[✔️] June 9, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest--

[Richard Pauli]

/*June 9, 2022*/

/[ " with incrementally increasing intensity, frequency and duration" ]
/*More Than 22 Million in Southwest Brace for Dangerous Heat*
Temperatures will rise well above 100 degrees in large swaths of 
California, Nevada and Arizona through the weekend. Meteorologists are 
warning residents to prepare now.
Dangerous and potentially deadly heat will settle over the Southwestern 
United States for the next several days, with temperatures in some 
locations expected to break records and exceed 110 degrees.

More than 22 million people in California, Nevada and Arizona are under 
some sort of heat-related alert through at least part of the weekend, 
the National Weather Service said. A heat wave is defined as a period of 
abnormally and uncomfortably hot and unusually humid weather that lasts 
for two or more days.

“Please protect yourself,” the Weather Service office in Phoenix warned 
residents, while the office in Sacramento said that the heat would 
affect everyone, not just people most sensitive to heat risk. 
Meteorologists in San Diego advised residents to learn the signs of heat 
exhaustion and heat stroke...
/- -/
Depending on the location, most heat-related alerts will expire by 
Saturday evening or Sunday evening.

Recent heat waves have been deadly.
Late last month, blazing heat and humidity tied or broke heat records in 
cities from Texas to Massachusetts. And last summer, record-breaking 
heat over the Pacific Northwest led to the deaths of hundreds of people 
and jeopardized the health of laborers in fields and warehouses./
/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/us/heat-wave-california-arizona-nevada.html/
/

/- -
/

/[  how hot in India?  Snopes says 140 F - yes it did ]/
*Did Land Surface Temperatures Reach 140 Degrees F in India, Pakistan?*
To answer the question, we must first understand the difference between 
land and air temperatures, and the impacts of wet bulb temperature.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/india-surface-temperatures-reach-140/


/
/

/[ rising seas --  4 min video  ]/
*Seal Level rise outer banks*
Jun 8, 2022
this giant mirror https://www.meer.org/ will stop the fires floods and 
hurricanes immediately
But those aren’t what scientists are really afraid of..  im not a 
scientist so here I will let Exeter University Professor Peter Cox 
Explain the urgency of this situation
https://youtu.be/_QKUO0B24PE

Fossil Methane Venting due to Permafrost Thaw:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub8sbCoJAMQ&list=UUGiX5xTYkVlTy8N8l8fARGQ&index=2
This was Not Predicted so it is NOT accounted for in climate models a 
"Wildcard for the climate" a worst case scenario
I always say to climate scientists that something they did not predict 
would get us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjQwOYnTscg



/[ the Biden administration is suppressing this legal action - a brief 
video /*The Lever: Biden's Trying To Block A Historic Climate Lawsuit*
285 views  Jun 7, 2022  The Biden Justice Department is preparing to do 
whatever it takes to block a historic climate change lawsuit from going 
to trial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1upcxuSEP0w

- -

/[ who has  a constitutional right to live?  ]/
*Biden Is Preparing To Crush A Historic Climate Change Lawsuit*
Julia Rock - - May 26, 2022
A vital effort to establish a legal right to a living planet could soon 
move forward — but the Biden administration is trying to stop it.
Any day now, a federal district court is expected to deliver a ruling 
that would allow a historic climate change lawsuit to proceed to trial.

If and when the case moves forward, however, it faces a major obstacle: 
President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.

The lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was brought by 21 young 
plaintiffs in 2015 and seeks to establish a federal, constitutional 
right to a livable planet. If the case is successful, any federal 
policies that enable more fossil fuel development could be challenged as 
unconstitutional.

But the Obama and Trump administrations both vehemently fought the 
lawsuit, and now those close to the case say that Biden’s Department of 
Justice (DOJ) has indicated it will also use every procedural tool at 
its disposal to prevent the lawsuit from ever getting a trial.

“I have asked [them] very directly, if we win this motion, and we can 
move forward with the case, do you intend to go to trial?” Julia Olson, 
the lead plaintiff’s lawyer, told The Lever. “Their response has always 
been something along the lines of, ‘It is our position that the court 
doesn’t have jurisdiction and that this case should never go to trial.’”

Juliana v. United States was ambitious from the start. The plaintiffs 
are asking a federal court system, stacked with right-wing judges backed 
by the fossil fuel industry, to enshrine a constitutional right to a 
livable climate. But the plaintiffs point to what they’ve pulled off 
thus far as evidence it’s achievable.

For example, Oregon District Court Judge Ann Aiken wrote in a procedural 
ruling on the case in 2016, “I have no doubt that the right to a climate 
system capable of sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and 
ordered society.” That was the first time a federal U.S. judge declared 
that such a constitutional right existed.

The case has widespread support from public officials: Last year, six 
state attorneys general filed an amicus brief in support of the case, 
and 48 congresspeople wrote to Biden in support of the plaintiffs. The 
matter is also beginning to capture public attention; the lawsuit is the 
subject of a newly released Netflix documentary, YOUTH v GOV.

After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the case in 2020 
because it concluded the plaintiffs lacked standing, the Juliana 
plaintiffs revised their complaint. Now, parties are waiting on a ruling 
from Aiken about whether the revised complaint addresses the Ninth 
Circuit Court’s concerns — a ruling that the plaintiffs’ lawyers expect 
will be favorable, allowing the case to again proceed.

But these same lawyers say they expect the Biden administration to fight 
them every step of the way, just like his presidential predecessors.

“There was zero shift when Biden took office, zero shift from the Trump 
administration,” said Olson.

Developments like this have been eye-opening for the young plaintiffs 
involved — such as Nathan Baring of Fairbanks, Alaska, who joined the 
lawsuit when he was 15 years old. Baring, now 22 and recently graduated 
from college in Minnesota, said his participation in the case “helped me 
grow up really quickly” — and not necessarily in a good way.

“I’ve realized climate change isn’t a partisan issue — I don’t mean that 
in a singsongy, everyone is supporting it way,” he told The Lever. “I 
mean the exact opposite.” Watching President Barack Obama, then 
President Donald Trump, and now Biden attempt to crush the lawsuit 
taught Baring a valuable lesson: “Just because a Democrat is in office, 
doesn’t mean that we suddenly need to stop fighting,” he said. “I 
stopped putting a kind of blind faith in the party label.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

*On The Shadow Docket*
In 2015, the young Juliana plaintiffs, with the support of the 
environmental non-profit Our Children's Trust, sued the Obama 
administration for pursuing policies that advanced fossil fuel expansion 
while knowing those policies threatened the habitability of the planet.

“For over fifty years, the United States of America has known that 
Carbon Dioxide (‘CO2’) pollution from burning fossil fuels was causing 
global warming and dangerous climate change, and that continuing to burn 
fossil fuels would destabilize the climate system on which present and 
future generations of our nation depend for their wellbeing and 
survival,” the original Juliana complaint began. “Defendants also knew 
the harmful impacts of their actions would significantly endanger 
Plaintiffs. Despite this knowledge, Defendants continued their policies 
and practices of allowing the exploitation of fossil fuels.”

Over the course of the next six years, the Obama and Trump 
administrations fought tooth and nail to delay the case and block it 
from ever going to trial.

After the case was filed in a federal court in Eugene, Oregon, Obama’s 
DOJ asked the court to dismiss the case. But in 2016, Aiken denied the 
government’s request, noting, “To hold otherwise would be to say that 
the Constitution affords no protection against a government’s knowing 
decision to poison the air its citizens breathe or the water its 
citizens drink.”

When Trump took office, his Justice Department repeatedly appealed 
Aiken’s ruling to the federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court — 
which handled those appeals on its notorious shadow docket.

The Supreme Court uses the shadow docket for supposed emergency actions, 
such as death penalty cases, so the matters can avoid the lengthy 
briefing and public hearing processes of typical Supreme Court cases. 
Opinions on shadow docket actions are not published, and the justices’ 
votes are usually usually not made public. Over the past few years, the 
court has also leaned on the shadow docket to quietly stop climate 
policy from taking effect — including Obama’s signature environmental 
legislation, the Clean Power Plan.

But the Juliana case stands out even among climate litigation: It has 
faced six rulings on the shadow docket — more than any other federal 
lawsuit. Those behind the lawsuit say this development illustrates the 
fossil fuel industry’s capture of American politics.

“​​The U.S. Solicitor General and U.S. Department of Justice have 
together authorized what appears to be the most exceptional of legal 
tactics more often in Juliana v. U.S. than in any other case in 
history,” said Olson. “They have authorized the filing of an apparently 
unprecedented six petitions for writ of mandamus in Juliana v. U.S., to 
keep the 21 youth plaintiffs’ evidence of our government’s 
unconstitutional complicity in causing the climate crisis from ever 
seeing the light of day.”

The Juliana plaintiffs hoped that with Trump out of the picture, the 
lawsuit might finally see the light of day. But instead they found that 
during settlement negotiations last fall, the Biden administration was 
just as stubborn in its approach to the case.

“After months of good-faith efforts on the part of the youth plaintiffs 
to meet with representatives of the Biden Administration authorized to 
reach a meaningful settlement, the plaintiffs saw no reason to continue 
to pursue settlement discussions until the decision-makers for the 
federal defendants come to the settlement table in good faith,” Olson’s 
co-counsel, Phillip Gregory, told The Lever.

Now they are awaiting a ruling from Aiken on their motion to proceed to 
trial.

*What The Government Knew*
While there has been a substantial uptick in climate-related litigation 
over the past five years, the Juliana case is different from other U.S. 
climate lawsuits in at least two substantial ways.

First, while most climate-related litigation targets the fossil fuel 
industry for misleading the public or causing irreversible harm, this 
case names the federal government as the perpetrator. (Of course, fossil 
fuel industry influence plays a key role — just four oil companies spent 
nearly $375 million lobbying the federal government in the past decade.)

In particular, according to the suit, the federal government has limited 
the due process rights of its citizens by subsidizing and passing 
regulations to enable fossil fuel expansion for decades, all while 
knowing about the potentially catastrophic consequences of that development.

Evidence of what the federal government has known about climate change 
for the past five decades is detailed in a legal brief written by Gus 
Speth, an environmental lawyer who co-founded the Natural Resources 
Defense Council and, before that, led the Council on Environmental 
Quality under President Jimmy Carter.

Speth’s brief is littered with examples of government and independent 
scientific reports, dating back from before the Carter administration, 
detailing the evidence that burning fossil fuels was contributing to 
global warming and, if not stopped, would have catastrophic consequences.

For example, President Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency 
(EPA) issued two reports on global warming caused by burning fossil 
fuels. One of the reports — titled “Can We Delay A Greenhouse Warming?” 
— predicted “an increase in temperatures of 2 degrees celsius  by 2040, 
a temperature increase that, in EPA’s assessment, was guaranteed to 
produce substantial climatic consequences, including disastrous 
flooding,” according to Speth’s brief. That report attributed most of 
the warming to burning fossil fuels, and suggested ending coal use by 
the year 2000.

Reagan, of course, didn’t make much of this warning. His administration 
worked to dismantle the federal government's regulatory authority over 
such matters, including slashing and burning environmental laws and 
cutting funding for Carter’s solar energy program. But it wasn’t just 
Reaganites who ignored the warnings of scientists and continued to 
exacerbate the problem.

“Until Biden, every Democratic administration — not to mention the 
Republican ones — was enthusiastic about fossil fuels,” Speth told The 
Lever. “We should never think that during those 40 years, from 1980 to 
2020, that the Democrats were on the right track in terms of getting out 
of the fossil fuel business.”

Speth pointed out that Carter had a renewable energy goal and spoke 
about the need for the U.S. to transition away from fossil fuels to 
achieve energy independence amid the 1979 oil crisis. Now, more than 40 
years later, observers are saying the same thing in the wake of the 
Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has similarly caused a massive spike 
in energy prices.
*
**In The Public Trust*
The second way the Juliana case stands out is that the plaintiffs are 
arguing that the federal government’s refusal to address global warming 
is in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Most climate cases instead 
argue that environmental threats violate particular legal statutes, such 
as the Clean Air Act or Endangered Species Act.

The plaintiffs’ unique approach is based on the idea that the government 
has a more general duty to protect natural resources — a concept that 
rests on legal principles developed by Mary Wood, a professor at the 
University of Oregon law school.

Wood has argued that the government has an obligation to ensure a 
livable planet because of the “public trust doctrine,” a common-law 
principle that the U.S. Supreme Court declared exists at the state level 
in a seminal 1892 case involving the Illinois Central Railroad company. 
The public trust doctrine stipulates that the government is the steward 
of the nation’s natural resources, upon which life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness depend.

Invoking the public trust doctrine in this case is a reflection of the 
gravity of the climate disaster, said Wood.

“There’s no way statutory law alone can solve this climate crisis,” Wood 
told The Lever. “They’re too narrow. They could do something if they 
were enforced, but the administration has not enforced them well over time.”

Instead, according to Wood, enshrining the public trust doctrine in 
environmental case law could form a constitutional basis for requiring 
the government to rapidly reduce carbon emissions.

As Wood noted in a journal article on the matter, “In this framework, 
survival resources remain quintessential public property belonging to 
posterity, and government’s clear responsibility is to manage such 
ecological wealth strictly for the endurance of society itself, for the 
benefit of both present and future citizens — not for the advantage of 
private parties or profiteers who may seek to despoil the trust and 
appropriate it for their own purposes.”

Baring, the young plaintiff from Fairbanks, is already seeing the 
impacts of his government violating that public trust. He explained that 
the Chinook winds, which carry warm air from the mainland United States 
up north through Canada and Alaska, have become more destructive due to 
climate change, and are increasingly wreaking havoc on his hometown. 
This winter, the winds caused such dramatic temperature swings in Alaska 
that the state Department of Transportation referred to the event as 
“Icemageddon.”

“The temperature can go from below zero to above freezing in a day, and 
then it will rain, and refreeze overnight,” he said. “There will usually 
be wind accompanying it, and when the trees are already weighed down by 
snow, all it needs is a 40 mile-per-hour wind and then trees fall on 
power lines and roads are impassable. Roofs cave in because of the weight.”

When asked about the future — the “posterity” that Wood deploys in her 
legal arguments — Baring shifted the conversation back to the present. 
He graduated college earlier this month, and is returning to Alaska to 
continue the climate fight.

“There’s so much dualism, especially in my generation, because we don’t 
have very much power and we are watching everything be gambled away,” he 
said. “But I always come back to this moment and think, ‘Well, what’s my 
obligation to change the trajectory, right now?’ This is our 
generation’s work to do.”

https://www.levernews.com/biden-is-preparing-to-crush-historic-climate-change-lawsuit/

- -
/[ factoid -- August 12, 2015: Case Filed - plaintiffs are growing up 
fast ]/
*Wikipedia -- Juliana v. United States*
"In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the 
grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue. On February 10, 
2021, the en banc Ninth Circuit issued an order without written dissents 
denying the appeal. As of December 2021, the case is awaiting the 
district court's ruling on plaintiffs' motion for leave to amend their 
complaint."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States



/[  Bill Gates Incorporated writes another perfectly worded report  ] /
*A scary but hopeful novel about climate change*
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.
By Bill Gates| June 06, 2022

Last year, after my book on climate change came out, several friends 
told me I should read a novel called The Ministry for the Future, by Kim 
Stanley Robinson. They thought of it, they said, because it explained 
something in great detail that I spent only one chapter on in my book: 
the consequences of failing to deal seriously with climate change. It 
explained the science well, told a great story, and had a surprisingly 
hopeful ending.

I finally had time to take my friends’ advice earlier this year, and I’m 
glad I did. The Ministry for the Future does a better job than any other 
book I’ve read of playing out, in a dramatic but realistic way, how high 
temperatures can literally kill people. Like a lot of hard science 
fiction—I’m thinking of someone like Neal Stephenson, whose books I 
love—it explains a lot of the science well. And although I don’t agree 
with all the things people do in the novel to address the problem, it 
has a lot of intriguing ideas.

The Ministry for the Future opens a few years from now during a historic 
heat wave in Uttar Pradesh, India—where Frank May, an American aid 
worker, is doing everything he can to save lives. But it’s not working. 
As day after day passes without a drop in temperature or humidity, the 
electric grid eventually gives out, turning life into an inferno for 
everyone who lives in the north Indian state.

Desperate, many rush to the nearest lake, hoping it will offer some 
relief—but its water is scorching, too. By the end of the heat wave, 
more than twenty million people are dead, and Frank has barely survived.

It’s as harrowing a scene as any I’ve read in a science fiction 
book—because the events depicted in it could very well take place in the 
real world. I don’t think we’re going to experience heat waves precisely 
as long or as severe as the one in the book over the next few years. But 
if we don’t decisively reduce carbon emissions and eventually eliminate 
them, in the decades ahead we could very well see successive days when 
there’s a deadly combination of extremely high temperatures and high 
humidity. (Just last month, parts of northern India experienced 
temperatures of around 60 degrees Celsius, or about 140 degrees Fahrenheit.)

But this is not a hopeless book. Over the course of the novel’s 106 (!) 
short chapters, Robinson presents a stimulating and engaging story, 
spanning decades and continents, packed with fascinating ideas and people.

Alongside Frank, another main character is Mary Murphy, a diplomat who 
runs the fictional Ministry for the Future, an organization formed by 
the United Nations when the Paris Climate Agreement’s signatories fail 
to meet their targets. Their mission is “to advocate for the world’s 
future generations of citizens, whose rights, as defined in the 
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are as valid as our own.” What 
that really means is they are charged with doing everything they can to 
fight climate change and save humanity. And by the end of the book— 
without giving too much away—they find some success.

In Robinson’s story, there isn’t a single solution to climate change, 
just as there won’t be in the real world. Instead, he weaves together 
stories about many new policies and innovations, all of which work 
together to avert disaster. Some of these ideas are really intriguing, 
like the idea of the Ministry for the Future itself. If we want to 
address climate change, then our political institutions will have to 
start doing what the Ministry does: acting on behalf of future generations.

Another major idea featured in the book is the carboni, a new reserve 
currency backed by the world’s major central banks and designed to 
incentivize decarbonization. Companies are paid in carboni whenever they 
remove carbon from the atmosphere or prevent more emissions from going out.

It’s an interesting idea. Creating carboni would be tantamount to 
putting a price on carbon that reflects the damage it does, which is an 
idea that I support. But it has downsides too, because it’s a zero-sum 
solution it would require people to make tradeoffs with finite 
resources. It might encourage you to spend your life on carbon removal 
instead of, say, being a teacher or farmer. That tradeoff comes at a 
cost—society ends up with fewer teachers or a less productive 
agricultural sector.

I wish Robinson had spent more time on broad solutions that enable us to 
get to zero emissions while helping people escape poverty: better seeds 
that don’t require as much fertilizer and can withstand changing 
weather, or ways to create cement and steel without emitting carbon.

But these are minor disagreements. The Ministry for the Future is a 
great read. Robinson has written a novel that presents the urgency of 
this crisis in an original way and leaves readers with hope that we can 
do something about it. The next chapter in the story of our planet is 
still being written, and the ending is up to us.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Ministry-for-the-Future



/[ rule is under consideration ]/
*Meet the group lobbying against climate regulations — using your 
utility bill*
Nick Tabor - - Jun 07, 2022
The federal government is considering a rule change that would make it 
harder for utility companies to recover trade association dues.
A typical electricity bill leaves the customer with the sense that she 
knows exactly what she’s paying for. It might show how many kilowatts of 
power her household has used, the costs of generating that electricity 
and delivering it, and the amount that goes to taxes. But these bills 
can hide as much as they reveal: They don’t indicate how much of the 
customer’s money is being used to build new power plants, for example, 
or to pay the CEO’s salary. They also don’t show how much of the bill 
goes toward political activity — things like lobbying expenses, or 
litigation against pollution controls.

Most U.S. utility bills also fail to specify that they’re collecting 
dues payments for trade associations. These organizations try to shape 
laws in electric and gas companies’ favor, in addition to more quotidian 
functions like coordinating regulatory compliance. On any given billing 
statement, these charges may only add up to pennies. By collecting them 
from tens of millions of households, however, trade associations have 
built up enormous budgets that translate to powerful political operations...
The Edison Electric Institute, an association that counts all of the 
country’s investor-owned electric utilities as its members, is the power 
industry’s main representative before Congress. With an annual budget of 
over $90 million, Edison is perhaps the largest beneficiary of the 
dues-collection baked into utility bills. In recent years, it’s 
attracted attention for its national campaign against rooftop solar 
panels, and for its role in the legal fight against the Obama 
administration’s Clean Power Plan.

Within the next year or two, however, this financial model could come to 
an end. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the top 
government agency overseeing the utility industry, is considering a rule 
change that would make it harder for companies to recover these costs. 
While utilities are already nominally barred from passing lobbying costs 
along to their customers, consumer advocates and environmental groups 
argue that much trade association activity that isn’t technically 
“lobbying” under the IRS’s definition is still political in nature — and 
that households are being unfairly charged for it.

Emily Fisher, Edison’s general counsel, said the organization works with 
its members to make sure customers aren’t held responsible for the 
portion of the budget that goes toward lobbying. Advocates counter that 
this is essentially an honor system, because often regulators don’t have 
time to look closely at how Edison’s revenue is being spent. Instead, 
the advocates want these costs to be non-recoverable by default. They 
say the burden should be on utilities to prove that dues passed on to 
ratepayers are not going toward prohibited political activity.

Half a dozen liberal senators, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth 
Warren, and Sheldon Whitehouse, are pushing for the change, along with 
numerous state governments and several hundred advocacy groups...
- -
At the same time, it’s clear that private utilities want to be allowed 
to make that transition on their own timeline and their own terms, in 
ways that ensure the best returns for their investors. It seems one of 
Edison’s priorities is protecting its members’ right to do this.

In addition to its formal lobbying, it’s important to understand 
Edison’s role in coordinating and advising the political work that 
individual utilities take on. One 7   example of this centers on the 
Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The plan called for reducing 
the carbon emissions from electricity generation by a third come 2030, 
and it aimed to achieve this by assigning each state its own target. 
Edison lobbied for a delay in implementation and for lighter regulations 
on coal. When the final version was released, Kuhn, Edison’s vice 
president, announced qualified support, thanking the administration for 
the “significant outreach” it had done with the industry.

At the same time, however, Edison helped back a legal fight against the 
new rules by serving as conduit for its members to donate to the Utility 
Air Regulatory Group, or UARG, an organization that was created to 
oppose the Clean Power Plan. It collected $7.7 million in donations for 
the organization, and it lent its accounting services to UARG as well. 
In the end, the legal challenges succeeded, causing the plan to be 
delayed until then-President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection 
Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, announced plans to scrap it in 
2017.* (In the end, the objectives of the Clean Power Plan were achieved 
even without the regulation, suggesting to some environmentalists that 
its goals had been too modest all along.)

Edison has also coached its members on running lobbying campaigns at the 
state level. And since 2012 it has been quarterbacking a campaign 
against rooftop solar panels, knowing its members stand to lose profits 
as customers generate more of their own power. With guidance from the 
trade association, individual utilities have lobbied their state 
legislatures to pass laws making rooftop solar installation less 
attractive to consumers. A main target of their opposition has been net 
metering, the rule that lets customers sell excess power back to 
utilities at retail price, which is a popular way of offsetting the cost 
of installing solar panels. Utility companies have pushed to lower the 
caps on how much energy residents can be reimbursed for, and they’ve 
also urged state legislators to impose fixed charges on residents who 
use solar panels.

Edison’s argument, which is often repeated by its members, is that net 
metering lets solar customers freeload on the power grid, forcing 
residents without solar panels to cover all the operational costs. “It’s 
not like we just eat those costs,” Fisher said. “Those get re-allocated 
to everybody else.” She added that the expense of installing solar 
panels means that this shifting cost burden falls disproportionately on 
less affluent customers. But the significance of this “cost shift” has 
been debated heavily. A comprehensive study, conducted by a U.S. 
Department of Energy lab in 2017, determined that the effects on the 
bills of non-solar customers were “negligible,” and that other factors — 
particularly capital projects by utilities (which customers can be 
forced to pay for) — have much larger effects.

Nevertheless, the industry’s efforts in this area have paid off. As of 
last year, more than 20 states had either put major restrictions on 
net-metering benefits or imposed additional charges on solar users.

Edison has also resisted climate and environmental regulations in other 
ways. In years past it has argued for a more flexible interpretation of 
airborne pollutant standards, and last year it pushed to have natural 
gas included under any “clean energy” standard passed by Congress. 
Edison has also donated to organizations that are well known for their 
opposition to climate regulation, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 
the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the State Policy Network.

It was the 2017 report by Pomerantz and his colleagues at the Energy and 
Policy Institute that inspired the current push for a federal policy 
change. Then, last year, the Center for Biological Diversity helped 
instigate a new policy in North Carolina that makes it harder for 
utilities to charge customers for political expenditures. New York and 
New Hampshire have also passed similar policies in recent years. In 
March 2021, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition asking 
FERC to make this kind of change at the federal level. Under the 
proposal, trade-association dues and other costs would automatically go 
into an account that customers cannot be billed for. In order to recover 
that money from ratepayers, utilities would have to make a case that 
customers benefited from those expenditures.

FERC announced in December that it was taking the matter under 
consideration. Since then, there’s been an outpouring of support. The 
attorneys general of 11 states have urged FERC to go through with the 
change, and in Louisiana, Ohio, and California, utility regulators have 
also submitted comments in its favor. In February, more than 300 
third-party groups (among them the Democratic Socialists of America, 
United Native Americans, and the Small Business Alliance) also signed on 
to a letter of support. The next update from FERC is likely to come in 
the fall or winter.

There’s no telling which way the five-member commission will rule. Two 
members, Allison Clements and Mark Christie, have so far said it’s at 
least important to consider tightening up the policies. A third, James 
Danly, objected to taking up the matter at all, saying that he feared 
the inquiry would “result in burdening protected expressive conduct.” 
Four of the current commissioners were nominated by former President 
Donald Trump, but it’s not clear that the votes will fall along party 
lines. As Pomerantz notes, the argument that customers shouldn’t be 
forced to pay these dues can as easily be made from conservative or 
libertarian principles as from liberal or leftist ones.

If the rule change does go through, the question becomes how much it 
will matter. Utility companies could certainly afford to pay their dues 
to Edison out of other coffers — for instance, the ones that go toward 
shareholder dividends or compensation for executives. But as the Center 
for Biological Diversity’s Crystal points out, they would be forced to 
decide whether it was worth the cost, when that money could instead go 
toward salaries, returns for shareholders, or other expenses.

Pomerantz also noted that trade associations don’t represent the 
totality of utility companies’ lobbying. Whereas groups like Edison have 
a large presence in Washington, D.C., companies do most of their own 
lobbying at the state level. To the extent that customers are funding 
this activity, some of it can only be addressed by state governments. 
Still, Pomerantz is eagerly waiting for the commission’s decision.

“Regulators have to cut off the flow of free money,” he said. “The 
trade-association rule right now is the clearest, most obvious thing 
that FERC can do.”
https://grist.org/regulation/utility-lobbying-ferc-rule-change-edison-electric-institute/



/[The news archive - looking back at pushing people out of agencies ]/
/*June 9, 2008*/
*Deputy EPA administrator Jason Burnett resigns; he later claims that he 
did so after repeated interference from the White House on issues 
related to carbon pollution.*

https://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Ex-EPA-aide-tells-of-White-House-censorship-3205205.php 


http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-07-09/news/36799342_1_climate-change-epa-deputy-associate-administrator-congressional-testimony 


http://youtu.be/IPjyauzrrv0


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