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Contact: David Rosen, drosen@citizen.org
Tara Thornton, tthornton@endangered.org
Dave Willett, dwillett@lcv.org
Hawk Hammer, hhammer@defenders.org
Two Dozen Riders Attacking Wildlife, Endangered Species, and At-Risk Habitats in House Spending Bills Must Be Removed
House Appropriations Republicans have loaded up their draft annual spending bills with at least two dozen poison pill policy riders that attack wildlife, endangered species, and at-risk habitats. The Clean Budget Coalition, which is tracking the poison pills added to federal spending bills, has repeatedly called on Congress to remove all of these harmful measures.
“The American people expect that wildlife conservation will be based on science, not politics,” said Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. “Decisions on how wildlife are protected should be made by biologists rather than politicians in Congress.”
“MAGA Republican leadership in the House has reached a new low in their Interior appropriations bill, which slashes protections for our clean air, water, and critically endangered species,” said Kaila Hood, government affairs advocate for the League of Conservation Voters. “The House Interior spending bill contains dozens of provisions that attack at-risk wildlife and habitats, including iconic species like bison, grizzly bears, and gray wolves. These harmful provisions are part of a larger wish-list from extractive industries and developers, which come at the expense of wildlife, our environment, and our collective health. We must ensure that these poison pill riders are not included in any final spending bills— now or in the future.”
“We need policies that meaningfully address the joint biodiversity and climate crises and the grave threats they present to wildlife and people,” said Mary Beth Beetham, legislative director for Defenders of Wildlife. “Politicians who attack the Endangered Species Act and override science-based conservation policies are ignoring catastrophes that grow worse by the day and will be poorly remembered by future generations paying for these harmful riders.”
The riders attacking wildlife include:
Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies
- The Climate Fisheries Rider would block funds for climate change fisheries research, which would harm fisheries management, ecosystems, and fishermen.
- The Vessel Strike Reduction Rule Rider would prevent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from finalizing its proposed North Atlantic right whale vessel strike reduction rule until a "near real-time monitoring and mitigation program" to track threatened or endangered whales has been deployed. This would slow down an urgently needed rule to protect the survival of this species.
- The Forest Protection Rider would block funds for implementation of Executive Order 14072, which protects forests in federal regulatory decision making.
Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies
- The Waters of the U.S. Rider would block the January 2023 revised definition of “Waters of the United States.”
Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies
- The Waters of the U.S. Rider would prevent the Waters of the United States rule from taking effect.
- The Boundary Waters Mining Rider would overturn the Biden administration's recently finalized withdrawal of around 225,000 acres of National Forest System lands in northeastern Minnesota, opening the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to toxic mine pollution.
- The Boundary Waters Hardrock Lease Rider would require the Secretary of the Interior to reinstate two canceled hardrock mineral leases in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
- The Ancillary Use Mining Rider would give mining claimants the right to permanently occupy federal public lands, construct massive toxic waste dumps, and build roads and pipelines across those lands – an unprecedented giveaway of America’s cherished public lands to mining corporations, reversing over one hundred years of legal precedent.
- The Caldwell Canyon Mining Rider would require the Secretary of the Interior to issue a new Record of Decision for Caldwell Canyon Mine project, imposing arbitrary timelines to shortcut compliance with applicable environmental laws and regulations. The Caldwell Canyon phosphorus-phosphate mine would be built on irreplaceable habitat, leading to decades of additional water pollution.
- The Expanded Sage Grouse Rider would expand the ban on protecting the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act – a legacy rider – to include the separate population of bi-state sage grouse.
- The Bison Rider would prohibit funds to allow the introduction of bison into the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana.
- The Endangered Species Consultation Rider would codify climate denialism into law by exempting the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management from updating their land management plans when new information – often new knowledge about the increasingly severe impacts of climate change – shows that endangered species are being harmed or killed on public lands.
- The Lesser Prairie Chicken Rider would prohibit the Interior Department from implementing or enforcing a rule that protects the Lesser Prairie Chicken under the Endangered Species Act.
- The Grizzly Bear Habitat Rider would block funds for the North Cascades Grizzly Bear Ecosystem Restoration Plan.
- The Northern Long-Eared Bat Rider would prohibit the Interior Department from implementing or enforcing a final rule that protects the northern long-eared bat under the Endangered Species Act.
- The Gray Wolf Rider would direct the Secretary of the Interior to reissue a rule prematurely removing endangered species protections for the Gray Wolf.
- The Grand Staircase-Escalante Rider would prohibit funds for management of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah except in compliance with the Record of Decision and the February 2020 Resource Management Plan.
- The Glacier National Park Reservation Rider would prohibit the park from implementing a reservation system to address overcrowding.
- The Bison Rider would prohibit the U.S. Department of the Interior from establishing a working group to help restore bison populations.
- The Lead Ammunition and Tackle Rider would prevent agencies charged with wildlife protection from banning toxic lead in ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands unless an impossible set of criteria are met.
- The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Rider would prohibit listing the animal under the Endangered Species Act.
- The Rat Poison Rider would block the EPA from restricting rodenticides that pose health risks to humans and other mammals and birds.
- The Conservation Land Use Rider would prohibit the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from implementing the Conservation and Landscape Health rule, which allows the agency to better prioritize conservation of public lands.
- The Grizzly Bear Rider would delist the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population of Grizzly Bears under the Endangered Species Act.
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(202) 588-1000'Insure Our Survival': XR Launches Campaign at British Insurance Industry Awards Night
"We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy," one activist said.
Key industry players arriving at London's Royal Albert Hall Wednesday night for the British Insurance Awards were met with a warning: Stop underwriting new oil, gas, and coal projects or face direct action from Extinction Rebellion.
Climate activists greeted the insurers with signs, photographs of extreme U.K. flooding, protest music, performance art, and business cards announcing XR's new "Insure Our Survival" campaign to pressure the industry away from backing fossil fuels.
"This is just the beginning," Insure Our Survival spokesperson Alex Penson said in a statement. "Thousands of XR activists stand ready to focus their nonviolent direct action energy on the insurance firms who are greenlighting the climate crisis by providing fossil fuel crooks with the insurance they need to dig and drill for oil, gas, and coal."
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest,"
The insurance industry has emerged as a target of the climate movement in recent years, as advocates point out that new fossil fuel projects would not be able to move forward without it.
"The insurance industry has a superpower," Penson said. "At a stroke, it could stop the fossil fuel crooks in their tracks and save the lives of billions of people threatened from the worst-case climate scenarios that scientists are saying are increasingly possible."
However, to date the industry has not chosen to use that power. According to the most recent report from the global Insure Our Future campaign, not one of the 30 major insurance firms it analyzed in 2023 had policies in line with limiting global heating to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. The insurers included in the U.K.-based Lloyd's market were the leading fossil fuel insurers, Insure Our Future found, earning $1.6-2.2 billion in premiums from oil, gas, and coal in 2022.
"It's time for insurers to use their superpower or be held responsible when all of our children face a future like the children in the photographs we showed at our protest," Penson continued, "struggling to survive in barely habitable countries haunted by crop failures, malnutrition, deadly storms, floods, and heatwaves."
At Wednesday's event, XR activists held up photos taken by photographer Gideon Mendell, showing massive flooding in the U.K. that has been made worse by the climate emergency. They also held up signs reading, "Stop Insuring New Fossil Fuels" and "Insure Our Survival."
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
At the sound of a violin, XR's Oil Slickers—activists draped in black cloth to resemble an oil spill—glided around the insurance luminaries as they approached the hall for the industry's annual awards ceremony.
(Photo: Extinction Rebellion)
A choir also sang a song to the tune of "Imagine," including the line, "Imagine all insurers, fighting for us all."
"Last night we challenged insurers having a good time and congratulating each other on their good work at the Royal Albert Hall to face up to some uncomfortable truths—that some of their work leads to flooded homes and wrecked lives for their customers facing more and more climate crisis-driven extreme weather events," Penson said.
The activists also distributed business cards to the attendees warning them that, if they continued to back new fossil fuel projects, XR would target them with direct action designed to hurt both their reputations and their bottom line.
Pension said: "We left the leading lights of the industry in no doubt about what they need to do: Stop insuring new oil, gas, and coal and focus on underwriting renewable energy to speed a just transition to a low or no-carbon economy."
XR's U.K.-based Insure Our Survival campaign emerged from the global Insure Our Future campaign, and in particular an international week of action it organized in late February and early March, including events in London and around the U.K.
About a month after the protests, Zurich Insurance announced that it would no longer underwrite new oil and gas projects.
Sierra Signorelli, Zurich's chief executive of commercial insurance, said at the time that Zurich took the action in keeping with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
"Further exploration and development of fossil fuels isn't required for the transition," Signorelli said. "We think it's the right time to evolve our position."
Insure Our Survival campaigner Lucy Porter said that since the spring, many insurance employees, in both senior and junior positions, had spoken to XR saying they supported a move away from backing climate-polluting projects.
"We intend to work with them to make insurance part of the climate solution, not part of the problem, and we invite other people in the industry to contact us and work with us," Porter said.
Porter continued, "To those who continue to put their profits before a livable planet we say: We will hold you accountable through an escalating campaign of nonviolent direct action across the country."
'More Unhinged by the Minute': Senior Israeli Lawmaker Suggests Nuclear Attack on Iran
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," the hardline Knesset member and former Israeli defense minister said.
A longtime Israeli lawmaker and former defense minister took to the airwaves and social media on Wednesday to suggest his country should do whatever it takes to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
"It is not possible anymore to stop the Iranian nuclear program with conventional means," Avigdor Liberman of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party said during a Channel 12 interview. "And we will have to use all the means that are available to us."
"We will have to stop with the deliberate policy of ambiguity, and it needs to be clear what is at stake here," Liberman continued, apparently referring to Israel's refusal to say whether it has nuclear weapons. "What is at stake here is the future of this nation, the future of the state of Israel, and we will not take any risks."
Member of Knesset and former Minister of Defense, Avigdor Liberman, live on Channel 12, openly calls to use nuclear weapon against Iran, in order to prevent it from reaching weaponization of its nuclear program. What a fuckin' psycho. pic.twitter.com/NYGfQ1zqVp
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 4, 2024
When pressed on what he meant by stopping Iran with non-conventional means, Liberman said, "I said it very clearly."
"Right now there is no time to stop the Iranian nuclear program, their weaponization, by using conventional means," he added.
Liberman made similar comments on social media, where his remarks sparked alarm and condemnation. The lawmaker's hardline call comes amid powder keg tensions between Tel Aviv and Tehran, which warned last week that any Israeli invasion of Lebanon—from which Iranian ally Hezbollah is resisting Israel's annihilation of Gaza—would trigger an "obliterating war."
According to the Arms Control Association (ACA), a U.S.-based advocacy group, Iran is a "threshold state," meaning "it has developed the necessary capacities to build nuclear weapons."
However, a February 2024 threat assessment report authored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence stated that "Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device."
"Since 2020, however, Tehran has stated that it is no longer constrained by any JCPOA limits," the report says, a reference to so-called Iran Nuclear Deal from which the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018 under former President Donald Trump. "Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced [International Atomic Energy Agency] monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so."
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Kamal Kharazi, a foreign policy advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
told the Financial Times earlier this week that his country would "have to change our doctrine" if faced with an existential threat.
The ACA and others estimate that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads and fissile material for approximately 200 more.
Liberman isn't the first Israeli lawmaker to suggest nuclear war against Iran. Far-right Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi—who sparked outrage by saying Israeli forces are "too humane" in Gaza and should "burn" the Palestinian territory—said in April that "in the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American ammunition, we will have to use everything we have."
'They're Everywhere': Common Foods Linked to Elevated Levels of PFAS in Body
Results from a new study "definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," a co-author said.
Common foods including white rice and eggs are linked to higher levels of "forever chemicals" in the body, new research from scientists at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth shows.
The researchers also found elevated levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in people who consumed coffee, red meat, and seafood, based on plasma and breast milk samples of 3,000 pregnant people. The findings, published in Science of the Total Environment, add to the mounting evidence of the accumulation of PFAS, which were developed by chemical companies in the mid-20th century, in the natural environment and the body.
"The results definitely point toward the need for environmental stewardship, and keeping PFAS out of the environment and food chain," Megan Romano, a Dartmouth epidemiologist and co-author of the paper, toldThe Guardian. “Now we're in a situation where they're everywhere and are going to stick around even if we do aggressive remediation."
PFAS are a class of 16,000 compounds linked to a wide range of adverse health conditions including cancer, with research ongoing. The chemicals' development and production went effectively unregulated for decades, but has received significant attention in recent years, with alarming studies coming out regularly.
3M, a consumer goods multinational that developed and manufactured many PFAS compounds, knew that they were accumulating dangerously in the blood of the general public, but concealed it, according to a recent investigation co-published by ProPublica and The New Yorker; the article was written by journalist Sharon Lerner, who previously reported on PFAS-related deception by 3M and Dupont for The Intercept.
Such corporations may yet face unprecedented legal action. As Steven Shapin wrote in the London Review of Books on Thursday, "It is thought that the monetary scale of American lawsuits against companies responsible for PFAS water pollution may eventually dwarf those involving asbestos and tobacco, considering that people are in a position to decide whether or not to smoke cigarettes but everybody has to drink water."
While much of the concern about PFAS has rightly centered on drinking water—in which they're found worldwide—that is just one of the ways the chemicals can get into the human body. A new study this week showed they can be absorbed through the skin.
Food intake is also a primary means of accumulation in the body, and the new Dartmouth study indicates which foods are the worst. The study doesn't explore why, though Romano discussed some possible reasons with The Guardian. Rice is likely contaminated because of PFAS in soil or agricultural water, while coffee could have PFAS because of various factors including filters. Animal products can be contaminated if, among other reasons, the ground that the animals lived off was treated with PFAS-fouled toxic sludge, which is used by farmers as a cheap alternative to fertilizer.
Even consumption of backyard chicken eggs lead to elevated levels of PFAS, and that could be because of the table scraps the chickens are often fed, Romano said.