Congress. It was the first area in the world to be designated a national park.

File Photo by A.J. Sisco/UPI

In 1932, aviator Charles Lindbergh's son was kidnapped. The child's body was found on May 12. Bruno Hauptmann was convicted of the kidnapping and murder and executed in 1936.

In 1953, former Soviet-General Secretary Joseph Stalin had a major stroke, from which he died four days later.

In 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, injuring five members of Congress.

In 1961, an executive order from U.S. President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps.

In 1971, a bomb exploded in a restroom in the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol, causing $300,000 damage but no injuries. The Weather Underground, a leftist radical group that opposed the Vietnam War, claimed responsibility.

In 1995, the company formerly known as Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web incorporated under the name, Yahoo!
In 2003, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, was captured in Pakistan.

In 2004, an interim government took over in Haiti one day after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into exile following a month long insurrection.

File Photo by Ezio Petersen/UPI

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that execution of juvenile offenders is unconstitutional.

In 2011, the U.S. Interior Department approved the first deep-water drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico since a BP offshore explosion and massive oil spill in April 2010.

In 2018, President Donald Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports. The announcement set off a series of tit-for-tat tariff increases between the United States and China for months.

File Photo by Win McNamee/UPI

Study: Methane Emissions from Fossil Fuels Vastly Underestimated
February 28, 2020
A new Rochester University study raises new grave questions about fossil fuel production and climate change. The author of the first major study on methane and fracking, Cornell University's Bob Howarth, explains its implications.

Story Transcript

DIMITRI LASCARIS: This is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network from Montreal, Canada.

According to a new study, methane from the extraction and use of fossil fuels may have been “severely underestimated.” The research indicates that natural or biogenic emissions of fossil methane, that seep out of deeply held reserves make up a much smaller fraction of the global increase in methane emissions than previously thought. This means that the levels of fossil methane in the atmosphere are likely being driven by the methane escaping as coal, oil and natural gas, are mined, drilled, and transported.

The findings of the study are particularly worrisome because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of up to 80 to 100 times greater than CO2 in a 20 year timeframe. Scientists say this is the critical time period during which the world must take sweeping action to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.

Now here to discuss this study with us is ecologist Robert Howarth. A David R. Atkinson Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology, Dr. Howarth is the founding editor of the journal Biogeochemistry and served as editor-in-chief for more than 20 years. Thanks for joining us today, Dr. Howarth.

ROBERT HOWARTH: Pleased to be with you. Thank you.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: First of all, could you tell us about the essential findings of this study, Dr. Howarth? And please talk to us a bit about the methodology that its authors employed.

ROBERT HOWARTH: Sure. It’s an important paper. For background, we’ve known for 20 years, at the end of the 20th century, about 30% of all the methane that is amid the atmosphere has come from ancient fossil sources. We knew that from the measurement of the average amount of radiocarbon-14 that’s naturally in that methane. Up until this new study and a previous one by the same lab, the Petrenko Lab at the University of Rochester, most scientists that assumed that of that methane that’s coming from these ancient fossil sources, some of it was coming from natural geological seeps and some of it was coming from the fossil fuel industries: oil, gas and then coal.

What the new papers shows, they took cores of ice from ice sheets. They extracted the methane from that ice. They need about a ton of ice per sample, and then they again, measured the amount of C-14, the radiocarbon methane that is in that. What they have determined is that over virtually all of the last 10,000 years or so, right up until the time of the Industrial Revolution, there was no methane to speak of coming from natural geological seeps. The methane sources naturally overall of that time period, were coming from wetlands and lakes and sources of that sort. So what that means is that we’re underestimating the methane source as of the end of the 20th century. And more recently, of that 30% of the total flux, none of it’s coming from natural seeps, probably–or very little. It’s mostly from the fossil fuel industry.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: So just to be clear, according to the study, what is the degree to which we have been underestimating methane emissions from the fossil fuels industry?

ROBERT HOWARTH: This increases our estimate of what the fossil fuel industry would be by say 40% to 50%, 45% something like that. So it’s a big increase. Then there are other reasons to believe it. The new finding is consistent with, I think, an increasing body of literature of measurements made on the ground too suggesting that many people have been underestimating the importance, particularly from the oil and gas industry.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Since this study was published, some have observed that there is a positive side to this news and that the study’s results mean that there is a greater opportunity to cut methane emissions. What are your thoughts on that?

ROBERT HOWARTH: Well, yeah. It’s not positive that the fossil fuel industries are contributing so much, but sure, if we recognize they’re the source we can cut it back. It’s not easy however, to cut back on the emissions from the fossil fuel industry without getting rid of fossil fuels quite frankly. I think the best evidence at the moment, say is that the natural gas industry, globally is a major, major driver of these emissions.

My research and that of many others suggest that somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3.5% Of the natural gas that’s developed in North America is emitted to the atmosphere unburned as methane. So that’s a fairly small percentage, 3.5%. Most of it were getting to market and burning. And yet, that 3.5% is the magnitude that we’re talking about. It’s a huge global flux and globally important in terms of the climate change. Can we reduce that 3.6% to 1.8%? Maybe, but it’s not easy. So I think really what this is is another call for why we need to move away from fossil fuels.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: You mentioned just a moment ago your prior work in this area. For those not familiar with your work, Dr. Howarth, you and your colleague, Anthony Ingraffea, cut against the grain at the dawn of the fracking boom in 2011, publishing a study finding that fracking in the Marcellus shale could do more to exacerbate global heating than mining coal. You and Dr. Ingraffea were heavily attacked by the gas industry for your work. Among other work that you have published since, you also authored a paper last year, which found that since the use of fracking shale, gas has increased in its share of global natural gas production and has released more methane into the atmosphere. Do you feel that this new study on methane emissions vindicates the work that you and Dr. Ingraffea have done on this issue over the past number of years?

ROBERT HOWARTH: I don’t know if I’d use the word, “vindicate,” because I don’t really feel like we’ve been attacked, but sure. The paper that professor Ingraffea and I put out is just a little under nine years ago. It was the first ever paper where anyone had looked at how much methane might be admitted from using shale gas and what it meant in terms of its climate ramifications. We said in the paper, the data which were available to us, we were using unpublished data from industry sources and from the US environmental Protection Agency. The data were not easy to verify.

So in our conclusions, we’re strongly qualified. We said that what was needed is to get better data, but if our findings were to hold up, then yes indeed, the methane emissions from developing shale gas would more than offset the carbon advantage, the CO2 advantage from switching from coal to natural gas. When you burn natural gas, you admit less carbon dioxide than coal, but you’ll meet a lot more methane. Since methane is roughly a hundred times more powerful as a greenhouse gas, that offsets it.

We postulated that nine years ago and what we hoped would happen has happened, and that is that hundreds of other scientists have gotten involved. There are now well over 1,400 peer reviewed papers published in this area all in the nine years since our study. They don’t all agree, but the science has been moving towards a consensus pretty strongly new over the last few years. I think the number I threw out a bit ago, 3.5% of the methane that’s produced being leaked to the atmosphere is strongly supported by most of the literature now. This new paper, yeah, it’s entirely consistent with that view. So I’m feeling good about the science. I’m feeling bad about climate change and the contribution of the fossil fuel industry to it. But it means that we not only need to get rid of coal, we need to get rid of natural gas as well as quickly as we can.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Lastly, Dr. Howarth, the climate debate in general has changed a lot in the United States. Since your 2011 study came out, Barack Obama fully backed the fracking boom and concerns over methane, got swept to the side until late in the administration’s second term. Under the current administration, we’ve seen a rather vigorous and unchecked support for the fossil fuels industry. What do you make of the debate in the Democratic Party presidential primaries today from the perspective of dealing with this problem, in particularly, the problem with fracking and methane emissions? Do you think that this is a subject within the debate that has being given sufficient attention?

ROBERT HOWARTH: No. Climate change in general hasn’t gotten sufficient attention in the debate. The last debate barely touched on climate. The debate the week before had more on climate. There’s a pretty strong contrast. If we go back to the Obama administration, you’re correct. President Obama more or less endorsed fracking and saw natural gas as a bridge fuel. I think he was wrong. He was changing his mind towards the end, and I gave an invited briefing to senior staff at the White House in May of his final year. I think they were strongly coming around.

But of course, President Trump sees no worry from climate change and there’s no fossil fuel he doesn’t like. So the Democratic Party really needs to come forward with candidates that address that. I think we have a pretty sharp… The candidates have said enough to show us that there’s a divergence of views. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders clearly have opposed fracking, understand that methane’s a problem, understand that natural gas is not a bridge fuel and we need to move on. They’ve clearly said that; Mayor Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, not so much. They tend to fall back on this language still that may be natural gas is a bridge fuel and they have not been critical of fracking at all. So the Democrats have a clear choice.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: Well, we were speaking to Dr. Robert Howarth about a new study relating to the emissions of methane from the fossil fuels industry, showing that they had been vastly underestimated. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Howarth.

ROBERT HOWARTH: Thank you for your interest. Appreciate it.

DIMITRI LASCARIS: And this is Dimitri Lascaris reporting for The Real News Network.

Is Medicare for All Bad for Union-Negotiated Healthcare?
February 26, 2020

The argument that Medicare for All will hurt workers because it abolishes hard-earned healthcare benefits of unionized workers has repeatedly been used against Sanders and Warren. But does the criticism have any basis?

Story Transcript

This is a rush transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Greg Wilpert: It’s The Real News Network. I’m Greg Wilpert in Baltimore.

As Bernie Sanders surges ahead in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, many of the attacks against him have honed in on how his Medicare for All plan would supposedly hurt unionized workers who have good health insurance. During the ninth Democratic debate in Nevada last week, moderator Chuck Todd summarized the issue as follows.Chuck Todd: I’m going to stay on this topic, on this issue with the Culinary Union. Obviously, their leaders are warning their members about … that your healthcare plan will take away their healthcare plan, take away private insurance completely. There are some Democrats who like you a lot but worry that this plan, Medicare for All, is going to take away private insurance and that it goes too far. Are they right?Greg Wilpert: Chuck Todd was referring to the Nevada Culinary Workers Union, which had criticized Sanders’ Medicare for All plan and which several other candidates used as an opportunity to attack Sanders as being anti-union. But what’s behind this? Why are unions such as the Nevada Culinary Workers opposed to or lukewarm in their support for Medicare for All? And would Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal really be a problem for workers with good employer-provided health insurance plans?

Joining me to explore this issue is Mark Dudzic. He is the National Coordinator with the Labor Campaign for Single Payer. Also, he is the author of an article published in the journal of New Politics titled Take My Benefits—Please!, which explores how unions would benefit from Medicare for All and why so many of them remain reluctant to endorse the plan. Thanks for joining us today, Mark.Mark Dudzic: Great to be with you.Greg Wilpert: Let’s start with a relatively common argument, which Joe Biden, Peter Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Mike Bloomberg also raised during the Nevada debate, that Medicare for All, by eliminating private health insurance plans, would get rid of hard-fought union benefits and would thus hurt unions and workers. What’s your reaction to that argument?

Mark Dudzic: Yeah, well, I think first of all that that is now actually a minority view within the organized labor movement, that there’s been a real sea change in perceptions about employment-based healthcare, and it’s a growing consensus that it turned out not to be a very good idea to link healthcare to employment. And we’re dealing with a, basically, an unsustainable system here. We have to bargain more and more money every contract, we have to sacrifice wages and other benefits in order to maintain payment into the world’s most expensive and inefficient healthcare system, and it’s not working for us. It’s causing strikes, lockouts, concession bargaining. It’s driving wage stagnation for both union and non-union workers. And we need to transition into a Medicare for All solution in order to take healthcare off the bargaining table and strengthen our bargaining power both as individual workers and as unions.

Greg Wilpert: Now, one of the arguments or concerns that are often raised in connection with how Medicare for All would affect the employer-provided health insurance that unions managed to get is that that it might not be as good as those plans, the existing private plans. What’s your response to that concern?

Mark Dudzic: Look, I would challenge anybody to show me a union plan that is as good as the level of benefits proposed in both the House and the Senate legislation in terms of comprehensive coverage, in terms of lack of out-of-pocket payments, copays, deductibles, coinsurance, et cetera, in terms of the freedom to access care, and in terms of the continuity of coverage. There’s not a single union plan in the country that can can match that level of benefits.

So I think that that’s kind of a false equivalence. I think because we call it Medicare for All, there might be a tendency to compare what the proposals are in the current legislation to the actually existing Medicare system, which has been severely compromised for over 50 years of cuts and attacks and reductions in payments. But this would be an expanded and an improved version of the current Medicare system and would in fact vastly improve Medicare for senior citizens who are currently on Medicare.

Greg Wilpert: I think that’s a very important point because by calling it “Medicare for All,” people always think of the usual Medicare. It used to be called single payer, actually, which perhaps would have been not necessarily clear, but at least it wouldn’t confuse the issue. But let me move to another issue.

Even the AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten have both expressed a bit of skepticism towards Medicare for All, even though both the AFL-CIO and the AFT have officially endorsed single payer. Now, if unions actually gain from Medicare for All, like you say, either because of their bargaining power and also because the plans themselves might be better or would be better, why are so many union leaders lukewarm towards it?

Mark Dudzic: Well, maybe you should ask them. I mean, I think that both of the organizations you mentioned have passed a number of resolutions that put them on record as supporting Medicare for All, so they’re not doing a very good job representing their own organizations’ positions. I think that there’s kind of two broad areas, I think, that might impact how union leaders feel about this.

The first is perhaps a reluctance to get ahead of their members, that there’s a perception that the union members themselves don’t support Medicare for All and are afraid to give up their benefits. I think to some degree, what happened last weekend in Las Vegas has disabused us of that notion, that, in fact, union members are often in advance of their leaders on understanding how Medicare for All would provide a vastly improved sense of security in their life and in the lives of their friends, neighbors, and family members. I think union members see that they’re more than just employees of a unionized operation, that they’re part of a working class that would vastly benefit from Medicare for All. So I think that that argument has begun to dissipate and will over the course of this election period.

And then the other argument or the other pull on national union leaders, I think, is a concern not to disrupt their political relationships with various groups within the Democratic establishment. And I think that that, again, will be addressed by the dynamics of this political campaign.

Greg Wilpert: So this brings me actually to my next question, which is that the US historically has actually considered a single payer bill back in 1946, at a time when union power was arguably at one of its strongest moments. So my question is, first of all, why did it fail back then? And how could it pass now when union power is actually at one of its lowest points in terms of strength in US history, and not only that, is, as you mentioned, quite intertwined with, for lack of a better word, with the establishment?

Mark Dudzic: I think that the short answer to the 1946 failure, and I wasn’t around then, but … is that in the US, unlike most of the industrialized world, capital emerged from World War II in a very strengthened position and went on the offensive in 1945 and ’46. And one of the first things they killed was the initiative that Roosevelt had promised when he was reelected in ’44 to make healthcare a right in this country, and they had moved on to put handcuffs on labor with the Taft-Hartley bill, and using anti-communism and all the other tools at their disposal to begin to weaken the labor movement. So that’s sort of the short story of what happened here.

But labor was strong enough to negotiate a second-best solution and negotiate healthcare, make healthcare a benefit rather than a right, and that worked pretty well right up into the 1970s for a lot of people, not for everyone. It created a number of disparities around race and gender within the working class in terms of access to healthcare. But beginning in the 1970s with the rise of neo-liberalism and globalization, deindustrialization, we began to experience a massive crisis in employment-based healthcare that’s just been unfolding now for almost half a century for working people.

So I would say that it’s this half-century’s experience with the demise of employment-based healthcare, which has opened up the new possibilities to win it. There’s been a huge paradigm shift in how people perceive Medicare for All. I think that that’s based on their life experience of most working-class families. Everybody knows they’re one major illness away from economic disaster. They understand how precarious it is. You lose your job, you lose your healthcare. Your kid ages out, she loses her healthcare. You go on strike, you lose your healthcare. People are ready for more, and they’re fed up with the status quo. And so that’s what’s really driving this.

Greg Wilpert: And as a campaigner for single payer, what would you say is the most important strategy to pursue in trying to make sure that this happens?

Mark Dudzic: I think we need to go very deep. I’m an old union organizer, and I think that this is kind of one of those moments like early on in an organizing drive, right before the boss finds out about the union. We have massive economic power and political power arrayed against us, and now is the time to really sit down and have the kind of kitchen table conversations with our coworkers and our neighbors about the … to anticipate the attacks that will be levied against us and the lies and the disunity and the threats and the scaremongering that’s going to be unleashed upon us as this campaign gains momentum. So I think now is the time to really go deep and challenge people to really understand this issue and to begin to take action in their own communities and their own workplaces to really reinforce and move this, their support for this issue.

Greg Wilpert: Okay, well, of course we continue to follow and to cover the issue, but we’re going to leave it there for now. I was speaking to Mark Dudzic, National Coordinator for the Labor Campaign For Single Payer. Thanks again, Mark, for having joined us today.

Mark Dudzic: Greg, wonderful to be here. Thanks.

Greg Wilpert: And thank you for joining The Real News Network.

The National Right To Abortion Is Facing An Intense Threat. This Group Has Been Preparing For This Fight For Decades.

The Center for Reproductive Rights will argue in the first major Supreme Court case over abortion in the Trump era, which could gut Roe v. Wade.

Ema O'ConnorBuzz Feed News Reporter March 1, 2020, at 10:01 a.m. ET

Melanie Metz for BuzzFeed News
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, in her Manhattan office.


It is no exaggeration to say that the Center for Reproductive Rights was made for this moment.

Around 30 years ago, Nancy Northup, the center’s current president, was outside an abortion clinic in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, linking arms with the people around her to form a human barricade to protect patients trying to get inside. Hundreds of anti-abortion protesters faced them down, chanting, saying prayers, and attempting to block patients from entering the clinic.

Northup was just out of law school at the time and clerking for a judge in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Louisiana. She had watched the fight over abortion rights reach a fever pitch in 1989, both in the courts and on the ground. Dozens of abortion clinics had been bombed or burned down in recent years. The Supreme Court, thanks to appointments made by the Republican president, was growing more and more conservative, and a recent case was just one vote short of dismantling Roe v. Wade. Though Roe survived, the court had still affirmed laws limiting access to abortion in Louisiana and Missouri.

Three decades later, Northup said, not much has changed.

“I had a frontline view to how vitriolic the battle was in Louisiana back then,” Northup told BuzzFeed News as she sat in business attire in her corner office in lower Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge stretching over the East River behind her.

“It’s really unfortunate that we’re here, 30 years later, and this remains such an entrenched fight,” she said.

The Center for Reproductive Rights, a major nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, focuses on bringing anti-abortion laws to court to block and overturn them before they can go into effect.

On March 4, attorneys from the center will appear before the Supreme Court to argue against another Louisiana law that could gut the constitutional right to abortion. This will be the first case on abortion to come before the conservative justices appointed by President Donald Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Abortion rights advocates are nervous.

The case, June Medical Services v. Russo, pertains to a law passed in 2014 that requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges to local hospitals. This requirement has proven to be unnecessary for clinics (an abortion rarely results in complications, and if one did, the patient would be admitted to a hospital regardless of the doctor’s privileges). And it’s so difficult to implement that when Texas passed a similar law, it shut down half the state’s clinics.

Many abortion-related regulations, referred to by advocates as TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, purport to be for the patient’s safety but in fact aim to close clinics and create barriers to accessing the procedure. But what makes this case unusual is that the Center for Reproductive Rights already argued against this law in front of the Supreme Court just four years ago— and won.

In 2016, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, a case over a nearly identical law requiring hospital admitting privileges in Texas in 2013. The court struck it down 5–3, giving abortion rights advocates their biggest legal win in decades. The court’s decision strongly reaffirmed that placing an “undue burden” on access to abortion is unconstitutional.

“Unnecessary health regulations that have the purpose or effect of presenting a substantial obstacle to a woman seeking an abortion impose an undue burden on the right,” Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the court’s opinion, concluding that Texas’s admitting privilege requirement “provides few, if any, health benefits for women, poses a substantial obstacle to women seeking abortions, and constitutes an 'undue burden' on their constitutional right to do so."

With such a cut-and-dried opinion from the highest court in the country, it was a shock to the center, and advocates in general, when Louisiana’s 5th Circuit Court of Appeals — where, coincidentally, Northup got her start — let a nearly identical law stand. In the 5th Circuit Court’s opinion, Judge Jerry Smith suggested the difference between the cases is not in the two laws, which the court admitted were virtually identical, but rather between the two states. It may be easier for doctors to obtain admitting privileges in Louisiana than it is in Texas, Smith wrote (the center strongly contests this assertion).

If the Supreme Court overturns Whole Woman’s Health, it would be a green light for states with anti-abortion legislatures to pass similar laws, closing down clinics and potentially making the procedure totally inaccessible in their states. While it is theoretically possible the justices could use this case to entirely overturn Roe v. Wade and completely undo the national right to abortion, as some advocates fear, it is much more likely that the court would instead give states the ability to regulate abortion until Roe only exists on paper.


Pete Marovich / Getty Images
Northup speaks to the media outside of the US Supreme 

Court in Washington, DC, June 27, 2016.

The center was created to fight a case like this. In 1992, lawyer Janet Benshoof founded the organization to represent Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania in one of the only other major Supreme Court cases on abortion to be decided in the past three decades: Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In that case, the center argued against Pennsylvania laws that required a married woman seeking an abortion to provide a signed statement indicating she notified her spouse, required minors to notify their parents, required patients to wait 24 hours between appointments to get an abortion, and required doctors to read patients scripts that were often inaccurate or opposed to abortion.

The center, then called the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, won the case 5–4, but it was a bittersweet victory. The court upheld Roe and struck down the spousal-notification law but allowed the rest of the restrictions to go into place. That decision has enabled the success of hundreds of TRAP laws nationwide in the two decades since, which have closed dozens of clinics, limited abortion access, and kept the center busy in the courts.

Northup took over as the center’s president and CEO in 2003. During her tenure, she has significantly built up the organization, expanding the team from around 55 staff members to hundreds, with around 800 lawyers around the world doing pro bono work for the center. Since Northup started, the organization’s operating budget has grown from around $6 million to $40 million, and the center is often thought to be on par with Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, two reproductive rights legal giants.

"Never have I been as concerned as I am today about the promise of Roe being hollowed out for the women in this country."

In 2016, when the center helped deliver a major Supreme Court win in Whole Women’s Health, the future looked bright for abortion rights. The center and its supporters thought they could soon start working to expand abortion rights rather than just focusing on repealing restrictions. Now, more than three years later, Northup is “alarmed.”

“Never have I been as concerned as I am today about the promise of Roe being hollowed out for the women in this country,” she said in an emphatic but measured voice during a hearing on the Women’s Health Protection Act before Congress in mid-February. She reiterated this thought to BuzzFeed News.

“What's alarming is the extremism of the laws that were passed in the last year, some 47 years after Roe v. Wade, that Alabama would pass a blanket abortion ban that would be signed by the governor, that other states would pass bans before women know that they're pregnant,” Northup told BuzzFeed News in her office, two days after returning from Congress. “Being back in the Supreme Court, litigating the same issue we won four years ago — that gives me grave concern.”

Usually, legal and policy organizations like the center know for years which cases are likely to be taken up before the Supreme Court, and they have that time to prepare. When Louisiana passed the exact same hospital-admitting privileges law that had been struck down in Texas, and when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to take it up, the center thought it was a “nothingburger,” Center for Reproductive Rights Senior Counsel T.J. Tu told BuzzFeed News.

Tu had started at the center just two weeks before, and this case was his first assignment. He thought it was so open-and-shut that he asked his supervisor for more work, he said, wondering how this could possibly fill up his days. When the 5th Circuit upheld Louisiana’s law, Tu and the whole center were shocked.

“We have mined the Supreme Court jurisprudence, and there's no situation that looks remotely like this, where the court has been confronted with an identical law in such a short period of time,” Tu said. “It’s unheard of. There was no way this one was going to be the next big abortion rights case, but here we are.”

"The center has been honing its skills for decades precisely so that they can be ready for a moment like this."

The center quickly snapped into action, putting what is normally a decade’s worth of work into a case that would be argued in just one year. Eight days away from the Louisiana law going into effect, the center rushed to the Supreme Court to request an emergency stay. The lawyers were told by prognosticators they had no chance of getting it, Tu said, but it was their Hail Mary pass.


“Stays in general are rare. You only really see them in the movies,” Tu, who will be arguing the Supreme Court case alongside the center’s senior director, Julie Rikelman, told BuzzFeed News. You need the assent of five justices to get a stay, the same number you need to win a case — but to the center’s surprise, it was granted, the law was blocked, and clinics were prevented from closing. This gave the center a sliver of hope that the Supreme Court, even with its new conservative majority, might rule on its side.

“The center has been honing its skills for decades precisely so that they can be ready for a moment like this,” Tu said.

As if this weren’t enough, the center was then thrown another curveball when Louisiana’s legal team entered a last-minute petition to the Supreme Court. The brief argued that the center and the abortion clinic it represents, June Medical Services, shouldn’t even have the ability to sue the state over abortion laws, and that the only people who should be able to sue are the patients themselves.

That argument could threaten the very core of how the center (and other organizations, like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU) functions. Since its inception, the center has mainly represented clinics suing state governments on behalf of their patients in order to block anti-abortion laws.

People seeking abortions in states that are hostile to the procedure often only have a matter of weeks between finding out they are pregnant and being able to get an abortion. The law requires the plaintiff to be pregnant when they file the suit. Without organizations like the center joining clinics to file suits on their patients’ behalf, very few lawsuits challenging anti-abortion laws would be filed.

“It would be devastating for us and other organizations that litigate” if the Supreme Court were to agree with Louisiana on this issue, Northup told BuzzFeed News. Tu agreed, saying that the vast majority of the cases they are currently working on would be thrown into turmoil. “It would instantly create an earthquake,” Northup added.

Louisana’s ask is not entirely out of the blue, getting rid of third-party standing for abortion clinics has long been a strategy pursued by anti-abortion organizations, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas even argued against it in his dissent in the Whole Woman’s Health case.

Still, the center’s lawyers said they are hopeful.

“The Supreme Court has recognized third-party standing for almost a hundred years, and it's done that in a number of cases — not just abortion,” Rikelman, the lead attorney on the case, said in a press briefing in mid-February. The practice has been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court, and if it were overturned it could have wide-reaching effects for cases outside of the abortion sphere, including, for example, gun sellers suing over Second Amendment rights on behalf of their customers or teachers suing on behalf of their students.


Bettmann / Bettmann Archive
Adelle Thomas, her daughter Marie Higgins, and her granddaughter Catherine Starr join in the picket line in St. Louis protesting Mayor John Poelker's refusal to allow city hospitals to perform abortions, despite two court rulings outlawing Missouri's anti-abortion laws, 1973.

Despite the feeling of emergency permeating the center in the weeks leading up to the Supreme Court hearing, the court’s decision — which will likely come in late spring or early summer — is in no way predictable. Nothing has changed about the effects of admitting privilege laws since the 2016 Whole Woman’s Health decision, the attorneys from the center said. Chief Justice John Roberts, now considered the court's swing vote, joined the dissent in Whole Woman's Health, though attorneys from the center insisted this does not necessarily indicate what his vote will be this time around.

The only thing that’s changed is the makeup of the Supreme Court and who occupies the White House.

It is in the court’s interest to appear above politics, above the whims of a presidency, no matter how difficult doing so may be, the attorneys emphasized. Flipping their own decision in such a short amount of time would undermine that.

“I have to feel hopeful, or I can’t get out of bed in the morning. ... As soon as I said that I was like, ‘Oh, we’re fucked.'"

“I have to feel hopeful, or I can’t get out of bed in the morning,” Janice Mac Avoy, a prominent member of the center’s board of directors, told BuzzFeed News over the phone. “[The justices] literally protect our freedoms. They’re the last bastion protecting us against tyranny, and I just hope they take that seriously.”

Mac Avoy paused for a moment and began to laugh. “As soon as I said that I was like, ‘Oh, we’re fucked,’” she said.

No matter what happens, the center has a plan. For one, there’s the Women’s Health Protection Act, the bill Northup testified to Congress about this month. The bill — which the center first spearheaded in 2013 during the Obama administration and now has more than 150 Democratic cosponsors — would essentially codify Roe, making the national right to abortion law no matter what the Supreme Court decides and giving lower courts guidance on which state laws would violate federal law.

The legislation has the support of every Democratic presidential candidate and is likely to pass the House, but not the Republican-controlled Senate. But Northup said advocates are preparing the bill so they’ll be “ready to move” if Democrats take back the Senate and the White House.

The center has also turned more attention to the states, working to pass legislation and challenge restrictive laws in state courts, to get the right to abortion enshrined in state constitutions even as it is degraded federally.

But Northup’s moon shot, she told BuzzFeed News, is to get an equality amendment in the US Constitution that would protect abortion rights as well as prohibit discrimination.

“If I have to go out of my career the way it came in, if I have to doorknock for the rest of my life, I’ll do it,” Northup said. “But you don't give up. There is always, always another route to go.” ●

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More Than 200 Members Of Congress Asked The Supreme Court To Consider Overturning Roe V. Wade

Ema O'Connor · Jan. 2, 2020


Ema O'Connor is a political reporter for BuzzFeed News 

and is based in Washington, DC.

Trump campaign fears evangelical voters are fleeing as election nears: Christian news reporter

February 29, 2020 By Matthew Chapman

On Saturday, an MSNBC panel discussed the possibility that certain groups of white evangelicals may be souring on President Donald Trump — and what it means that so many of them have not yet.

“What you see in the Christianity Today article is a publication speaking to and for white evangelicals who have always been uncomfortable with Trump,” said Religion News Service national reporter Jack Jenkins. “The whole subset are, in fact, Democrats. But a lot could be described as centrists or moderates. Some might have held their noses and voted for him in 2016. If they continue to express this kind of frustration like we saw in that Christianity Today editorial, there’s a chance he might lose some. They could vote independent or third party, or some might end up voting for Democrats. So there is some sense of concern within the Trump camp, looking forward in terms of shoring up their support among white evangelicals.”

Journalist Roland Martin offered his take on the current state of white evangelical Christianity.

“First and foremost, look, I’m a Christian author. My wife is ordained minister,” said Martin. “And the reality is this here — white conservative evangelicals are Christian frauds. Let me say it again: they’re frauds. If you look at the Moral Majority from the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons of the world, all we heard from them since the late ’70s and ’80s, character, values, morals, and all those things. Yet, what they did is they embraced Donald Trump, who is immoral, has no values, has no principles, and, frankly, is a fake Christian, okay.”

“Remember it was white conservative evangelicals who held up and supported Jim Crow and who would use the Bible to endorse slavery,” said Martin. “What you have are individuals who only care about two things — white conservative evangelicals care about two things. They can’t stand gay people, and they can’t stand abortion. And so all they care about are federal judges who are going to drive home their agenda, and that’s why they suck up to Trump … they don’t care about the poor, they don’t care about climate change.”

“I go back to 2003, when Governor Bob Riley, big-time white conservative evangelical, wanted to change the tax code, give a $1.2 billion increase in Alabama to help the poor,” added Martin. He even used ‘What would Jesus do’ to better the schools in Alabama. Lost 67-33, and guess who voted against him? The same people who say they love Jesus.”

Trump officials downplaying coronavirus risk in America are ‘full of crap’: Health policy analyst

February 29, 2020 By Matthew Chapman


President Donald Trump’s latest line on the coronavirus is to claim that it is a hoax intended to hurt his campaign. But even putting that aside, there is still the question of exactly how widespread the virus is in the United States or what the potential for a large-scale outbreak is.

On MSNBC Saturday, health policy analyst Laurie Garrett warned that there is no way to know for sure — in large part, because our testing capabilities are nowhere near where they need to be.

“It’s far more infectious than the flu and far more deadly than the flu,” said Garrett, referring to comments from Trump and radio host Rush Limbaugh that it was no worse than the flu. “And it is like trying to keep from getting a cold. The best way to think about it is half of all common colds are from the same family of viruses, coronaviruses. If you think about how hard it is to not get a cold when your child comes home sneezing from school or when you go to the office and somebody you work with has a cold, then you realize how contagious it is.”

“The CDC can’t do the test … this is the problem,” continued Garrett. “The test failed. The test isn’t working. It has to be completely rethought, remade. And now the problem is you have jurisdiction after jurisdiction around the country saying, FDA, loosen your rules, let us develop our own tests. We can do it faster. We have the technology in place, we have the scientists in place. Let us do our testing.”

“In the entire United States, we’ve only tested about 450 people. That’s it,” said Garrett. “And you look across the world, and all sorts of countries are way ahead of us with tens of thousands of people having been tested. Even up to a million people being tested. We have no idea how pervasive this virus is in America. And anybody who’s telling you otherwise is full of crap.”

Terabytes Of Stolen Adult Content From OnlyFans Have Leaked

An OnlyFans spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that no breach occurred, but sex workers are outraged.
Posted on February 27, 2020

Osa Lovely
Performer and OnlyFans user Osa Lovely.

A leak of several terabytes of pornographic images and videos from clip site OnlyFans went viral on Thursday. According to users on Twitter, versions of the leak — being shared via the Mega cloud storage site — contain between 1.5 and 4 terabytes of content.

OnlyFans is a British social media platform popular with influencers, porn actors, and sex workers. It allows users to host images and video content behind a paywall for subscribers.


Jewels Jade
Porn star and OnlyFans user Jewels Jade

“This is paid for private content that we own,” porn star and OnlyFans user Jewels Jade told BuzzFeed News, “This is illegal and a violation of our rights.” Jade was unsure if her content had been leaked.

After news of the leak spread, OnlyFans denied anything malicious had happened to its platform.

“We have investigated claims of a site-wide hack and found no evidence of any breach of our systems,” a spokesperson for OnlyFans told BuzzFeed News. “The content contained in the supposed ‘leak’ seems to be curated from multiple sources, including other social media applications.”

The OnlyFans spokesperson did not answer follow-up questions about whether the company had taken steps to stop the spread of the Mega links.

The leak is organized as a directory, with content listed by the date it was first uploaded to OnlyFans and the names performers use on the site. According to Mega links viewed by BuzzFeed News, the leaks include TikTok stars, Instagram models, and amateur porn stars, all of whom use OnlyFans to make money from producing adult content.


MEGA






Scottish journalist Vonny LeClerc told BuzzFeed News she first noticed people sharing links to the leak when it was trending on Twitter in the UK on Thursday. LeClerc has found at least five Mega folders circulating on social media. As one goes down, many more pop up. She said she’s not sure how the leak was assembled.

“Creators are understandably concerned,” LeClerc told BuzzFeed News. “I have been DM'd by a number of sex workers so they can see if they are on the list. Unfortunately, it seems to have attracted the trolls who are now victim-blaming and calling women 'degenerates.'”

Because of the disorganized nature of the leak, it’s unclear who started compiling it, but at the top of one of the Mega links is a Cash App username posted to Reddit several times by an account that regularly shares Mega links of leaked pornography.


“Lots of people who use [OnlyFans] rely on this as a revenue stream,” LeClerc said. “Younger people, trans and nonbinary people, disabled people, people who may not have the easiest access to traditional employment. If gives anyone a means of making paywall-protected adult content. But clearly, it offers zero protection for creators, whose content can be bought and then freely distributed onwards.”


OnlyFans

Although OnlyFans leaks aren’t uncommon, none has ever been as large and widespread as Thursday’s. There are communities on Reddit and Telegram dedicated to cracking performers’ accounts and sharing the content without their consent. Many of those videos eventually make their way to various tube sites. A similarly large, though different, OnlyFans leak was posted last Saturday to forums dedicated to cracking and leaking pirated content.

An OnlyFans user, who requested to remain anonymous due to harassment on Twitter, said she was unsure if she had been included in the leak because there were so many different versions of it circulating on Twitter.

“It’s heartbreaking to see the content we’ve all worked so hard to create just be thrown into the hands of the wrong people,” she told BuzzFeed News. “From what I’ve seen pretty much everyone who has an account on OnlyFans has been leaked, but it’s such a huge amount of storage I doubt everyone’s will be seen.”

She said that after the links began to be shared many OnlyFans users were desperate to find out if they’ve been included.

This is not the first big leak of content and personal information belonging to adult performers and sex workers. Sexting site SextPanther also reportedly exposed user’s information earlier this year, including home addresses, dates of birth, and biometric data. And, other sites serving sex workers like PussyCash and iWantClips have had recent leaks too, according to Daly Barnett, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“This breach is another marker in an unfortunate trend,” Barnett told BuzzFeed News. “These platforms routinely have terrible security posture and reprehensible incident response.”

“I think these platforms are only interested [in] avoiding legal troubles...while making the most money off their users,” Barnett added, referencing FOSTA-SESTA, a federal law governing sex-related content online.

“This is the second leak I’ve heard about this year. This puts us and our families at terrible risk,” said performer and OnlyFans user Osa Lovely.


Dee Siren.
Performer and OnlyFans user Dee Siren


Lovely called on the sites to take greater precautions with performers’ information, saying that they should “protect our sensitive personal information like you protect our customer’s information. We are your customers too.”

“When we are barred from most traditional payment processors, we are forced to use niche websites [...] and are denied the security protections of trusted sites,” Danielle Blunt, a dominatrix and cofounder of sex worker advocacy organization Hacking Hustling, told BuzzFeed News. “That vulnerability is then preyed upon by malicious actors.”

“Our online content should be protected just as any other performer would be in any other industry,” said performer and OnlyFans user Dee Siren. Siren added, though, that anyone looking at the leaked material today was missing its point, saying that OnlyFans is “more about the interaction that we have with our fans, which is only personal. Our fans know that and that cannot be re-created by someone hacking or sharing her information.”

“So that’s pretty fucking worthless,” said Siren.


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Ryan Broderick is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York City.
Contact Ryan Broderick at ryan@buzzfeed.com.

Otillia Steadman is the world news operations manager for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Contact Otillia Steadman at otillia.steadman@buzzfeed.com.