artificial sweeteners
Little known about non-natural chemicals increasingly being found in environment
Pesticides, ingredients from sunscreen, an artificial sweetener and the plasticizer bisphenol-A,were among the chemicals found.
Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment leveled at noted scientist.
Years ago, two women allege, their team leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica. Now they are taking action.
A COLD CASE Years ago, two women allege, their team
leader sexually harassed them in Antarctica.
Now they are taking action
In 1999 at Pivot Peak in Antarctica, Jane Willenbring (right) was the only woman on a four-person team including David Marchant (center) and his brother (left).
ADAM LEWIS
Disturbing allegations of sexual harassment in Antarctica leveled at noted scientist
By Meredith WadmanOct. 6, 2017 , 12:45 PM
Editor’s note: This article includes crude language and disturbing details.
Boston University (BU) is investigating sexual harassment complaints made against a prominent Antarctic geologist by two of his former graduate students. The women allege that David Marchant, then an assistant professor, harassed them during different research expeditions starting 2 decades ago, while they were isolated in small groups in the Antarctic. In supporting documents and interviews, several other women report similar treatment from Marchant in that period.
The first complainant, Jane Willenbring, now an associate professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California, San Diego, alleges that Marchant repeatedly shoved her down a steep slope, pelted her with rocks while she was urinating in the field, called her a “slut” and a “whore,” and urged her to have sex with his brother, who was also on the trip.
The second complainant, Deborah Doe (a pseudonym), who was in Antarctica for two austral summers during this era, reports that Marchant called her a “c--t” and a “bitch” repeatedly. She alleges that he promised to block her access to research funding should she earn a Ph.D. She abandoned her career dreams and left academe.
A third woman, Hillary Tulley, a Skokie, Illinois, high school teacher, describes her experience in a supporting letter filed with BU investigators. “His taunts, degrading comments about my body, brain, and general inadequacies never ended,” she writes. She claims Marchant tried to exhaust her into leaving Antarctica. “Every day was terrifying,” she says in an interview with Science.
Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.
“This is one of the only real regrets I have in my whole life,” says Adam Lewis, who as a graduate student was in Antarctica with Willenbring and Tulley. “I had the chance to stand up for people. And I didn’t.”
David Marchant has led dozens of field expeditions to Antarctica’s Dry Valleys.
COURTESY NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Science is unaware of any additional formal complaints from more recent students. Marchant supervised two women who earned Ph.D.s in 2009 and 2016. Both women, contacted repeatedly by Science, declined to comment on their experiences with him.
Marchant, 55, now a department chair at BU, declined by email to be interviewed or to provide his written rebuttal to Willenbring’s complaint. Other documents related to the investigation suggest that he denies the allegations. He was scheduled to be honored as a fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) at the society’s meeting in Seattle, Washington, this month, but last week his name was removed from the GSA website listing of new fellows.
Some other women who have worked with Marchant at BU and in the field stoutly defend his character. Emily Jacesko, who as a 21-year-old undergraduate worked with Marchant and others in Antarctica in 2002, says she never witnessed or experienced sexual harassment from him. “I … sincere[ly] support … him as an upstanding and professional individual,” says Jacesko, a senior staff geologist at a consulting firm headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. She has filed a letter of support for Marchant with BU.
The allegations come at a time of heightened attention to sexual harassment and gender discrimination in science. Scientists are also becoming more attuned to the potential dangers women face in isolated field camps, where they may depend on senior men for food, water, and shelter. In one online survey published in PLOS ONE and covered by Science in 2014, 71% of 512 female respondents reported being sexually harassed during fieldwork; 84% of them were trainees.
He said, ‘I noticed someone hasn’t cried today.’
Jane Willenbring, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
The allegations against Marchant raise the question of whether women can successfully press complaints many years after allegedly abusive incidents. “I have seen claims up to 4 years after the last incident had happened. But I haven’t seen anything with quite that amount of time,” says Alexandra Tracy-Ramirez, an attorney with Hopkins Way in Phoenix who specializes in gender discrimination.
Tracy-Ramirez, who read Willenbring’s complaint at Science’s request, says the case likely “will be a fairly important part of a larger conversation schools are having about ‘What are we required to do?’ and ‘What is the right thing to do?’”
Two portraits of a man
Those who know Marchant describe him as often charming and charismatic, a very good scientist, and an excellent teacher. He made his name documenting landscape evolution in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, and he is known as an experienced field geologist, making more than 30 research trips to the frigid continent.
Jennifer Berglund, 33, a science communicator based in Somerville, Massachusetts, who was a field assistant for Marchant in 2012, recalls her first, windy night in Antarctica, when she and her tentmate had set up their tent with only small rocks holding down the guy lines. “In the middle of the night, we heard some rustling around outside of the tent. It was Dave lugging and placing giant boulders atop our small, scrawny ones, and tightening the guy lines.”
Marchant also made his mark on the BU campus, winning two teaching awards including, in 2004, one of the university’s highest teaching prizes. In 2014 he was named a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); his $1 million, 5-year award is part of a program to improve science teaching. Marchant was “an excellent professor,” says Rachel Watsky, now a law student at BU. She took a class with Marchant, who was also her undergraduate academic adviser, and she worked for him as a lab assistant on campus in 2011–12. She told Science he was a “great boss … eager for my input.”
Jane Willenbring (in Antarctica in 2008) switched her Ph.D. thesis research to the Arctic after working with Marchant.
ADAM LEWIS
The allegations against Marchant in the complaints and supporting documents paint a different picture, and read like a riveting survival novel unfurling in unforgiving, isolated terrain. In her complaint, Willenbring, now 40, describes her first Antarctic field season as a master’s student starting in December 1999, when she was 22.
Marchant, Willenbring, Lewis (then a graduate student at the University of Maine, Orono), and Marchant’s brother Jeffrey, who was working as an assistant, lived and worked in the arid, boulder-strewn Beacon Valley and in the shadow of 2470-meter Pivot Peak. They slept in unheated tents in temperatures as low as –40°C, walked long distances in rugged terrain, and dug deep holes to find ancient ice and volcanic ash. Dropped by helicopter with supplies, for weeks the four had only radio contact with the main base at McMurdo Station.
Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.
One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.
“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.
As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.
In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.
Lewis, a glacial geologist who worked at North Dakota State University in Fargo until he emigrated to Canada last year, corroborates this anecdote in a written letter to BU. He writes that after Marchant blew ash in Willenbring’s eyes, she “yelled and cursed in pain. While she was doubled over, [Marchant] looked back at the other members of the field party and gave us a comical expression that I interpreted as meaning ‘oops, that went a little too far.’” Lewis’s letter also says that he saw Marchant grab and push Willenbring at least twice.
Lewis had also been in Antarctica with Marchant the previous season, when Tulley was there with a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Teachers Experiencing Antarctica and the Arctic. Tulley writes in a letter supporting Willenbring’s complaint that she had not yet cleared the rotors of the helicopter that dropped them at their field site when “I was aggressively grabbed by Marchant and wheeled around, while he yelled and called me a ‘dumbass, lazy c--t … who did not know that we had to set up camp immediately.”
She alleges in her letter that Marchant failed to teach her or include her, the only woman present, in the research. “Talk during [group] meals … always included relentless, snickering mentions of my advanced age (I was 43), my small breasts, and other failings, always initiated by Marchant. All my attempts to steer the conversation to science were shut down.”
The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.
Jacquelyn Hams, Los Angeles Valley College
Lewis’s letter supports much of Tulley’s account. He writes that Marchant repeatedly said to the other men that an older woman in the field “will slow us down.” He adds in his letter: “On multiple occasions while walking without Tulley, Marchant made grotesque sexual comments about her body.” At other times, Lewis writes, Marchant “clearly stated that he did not believe women should be field geologists.”
Andrew Lorrey, then a student at the University of Maine, Orono, was also in the field that season and was interviewed by BU investigators last year. Contacted by Science, Lorrey says he also remembers Marchant’s mealtime disparagement of Tulley and her body. Marchant’s relationship with Tulley was “not positive,” says Lorrey, now a climate scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in Auckland, New Zealand. However, he says: “I did not necessarily attribute [this] to her being a woman as much as … an outsider.”
Doe, a third woman, alleges that she was harassed by Marchant in field seasons in the late 1990s, in a supporting letter for Willenbring that she later converted into a formal complaint on her own behalf. (She authenticated this letter in an email to Science, and requested anonymity.)
When she was a student at BU, she writes, Marchant told her “less than two weeks into my graduate career, that I was lazy, less than intelligent, and incapable of meeting even the basest expectations.” She adds in the letter that, “My every action or social interaction was scrutinized and remarked upon, usually with a belittling comment, followed by … that blinding smile that he deployed to make it seem as if he hadn’t just cut you to the core. … I began to believe the things he told me.”
Once in Antarctica, the abuse escalated, Doe writes. “He repeatedly called me a ‘c--t,’ among many other insults … (bitch being the most common) that were invoked on a daily basis or more. … He would crow that he could say absolutely anything he wanted to because we were ‘in his domain.’”
Marchant told her that if she completed her Ph.D., he and another scientist would ensure she never got NSF funding, Doe alleges. (NSF is the major source of funding for Antarctic field research.)
“I distinctly remember standing there, aghast, in my red down jacket and black wind pants, watching my career and life plans dissolve as Dr. Marchant smiled triumphantly at me,” she writes.
Four women who all worked in the Antarctic with Marchant at different times report him saying close variations of the same words: “I’m going to break you down and build you up in my image.”
Keeping quiet
Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”
Simpson, who has since retired, wrote in an email that she could not comment on the ongoing investigation. She wrote that she would have “dealt quickly and decisively” with allegations “approaching the seriousness indicated” in Doe’s letter.
Doe writes that “it took years, literally, to overcome the damage to my self-worth. I slowly … rebuilt a career grounded in scientific inquiry” outside academe. She writes in her complaint: “For [many] years I have carried the weight of knowing” that she stayed quiet “rather than speaking up and saving those who would follow me from the torment and anguish I had experienced.”
Tulley writes that she contacted one of the directors of NSF’s polar program for teachers upon her return, and was promised “a private, confidential meeting with an administrator.” The meeting did not materialize, and she did not pursue her complaint, she tells Science, because Marchant’s alleged treatment had “knocked me for a loop psychologically.…I wimped out.” When she spoke to other teachers on NSF’s behalf, she relayed only the positive aspects of her experience.
Back at BU, Willenbring, too, did not speak up. She writes in her complaint that, “I believe that I would not be where I am today if I had said something” at the time.
In 2002, as Willenbring finished her master’s degree with Marchant, another professor asked her to write a letter of evaluation for Marchant’s tenure and promotion file. She alleges that Marchant threatened to ruin her career if she did not write a positive letter. She wrote one. “I kept it to the science because he is a very good scientist,” she tells Science.
To avoid Marchant, Willenbring switched her Ph.D. research to the Arctic and moved to another university. She promised herself that when she got tenure, she would speak out.
Speaking out
In July 2016, Scripps hired Willenbring as a tenured associate professor. She filed a Title IX complaint with BU in October 2016. Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex at universities that receive federal funding. Institutions can lose federal funds if they do not comply with the law. (Willenbring also filed complaints with NSF and NASA, which fund Marchant’s research, in December 2016. However, Title IX complaints against individuals are typically handled first by the institutions where the alleged harassment occurred.) Schools are unlikely to dismiss a years-old complaint out of hand, says Tracy-Ramirez, the Title IX lawyer, “but rather to ask ‘Did a hostile environment occur at that time?’ and ‘Is there reason to suspect there is a hostile environment happening now?’”
BU’s Equal Opportunity Office has interviewed numerous people, elicited a 200-page rebuttal from Marchant, and received at least four letters in his support plus at least five letters supporting Willenbring. It has also begun investigating Doe’s complaint, which was filed 7 months later, in May. BU told Willenbring last month that it expects to finish its report soon. The university declined to discuss the investigation with Science, citing privacy concerns.
Willenbring had also sent her complaint to GSA in December, because Marchant edits a GSA publication. The society declined to comment, or to say why Marchant’s name was removed as a GSA fellow.
Marchant, contacted repeatedly by Science, wrote in an email: “Boston University’s investigation into these allegations is ongoing. I have cooperated fully in that investigation. I do not wish to compromise the integrity of that investigation by making any comments before the investigation has been completed.”
Marchant’s defenders tell Science they do not recognize the man described in the complaints. “I find the allegations against Dave of physical abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment beyond comprehension given my field experiences with him in Antarctica as a female” in 2008 and 2012, Jacquelyn Hams, chairperson of the earth science department at Los Angeles Valley College in California, wrote in an email. “The time I spent doing field work in Antarctica with Dave continues to be the best experience of my professional life.”
Others praised his character. Marchant is “a person completely absent the stain of misogyny or unchecked anger,” wrote Berglund, who in addition to working with Marchant in Antarctica, administers the HHMI-supported BU science education program that he leads. Shivani Ehrenfeucht, 26, a second-year Ph.D. student in Marchant’s lab who has not been to Antarctica, says she was “completely shocked” by the allegations. “Nothing that I have heard lines up with the man that I know.” She calls Marchant “kind and genuine.”
Some scientists note that extreme isolation and the absence of institutional support at remote camps create conditions where abuse can flourish. “On campus, I can go speak to a trusted faculty member, the department chair, the ombudsperson,” says Meredith Hastings, an atmospheric chemist at Brown University and co-principal investigator on a $1.1 million NSF grant aimed at curbing sexual harassment in the geosciences. “Who do you go talk to when you are in the field?”
Lewis, who earned his Ph.D. with Marchant, noted in his letter: “In the office and classroom setting, Marchant’s behavior toward women was much less outrageous … he was careful and measured in his tone when others were present.” He adds that he never again saw from Marchant “the extreme behavior” of those early seasons, and says Marchant’s “attitude shifted to simply being distrustful” of women.
What is an institution’s responsibility when confronted with decades-old sexual harassment complaints? “The evidence is that the people who perpetrate this kind of behavior, it’s a pattern,” Hastings says.
Billie Dziech, a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and an expert on sexual harassment on college campuses, argues that even if an abuser has changed over time, they are not absolved of responsibility for acts committed decades ago. “I have a moral responsibility to the young people I teach,” she says. “I don’t care if I did damage 10, 20 years ago: What I do today and what I did yesterday matters.”
In concluding her complaint against Marchant, Willenbring writes that her goal is to prevent “another young, female student bearing the brunt of his misogyny.” She added, in an interview with Science: “I just don’t want it to happen again.”
Keep reading...Show less
Ontario Minister Glen Murray quits politics for dream job.
As the Ontario government lost an experienced cabinet minister on Monday, one of Canada's leading environment and energy think tanks greeted its incoming executive director.
As the Ontario government lost an experienced cabinet minister on Monday, one of Canada's leading environment and energy think tanks greeted its incoming executive director.
Glen Murray — MPP for Toronto Centre and Ontario's minister for environment and climate change — announced his resignation on Monday in order to take the helm at the Calgary-based Pembina Institute, prompting an early morning cabinet shuffle in Premier Kathleen Wynne's government.
Murray, who has built a reputation as a champion of human rights and climate action, will start his new job in September.
"I'm thrilled, a little bit surprised, a bit overwhelmed, excited and anxious all at the same time," Murray told National Observer in an interview. "It’s a job I’ve dreamed of having and it’s an organization which I have such huge respect for, one of the easiest decisions I ever made in my life was filling out the application form for the job at Pembina."
Murray will remain an MPP until the beginning of September in order meet promises and commitments made to his constituents, before taking over for former Pembina executive director Ed Whittingham. Whittingham said his own resignation from the position was "just to give something else a try and make space for someone new at the helm."
The Pembina Institute focuses on generating the research and evidence required to support Canada's clean energy transition, and has offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto and Ottawa.
Climate leadership is shifting, says Murray
Murray has a broad portfolio of experience in both the non-profit and political world. Over a seven-year career in provincial politics, he has served as the minister for infrastructure, transportation, research and innovation, and training, colleges and universities.
Prior to that, he was one of Winnipeg's longest-serving mayors and the first openly gay mayor of a large North American city. He has also co-chaired Canadians for Equal Marriage, worked as president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Institute, and fundraised for Habitat for Humanity. He is a founding member of the Canadian AIDS Society and a recipient of the Queen's Jubilee Medal.
In an interview, he said he was "really glad" to be leaving politics, but that he wouldn't be too far away. As executive director of the Pembina Institute, Murray will be actively involved in working with local, provincial and national governments to develop durable, innovative climate solutions.
"I will miss the ability to affect change and I will miss my colleagues," he said. "But I'm really glad to be out of politics. I think on the climate file, leadership is leaving government for communities, municipalities and business. It's a good time if you want to continue to keep your shoulder to the wheel in the fight to be out of government."
The policy implementation challenge
Whittingham, whose career at Pembina spanned 12 years, welcomed Murray warmly. He said his successor's challenge will be helping to develop lasting policies that can't be taken down easily by successive governments. He pointed to the Trump administration's derailing of climate action as one example, and the environmental crackdown he faced while working for Pembina under the former Stephen Harper government as another.
"The challenge that he will face at the helm of Pembina is now focusing from getting policy in place to implementation," Whittingham said in an interview. "Implementing policy — how do you make it enduring? How do you make it robust? How to you make it so that's it's resilient to different governments down the road who might be coming in?"
Murray said his experience makes him well-positioned to tackle that challenge. As environment minister for Ontario, he said he has helped implement lasting market solutions to the climate crisis, including cap-and-trade legislation with Quebec and California, and the Circular Economy Act, which holds Ontario sellers and producers responsible for end-of-life management of their products and packaging.
"When you've got things that are set up and are really owned by the community and work in the economy independently, it’s very hard to undo those kinds of things," he explained. "When you’ve been a mayor of a large city as I have…you want to see the things you’ve done to improve your city get locked in, so you get very good at designing policies in ways that they’re hard to undo, as long as they’re doing the right thing."
Wynne names new environment minister
Ontario's minister for housing and poverty reduction, Chris Ballard, took over the climate portfolio from Murray during a swearing-in ceremony on Monday morning. Wynne promoted Peter Milczyn, MPP for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, to cabinet as a replacement for Ballard.
During the shuffle, Wynne also made the Office of Francophone Affairs for Ontario a standalone ministry, led by Marie-France Lalonde, the minister for francophone affairs, community safety and correctional services.
Asked whether Murray's shift to the think tank, which takes part in lobbying activities, represents a conflict of interest, Pembina Institute responded via email:
"Glen is aware of the rules governing lobbying and he has had multiple conversations with the integrity commissioner to be sure that everything is square. Like every other minister, Glen will continue to follow the rules of the legislature. All of Pembina’s lobbying work in Ontario will continue to be handled by our current team based out of Toronto."
Over the next month, Murray said he will spend his time working with his "very large, demanding" Toronto constituency to keep his promises and leave the riding in good shape before starting with Pembina on Sept. 5. He will likely spend a lot of time "couch-surfing," he added, as he hops back and forth between the think tank's offices across the country.
"I expect I’ll spend a great deal if not most of my time in Calgary, but my partner and my mother whose going to turn 90 in a few weeks — it’s hard for me to completely relocate," he explained. "We have a very dynamic group in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto and Ottawa and we want to expand our presence across Canada, so I expect I’ll be divided by time fairly equally, with an emphasis on Calgary.”
News of Murray's new position at Pembina comes just as another major environmental organization announced its own new executive director. Nature Canada appointed Graham Saul to the top job, after a long career in advocacy for Ecology Ottawa, Climate Action Network Canada, Friends of the Earth Canada and Oil Change International.
Keep reading...Show less
In the American South, an inequity of diseases.
In Alabama, climate change and poor infrastructure provide hospitable conditions for diseases typically found in the developing world.
VARIABLES/News & Features
In the American South, an Inequity of Diseases
In Alabama, climate change and poor infrastructure provide hospitable conditions for diseases typically found in the developing world.
06.29.2017 / BY Lyndsey Gilpin
JOIN THE DISCUSSION SHARE
ON A MUGGY DAY IN October 2009, Catherine Flowers stepped down the stairs behind a mobile home in Lowndes County, Alabama to find a pit filled with raw sewage. Mosquitoes and flies buzzed around, and a putrid smell hung in the damp air. Without any municipal sewer treatment or an onsite septic system, the owner of that mobile home had little choice but to pump waste outside. It had rained more than usual that month, so the pit overflowed. The sewage leaked through the yard and seeped into the soil.
“This is the frontline community for environmental injustice.”
As Flowers, the founder of the nonprofit Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise, examined the scene, several mosquitoes bit her legs. Three days later, she broke out in an expansive red and blotchy rash. Doctors ran tests for bacterial infections and allergic reactions, and gave her creams for the itch. But the tests came back negative and the creams didn’t work. After three months, the rash eventually faded away.
Flowers asked her doctor if perhaps the tests hadn’t focused on the right kind of infection, since the third-world conditions of the mobile home were unexpected in the United States. The doctor said it was possible.
Eight years later, on a stifling hot spring morning, the 58-year-old Flowers, who also works on race and poverty initiatives at the Equal Justice Initiative and is an avid environmental justice activist, drove through Lowndes on the famous 54-mile highway between Selma and Montgomery that Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of others marched in 1965. “This road is supposed to represent equality in the United States,” she said. “But here, there’s one of the most glaring forms of inequality in the U.S.”
For decades, this poor, rural county has lacked basic wastewater infrastructure. With climate change driving warmer temperatures and heavier rains, flooding is more common, and the standing water and raw sewage attracts mosquitoes and other tropical disease vectors. Flowers has witnessed these conditions since her childhood — she grew up in the area — and long suspected they were a problem. But earlier this year, her suspicions were confirmed: researchers from the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, found tropical parasites in Lowndes County that are typically found in developing countries.
“This is the frontline community for environmental injustice, already suffering from climate change and having health issues exacerbated by it,” Flowers said. “We’re starting to see the possibility of tropical illnesses in places that didn’t have them before. And we don’t have infrastructure in place to address it, nor are our medical personnel being trained to find it.”
Catherine Flowers shows Senator Cory Booker a site in Lowndes County with standing water, raw sewage, and mosquitoes.
Visual by Catherine Coleman Flowers
THE DENSE FORESTS IN rural southern Alabama are lush and green in the late spring. Spanish moss hangs heavy from oak and cypress trees along the Alabama River in Lowndes County, which has a dwindling population of about 11,000. Most live in narrow ranch-style houses or mobile homes along the back roads off Interstate 65, which connect the three largest towns: Fort Deposit, which is the most populous; Hayneville, the county seat; and White Hall, where Flowers grew up. Here in the heart of the Black Belt, the county is 73 percent black. A tall Confederate monument memorializing fallen soldiers sits prominently in the middle of the small Hayneville town square.
“This road is supposed to represent equality in the United States. But here, there’s one of the most glaring forms of inequality in the U.S.”
During a visit in late May, Flowers surveyed Fort Deposit, Hayneville, and White Hall. There was standing water everywhere — in yards, along gravel side roads, in ditches and fields — even though it was 90 degrees and hadn’t rained for several days. A man stood ankle deep in a puddle and scooped out water from his yard with a plastic bottle. Across the street, a woman’s yard was completely flooded — a Hayneville wastewater lagoon recently overflowed, as it often does when it rains. Flowers pointed out dozens of homes that dump raw sewage in their yards because they can’t afford individual septic systems. Many of these families participated in the Baylor College of Medicine study.
Flowers has a commanding presence and contagious laugh, and she never meets a stranger — especially in Lowndes County. She was born in Birmingham, but her family moved to Lowndes in the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement — when it was called “Bloody Lowndes” for the excessive police violence against black residents. The family used an outhouse for years before her parents installed an onsite septic system. But the dark, rich Alabama soil, perfect for agriculture, retains water, so the systems overflow in hard rains.
After a couple of decades teaching around the country, Flowers returned to Alabama in 2000. She first worked in economic development, and then homed in on water infrastructure and public health. In outlining a project in 2005 aimed at improving wastewater management, Flowers pointed out that only 18 percent of Lowndes residents were on municipal sewer systems. About 82 percent would have to rely on onsite wastewater systems that ran between $5,000 and $30,000 — money most people didn’t have. In the early 1990s, Flowers said, the health department cited residents who didn’t have onsite septic systems; in some cases, the citations led to police arrests. With the help of the Woodson Center, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that supports low-income communities, she helped stop the arrests.
Also in the early 1990s, a University of Alabama study on a small clinic in neighboring Wilcox County revealed that a third of children under age 10 had intestinal helminths, parasites linked to poor sanitation and contaminated soil. By the time Flowers was bitten by those mosquitoes in 2009, she had a feeling the effects of climate change were making conditions in rural Alabama worse. Three years later, she read an op-ed on tropical diseases as the new plague of poverty in The New York Times, written by Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor. It sounded all-too familiar. “I held onto that article, kept going back to it,” she said. Three months later, she emailed Hotez and told him about Lowndes.
Hotez is one of the world’s leading experts on neglected tropical diseases, and helped found the National School of Tropical Medicine six years ago. He said these types of neglected diseases, which most people associate with developing nations, impact 12 million people living in poverty in the U.S. already, and more are at risk. Most are on the Gulf Coast in Texas and in the Southeast. Poverty is the overriding determinant, but other key factors include hot and wet conditions, climate change, migration, and increasing numbers of vector species. “These diseases are not on anybody’s radar,” Hotez said. “They’re occurring in flyover country, among the poor, in neighborhoods that go unseen.”
Severe poverty in the United States leads to poor sanitation systems and increased risks for parasitic infections.
Visual by Rojelio Mejia
Yards near a sewage waste lagoon in Hayneville flood whenever it rains excessively.
Visual by Lyndsey Gilpin
There’s West Nile virus, mostly spread by Culex mosquitoes in economically depressed areas like rural Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and southeast Texas — usually where there are unsanitary conditions, which attracts the mosquitoes, and standing water, where they like to breed. Zika virus is spread by Aedes mosquitoes in tropical conditions and places that are environmentally degraded, Hotez said, like run-down homes and yards filled with trash. Then there is Chagas disease, which, if left untreated, leads to congestive heart failure. Although Chagas is most common in Latin America, it’s now also found in the southern U.S. and Texas. The disease spreads through “kissing bugs,” which live in lush vegetation and trees. The bugs are often found in rural areas where people are easily accessible — like mobile home parks.
Other poverty neglected diseases in the South — particularly low-income areas along the Gulf Coast and Texas — include cysticercosis, a tapeworm transmitted through human feces, and murine typhus, a bacterial infection spread by fleas.
“These diseases are not on anybody’s radar. They’re occurring in flyover country, among the poor, in neighborhoods that go unseen.”
For more than two decades, Hotez has tried to convince governments, doctors, and communities to take direct action, with little avail. “We’re not going into communities we think are affected and doing active surveillance and testing,” he said. “We’re not doing anything to look at how they’re being transmitted in America. We are not providing access to diagnosis and treatment, and we’re not doing research and development except [at the National School of Tropical Medicine.]”
After Flowers told Hotez about the conditions in Lowndes in 2012, a team from the school decided to survey the area for signs of similar types of tropical parasites. Over the next couple of years, Flowers and scientists including Hotez and Rojelio Mejia, also at the National School of Tropical Medicine, took dozens of samples of feces, water, soil, and blood from people throughout the 720-square-mile county. The researchers won’t cite specifics because they aren’t publishing the study until later this summer after peer-review, but Hotez said they found evidence of tropical parasites that are common in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
Dawn Wesson, an associate professor of tropical medicine at Tulane University who was not involved with the study, said that there are several reasons these parasites could be showing up more frequently in areas like Lowndes County: an increase in detection, awareness, and the discovery of rare parasites that are endemic to the U.S., but rarely show up in humans. “Human exposure can increase in poor housing conditions,” Wesson said. Exacerbating the spread of tropical diseases, she said, are climate change and travel.
When the researchers were out testing, one of them shared photos of the raw sewage in the Lowndes yards with colleagues around the world. Flowers recalled some of them saying they “couldn’t believe this was in America.”
In Lowndes County, Alabama, lack of sewage infrastructure leaves residents vulnerable to disease.
THE SOUTHEASTERN U.S. IS exceptionally vulnerable to sea level rise, extreme heat waves, hurricanes, and water scarcity. Temperatures have increased an average of two degrees Fahrenheit since 1970, with higher jumps during the summer. That means mosquito season will only get longer, Wesson said. “In the South, we have longer transmission seasons and we can expect those to become even longer. Right now, it’s May through September, but it might be March through October.”
With more frequent and intense weather events — like hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding — more people are exposed to pathogens than normal. For instance, a West Nile virus outbreak followed Hurricane Katrina. “When people are driven out of their homes, or exposed when they’re trying to clean up disaster areas and get back in, or protect their homes, those types of situations increase the chances for transmission of these diseases,” Wesson said.
“I’ve been offered other jobs, and there are other things I want to tackle. But I want to see this through first. I don’t know if it will get done if I don’t do it.”
As sea levels continue to rise, more people will move inland to both rural and urban areas. According to a 2015 analysis by Climate Central, by the end of the century, nearly 33,000 people are at risk of up to 10-foot flooding in Alabama alone. Within the last few years, Flowers traveled around the country to conferences to speak about the lack of water infrastructure, tropical diseases, and climate change in rural areas. She’s also helping Hotez and a few senators introduce a bill called “Eliminating Neglected Infections of the Poorest Americans Act.” And Flowers recently submitted recommendations to the Environmental Protection Agency for improvements in Lowndes, including a five-mile extension of the municipal water system in Fort Deposit; getting rid of the wastewater lagoon; and funding research for wastewater technologies.
One of the best ways to protect people is education, Wesson said. That means communicating the risks as well as the importance of preventative techniques like putting up proper window screens, cleaning up yards, and using bug spray when outdoors. But that education only goes so far when there’s raw sewage on the ground.
Near the end of her visit to Lowndes in May, Flowers took a break at the Selma to Montgomery Trail exhibit at the Lowndes County Interpretive Center. She paused often, silently reading quotes about equality from movement leaders, as she had done dozens of times before. Lowndes is her home, and seeing the conditions unchanged for decades hurts — she wants to come back here to live. “I’ve been offered other jobs, and there are other things I want to tackle,” she said. “But I want to see this through first. I don’t know if it will get done if I don’t do it.”
Lyndsey Gilpin is a journalist based in Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in High Country News, FiveThirtyEight, The Atlantic, Outside, Hakai, The Washington Post, and more. She is the editor of Southerly, a weekly newsletter about the American South.
Alabama, Lyndsey Gilpin, tropical disease, West Nile, zika
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Your email address will not be pu
Keep reading...Show less
Food Evolution GMO film showcases chemical industry agenda.
Scott Kennedy’s new documentary, Food Evolution, claims to look at all points of view in the GMO debate, then makes a hard sell for the chemical industry agenda.
Stacy Malkan, Contributor
Co-director U.S. Right to Know; author, “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry”
Food Evolution GMO Film Showcases Chemical Industry Agenda
06/15/2017 01:49 pm ET
Scott Kennedy’s new documentary, Food Evolution, claims to look at all points of view in the GMO debate, then makes a hard sell for the chemical industry agenda.
Some industry messaging efforts are so heavy-handed they end up highlighting their own PR tactics more than the message they are trying to convey. That’s the problem with Food Evolution, a new documentary by Academy Award-nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy and narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The film, opening in theaters June 23, claims to offer an objective look at the debate over genetically engineered foods, but with its skewed presentation of science and data, it comes off looking more like a textbook case of corporate propaganda for the agrichemical industry and its GMO crops.
That the film’s intended purpose was to serve as an industry-messaging vehicle is no secret. Food Evolution was planned in 2014 and funded by the Institute for Food Technologists, a trade group, to culminate a multi-year messaging effort.
IFT is partly funded by big food corporations, and the group’s president at the time was Janet Collins, a former DuPont and Monsanto executive who now works for CropLife, the pesticide trade association. IFT’s President-Elect Cindy Stewart works for DuPont.
IFT chose Kennedy to direct the film, but he and producer Trace Sheehan say they had complete creative control over the film, which they describe as a fully independent investigation into the topic of GMOs including all points of view.
The film’s credibility suffers from their choice to embrace only the science and scientists who side with the chemical industry players who profit from GMOs and the chemicals used on them, while ignoring science and data that doesn’t fit that agenda.
The Monsanto Science Treatment
The clearest example of the scientific dishonesty in Food Evolution is the way the film deals with glyphosate. The weed killer chemical is at the heart of the GMO story, since 80-90% of GMO crops are genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate.
Food Evolution reports that the increase in glyphosate use due to GMOs is not a problem, because glyphosate is safe. Two sources establish this claim in the film: a farmer says glyphosate has “very, very low toxicity; lower than coffee, lower than salt,” and Monsanto’s Robb Fraley – in response to a woman in an audience who asks him about science linking glyphosate to birth defects and cancer – tells her that’s all bad science, “it’s pseudoscience.”
There is no mention of the carcinogenicity concerns that are engulfing Monsanto in an international science scandal, or the many farmers who are suing Monsanto alleging they got cancer from the company’s glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide.
There is no mention of the 2015 report by the World Health Organization’s cancer agency that classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen, or California’s decision to add glyphosate to the Prop 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer, or the peer-reviewed studies that have linked various adverse health outcomes to glyphosate and Roundup.
Instead of an objective look at the evidence, Food Evolution gives viewers the full Monsanto science treatment: any science that raises concerns about the possible health risks of agrichemical products should be ignored, while studies that put those products in a favorable light is the only science worth discussing.
Double Standards in Science and Transparency
Equal treatment of interview subjects with different points of view would have helped the credibility of Food Evolution. Instead, the film paints the GMO critics it features as dishonest, clueless or out to make a buck off the organic industry, while leaving out key details about its pro-industry sources.
In one scene, the film’s main character, UC Davis professor Alison van Eenennaam, frets that appearing onstage with a Monsanto executive at a debate could sully her independent reputation. Viewers never learn that she used to work for Monsanto, or that she holds several GE patents which suggest a financial interest in the topic at hand.
Pro-industry scientist Pamela Ronald, another key science source, gets the hero treatment with no mention that two of her studies have been retracted. Yet viewers are hammered with news that a study by French scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini – which found kidney problems and tumors in rats fed GMO corn – was “retracted, retracted, retracted!”
The film leaves out the fact that the study was subsequently republished, and was retracted in the first place after a former Monsanto employee took an editorial position with the journal where it was originally published.
The “Africa Needs GMOs” Narrative
In another neatly spun narrative, Food Evolution takes viewers on an emotional journey to the developing world, and along a well-worn industry messaging track: rather than focus on how genetic engineering is used in our food system now – primarily to convey herbicide tolerance – we should focus on how it might possibly be used in the future.
With plenty of airtime and dramatic tension, the film examines the problem of banana wilt, a disease killing staple crops in Africa, and leads viewers to believe that genetic engineering will save the crop, the farmers and the community.
Maybe. But the film neglects to mention that the savior GE technology is not yet available and might not even work. According to a paper in Plant Biotechnology Journal, the resistance shown in the lab is robust but may not be durable in open fields.
Meanwhile, a low-tech solution is working well and looks like it could use some investment. According to a 2012 paper in the Journal of Development and Agricultural Economics, farmer field schools, which help growers acquire hands-on knowledge of techniques to prevent banana wilt, led to lower infection rates and high crop recovery in Uganda. Results from farmer field schools “have been remarkable,” according to the UN.
That solution doesn’t warrant airtime in Food Evolution.
“It's fundamentally dishonest of the film to tout a GE solution that may not even work, as the scientists themselves acknowledge,” said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union, “while failing to point out another way to control the problem that works very well, but doesn't involve selling a product to make money.”
Did Monsanto have anything to do with Food Evolution?
Monsanto and allies were discussing plans for a documentary in late 2013, according to emails obtained by US Right to Know. The emails do not contain evidence linking those discussions to Food Evolution, but they do establish Monsanto’s desire for a film that sounds surpassingly similar to the one Kennedy created.
Monsanto’s Eric Sachs wrote in Dec. 2013 to a group of PR advisors, “there is clearly a lot of interest to pursue a documentary film. Importantly, the consensus was the Monsanto’s participation was welcome, particularly in the planning phase.”
He recommended a January 2014 planning call. Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project stepped up to take the lead, and mentioned he had “gotten a personal pledge of $100,000 from a private business person if we can get” (the rest of the line is cut off). Entine also has a connection to the Institute for Food Technologists; he spoke about “anti-food activism” at IFT’s 2012 annual meeting.
Another person mentioned in the Monsanto emails, Karl Haro von Mogel – who had discussed with Sachs “the downsides of a film funded by the ‘Big 6’” and suggested “what would matter more than their money is their participation” – was interviewed in Food Evolution, and was also involved in filming one scene, which suggests some behind-the-scenes coordination with the filmmakers.
In reaction to the emails, Kennedy wrote on Twitter: “@foodevomovie has had ZERO $ or INPUT from #Monsanto. We are fully transparent & happy 2 have fact-based dialogue.”
He said in an interview, “that email exchange had absolutely nothing to do with our project whatsoever … we hadn't even committed to making the film with IFT at that date in 2013.”
The people in the email exchange were not involved in filming or advising, he said, and Karl Haro von Mogel “was a subject in the film and had no involvement or influence on any creative/editorial decisions on the film at any point in the production. Also it may be useful to point out that the email conversation you reference occurred long before we ever even knew Karl or any of these people.”
Sneak Peek Behind the Scenes
Another email exchange obtained by US Right to Know offers a peek behind the scenes at the narrative development in Food Evolution. The exchange depicts Kennedy’s search for examples to feature for “us/developing world need GMO.”
“Any other ‘us/developing world need GMO’ you can give me names of aside from oranges? Shintikus lettuce?” Kennedy asked. Producer Trace Sheehan responded with a list of GMO products including drought-tolerant rice, allergy-free peanuts, carcinogen-free potatoes … “and then button with Golden Rice.”
When Kennedy pushed for “the top GMO crops currently in use, and what countries,” Mark Lynas of the Cornell Alliance for Science wrote, “Really Bt brinjal in Bangladesh is the only one that is truly GMO in and is in widespread operation.”
The film’s frame-driven reporting ignores that detail about the lack of operational GMO solutions, and doesn’t mention that the closer example, vitamin-A enhanced Golden Rice, still isn’t available despite huge investments and years of trials, because it doesn’t work as well in the field as existing rice strains.
What is propaganda?
In a scene that is supposed to convey scientific credibility, Food Evolution flashes the logo of the American Council on Science and Health at the very moment Neil deGrasse Tyson says there is a global consensus on the safety of GMOs. It’s a fitting slip. ASCH is a corporate front group closely aligned with Monsanto.
The ACSH logo scene also appears in the background in this 2-minute clip from a recent Climate One debate, as Kennedy pushed back against the suggestion that his film is propaganda.
“How do we determine what is propaganda?” Kennedy asked. “I say one of the ways we do it is (to ask), are results asked for, or results promised? I was not asked for results and I did not promise results. If you have a problem with the film, the problem lies with me.”
Keep reading...Show less
The other 100 days: 5 decades before Trump, the new EPA truly made America great again.
Once upon a time, the EPA had a golden age.
On New Year's Day in 1970, President Richard Nixon appeared in San Clemente, California, for the momentous signing of the National Environmental Policy Act—the congressional statute that formally recast the government's role from conserving the wilderness to protecting the health of the environment and the general public. In the previous decade, rising unrest over the link between pollution and poor health—spurred forward by Rachel Carson's groundbreaking 1962 exposé Silent Spring and Lady Bird Johnson's beautification campaign—gave birth to a burgeoning environmental movement demanding strong and urgent action from the federal government. Nixon, who was largely indifferent to environmental issues but sensitive about his own popularity, succumbed to the public pressure.
There was no evidence of any indifference in San Clemente that day when he laid out his new vision for the decade: "The 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment," he said. "It is literally now or never."
In the following months, the president moved quickly to fulfill his promise. In February, he rolled out an unprecedented 37-point plan on the environment; by April, he approved suggestions from the Advisory Council on Executive Organization to form an independent agency dedicated to enforcing environmental regulation. Whereas such enforcement responsibilities had previously been scattered across 15 other federal organizations—water pollution under the Department of Interior, air pollution and solid waste under the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and pesticides under the Department of Agriculture, to name a few—the Environmental Protection Agency would consolidate the authority over specific areas under one umbrella. After a summer of congressional hearings, the EPA became a government agency with its own member of the Cabinet. Part of its initial budget came from the other 15 agencies; a formal separate budget wasn't established until January of the following year. Nixon appointed William D. Ruckelshaus, a 38-year-old moderate Republican and assistant attorney general plucked from the Department of Justice, to head the agency, which opened its doors on December 2.
As the Trump administration concludes its first 100 days in office against a backdrop of aggressive efforts to dismantle the EPA, it may seem difficult to imagine a golden era of environmental legislation, ushered in by a conservative Republican president with strong bipartisan and public support. Yet 47 years ago, within the first 100 days of the EPA, Ruckelshaus successfully established a sweeping anti-pollution vision and laid the groundwork for a sophisticated and effective regulatory framework. Looking back on the EPA's origins and early successes is a reminder of how much the agency was able to achieve with an engaged and supportive administration, Congress, and public.
"What defined EPA in its earliest days was less the need to define a regulatory agenda than a need to convey a sense of mission and purpose to the public, the states, and the regulated community," Ruckelshaus recalled in a March 1988 EPA Journal article.
The 5,800-employee fledgling agency posed challenges in both internal cohesion and public credibility. To address the former, Ruckelshaus delegated the internal organization of the staff to his deputy and focused on clarifying exactly what the agency's mission would be. After consulting his own staff and looking at two other agencies—NASA, which had a very narrowly defined goal ("let's get to the moon in ten years"), and the Office of Equal Opportunity, which had a broad and amorphous goal ("let's do something about poverty")—he decided the EPA would be focused on pollution abatement, which was, in his words, "identifiable enough, understandable enough to let us know what we were doing."
Having defined a sense of mission, Ruckelshaus then set about communicating it to the American people and other stakeholders. What he saw as the EPA's "most important imperative" was to demonstrate its willingness "to respond to the legitimate demands of the people." The public was predisposed to be distrustful of government-driven environmental regulation. Prior to the EPA, conflicts of interest riddled the regulatory process. The Department of Agriculture, for example, had been in charge of regulating pesticide use while also being required to promote agricultural production. Days after the EPA's founding, a New York Times investigation revealed that the majority of the state air and water pollution control boards were staffed by industry representatives engaged in pollution activities.
In response to this atmosphere of mistrust, Ruckelshaus did not shy away from enforcement. A week after his confirmation, he filed suit against Atlanta, Detroit, and Cleveland for polluting their rivers in violation of water quality standards. (Similar suits against major industry players, including Armco Steel Company and Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, soon followed.) Less than a week after that, he established 10 regional EPA offices across the US to engage more deeply in local environmental issues. "Those actions established EPA foresquare in front of the American people as an Agency committed to doing its job," wrote Ruckelshaus in the EPA Journal.
The EPA also engaged in an aggressive regulatory agenda, according to a comprehensive review of the Federal Registers (the government's official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, notices, and presidential documents) during its first 100 days. With a budget of $2.5 billion at the start of 1971, the agency was tasked with researching, standard-setting, monitoring and enforcing five environmental hazards: air and water pollution, solid waste disposal, radiation, and pesticides.
Leading up to its 100th day, the focus was primarily on administering and enforcing the Clean Air Act of 1970, which was enacted on December 31 to strengthen government crackdown of air pollution from industry and motor vehicles. To do so, the agency began systematically delineating air quality control regions in each state in consultation with local authorities. They also set thresholds for six air pollutants, including sulfur oxides, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide, based on available scientific and medical data, and used them to develop fuel additive and emissions standards. Detailed diagrams and formulas accompanied each rule to demonstrate the methods for measuring ambient pollutant concentrations.
Aside from air quality regulation, the agency also set new standards for pesticides and food additives, initiated the process to ban DDT, and began rudimentary regulation of water pollution. Though the Clean Water Act wasn't enacted until 1972, in 1970 the staff creatively repurposed the 1899 Refuse Act. The act was originally passed to prevent the industry from dumping debris into navigable waters but was revived to implement a permit program for restricting all forms of industrial water pollution.
Finally, the EPA engaged in an intensive public education campaign to build awareness of and rally support for the agency. Ruckelshaus traveled to each regional office in his second two months in office to listen to the concerns of local policymakers and constituents and to talk with the press. He understood what constituted his agency's lifeblood: The EPA "never would have been established had it not been for public demand," he reflected in a 1993 oral history interview for the EPA's archives. "Public opinion remains absolutely essential for anything to be done on behalf of the environment. Absent that, nothing will happen."
The legacy of Ruckelshaus' first 100 days laid the foundation for the agency's growth and the subsequent passage of pivotal environmental legislation over the following years. During his tenure, he saw the enactment of the Clean Water Act and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, as well as the reauthorization of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. Following his departure in 1973, the momentum continued with the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976, among others.
A decade after stepping down, Ruckelshaus was asked by President Ronald Reagan to return. The first 28 months of the Reagan administration had proved disastrous for the EPA. Under Administrator Anne Gorsuch, the mother of recently confirmed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, the agency suffered deep budget and staff cuts, scandals, investigations, and even a key official's imprisonment—all of which triggered increasing public outrage. Ruckelshaus took over and revived the flagging organization.
While the specifics clearly differ, the antipathy of the Trump administration to the EPA uncannily mirrors the attitudes that nearly brought the agency to its knees during Reagan administration. "The E.P.A.'s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, comes to his job with this historical backdrop," Ruckelshaus wrote in a New York Times op-ed this March, after describing the agency's disarray at the start of his second term.
"The public will tolerate changes that allow the agency to meet its mandated goals more efficiently and effectively. They will not tolerate changes that threaten their health or the precious environment," he cautioned. "These are the lessons President Reagan learned in 1983. We would all do well to heed them."
Keep reading...Show less
Rex Tillerson's Senate confirmation hearing: Live updates.
Tillerson's conduct as the head of Exxon, his business dealings in Russia and his relationship with President Vladimir Putin were the subject of the first day of pointed questions from both Senate Democrats and Republicans.
The Senate confirmation hearing for Donald Trump's secretary of state nominee, Rex Tillerson, which began Wednesday morning and is scheduled to continue Thursday, is likely to take the title of the most fascinating of the parade of hearings. Tillerson fielded questions from senators, speaking from a background that includes no formal government or diplomatic experience. He was until last week Exxon's chief executive.
Tillerson's conduct as the head of the oil giant, his business dealings in Russia and his relationship with President Vladimir Putin were the subject of the first day of pointed questions from both Senate Democrats and Republicans.
Because the secretary of state is in charge of the nation's climate diplomacy, Tillerson also faced questions about Exxon's history of climate change research and funding of denial, and how his support for the Paris climate agreement meshes with Trump's promise to "cancel" it.
Follow our live updates from ICN journalists John H. Cushman Jr., Neela Banerjee and Marianne Lavelle here.
As a primer, read ICN's coverage of Tillerson and Exxon's climate history:
Rex Tillerson's Record on Climate Change: Rhetoric Vs. Reality
Exxon's Chief as Secretary of State Puts Climate Diplomacy in Oil Magnate's Hands
Exxon's Support of a Tax on Carbon: Rhetoric or Reality?
Exxon: The Road Not Taken
JAN 11
2017
6:07 PM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire reminded Tillerson that the G20 nations have pledged to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. It's a promise that dates to 2009 but is still pending, and is likely to come up at the next meeting of these major economies in a few months.
Tillerson shrugged the question off. "I'm not aware of anything the fossil fuel industry gets that I would characterize as a subsidy," he said. "Rather it is simply an application of the tax code."
Defining subsidies is no simple matter, but the basic principle is pretty simple—policies should discourage things that are harmful and should reward things that are helpful. The G20 position has been that things that underwrite consumption of fossil fuels, for example, or make them cheaper to produce through financial incentives are considered subsidies. In some analytical circles, it is even considered a subsidy to ignore what economists call the "externalities" —like the damages from climate change that nobody bothers to incorporate into the price of fossil fuels.
In any event, it just so happens that there's a new analysis out this week from the Stockholm Environmental Institute and EarthTrack, which quantifies how much harmful fossil fuel production is underwritten by U.S. policy.
"The study shows that at current prices of around $50 per barrel, 45 percent of discovered, but not yet developed, oil resources are only economically viable with federal and state production subsidies," says the advocacy group Oil Change International, which is promoting the study. The full study is here.
JAN 11
2017
5:21 PM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
As the final hour of the hearing approached—it will be wrapping up by 6, at least for today—Tillerson once again was pressed on climate, this time by Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
This time, while he reiterated some of his previous answers, he shaded them in ways that revealed his considerable skepticism over the urgency of action.
For example, when Merkley asked him whether he believed climate change was a significant national security concern (see the previous posting about the new intelligence report on that question) Tillerson said: "I don't see it as the imminent national security threat that perhaps others do."
One reason is that Tillerson continues to express doubt that any particular severe weather event can be directly linked to climate change.
When Merkley asked whether, for example, droughts like Syria's could spark refugee crises, Tillerson responded: "The facts on the ground are indisputable, in terms of what is happening with drought, disease, insect populations, all the things you cite. The science behind the clean connection is not conclusive and there are many reports out there that we are unable yet to connect specific events to climate change alone."
In fact, scientists have made considerable progress in making that connection, a field known as attribution studies. Some events are harder to link conclusively to climate than others, but as Merkley commented, the evidence is growing stronger all the time. And even Tillerson agreed that the lack of precision in the science "doesn't mean we should do nothing."
On another note, Tillerson elaborated on the reasons for the U.S. not to abandon Paris—to keep other countries honest. "I think it's important that the U.S. maintain a seat at the table so we can judge the level of commitment of the other 189 or so countries around the table, and again, adjust our own course accordingly."
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
"It looks like a treaty," is what Tillerson said about the Paris climate accord, in an exchange with Sen. Ron Johnson (D-Wisc.) about the Senate's role of advice and consent regarding international treaties.
The subtext of this exchange is the argument by some in the GOP that the Paris accord should have been brought before the Republican-controlled Senate for ratification: a vote that would be a death sentence for the treaty.
As an analysis by the Congressional Research Service pointed out, the Obama administration negotiated the Paris accord as a subsidiary to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That treaty was negotiated at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio under President George H.W. Bush, and it was ratified by voice vote of the Senate. The Obama administration and its supporters argue that the Paris accord did not require a new ratification vote.
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Tillerson clarified his personal position on the Paris agreement in answer he gave to New Mexico Democrat Tom Udall. ""I think we are better off by being at that table than leaving that table," Tillerson said, explicitly saying he meant the Paris agreement signed by more than 190 nations.
Udall noted that the two of them had discussed the matter when Tillerson made the rounds to meet committee members. Tillerson's articulation of his personal position is a marker to judge how much sway he has with the Trump administration. Will he be able to convince Trump to stay in Paris Accord? Or will he end up sidelined like Christine Todd Whitman, administrator of President George W. Bush's Environmental Protection Agency, whose willingness to address climate change was quashed by Vice President Dick Cheney?
JAN 11
2017
3:12 PM
Sabrina Shankman
BY SABRINA SHANKMAN
FOLLOW @SHANKMAN
Outside the Tillerson hearing, organizers from 350.org said that more than 200 protestors—at least 15 dressed as T. rex dinosaurs—were demonstrating against Tillerson's appointment for secretary of state.
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
In responding to New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker's questions about sanctions in response to Russia's invasion of Crimea, Tillerson said he didn't think the sanctions deterred further aggressive action by the Putin regime. He said that Ukrainian forces should have taken a "defensive" show of force at the line of conflict with Russia. Does that mean Tillerson believes sanctions should not have been implemented at all?
JAN 11
2017
2:39 PM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming noted the $3 billion that the U.S. has pledged to the UN Global Climate Fund. That fund is designed to help the poorest nations cope with the impact of climate change and to help them reduce their own emissions.
Barrasso asked if Tillerson would support to cutting that commitment to zero.
"My expectation is we're going to look at all this from the bottom up," Tillerson said.
Barrasso said "there are so many opportunities where the money could be better spent," including against terrorism.
The two also had an exchange on poverty and energy.
"Nothing lifts people out of poverty faster than electricity," Tillerson said. And he added "I think it's important that we use wisely the American people's dollars, and that it is used for whatever is the most efficient, effective way to deliver electricity to people."
The important climate, energy and development issue the two were discussing somewhat indirectly is how the world addresses the 3 billion people in the world who rely on wood, dung, and charcoal for cooking, at great risk to their health. A number of fossil fuel companies have focused on this issue, promoting natural gas and natural gas-fired electricity as a way to lift these communities out of poverty and protect health. But that electricity could also be provided, possibly more efficiently, from renewable sources, which is not in the interest of fossil fuel supporters.
JAN 11
2017
2:34 PM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
In case you missed it, Tillerson answered questions about whether the United States would remain in the Paris climate accord in a such a non-committal way that he left open the possibility for the Trump administration to ditch the agreement or pull out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as some of the President's team have recommended.
Tillerson suggested that the "America First" motto that Trump ran on would be the main criterion in assessing participation in the global climate accord.
Responding to a question from Massachusetts Democrat Edward Markey about staying in the accord, Tillerson said that Trump would conduct a thorough review of global and bilateral accords on climate. He also said that he would make his views known to the new president, who has vowed to cancel the agreement and who has called climate change a "hoax" invented by the Chinese to hobble American business. Tillerson did not say what his views or recommendations would be.
Tillerson then continued: "I also know that the president as part of his priority in campaigning was to put America first. So there's important considerations as we commit to such accords and as those accords are executed over time, are there any elements of that put America at a disadvantage?"
The Trump team could cite such considerations in abandoning UN efforts to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial times.
Markey then asked if it should be a priority of the U.S. to work with other countries to find solutions to that problem.
Tillerson answered: "It's important for America to remain engaged in those discussions so we are at the table expressing a view and understanding what the impacts may be on the American people and American competitiveness."
JAN 11
2017
1:17 PM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
In response to the exchange between Corker and Tillerson on sanctions against Russia, ExxonMobil replied in a direct message over Twitter: "As our former chairman said, we provided information about impact of sanctions, but did not lobby against sanctions. The lobby disclosure reports cited do not contradict his testimony."
JAN 11
2017
1:11 PM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
More on sanctions. When the hearing resumed after a five minute break, Chairman Bob Corker gave Tillerson an opportunity to elaborate on his statement that he did not lobby the Obama administration about the sanctions it introduced against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Tillerson said he didn't lobby against sanctions. Rather, he said he met with administration officials about how such sanctions would be constructed and how they would affect American business interests in Russia.
Tillerson went on to say that at the time sanctions were introduced, Exxon was drilling an exploratory well in a remote part of the Arctic called the Kara Sea. The sanctions "went into immediate effect, there was no grace period," he said, and he "engaged immediately" to tell the State Department that halting the drilling would be a risk to people and the environment.
"It took about five days for them to understand. Exxon stood still," Tillerson said. The State Department then gave the company a temporary license to complete the well by late 2014 and then remove the workers and the rig itself, as per sanctions.
"The characterization that ExxonMobil was against sanctions is just not accurate," he said.
A bit later, Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy said that any call to administration officials to shape sanctions is considered lobbying.
JAN 11
2017
1:00 PM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Tillerson is saying it is impossible to be friends with Russia.
HE HAS AN ORDER OF FRIENDSHIP FROM VLADIMIR PUTIN.
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 11, 2017
More here. And here.
JAN 11
2017
12:58 PM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
After Sen. Udall's questioning of Tillerson, the committee chairman, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee tried to do a "redirect," as they'd say in a courtroom.
"Would you succinctly state your personal position as it relates to climate change?"
Said Tillerson, "I came to my personal position over about 20 years as an engineer and a scientist, understanding the evolution of the science. I came to the conclusion that the risk of climate change does exist. And the consequences of it could be serious enough that action should be taken. The type of action seems to be where the largest areas of debate exist in the public discourse.
"I think it's important to recognize the U.S. has done a pretty good job...."
Said Corker, "This is not quite as succinct as I was hoping."
Worth noting: It would be quite a development in Congress if the debate moved to the question of "the type of action" that should be taken, when some members clearly are still debating whether human-caused climate change exists. Also, if the U.S. has done "a pretty good job," that must be referring to the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that has occurred under President Obama's administration.
Finally, Corker asked flatly: "You believe, based on science, that human activity is contributing to climate change?"
Said Tillerson: "The increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are having an effect. Our ability to predict that effect is very limited."
JAN 11
2017
12:56 PM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Here's 1982 internal Exxon doc on climate Sen. Kaine read at Tillerson hearing from @insideclimate, end p 2-top 3: https://t.co/cLxMtt9dlu
— Neela Banerjee (@neelaeast) January 11, 2017
JAN 11
2017
12:55 PM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
In his exhange with Tillerson, Sen. Udall noted Exxon's stated support for a carbon tax, and asked whether Tillerson will advocate a carbon tax.
"When it gets to tax policy that's going to be responsibility of other agencies to conduct," Tillerson said. "My role at the State Department would be only to deal with those issues that are relevant to treaties and international accords, in terms of our continued compliance with those, participation in those."
(Remember, one of those accords is the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Tillerson has not made a strong statement specifically on continued participation in the Paris accord, which Trump has said he wants to "cancel.")
Udall then asked Tillerson about the analysis he made on climate policies how he came to a conclusion that a carbon tax was the best policy on climate change.
"The analysis I went through was largely informed by a number of economic studies. It was during the time Congress was debating the cap and trade approach, which in my view, had not produced the result everyone wanted in Europe. So in Europe we had a working model we had been watching, and in which ExxonMobil had been participating. This stimulated the question for me, 'If this isn't working, what might?'
"One of the most important elements of even considering something like that as a solution, though, is two other aspects: One, it replaces the hodgepodge of approaches we have today, which are scattered. Some of which are through mandates, some well-intended, but ineffective incentives. So let's simplify the system. This is the one and only effort we're going to undertake to begin to try to influence choices. The second qualifier I've always placed on it is it has to be revenue-neutral. All revenue the money goes back out into the economy through reduced employee payroll taxes. There will be impact on jobs, so let's reduce the impact by putting the revenue back out into the economy. So none of the money is held in the federal treasury for other purposes. The purpose is to incentivize the choices people are making. It's not a revenue raiser."
JAN 11
2017
12:47 PM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
More from the Kaine/Tillerson exchange:
Ever since ICN's reports appeared, Exxon has been caught up in a legal fight with state attorneys general, led by New York's Eric Schneiderman, over what it knew and whether it properly disclosed the risks of climate change to shareholders and investors. If Tillerson spoke about this under oath at this hearing, it conceivably could complicate matters for lawyers at the company he led. Environmental advocates had said for weeks that they wanted detailed questions on these matters to be posed at the hearing.
Kaine went so far as to quote extensively from one internal company document revealed in ICN's investigation, and had it entered into the record.
"Over the past several years a clear scientific consensus has emerged regarding the expected climatic effects of increased atmospheric CO2," an Exxon researcher wrote in the 1982 memo. "The consensus is that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial revolution value would result in an average global temperature rise of (3.0 ± 1.5)°C." (Equal to 5.4 ± 2.7°F).
"There is unanimous agreement in the scientific community that a temperature increase of this magnitude would bring about significant changes in the earth's climate, including rainfall distribution and alterations in the biosphere."
It was a particularly notable citation, in light of Tillerson's earlier testimony that it is hard to predict how much emissions might cause the planet to warm.
You can watch the exchange here.
JAN 11
2017
12:45 PM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
Tillerson brushed aside questions based mainly on InsideClimate News' 2015 investigative series on Exxon's record on climate change, saying that Exxon should be asked the questions, not him.
"I'm in no position to speak on their behalf," he said. "You will have to ask them."
Sen. Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton's vice presidential running mate, sought the comments in a detailed set of questions that carefully reiterated the main points made by ICN in a series that the senator noted was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as similar reporting by a Columbia Journalism School team published by the Los Angeles Times. The articles noted that Exxon invested heavily in climate research as early as the 1970's, recognized the risks, but nonetheless supported organizations that sought to undermine the scientific consensus that its own scientists had confirmed.
When Tillerson demurred, Kaine asked whether he was "unable" to answer, or "unwilling."
"A little of both," Tillerson answered, getting a quiet laugh from the room but an expression of disbelief from Kaine, who said Tillerson surely knew a lot about the subject.
JAN 11
2017
12:19 PM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
More from Tillerson's exchange with Sen. Udall on climate change.
Udall noted that the Trump transition team had sent a query to the Energy Department requesting the names of staffers who had participated in the Paris agreement. Udall asked if Tillerson planned to "persecute, sideline or otherwise retaliate against " career staffers who had worked on international climate change issues.
"No sir, that would be a pretty unhelpful way to get started," Tillerson said.
Udall then referenced Exxon's corporate position on climate, that the risk is clear and warrants action. Did Tillerson still personally stand by that statement today?
"I do not take exception to that statement. I might articulate it a little differently as to my personal views.
"The president-elect has invited my views, he has asked for them. He knows that I am on the public record with my views. And I look forward providing those, if confirmed, to him, in discussions around how the U.S. should conduct its policies in this area.
"Ultimately, the President-elect was elected, and I'll carry out his policies in order to be as successful as possible.
"But I think it's important to note that he has asked, and I feel free to express those views."
JAN 11
2017
12:16 PM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
In answering a basic question Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker put to him about whether he accepts man-made climate change, Tillerson said a couple of interesting things. He said the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising, but he refrained from ascribing the increase to burning fossil fuels, such as those his company's product produces. He then said that we have very little knowledge about how those greater greenhouse gas concentrations would affect life on Earth.
That's incorrect. Climate scientists have gotten an increasingly fine-grained view of the effects climate change is having and could have, including longer and more intensive heat waves and droughts, sea level rise and its impact on coastal communities, loss of species, increase in pests and constrained water resources.
Here's what the IPCC has recently said: "Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, and in global mean sea level rise; and it is extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans."
And this too: "Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios. It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise."
Here's what the US government has weighed in with similar conclusions in its National Climate Asessment.
JAN 11
2017
12:03 PM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
Tillerson had a substantive exchange related to climate, with Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.). There were important points made on his future dealings with Exxon, on a carbon tax, and on climate science.
On future dealings with Exxon:
Udall noted Exxon has relationships all over the world, so he asked how will Tillerson handle a country where Exxon is involved in a dispute? Will he take phone calls from Exxon's chief executive, his successor?
"I would not expect I would be taking phone calls from any business leaders," Tillerson said. "In my prior role I never called on the secretary of state directly. I called on the deputy often, or the missions, primarily the ambassadors. Whether I'll be taking phone calls from anyone is subject to question.
"I've made clear... that there's a statutory recusal period which I will adhere to on any matters that deal directly and specifically with ExxonMobil. Beyond that, though, in terms of broader issues that might involve the oil and natural gas industry itself, the scope of that is such that I would not expect to have to recuse myself.
"In any instance where there is any question, or even the appearance, I would expect to seek the guidance of counsel from the office of ethics in the State Department, and will follow their guidance on whether it was an issue I should recuse myself from."
So it is important to note that he emphasized he will not be recused from climate change issues, unless the State Department ethics officer says he needs to be.
JAN 11
2017
11:30 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Democratic Sen. Tom Udall asked Tillerson if he would support sidelining or persecuting civil servants who have worked on climate change, a possibility that has been hinted at by some moves the Trump transition team has made.
Tillerson said: "No sir, that'd be a pretty unhelpful way to get started."
And he drew a chuckle from the room.
JAN 11
2017
11:26 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Rex Tillerson just said he did not know of ExxonMobil lobbying against sanctions the Obama administration applied to Russia in 2014 over its invasion of Ukraine. That might depend on how you define lobbying. When sanctions were imposed, Exxon had begun drilling an exploration well in Russia's Kara Sea, as part of a landmark deal it signed with the Putin government in 2011 to exploit oil and gas in the Arctic. The sanctions jammed a stick in the spokes of the Arctic deal.
Contrary to what he said at the hearing, Tillerson visited the White House at least five times after the sanctions were imposed, according to Bloomberg News.
"Tillerson, who has questioned whether sanctions work, was concerned that European nations might not apply the restrictions as strictly as the U.S., giving Exxon's European competitors an advantage, according to a White House official at the time, who asked not to be identified because the purpose of the visits was never made public," the Bloomberg article said.
Exxon also lobbied against an effort that would make it harder for a future president to lift sanctions, according to a Politico story in December.
JAN 11
2017
11:23 AM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
Among other points in the National Intelligence Council global trends report:
"The willingness of individuals, groups, and governments to uphold recent environmental commitments, embrace clean energy technologies, and prepare for unforeseen extreme environmental and ecological events will test the potential for cooperation on global challenges to come."
"Climate change—whether observed or anticipated—will become integral to how people view their world. Many ecological and environmental stresses cut across state borders, complicating the ability of communities and governments to manage their effects. The urgency of the politics will vary due to differences in the intensity and geography of such change."
"Climate change will drive both geopolitical competition and international cooperation as well. China, poised for global leadership on climate change, would likely keep to its Paris commitments but could weaken its support for monitoring mechanisms and gain favor with developing world emitters like India."
JAN 11
2017
11:20 AM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
If Tillerson is briefed on climate change by intelligence agencies, they will surely tell him that it is an issue that needs the secretary of state's serious attention.
The National Intelligence Council, representing the view of the whole intel team, just released a report on global trends that has this to say about the climate crisis:
"A range of global hazards pose imminent and longer-term threats that will require collective action to address—even as cooperation becomes harder. More extreme weather, water and soil stress, and food insecurity will disrupt societies. Sea-level rise, ocean acidification, glacial melt, and pollution will change living patterns. Tensions over climate change will grow. Increased travel and poor health infrastructure will make infectious diseases harder to manage."
This is such a widely held consensus among the world's thoughtful national security leaders that it is not really subject to dispute—unlike some other recent intelligence findings and theories that are occupying Washington as the Trump team comes into power.
JAN 11
2017
11:18 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
Two more protesters interrupted the questioning of Tillerson and were ejected. Both of them held up "Rexx" posters. The first one spoke out immediately after Sen. Ron Johnson, (R-Wisc.) had asked Tillerson to explain what he meant by his statement that "Russia does not think like we do."
"Exxon wants to drill and burn the Arctic!" the protester called out. "That would ruin the climate and our future for our children and grandchildren. Please don't put Exxon in charge of the State Department Protect our children and grandchildren!"
Committee Chairman Corker said he would "stop the clock" whenever there are such interruptions, assuring the Senators the time would not be counted against their limited time for questioning. That was fortunate for Johnson, because his questioning was interrupted again a few moments later.
"Vulnerable communities are expendable," to the oil industry, the protester said. "In our home state of Texas, people are resisting dated pipelines. Oil is dead and people will not stop. Senators, be brave. Stop this man. Protect the vulnerable!"
Each of the two protestors was ejected from the room in turn. Tillerson did finally get a chance to expound on his views on Russia: "They are very calculating, very strategic in their thinking," he said.
JAN 11
2017
10:47 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
In answering the early pointed questions that Senators Cardin and Rubio raised about Russia committing human rights abuses and war crimes, Tillerson said he would need to see classified information before making any judgment about Russia's culpability. His future boss, however, seems to place little faith in the classified information intelligence agencies provide.
JAN 11
2017
10:42 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Florida Republican and GOP presidential contender Marco Rubio is pushing Tillerson even harder than Cardin on Russia. He asked whether he would advise Trump to continue Obama's sanctions against Russia over the election cyber attacks. Tillerson said he would have to review materials once he is in office. Rubio asked if he'd call Putin a war criminal for the bombing in Aleppo. On that, Tillerson said no.
JAN 11
2017
10:35 AM
Tillerson had his first chance to address climate change and the future U.S. role in the 2015 Paris accord on global warming in response to a question from the ranking Democratic member of the committee, Sen. Benjamin Cardin of Maryland: "Do you believe that the United States should continue in international leadership on climate change?"
Said Tillerson, "I think it's important that the United States maintain its seat at the table in the conversations on how to address the threats of climate change, which do require a global response. No one country is going to solve this alone."
Cardin had said he had asked this question of Trump's nominee for Environmental Protection Agency chief, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. And Pruitt said that was a question that should be posed to Tillerson.
JAN 11
2017
10:28 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
Tillerson finances, part 3:
Tillerson has also agreed to give up his rights to about $7 million in other retirement benefits he was due from Exxon, including medical and dental insurance, and administrative, financial and tax support.
He's also giving up his right to an Exxon credit card he could have used for discounted gasoline for life.
JAN 11
2017
10:25 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Maryland Sen. Benjamin Cardin pushes a hard line on Russia and Tillerson is so far concurring. Tillerson said that Crimea was "a taking of territory that was not theirs."
He said that Ukraine should have lined up its forces on eastern line against Russian troops that had invaded Ukraine to say to Russia, "You took the Crimea but this stops right here."
JAN 11
2017
10:16 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
More on Tillerson's finances: During the 10 years in which his money is in the Exxon blind trust, Tillerson would be prohibited from working in the oil and gas industry, he said in his letter to federal regulators. If he violates that prohibition, he would forfeit the remaining funds and the money would be distributed "to one or more charities involved in fighting poverty or disease in the developing world," according to a company statement.
But the watchdog group Public Citizen noted that the language in the documents that Exxon filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is slightly different than the letter he sent the ethics regulators. The SEC disclosure says Tillerson would be barred from "competitive" employment in the oil and gas industry. Is that a loophole that means Tillerson couldn't work for other oil and gas companies, but he could work again for Exxon (as a consultant, since he has reached the company's mandatory retirement age of 65 and could not be an employee again)? It will be interesting to see if he is asked about this detail.
JAN 11
2017
10:14 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Tillerson just said that Russia is not unpredictable in advancing its interests. I'd like to get a better understanding about how Russia is more predictable to Tillerson and the Trump administration than radical Islam and China. All state and now non-state actors have interests that animate them. Predictability signals someone you can get a bead on, and possibly work and negotiate with.
JAN 11
2017
10:06 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
The financial aspect of Tillerson's nomination has been one of the most fascinating parts of it. He has assets worth as much as $400 million, according to his financial disclosures. If confirmed as secretary of state, he has agreed to sell the 600,000 shares of Exxon stock he owns, a stake worth about $52 million, based on the company's current market price.
But the more complex issue is what happens to the much larger stake—2 million shares, worth about $176 million—that he was due to receive over the next 10 years.
In an arrangement designed in consultation with federal ethics regulators, Exxon agreed to put the current value of those deferred shares into a blind trust that would be barred from investing in Exxon. He'll receive cash payouts from the trust over 10 years, based on a formula that takes into account the value of Exxon stock at that time. That prevents Tillerson from getting a big cash bonus from going to the government, but it also works to his benefit—an analysis by Fortune magazine notes—because it allows him to put off a big tax bill.
JAN 11
2017
10:04 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
Although Tillerson's opening statement didn't refer to climate change, a heckler who interrupted him did. "Senators, be brave! Protect my community...My home was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy!" The protestor was escorted out of the hearing room.
JAN 11
2017
9:59 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
In his prepared remarks, Tillerson takes a tough stance toward "radical Islam" and China's ambitions in the South China Sea. His comments about Russia are more conciliatory.
"We must also be clear-eyed about our relationship with Russia. Russia today poses a danger, but it is not unpredictable in advancing its own interests. It has invaded Ukraine, including the taking of Crimea, and supported Syrian forces that brutally violate the laws of war. Our NATO allies are right to be alarmed at a resurgent Russia.
"But it was in the absence of American leadership that this door was left open and unintended signals were sent. We backtracked on commitments we made to allies. We sent weak or mixed signals with 'red lines' that turned into green lights. We did not recognize that Russia does not think like we do. Words alone do not sweep away an uneven and at times contentious history between our two nations. But we need an open and frank dialogue with Russia regarding its ambitions, so that we know how to chart our own course.
"Where cooperation with Russia based on common interests is possible, such as reducing the global threat of terrorism, we ought to explore these options. Where important differences remain, we should be steadfast in defending the interests of America and her allies. Russia must know that we will be accountable to our commitments and those of our allies, and that Russia must be held to account for its actions."
JAN 11
2017
9:53 AM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
The Foreign Relations Committee has posted Tillerson's prepared opening statement here.
It contains no discussion of climate change.
JAN 11
2017
9:52 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
You may think that Rex Tillerson needs no introduction, but introductions are an important element of the ritual of the confirmation hearing, carefully planned by the presidential transition teams. You'll notice it's not only people who know the nominee, but they sometimes like introductions by people who it is a little bit surprising to see endorsing the candidate.
For example, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) was first up to introduce Tillerson. When Cornyn was Texas' attorney general in 2001, he launched a lawsuit against Exxon, charging that the company owed the state tens of millions of royalties for oil and gas it drained from beneath a state highway right-of-way. "We are accusing them of stealing oil and gas owned by the state of Texas," Cornyn said at the time. Exxon succeeded in getting that claim thrown out., saying it ran counter to decades of law in Texas. This all occurred before Tillerson took over as company chief executive in 2006.
Today Cornyn told his colleagues that Tillerson was "an inspired choice" for secretary of state.
JAN 11
2017
9:43 AM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
Bob Semple, who has witnessed the modern environmental era from his seat as a Pulitzer-winning editorial writer at The New York Times, is urging members of the Foreign Relations Committee to be sure they give due time to the climate crisis as they interview Tillerson.
Citing research by InsideClimate News, Semple calls Exxon's historical stance on climate change "particularly negligent, indeed borderline duplicitous," even in an industry whose interest in reducing emissions of greenhouse gases "has been close to zero."
Semple gives credit to Tillerson for moderating the company's position in recent years. "But how much of this was public relations is not clear," he writes.
"In May, Mr. Tillerson said, 'At Exxon Mobil, we share the view that the risks of climate change are serious and warrant thoughtful action.' " Semple notes. "The unsettling thing there is the phrase 'thoughtful action,' which sounds for all the world like 'common sense solutions,' the usual formulation when politicians plan to do nothing. What the world needs in a secretary of state is far greater sense of urgency than that, not to mention an agenda for action."
JAN 11
2017
9:41 AM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
Robert Gates, for decades a fixture of national security policy circles under presidents of both parties, has no quarrels with Rex Tillerson and gave him a resounding endorsement, laced with sober words about how grave are the foreign policy challenges facing the country.
It was a remarkable display of a seasoned insider's ability to let bygones be bygones. Gates was a vocal critic of Donald Trump during the campaign -- and vice versa.
Gates at one point called Trump's foreign policy "beyond repair."
Trump, in a September speech in Colorado, said this:
"We had a clown today, an absolute clown, Robert Gates," as reported by NBC News. "He's supposed to be an expert. He's been there forever ... he goes out and he says negative things about me. I never met him. I never talked to him. Believe me, I am so much better at what he's doing than he is."
JAN 11
2017
9:39 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Former national security advisor Robert Gates said at the hearing that Tillerson will be candid and honest and will tell Trump the real deal
Gates moved on to address Tillerson's relationship with Russia. He said said he spent his whole career on Russia and acquired a reputation as a hardliner. But he also saw necessity of dialogue. "This administration must thread the needle against pushing back against Putin...and stopping a downward spiral in relations." Gates did a good job presenting Tillerson as experienced in foreign affairs and able to thread that needle.
Now that Gates has gotten the ball rolling, someone should keep track of how many times Tillerson's Boy Scout past will be mentioned by his supporters.
JAN 11
2017
9:23 AM
Marianne Lavelle
BY MARIANNE LAVELLE
FOLLOW @MLAVELLES
Tillerson has agreed to recuse himself from certain matters to avoid conflicts or the appearance of conflict, unless he gets prior authorization under a section of the federal ethics regulations known as 5 C.F.R. § 2635.502(d). What that means is he needs to get prior authorization from a State Department ethics officer.
So if Tillerson is confirmed, he said he will seek such an authorization before participating "in any particular matter involving specific parties in which I know that ExxonMobil is a party or represents a party" for the first year following his resignation from the company, which was December 31.
He also said he will seek an ethics authorization before participating "in any matter where "a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts would question [his] impartiality."
JAN 11
2017
8:58 AM
John H. Cushman Jr.
BY JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR.
FOLLOW @JACKCUSHMANJR
One of the most enthusiastic voices to welcome the news last month that Tillerson would be named secretary of state was that of OPEC, the oil cartel whose mission is, of course, to prop up oil prices and the finances of its members—or, as it puts it, to enhance stability and foster investment in petroleum.
The U.S. is not a member. Nor is Russia, although it played a role in OPEC's latest efforts to control the oil glut and prop up prices. Nowadays OPEC cannot achieve its ends without cooperation from companies and countries that are not in step with its goals— including the U.S. and its domestic industry.
In an interview on CNBC, the cartel's secretary general, Mohammad Barkindo, embraced Tillerson as "an outstanding accomplished oil technocrat" and declared that "we in the industry who share Rex's primary constituency are very proud" to have one of their ranks rise to such a powerful post.
"The United States is extremely lucky to have such an asset step into the State Department at these challenging times, considering the geopolitics of the world," Barkindo said, adding:
"There is a very thin line between oil and geopolitics and diplomacy."
Interview is here:
JAN 11
2017
8:53 AM
Neela Banerjee
BY NEELA BANERJEE
FOLLOW @NEELAEAST
Rex Tillerson knows all about what Washington insiders call "murder boards" as he prepared for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Murder boards" are intense preparation for Congressional hearings, often with those who will be testifying facing rounds of practice questions day after day. Several of Trump's cabinet nominees have no government experience, including Tillerson, so they have been put through their paces recently at mock hearings in a D.C. office building, according to a story by Politico.
The murder boards might be a concentrated form of the questioning that Tillerson has gotten over the years from shareholders seeking greater accountability from ExxonMobil on its climate change policies and practices. Shareholders have been pushing throughout his tenure as CEO for the company to invest in renewables, cut its own emissions and add a board member with expertise on climate change. Tillerson has faced that pressure calmly but always with a firm no.
So far, he has held the activist shareholders at bay. The question today is will that kind of chief executive experience and now, the murder boards, be enough for Tillerson to prevail in hearings where his views on climate change and ties to Russia will be repeatedly probed?
Keep reading...Show less
ORIGINAL REPORTING
MOST POPULAR
CLIMATE
