Scientists develop new geochemical ‘fingerprint’ to trace contaminants in fertilizer

Heavy metals pollution traced back to mineral-based fertilizers

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DUKE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: 

A PERSON'S HANDS CUP A SAMPLE OF PELLETIZED AGRICULTURAL FERTLIZER AND A PIECE OF THE PHOSPHATE ROCK FROM WHICH IT IS CREATED.

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CREDIT: ROBERT HILL, DUKE UNIVERSITY

DURHAM N.C. – An international team of scientists has uncovered toxic metals in mineral phosphate fertilizers worldwide by using a new tool to identify the spread and impact of such contaminants on soil, water resources, and food supply.

“While mineral phosphate fertilizers are critical to boost global sustainable agriculture and food security, we found high levels of toxic metals in many fertilizers worldwide,” said Avner Vengosh, chair of the Earth and Climate Sciences division at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. “Our study developed a new method to identify sources and impacts of these metals on the environment.” Those metals included cadmium, uranium, arsenic, vanadium, and chromium.

Use of mineral fertilizer – synthetic or naturally occurring substances with essential nutrients needed for plant growth – has helped boost sustainable crop yields worldwide. But until recently, its contamination with toxic metals has not been systematically evaluated. This new study analyzes global phosphate fertilizers from major phosphate-mining countries.

“We measured strontium isotopes in both phosphate rocks and fertilizers generated from those rocks to show how fertilizers’ isotope ‘fingerprint’ matches their original source,” said Robert Hill, the study’s lead author and a PhD student at Duke University.

Isotopes are variations of an element, in this case strontium. Chemical analysis of each fertilizer shows a unique isotope mix that matches phosphate rocks from where it was sourced.

“Given variations of strontium isotopes in global phosphate rocks, we have established a unique tool to detect fertilizers’ potential impact worldwide,” Hill said.

To learn whether strontium isotopes are a reliable indicator of trace elements in fertilizer worldwide, researchers analyzed 76 phosphate rocks, the main source of phosphate fertilizers, and 40 fertilizers from major phosphate rock-producing regions including the western United States, China, India, North Africa and the Middle East. Researchers collected samples from mines, commercial sources, and Tidewater Research Station, an experimental field in North Carolina. The research team published its findings on May 9, 2024 in Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

Metals found in soil and groundwater come from both naturally occurring and human-made sources.

“Strontium isotopes essentially are a ‘fingerprint’ that can reveal contamination in groundwater and soil worldwide,” said Vengosh. His research team has also used strontium isotopes to trace environmental contamination in landfill leaching, coal mining, coal ash, fracking fluids, and groundwater that is pulled to the surface with  oil and natural gas extraction.

“The isotope is a proxy to identify the source of contamination,” Vengosh said. “Without this tool, it is difficult to identify, contain, and remediate contamination linked to fertilizer.”

Fertilizers in the study showed different concentrations of trace elements, with higher levels observed in fertilizers from the U.S. and the Middle East compared to those from China and India. As a result, the researchers conclude that  phosphate fertilizers from the U.S. and the Middle East will have a greater impact on soil quality due to their higher concentrations of uranium, cadmium, chromium as compared to fertilizers from China and India, which have higher concentrations of arsenic.

The National Science Foundation funded this study. (EAR-2305946)

CITATION: “Tracing the Environmental Effects of Mineral Fertilizer Application with Trace Elements and Strontium Isotope Variations,” Robert C. Hill, Gordon D. Z. Williams, Zhen Wang, Jun Hu, Tayel El-Hasan, Owen W. Duckworth, Ewald Schnug, Roland Bol, Anjali Singh, and Avner Vengosh. Environmental Science & Technology Letters, May 9, 2024. DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00170

Online: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00170

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JOURNAL

Environmental Science & Technology Letters

DOI

10.1021/acs.estlett.4c00170 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Tracing the Environmental Effects of Mineral Fertilizer Application with Trace Elements and Strontium Isotope Variations

Banks Remain Financially Committed to Oil Despite Transition Shift

By Irina Slav - May 16, 2024
• 
  
• The world’s 60 largest banks have invested $6.9 trillion in the oil and gas industry since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2016.
• Oil Change International reported, $3.3 trillion went towards expanding the production of hydrocarbon energy.
• 
  
• Worse still for climate NGOs, funding for fracking increased last year as well, reaching $59 billion.

There is no large international bank without a net-zero plan. These plans invariably include curbs in lending to the oil and gas industry. Yet despite these plans. Most of the world’s top lenders continue doing business with the oil industry—and they’ve been doing more of it lately.

The revelation comes from the 15^th annual Banking on Climate Chaos report authored by an organization called Oil Change International, part of a group of climate NGOs committed to putting an end to the oil and gas industry.

According to this report, the world’s 60 largest banks have invested $6.9 trillion in the oil and gas industry since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2016, marking the official start of the global net-zero shift. Of this, Oil Change International reported, $3.3 trillion went towards expanding the production of hydrocarbon energy.

This is bad enough news from the climate NGO perspective, certainly, but it is not the only bad news. What’s worse than a total of $6.9 trillion in hydrocarbon investment is an investment of $705 billion for 2023 alone—with some segments of the industry seeing increases in bank funding. This, in a world with a net-zero agenda, should not be happening, especially when banks are making decarbonization pledges and officially shrinking their business dealings with oil and gas producers. Yet not all of them are doing it.

Oil Change International, for lack of other tools, uses naming and shaming to sound the alarm of banks financing oil and gas, calling what it sees as the worst net-zero offenders “The Dirty Dozen”.

Those are led by JP Morgan, which invested $430.9 billion in the oil and gas industry between 2016 and 2023. At number two, we have Citi, with oil and gas exposure of $396.3 billion for the period, followed by Bank of America, which invested $333.3 billion between the signing of the Paris Agreement and last year.

The “Dirty Dozen” also includes lenders such as Barclays, MUFG, Scotiabank, and HSBC, as well as RBC and the report includes a lot of language aimed at making these banks feel embarrassed about their business practices. What it doesn’t do is ask the question that this information begs: why are banks investing so much in oil and gas?

The answer, of course, lies in the financial reports of oil companies and news reports such as the one that Global Witness released this February, stating Big Oil majors paid their shareholders a record $111 billion in dividends on the back of record profits for 2022. Those record profits were driven by the energy crunch in Europe that highlighted the importance of energy security in a way that everyone could understand—except climate NGOs, it appears.

The Oil Change International report says that financing for liquefied natural gas increased last year, hitting $120.9 billion. From their perspective, this must be a worrying trend. From the perspective of the banks themselves, this is good business—because demand for LNG is on the rise with Europe switching from pipelines to LNG carriers. Even record electricity generation from wind and solar in 2023 did not depress demand for liquefied gas.

Worse still for climate NGOs, funding for fracking increased last year as well, reaching $59 billion, provided to a total 236 companies by lenders including already named and shamed JP Morgan, Citi, and BofA, along with Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. The reason this happened was that demand for oil, including shale oil, was also on the rise, just like demand for natural gas.

The energy demand conundrum is the ultimate challenge for the climate NGO crowd. Protests and road-gluing spectacles may attract attention—although sometimes it is the wrong kind of attention—but the net-zero agenda cannot be followed if demand for hydrocarbons remains as strong as it has been in all the years since the signing of the Paris Agreement.

Attempts to destroy this demand, however, have invariably failed. The buildout of alternative sources of electricity to gas and coal are thriving, with governments spending billions on supporting them. Even so, wind and solar have been unable to cope with the rise in electricity demand and now there are warnings that more gas power plants would need to be built to respond to the expected surge in that demand that the IT sector will drive.

In transport, EV sales have grown strongly thanks to equally strong government support and yet even in Norway, which has the highest per-capita adoption rate, oil demand has not declined. Some of the world’s top carmakers are losing hundreds of thousands on the EVs they produce and they only keep doing it because their gasoline and diesel vehicles are still selling well.

Pointing the finger at banks for their lending to the oil and gas industry without acknowledging the reasons they are doing it would, in any other context, be considered sloppy work. Yet in this case, the reasons for banks to continue funding oil and gas are too inconvenient for the activists tracking this funding. These reasons are that oil and gas make money and that it is very good money—because people want reliable, affordable energy.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

Big Banks Have Funded Climate Crisis With Nearly $7 Trillion Since Paris Agreement

"Banks that profit from climate chaos invent new greenwash every year, but we have the receipts that show how much money they put into fossil fuels," said one report author.

Protesters picket outside a Chase Bank branch in November 2019.
(Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

OLIVIA ROSANE
May 13, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

The world's 60 biggest banks funded fossil fuels to the tune of $6.9 trillion in the eight years following the Paris agreement.

That's the conclusion of the 15th annual Banking on Climate Chaos report, which was published Monday and also found that the financial institutions lavished $705 billion on oil, gas, and coal in 2023—the hottest year on record.

"Financiers and investors of fossil fuels continue to light the flame of the climate crisis," Tom BK Goldtooth, report co-author and executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a statement. "Paired with generations of colonialism, the fossil fuel industry and banking institutions' investment in false solutions create unlivable conditions for all living relatives and humanity on Mother Earth."

U.S. financial giants JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America topped the "dirty dozen" list of the banks that gave the most to fossil fuels since 2016, at $430.9 billion, $396.3 billion, and $333.2 billion respectively. In 2023, U.S. banks provided 30% of total fossil fuel finance, the largest share of any country. JPMorgan also topped the 2023 list at $40.88 billion, with Japanese bank Mizuho Financial overtaking the No. 2 spot with $37.04 billion, and Bank of America remaining in third place with $33.68 billion.




"The science shows that over half of fossil fuels in existing fields and mines must stay underground to limit global warming to 1.5°C, and our Big Oil Reality Check analysis finds that none of the major oil and gas companies we analyze plan to do anything even close to what is needed to hold global warming to 1.5°C," report-co-author David Tong, the global industry campaign manager at Oil Change International, said in a statement. "By injecting a staggering $70[5] billion into fossil fuel financing in 2023 alone, the world's largest banks fund the climate chaos fossil fuel companies wreck on communities worldwide."

The report also tracks how much the financial institutions spent on companies that had fossil fuel expansion plans, according to the Global Oil and Gas Exit List and the Global Coal Exit List. The banks spent $3.3 trillion since 2016 and $347.5 billion in 2023 alone on these companies, or nearly half of total expenditures. Report co-author April Merleaux, research and policy manager at Rainforest Action Network, called the 2023 expansion finance figure "dangerous and inconsistent with real climate commitments."

Overall, Citibank has spent the most on fossil fuel expansion since 2016 at $204 billion, while JPMorgan was the top funder of expansion in 2023 with $19.3 billion.

"As this report is worth nothing if it doesn't turn into action, we call on the banks to finally become fossil free banks, and on the wider climate justice movement to use this data to mobilize for a fossil free banking world."

The researchers also looked at what fossil fuel companies and activities the banks were financing. All told, they considered funding to 4,228 companies. Clients with major expansion plans in 2023 included the pipeline companies Enbridge, TC Energy Corp, and Sempra as well as NextDecade Corp and Rio Grande Valley LNG, which are developing new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity.

Fossil fuel financing did decrease in 2023, down from $778.7 billion in 2022.

"The trend of decreased financing from traditional banks to fossil fuel companies is good news, tempered by the reality that financing for fossil fuel expansion should be zero," the report authors wrote. "But there is little evidence that the decline is driven by voluntary commitments by the banks, especially given the policy rollbacks among major banks."


Indeed, in 2023, Bank of America rolled back commitments to not fund Arctic drilling, thermal coal, or coal-fired plants. Instead, the report authors suggested the downturn in finance was due to external economic and geopolitical factors.

"Unless banks take action to rule out finance for such clients, the decline may not be permanent," they warned.

When it came to the funding of individual high-risk fossil fuel activities, funding for overall expansion, fracking, tar sands, coal- and gas-power plants, and Amazon, Arctic, and deepwater oil and gas all declined. At the same time, funding for metallurgical coal, coal mining, and methane LNG all increased, with LNG funding rising from $116 billion in 2022 to $121 billion in 2023.

"In a year with record climate impacts, I am shocked to see financing for any category of fossil fuels increase. And yet in 2023 this report shows a big increase in financing to companies developing methane gas terminals and related infrastructure," Merleaux said. "Banks should be listening to those on the frontlines and stepping away from these projects."

This year the report—which is a collaboration between Rainforest Action Network; BankTrack; the Center for Energy, Ecology, and Development; Indigenous Environmental Network; Oil Change International; Reclaim Finance; Sierra Club; and Urgewald— features updated methodology that primary sources revealing the role of banks in corporate financial deals. The banks were given a chance to review the data and respond.

"Wall Street's top concern is its profit. Our top concerns are the climate and human rights. Banks that profit from climate chaos invent new greenwash every year, but we have the receipts that show how much money they put into fossil fuels," Merleaux said. "Our new methodology uncovers previously unreported details on banks' support for fossil fuels and gives campaigners new tools to hold them accountable."

Accountability is the report's main goal, according to co-author Diogo Silva, who leads the banks and climate campaign at BankTrack.

"As this report is worth nothing if it doesn't turn into action, we call on the banks to finally become fossil free banks, and on the wider climate justice movement to use this data to mobilize for a fossil free banking world," Silva said. "Later might just be too late. Fossil banks, no thanks!"

'Which Side Are You On?' Mountain Valley Pipeline Foes Block Road to Fracking Projec

"I see no choice but to rebel against these systems in any small way I can," said a campaigner. "To choose to fight on the side of the mountains, the rivers, the critters, and the people. Against the extraction, empires, and all death-making institutions."


Campaigners block access to the Mountain Valley Pipeline 

easement in Roanoke County, Virginia on May 16, 2024.
(Photo: Appalachians Against Pipelines)

JULIA CONLEY
May 16, 2024
COMMON DREAMS

Decrying both the environmental harms and the U.S. fossil fuel industry's support of Israel's assault on Palestinian rights, a pipeline opponent on Thursday morning locked themself to two barrels in the middle of a road on Poor Mountain in Roanoke County, Virginia, blocking access to the Mountain Valley Pipeline easement.

The campaigner, who was supported by other demonstrators in the road, was identified by Appalachians Against Pipelines as Mullein. The protest took place close to where environmental protectors spent more than two and a half years holding the Yellow Finch Tree Sit protest, stopping the destruction of the last remaining trees in the MVP's path.

Mullein said they were driven to block the road by "the interlocking systems of colonization and capitalism," in light of Israel's U.S.-backed assault on Gaza, for which MVP would provide support.




"Today, as I sit in the road on so-called Poor Mountain, it is the day after Nakba Day," said Mullein, referring to the anniversary of more than 700,000 Palestinians' forced displacement when Israel declared statehood. "Today, through this ongoing genocide, Palestinians have been resisting colonization for over 76 years. MVP claims that this pipeline would supply fracked gas to various U.S. military locations including the Pentagon and the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, which is operated by BAE systems, a weapons company supplying weapons to 'Israel' during their genocidal campaign."

"The destruction of land and lifeways is interconnected, from Turtle Island to Palestine," said Mullein, using the Indigenous name for North America. "As a settler here, these systems have disconnected me from land, from others, from myself.

Appalachians Against Pipelines reported that the blockade went on for seven hours. Mullein was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors, with their bail set at $2,000.

The protest comes a week ahead of a deadline for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to grant MVP permission to place the pipeline in service, despite a recent citation by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality for over a dozen violations. The fracked gas pipeline would stretch across at least 300 miles of the Appalachian region, and has been opposed by local and national environmental justice groups.

"I'm sitting locked to two barrels today because I see no choice but to rebel against these systems in any small way I can," said Mullein. "To choose to fight on the side of the mountains, the rivers, the critters, and the people. Against the extraction, empires, and all death-making institutions. Which side are you on?"

Alleged ‘deal’ offer from Trump to big oil could save industry $110bn, study finds

Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor

THE GUARDIAN
Thu, 16 May 2024 

Donald Trump in Nashville, Tennessee, on 22 February 2024

.Photograph: Jon Cherry/Getty Images


A “deal” allegedly offered by Donald Trump to big-oil executives as he sought $1bn in campaign donations could save the industry $110bn in tax breaks if he returns to the White House, an analysis suggests.

The fundraising dinner held last month at Mar-a-Lago with more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, reportedly involved Trump asking for large campaign contributions and promising, if elected, to remove barriers to drilling, scrap a pause on gas exports, and reverse new rules aimed at cutting car pollution.

Congressional Democrats have launched an investigation into the “ethical, campaign finance and legal issues” raised by what one Democratic senator called an “offer of a blatant quid pro quo”, while a prominent watchdog group is exploring whether the meeting warrants legal action.

But the analysis shared with the Guardian shows that the biggest motivation for oil and gas companies to back Trump appears to be in the tax system, with about $110bn in tax breaks for the industry at stake should Joe Biden be re-elected in November’s election.

Biden wants to eliminate the tax breaks, which include long-standing incentives to help drill for oil and gas, with a recent White House budget proposal targeting $35bn in domestic subsidies and $75bn in overseas fossil fuel income.

“Big oil executivess are sweating in their seats at the thought of losing $110bn in special tax loopholes under Biden in 2025,” said Lukas Ross, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Action, which conducted the analysis.

Ross said the tax breaks are worth nearly 11,000% more than the amount Trump allegedly asked the executives for in donations. “If Trump promises to protect polluter handouts during tax negotiations, then his $1bn shakedown is a cheap insurance policy for the industry,” he said.

Some of the tax breaks have been around for decades, and are a global issue, but the US oil and gas industry benefited disproportionately from tax cuts passed by Trump when he was president in 2017.

Next year, regardless of who is president, a raft of individual tax cuts included in that bill will expire, prompting a round of Washington deal-making over which industries, if any, will help fund an extension.

Lobbying records show that Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips, Occidental, Cheniere and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have all met lawmakers this year to discuss this tax situation, likely encouraging them to ignore Biden’s plan to target the fossil fuel industry’s own carve-outs.

Chevron and ConocoPhillips, the analysis shows, lobbied on a deduction for intangible drilling costs, the largest federal subsidy for US oil and gas companies, which is worth $10bn, according to federal figures.

Other lobbying centered on more generalized tax breaks that the oil and gas industry has taken advantage of. ExxonMobil lobbied for a little-known bill that would restore a bonus depreciation deduction to its full value, which, according to Moody’s, would allow big oil to avoid Biden’s newly established corporate minimum tax.

“Unlike previous administrations, I don’t think the federal government should give handouts to big oil,” Biden said following his inauguration in 2021. But Congress and the president will have to agree to any new tax arrangements next year, and the fossil-fuel industry continues to have staunch support from Republicans and some Democrats.

The API insisted its industry gets no favorable treatment in the tax system. “America’s energy industry proudly invests in communities, pays local, state and federal taxes and receives no special tax treatment from the federal government,” an API spokesperson said.

“This nonsense report is another attempt to distract from the importance of all energy sources – including oil and natural gas – to meet America’s growing energy needs.”
Who was at Mar-a-Lago?

The high stakes for the fossil-fuel industry, as well as for the climate crisis, have placed scrutiny upon those who attended Trump’s dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Although representatives of large oil companies were present, the majority of known attendees were executives of smaller firms focused on specific subsections of the fossil-fuel industry, such as fracking or gas exporting.

Those companies are not often held to account in international forums such as the UN climate talks or the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which means they are less likely to make buzzy climate pledges. They may also be more threatened by regulations on individual parts of the US fossil fuel economy, such as auto-emissions standards aiming to quell gas-car usage.

“The oil majors … see their future in plastic [production]. That doesn’t apply to the smaller companies who don’t work across the industry,” said Kert Davies, director of special investigations at the Center for Climate Integrity. “They’ve got nothing to shift to.”

Among other reported attendees were the head of the company Venture Global, which rivals Qatar as one of the world’s leading liquefied natural gas exporters. This year, the company came under fire after it was revealed to have been using millions of gallons of water to construct a Louisiana LNG terminal while a nearby community faced extreme shortages. The firm was also accused late last year of reneging on its contracts by Shell and BP.

Another attendee: Nick Dell’Osso, CEO of Chesapeake Energy, which after years of court fights had to pay $5.3m to Pennsylvania landowners who say they were cheated out of gas royalties. The company’s earlier CEO, John McClendon, was indicted in 2016 on charges of conspiring to rig bids on oil and gas leases in Oklahoma.

Billionaire oil tycoon Harold Hamm, who founded fossil fuel exploration company Continental Resources, was also present. He helped raise money for Trump’s 2016 presidential run and was under consideration to be Trump’s energy secretary, and was reportedly one of the seven top donors who had special seats at Trump’s inauguration. Though he eschewed the former president after his 2020 loss, he donated to his primary campaign in August.

Asked about the meeting, API spokesperson Andrea Woods said the organization “meets with policymakers and candidates from across the political spectrum on topics important to our industry”. She said the premise of Democrats’ investigation into the meeting is “patently false and an attempt to distract from a needed debate about America’s future – one that requires more energy, including more oil and natural gas”.

Amid the scrutiny of last month’s Mar-a-Lago dinner, Trump is continuing to court oil-tied funders. On Tuesday evening, he held a Manhattan fundraising dinner that cost a minimum of $100,000 to attend.

Among the event’s hosts, advocacy group Climate Power noted, was John Catsimatidis, the chief executive of the much-scrutinized gas refiner United Refining Company and owner of two grocery chains, a radio station and holding company Red Apple Group.

Between 2017 and 2023, United Refining Company’s small refinery in western Pennsylvania was the most dangerous refinery in the country, with federal data showing it reported 10 times the average number of injuries for a refinery – 63% higher than the next-most dangerous facility.

The company also reportedly sought to dodge environmental regulations using a process championed by Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt.

Catsimatidis has also been criticized for neglecting vacant gas-station properties and for blaming gas prices on “open” borders, corporate taxes and worker benefits. The Pennsylvania town home to United Refining pays some of the highest gas prices in the state, despite the presence of the refinery, raising suspicions among some residents about the company’s practices.

Trump this week also held a fundraiser hosted by the US senator JD Vance, who is one of the largest recipients of big-oil funding in Congress, and another with Joe Craft, a major Trump donor who owns massive coal producer Alliance Resource Partners. In 2016, Craft reportedly gifted Pruitt courtside basketball tickets after the agency crafted pro-coal regulations.

11,000% Return: Trump’s $1 Billion Offer Could Yield $110 Billion Windfall for Big Oil

A new analysis explores the possible payout if fossil fuel companies—who have already shown a willingness to put a price tag on the value of planet Earth—agree to the presumptive Republican nominee's election year "quid pro quo" deal.

By Jon Queally

May 16, 2024

Source: Common Dreams

A new analysis reveals that the alleged $1 billion election year “quid pro quo” offer that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump made to executives of major oil company’s could, if they agreed to the deal, bank them a handsome profit.

According to the study by Friends of the Earth Action, first reported by The Guardian on Thursday, the “remarkably blunt and transactional” offer from Trump—in which $1 billion in campaign funding put together by the nation’s major oil companies would be repaid upon his election with massive deregulation of the oil and gas sector as well as tax relief for the industry—would yield a major windfall for those same corporations, including an estimated $110 billion from the tax breaks alone.

As The Guardian reports:

Biden wants to eliminate the tax breaks, which include long-standing incentives to help drill for oil and gas, with a recent White House budget proposal targeting $35bn in domestic subsidies and $75bn in overseas fossil fuel income.

“Big oil executivess are sweating in their seats at the thought of losing $110bn in special tax loopholes under Biden in 2025,” said Lukas Ross, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Action, which conducted the analysis.

Ross said the tax breaks are worth nearly 11,000% more than the amount Trump allegedly asked the executives for in donations. “If Trump promises to protect polluter handouts during tax negotiations, then his $1bn shakedown is a cheap insurance policy for the industry” he said.

Republicans in Congress last year confirmed that if Trump wins back the White House and the GOP resume control of both chambers, they will move aggressively to make the Republican’s 2017 tax cuts, which largely benefited the wealthy and corporations, permanent. As some of the most profitable companies in the U.S., oil and gas companies stand to benefit greatly from that outcome.

In Florida last month, not long before his meeting with oil executives, Trump told a different crowd of “rich as hell” supporters gathered at Mar-a-Lago: “We’re gonna give you tax cuts, we’re gonna pay of our debt.” The problem with the second half of that claim is presented in a recent CBO report which found that another wave of tax cuts like those passed by the GOP in 2017 would skyrocket the national debt by an estimated $4.6 trillion over the next ten years.

Earlier this week, House Democrats, led by Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), launched a probe into the “quid pro quo” allegations between Trump and Big Oil, including letters to company executives believed to have been in attendance.

The blatant nature of Trump’s corrupt intent, according to some political observers, is an opportunity that Democrats and champions of climate action and other progressive causes should not miss.

Writing about the circumstances in The New Yorker on Wednesday, journalist and veteran climate activist Bill McKibben argued that the stakes of this election are made plain in what Trump has offered the fossil fuel industry in exchange for its financial backing.

“Trump’s reported billion-dollar offer to fossil-fuel executives shows that this is the key year to save the planet,” McKibben writes.

“Given four years to finish the implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act, a second-term Biden Administration might finally be able to break the hold of fossil fuel’s political influence,” his essay explains. “Another term of Trump, however—and with all that it means for undercutting global efforts at climate regulation, as well—offers an entirely plausible and entirely opposite outcome: climate chaos combined with continued fossil-fuel dependence.”

What’s true, according to McKibben, is that the fossil fuel industry “might well decide that defeating Biden in November is worth a lot of money.” Citing recent profits by Chevron of $21 billion and ExxonMobil’s $36 billion, he said the oil giants will “definitely give Trump something, and the return on investment on that donation—if successful—would be better than the luckiest well they ever hit.”

The new analysis by Friends of the Earth Action shows that McKibben—once again—probably has the math right.

WTF?! ATTACKING THE UCP BASE
The Rural Municipalities of Alberta fear trio of provincial bills are a power grab

FASCISTS DISUISED AS LIBERTARIANS

The Canadian Press
Wed, May 15, 2024 

EDMONTON — Alberta's rural municipalities are teeing off on a trilogy of provincial bills they say erode trust and attack local authority.

Paul McLauchlin, head of the Rural Municipalities of Alberta, says proposed legislation giving the province the ability to take control of local emergency responses isn't salvageable.

He says Premier Danielle Smith’s government hasn't offered a clear explanation as to how this change will do anything other than confuse and complicate critical situations.

"They never really listened to what we wanted, which was better financial clarity as it relates to disasters -- more certainly financially when it comes to disasters -- and increased communication,” McLauchlin said in an interview.

The emergencies bill is one of three pieces of proposed legislation introduced in the spring sitting that sparked concern Smith's United Conservatives are making a gratuitous, unnecessary power grab.

One bill would give the province gatekeeping power to veto federal funding deals with cities and towns while another would give Smith's cabinet broad authority to fire councillors and overturn local bylaws.

Despite assurances from the government that the bills maintain the status quo, McLauchlin said he’s “starting to get paranoid.”

"Are you just trying to move authority more and more into ministerial positions, and (cabinet) ministers can start making these decisions without any input of municipalities?" he said.

Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis said the emergencies bill is about clarifying existing powers, not creating new ones.

"Paul (McLauchlin) is quite frankly incorrect,” Ellis told reporters in the legislature Tuesday, calling the negative reaction “misinformation.”

“We are just creating a reporting structure, which is very common in any sort of critical incident.

"There is nothing nefarious in any of these bills.”

Ellis also promised that if the province does take over an emergency response, it will pick up the costs.

Last week, Municipal Affairs Minister Ric McIver, a former three-term councillor in Calgary, also rejected the suggestion the bills are an overreach.

He noted the province already has legal authority over municipalities.

“That is our reach,” said McIver.

“Not only our reach, it is our responsibility. They may not like the bills, I accept that, but using the phrase 'overreach' seems inappropriate.”

McLauchlin said he views the bills differently.

"We're being put into a smaller and smaller box and the government is taking more and more authority away from us, which makes no sense based upon our past relationship with this government," he said.

"It is extremely hard for a conservative government to make rural Alberta mad, and they've done that successfully in three acts.”

One contentious element of the emergencies bill would allow cabinet, during a crisis, to quickly direct water use and allow temporary low-risk water transfers between major water basins without the possibility for an appeal to the Environmental Appeals Board.

That board is an independent body that hears complaints about ministry decisions on things like water licenses and environmental protection orders.

Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz pledged last week that the government will engage with municipalities before approving large-scale inter-basin transfers.

“What this change allows us to do is enable or approve a low-risk inter-basin transfer for the purposes of providing drinking water to a municipality,” she said, a move that has rarely been made.

McLaughlin said with industrial users wanting to siphon water for things like fracking during droughts, the move from the government demands more debate.

"Creating legislation to deal with rare instances is not the best way to govern a society,” he said.

The emergencies bill, if passed, would also move the fixed election date to October 2027 instead of May that year in an effort to dodge the potential disruption of natural disasters.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 15, 2024.

Lisa Johnson, The Canadian Press

A Sick, Dystopian System Worth Overthrowing

BY PAUL STREET

 MAY 10, 2024
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Image by Clay Banks.

Many friends and allies, especially younger ones, have been getting The Lecture from older Democratic Party relatives or friends – the Lesser Evil Lecture.

This year the lecture comes not only with the admonition to hold your nose and vote for Joe Biden to get a second term to block the fascist monster Trump but also with the insistence or at least request that you not join in protests of Biden’s funding, equipping, and political, military, and diplomatic protection of Israel’s mass murderous and genocidal seven-month war on the people of Gaza. The lecturers say, “don’t come to Chicago to rise up in anger and cause chaos over Biden’s Israel policy when the Democratic Party meets to re-coronate him as their presidential nominee this August.”

A version of the lecture recently came in the form of a Guardian column in which the senior progressive Democrat and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich expressed his discomfort with how young people protesting Israel’s criminal US-backed war tell him that “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” Reich also recalled how antiwar protests Chicago during the 1968 Democratic national convention helped elect the vicious authoritarian and racist right-wing Cambodia-bombing president Richard Nixon.

Reich instructs young Americans that “a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump” and that “Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil.”

Don’t get me wrong. Robert Reich may have written a book with the dumbest title of all time – Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (that’s like saying “saving cancer for the common good”) – but Reich is no dummy. He was one of the earliest US political commentators to properly and serious identify Trump and Trumpism as fascist back in 2016.

Trump is in fact worse than Biden when it comes to one policy after another. They are both mad dog killers but Trump is a mad dog killer with rabies. He leads a movement for the implementation of Christian white nationalist neo-fascist governance within the US. (I’ve spilled a lot of printer ink on how this is true).

And it’s NOT just about domestic politics and policy. Trump is more strongly behind Israel’s genocidal policies than Genocide Joe, sick as that sounds to say. He would never as president threaten to withhold bombs from the Israel Defense Forces, as Biden has just (sort of) done under pressure from protests at home and abroad. Trump would never have tried to warn Israel against going overboard in Gaza, as Biden did right after the October 7 Hamas attack. Consistent with his promise to re-impose a Muslim travel ban and his opposition to the immigration of any refugees from Gaza, Trump applauds the slaughter of Palestinian families. He’d be perfectly happy to see the civilian death in Gaza hit half a million or more.

So why will I not join Reich in lecturing young folks on the need to hold their noses and vote “for” Biden, and cool their protest jets?

Eight reasons.

First, Reich’s admonition to vote for Biden holds practical relevance in just six or seven contested states. Under the archaic Electoral College, presidential elections are absurdly determined in just a small handful of states. How young folks vote or don’t will not change the outcome in most US states.

Second, the progressive/left reasons for refusing to hold one’s nose for Biden go beyond his abhorrent and central complicity in the Crucifixion of Gaza. Other grounds for refusing to make the lesser evil ballot punch include his provocation and fueling of a deadly imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, his lame response to the Christian fascist war on abortion, his signing off on expanded eco-cidal oil and gas drilling, his failure to confront deadly capitalist food and rent inflation, his failure to order the prompt prosecution and incarceration of Adolph Trump, and his reckless military provocation of China.

Third, the Lesser Evil habit is a disastrously slippery slope that has no clear limits as the whole US capitalist political and governance order moves ever more dangerously to the right. Is nothing out of Lesser Evil bounds? Many liberals and “progressives” seem ready to write the capitalist-imperialist Democrats a big blank check simply because they’re not the party of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump. Are there no red lines that the Weimar/Vichy Democrats must not pass without losing liberal and even “left” support? How about killing Single Payer health insurance, ripping up public family cash assistance, deregulating Wall Street, advancing racist mass incarceration, leading the charge for the corporate-globalist North American Free Trade Agreement, bombing Serbian civilians, and killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children through economic sanctions under Bill Clinton? How about re-murdering Single Payer, abandoning labor law reform, bailing out Great Recession-inflicting Wall Street overlords (while leaving working class Americans to drown), blowing up Libya, signing off on Guantanamo, giving George W. Bush a pass on torture, protecting a right wing fascist coup in Honduras, sponsoring and protecting an anti-Russian coup in Ukraine, killing international binding climate emission agreements (in Copenhagen), crushing the Occupy Wall Street rebellion, lecturing Black people on respectable obedience, signing off on escalated North American oil and gas drilling (fracking included), setting new drone kill records, murdering US citizens with drones, rescuing the imperialist and corporatist warmonger Joe “We’d Have to Invent Israel if It Didn’t Already Exist” Biden from the ash heap of history, and more terrible to mention under Barack “The Empire’s New Clothes” Obama? How about fanning the flames of climate catastrophe, raising the threat of nuclear war to new levels, backing GENOCIDE in Gaza, and smearing peaceful anti-genocide protesters as violent antisemites under Joe “Nothing Will Fundamentally Change” Biden?!

Seriously: are there no disqualifying red lines Democrats can cross in the view of the Lesser Evil lectures? At what point, if any, does the lesser evil become too evil?

Fourth, the horrific Democratic Party record partially related above, a reflection of the Democrats’ captivity and allegiance to US capitalism-imperialism, encouraged by lesser evilists’ absence of red lines, opens the electoral door to the Republi-fascist Party by demobilizing the Democrats’ voting base. The dismal Dems’ recurrent betrayal of their progressive-sounding campaign promises costs them millions of votes and helps create quasi-populist space for the Republi-fascists to exploit.

Fifth, the officially diverse and multicultural Dems’ captivity to concentrated capitalist wealth and power helps discredits and delegitimize not just the Democratic Party but “small d” democracy itself. That in turn encourages millions to embrace authoritarian white nationalist narratives on, and (fake) fascist “solutions” to, the numerous overlapping societal problems and crises that capitalism creates and that require big government response.

Sixth, I cannot in good faith encourage people to place their hopes for justice, equality, peace, environmental sanity, and popular sovereignty in voting under an electoral system like the one that reigns in the US. It is a savagely right-tilted Minority Rule regime in which the nation’s rightmost-/Reich-most regions, interests, and people are vastly overrepresented. This comes courtesy of the presidential Electoral College system, the absurdly malapportioned Senate, the undemocratically appointed Supreme Court, the gerrymandered US House and state legislatures, the excessive autonomous power of state governments (“states’ rights”), the absence of proportional representation, and the openly plutocratic and dark money campaign finance regime.

Seventh, as the Biden administration has shown, Democrats don’t really fight, much less crush fascism when they hold office. They conciliate it, keeping it alive with bipartisan compromises while fueling its fires and opening the door for its return to presidential power. So really, what’s the antifascist point of “vote blue no matter who”? If Hillary Clinton had won in 2016, we’d be in the last year of the first Trump administration right now. If Biden squeaks through for a second term, he’ll just be the kind of Weimar/Vichy POTUS who sets up a Republi-fascist presidential victory in 2028.

Meanwhile, regardless of which ruling class party or mix of ruling class parties holds sway in Washington, US capitalism-imperialism and the underlying world capitalist system are threatening the world with ever more imminent ecological and/or military destruction. Time is running out for us to save ourselves and decent lives/life on this planet with socialist revolution.

That’s my eighth reason for holding off on the lesser evil counsel this year. The clock on that shit has run out. I’m not going to vote-shame anybody for doing the Lesser Evil thing, especially if you live in a contested state. I get why many people will go there, actually, but you aren’t going to get Lesser Evil voting counsel from me at this point. It’s not how I want to focus folks’ energies at this stage of apocalyptic capitalism-imperialism.

The comedian Aamer Rahman said something powerful in London recently. He noted how white liberals are tensely saying this to Black and brown anti-genocide activists who can’t and won’t vote for Genocide Joe this year: “is that what you really want? You want Trump to come back? You want to Trump to win?…You think that’s a good idea? Cuz its’ your community that’s going to suffer if Trump comes back. People like you are going to suffer. What do you think of that?”

“What I want,” Rahman told his audience, “is for you to not lecture us on how to respond to a genocide you didn’t try to stop, okay? I think that a political system that ultimately makes you choose between genocidal dementia and cheeseburger-powered fake-tan Hitler is a system worth overthrowing, okay? Maybe that is the conclusion you should be coming to instead of lecturing Black and brown people on why they should worship the Democrats.”

Right on.

Even better are the words of on online friend the other day:

“We’re living in a sick, dystopian, Hunger Games world run by imperialists who are long past their use-by date and care nothing about humanity/planet. Look at the obscene Met Gala that took place the other night- celebrities, wealthy people dressed up in expensive clothing as the genocide in Gaza escalated. A ticket to that event was $75000. One woman’s dress was so complicated that she had to be carried up the steps into the building. Props to anti- genocide demonstrators who disrupted that event, making it clear to the world that it was an obscenity, in spite of violent police repression. Eric Adams, the pig mayor of NYC is the Black Guiliani- another pig who serves the interests of this system that needs to be dismantled and gotten rid of.”

Damn straight. That’s what I call telling it how it is.

We are long past revolution time. We need to catch up with our humanity and get serious cuz it’s like a couple German dudes wrote 176 years ago: its “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or the “common ruin of all.”

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).