February, 23 2022, 08:43am EDT
![Center for Biological Diversity](https://assets.rbl.ms/32012680/origin.jpg)
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jean Su, Center for Biological Diversity: jsu@biologicaldiversity.org
Hunter Spence, Office of Rep. Earl Blumenauer: Hunter.Spence@mail.house.gov
Martina McLennan, Office of Sen. Jeff Merkley: MerkleyPressOffice@merkley.
Report Details Key Powers Biden Can Unlock With National Climate Emergency, Echoes Congressional Calls for Declaration
President Could Ban Oil Exports, Boost Renewables Manufacturing, Halt Offshore Drilling
WASHINGTON
The Center for Biological Diversity released a groundbreaking report today outlining the suite of specific powers that President Biden could unlock to fight the climate crisis by declaring a national climate emergency.
Today's report outlines key climate steps the president could take under the National Emergencies Act, the Defense Production Act and the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. Declaring a national emergency would allow the president to halt crude oil exports, stop offshore oil and gas drilling, restrict international fossil fuel investment and rapidly manufacture and distribute renewable energy systems.
"Declaring a climate emergency isn't a catch phrase, it's a vital suite of actions to protect people and the planet from this crisis," said Jean Su, director of the Center's energy justice program and co-author of the report. "In the face of delayed climate legislation, President Biden should use his tremendous executive powers to turn this emergency into an opportunity for profound economic and social transformation."
In February 2021, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the National Climate Emergency Act, which would require the president to invoke his authorities under the National Emergency Act. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Jeff Merkley also made public calls for a national emergency declaration from President Biden.
"We are in the midst of a climate emergency -- it is here and it is costing millions of lives and livelihoods," said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). "The impacts of climate chaos are affecting us all, with devastating fire seasons, increased heat-related deaths and illnesses, and more powerful and deadly storms. Climate chaos is undermining the pillars of rural economies -- farming, forests and fishing. And many of the impacts are felt disproportionately by poor communities and communities of color. Since this is a devastating emergency, the right and appropriate action is for the Biden administration to treat it as such and declare a climate emergency to unlock the powers of government to respond boldly and effectively."
"The scientists, experts and all of our own lived experiences in the past few years make it clear: this is a climate emergency and it is past time to take action," said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), author of the Climate Emergency Act. "I worked closely with the environmental community, Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders to introduce climate emergency legislation that would unleash every resource at our disposal to halt, reverse, mitigate and prepare for the consequences of this climate crisis. President Biden has worked to prioritize climate in the first year of his administration, but after years of practiced ignorance during the last administration and from congressional Republicans, more work remains to be done. This report, and my bill, chart the course."
BACKGROUND
More than 50 lawmakers and more than 1,000 national groups support the call for a national climate emergency as part of the Climate President Action Plan and Build Back Fossil Free coalition. In October, thousands of people joined demonstrations at the White House demanding that Biden declare a climate emergency and reject fossil fuel projects.
Community leaders with Build Back Fossil Free are now calling on the administration to use the upcoming State of the Union on March 1 to lay out a bold new climate agenda that includes declaring a climate emergency.
Since the passage of the National Emergencies Act in 1976, every president has used these emergency powers and declared at least one national emergency. Presidents routinely employed the Stafford Act and Defense Production Act to address disasters. For example, President Biden has used the Defense Production Act to address medical supply shortages in the COVID-19 crisis.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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New Report Argues Private Rail Is a Train Wreck, Public Ownership Needed
"Our nation's rail system is in disarray," an expert said. "Dominated by a small group of giant for-profit companies, it is imperiling the health and safety of workers and communities."
Jul 01, 2024
Railword Workers United and a Brown University fellow on Monday published a white paper calling for the institution of a public rail system to replace America's corporate railroad giants.
The 110-page white paper, written by Brown University undergraduate Maddock Thomas and published as part of RWU's Public Rail Now campaign, argues that U.S. railroad corporations such as BNSF, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and CSX have failed on safety, workers' rights, service, electrification, and expanding capacity to meet rising freight demand.
Instead of using profits to invest in critical infrastructure, the railroads have lined shareholder pockets with dividends and buybacks, Thomas wrote, advocating for a public system where that money could be spent to improve safety and decarbonize freight transport, among other goals.
Thomas M. Hanna, research director at the Democracy Collaborative, called for democratic, public ownership of railroads in a Public Rail Now statement.
"At a time when we need it most, our nation's rail system is in disarray," Hanna said. "Dominated by a small group of giant for-profit companies, it is imperiling the health and safety of workers and communities, providing poor service for customers, abandoning growth and development, and stalling the expansion of passenger rail services."
"These lands were given under a promise of providing a 'public highway' operated in the public interest, a deal that today's Class 1s have inherited along with their predecessors' easements... Perhaps it is time for Congress to retake control of our public rights-of-way."
The frequency of rail accidents rose by 28% between 2013 and 2022, which many critics attribute to the Precision Scheduled Railroading system that's become the industry standard. Thomas wrote that the system prioritizes "speed over safety."
Despite the alarming trend, the industry has lobbied against safety-minded legislation such as the Railway Accountability Act proposed by senators last year following a disastrous derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The industry pushed against reforms strongly in the year after the disaster and that lobbying has continued in recent months, according toJacobin.
The current system has led to precarity and difficulty for railway workers. The number of jobs in the industry has gone down over the last 10 years, with nearly 30% of workers having been laid off since 2015, Thomas found. Railway workers also face tough conditions, with unpredictable schedules and forced overtime—some of the subjects of a 2022 labor dispute that ended with the controversial intervention of President Joe Biden.
The white paper emphasizes the underinvestment that private rail ownership has allowed. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that rail freight will nearly double by 2035. This growing demand has long been understood, but not acted on. A 2008 report commissioned by the Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency, found that the aforementioned major rail companies—called "Class 1" railroads—needed to spend $135 billion by 2035 to build up infrastructure to meet incoming demand.
They did not, the white paper says.
"Instead, the Class 1s spent $196 billion on buybacks and dividends for shareholders between 2010 and 2020," Thomas wrote.
Thomas presented a historical case for public rail. In the late 1800s, hundreds of millions of acres of public land, as well as other subsidies, were granted to railroad companies on the condition that their services benefited the public. Thomas wrote that the land grants were provided with the understanding that the railways would be like public highways, and that the federal government to this day "retains a reversionary interest of ownership and control" over the rights-of-way.
"There is a compelling case that every railroad that sits on a right-of-way granted from Congress merely possesses an easement over public land," he wrote. "Furthermore, Congress reserved the right to 'add to, alter, amend' the terms of its land grants. Ultimately, these lands were given under a promise of providing a 'public highway' operated in the public interest, a deal that today's Class 1s have inherited along with their predecessors' easements. One might argue that the Class 1s failed to live up to this deal and that perhaps it is time for Congress to retake control of our public rights-of-way."
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'A Full-Fledged War Crime': Israel Condemned Over New Human Shield Footage
"These crimes, and dozens of similar cases, require urgent intervention from the international justice system," said one human rights group.
Jul 01, 2024
The latest video evidence of Israel's use of Palestinians as "human shields" during combat was condemned by one human rights advocate on Monday as "horrifying but not surprising," as campaigners emphasized that the Israel Defense Forces has long used civilians in Palestine to shield their own soldiers from harm while bombarding Gaza and the West Bank.
Footage released by Al Jazeera on Sunday night showed Israeli forces attaching body cameras to handcuffed Palestinians who they had detained, dressing them in IDF uniforms, and sending them into buildings and tunnels to ensure the locations weren't rigged with explosives.
The footage presented "evidence of a systematic tactic of the army," said the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.
"The leaked horrific scenes that were obtained and published by Al Jazeera reveal how the Israeli army uses civilians, including injured detainees, as human shields and forces them into hazardous combat zones after installing cameras on their bodies and binding them with rope," said Euro-Med. "Each of the aforementioned acts of criminal, brutal, and inhumane behavior constitutes a grave violation of the rules of international humanitarian law, and is a full-fledged war crime. These crimes, and dozens of similar cases, require urgent intervention from the international justice system to ensure the protection of civilians, prevent their use as human shields, and hold the Israeli political and military perpetrators."
The Israeli government has long blamed Hamas' use of "human shields" for deaths in Gaza, which now number at least 37,900, saying the group operates out of civilian infrastructure and places Palestinians in harm's way.
Journalist Dan Cohen pointed out that the IDF has used what it calls "the neighbor procedure" for decades, forcing Palestinian "messengers" to approach the homes of suspected fugitives alone and unarmed while Israeli soldiers announce over a loudspeaker that they are surrounding the building.
The procedure "is so commonplace that the military tried to justify it as a lifesaving measure in use since the 1980s," said Cohen. "The images... show the reality of this criminal practice."
In its statement on the new footage, Euro-Med detailed numerous instances in which Israel has appeared to use human shields as defined by the Geneva Conventions: "cases where persons were actually taken to military objectives in order to shield those objectives from attacks."
As Euro-Med reported:
During the Shifa Medical Complex raid in March 2024, Israeli forces used civilians, including patients and displaced individuals sheltering inside the complex, as human shields. To protect their military operations within the hospital and its vicinity, Israeli forces exploited Palestinian civilians by making them form human barriers to surround Israeli soldiers and military vehicles, or sending them under threat to residential homes and buildings to either help arrest or forcibly evacuate other civilians before army raids and the subsequent destruction of many of these buildings.
[...]
Furthermore, several families residing near the Shifa Medical Complex reported that Israeli forces arrested young men from inside the medical facility, then used them to enter the families' homes and demand that they immediately evacuate to the central and southern Strip.
The group also cited a recent example from June 22 in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, where Israeli forces placed a wounded Palestinian man on the hood of a military vehicle and drove through the Jabariya neighborhood, and "a compound and comprehensive crime" against a civilian family in Gaza City on June 27.
"A family comprising an elderly woman and her four children, including three young women and a one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, was attacked with gunfire and bombs by Israeli forces who stormed their house in the Gaza City neighborhood of Al-Shujaiya," said the group. "They were later taken outside and detained for over three hours near Israeli tanks in a dangerous combat zone, despite the injuries they sustained in the initial attack on their home, and were used as human shields. The 65-year-old mother, identified as Safiya Hassan Musa Al-Jamal, was run over by an Israeli tank and killed in front of her son."
On Monday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) condemned the footage released Sunday from the incident in Gaza while noting that Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir was recorded over the weekend calling for Palestinian prisoners to be executed and fed reduced food rations as a "deterrence" tactic.
Almost 10,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli forces, including women and children, CAIR said, demanding that the U.S. end its military support for Israel.
"Israeli war crimes, and calls for more war crimes, are occurring daily in Gaza and the West Bank, while the Biden administration rushes more American bombs to Israel to complete the genocide," said CAIR communications director Ibrahim Hooper. "The U.S.-Israeli partnership in genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced starvation will shape the international community's image of America for generations to come. The Biden administration must change course to uphold universal human rights and recognize Palestinian humanity."
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AOC Vows to File Articles of Impeachment After Supreme Court Trump Ruling
"Today's ruling represents an assault on American democracy. It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture."
Jul 01, 2024
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday said she will file unspecified articles of impeachment U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority ruled that former President Donald Trump is entitled to "absolute immunity" for "official acts" performed while he was in office, a decision that prompted dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor to declare her "fear for our democracy."
Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said on social media that "the Supreme Court has become consumed by a corruption crisis beyond its control."
"Today's ruling represents an assault on American democracy. It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture," she added. "I intend on filing articles of impeachment upon our return."
The House of Representatives reconvenes next Monday.
The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines Monday in Trump v. United States that "the nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority" and that "he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts."
Dissenting, Sotomayor asserted: "Never in the history of our republic has a president had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former presidents will be cloaked in such immunity."
Far-right Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dismissed calls to recuse themselves from the case over alleged conflicts of interest. In addition to them and Chief Justice John Roberts, the court's three Trump appointees sided with the ex-president in the case.
The decision means it is highly unlikely that Trump will face a trial for his alleged role in fomenting the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection before November's election, in which he is the presumptive Republican nominee. In addition to four felony charges in that case, Trump faces one trial in Fulton County, Georgia for his alleged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and another in Florida over his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
In May, Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges related to the falsification of business records regarding hush money payments to cover up sex scandals during the 2016 presidential election. The former president was also impeached twice while in office, although the Senate did not convict him either time.
At least one other House lawmaker—Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.)—said he supports Ocasio-Cortez's move. Other progressive lawmakers expressed alarm over Monday's ruling.
"Presidents are not kings. Trump should absolutely be held criminally liable for inciting a violent mob to overturn the 2020 election," said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). "This ruling sets an incredibly dangerous precedent. This extremist court has put our democracy on life support."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said that "the far-right extremist majority has politicized our highest court, undermined its legitimacy, and has created a dangerous 'absolute' immunity for a president's official acts."
"This is a rogue, untethered, and damaging Supreme Court. MAGA extremist justices also are ignoring the festering corruption in their ranks," he added. "We need justices committed to justice. Stolen seats filled with partisan hacks lead to alarming results. Today's ruling is devastating to our democracy."
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked, "If brazenly attempting to overturn a democratic election by claiming the powers of the presidency can be a so-called 'official' act of the president, then where does it end?"
"If a former president who has fomented an insurrection at our Capitol and who now promises to serve as a dictator on day one back in office can avoid accountability in a court of law, then as Justice Sotomayor stated, I too 'fear for our democracy,'" he added.
Some progressive groups and campaigners also called for the impeachment of the six right-wing justices.
"The Supreme Court is a corrupt institution that's more concerned with advancing their ideological agenda than upholding the Constitution," Sunrise Movement said on social media. "Congress must move forward with impeachment."
Erica Payne, founder and director of Patriotic Millionaires, said in a statement that "the Supreme Court's decision effectively legalizes the use of political violence by a president so long as it is an 'official act.'"
"This relieves the presidency—and the sitting president—from the most basic level of accountability while putting our entire constitutional republic in mortal danger," she continued. "Donald Trump incited an insurrection and encouraged his thugs to storm the Capitol. The idea that he should not be held accountable if these actions were 'official' is an egregiously partisan attempt to deny reality."
"This decision is the culmination of a relentlessly executed, multidecade plan to destroy American democracy," Payne contended. "It is the inevitable outcome of rank corruption facilitated by a malignant class of American oligarchs who, over decades, bought and paid for a complicit Supreme Court."
"The frog in the pot is now at a rolling boil," she added. "The president can encourage his thugs to murder members of Congress without fear of legal repercussions. If Democrats do not immediately take bold action, historians will mark today as the moment illiberal authoritarians cemented their rule over the United States of America."
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