Exxon Rejected Net Zero Pitch After Proxy Loss, Citi Banker Says



David Wethe and Kevin Crowley
Thu, September 30, 2021, 

(Bloomberg) -- Exxon Mobil Corp. rejected a pitch from a Citigroup Inc. senior investment banker to commit to a target for net zero emissions even after shareholders staged a revolt over the company’s climate policy.

Stephen Trauber, co-head of the bank’s newly created natural resources and clean-energy transition group, said he met with the oil giant’s executive committee right after it lost three board seats in June. Activist investor Engine No. 1 ran a successful proxy campaign as it pushed for a net zero target. Trauber said he urged the oil giant to reconsider its position.

“They looked at me and said, ‘That’s great, but we don’t know how we would get there. We can’t commit to that if we don’t have a plan to get there,’” he said Thursday during the webcast of an event hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Energy Studies and law firm Baker Botts LLP. “I assured them most companies today who have committed to net zero don’t have a plan on how to get there, but they’re working to get there.”

Trauber’s comments offer a rare glimpse inside Exxon’s inner sanctum as it grapples with intense external pressure to follow the example of European rivals Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc, which have pledged to eliminate on a net basis not only their own emissions of greenhouse gases but those of their suppliers and customers as well.

Asked to respond to Trauber’s account, Exxon said in a statement that it routinely evaluates its climate pledges and will provide updates on its strategy “to reflect the changing landscape.” The company hasn’t committed to any net zero goals but has previously announced various emission-reduction plans including the reduction its so-called methane intensity by as much as half by 2025.

According to Bloomberg’s Environmental scores, Exxon scores 3.5 out of 10 on greenhouse gas emissions management, which measures performance on metrics including gas flaring and emissions from its own operations. A score of 10 indicates the highest possible performance. Bloomberg’s environmental, social and governance scores are based on company-reported data.

Trauber also criticized the divestment of assets by major oil companies in order to achieve lower emissions. He said the largest companies have the lowest cost of capital and thus are best equipped to tackle the lowering of emissions from those operations, rather than just passing on the problem to another owner.

“There’s lots of dialog about should we create ‘Good Co’ and ‘Bad Co,’ like the banks used to do after the financial crisis,” Trauber said, describing a possible way in which oil companies could manage their dirtiest assets.

“Greenhouse emissions and carbon emissions don’t go away just because you sell off that asset,” he said. “I think we need to find other ways to do this where we’re not pushing the burden to companies that least are able to handle that burden.”

(Updates with comments from Trauber in last paragraph)

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What you need to know about China’s power crunch

Jane Li
Thu, September 30, 2021,

A molten salt solar tower stands behind electricity pylons at a power station near Dunhuang, Gansu province, China April 13, 2021. Picture taken April 13, 2021. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

Intermittent electricity cuts with no prior notice for hours or even days. Dimmed traffic lights that cause chaos. Half-cooked rice in rice cookers. For many residents in northeastern China, the power cuts of the past week have felt like a return to the 1980s, when China had acute power shortages due to the stunning pace of its economic growth.

“In terms of wide-spread power rationing, I would say this is the worst in a decade,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst for the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. In addition to residential use, the shortages are affecting businesses and factories, including suppliers to global tech giants such as Apple and Tesla.

Energy and economic analysts worldwide are now watching to see how Beijing plans to tackle the shortage—caused by increased demand, higher coal prices, and president Xi Jinping’s climate goals.

What are the reasons for the power crunch?

The demand for power is rising. China has been experiencing a strong recovery in exports, intensified by seasonal orders for Christmas, prompting factories to extend their work hours and increase power consumption. The hot weather this summer also pushed up residential power usage, especially in coastal province Guangdong. “The pandemic has driven China to become the world’s factory again. So even though traditional power plants are running at full capacity, electricity demand cannot be met,” wrote Xia Chun, managing director and chief economist of wealth management firm Noah Holdings International, in a column for Chinese financial news outlet Caixin. High coal prices. China’s curbs on coal mining for environmental and safety reasons, as well as heavy rain in Indonesia, disrupted coal production, pushing up its price. Given China’s tight control on electricity prices, for many power plants the high coal prices means it’s unprofitable or even loss-making to operate, according to Myllyvirta. Last October, China also decided to stop importing coal from Australia over political disputes. Although China managed to make up some of the void created by its boycott by importing from countries like the US, it has to pay higher prices for it due to the longer transportation distance. Through August this year, China imported 10% less coal that it did last year. Climate goals. Many energy analysts including Myllyvirta have argued that this is a more minor reason compared to other factors that are driving the power crisis. But in a country where local officials are mostly measured on their ability to meet state goals, the pressure from Beijing for provinces on fulfilling energy targets cannot be ignored. In August, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, which sets energy consumption and economic targets, in a rare move named and shamed nine provinces for not meeting their energy intensity reduction targets, prompting the provinces and other regions to scramble to set curbs on power use. Such pressure will likely become more significant in time.

When did China begin limiting electricity use?

As early as May, some factories in the wealthy southern manufacturing hub Guangdong province began shutting a few days a week, but the shortage seems to have seriously worsened since last week. As of Tuesday (Sept. 28), power rationing and industrial production cuts have been reported in at least 20 provinces, which account for 71% of China’s industrial production, according to a note from analysts at BofA Securities.

While earlier power curbs mostly affected manufacturers, around Sept. 23 some cities in three northeastern Chinese provinces—Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning—cut electricity for some residential use, causing panic among citizens. After waves of complaints under the hashtag #northeast power cut on microblog Weibo, state media People’s Daily on Sunday urged local governments to ensure residents’ power use, and to avoid “stimulating conflict and transferring responsibilities.”

Today, Liaoning issued a new warning about the “acute” electricity shortage the province faces and revealed more restrictions, while the southern hubs Shenzhen and Guangzhou announced the cancellation of light shows for the upcoming Oct. 1 National Day holiday.

How is it affecting China’s economy?

The energy crisis is seen as an equally huge, if not bigger shock to China’s economy compared to the financial woes of embattled Chinese developer Evergrande, which is mired in around $300 billion of liabilities and struggling to make interest payments. Economists at Nomura and Goldman Sachs have lowered their estimates for China’s GDP growth this year, with the latter citing Beijing’s increasing pressure to meet environmental targets for energy consumption and energy intensity.

Some suppliers to Apple and Tesla have halted their production due to the crunch, while more than 20 China-listed companies, ranging from bread makers to furniture producers, have announced that they have to suspend or limit their production. This could push up consumer goods prices in China.
What China is doing to fix its electricity crisis

On Wednesday, the National Development and Reform Commission laid out plans for tackling the power crunch. They include an orderly increase in coal imports, ensuring power generation of coal and gas plants, and urging plants to prepare coal inventories before the winter to above “safety levels,” and allowing prices to reflect demand and costs. The country might consider raising power prices for industrial or even residential users, according to Bloomberg, perhaps linking tariffs to the price of coal. Last month, it also said it had temporarily restarted some shuttered coal mines.

“In the slightly longer term, the rational response would be to dramatically increase investment in clean energy,” said Myllyvirta. China has set a goal of increasing the share of non-fossil fuels, such as wind and hydropower, in primary energy generation to 25% by 2030. But as those energies are highly reliant on weather conditions, and until related storage and transport infrastructure exists, they will not be able to replace coal as a stable source for power generation in the foreseeable future. Lower hydropower production contributed to power shortages in southern China this year.

The crunch has “no sign of abating in the near term,” according to the BofA Securities analysts’ note, pointing out that peak electricity use in this part of China usually takes place in winter, which is looming.

“Power crunch is usually observed in [the] summer or winter, when household power consumption peaks. The September outage raises question on how bad things could go in two months’ time when winter heating starts,” they wrote.

U.S., rights groups urge full probe of Rohingya leader's killing in Bangladesh

Mohibullah had been an international advocate for Rohingya rights, including traveling to the White House for a meeting on religious freedom in 2019.

Bangladesh has been sheltering more than 1.1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

Mushfiqul Alam / Reuters

Oct. 1, 2021
By Jennifer Jett and Emanuel Stoakes

The United States and rights groups are calling for a full investigation after a prominent Rohingya Muslim leader was shot and killed at a refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Mohibullah, who was known by one name and was in his late 40s, was killed by unidentified gunmen on Wednesday in the Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar.

On Thursday evening, thousands of refugees attended his funeral prayers before Mohibullah was buried in a graveyard inside the camp.

The incident comes amid worsening violence at the sprawling settlement, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees driven from neighboring Myanmar in 2017 by waves of state-sponsored violence.

2020: Bangladesh ships Rohingya refugees to remote island

 DEC. 4, 2020

Mohibullah had been an international advocate for Rohingya rights, including traveling to the White House for a meeting on religious freedom in 2019.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was saddened by the murder and praised Mohibullah as a brave and fierce advocate for Rohingya rights.

“We urge a full and transparent investigation into his death with the goal of holding the perpetrators of this heinous crime accountable. We will honor his work by continuing to advocate for Rohingya and lift up the voices of members of the community in decisions about their future,” Blinken said in a statement Thursday.

Mohibullah was known as a voice for starting the repatriation of the refugees to Myanmar.

Manir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images file

Mohibullah's death highlights the enduring struggles of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group long persecuted by the Myanmar government, as they contend with not only displacement but threats to their safety within the camps, Human Rights Watch said.

“He always defended the rights of the Rohingya to safe and dignified returns and to have a say in the decisions concerning their lives and future,” Meenakshi Ganguly, the group's South Asia director, said in a statement.

“His killing is a stark demonstration of the risks faced by those in the camps who speak up for freedom and against violence.”

The U.N. refugee agency condemned the attack and said it was in contact with agencies responsible for the security of Rohingya refugees

"We urge the Bangladesh authorities to undertake an immediate investigation, and hold those responsible to account," it said.

As leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, Mohibullah painstakingly documented the testimonials of survivors in the camps. The detailed record he provided has been cited in multiple investigations, including one by the International Criminal Court.

He addressed the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2019, and later that year he was part of a delegation of victims of religious persecution who met with former President Donald Trump at the White House.

Mohibullah, a former teacher, had served as a spokesman representing the Muslim ethnic group in international meetings. 

Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images file

In his remarks to the U.N. rights council, Mohibullah said the Rohingya had faced "systematic genocide" in Myanmar, where the government denies them citizenship.

"Imagine you have no identity, no ethnicity, no country, nobody wants you," he said. "How would you feel? This is how we feel today as Rohingya."

He said the Rohingya wanted to return home if they could be guaranteed citizenship and security.

"We are not stateless. Stop calling us that," he said. "We have a state, it is Myanmar."

But as Mohibullah's international profile increased, so did the number of death threats.

“Everyone in governments around the world who facilitated his travel overseas was well aware of the death threats he received, over the last 12 months in particular,” Eva Buzo, Mohibullah's lawyer, said in a phone interview with NBC News.

Saad Hammadi, South Asia campaigner for Amnesty International, said Mohibullah's killing "sends a chilling effect across the entire community."

The rights group said that since last year, at least 2,000 Rohingya refugees had been forced to flee their shelters by violence between two factions vying for control of the camp's illicit drug trade.

Bangladesh pledges 'justice' for murdered Rohingya activist

The country said that "no-one will be spared" in the hunt to find Mohib Ullah's killers. The police have made a number of arrests tied to the murder

Mohib Ullah was killed by unknown gunmen in Kutupalong refugee camp

Bangladesh on Saturday promised to mete out justice to the killers of a prominent Rohingya rights activist.

Mohib Ullah, the head of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), was killed by unknown gunmen in the Kutupalong refugee camp, in the southeastern Bangladeshi district of Cox's Bazar, on Wednesday night.

The police made three arrests on Friday in connection with the killing but provided no further details.

Over 700,000 Rohingya fled their home country Myanmar to Bangladesh, following a brutal crackdown by the military in 2017.

What has Bangladesh promised?

"The government will take stern action against those who were involved in the killing. No one will be spared," Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen said in his first comment since the killing.

Momen added that "vested" interests were responsible for the killing as Mohib Ullah had wanted to return to Myanmar. "The killers of Mohib Ullah must be brought to justice," he said.
Are there any suspects?

The three people arrested on Friday are believed to have links to an armed insurgent group among Rohingya refugees.

They are currently being interrogated, Naimul Huq, a police official in Cox's Bazar, said.

In an unverified video circulated on social media, Mohib Ullah's brother, Habib Ullah, who said he witnessed the shooting, blamed the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed group active in the camps.

ARSA said in a post on Twitter on Friday that it was "shocked and saddened" by the killing and decried "finger-pointing with baseless and hearsay accusations."

Who was Mohib Ullah?

Mohib Ullah was known as a moderate who advocated for the Rohingya to return to Myanmar with rights they were denied during decades of persecution.

He founded the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights in a bid to document atrocities against Rohingya in their native Myanmar and give them a voice in international talks about their future.

But his high profile made him a target of hardliners and he received death threats.

The killing has ignited grief and anger in the camps that make up the world's largest refugee settlement.

Why aggressively taxing the obscenely rich is key to fighting fascism

John Stoehr
October 01, 2021

Wealthy friends sip champagne on a yacht (Shutterstock)


A reader asked the other day why the Republicans are voting against the full faith and credit of the United States when the GOP comprises so many millionaires and billionaires invested in financial markets. In other words, why would the very obscenely rich support a party that's clearly threatening the very obscene power of the very obscenely rich?

One theory, which I think is the right theory, is they don't want the Republicans to prevail. They think the Democrats will do the right thing for the sake of their country, not their party. The gamble is almost certainly the right one. Bringing the economy to the brink of panic is dangerous, but the actual risk is minimal given the Democrats are the party of governance. They would not call the Republicans' bluff.

Proof of this theory can be seen in the near-total silence of the very obscenely rich in the wake of news that the Senate Republicans had voted against the full faith and credit of the United States. Sure, there's been a few gentle reminders that defaulting on the national debt would be, um, subpar. But that's nothing compared to the hysterical outcry against the Democrats and their big plan to raise taxes on the very obscenely rich to pay for reshaping the government. While they have little to say about the real danger of default, they have a lot to say about higher taxes! That would hurt business! The economy! Jobs!

One takeaway is the very obscenely rich are lousy with bad faith. The government taxed them at much higher rates decades ago (at more than 90 percent during the Eisenhower administration). Yet they still managed to continue being very obscenely rich. During the same period, the economy was gangbusters. Jobs, too. The Democrats haven't yet passed their 10-year infrastructure bills, but so far, they seem unaffected by the lousy bad faith of the very obscenely rich (though the rates they are aiming for are not nearly high enough).

The other takeaway is the very obscenely rich are fully supportive of the Republican Party's efforts to sabotage the country just enough to maintain parasitic control of it. The GOP and the very obscenely rich don't want to kill off democracy. That would be bad for business. They only want to weaken it. As I said earlier this week, the party voting against America's credit is the same party "undermining the national recovery from the covid pandemic, which is the same party tolerating insurgents who nearly brought down the republic, which is the same party eroding the rule of law, which is the same party welcoming interference by Russia, which is … so on and so forth." The very obscenely rich, meanwhile, have resumed campaign donations to Republicans who voted to toss the 2020 election results. Firms like Home Depot and Walmart want the people to buy their stuff. They also want to prevent the people from flexing the sovereignty that would prevent them from continuing to extract wealth from the people.

Those of us worried about the future of democracy have pinned hope on the Democrats passing election reform. I've pointed out one reason that's not enough. We need to crack down on lawlessness, too. But all of the above is another reason reforming elections is insufficient. If we're going to fight authoritarianism creeping through the body politic, we need to do more about the very obscenely rich who are paving the way for that authoritarian creep with their money. The democratic way of doing that is with higher, much higher, taxation.

The problem is worse than it looks. The very obscenely rich are not only financing Republicans prepared to deny the sovereignty of the people. Directly and indirectly, they are enabling the bullies, thugs and terrorists trying to bring the republic down. In April, The Guardian reported a Christian fundraising site connected the Proud Boys and other violent groups to "anonymous high-dollar donors." Robert Mercer, Donald Trump's sugar daddy, backs far-right candidates and a social media network insurgents used to organize the assault on the US Capitol. Charles Koch, the industrialist, is tied to a vast propaganda network that includes VDare, a fascist organization. Virtually all organized anti-government "protests" during the covid pandemic can be traced back to the very obscenely rich. Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, has been called "one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement."

Right now, the Democrats are focused on getting two infrastructure packages through the Congress to reshape government and the US economy. Their focus is on raising taxes on the very obscenely rich just enough to pay for it. Democracy demands taking that another step. To fight fascism, we must fight the people paying for it. That means raising taxes higher, much higher, on the very obscenely rich.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.

Will the United States officially acknowledge that it had a secret torture site in Poland?

Pro Publica
October 01, 2021

Abu Zubaydah's drawings, which were made while he was in U.S. custody. These are two of eight drawings released by the CIA. Credit: Drawings released by the CIA

One of the longest-held prisoners in the U.S. global war on terror is finally getting a day in court. Sort of. The prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who has never been charged with a crime, has been waiting 14 years for a federal judge to rule on his habeas corpus petition that challenges the legality of his detention. But next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a separate case: Zubaydah's request that he be permitted to take testimony from the two CIA contractors who oversaw his torture.

The Trump administration intervened to block public disclosure about how Zubaydah was treated while in U.S. custody, or even where he was held, and the Biden administration is continuing the fight. In its Supreme Court briefs, the administration has cited an array of arguments against allowing the two men to be deposed, citing everything from the state secrets privilege, which shields highly sensitive government information from being revealed in civil litigation, to the plot of the Oscar-winning thriller “Argo."

Zubaydah's case has reached the Supreme Court circuitously, beginning with an investigation in Poland five years ago into whether any of its government officials were complicit in Zubaydah's detention and torture. The United States has refused to cooperate with the Polish prosecutors, citing national security concerns.

The Polish investigators asked for help from Zubaydah's lawyer, who in turn sought to take the depositions of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Paid more than $80 million, they were the principal architects of the CIA's “enhanced interrogation techniques" — the agency's euphemism for waterboarding prisoners, slamming them against walls, forcing them into a coffin-sized box, depriving them of sleep for days at a time and other forms of torture. Zubaydah was the first prisoner on whom Mitchell and Jessen tested their techniques, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2014.

After the CIA seized Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002 and secretly took him to a black site in Thailand, Bush administration officials asserted that he was al-Qaida's third-highest-ranking leader. The government has since acknowledged that he was not a senior terrorist leader and that he had no known connection to the 9/11 attacks. He had been in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly a decade and had suffered a serious head injury while fighting against the Soviet-backed government. Intelligence officials concluded he was more of a facilitator, providing false passports, housing and other arrangements for men, some potential terrorists, who moved between the two countries.

“He wasn't hatching plots and giving orders," Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad when Zubaydah was being monitored and eventually seized, wrote in his book “88 Days to Kandahar." “I did not expect that he would know the time or place of the next attack." However, in Washington, CIA officials were convinced that Zubaydah knew about plans to attack the United States, and Mitchell was determined to extract the information, according to declassified documents.

After being waterboarded 83 times in Thailand, Zubaydah had still not revealed any “actionable intelligence," cables from Thailand to Langley reported. Later, interrogators would conclude he knew nothing about al-Qaida's plans.

He did, however, send FBI agents on futile investigations as he tried to end the torture. At one point, interrogators in Thailand asked Zubaydah a hypothetical question: If you were going to carry out an attack in the United States, where would you do it? The Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, Zubaydah answered. This led New York City to impose security measures “not seen since the first months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," The New York Times reported.

In December 2002, when journalists began asking questions about a black site in Thailand, it was shut down, and Zubaydah was secretly transferred to Poland.

For years, the Polish government denied the existence of a CIA detention site. But after the 2014 Senate Intelligence report and after the European Court for Human Rights ruled in 2015 that it was “beyond a reasonable doubt" that Zubaydah had been held in Poland, Polish prosecutors began their investigation. Invoking a mutual legal assistance treaty, which commits each country to support the other's criminal investigations, Warsaw asked Washington for assistance. Their request went unanswered.

Joseph Margulies, one of Zubaydah's American lawyers, realized that the Polish investigation offered an opportunity to make public at least some of what had been done to his client at the black sites and might lead to his release. Invoking a federal law that allows an interested party to gather evidence in support of a foreign investigation, he asked a court to compel the depositions of Mitchell and Jessen. The Trump administration immediately intervened. It asserted the state secrets privilege to block the depositions, contending that the testimony would formally confirm or deny that the CIA operated a clandestine detention center in Poland.

As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit organization in London, put it in a brief recently filed with the Supreme Court in support of Zubaydah, “Study after study, report after report, emerging from the CIA, DOJ and SSCI, along with flight record after flight record, flight invoice after invoice, have confirmed, in graphic and granular detail, what the world already knows: that the CIA had black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay."

Even the former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski has acknowledged that the CIA had set up a black site in his country. “Of course, everything took place with my knowledge," he told Poland's leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, in 2012. “The President and the Prime Minister agreed to the intelligence co-operation with the Americans, because this was what was required by national interest."

None of this has slowed the U.S. government's efforts to avoid acknowledging what is now accepted fact. In their briefs, government lawyers argue that the Polish site, if it ever existed, remains a state secret because the federal government has never officially admitted to its existence. They contend that all those public reports and statements could be part of a CIA disinformation campaign. The lawyers cite as evidence the book and movie “Argo," which chronicles how the CIA rescued Americans hiding out in Iran by posing as a film crew. (As many commentators pointed out, the movie takes considerable liberties with the facts, adding, among other things, a chase through an airport that never occurred.)

The government's Supreme Court brief relies primarily on United States v. Reynolds, a 1953 case regarding the crash of an Air Force B-29 near Waycross, Georgia. When the families of three civilian engineers killed in the crash sought a copy of the accident report and witness statements, the Air Force refused to turn over the documents, asserting that they contained classified information about a secret mission. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld the government's claim and, for the first time, formally recognized the state secrets privilege.

Forty-seven years later, the Air Force declassified the documents. They contained no reference to a secret mission. “Instead, the report told a horror story of incompetence, bungling, and tragic error," Garry Wills wrote in The New York Review of Books.

From slavery to police abuse, new museum documents US history of racism

Agence France-Presse
October 01, 2021

An exhibit at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama (AFP)

Slavery, lynchings, segregation, mass incarceration and police abuse: a museum that opens Friday in the state of Alabama traces a direct link between the racist past of the United States and today's inequalities.

The Legacy Museum in the state capital of Montgomery is housed in a building where African captives were once held before being sold as slaves.

"It's a museum about the history of America, with a focus on the legacy of slavery," Bryan Stevenson, the head of Equal Justice Initiative, a civil rights organization in Alabama, told AFP.

"I can't think of another institution in America that has more profoundly shaped our economy, our politics, our social structures. And our character."

"Our understanding of slavery is very very incomplete," he said.

It is this information void that the Legacy Museum aims to fill, while prompting Americans to campaign against the inequality that persists today, according to Stevenson.

"The only way we can make progress in this country is if we engage both our minds and our hearts in a serious commitment to truth and justice to eliminating racial injustice," he said.

The museum, inspired by memorials to the Holocaust in Berlin or to apartheid in Johannesburg, offers an immersive experience: upon arrival, visitors board a ship crossing the Atlantic, witnessing the suffering of future slaves.

Another space is dedicated to the violence experienced by slaves, including sexual violence.

One wing is dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynchings of Black Americans, which occurred between 1877 and 1950. The National Lynching Memorial, located next to the museum, is devoted to the same topic.

The museum also conveys the "humiliation of segregation" in the South after World War II, Stevenson said.

Stevenson's organization provides legal assistance and advocacy for people wrongly convicted of crimes, a widespread problem for African Americans.

The group has succeeded in acquitting several people who had been condemned to death. In the museum, visitors can listen to them tell their stories.

The museum is part of a national reckoning on race and racism in America, which has grown more intense since the murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in May 2020.

Stevenson lamented that the efforts are meeting resistance on the part of conservatives. Still, he was optimistic.

"The good news is that we have the capacity to get past that fear, to get past that preference for silence," Stevenson said. "I believe we will make that choice."

Gen. Honoré plans to confront oil companies over neglecting infrastructure in Louisiana
Wesley Muller, Louisiana Illuminator
October 01, 2021

Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré and former President George W. Bush (Bush Archives)

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré plans to attend a meeting of the Petroleum Club of Lafayette next week to demand that oil corporations — not taxpayers — pay the half-billion dollar bill that could result from having to clean up the thousands of oil spills and other incidents of pollution in Louisiana exposed by Hurricane Ida, according to a Friday press release.

Honoré, an emergency preparedness expert known for leading the recovery of Hurricane Katrina and the U.S. Capitol security review in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, will attend the Petroleum Club meeting at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 5, at 1030 E. Saint Mary Blvd., Lafayette.

According to his press release, the general will demand the industry foot the bill that could cost up to $650 million to properly plug all 4,600 abandoned wells across the state of Louisiana. The news release said the thousands of pollution incidents since Ida's landfall have exposed vulnerable and abandoned industrial infrastructure across the state.

Industrial and petrochemical pollution incidents in Louisiana have drawn heightened scrutiny after Associated Press journalists, combing through weather satellite images, spotted oil slicks near a Gulf of Mexico rig in the days following Hurricane Ida's Aug. 29 landfall. That oil spill, which left an 11-mile long slick, came from an abandoned pipeline that authorities have yet to trace to a company responsible.

Since then, the U.S. Coast Guard has received more than 2,100 reports of spills and other contamination incidents, according to a Washington Post article.

Among those reports, the Phillips 66 Alliance refinery, located along the Mississippi River in Belle Chasse, spilled an unreported amount of oil that killed several deer and cows and covered otters, hogs and at least 100 birds, according to NOLA.com.

Louisiana's industries also affected the air after the storm. Oil refineries, such as Shell Norco, released chemical emissions at a high rate in the days before and after Ida's landfall, forming a long black cloud that stretched from Norco to near the middle of Lake Pontchartrain north of Metairie where it began to dissipate.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jarvis DeBerry for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

‘Clear and present danger’: Majority of Trump voters believe it’s ‘time to split the country’ in two: report

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
September 30, 2021

The highly-respected University of Virginia's nonpartisan Center for Politics has released a new study that finds a majority of Trump voters believe it's time to split the country into two, with "red states" and "blue states" seceding from the Union.

The organization, headed by Larry Sabato of "Sabato's Crystal Ball," reports that four in ten Biden voters agree.

“The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous. The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed," said UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato.

“In order to figure out ways to bridge these divides, we need to understand not just the divides themselves, but also understand the ways in which we can, together, move forward to reach common ground. This project helps us do both," said Larry Schack of Project Home Fire, a new initiative partnering with the UVA Center for Politics.

The report top-line revelations include: "Trump and Biden voters are at crisis stage"; there is tremendous "fear and distrust among Biden and Trump voters"; and "Many Trump and Biden voters believe the deck is stacked against them, and their commitment to democracy is wavering."

Crystal Ball's managing editor, Kyle Kondik, tweeted out some charts (below) from the project. Among the disturbing but unsurprising revelations:

Eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say elected officials from the opposition party present a "clear and present danger" to democracy. Almost eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say Americans who support the opposite party have also become a "clear and present danger" to the American way of life.

The report also finds strong areas of common ground, including on the need for improvements to the electric grid, water supply, roads, rail, and bridges, and raising taxes on the wealthy

Toxic foam dumped into southern Illinois coal mine in unsuccessful attempt to extinguish underground fire

2021/10/1 
© Chicago Tribune

Sugar Camp coal mine near Benton in southern Illinois on Sept. 16, 2021.

 - E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS

Operators of a southern Illinois coal mine dumped toxic foam deep underground in an unsuccessful attempt to extinguish a fire that idled production last month, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

The type of foam used by St. Louis-based Foresight Energy is being phased out in Illinois and 11 other states under laws that for the first time restrict unregulated chemicals known as PFAS — shorthand for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

PFAS are a growing concern worldwide because they remain in the environment forever, linger in the blood of exposed people for years and trigger several health problems, including cancer, liver damage and decreased fertility.

One of Foresight’s lawyers told state officials the foam used at the Sugar Camp complex was biodegradable and would not harm fish or wildlife. But inspectors later determined the company had pumped more than 46,000 gallons of PFAS-laden foam into the mine, raising the possibility that nearby private wells and other sources of drinking water could be contaminated.

Company officials also hired contractors to drill boreholes into the mine without a permit, records show. One of the boreholes is close to a creek where testing this month by the Illinois Environmental Protection detected high levels of PFAS.

“Potential environmental impacts are tremendous, especially if the foam is not contained,” said Melanie Benesh, an attorney for the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization pushing to ban the chemicals. “PFAS can seep into groundwater where it won’t break down. If the contaminated groundwater is a source of drinking water, then residents may be exposed to PFAS.”

Both the fire and Foresight’s responses to it remained secret until a local environmental activist took pictures of foam that had drifted to above-ground ditches and farm fields near the mine entrance in Franklin County, about 270 miles southwest of Chicago.

The activist forwarded the photos to state officials and to the Tribune, which sought more details under the Freedom of Information Act.

Foresight executives did not return requests for comment. Federal and state officials declined to say anything other than the fire remains under investigation.

Portions of the mine are still smoldering, and federal mining regulators have blocked Foresight from resuming production.

Emails show the Illinois EPA didn’t begin looking into potential harm to people and wildlife until Sept. 1, more than three weeks after Foresight evacuated miners at Sugar Camp.

“We should have our PFAS crew go out there to do some sampling,” Sanjay Sofat, chief of the agency’s Bureau of Water, wrote to colleagues.

Samples collected the next day had PFAS concentrations up to 16 times higher than state health guidelines, records show.

Foresight’s use of PFAS-laden foam came a month after federal and state regulators ordered a Louisiana-based contractor to switch to safer alternatives while putting out a fire that destroyed a chemical plant near Rockford.

A lack of uniform federal or state policies reflects how regulators struggle to protect Americans from PFAS more than two decades after it became clear the chemicals pose widespread hazards to public health.

Nearly every American has PFAS in their blood, studies have found. The compounds are known largely for their use in products featuring the Teflon and Scotchgard brands, manufactured by DuPont and 3M, respectively. But dozens of related compounds are still widely used in firefighting foam, food packaging, stain- and water-resistant clothing, carpets and household products, among other things.

Foresight, one of the last coal companies operating in Illinois, declared bankruptcy last year. And yet, led by the Sugar Camp complex, the company produced more than half of the 32 million tons of coal mined in the state during 2020.

Nearly all of Foresight’s coal is shipped to other states and countries. The company cuts costs by relying on longwall mining, a process that uses robotic equipment rather than people to do most of the work.

Since opening in 2008, Sugar Camp has repeatedly shown up on the U.S. EPA’s list of chronic violators of the federal Clean Water Act. Five of the 16 Illinois miners killed on the job since 2008 worked at the mine, where the injury rate exceeded the national average at times during the past decade.

The mine also is a major source of heat-trapping pollution scrambling the earth’s climate. Burning Foresight’s coal in power plants and factories released more carbon dioxide last year than the heat-trapping emissions from all 4.6 million automobiles registered in Illinois.