February, 14 2023, 03:03pm EDT
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Sierra Club Supporters Submit More than Sixteen Thousand Comments Urging EPA to Finalize Strongest Possible Methane Rule
Comments Show Support, But More Limits on Flaring Needed to Protect Climate & Public Health
The public comment period for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed supplemental rule aimed at cutting methane and other emissions from the oil and gas sector ends today. The broad coalition of methane rule supporters submitted more than 400,000 comments, more than 16,000 of which came from Sierra Club members and volunteers, urging EPA to further strengthen the draft rule and quickly finalize, by summer at the latest, and implement it so communities can realize its emission reduction benefits as soon as possible.
While the comments supported the supplemental rule, which is an improvement over the original draft from 2021, they also urged EPA to impose greater limits on the harmful practice of flaring. These restraints are critical to ensure the strongest possible methane safeguards to mitigate climate change and protect public health. EPA must also widen standards to address emissions from more storage tanks and improve and clarify ways in which communities and individuals can report large leaks.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that has more than 80 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, driving approximately one-third of the warming our planet has experienced to date. Each year, the U.S. oil and gas sector emits 16 million metric tons of methane, alongside other damaging and harmful pollutants, into our atmosphere.
In January, over three days of public hearings, 289 advocates across 33 states and 110 organizations testified in support of a strong methane rule. Along with the written comments, it should now be clear to EPA that finalizing maximally protective safeguards against methane pollution from the oil and gas industry is essential to advancing environmental justice, slowing the rate of climate change, and keeping everyone's air clean and safe to breathe.
In response, Sierra Club released the following statements:
Senior Director of Energy Campaigns Kelly Sheehan said: “The response to EPA during this public comment period leaves no question: the agency must strengthen and finalize the strongest possible methane rule as swiftly as possible to protect clean air and ensure a stable climate and healthy communities. During the public hearings and this comment period, EPA heard from people who have experienced the harmful impacts of pollution from oil and gas drilling firsthand, who live and work on the frontlines of the climate crisis, and who are counting on the agency to hold these fossil fuel companies accountable. Many of these communities live in states where political leaders have failed to prioritize community protections. We urge EPA–for the benefit of our families, economy, and climate–to incorporate these recommendations into the final rule and to enact the strongest safeguards possible without delay. Nothing less than our lives and planet depends on it.”
Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter’s Conservation Director Cyrus Reed said: “No state produces more oil and gas than Texas, and no state has more to gain from strong methane regulations than our state. Unfortunately, state leadership and our two main state agencies that have a role in regulating methane -- the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Railroad Commission, have largely turned a blind eye on Texas communities, putting our health and our planet at risk. We look to the federal government to do what our state leadership has not done - protect our communities. The EPA can and must adopt a strong final rule on methane pollution.”
Sierra Club Organizer for Southern New Mexico Antoinette Reyes said: “It has been more than a year since its initial introduction, so we are looking forward to the finalization of EPA’s methane rule after hundreds of thousands of comments showed clear support for a strong rule that cracks down on leaks. Air pollution knows no boundary, these rules are necessary to protect public health and the environment in New Mexico, as well as in bordering states, like Texas. It is the job of the EPA to create meaningful federal rules that set a minimum standard for new and existing oil and gas operations - it is the best tool we have to protect communities from harmful pollutants. After a huge outpouring of comments from all over the country, it is not critical that a final, strong rule be implemented as soon as possible to ensure that our communities' air gets cleaned up for healthier, fuller lives."
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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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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'The President Is Now a King Above the Law,' Sotomayor Warns in Chilling Dissent
A legal journalist described the liberal justice's dissent as "one of the most terrified and terrifying pieces of judicial writing I've ever encountered."
Jul 01, 2024
In her
dissent against the U.S. Supreme Court's Monday ruling in Trump v. United States, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor listed several acts that she argued the high court's right-wing supermajority has effectively sanctioned as unprosecutable exercises of presidential authority.
"Orders the Navy's SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune," wrote Sotomayor. "Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."
The high court's 6-3 decision along ideological lines granted former President Donald Trump "absolute immunity" for acts that fall within the scope of the "responsibilities of the executive branch under the Constitution," as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
The new ruling leaves it to the lower courts to determine whether the election-subversion acts for which Trump was charged last year in a case led by Special Counsel Jack Smith were "official" or "unofficial." The Supreme Court took more than four months to decide the case after agreeing to hear it, meaning Trump is unlikely to face trial before the November presidential election.
The Associated Pressnoted that the Supreme Court "further restricted prosecutors by prohibiting them from using any official acts as evidence in trying to prove a president's unofficial actions violated the law"—a move that Sotomayor condemned as "nonsensical."
While Roberts acknowledged that "not everything the president does is official," Sotomayor argued that the majority's expansion of "the concept of core powers beyond any recognizable bounds" means that "a president's use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution."
"Whenever the president wields the enormous power of his office, the majority says, the criminal law (at least presumptively) cannot touch him," wrote Sotomayor. "Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law."
Sotomayor: Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent. pic.twitter.com/sJjM6iMvk1
— Leah Litman (@LeahLitman) July 1, 2024
Sotomayor expressed "fear for our democracy" as she closed her dissent against the ruling by the Supreme Court's majority, two members of which have recently faced intense scrutiny and calls to resign for accepting lavish gifts from right-wing billionaires.
"Justice Sotomayor's alarmed dissent was signed 'with fear for our democracy,'" U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement Monday. "This is a blaring warning to voters of the anti-democratic forces pulling the strings both at the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party."
"Not only does this decision deprive the American people of knowing whether the former president is guilty of attempting to overturn the last election before they head to the polls in November, it also makes it much harder to hold a former president accountable for illegal acts committed while in office," said Whitehouse. "The far-right radicals on the court have essentially made the president a monarch above the law, the Founding Fathers' greatest fear."
Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the U.S. courts for Slate, called Sotomayor's dissent "one of the most terrified and terrifying pieces of judicial writing I've ever encountered."
Pointing to Sotomayor's dissent, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) wrote Monday that "it is a dark day for democracy when presidents can commit any crime they want in their official capacity, and these justices are bribed for their decisions."
"Coup attempts are not 'official acts,'" she added.
Also writing in dissent was liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who warned that "in the majority's view, while all other citizens of the United States must do their jobs and live their lives within the confines of criminal prohibitions, the president cannot be made to do so; he must sometimes be exempt from the law's dictates depending on the character of his conduct."
"Indeed, the majority holds that the president, unlike anyone else in our country, is comparatively free to engage in criminal acts in furtherance of his official duties," wrote Jackson, who criticized the right-wing majority's "arbitrary and irrational" attempt to distinguish between official and unofficial acts.
"It suggests that the unofficial criminal acts of a president are the only ones worthy of prosecution," the justice continued. "Quite to the contrary, it is when the president commits crimes using his unparalleled official powers that the risks of abuse and autocracy will be most dire."
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