Hungry polar bears are eating garbage instead of seals as their habitats melt away

“Education, the implementation of polar bear-proof methods of waste storage, law enforcement and the provision of adequate resources at the community level are required to mitigate this potentially increasing problem.”

By

 Olivia Rosane

 -

July 26, 2022

As climate change erodes the icy habitats of polar bears, they are left stranded from their usual food sources for longer periods of time. So instead of filling up on seals, a new study has found that polar bears are supplementing their diets with garbage, which is expected to become a growing threat to the species.

A new report from Canadian and U.S. scientists published in the journal Onyx outlines how polar bears are beginning to turn to humans’ trash as a food source, which could lead to more regular and/or unpredictable human-polar bear conflicts as the animals search for food.

“Bears and garbage are a bad association,” said study co-author Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta, as reported by Reuters. “We know that very well from a brown bear and black bear perspective, and now it’s an issue developing with polar bears.”

Polar Bears International

Polar bears usually hunt seals, but they need ice to do so. As temperatures rise and the ice melts earlier and refreezes later, polar bears are stuck on shore for longer amounts of time. Their time to hunt is shortening, leaving the animals hungry. So they turn to landfills and other sources of garbage to satiate their hunger, similar to the way brown bears and black bears already come into communities in search of food.

Polar bears, which are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, have been recently spotted in several Arctic communities looking for food. In February 2019, the report stated there was a “mass invasion” of polar bears in Belushya Guba, Novaya Zemlya, Russia, when 52 polar bears came to feed in an open dump. Further, the bears attempted to get into local buildings.

Another 60 polar bears were found scavenging in an open dump in the 600-person village of Ryrkaypiy, Chukotka, Russia in December 2019. The bears remained in the area until the sea ice refroze in the fall.

The trash diet can make the polar bears sick, and they could choke on materials like plastic wrappers.

“Bears don’t know all the negatives that come with plastic ingestion and the diseases and toxins they’re likely exposed to in a (landfill) setting,” Geoff York, study co-author and senior director of conservation at Polar Bears International, said.

But their proximity to humans and potential for conflict is a big risk. People may kill the polar bears to protect their communities. Scientists expect these risks to rise in the coming years as global temperatures continue to rise and human populations extend farther into the Arctic. For example, the human population of Nunavut, Canada is slated to grow 31% from 2014 to 2043. This area is home to thousands of polar bears.

While waste management could help, it can be a challenge for these remote, Arctic communities. The ground is too cold to bury the trash, and the cost to haul the trash away is too high. 

“Education, the implementation of polar bear-proof methods of waste storage, law enforcement and the provision of adequate resources at the community level are required to mitigate this potentially increasing problem,” the study said, noting that measures taken to reduce conflicts between brown and black bears and humans could be replicated for polar bears. Scientists also say federal funding will be important to providing better waste management for remote communities in the affected areas.

The Corporate Oligarchs Have Put Humanity on a Path Toward Self-Annihilation

We are stumbling—seemingly oblivious—into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it's not here.

Buffalo skull in Death Valley, California. (Photo: Getty/stock photo/Tetra Images)


THOM HARTMANN

July 28, 2022

The world today is on the verge of a major food emergency, provoked in part by Russia's attack on Ukraine but more broadly by the damage heat from global warming is doing to crops worldwide. This is both a crisis and an opportunity.

Let's start with the basics. Food is the raw material that makes people. More food, more people; less food, fewer people.

Hundreds of millions have become climate refugees and radical weather is destabilizing governments around the world.

This is a basic law of nature. The insect-eating bird population around us, for example, is a fraction today of what it was 20 years ago because its food—the insect population—has been decimated by pesticides and loss of habitat (their food source), over the past few decades.

Pick any species and the law of nature is the same: more food produces population growth while less food shrinks population (often in brutal ways). It's why areas like desert and scrub that produce little food were, over the past millennia, lightly populated, whereas areas rich with food like forests and seacoasts carried large human populations.

Throughout our lifetimes (and the past four centuries) human population has steadily grown because we hadn't yet hit the new ceilings the agricultural and industrial revolutions gave us to produce and distribute food.

However, this halcyon era is coming to an end because of the climate crisis, provoked by 60 years of senior executives in the fossil fuel industry lying to us and buying off politicians while making trillions pouring their poisons into our atmosphere.

This should not shock us when it happens all around us and millions are starving and homeless, although it almost certainly will because most of the human race has lived for so long within the food abundance created by the widespread use of fossil fuels starting in the 19th century.

Humans reaching the limits of food's ability to sustain population is not a new story; it's as old as humanity itself.

As I wrote in Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture, eight hundred years ago a group of Melanesians sailed to the islands they called Aotearoa and we now call New Zealand. When they first arrived, around the year AD 1200, humans had never before inhabited that island paradise.

Food was everywhere for the taking, particularly a large flightless family of birds called the moa (similar to ostriches). There were so many of the birds, and they were so easily approached, that the archeological record shows that during the first few hundred years of occupation the islanders didn't even need weapons.

No bows and arrows, no spears, no specialized weapons of any sort can be found in the archaeological record from those early times: the birds and many other large animals were so docile that people simply walked up and clubbed them to death with a stick or broke their necks.

A dozen different species of New Zealand moa birds, weighing from under fifty to over five hundred pounds each, provided meat and eggs well in excess of the food needs of the initial Melanesian explorers.

This abundance of food led to a golden age of peaceful human population expansion on New Zealand. The few dozen initial settlers became hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, all feasting on the huge moa birds.

As their populations grew, the Māori killed the moa in huge numbers: in the Otago District, an ancient killing field was found at Waitaki containing more than ninety thousand moa skeletons. The bones suggest that the birds were clubbed or their necks were wrung.

While this is the largest moa boneyard, several other similar ancient sites have been discovered around New Zealand in the past few decades: as many as a million moa birds, representing hundreds of millions of pounds of meat, were killed by the early settlers, now known as the Māori (or "moa-eating") people.

The Māori population grew and over the next 300 years Māori people spread all across the 103,000 square miles of New Zealand. They lived in peace and harmony, convinced the gods had intentionally brought them to this island and thus showered them with its blessing of a seemingly unlimited supply of food.

But, as inevitably happens to cultures who think they can defy nature, the times of moa for the Māori came to an end. Their moa feast lasted for three to four hundred years but came to an abrupt end with the death of the last moa bird and thus the final and total extinction of all twelve Moa species.

The islanders then began eating other local animals, and in short order they exterminated or brought to the brink of extinction the huia, takahe, and kakapo, all birds ranging from the size of modern chickens down to the size of pigeons.

Along the coast, Māori people hunted the three-ton elephant seal to extinction within those first four hundred years, exterminated the half-ton sea lion (Phocartos hookeri), and from all but the most remote regions wiped out the three-hundred-pound New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri).

Turning to fish, the Māori soon endangered even the ubiquitous snappers, as the archeological record shows the fish skeletons and the hooks used to catch them declined in size rapidly over a hundred-year period following the extinction of the moa.

The easily killed large animals all exterminated, the Māori turned to what were considered famine foods by their seafaring ancestors: roots, tubers, frogs, ferns, rats, and small birds. Along with this change in their diet came a dramatic shift in Māori culture.

Around AD 1400—roughly four hundred years after their initial colonization of New Zealand—the Māori people began building fortresses and constructing tools for organized warfare. The forts, called pas in the Māori language, proliferated across the island.

We find new lands or new resources, exploit them mercilessly until they're exhausted, then fall back into famine and war until a new homeostatic culture/lifestyle is achieved.

The primary cultural values of Māori society shifted from cooperation to fighting and killing other humans for the scarce resources left on the island. The arts of war became elaborate, and each community spent enormous time and effort making their pa an impenetrable fortress. Shortly after birth, Māori boys were dedicated to the god of war.

Over the next two hundred years, the Māori's war-bent culture achieved an uneasy stability. They had moved from population explosion in the face of huge food resources to near-famine conditions, then to farming sweet potatoes in the lowland valleys and building forts for standing armies.

Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to reach New Zealand and encounter the Māori people, just weeks after he had mapped nearby Tasmania. On December 16, 1642, he wrote in his journal about his one and only encounter with the Māori.

He sent a small group of his men out in a cockboat to meet the natives. Without warning, the Māori attacked Tasman's sailors as soon as the boat was close to their canoes:


"In which fray three of the Zeehaen's men were left dead and a fourth owing to the heavy blows mortally wounded. The quartermaster and two sailors swam towards our ship and we sent our shallop to meet them, into which they got alive. After this monstrous happening, and detestable affair, the murderers left the cockboat drift, having taken one of our dead in their canoe and drowned another."

What Tasman discovered was that among the Māori protein was in such short supply that they had passed the last human cultural barrier to a food source: cannibalism.

Tasman watched helplessly as his one crewman taken alive by the Māori was beheaded on the beach. The Māori recovered the bodies of the others and roasted them. Horrified, Tasman named the cove Murderer's Bay and sailed away, never to return.

This story of humans wiping out the resources that sustain them has been repeated over and over again throughout human pre-history. It's far more the norm than the exception.

For the first few hundred thousand years of our history (more or less) modern humanity worldwide was limited to an estimated 5 million or so humans. As Daniel Quinn would say, we "lived in the hands of the gods," repeatedly booming and busting our own local populations as we spread to new territories, discovered new food supplies, and then depleted them.

Here in North America the arrival of humanity around 15,000 years ago coincided with a mass die-off of large, easily killed food animals including:

woolly mammoths


Columbian mammoths


American mastodons


three types of ground sloths


glyptodonts


giant armadillos


several species of horses


four species of pronghorn antelopes


three species of camels


giant deer


several species of oxen


giant bison

Scientists are still debating whether changes in climate or the human over-hunting "Pleistocene overkill" was most responsible for the extinction of so many animals in such a short period; odds are it was both, as this was toward the tail end of the Ice Age and the climate was rapidly changing.

As David J. Meltzer chronicles in his brilliant new book First Peoples in a New World: Populating Ice Age America, multiple DNA-identified groups of humans moved across North and South America over the following ten thousand years. Many of them simply vanished, their DNA gone forever, leaving not a single descendant to this day.

This boom-and-bust cycle has been the story of humanity since the first modern humans began migrating out of east Africa across that continent, up through the Middle East into Europe and Asia, and across the frozen Barents Straight to the Americas.

Periodic famine has been the norm for humanity throughout most of our history. We find new lands or new resources, exploit them mercilessly until they're exhausted, then fall back into famine and war until a new homeostatic culture/lifestyle is achieved.

It's the most logical explanation, some anthropologists argue, for why Native American societies placed such a high premium—reported in the era of first contact with Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries—on sustainability. Their distant ancestors had wiped out local food supplies producing famine, inter-tribal conflict, and war.

Most of the subsequently-rebuilt cultures and systems of governance were intentionally designed to prevent a repeat of those traumatic experiences. The most well-known of those is the Iroquois Confederacy that Ben Franklin so admired.

Which brings us to today.

While the agricultural revolution increased the world's population—because farming is so much more efficient at producing food than hunting and gathering or even pastoralism—we'd still only reached a bit over a half-billion people worldwide when Europeans first arrived in North America.

The subsequent industrial revolution—powered by fossil fuels created by hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis (fossil fuels are simply fossilized plants)—dramatically ramped up our ability to grow and transport food.

Thus, we hit 1 billion people in 1800, 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1986, 6 billion by the turn of the century, and today are on the verge of 8 billion people.

Fossil fuels were turned into fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to grow more food on the same amount of land. They power our planting and harvesting machines, allowing a single person to do a job that previously would have required hundreds, each driving a horse or ox.

In 1820, for example, 72 percent of the American workforce were farmers. By 1850, because of the Cotton Gin and new plowing technologies, that number fell to 64 percent of the American workforce. In 1920, as gasoline- and diesel-powered internal combustion engines began showing up on farms, only 30 percent of us worked on farms. Today, farmers are fewer than 2 percent of us.

And, like the Moa birds, the era of cheap fossil fuels and a stable climate that enabled 2 percent of us to feed the other 98 percent is drawing to a close. Fossil fuels are getting harder to find and more expensive to produce, while climate change is reducing crop yields, melting glaciers that are the source of irrigating rivers, and drying up above-ground reservoirs.

Will humanity prevail over the forces of greed and destruction and help salvage our biosphere while reinventing our culture and world?

We are stumbling—seemingly oblivious—into the bared teeth of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch driven by humanity itself. We are walking straight into it and pretending it's not here.

And it's changing how we live, how we govern ourselves, and the nature of relations between nations.

Already, hundreds of millions have become climate refugees and radical weather is destabilizing governments around the world: the Arab Spring, for example, started because the desert across north Tunisia and Syria had moved south and wheat farms were turned into scrub-land, causing the price of that staple food to explode.

A Tunisian falafel street-vendor lit himself on fire in protest, triggering uprisings across the region. The Arab Spring and its subsequent democratic collapse in Egypt and now Tunisia are harbingers of things to come in other parts of the world.

The growth of a food supply parallels the growth of a population. It's one of the few laws of nature that has always applied to humans, even though we ignore it or pretend it doesn't exist.

The agricultural and industrial revolutions, by increasing the available food supply, exploded the world's human population. Over the last two hundred years, advances in medical science and hygiene have additionally reduced the death rate while a whole variety of technologies have increased our food output.

But, like the Māori, we're approaching the end of the free ride. Food, energy, and housing are starting to get very expensive; most of the world has already leaped into this maelstrom.

This isn't run-of-the-mill inflation: it's what happens to an economy when a basic commodity—in this case, the most basic commodity, food—becomes scarce.

The entire GOP refuses to even discuss climate change, while they and Joe Manchin stuff their pockets with fossil fuel money. Meanwhile, the end-stage crisis that's been building ever since the fossil fuel companies learned this was coming and started aggressively lying to us about it—while funding the Reagan Revolution—has arrived.

What happened to the Māori, or Native American communities who overhunted 10,000 years ago, was local. This is now planet-wide. There's no place left to go and start over.

If you thought it was a disgusting spectacle to see the Bundy family stealing federal lands and water at gunpoint, you ain't seen nothing yet. Water wars between states and regions are just around the corner, and soon large parts of America will begin to lose population as their water supplies vanish.

Will we, like the ancient Maori, devolve into an authoritarian and war-based society? Or will we, like the Iroquois, Hopi, and Wendat people, make a conscious decision to live within our means, stop destroying our environment, and fine-tune our governmental systems to meet the needs of all of our citizens?

We are not without resources, and it's always a mistake to bet against human ingenuity. On the other hand, we are facing an unprecedented level of avarice mobilized by billionaires and corporations with more power and wealth than the world has ever seen.

Will they win, and, in the process, set human civilization back millennia? Or will humanity prevail over the forces of greed and destruction and help salvage our biosphere while reinventing our culture and world?

The hour is late, but, scientists tell us, not too late. Our fate—and that of the planet—is still in our hands.

This article was first published on The Hartmann Report.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.

Price Gouging at the Pump Results in 235% Profit Jump for Big Oil: Analysis

"Make no mistake; these profits mark a large transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class people to wealthy oil executives and shareholders," said Jordan Schreiber of Accountable.US.

An ExxonMobil gas pumping station displays a purchase on June 9, 2022 in Houston, Texas. (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

JESSICA CORBETT

July 29, 2022

As fossil fuel giants this week reported record profits for the second quarter, an analysis out Friday highlighted how eight oil companies have raked in nearly $52 billion over the past three months "while Americans continue to struggle at the pump."

The review by the watchdog group Accountable.US revealed that from April through June, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp, Phillips 66, Shell, and TechnipFMC "saw their profits skyrocket from the same time period last year, with income shooting up 235%."

The analysis also pointed out that leaders at Equinor, Halliburton, Hess Corp, and TechnipFMC have boasted "about excellent quarters while dismissing high prices for consumers."


Jordan Schreiber of Accountable.US called the companies' collective profit boost "eye-popping" but also unsurprising "after spending the past three months price gouging consumers by raising gas prices to unprecedentedly high levels."

"Make no mistake; these profits mark a large transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class people to wealthy oil executives and shareholders," she said. "While many consumers were feeling the heavy burden of a life necessity suddenly doubling in price, oil executives were keeping prices high to maximize their profits."

The Q2 profits of U.S. energy giants Chevron and Exxon—$11.62 billion and $17.85 billion, respectively—along with that of Europe's largest oil company, Shell—$11.47 billion—drew widespread criticism along with calls for action by lawmakers and President Joe Biden.


"Big Oil companies are making a killing and pouring fuel on the climate fire while communities pay for more and deadlier climate disasters. It's outrageous," said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, in a statement Friday.

"Exxon and other oil and gas corporations lobbied and lied for decades to keep the world addicted to fossil fuels, making billions while hardworking families pay for higher gas prices and costlier heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and floods," he continued. "Now Exxon is once again using its record profits to line the pockets of executives and shareholders."

Wiles asserted that "elected officials cannot remain silent in the face of this injustice. Whether it's taxing these companies' record profits, or taking them to court to make polluters pay for climate damages they knowingly caused, it's time to stand up to Big Oil."


Public Citizen president Robert Weissman declared that "Big Oil is laughing all the way to the bank—and the joke's on us."

"We don't have to be suckers," he argued. "A windfall profits tax with rebates to taxpayers would offset the pain at the pump and end Big Oil's profiteering. Banning U.S. oil exports would actually lower prices for American consumers."

According to Weissman, "It's time for Congress and the Biden administration to stop complaining about Big Oil's rip-off and start doing something about it."

Some lawmakers agree. While Republicans "will continue to play politics and blame Biden for gas prices," Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said of the fossil fuel giants' quarterly profits, "we need to crack down on Big Oil."

Sen. Bernie Sanders concurred, tweeting that "it's time for a windfall profits tax."

While some of his colleagues have introduced legislation focused on Big Oil, Sanders has put forth a broader tax proposal that would target price gouging by a range of companies.


Amid rising fears of recession in recent weeks, calls have been mounting for federal lawmakers to more forcefully take on corporate greed. The Inflation Reduction Act unveiled Wednesday features some related policies, but climate activists have also sounded the alarm about its energy provisions. The bill—negotiated with fossil fuel ally Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—contains major handouts that are reportedly "delighting" the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry has not only used its record profits to enrich shareholders; it's also dumped money into influencing officials on Capitol Hill. As Common Dreams reported exclusively on Thursday, an analysis from Climate Power shows that since last year, the sector has poured over $200 million into sabotaging climate action.

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Big Oil's Record Profits and Buyback Splurge Spotlight 'Broken Energy System,' Critics Say

Fossil fuel giants raked in billions in profits last quarter "by gouging people at the gas pump," said one campaigner. "Why on Earth are we still subsidizing Big Oil?"

Activists from Just Stop Oil block the entrance to a Shell gas station on April 28, 2022 in Cobham, England. (Photo: Guy Smallman/Getty Images)


KENNY STANCIL

July 28, 2022

Economic and climate justice advocates on Thursday reiterated their demands for far-reaching energy reforms after Europe's two biggest fossil fuel corporations reported more than $21 billion in combined second-quarter profits and announced plans to buy back a combined $8 billion in shares in the third quarter—all while continuing to receive billions in public subsidies each year to wreck the planet.

British venture Shell posted a record-breaking $11.5 billion in profits from April through June, more than doubling its Q2 earnings compared with 2021 ($5.5 billion) and surpassing the previous quarterly high of $9.1 billion set during the first three months of 2022, which was nearly triple last year's Q1 net income of $3.2 billion.

"We must phase out fossil fuels and speed up the transition to renewables in order to overhaul our energy system."

Its French rival, TotalEnergies, made $9.8 billion in profits between April and June, up from $9 billion during the first three months of 2022. Last year, the company brought in $3.5 billion and $3 billion, respectively, during Q2 and Q1.

Fossil fuel giants raked in billions in profits last quarter "by gouging people at the gas pump," Jamie Henn, a spokesperson for the Stop The Oil Profiteering campaign, wrote on social media. "Why on Earth are we still subsidizing Big Oil?"

Trillions of dollars per year in public money has helped the oil and gas sector make more than $52 trillion in profits since 1970. That sum, which amounts to $2.8 billion dollars per day for the past half-century, has enabled the fossil fuel industry to "buy every politician" and delay lifesaving climate action, Aviel Verbruggen, the author of the analysis, told The Guardian last week.

Like other firms in the sector, Shell and Total are presently cashing in on the sky-high cost of energy. Although retailers started charging more for gasoline in 2021 as consumer demand, which took a nosedive during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, began to outpace supply—deliberately suppressed at the behest of investors to boost profits—price hikes at the pump have intensified since Russia invaded Ukraine in late-February.

"The hikes in prices did not disappear into a black hole," Sheffield University political economist Richard Murphy tweeted Thursday. "They went... into corporate profits, massively increasing the divisions and stresses in our society."

Big Oil is capitalizing on the war in Ukraine by jacking up prices and rewarding shareholders with massive stock buybacks. Shell bought back $8.5 billion in shares during the first half of 2022 and just announced a $6 billion stock buyback program for Q3, Reuters reported. Total, meanwhile, bought back $3 billion in stocks during the first six months of this year and has plans for another $2 billion in share buybacks in the current quarter.

Progressive activists responded with outrage to Thursday's news.

"This announcement of yet another obscene profit for Shell is a clear sign that our broken energy system is completely unfit for purpose," Freya Aitchison, an oil and gas campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said in a statement.

"Rising energy prices are a key driver of the cost of living crisis that has plunged millions of people in the U.K. into fuel poverty, yet bosses and shareholders at Shell are getting even richer by exploiting one of our most basic needs," said Aitchison.

In addition, Shell is "worsening climate breakdown and extreme weather" by moving ahead with harmful proposals, such as expanded offshore drilling in the Jackdaw gas field, that will "lock us into" decades of increased planet-heating emissions, she continued. Experts have warned repeatedly that investing in new oil and gas projects is incompatible with the Paris agreement's goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC.

"We must phase out fossil fuels and speed up the transition to renewables in order to overhaul our energy system and ensure that everyone has access to affordable and clean renewable energy," Aitchison stressed.



Total "is responsible for some of the most destructive fossil fuel projects on the planet, including the controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline [EACOP] and fracking across Vaca Muerta, Argentina," 350.org noted. "It is vital that we stop the flow of money to reckless fossil fuel companies."

Thursday's announcement "shines a spotlight on the moral bankruptcy and danger posed by oil majors," the group continued. "These corporations are ruthlessly profiteering off war in Ukraine, at a time when tens of millions of people are currently suffering from the combined impacts of the climate crisis and the cost of living scandal."

"Total is currently leading a dash for gas in Africa, recently securing billion-dollar deals in Algeria and South Africa to extract and burn more fossil fuels from the continent," the group added. "Total's planned operations will be devastating for people and the planet—their actions will benefit a handful of wealthy shareholders at huge cost to local communities and the climate."

Fossil Fuel Expansion in Africa 'Not Compatible With a Safe Climate Future': Report

"It is appalling that Total Energies continues to rake in obscene profits at the expense of people and the planet, more so in Africa, the continent most vulnerable to climate change," said Omar Elmawi, coordinator of Stop EACOP.

The project is "facing sustained resistance locally and globally due to the threat it poses to communities and their livelihoods as well as expected negative impacts on the environment and sensitive ecosystems in Uganda and Tanzania," Elmawi added. "We can stop EACOP and the wave of destruction it is set to leave in its wake, if we stop the flow of finance to Total."

"The future the world needs is one that no longer burns fossil fuels."

Charity Migwi, Africa regional campaigner at 350.org, said that "Total makes vague promises of job creation in the oil and gas sector while it causes significant job losses in the agricultural and tourism sector."

"Total's business has no place in Africa," Migwi added. "The future the world needs is one that no longer burns fossil fuels."

Shell and Total are two of the world's five oil supermajors; the others are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and BP. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that these fossil fuel giants are collectively poised for a record-shattering $50 billion in Q2 profits, with Exxon alone expected to bring in up to $18 billion, potentially doubling its massive Q1 earnings.

Lawmakers in the United Kingdom approved a 25% windfall tax on oil and gas producers' profits earlier this month, but their counterparts in France and the United States have yet to take similar action.

A whopping 80% of U.S. voters—including 73% of Republicans—support the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax introduced by congressional Democrats in March.

Dozens of progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers have been urging President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to support the measure, which would redistribute an estimated $45 billion to U.S. households.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has said the proposal can help Democrats avoid "big losses" in November's crucial midterms, but it faces long odds given the GOP's desire to exploit voters' mounting anger at the state of the economy. Not only is it unlikely that at least 10 Senate Republicans would support advancing debate on the bill, as required due to the filibuster, but it remains unclear whether right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) would vote for it.

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Since 2021, Big Oil Has Spent Over $200 Million to Sabotage Climate Action: Analysis

Climate Power, the group behind the new analysis, said Democrats' new climate deal sends "a strong signal" that "deep pockets only go so far."

Environmentalists gather outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on October 15, 2021. 

(Photo: Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

JAKE JOHNSON

July 28, 2022

The oil and gas industry, one of the most powerful corporate forces in American politics, has spent more than $200 million over the past year and a half to stop Congress from slashing carbon emissions as evidence of their catastrophic impact—from deadly heatwaves to massive wildfires—continues to accumulate in stunning fashion.

That topline estimate of the fossil fuel industry's lobbying outlays and congressional election spending in the U.S. was calculated by Climate Power, which provided its findings exclusively to Common Dreams.

"Democrats took their biggest step ever towards showing that politicians who protect profiteers fleecing Americans at the pump are on the wrong side of history."

Nearly 80% of the industry's campaign donations during the time period examined went to Republican candidates, according to Climate Power, whose analysis draws on data from OpenSecrets.

Until Wednesday night, when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced a surprise deal on climate investments, it looked as if the industry's influence campaign had fully paid off, having helped crater the Democrats' sweeping Build Back Better package.

Earlier this month, Manchin—the leading individual recipient of oil and gas industry cash in Congress—informed the Democratic leadership that he would not support moving ahead with renewable energy spending as part of a less ambitious bill, an apparently fatal blow to the hopes of climate action this year and possibly years into the future.

Manchin, for now, appears to have reversed course, striking an agreement with Schumer that contains a historic $369 billion in climate and energy spending, including billions to speed the country's lagging transition away from fossil fuels. If accepted by all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, the reconciliation bill can pass without GOP support.

Schumer, who said the measure would put the country "on a path to roughly 40% emissions reductions by 2030," announced that he expects a vote on the legislation by next week. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a key swing vote, has not commented on the deal.

Noreen Nielsen, a senior adviser to Climate Power, told Common Dreams that with the new framework, "a strong signal was sent that deep pockets only go so far."

"Democrats took their biggest step ever towards showing that politicians who protect profiteers fleecing Americans at the pump are on the wrong side of history," said Nielsen. "All the money in the world couldn't stand in the way of an agreement to move forward on a bold plan to ramp up American-made clean energy, lower energy bills for families, and take on climate change."

But while climate advocates welcomed the proposal overall as a potential game-changer for the environment, they also stressed that the deal is littered with the fingerprints of the oil and gas industry, which—according to Climate Power's new analysis—has spent $63.5 million on lobbying so far this year.

As part of the agreement, Democratic leaders—including Schumer and President Joe Biden—agreed to reform the regulatory process for pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure in the coming months, a victory for Manchin and his industry backers.

Such reforms could clear the way for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a fracked gas project in West Virginia and Virginia that, if completed, would spew 89,526,651 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere each year.

Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, said late Wednesday that it is "incumbent on every green group and climate activist" to "fight like hell to make sure the Mountain Valley Pipeline is never built."

"No communities should be sacrificed for political gains," Henn added.

The bill, in its current form, would also mandate oil drilling lease sales off the coast of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Climate Power's analysis of Big Oil lobbying and the Schumer-Manchin deal came as fossil fuel giants began reporting their profits for the second quarter of 2022.

Early Thursday, Shell announced a record-shattering $11.5 billion in profits for last quarter. ExxonMobil—which is also expected to announce a profit surge—and Chevron are set to report earnings on Friday as the industry continues to exploit Russia's assault on Ukraine to push up costs for consumers.

According to a study published last week, the global oil and gas industry has raked in nearly $3 billion in profit per day over the past five decades as it has sown disinformation about its central responsibility for the climate crisis and tanked efforts to address destructive warming.

In the words of Aviel Verbruggen, the study's lead author, those staggering profits have given the fossil fuel industry the ability to "buy every politician" and "every system."

"I think this happened," Verbruggen told The Guardian.

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Big Pharma Flooding Airwaves With Disinformation to Kill Drug Price Reform

"Powerful interest groups out there don't want this legislation to succeed, so they're pouring dark money into efforts to stop it," said one Democratic senator.


The group American Commitment is running ads in several states attacking Democrats' plan to lower prescription drug prices. (Photo: Screengrab/American Commitment)

JAKE JOHNSON

July 29, 2022

While its thousands of lobbyists work fervently on Capitol Hill, the pharmaceutical industry is flooding the airwaves in several states with deceptive ads in a last-ditch campaign to block Senate Democrats' plan to curb the unchecked pricing power of drug corporations.

Included as part of a reconciliation package negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the proposal would require Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small number of drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies, which can currently drive up costs as they please—boosting their profits at the expense of patients.

"We aim to pass reforms to lower Rx prices in the coming days and curb pharma's power to dictate prices to Americans. Let's see it through."

The measure would also cap out-of-pocket medicine costs at $2,000 a year for recipients of Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit provided through private plans approved by the federal government.

The drug industry—which has repeatedly fought off price regulation attempts in recent decades—has lashed out furiously against Democrats' plan, even though it is in some ways significantly weaker than a proposal that the House passed last year. Republicans bankrolled by Big Pharma are also working to tank the bill.

Roll Call reported Friday that the "Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the National Association of Manufacturers, and a group called American Commitment have collectively spent millions of dollars on ads in July" to attack Democrats' proposal, key parts of which are overwhelmingly popular with the American public.

"We're going to use every tool in the toolbox to relentlessly educate lawmakers about the flaws in this bill," declared Stephen Ubl, president of PhRMA, the nation's leading drug industry trade group.

American Commitment, a nonprofit with ties to the Koch Brothers, launched a new seven-figure ad buy on Thursday, targeting audiences in Washington, D.C. as well as West Virginia, Nevada, and Georgia.

The ads, which can be viewed in full on American Commitment's website, recycle the false and repeatedly debunked claim that Democrats' bill would cut "nearly $300 billion from Medicare," distorting the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the legislation would save the federal government roughly $290 billion over ten years.

The American Prosperity Alliance, a dark money group, is running similarly misleading ads.



Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) responded directly to the ads—one of which attacks her directly—in a speech on the Senate floor earlier this week, noting that the 30-second spots led hundreds of constituents to call her office seeking an explanation.

"They were anxious and alarmed over a deliberately misleading ad that is running on TV, on Facebook, and via a text campaign," said Cortez Masto. "In Reno this past weekend, Nevadans came up to me because they were concerned about these false accusations. This ad incorrectly claims that I support a bill that would strip $300 billion dollars from Medicare. This couldn't be further from the truth."

"Powerful interest groups out there don't want this legislation to succeed, so they're pouring dark money into efforts to stop it," the senator continued. "Well, let me just say this: it won't work."

In an analysis of Democrats' proposal published Wednesday, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) concluded that the bill has the potential to "limit annual increases in drug prices for people with Medicare and private insurance" and "provide substantial financial protection to people on Medicare with high out-of-pocket costs."

The precise impact of the legislation, KFF stressed, will depend on which prescription drugs Medicare chooses to negotiate. A separate KFF analysis released last year found that a small number of drugs make up a major share of Medicare's prescription drug spending.

"We are inches from the goal line," David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, tweeted Friday. "We aim to pass reforms to lower Rx prices in the coming days and curb pharma's power to dictate prices to Americans. Let's see it through."

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GOP 'Working Hand in Hand With Big Pharma' to Kill Drug Price Reform Behind Closed Doors

"Republicans are going to use every tool they have to keep drug prices high and drug industry profits higher," said one Democratic senator.


Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) talks with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) during a hearing

JAKE JOHNSON

July 27, 2022

Republican lawmakers are working behind closed doors to convince the Senate parliamentarian—the chamber's unelected rules arbiter—to tank Democrats' watered-down but still potentially impactful proposal to require Medicare to negotiate the prices of a small number of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies.

Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), a major beneficiary of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash, admitted as much in remarks to reporters on Tuesday, saying that he and his GOP colleagues are "going through line by line, literally, making objections" in private meetings with the Senate parliamentarian, who is tasked with offering advice on whether reconciliation provisions comply with chamber rules.

"Folks in Idaho need to know he's not working for them—he's working for Big Pharma."

Under the Senate's Byrd Rule, every provision of a reconciliation package must have a direct, not "merely incidental," impact on the federal budget. Democrats contend their Medicare proposal meets that requirement, citing the Congressional Budget Office's recent estimate that the plan would save the federal government $290 billion over 10 years.

But Crapo insisted Tuesday that "there are many Byrd objections," and Politico reported that Democrats are currently "making tweaks" to the legislation to ensure it survives the parliamentarian's scrutiny—even though the official's opinions are nonbinding and can be overruled.

"Republicans are working hand in hand with Big Pharma to try to block Democrats from lowering drug prices," warned Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group.

The GOP's efforts come as the pharmaceutical industry is mobilizing its huge army of Capitol Hill lobbyists in a last-ditch campaign to defeat Democrats' plan, which would require Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of a subset of prescription drugs—an idea that is overwhelmingly popular with the U.S. public.

While Democrats' proposal has faced criticism from progressive lawmakers who say it doesn't do enough to challenge the pharmaceutical industry's power to drive up costs, advocates and experts say the bill could still have a significant effect on prices for seniors and people with disabilities, given that a small number of medicines account for a major portion of Medicare's prescription drug spending.

"Sen. Mike Crapo is proud that he's trying to gut legislation to lower drug prices supported by more than 70% of Americans," said David Mitchell, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs. "Legislation to improve health and save Americans money. Folks in Idaho need to know he's not working for them—he's working for Big Pharma."

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is aiming to get the Medicare proposal as well as a plan to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies through the chamber before the August recess, which is set to begin next week.

In the face of unanimous Republican opposition, Democrats will need the support of all fifty senators in their caucus to pass the reconciliation package, which is exempt from the 60-vote filibuster.

"Republicans are going to use every tool they have to keep drug prices high and drug industry profits higher," Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) warned Tuesday.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) added that "every single elected Republican in the Senate is about to vote against reducing the cost of prescription drugs for those on Medicare."

"This is not a show vote or a symbolic thing—we are going to make a new law," Schatz wrote. "It will save seniors thousands of dollars a year."
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‘Is it better than nothing? I suppose’: Sanders disappointed by Dems’ drug pricing plan

"It's a very weak proposal" but "we're dealing with the power of PhRMA over the Congress," he said, taking aim at industry lobbyists.

By

 Jessica Corbett

 -

July 27, 2022

SOURCECommon Dreams

Bernie Sanders (Crush Rush via Shutterstock)

Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders on Tuesday blasted Democrats’ watered-down drug pricing plan and suggested pharmaceutical industry lobbying weakened the proposal.

“It goes nowhere near as far as it should.”

“It’s a very weak proposal. It goes nowhere near as far as it should,” Sanders (I-Vt.) told NBC News‘ Sahil Kapur.

The deal unveiled earlier this month would enable Medicare to negotiate the prices of a limited number of prescription drugs. Other provisions include creating a $2,000 out-of-pocket cap for Medicare Part D beneficiaries, stopping brand-name manufacturers from blocking generic options, and penalizing companies that raise prices faster than inflation.

The plan is notably backed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—who last year blocked a House-approved budget reconciliation package and said this month that he wouldn’t support new climate spending or tax hikes on the rich and large corporations.

Sanders, who pushed for a sweeping package last year and has long been a leading Medicare for All advocate, pointed to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as a model for drug price negotiation.

“The American people want Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices like the VA does,” the senator said Tuesday, according to The Hill.

“The VA has been doing that for decades. The prices they pay are about half as much as Medicare. This thing will only apply to a certain number of drugs,” Sanders continued, noting that parts of the proposal would not take effect until 2026.

“So it’s a weak proposal. Is it better than nothing? I suppose,” he added of Democrats’ plan.

Sanders also took aim at industry lobbying, specifically calling out the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). As he put it: “We’re dealing with the power of PhRMA over the Congress. They don’t lose very often.”

As Common Dreams reported last week, Big Pharma is mobilizing an army of lobbyists to tank Democrats’ drug reform plan while hiking the price of prescription medications.

“Pharma is spending millions to defeat a very modest drug pricing bill,” Sanders tweeted Friday. “Joe Manchin, who is blocking climate action, is the major recipient of fossil fuel campaign contributions. This is how a corrupt political system works.”

Democrats Are Fumbling Their Chance to Make Insulin More Affordable


Published in:The Nation
July 28, 2022 
Matt McConnell
Researcher, Economic Justice and Rights Division

HRW

A nurse prepares an insulin shot for a diabetes patient. © Creative Commons

A member of an underground group that brings drugs across the Canadian border explained his methods to me. “We break it up,” he said, describing how their haul is carefully divided into different mailing boxes lined with foam insulation and ice packs. “So, if Customs catches something, we don’t lose it all.”

I was interviewing a drug runner for Human Rights Watch research, but he wasn’t looking to turn a profit. He was just one of many people working ordinary jobs and living ordinary lives—students, homemakers, restaurant and public utility workers, among them—who told me about their experiences in the shadowy world of insulin supply sharing.

Across the United States, informal aid networks of diabetics work, often in legal gray areas, to ensure access to insulin for those who cannot afford it, importing, mailing, donating, delivering, and sharing as many vials and injection pens as they can. This spontaneous solidarity movement, motivated by tragedy and organized online, is often a last line of defense for those facing the possibly lethal consequences of running out of this lifesaving, but unaffordable, medicine.

“I don’t care if they want to throw us in jail,” the insulin smuggler told me. “We want to save lives.”

Congress has proposed legislation that would help address this crisis by limiting annual increases in drugs’ list prices to the rate of inflation, capping patients’ out-of-pocket costs, and allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, including for insulin. These reforms are popular and a core component of President Joe Biden’s plan to address inflation. But the window to enact them is rapidly closing.

This urgency is not lost on Senate Democrats, who are moving forward with plans to enact these comprehensive drug price reforms through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 50 votes in the Senate. But in a sudden—and unexplained—policy shift, when the draft version of this reform package was submitted to the Senate parliamentarian on July 6, it removed previously uncontroversial provisions that included all insulin products in Medicare negotiation and capped health insurance copays for insulin at $35.

It is possible that a separate bipartisan bill that would implement a similar cap on out-of-pocket insulin costs for people with health insurance may have played a part in this decision. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has promised to bring this bill to a vote, but it has a much harder and unlikely path to being passed into law, as it would require 60 votes to overcome the filibuster. This insulin affordability crisis forces people to choose between a medicine that many cannot live without and other basic needs like food and rent. It doesn’t just harm peoples’ health; it limits access to higher education, home ownership, and other life goals, while causing immense stress and anxiety. Congress can take a significant step towards ending it now. But unless Schumer changes course, Democrats may miss this opportunity. (Schumer’s office did not respond to inquiries in time for publication.)

The insulin smuggler I spoke with was one of many people with insulin-dependent diabetes we interviewed for a recent report on the human rights impacts of unaffordable insulin in the United States. Our investigation revealed a deadly but largely unseen crisis of insulin rationing, driven by federal policies and corporate practices that make lifesaving medication like insulin prohibitively expensive for many people.

About 8 million adults in the US use one or more types of insulin to regulate their blood sugar. Without it, they may experience high blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, which can lead to serious and even life-threatening complications. But in the US, the most commonly prescribed form of this lifesaving drug—analog insulin—can cost more than $300 for a single vial, easily adding up to more than $1,000 a month.

Uninsured and underinsured people, who are much more likely to be from marginalized communities and working low-income jobs, may have no choice but to bear the full burden of this medicine’s exceptional cost. People who require lifesaving medicines like insulin will pay what they must to survive, regardless of the price. Or, as some of the accounts people shared with me showed, they will pay for as much as they can afford and then just hope not to die.

Almost every insulin-dependent person we interviewed said they had rationed analog insulin because of its cost, risking long-term and potentially lethal health complications by taking less medicine than needed to stretch out their supply. Although it is difficult to estimate how many people in the US ration insulin in this way, several recent studies found that about one-in-four insulin users reported doing so.

The consequences of rationing can be deadly. A 2020 study of national hospitalization records from 2017 found that on average more than two people died each day in the US after being admitted into a hospital with a primary diagnosis of diabetic ketoacidosis, also called DKA. But this figure may underestimate the total number of these tragic DKA deaths in the US, since this inpatient hospitalization data does not capture deaths that occurred at home or in an emergency room.

Memorials written by family members who found their loved one dead after they rationed insulin because of cost capture the painful human toll of many deaths that potentially went uncounted in these records.

The drivers of this crisis are clear. Unlike most countries, the United States has no direct government regulation of drug prices to make sure they are affordable. There are no systems to establish a fair price for medicines before they enter the market or to restrict how much manufacturers or intermediaries can increase prices once they do. In this unregulated market, analog insulin prices in the US are more than eight times the average among the 32 other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Despite the immense wealth and pharmaceutical production capacity of the US, many diabetics must rely on the illicit but lifesaving work of ordinary people to ensure that they have access to the medicine they need to survive. This crisis is the result of government policies. But thankfully that means that it can be undone by changing them.

While these comprehensive drug price reforms still fall far short of the US government’s human rights obligations, they would be life-changing for millions of older adults and would represent the most significant US health care legislation since the Affordable Care Act. Not including insulin products, essential to the human rights of diabetics, would be a harmful and pointless mistake that only benefits corporations that have profited from a status quo where the lives and livelihoods of millions of diabetics are endangered by an unaffordable drug they cannot live without. Schumer should reinsert insulin into the reconciliation bill without delay.