America’s oil industry released its wish list for the incoming Trump administration on Tuesday, a five-point plan that would eliminate many of the Biden administration’s most far-reaching efforts to reduce climate pollution and limit the warming that is driving ever more destructive and deadly extreme weather.
The list, released by the American Petroleum Institute and coming on the second day of the global United Nations climate conference, does not mention the words “climate change.” The document maintains that the industry group and its members agree on the need to reduce emissions. Yet its requests, if enacted, would remove many of the tools available to the United States to achieve that goal.
Perhaps most importantly, API asked the incoming administration to repeal the tailpipe and fuel economy standards for cars and trucks that aim to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector, the nation’s largest source of climate pollution. The list also includes revoking a waiver that allows California and 12 other states to set tougher rules for vehicles. These rules together are expected to speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles and significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions.
“The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on earth.”
API also called on the Trump administration to issue a new five-year plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling leases and to repeal rules adopted by the Biden administration that restricted new drilling on public lands. The Biden administration had greatly reduced the amount of new drilling on public lands and in waters offshore. The oil industry also wants the new administration to accelerate permits to export natural gas, a process the Biden administration had put on hold to review its climate impacts.
API’s chief executive, Mike Sommers, said his group would press Congress to enact a bill to ease permitting of major energy projects before the end of this session, and would seek more changes to further speed permitting next year.
The proposal also looks ahead to a looming debate to extend or replace the 2017 tax cuts that expire next year, seeking to maintain the lower corporate tax rate the first Trump administration enacted and the numerous benefits the oil industry enjoys.
In a call with reporters, Sommers said voters had elected Donald Trump with energy and the economy in mind and that the proposals would help increase the nation’s oil and gas production, which climbed substantially under President Joe Biden. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer.
“It is clear that energy was on the ballot, whether it was EV mandates in Michigan or fracking in Pennsylvania,” Sommers said, referring to the Biden administration’s policies to encourage the sale of electric vehicles.
Environmental groups reacted to the proposal with scorn.
“This is a toxic soup of reckless proposals that would benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of the climate, frontline communities and future generations. We’re prepared to fight them in court,” said Jason Rylander, legal director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on Earth.”
Some of the requests seem difficult to square with the stated goals of API and many of its members to support the Paris Agreement and its goal of limiting warming.
Sommers said his industry supports the federal regulation of methane, for example, and that some API members support the idea of a methane fee. But the group is united, he said, in its opposition to the fee the Biden administration enacted. Sommers did not elaborate on what type of fee, if any, his group would support.
When asked if API would oppose Trump’s stated desire to withdraw the nation from the Paris Agreement, Sommers declined to answer directly, saying the industry would continue to support cutting emissions while producing more oil and gas regardless of whether the country stays in the global pact.
“It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”
This year is expected to be the hottest on record. Scientists say that in order to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, governments must begin reducing oil and gas production.
Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that the car and truck efficiency standards would save Americans “billions of dollars at the pump, so it’s no surprise that the oil industry would want to gut them.” She added, “Drivers, auto companies, and workers are all benefitting from these standards. For their sake, they should be preserved.”
Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said in an email, “This agenda looks like something written in the 1900s.” Rolfes’ group has campaigned against building new pipelines and export projects along the Gulf Coast because of their impact on communities and the environment. “It does not reflect the technologies that are available now, and forfeits American leadership in so many areas, including high mileage and electric vehicles. It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”
Oil executives were prominent donors to Trump’s campaign, and the industry is likely to find a partner in a new Trump administration on many fronts. Yet some signs of possible friction emerged during the Tuesday call. Sommers indicated his industry might oppose efforts to implement new tariffs, for example, if they restrict the free flow of oil and gas across national borders. The imposition of new tariffs was one of Trump’s central campaign promises.
Many of the steps sought by API could be taken through administrative action, but some, including the repeal of the fee on methane emissions from oil and gas equipment, would require congressional action. Either way, they will be sure to face new lawsuits from environmental groups, which were able to delay or stymie many similar efforts by the first Trump administration.
America’s oil industry released its wish list for the incoming Trump administration on Tuesday, a five-point plan that would eliminate many of the Biden administration’s most far-reaching efforts to reduce climate pollution and limit the warming that is driving ever more destructive and deadly extreme weather.
The list, released by the American Petroleum Institute and coming on the second day of the global United Nations climate conference, does not mention the words “climate change.” The document maintains that the industry group and its members agree on the need to reduce emissions. Yet its requests, if enacted, would remove many of the tools available to the United States to achieve that goal.
Perhaps most importantly, API asked the incoming administration to repeal the tailpipe and fuel economy standards for cars and trucks that aim to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector, the nation’s largest source of climate pollution. The list also includes revoking a waiver that allows California and 12 other states to set tougher rules for vehicles. These rules together are expected to speed the nation’s transition to electric vehicles and significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions.
“The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on earth.”
API also called on the Trump administration to issue a new five-year plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling leases and to repeal rules adopted by the Biden administration that restricted new drilling on public lands. The Biden administration had greatly reduced the amount of new drilling on public lands and in waters offshore. The oil industry also wants the new administration to accelerate permits to export natural gas, a process the Biden administration had put on hold to review its climate impacts.
API’s chief executive, Mike Sommers, said his group would press Congress to enact a bill to ease permitting of major energy projects before the end of this session, and would seek more changes to further speed permitting next year.
The proposal also looks ahead to a looming debate to extend or replace the 2017 tax cuts that expire next year, seeking to maintain the lower corporate tax rate the first Trump administration enacted and the numerous benefits the oil industry enjoys.
In a call with reporters, Sommers said voters had elected Donald Trump with energy and the economy in mind and that the proposals would help increase the nation’s oil and gas production, which climbed substantially under President Joe Biden. The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer.
“It is clear that energy was on the ballot, whether it was EV mandates in Michigan or fracking in Pennsylvania,” Sommers said, referring to the Biden administration’s policies to encourage the sale of electric vehicles.
Environmental groups reacted to the proposal with scorn.
“This is a toxic soup of reckless proposals that would benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of the climate, frontline communities and future generations. We’re prepared to fight them in court,” said Jason Rylander, legal director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The API’s wish list demonstrates the fossil fuel industry’s existential threat to life on Earth.”
Some of the requests seem difficult to square with the stated goals of API and many of its members to support the Paris Agreement and its goal of limiting warming.
Sommers said his industry supports the federal regulation of methane, for example, and that some API members support the idea of a methane fee. But the group is united, he said, in its opposition to the fee the Biden administration enacted. Sommers did not elaborate on what type of fee, if any, his group would support.
When asked if API would oppose Trump’s stated desire to withdraw the nation from the Paris Agreement, Sommers declined to answer directly, saying the industry would continue to support cutting emissions while producing more oil and gas regardless of whether the country stays in the global pact.
“It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”
This year is expected to be the hottest on record. Scientists say that in order to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, governments must begin reducing oil and gas production.
Kathy Harris, director of clean vehicles at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement that the car and truck efficiency standards would save Americans “billions of dollars at the pump, so it’s no surprise that the oil industry would want to gut them.” She added, “Drivers, auto companies, and workers are all benefitting from these standards. For their sake, they should be preserved.”
Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said in an email, “This agenda looks like something written in the 1900s.” Rolfes’ group has campaigned against building new pipelines and export projects along the Gulf Coast because of their impact on communities and the environment. “It does not reflect the technologies that are available now, and forfeits American leadership in so many areas, including high mileage and electric vehicles. It does everything possible to lock us into the fuels of bygone eras.”
Oil executives were prominent donors to Trump’s campaign, and the industry is likely to find a partner in a new Trump administration on many fronts. Yet some signs of possible friction emerged during the Tuesday call. Sommers indicated his industry might oppose efforts to implement new tariffs, for example, if they restrict the free flow of oil and gas across national borders. The imposition of new tariffs was one of Trump’s central campaign promises.
Many of the steps sought by API could be taken through administrative action, but some, including the repeal of the fee on methane emissions from oil and gas equipment, would require congressional action. Either way, they will be sure to face new lawsuits from environmental groups, which were able to delay or stymie many similar efforts by the first Trump administration.
Trump’s reelection has been described by advocates and experts as a final blow to reproductive rights.
These fears are not unfounded. Trump appointed three of the five conservative Supreme Court justices who overruledRoe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion and unleashing a health care apocalypse. Vulnerable women found themselves in even greater danger thanks to abortion bans in more than a dozen states that have enabled abusers and left doctors fearful of prosecution if they intervene in pregnancy-related emergencies that require abortion care. ProPublica reported such bans appeared to have led to the deaths of several women in Georgia and Texas who were unable to get necessary abortion care when faced with dire medical complications. Add to this, Project 2025—the 900-plus-page extremist guidebook to a second Trump term—recommends thatvarious federal agencies take sweeping actions to roll back abortion access.
Trump’s convictions on abortion have been flexible throughout his career. During the presidential campaign, he tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and claimed he would leave abortion policy “to the states.” Immediately after the election, however, his acolytes admitted that “Project 2025 is the agenda.”
Given all this, reproductive rights experts and advocates agree that the future of abortion access is bleak. But there are several actions President Biden and his administration could take before Inauguration Day that could make it harder for the next administration to enact their absolutistanti-abortion agenda. “Some of [the ideas] are just throwing monkey wrenches into the gears,” says David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University whose scholarly work focuses on abortion access, “and maybe with the chaotic Trump administration that helps delay some of the harm.”
“Some of [the ideas] are just throwing monkey wrenches into the gears, and maybe with the chaotic Trump administration, that helps delay some of the harm.”
While Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on “restoring reproductive freedom,” it’s unclear if the Biden administration will prioritize these requests before the transition. The White House did not respond on the record to the specific proposals mentioned in this story, but pointed to the administration’s record of defending and expanding reproductive rights. But some say there’s more they can, and should, do. “If the administration was hesitant or holding off, now is the time, I think, to not hesitate,” Rachel Rebouché, reproductive rights legal scholar and dean of Temple Law School, says.
Here’s a look at some of what the administration could do to stymie the Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda before he’s back in the White House.
Preemptively Pardon Providers of Abortion Pills
The Comstock Act isa 19th-century anti-obscenity law still on the books that anti-abortion Republicans argue should be used to “enforce federal law against providers and distributors of [abortion] pills.” In December 2022, Biden’s DOJ issued a memo arguing that the law cannot be used to prosecute abortion pill providers. Earlier this year, Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to repeal parts of the bill lawmakers say could be most relevant to abortion, but the measure has languished in House and the Senate committees.
Given that Project 2025 advises Trump’s DOJ to invoke the Comstock Act to prosecute providers of abortion pills, some advocates suggest that Biden preemptively pardon anyone who could be implicated for doing so. Cohen, from Drexel, notes that a preemptive pardon “would make it so that the people who have been mailing [abortion] pills, or mailing procedural instruments or supplies, are not at risk of being prosecuted.”
Jodi Jacobson, founder and executive director of the initiative Healthcare Across Borders, described the proposal as “a proactive thing that the Biden administration can do to automatically protect people over the five-year statute of limitations” for federal offenses. Jacobson oversees a coalition that comprises several reproductive health advocacy organizations that plan to ask the Biden administration to issue the blanket preemptive pardon. “This is a no-brainer—there is no reason not to do this,” she says, adding that it would “take off the table the immediate criminalization of folks who have been trying to save lives.”
Trump’s Food and Drug Administration, though, could still revoke its approval of abortion pills, as Project 2025 recommends—but the preemptive pardon would protect providers who could otherwise face prosecution. Experts concede that while there would likely be legal challenges, “pardon power is pretty plenary to the president,” Cohen says. President Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned his predecessor, President Richard Nixon, for instance, which allowed Nixon to avoid Watergate-related charges (but ignited a national outcry). The Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the proposal from Mother Jones.
Push to Fill Vacancies in the Federal Judiciary
Biden cannot shift the balance of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority before he leaves office, but the president and Senate Democrats do have the power to attempt to fill the 47 vacancies for open seats in the federal judiciary, mostly in federal district courts.
“We know the federal courts will continue to be central in the fight for reproductive freedom; the administration and Congress must be vigilant now in safeguarding our rights as much as possible,” Karen Stone, vice president of public policy and government relations at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.
“We know the federal courts will continue to be central in the fight for reproductive freedom; the administration and Congress must be vigilant now in safeguarding our rights as much as possible.”
The significance of these lifetime appointments for the future of reproductive rights becomes apparent when you consider Matthew Kacsmaryk. He’s a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas who issued an anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring a case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion. (The justices ultimately struck down the case, ruling that the anti-abortion plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit, as my colleague Nina Martin reported.)
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court sent the case on emergency abortion care back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—a federal court in California with 10 Trump-appointed judges and jurisdiction over more than a dozen district courts in nine states. “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” Cohen says, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”
Once Biden makes a nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee, currently chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.),recommends whether to send nominees to a full floor vote, which is required for their confirmation. A spokesperson for Durbin’s office said that, as of Wednesday morning, there were 16 nominees ready for a floor vote, and eight more who have had committee hearings and are waiting for a committee vote. The spokesperson added that Durbin “aims to confirm every possible nominee before the end of this Congress.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, “We are going to get as many done as we can.”
But that won’t necessarily be easy. Trump said in a social media post this weekend that “no Judges should be approved during this period of time because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership.” Indeed, for Senate Democrats, time is of the essence. The next session of Congress begins January 3, just over two weeks before Trump takes office—so Biden’s nominees would need to be approved by after the New Year to make it onto the bench. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), whose vote is crucial in the tight Senate, may once again undermine Democrats’ plans. He toldPolitico in March he would not support any Biden-nominated judge unless they have at least one Republican supporter.
Still, several advocates say they hope Senate Democrats make the necessary effort to get as many Biden-nominated judges approved as possible, considering the influence they’ll likely have on the future of reproductive rights. “If [getting judges approved] means working over Thanksgiving, working over Christmas, working over New Year’s—do it,” Cohen says. “This is not something that should be gifted to Trump.” One way they could speed circumvent Republican opposition is by dispensing with a tradition known as “blue slips,” in which senators weigh in on whether or not they support the federal court nominees for their state. There is precedent for this: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, abandoned the tradition—to the ire of Democrats—to get two Trump-nominated judges confirmed despite opposition from their home states’ Democratic senators. With only two months until the next Congress, Senate Democrats may not want to buck this tradition, though; they may want to keep “blue slips” as a weapon in their own arsenal as they anticipate Trump’s nominees to the federal judiciary.
Finalize Pending Reproductive Health-Related Rules for Federal Agencies
The Biden administration made headlines last month when it announced a proposedrule to allow 52 million women with private health insurance to obtain over-the-counter contraception for free under the Affordable Care Act. (Trump, on the other hand, has said he wants to “replace” Obamacare. And while he claims he would not restrict contraception access, it will face myriad threats in his administration, as my colleague Madison Pauly recently reported.)
But the contraception rule has yet to be finalized, and its pathway to becoming a reality is less straightforward than the optimistic White House press release suggests. After the public comment period—which has, so far, only attracted 2 people—ends on December 27, officials will analyze the comments and then write the final rule, which could then not even take effect for another 30 days.
Unlike executive orders, which can be wiped out with the stroke of a pen, rules approved for federal agencies are typically harder to undo. That’s thanks to the Administrative Procedure Act, which outlines the process of how a proposed rule becomes a finalized regulation, and requires that federal agencies do not act in a way that is “arbitrary, capricious, [or] an abuse of discretion.” Rebouché, from Temple Law School, says the administration needs to aim to get the contraception rule—and any other similar ones—finalized as soon as possible. “Any rule that’s already in process, push forward,” she says.
Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, would like to see the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s promise to launch a rule focused on ensuring “modern-day digital data brokers are not misusing or abusing our sensitive data” come to pass. An investigation by the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) earlier this year found that a data broker tracked visits by individuals to 600 Planned Parenthood locations across the country and then sold the data for an anti-abortion ad campaign. Even though the rule was promisedlast year, a CFPB spokesperson says they did not have any update.
Even if the agency tried to ram it through, though, any rules that get finalized at this late stage of the administration are at risk of being overturned in the next session of the GOP-controlled Congress, thanks to the Congressional Review Act, notes Steven Balla, associate professor of political science at George Washington University and co-director of the school’s Regulatory Studies Center. During Trump’s first term, Congress used the legislation to overturn 16 rules issued at the end of the preceding Obama administration—the most of any administration, ever, Balla explains.
Complete Investigations Into Hospitals Accusedof Violating Federal Law on Emergency Abortion Care
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court heard a case on whether hospitals must provide abortions to people whose lives or health are at risk, even in states with abortion bans, under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA. In a 6–3 decision—with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting—the court sent the case back to a lower court, refusing to rule on the merits of the Biden administration’s argument that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care in states with post-Dobbs abortion bans that lack exceptions for a patient’s health. Project 2025 proposes an alternative approach: The guidebook says that “EMTALA requires no abortions” and that HHS should stop investigating hospitals that have failed to comply with its interpretation of the law.
Abortion rights advocates say Biden’s HHS should complete as many investigations as possible into hospitals that may have violated their interpretation of EMTALA by not providing stabilizing abortion care when needed. Otherwise, the Trump administration would inheritthem, a spokesperson for the Center for Reproductive Rights points out.
That spokesperson added that the organization has also submitted three recent complaints to HHS, focused on hospitals in Texas and Arizona that allegedly violated EMTALA by failing to provide medically necessary abortions to women in need. A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at HHS said the agency does not comment on ongoing investigations.
But even if these investigations were undertaken and completed before the transition, reports suggest they would be unlikely to face penalties from the Biden administration. Investigations recently published by the Associated Press found that more than 100 pregnant women were turned away from emergency rooms while they were in medical distress over the past two years, and that none of those hospitals were fined. Last year, HHS announced it was investigating two unnamed hospitals for allegedly violating the law by failing to offer a woman with a nonviable pregnancy the abortion care she needed. The National Women’s Law Center said it filed the complaint on behalf of Mylissa Farmer and identified the hospitals as Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, Missouri, and the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City, Kansas. A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Mother Jones Wednesday, “Both hospitals are back in compliance,” but did not clarify whether they had faced monetary penalties.
One thing that both advocates and officials agree on? Elections have consequences, and there’s a limit to what Biden administration can actually do to mitigate the decades-long damage the Trump administration could do to reproductive rights once he takes office. “The electorate was confused or didn’t really care about abortion,” Cohen says, “and we’re reaping the reality of it.”
Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.
In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”
“I’ve said many times,” he continued,“you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”
President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Szpic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl
Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said.Of course, now that Trump has won,the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.
The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”
“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”
Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday.“The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”
Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.
“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”
The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarksreminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.
Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden on Thursday pledged a peaceful transfer of power back to Donald Trump, touted his accomplishments in office, and reassured supporters that “We’re going to be OK.” Speaking in the Rose Garden at the White House, Biden paid tribute to the workings of democracy and the fairness of American elections. “We accept the […]
An Alabama mining company is taking final steps toward a major buildout of its operations in the central part of the state.
The expansion, which is proposed to include the mining of federally owned coal, comes in the wake of a settlement over the company’s environmental record and as its mines continue to be cited by regulators for alleged safety violations.
The project’s fate has become a litmus test for the Biden administration, which has moved to phase out mining of federal coal in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming.
Warrior Met Coal, based in Brookwood and one of the largest producers of metallurgical coal in the United States, is nearing regulatory approval for expanded operations at its Blue Creek facilities between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, according to corporate filings.
The project would be among the largest recent expansions of coal mining in Alabama, expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent.
If approved by state and federal regulators, the project would be one of the largest expansions of coal mining in Alabama in recent years, with the new facilities expected to increase Warrior Met’s production by up to 60 percent. Public financial support for the facility and its export of coal to overseas markets for use in steel-making may top $400 million.
The project is set to use the destructive longwall mining method, where bladed machines shear coal from expanses as wide as 1,000 feet, extracting coal from an area that can extend well over a mile. The rock ceiling, called “overburden,” then collapses behind the cutting tool. When the ceiling of the mine collapses, the ground above the mine sinks, sometimes by several feet, even though it may be hundreds of feet above the mine.
This subsidence, or sinking of land, caused by longwall mining can lead to serious surface impacts, such as damage to buildings and draining of creeks and ponds, as well as increasing risks related to methane escape. Oak Grove, a small community about 25 miles southeast of Warrior Met’s expansion, has become an ominous example of those impacts, with residents outraged by closing businesses, undermined homes and a fatal home explosion atop the mine.
Unlike the operation in nearby Oak Grove, however, Warrior Met’s expansion at Blue Creek may also include the extraction of publicly-owned coal managed by the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency.
In Alabama, as in many other states, so-called “mineral rights”—the right to, for example, mine for coal under one’s property—have been separated from surface ownership over time. One person or entity can own a surface property under Alabama law while another person or entity can own the rights to all of the resources below that same piece of land, a situation known as a “split estate.” In significant portions of Alabama, for example, the federal government retains mineral rights despite private land ownership on the surface.
BLM announced in April that it would conduct an environmental assessment related to Warrior Met’s proposal to mine 14,040 acres of federal minerals underlying privately owned land in Tuscaloosa County. Warrior Met’s applications to lease the coal rights propose to extract approximately 57.5 million tons of recoverable public coal reserves, documents show.
In July, the Biden administration announced that the federal government plans to phase out coal leasing in Montana and Wyoming, a decision lauded by environmentalists and criticized by industry representatives and right-wing politicians. Now, Biden must decide whether his administration will adopt the same policy concerning federally-owned coal in Alabama.
Warrior Met has a checkered safety history, according to federal records. Lee Hedgepeth/Inside Climate News
According to records from the Mining Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), the federal underground mine regulator, the Blue Creek facility is regularly fined for safety violations. Records show that just this year, employees of Warrior Met and their contractors inside Blue Creek No. 1 have been cited 76 times for safety violations, 22 of which were labeled “significant or substantial.” In each of these 22 cases, federal inspectors found “a reasonable likelihood the hazard…[would] result in an injury or illness of a reasonably serious nature.” The violations pertained to mining coal through private, not federal, mineral rights.
Warrior Met has also been the target of litigation over its environmental record. In September, Black Warrior Riverkeeper, an environmental group founded to protect and restore the Black Warrior River and its tributaries, settled a suit with the company over a leaking coal slurry impoundment at Warrior Met’s No. 7 Mine in Brookwood. The riverkeeper had documented nearly two dozen distinct leaks from the coal waste pond in the year before the suit was filed, the organization’s lawyers wrote in a court filing earlier this year. The settlement agreement, approved by a federal judge on Sept. 18, requires Warrior Met to limit and monitor leaks from the site, pay $250,000 to the Freshwater Land Trust for a conservation project and reimburse the nonprofit for its legal fees.
“This case is a textbook example of why citizen suits are a critical enforcement mechanism when governments fail to enforce the law,” Eva Dillard, a staff attorney with Black Warrior Riverkeeper, said in September. “We are pleased that [Warrior Met] was willing to take responsibility for the problems at Mine No. 7…”
Public officials have already made major commitments to Warrior Met related to its planned expansion, including both infrastructure investments and tax abatements.
The project would receive an estimated $26.5 million in total tax breaks from Tuscaloosa County.
In March, Gov. Kay Ivey announced that, with the support of the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, the Appalachian Regional Commission would provide $500,000 in taxpayer funding to install public water service to the proposed Blue Creek mine site.
“Access to dependable local water service is essential to attract and grow new business and jobs,” Ivey said at the time. “I am pleased to support this grant to extend water service to support Warrior Met Coal’s expansion in west Alabama.”
Warrior Met also managed to secure a $26.5 million tax abatement from the Tuscaloosa County Industrial Development Authority before the project began initial moves toward construction in 2020.
At the time, a breakdown of the tax incentive estimated that Warrior Met would receive $18 million in tax breaks during the project’s construction and $8.5 million over a decade afterward.
“This project represents a significant investment in our community by Warrior Met Coal,” said Mark Crews, chairman of the Tuscaloosa County Industrial Development Authority, “but also represents valuable job opportunities for our citizens for several decades to come.”
The coal produced at Blue Creek is metallurgical coal, most commonly used in the production of steel. Nearly all met coal extracted in Alabama is shipped overseas to places like China and South America through the Port of Mobile, according to federal records.
Yesterday, Axios reporter Barak Ravid published a copy of a letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Israel urging the country to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza—and, in a rare move for the Biden administration, backing that request up by publicly threatening to remove some military aid.
“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for US policy under NSM-20,” Blinken and Austin wrote, suggesting that the US could withhold money from Israel if the country does not: enable 350 aid trucks to enter daily, reinstitute “humanitarian pauses” in their military operations, allow Palestinians to move inland before winter, and open an additional aid crossing within thirty days.
“Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account.”
The State Department confirmed the veracity of the letter. And Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative to the United Nations, today said the effort was to ensure there was not a “policy of starvation” for a region that has received zero food or medical aid since October 1st.
Israeli press reported that 50 trucks of food aid entered North Gaza today, likely in response. But it still is not clear yet whether the administration will actually back up its words with action before the election and pull military funds if Israel continues blocking aid.
NSM-20, the policy directive Blinken and Austin reference in their letter, is based on an amendment filed by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) in December of 2023. The policy requires that the provision of US “security assistance” comply with international law, and that countries receiving US weapons and military funding—of which Israel has received over $17.9 billion in the past year—do not also obstruct the provision of humanitarian aid. This past spring, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid; Blinken rejected the reports, according to ProPublica.
“As the humanitarian situation in Gaza has gone from horrible to catastrophic, the Biden Administration has failed in its ongoing duty to apply the law and terms of NSM-20,” Van Hollen said Tuesday. “Today’s action falls into the category of better late than never—we will carefully monitor the situation to see if the Administration will finally hold the Netanyahu government to account in meeting the requirements set forth in the secretaries’ letter.”
Annelle Sheline, a Quincy Institute analyst who resigned from the State Department in April over Biden’s Gaza policy, wrote on X that the letter, which expresses “concern” that Israel is impeding the movement of civilians within Gaza and prohibiting nearly all aid from entering the strip, is also a “clear acknowledgement” that section 620I of the foreign assistance act is being violated. 620I—which prohibits the provision of military aid to foreign governments which restrict humanitarian aid—“has never been systematically implemented,” according to the Center for Civilians in Conflict.
According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts since the war began a year ago. The United Nations said that Israel blocked all food aid from entering north Gaza between October 1st and October 14th. Health officials at North Gaza hospitals say food, medicine, and even water are running out.
The letter’s 30-day deadline means any threats it contains won’t be enforceable until after the US presidential election. And Austin announced on October 13th, just days before the letter, that the US would send another THAAD missile defense battery—along with about 100 soldiers to operate it—to supplement Israel’s pre-existing air defenses.
Annelle Sheline, the ex-State-Department official, told the Wall Street Journalshe suspects it’s a strategy to gain Arab and Muslim votes in key swing states like Michigan for Harris, rather than a real attempt to shift Israel’s policy long-term. “It’s very convenient that the deadline is after the election,” she said.
On October 7, 2024, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released two new reports. One report from the military-research group details how much the United States government has spent aiding the Israeli military between October 2023 and September 2024. The other gathers and evaluates previously published data to estimate the human cost of this past year’s unrelenting violence.
In both cases, the researchers show staggering new findings.
The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.
Human Cost
To estimate the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, researcher Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins started with the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of confirmed deaths, which has now surpassed 41,615.
Beyond that, an estimated 10,000 people are buried under rubble. Over the past year, 60 percent of buildings and nearly all road-systems in Gaza have been destroyed, making the retrieval of dead and injured people near-impossible. Adding an estimate of those who have died by starvation—about 62,413 people—brings the total estimated death toll to 114,000, or about 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Those likely death-by-starvation numbers come from a letter 99 physicians who served in Gaza sent President Joe Biden last week.
“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” the physicians wrote to Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
Still, as Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell told Mother Jones, factors like the destruction of water infrastructure and sanitary facilities mean the real loss may be incalculable for years to come. Savell said that the numbers used here are a “really solid, conservative minimum number of deaths.”
Given the depletion of Gaza’s medical system, thousands more have likely died due to lack of care for their chronic illnesses. (Cancer care, for example, has been unavailable in Gaza, as has most prenatal care. Women are dying in childbirth without adequate care, and are reportedly undergoing cesareans without anesthesia: “A big portion of death tolls from war comes in deaths of newborns, and pregnant mothers,” Savell said.
Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel one year ago on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200, Israel has imposed a severe blockade on food entering Gaza. “96 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse,” the Costs of War Project researchers reported, noting that Israel’s government has limited humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza that might alleviate that hunger or bring in medical supplies. (A recent ProPublica report found that officials with the US State Department were aware that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza, which would have triggered a potential end to arms shipments to the close ally; Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly rejected the findings.)
Researchers at Brown cited the metric for estimating indirect deaths used by the authors of a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet in July, that warned deaths might be much higher in Gaza than currently reported: four “indirect deaths”—that is, preventable deaths from starvation, or untreated illness, for example—for every direct death in a war. In this case, though, “It seems to me that ratio might be much higher,” Savell said.
Costs of War Project researchers Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler calculated that the United States government has spent $17.9 billion providing military supplies—including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, bombs, and jet fuel—to the Israeli army over the past year.
Those weapons have come through a variety of channels, including commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Financing (which provides grants for countries to buy from US defense contractors), and a program providing excess military equipment no longer needed by the US military to ally nations for a steep discount.
“There are different degrees of public information available on each of these arms channels, and there have also been efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” the researchers explained.
In addition to the $17.9 billion going directly to Israel, the US Navy is spending at least $4.86 billion in the region, “primarily defending maritime shipping against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.” The Navy is currently operating two carrier strike groups present in the area, each of which costs $8.7 million per day to operate. (This led to a particularly odd moment when Vice President Kamala Harris boasted on the debate stage that there are no US troops present in conflict zones.)
The amount of taxpayer money sent to Israel this year was not easy to calculate, or perfectly precise. The Pentagon has not been releasing regular reports on weapons transfers and military loans to Israel. Researchers were forced to rely on news reports instead. “The patchwork government reporting on U.S. military aid to Israel contrasts sharply with the treatment of military aid to Ukraine, where dollar amounts, channels of delivery, and specific systems supplied (including how many) are routinely reported in government-supplied fact sheets on a regular basis,” Blimes, Hartung, and Semler wrote.
This year’s $17.9 billion sum is by far the most the US government has spent on Israel’s military since the country’s founding in 1948, the researchers said, adding that the spending “exceeds the historic amounts of military aid approved for Israel following the Camp David Accords in 1978 and, before that, the start of the October War of 1973.” Though this number is unusually high, Israel has throughout its history received more US military aid than any other country, benefiting from $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959.
“All of us have an obligation to…put the pieces of the picture together, and to look at not just the money that’s spent on war, but its toll on human lives,” Savell said.
On October 7, 2024, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released two new reports. One report from the military-research group details how much the United States government has spent aiding the Israeli military between October 2023 and September 2024. The other gathers and evaluates previously published data to estimate the human cost of this past year’s unrelenting violence.
In both cases, the researchers show staggering new findings.
The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.
Human Cost
To estimate the human cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, researcher Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins started with the Gaza Ministry of Health’s count of confirmed deaths, which has now surpassed 41,615.
Beyond that, an estimated 10,000 people are buried under rubble. Over the past year, 60 percent of buildings and nearly all road-systems in Gaza have been destroyed, making the retrieval of dead and injured people near-impossible. Adding an estimate of those who have died by starvation—about 62,413 people—brings the total estimated death toll to 114,000, or about 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Those likely death-by-starvation numbers come from a letter 99 physicians who served in Gaza sent President Joe Biden last week.
“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” the physicians wrote to Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
Still, as Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell told Mother Jones, factors like the destruction of water infrastructure and sanitary facilities mean the real loss may be incalculable for years to come. Savell said that the numbers used here are a “really solid, conservative minimum number of deaths.”
Given the depletion of Gaza’s medical system, thousands more have likely died due to lack of care for their chronic illnesses. (Cancer care, for example, has been unavailable in Gaza, as has most prenatal care. Women are dying in childbirth without adequate care, and are reportedly undergoing cesareans without anesthesia: “A big portion of death tolls from war comes in deaths of newborns, and pregnant mothers,” Savell said.
Since the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel one year ago on October 7 that killed nearly 1,200, Israel has imposed a severe blockade on food entering Gaza. “96 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse,” the Costs of War Project researchers reported, noting that Israel’s government has limited humanitarian aid convoys entering Gaza that might alleviate that hunger or bring in medical supplies. (A recent ProPublica report found that officials with the US State Department were aware that Israel deliberately blocked aid to Gaza, which would have triggered a potential end to arms shipments to the close ally; Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly rejected the findings.)
Researchers at Brown cited the metric for estimating indirect deaths used by the authors of a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet in July, that warned deaths might be much higher in Gaza than currently reported: four “indirect deaths”—that is, preventable deaths from starvation, or untreated illness, for example—for every direct death in a war. In this case, though, “It seems to me that ratio might be much higher,” Savell said.
Costs of War Project researchers Linda J. Bilmes, William D. Hartung, and Stephen Semler calculated that the United States government has spent $17.9 billion providing military supplies—including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, bombs, and jet fuel—to the Israeli army over the past year.
Those weapons have come through a variety of channels, including commercial sales approved by the State Department, Foreign Military Sales, Foreign Military Financing (which provides grants for countries to buy from US defense contractors), and a program providing excess military equipment no longer needed by the US military to ally nations for a steep discount.
“There are different degrees of public information available on each of these arms channels, and there have also been efforts to hide the full amounts of aid and types of systems through bureaucratic maneuvering,” the researchers explained.
In addition to the $17.9 billion going directly to Israel, the US Navy is spending at least $4.86 billion in the region, “primarily defending maritime shipping against attacks by Houthi militants in Yemen.” The Navy is currently operating two carrier strike groups present in the area, each of which costs $8.7 million per day to operate. (This led to a particularly odd moment when Vice President Kamala Harris boasted on the debate stage that there are no US troops present in conflict zones.)
The amount of taxpayer money sent to Israel this year was not easy to calculate, or perfectly precise. The Pentagon has not been releasing regular reports on weapons transfers and military loans to Israel. Researchers were forced to rely on news reports instead. “The patchwork government reporting on U.S. military aid to Israel contrasts sharply with the treatment of military aid to Ukraine, where dollar amounts, channels of delivery, and specific systems supplied (including how many) are routinely reported in government-supplied fact sheets on a regular basis,” Blimes, Hartung, and Semler wrote.
This year’s $17.9 billion sum is by far the most the US government has spent on Israel’s military since the country’s founding in 1948, the researchers said, adding that the spending “exceeds the historic amounts of military aid approved for Israel following the Camp David Accords in 1978 and, before that, the start of the October War of 1973.” Though this number is unusually high, Israel has throughout its history received more US military aid than any other country, benefiting from $251.2 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1959.
“All of us have an obligation to…put the pieces of the picture together, and to look at not just the money that’s spent on war, but its toll on human lives,” Savell said.
This story was originally published by theGuardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia.
Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.
But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33 percent worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.
More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.
“The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken—LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University and author of the new paper. “To think we should be shipping around this gas as a climate solution is just plain wrong. It’s greenwashing from oil and gas companies that has severely underestimated the emissions from this type of energy.”
Drilling, moving, cooling, and shipping gas from one country to another uses so much energy that the actual final burning of gas in people’s homes and businesses only accounts for about a third of the total emissions from this process, the research finds.
The large resulting emissions mean there is “no need for LNG as an interim energy source,” the paper says, adding that “ending the use of LNG should be a global priority.”
The peer-reviewed research, published onThursday in the Energy Science & Engineering journal, challenges the rationale for a huge surge in LNG facilities along the US Gulf coast, in order to send gas in huge tankers to overseas markets. The US is the world’s leading LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar.
Previous government and industry estimates have assumed that LNG is considerably lower-emitting than coal, offering the promise that it could replace it in countries such as China, as well as aiding European allies menaced by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major gas producer.
“US LNG exports can help accelerate environmental progress across the globe, enabling nations to transition to cleaner natural gas to reduce emissions and address the global risks of climate change,” Dustin Meyer, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute, has said.
But scientists have determined that LNG expansion is not compatible with the world avoiding dangerous global heating, with researchers finding in recent years the leakage of methane, a primary component of gas and a potent planet-heating agent, from drilling operations is far higher than official estimates.
Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5 percent of the gas delivered to customers leaks into the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed. Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that rising global methane emissions risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals.
“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal…It’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”
Howarth’s research also found that during LNG production, around half of the total emissions occur during the long journey taken by gas as it is pushed through pipelines to coastal terminals after it is initially drilled, usually via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from areas such as the US’s vast shale deposits.
The energy used to do this, along with the leaks, causes pollution that is exacerbated once the gas gets to the export facilities. There, it is supercooled to -162C (-260F) to become a liquid, which is loaded into huge storage containers on tankers. The tankers then travel long distances to deliver the product to client countries, where it is turned back into a gas and then burned.
“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal,” said Howarth. “The science is pretty clear here: it’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”
Howarth’s paper has caused something of a firestorm before its publication, with a draft of the study highlighted by climate campaigners such as Bill McKibben to the extent it was reportedly a factor in a decision earlier this year by the Biden administration to pause all new export permits for LNG projects.
This pause has enraged the oil and gas industry—prompting lawsuits—and its political allies. Last month, four congressional Republicans wrote to the Department of Energy demanding correspondence between it and Howarth over what they called his “flawed” and “erroneous” study.
Gas-friendly groups have also argued that the paper overstates emissions from LNG, an stance echoed by some energy experts. “It’s hard to swallow,” said David Dismukes, a leading Louisiana energy consultant and researcher. “Does gas have a climate impact? Absolutely. But is it worse than coal? Come on.”
Howarth said the result of this unusual scrutiny was “more peer review than I’ve ever had before,” with five rounds of review being conducted by eight other scientists. Howarth said: “I don’t consider the criticism valid at all—it feels like a political job.”
Howarth said the US has a “huge choice” to make in the presidential election, with Donald Trump vowing to undo Biden’s pause on his first day back in the White House to allow a raft of new LNG projects. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has backed away from a previous plan to ban fracking but has promised action on the climate crisis.
More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.
The paper’s findings are “plausible,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University, who was not involved in the research.
“Bob’s study adds to a lot of literature now that shows the industry’s argument for gas is undermined by the option to go to renewables,” Shindell said. “The debate isn’t really about whether gas is slightly better or worse than coal, though. It should be about how both are terrible and that we need to get rid of both of them.”
This story was originally published by theGuardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Exported gas emits far more greenhouse gas emissions than coal, despite fossil-fuel industry claims it is a cleaner alternative, according to a major new research paper that challenges the controversial yet rapid expansion of gas exports from the US to Europe and Asia.
Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels when combusted for energy, with oil and gas producers for years promoting cleaner-burning gas as a “bridge” fuel and even a “climate solution” amid a glut of new liquefied natural gas (or LNG) terminals, primarily in the US.
But the research, which itself has become enmeshed in a political argument in the US, has concluded that LNG is 33 percent worse in terms of planet-heating emissions over a 20-year period compared with coal.
More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.
“The idea that coal is worse for the climate is mistaken—LNG has a larger greenhouse gas footprint than any other fuel,” said Robert Howarth, an environmental scientist at Cornell University and author of the new paper. “To think we should be shipping around this gas as a climate solution is just plain wrong. It’s greenwashing from oil and gas companies that has severely underestimated the emissions from this type of energy.”
Drilling, moving, cooling, and shipping gas from one country to another uses so much energy that the actual final burning of gas in people’s homes and businesses only accounts for about a third of the total emissions from this process, the research finds.
The large resulting emissions mean there is “no need for LNG as an interim energy source,” the paper says, adding that “ending the use of LNG should be a global priority.”
The peer-reviewed research, published onThursday in the Energy Science & Engineering journal, challenges the rationale for a huge surge in LNG facilities along the US Gulf coast, in order to send gas in huge tankers to overseas markets. The US is the world’s leading LNG exporter, followed by Australia and Qatar.
Previous government and industry estimates have assumed that LNG is considerably lower-emitting than coal, offering the promise that it could replace it in countries such as China, as well as aiding European allies menaced by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, a major gas producer.
“US LNG exports can help accelerate environmental progress across the globe, enabling nations to transition to cleaner natural gas to reduce emissions and address the global risks of climate change,” Dustin Meyer, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute, has said.
But scientists have determined that LNG expansion is not compatible with the world avoiding dangerous global heating, with researchers finding in recent years the leakage of methane, a primary component of gas and a potent planet-heating agent, from drilling operations is far higher than official estimates.
Howarth’s paper finds that as much as 3.5 percent of the gas delivered to customers leaks into the atmosphere unburned, much more than previously assumed. Methane is about 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, even though it persists for less time in the atmosphere, and scientists have warned that rising global methane emissions risk blowing apart agreed-upon climate goals.
“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal…It’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”
Howarth’s research also found that during LNG production, around half of the total emissions occur during the long journey taken by gas as it is pushed through pipelines to coastal terminals after it is initially drilled, usually via hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from areas such as the US’s vast shale deposits.
The energy used to do this, along with the leaks, causes pollution that is exacerbated once the gas gets to the export facilities. There, it is supercooled to -162C (-260F) to become a liquid, which is loaded into huge storage containers on tankers. The tankers then travel long distances to deliver the product to client countries, where it is turned back into a gas and then burned.
“This whole process is much more energy intensive than coal,” said Howarth. “The science is pretty clear here: it’s wishful thinking that the gas miraculously moves overseas without any emissions.”
Howarth’s paper has caused something of a firestorm before its publication, with a draft of the study highlighted by climate campaigners such as Bill McKibben to the extent it was reportedly a factor in a decision earlier this year by the Biden administration to pause all new export permits for LNG projects.
This pause has enraged the oil and gas industry—prompting lawsuits—and its political allies. Last month, four congressional Republicans wrote to the Department of Energy demanding correspondence between it and Howarth over what they called his “flawed” and “erroneous” study.
Gas-friendly groups have also argued that the paper overstates emissions from LNG, an stance echoed by some energy experts. “It’s hard to swallow,” said David Dismukes, a leading Louisiana energy consultant and researcher. “Does gas have a climate impact? Absolutely. But is it worse than coal? Come on.”
Howarth said the result of this unusual scrutiny was “more peer review than I’ve ever had before,” with five rounds of review being conducted by eight other scientists. Howarth said: “I don’t consider the criticism valid at all—it feels like a political job.”
Howarth said the US has a “huge choice” to make in the presidential election, with Donald Trump vowing to undo Biden’s pause on his first day back in the White House to allow a raft of new LNG projects. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has backed away from a previous plan to ban fracking but has promised action on the climate crisis.
More than 125 climate, environmental and health scientists wrote to the Biden administration last month to defend Howarth’s research and urge a continuation of the pause on LNG exports.
The paper’s findings are “plausible,” said Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University, who was not involved in the research.
“Bob’s study adds to a lot of literature now that shows the industry’s argument for gas is undermined by the option to go to renewables,” Shindell said. “The debate isn’t really about whether gas is slightly better or worse than coal, though. It should be about how both are terrible and that we need to get rid of both of them.”
On October 1, 2024, as Israel began a ground incursion of Lebanon and Iran prepared to fire missiles into Israel, Foreign Affairs published a piece from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “America’s strategy for renewal” in a “new world.”
Like policy adviser Jake Sullivan’s essay in the same magazine a year ago—boasting of a “quiet” Middle East—Blinken’s manifesto had an ironic twist. It was published right as fighting broke out.
A different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of the big war to change the Middle East.
In the essay, Blinken promised a way forward that was actively failing. Over the past fifteen days, the Biden administration’s putative plan to avoid regional war has collapsed. Here is how Blinken described (in one long-winded sentence) the goals of US foreign policy in the Middle East:
The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza, find a diplomatic solution that enables Israelis and Lebanese to live in safety on both sides of the border, manage the risk of a wider regional war, and work toward greater integration and normalization in the region, including between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Every single thing Blinken said the administration is working “tirelessly” for is the opposite of what is happening: There is not a ceasefire, nor an end to suffering in Gaza; there is more conflict between Israel and Lebanon; there is a growing likelihood of a full regional war; and Saudi Arabia has now said it won’t normalize diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestinians get a state (something Israel has no plans to allow).
As Blinken’s plans have failed—and Israel has ignored stern warnings from Biden that did not carry consequences—an old hope has returned. In the three days since the Secretary of State’s essay, a different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of a potential big war to change the Middle East.
After the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, the US has seen a rhetorical push—from background administration sources, former government officials, op-ed columnists, and TV pundits—for a reshaping of the Middle East through large conflict (and away from the immediate goal of just stopping the death in Gaza). The war hawks are back in full force. In newspapers and speeches, there has been a return of neoconservative talking points and even repeated requests for Israel, or the United States, to attack Iran.
Politico reported that top Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk privately supported Netanyahu as he shifted Israel’s strategy towards “reshaping the Middle East.” Jared Kushner, current son-in-law and former adviser to Donald Trump, had a similar idea. He called Israel’s actions in Lebanon “brilliant, rapid-fire technical successes” and said that “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade [Hezbollah] was possible.” Kushner began to see the possibility of a total reconfiguration of the Middle East in the wake of the bombings, he said on X.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what Israel’s plans in Lebanon were,” John Bolton, famous war enjoyer, said Tuesday, “but their plans should not be for a limited incursion.”
In the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested that America “absolutely” should escalate directly and attack Iran. (He then proceeded to name specific missile complexes he believes Biden should be planning to destroy.) Stephens said he is looking forward to when Israel “completes Hezbollah’s decapitation in Lebanon and Hamas’s evisceration in Gaza.”
On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) seemed to suggest that the Biden administration should stop calling for ceasefires altogether. He described Biden’s current position as deeply self-contradictory: “On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel. On the other hand, they’re constantly telling Israel: ceasefire. That’s very, very strange.”
Other Republicans chimed in on which places to bomb first. “I would urge the Biden Administration to coordinate an overwhelming response with Israel, starting with Iran’s ability to refine oil,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested. “This is a moment of choosing for the free world regarding Iran.”
“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” a source in Gaza texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”
Much of this began in mid-September, when official Israeli Defense Force messaging shifted from “return the hostages,” to “regain control of northern Israel.” It was then that Israel blew up hundreds of pagers and cell phones in Lebanon and Syria, killing both Hezbollah members and civilian children. The attacks injured thousands. In the following week, Israel dropped hundreds of bombs on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continued launching missiles at Israel, attacking further south, aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv.
On September 26th, the US and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire with Lebanon. Netanyahu scuttled the plan. The following day, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech at the UN in which he made it clear that “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory.”
That same day, Israel reportedly dropped more than eighty bombs on four residential buildings in Beirut. They announced that they’d killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the process. Within days, Israeli forces went further and entered Lebanon.
But this escalation has not brought de-escalation. On Tuesday, Israel formally began a ground “offensive” in Lebanon, and Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel (most of which were reportedly intercepted by the US and Israeli militaries). The only person killed in the attack was a Gazan laborer with an Israeli work permit who spent the past year stranded in the West Bank. Damage was also reported at a school in central Israel. In Lebanon, officials say over a thousand people have been killed, and one million displaced.
Throughout all this, the Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza continues. As bombardment in the city of Khan Younis increased, I received panicked messages from Palestinians in European Gaza Hospital who were hearing F-16s outside and witnessing mangled corpses arriving at the emergency room. (“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” one person texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”)
Indeed, global attention is shifting away from Gaza toward everywhere else in the region. At this point, at least four other countries are involved in Israel’s war that began with a goal of eliminating Hamas: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Netanyahu’s government is expected to directly retaliate against Iran soon.
Now, the question is whether America will merely fund that barrage, or more actively join in. The hawks—from background sources to Bolton—seem eager to broaden the violence.
Sullivan, the same man who once called for “red lines” in Rafah and hailed a “quiet” Middle East right before October 7th, spoke from the White House mid-day Tuesday of “consequences” for Iran; and not just doled out by Israel, but potentially levied by the United States and the Biden administration.
“We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” he said. “We have made it clear that there will be consequences—severe consequences—for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.”
On October 1, 2024, as Israel began a ground incursion of Lebanon and Iran prepared to fire missiles into Israel, Foreign Affairs published a piece from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on “America’s strategy for renewal” in a “new world.”
Like policy adviser Jake Sullivan’s essay in the same magazine a year ago—boasting of a “quiet” Middle East—Blinken’s manifesto had an ironic twist. It was published right as fighting broke out.
A different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of the big war to change the Middle East.
In the essay, Blinken promised a way forward that was actively failing. Over the past fifteen days, the Biden administration’s putative plan to avoid regional war has collapsed. Here is how Blinken described (in one long-winded sentence) the goals of US foreign policy in the Middle East:
The Biden administration, for its part, has been working tirelessly with partners in the Middle East and beyond to end the conflict and suffering in Gaza, find a diplomatic solution that enables Israelis and Lebanese to live in safety on both sides of the border, manage the risk of a wider regional war, and work toward greater integration and normalization in the region, including between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Every single thing Blinken said the administration is working “tirelessly” for is the opposite of what is happening: There is not a ceasefire, nor an end to suffering in Gaza; there is more conflict between Israel and Lebanon; there is a growing likelihood of a full regional war; and Saudi Arabia has now said it won’t normalize diplomatic relations with Israel until Palestinians get a state (something Israel has no plans to allow).
As Blinken’s plans have failed—and Israel has ignored stern warnings from Biden that did not carry consequences—an old hope has returned. In the three days since the Secretary of State’s essay, a different mood has begun to creep back into the US discussions of foreign policy: the glee of a potential big war to change the Middle East.
After the killing of Hezbollah’s leader, the US has seen a rhetorical push—from background administration sources, former government officials, op-ed columnists, and TV pundits—for a reshaping of the Middle East through large conflict (and away from the immediate goal of just stopping the death in Gaza). The war hawks are back in full force. In newspapers and speeches, there has been a return of neoconservative talking points and even repeated requests for Israel, or the United States, to attack Iran.
Politico reported that top Biden advisors Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk privately supported Netanyahu as he shifted Israel’s strategy towards “reshaping the Middle East.” Jared Kushner, current son-in-law and former adviser to Donald Trump, had a similar idea. He called Israel’s actions in Lebanon “brilliant, rapid-fire technical successes” and said that “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade [Hezbollah] was possible.” Kushner began to see the possibility of a total reconfiguration of the Middle East in the wake of the bombings, he said on X.
“Well, I don’t exactly know what Israel’s plans in Lebanon were,” John Bolton, famous war enjoyer, said Tuesday, “but their plans should not be for a limited incursion.”
In the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested that America “absolutely” should escalate directly and attack Iran. (He then proceeded to name specific missile complexes he believes Biden should be planning to destroy.) Stephens said he is looking forward to when Israel “completes Hezbollah’s decapitation in Lebanon and Hamas’s evisceration in Gaza.”
On Tucker Carlson’s podcast, Sen Mike Lee (R-Utah) seemed to suggest that the Biden administration should stop calling for ceasefires altogether. He described Biden’s current position as deeply self-contradictory: “On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel. On the other hand, they’re constantly telling Israel: ceasefire. That’s very, very strange.”
Other Republicans chimed in on which places to bomb first. “I would urge the Biden Administration to coordinate an overwhelming response with Israel, starting with Iran’s ability to refine oil,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina suggested. “This is a moment of choosing for the free world regarding Iran.”
“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” a source in Gaza texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”
Much of this began in mid-September, when official Israeli Defense Force messaging shifted from “return the hostages,” to “regain control of northern Israel.” It was then that Israel blew up hundreds of pagers and cell phones in Lebanon and Syria, killing both Hezbollah members and civilian children. The attacks injured thousands. In the following week, Israel dropped hundreds of bombs on southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah continued launching missiles at Israel, attacking further south, aiming for Haifa and Tel Aviv.
On September 26th, the US and France proposed a 21-day ceasefire with Lebanon. Netanyahu scuttled the plan. The following day, the Israeli Prime Minister gave a speech at the UN in which he made it clear that “Israel’s war on Hamas and Hezbollah will continue unabated,” until “total victory.”
That same day, Israel reportedly dropped more than eighty bombs on four residential buildings in Beirut. They announced that they’d killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in the process. Within days, Israeli forces went further and entered Lebanon.
But this escalation has not brought de-escalation. On Tuesday, Israel formally began a ground “offensive” in Lebanon, and Iran fired approximately 180 missiles at Israel (most of which were reportedly intercepted by the US and Israeli militaries). The only person killed in the attack was a Gazan laborer with an Israeli work permit who spent the past year stranded in the West Bank. Damage was also reported at a school in central Israel. In Lebanon, officials say over a thousand people have been killed, and one million displaced.
Throughout all this, the Israeli military’s incursion into Gaza continues. As bombardment in the city of Khan Younis increased, I received panicked messages from Palestinians in European Gaza Hospital who were hearing F-16s outside and witnessing mangled corpses arriving at the emergency room. (“Charred bodies and severed limbs,” one person texted me, “all of this is just normal news to the outside world.”)
Indeed, global attention is shifting away from Gaza toward everywhere else in the region. At this point, at least four other countries are involved in Israel’s war that began with a goal of eliminating Hamas: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Netanyahu’s government is expected to directly retaliate against Iran soon.
Now, the question is whether America will merely fund that barrage, or more actively join in. The hawks—from background sources to Bolton—seem eager to broaden the violence.
Sullivan, the same man who once called for “red lines” in Rafah and hailed a “quiet” Middle East right before October 7th, spoke from the White House mid-day Tuesday of “consequences” for Iran; and not just doled out by Israel, but potentially levied by the United States and the Biden administration.
“We are proud of the actions that we’ve taken alongside Israel to protect and defend Israel,” he said. “We have made it clear that there will be consequences—severe consequences—for this attack, and we will work with Israel to make that the case.”
This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
The US government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.
The US Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”
Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.
Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.
The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death—likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.
The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.
USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.
It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”
In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”
US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.
Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”
The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.
Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede US provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.
Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.
In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.
“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”
A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.
“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.
The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.
But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy—along with Lew’s decision to undermine them—reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.
Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.
“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”
The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.
“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”
While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”
The US gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime—money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.
One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.
In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.
Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.
In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”
“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”
As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.
The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.
Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.
In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.
In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.
USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.
Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.
Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.
On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.
Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.
The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.
But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.
The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”
By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.
“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.
It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”
Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)
But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.
The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.
Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.
Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.
This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
The US government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.
The US Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because US law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”
Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots, and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.
Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.
The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death—likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.
The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.
USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.
It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”
In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”
US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.
Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”
The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.
Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede US provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.
Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.
In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.
“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”
A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.
“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.
The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo and its broad conclusion was also previously reported by the global development publication Devex.
But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy—along with Lew’s decision to undermine them—reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.
Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.
“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”
The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.
“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”
While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”
The US gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime—money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.
One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.
In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.
Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.
In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”
“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”
As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.
The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.
Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.
In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.
In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.
USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.
Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.
Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.
On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.
Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.
The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.
But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.
The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”
By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.
“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.
It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”
Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)
But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.
The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.
Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.
Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign partners? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.
This story was originally published by the Guardianand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
A hulking steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, is the city’s economic heartbeat as well as a keystone origin story of JD Vance, the hometown senator now running to be Donald Trump’s vice-president.
Its future, however, may hinge upon $500 million in funding from landmark climate legislation that Vance has called a “scam” and is a Trump target for demolition.
In March, Joe Biden’s administration announced the US’s largest ever grant to produce greener steel, enabling the Cleveland-Cliffs facility in Middletown to build one of the largest hydrogen fuel furnaces in the world, cutting emissions by a million tons a year by ditching the coal that accelerates the climate crisis and befouls the air for nearby locals.
In a blue-collar urban area north of Cincinnati that has long pinned its fortunes upon the vicissitudes of the US steel industry, the investment’s promise of a revitalized plant with 170 new jobs and 1,200 temporary construction positions was met with jubilation among residents and unions.
“It felt like a miracle, an answered prayer that we weren’t going to be left to die on the vine,” said Michael Bailey, who is now a pastor in Middletown but worked at the plant, then owned by Armco, for 30 years.
“America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said.
“It hit the news and you could almost hear everybody screaming, ‘Yay yay yay!’” said Heather Gibson, owner of the Triple Moon cafe in central Middletown. “It showed commitment for the long term. It was just so exciting.”
This funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the $370 billion bill to turbocharge clean energy signed by Biden after narrowly passing Congress via Democratic votes in 2022, has been far less thrilling to Vance, however, despite his deep personal ties to the Cleveland-Cliffs plant.
The steel mill, dating back to 1899 and now employing about 2,500 people, is foundational to Middletown, helping churn out the first generations of cars and then wartime tanks. Vance’s late grandfather, whom he called Papaw, was a union worker at the plant, making it the family’s “economic savior—the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle class,” Vance wrote in his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.
But although it grew into a prosperous All-American city built on steel and paper production, Middletown became a place “hemorrhaging jobs and hope” as industries decamped offshore in the 1980s, Vance wrote. He sees little salvation in the IRA even as, by one estimate, it has already spurred $10 billion in investment and nearly 14,000 new jobs in Ohio.
When campaigning for the Senate in 2022, Vance said Biden’s sweeping climate bill is “dumb, does nothing for the environment and will make us all poorer,” and more recently as vice-presidential candidate called the IRA a “green energy scam that’s actually shipped a lot more manufacturing jobs to China.”
America needs “a leader who rejects Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s green new scam and fights to bring back our great American factories,” Vance said at the Republican convention in July. “We need President Donald J. Trump.”
Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to gut the IRA, with Project 2025, a conservative blueprint authored by many former Trump officials, demanding its repeal should Republicans regain the White House.
Such plans have major implications for Vance’s hometown. The Middletown plant’s $500 million grant from the Department of Energy, still not formally handed over, could be halted if Trump prevails in November. The former president recently vowed to “terminate Kamala Harris’s green new scam and rescind all of the unspent funds.”
“The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows…It gives you an instant headache.”
Some longtime Middletown residents are bemused by such opposition. “How can you think that saving the lives of people is the wrong thing to do?” said Adrienne Shearer, a small business adviser who spent several decades helping the reinvigoration of Middletown’s downtown area, which was hollowed out by economic malaise, offshored jobs, and out-of-town malls.
“People thought the plant was in danger of leaving or closing, which would totally destroy the town,” she said. “And now people think it’s not going anywhere.”
Shearer, a political independent, said she didn’t like Vance’s book because it “trashed our community” and that he had shown no alternative vision for his home town. “Maybe people who serve with him in Washington know him, but we don’t here in Middletown,” she said.
Climate campaigners are even more scathing of Vance. “It’s no surprise that he’s now threatening to gut a $500 million investment in US manufacturing in his own hometown,” said Pete Jones, rapid response director at Climate Power. “Vance wrote a book about economic hardship in his hometown, and now he has 900 new pages from Trump’s dangerous Project 2025 agenda to make the problem worse so that Big Oil can profit.”
Local Republicans are more complimentary, even if they differ somewhat on the IRA. Mark Messer, Republican mayor of the neighboring town of Lebanon, used the vast bill’s clean energy tax credits to offset the cost of an upcoming solar array that will help slash energy costs for residents. Still, Vance is a strong running mate for Trump and has “done good for Ohio,” according to Messer.
“My focus is my constituents and doing what’s best for them—how else will this empty floodplain produce $1 million for people in our town?” Messer said. “Nothing is going do that but solar. I’m happy to use the IRA, but if I had a national role my view might be different. I mean printing money and giving it away to people won’t solve inflation, it will make it worse.”
Some Middletown voters are proud of Vance’s ascension, too. “You have to give him credit, he went to [Yale] Law School, he built his own business up in the financial industry—he’s self-made, he did it all on his own,” said Doug Pergram, a local business owner who blames Democrats for high inflation and is planning to vote for Trump and Vance, even though he thinks the steel plant investment is welcome.
This illustrates a problem for Democrats, who have struggled to translate a surge of new clean energy projects and a glut of resulting jobs into voting strength, with pollsshowing most Americans don’t know much about the IRA or don’t credit Biden or Harris for its benefits.
Ohio was once a swing state but voted for Trump—with his promises of Rust belt renewal that’s only now materializing under Biden—in the last two elections and is set to do the same again in November. Harris, meanwhile, has only fleetingly mentioned climate change and barely attempted to sell the IRA, a groundbreaking but deeply unsexy volume of rebates and tax credits, on the campaign trail.
“Democrats have not done well in patting themselves on the back, they need to be out there screaming from the rooftops, ‘This is what we’ve done,’” said Gibson, a political independent who suffers directly from the status quo by living next to the Middletown facility that processes coke coal, a particularly dirty type of coal used in steel production that will become obsolete in the mill’s new era.
“The air pollution is horrendous, so the idea of eliminating the need for coke, well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” said Gibson. The site, called SunCoke, heats half a million short tons of coal a year to make coke that’s funneled to the steel plant, a process that causes a strong odor and spews debris across the neighborhood. Gibson rarely opens her windows because of this pollution.
“Last year it snowed in July, all this white stuff was falling from the sky,” Gibson said. “The soot covers everything, covers the car, I have to Clorox my windows. The smell is so bad I’ve had to end get-togethers early from my house because people get so sick. It gives you an instant headache. It burns your throat, it burns your nose. It’s just awful.”
“Somewhere in there, JD changed. He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”
The prospect of a cleaner, more secure future for Middletown is something the Biden administration tried to stress in March, when Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, appeared at the steel mill with the Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive, union leaders and workers to extol the new hydrogen furnace. The grant helps solve a knotty problem where industry is reluctant to invest in cleaner-burning hydrogen because there aren’t enough extant examples of such technology.
“Mills like this aren’t just employers, they are anchors embedded deeply in the community. We want your kids and grandkids to produce steel here in America too,” Granholm said. “Consumers are demanding cleaner, greener products all over the world. We don’t want to just make the best products in the world, we want to make sure we make the best and cleanest products in the world.”
Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of Cleveland-Cliffs, the largest flat-rolled steel producer in North America, followed Granholm to boast that a low-emissions furnace of this size was a world first, with the technology set to be expanded to 15 other company plants in the US.
Republicans elsewhere in the US have jumped onboard similar ribbon-cutting events, despite voting against the funding that enables them, but notably absent among the dignitaries seated in front of two enormous American flags hanging in the Middletown warehouse that day was Vance, the Ohio senator who went to high school just four miles from this place. His office did not respond to questions about the plant or his plans for the future of the IRA.
Bailey, a 71-year-old who retired from the steel plant in 2002, said that as a pastor he did speak several times to Vance about ways to aid Middletown but then became alarmed by the senator’s rightward shift in comments about women, as well as his lack of support for the new steel mill funding.
“JD Vance has never mentioned anything about helping Middletown rebound,” said Bailey, who witnessed a “brutal” 2006 management lockout of workers during a union dispute after which drug addiction and homelessness soared in Middletown. “He’s used Middletown for, in my view, his own personal gain.”
“Somewhere in there, JD changed,” he added. “He’s allowed outsiders to pimp him. This guy is embarrassing us. That’s not who we are.”
Do you have $100 million? I don’t. Heck, I don’t even have $50 million! Which is why I’m not worried about the likes of President Joe Biden and maybe-president Kamala Harris and Rep. Barbara Lee and Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Bernie Sanders—all of whom have proposed various levies on excessive wealth over the past five years—taxing my unrealized capital gains.
I do have unrealized capital gains. Maybe you do, too. My wife and I bought our house in Oakland, California, almost 20 years ago, and it’s worth more now than when we bought it. We also own shares of some stock funds that have appreciated over the years. Those paper gains are “unrealized” because we haven’t sold the assets. Unless they are sold, and the profits “realized,” they won’t be taxed under current law.
This gives America’s richest families a convenient way to avoid income tax. If you, like our thousand-ish billionaires, have vast stock holdings, you can have your tax lawyers and accountants arrange your affairs so as to minimize your realized income. Then, instead of selling long-held assets to fund your lavish lifestyle—and paying a capital gains tax of 20 percent plus a 3.8 percent surcharge known as the Net Investment Income Tax (NIIT)—you simply borrow against your holdings at a few percent interest, tops.
Guys like Bezos and Bloomberg and Buffett (who needs first names?) take advantage of this tactic, which is why ol’ Warren can accurately say he pays a lower overall tax rate than his secretary does. Per ProPublica‘s analysis, the wealth of the 25 richest Americans totaled $1.1 trillion at the end of 2018, but their combined 2018 tax bill? A scant $1.9 billion.
Several of the aforementioned wealth tax proposals, including Biden’s (which Harris generally supports), aim to shrink our obscene wealth gap by taxing the unrealized gains of the super-rich. But the $100 million Biden-Harris cutoff means that fewer than 10,000 people would be affected.
They arent talking about us. The capital gains tax has nothing to do with us. Aside from trying to reign in the uber greed of the already mega wealthy in our country. Trickle down economics failed. #harriswalz#capitalgainstax#taxtherich#99percent
The TikTok dad below, Dean, sums up the situation nicely: Taxing unrealized gains “sounds really ridiculous, and it’s very, very complicated,” he says. “But the key thing everyone needs to know, which is why I don’t care about it,” he says, is the cutoff: “I’d love to have this problem. It means I’m freakin’ worth $100 million!”
The people who are freakin’ worth $100 million oppose such a tax, of course. The New York Timesreports that a group of venture capitalists calling themselves VCs for Kamala has been whispering in her ear to dissuade her from trying to tax unrealized gains. In a survey, 75 percent of the group’s members reportedly agreed that doing so would “stifle innovation.”
Bob Lord, a tax attorney who advises Patriotic Millionaires, a group of affluent people seeking fairer tax policies, isn’t buying it. Wouldn’t that innovation-stifling argument “apply equally to their realized gains? And to their tax rates?” he asks in an email. “The logic would justify them having a negative tax rate, so we could spur innovation.”
“As I see it,” adds Lord (who helped write Rep. Barbara Lee’s Oligarch Act of 2023, and who has contributed to this publication) “any tax on the ultra-rich is significant to them only for how it impacts their wealth. Taxes don’t impact their spending decisions, their career decisions, college affordability, retirement decisions, or whether a spouse needs to work full time.”
Those taxes also won’t affect you if you have the following issue:
VCs for Kamala did not respond to questions I sent via their media contact, but those rich kids may not have to worry either. Congress has thus far been unwilling to touch unrealized gains, in part because, as Dean noted, it sounds ridiculous—even un-American—when applied to ordinary people.
I know. These aren’t ordinary people. But remember how, when Congress passed $80 billion in funding so the IRS would finally have sufficient resources to go after wealthy, sophisticated tax cheats? And remember how Republican lawmakers, including Donald Trump, widely (and falsely) shrieked that the Biden administration was hiring 87,000 new IRS agents to fan out and harass regular people just like you? Yeah, that was hogwash. But it was politically effective hogwash that helped set the stage for the GOP to claw back tens of billions of that funding as part of a subsequent debt ceiling deal.
Something similar would almost certainly happen if Congress got close to imposing a tax on unrealized gains. It’s simple politics: “We don’t feel in general that it’s fair to tax people when they don’t have the ability to pay,” explains Harvey Dale, an attorney who advises ultra-wealthy clients on tax matters. “Suppose I am a farmer. My family has owned this 1,000-acre spread for four generations, and in a good year I make $30,000 farming. But the land, wow, that could be worth $10 million now.”
(Note: That farmer, lacking $100 million in assets, would be unaffected by the Harris plan.)
The Supreme Court “is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies.”
One could, of course, write exceptions into the law, “as long as you could figure out what all of those kinds of issues are,” Dale says. Or you could take a different approach: “Why don’t you say, in general, we won’t tax unrealized gains, but we’ll make exceptions and tax them—for example, if the asset in question is freely marketable, like securities, and we won’t do that for people below a certain level of wealth or income.”
As things stand, investors already get a sweetheart deal. When you profit from the sale of an asset today, you pay a far lower tax rate than you would if you made the money by working. Sometimes you pay no tax at all: Uncle Sam, for instance, lets a married couple pocket the first $500,000 in gains from the sale of their primary residence. (Sorry, renters.)
Stock is different. If you sell shares you’ve held at least a year, any profits are taxed at a rate based on your overall income. For 2024, a couple making up to about $94,000 pays no capital gains tax. From there up to $583,750, the rate is 15 percent plus that 3.8 percent NIIT on incomes north of $250,000. Families raking in even more pay 20 percent—23.8 percent with the NIIT.
That’s a great deal for people whose incomes derive largely from investments. It means that a couple with wage income of $1 million in 2024 owes the IRS about $321,000, whereas a couple with $1 million in investment income owes only $181,000. (These simple figures ignore tax credits, deductions, etc.)
Why structure our tax code this way? Some people say it’s to incentivize investment, but I’m skeptical. As long as the government isn’t taking 90 percent of your profits, people will keep investing. What else are you gonna do—shove your excess cash under the mattress? Bury it in the yard?
Another rationale, says Dale, who has taught tax at New York University’s law school for decades, involves “bunching.” If my job pays $100,000 a year and I work for five years, I pay 22 percent annually to the federal government. But suppose capital gains were taxed the same as wages. If an investor who’s held a bunch of stock for four years then sells that stock the fifth year for a $500,000 profit, their income is the same as mine, but because it came all at once, their tax rate would be closer to 28 or 29 percent. “So if you want the theoretical justification, it is to average out the bunching,” Dale told me.
For people who make more than $1 million a year, Biden has proposed taxing capital gains at the same top rate as ordinary income—currently 37 percent. Last week, Harris softened that proposal, saying she’d only raise the rate to 28 percent. She and Biden also both seem to support raising the NIIT to 5 percent on incomes north of $400,000. Which means wealthy investors would pay a total of 33 percent on realized gains.
But you don’t make $1 million a year, so never mind.
Trump hasn’t specified his plan for capital gains—maybe, as with health care, he only has a “concept of a plan.” But Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint created by conservatives from Trump’s first administration, proposes cutting the top rate to 15 percent and eliminating the NIIT. If that happens, America’s one-percenters will pay a tax rate on investment profits that’s less than half the rate they pay on their salaries. And it means wealthy families whose income comes largely from investments will pay a lower tax rate than workers who bring home the nation’s median pay: roughly $60,000 a year.
For hectomillionaires, people with $100 million or more, the Biden-Harris plan would impose a minimum tax of 25 percent on all income, realized and unrealized. But that faces long odds, because even if Congress passes it, the Supreme Court might slap it down.
As the Tax Policy Center’s Steven Rosenthal has written, in the case ofMoore v. United States, four of the justices “expressly declared that realization is a constitutional requirement” for taxation. If either Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh joins with their fellow conservatives, most of those wealth tax proposals would be in trouble.
Lawyers specializing in trusts and estates have long been engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy.”
Tax attorney Lord sees a window: “The court is all but certain to strike down a tax on wealth, and the wealth transfer tax system we have has effectively been neutered through avoidance strategies,” he says, “so that leaves a tax on true economic income [including unrealized gains] as the only plausible option.”
Dale says he likes the Harris plan, and “it’s not clear that SCOTUS would declare unconstitutional a 25 percent tax on unrealized gains of people whose net worth is over $100 million, but it’s also not clear that SCOTUS would approve or sustain such a tax.”
That uncertainty, he adds, will affect how Congress views the proposal: “At least some senators and representatives would decide to vote against it because of its possible unconstitutionality. Others in Congress will vote against it because they will dislike such a tax.”
Dale’s NYU colleague, former Biden Treasury official and tax expert Lily Batchelder, is more optimistic about the Supreme Court sustaining a minimum income tax for extremely high-wealth individuals: “The majority in Moore expressed concern about how the petitioners’ arguments would deprive the government and the American people of trillions of dollars in tax revenue by eliminating a vast array of existing provisions, including multiple provisions that already tax unrealized income,” she notes in an email. “I think the case educated the justices about the ‘blast radius’ that would result if they read some sort of realization requirement into the Constitution.”
It’s always been somewhat of a challenge to effectively tax the superwealthy, who wield political power and guard their hoards as jealously as Smaug, the Tolkien dragon. But Congress isn’t without options. It could, as Sens. Wyden and Angus King have proposed, restrict abusive trusts that allow billionaires to transfer massive sums to their heirs without paying a dime in tax. And lawmakers could cap federally subsidized retirement accounts to prevent wealthy retirees from taking excessive government handouts.
They also could do away with carried interest once and for all and strengthen the rules for Roth IRAs—retirement accounts meant for the middle class—that have famously allowed Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel to parlay a $1,700 retirement fund contribution into billions of tax-free dollars.
And they could, as Biden has proposed, eliminate the socially corrosive “step-up in basis” rule: Suppose your father bought $5,000 worth of stock in 1960 and now it’s worth $5 million. If he dies and leaves it to you, under today’s rules, the “cost basis” of the stock—what it cost him originally—resets to the current market value. Boom! Your family just sidestepped taxes on almost $5 million in investment profits.
His estate wouldn’t have to pay any tax on that transfer, either: As of 2024, the IRS lets a couple give their kids up to $27.2 million, free of any gift or estate tax. This generous exemption is yet another rule that Congress could target. In fact, it’s set to revert to half that amount at the end of 2025, so I guess we’ll see whether our lawmakers will stand up to the oligarchs.
“There are $5 trillion of offsets in the president’s budget that raise revenue exclusively from large corporations and individuals earning more than $400,000 in income,” Batchelder points out. “Every member of Congress has different views about which of these options are most appealing, so the most doable reforms will depend on who are the marginal votes in Congress after the election, but there are many, many options.”
Dale figures the best way to shrink the wealth gap is to target inheritances—closing loopholes, restricting trusts, and generally strengthening the rules on intergenerational wealth transfers, which are taxed at only about 2 percent overall, per Batchelder’s 2020 analysis. The wealth industry will find workarounds, and you’ll never get a perfect system, he says, but you could make inheritance taxes harder to circumvent.
“A nontrivial portion of my practice was estate planning,” a field that has long engaged in “an ongoing, very complicated game to reduce the taxes paid by the wealthy,” Dale says. “It would be sweet, I suppose, to say, here is one simple thing that could be done that your readers can understand. But the loopholes are very, very sophisticated. If I tell you that the right thing to do is to repeal 664(c)(1), your eyes would glaze over. But there are trillions of dollars in that simple thought.”
Vice President Kamala Harris just showed why she is a better candidate on abortion than President Biden ever was.
In a blistering response to former President Donald Trump’s rambling about his ever-shiftingstance on abortion—which included appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruledRoev. Wade—Harris put the ex-president on blast for what she has been calling the “Trump abortion bans” now present in over a dozen states.
“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said.
And when Trump repeated his false claim that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe overruled, Harris promptly laid outthe devastating consequences of the Dobbs decision.
“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Harris said.
“A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term—they don’t want that,” she continued. Harris pledged to sign legislation restoring Roe into law if Congress passed it during her presidency—and noted that Trump could very well sign a national abortion ban if reelected, as Project 2025recommends.
“Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” she said. “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms—in particular, the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body—should not be made by the government.”
Tonight, Harris showed exactly why abortion rights advocates see her as their ideal messenger: In clear and forceful language, she described the health care apocalypse Trump helped create, and the first-hand experiences of pregnant people bearing the brunt of it. When Biden talked about abortion during the first debate, on the other hand, it was a garbled, confusing mess that ended with him talking about immigration.
But in fairness, Trump was also clear about his stance on abortion: When asked two different times, he refused to answer whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one.
This story was originally published byGristand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
Following the release of a major climate report last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the “climate time bomb” was ticking. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the United Nations symbol of a globe encircled by olive branches, Guterres declared, “Our world needs climate action on all fronts—everything, everywhere, all at once.”
That call to action (possibly inspired by the movie of the same name) turns out to be a decent summary of what it takes to tackle rising carbon emissions. According to a new study out Thursday in the journal Science, countries have managed to slash emissions by putting a price on carbon, but the biggest cuts came from adopting a combination of policies. Seventy percent of the instances where countries saw big results were tied to multiple actions that generated “synergy.”
“There really isn’t a silver bullet,” said Felix Pretis, a co-author of the study and an economics professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. “That goes a bit against the conventional wisdom that economists have been saying that carbon pricing is the one thing we should push for.”
“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress.”
Pretis and researchers in Germany, France, and the UK looked for big drops in countries’ emissions and compared those results against the policies that had been adopted. Using machine learning, they analyzed 1,500 policies across 41 countries between 1998 and 2022, and found just 63 instances in which countries substantially slashed emissions. In total, these cuts added up to between 600 million and 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
“I feel like there’s so much gloom and doom around climate policies, that nothing really happens, but actually, we’ve made a fair amount of progress,” Pretis said.
Part of the reason that the study only found 63 success stories is because it set a high bar in terms of emissions reductions, Pretis said. “But at the same time, we also see lots of policies having been implemented that don’t really bite.”
Governments are falling short of their climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement by about 23 billion metric tons of CO2. The problem isn’t just caused by a lack of ambition, the study says, but a lack of knowledge in terms of what policies work in practice.
Carbon pricing, whether through a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program, was “a notable exception” in that it sometimes led to large emissions cuts on its own, the study says, and worked particularly well for emissions from industry and electricity. However, “it works even better if you complement and package it up as a policy mix,” Pretis said.
The study doesn’t capture policies “that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.”
For example, the United Kingdom saw a 19 percent drop in emissions from the electricity sector between 2012 and 2018 after the European Union introduced a carbon price for power producers. Around the same time, the UK had implemented a host of other steps, including stricter air pollution standards, incentives for building solar and wind farms, and a plan to phase out coal plants. Similarly, China cut its industrial emissions by 20 percent from 2013 to 2019 through a pilot emissions-trading program, but also by reducing fossil fuel subsidies and strengthening financing for energy-efficiency investments.
To cut emissions from transportation and buildings, the study shows that it’s an even better idea to pair together multiple tools. Regulation is the most powerful policy for reducing emissions from transportation, and it can work well alongside carbon pricing or subsidies. The study also stresses that different policies might be effective in different contexts. The researchers found that carbon pricing was less effective in developing economies, places where regulations to limit pollution and investments in green technologies might be a better fit.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said the study shows what measures to curb carbon emissions have been politically possible, but it shouldn’t necessarily serve as a guide for future policymaking. “It doesn’t capture policies that never passed—including those that would have been wildly successful but didn’t pass precisely because they would have been so effective.”
Because of the bounds of the study, it also missed some of the most significant climate policies, Wagner said, pointing to the carbon taxes Sweden’s government passed in the early 1990s and the Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden in 2022. The United States’ landmark climate law invests hundreds of billions of dollars in clean energy and tax credits toward low-carbon technologies like heat pumps. The law is estimated to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030, compared to 2005 levels.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this exercise gets repeated five, 10 years from now, the Inflation Reduction Act would show up” as causing a big drop in emissions, Wagner said.
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