Absolute Standards Inc., located on the outskirts of New Haven, produces and sells materials used to calibrate laboratory and research instruments. The company is registered with Connecticut as a “manufacturer of drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices” and employed just 21 people in the lead-up to the executions, records show.

John Criscio, the company’s owner, has denied that Absolute Standards played a role in supplying pentobarbital, a barbiturate used for lethal injection.

But according to a source The Intercept interviewed last year, Criscio and the company’s director, Stephen Arpie, acknowledged in a meeting that Absolute Standards produced the active ingredient for pentobarbital for use in the federal executions. The person, who met with Criscio and Arpie about the possibility of obtaining lethal injection drugs, asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the interaction. A separate unnamed pharmacy then used the active ingredient, or API, to make an injectable drug that would stop prisoners’ hearts.

“They went about explaining to us how they produce the chemical,” the person said of Criscio and Arpie. “They’d been reading about it in the papers. And they saw that people couldn’t get it. They were like, ‘Well, we make the standard, so we know how to make it. So we can just make it.’ They basically bragged about how they built this little home market.”

A second person interviewed by The Intercept said they were also told by Arpie and Criscio that Absolute Standards made drugs for executions.

Like many of the 27 states capable of carrying out death sentences, the federal government has fought to keep the identity of its supplier hidden from the public. Earlier this month, the comedy news program “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” named Absolute Standards as the Bureau of Prisons’ drug supplier, citing an anonymous source. The segment echoed reporting by Reuters, which noted in 2020 that the House Oversight Committee had sent a letter to Absolute Standards suspecting the business was the source of the drugs. At the time, Arpie told Reuters that he did not always keep track of the final use of his products and couldn’t rule out involvement.

Interviews conducted by The Intercept and documents obtained under public records laws bolster evidence that Absolute Standards, located in a state that abolished the death penalty in 2012, helped the Trump administration resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. A Connecticut congressional staffer raised concerns about the company’s role in the executions as early as April 2021, suggesting that states might be looking to follow the federal government’s lead. “As Absolute Standards has been identified as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for executions,” the staffer warned, “the risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”

When asked about pentobarbital, Criscio told The Intercept, “We don’t make that material.” Arpie did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the BOP declined to comment.

In August 2018, Absolute Standards applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital, according to a notice in the Federal Register. The designation allows for the production of chemicals “by means of chemical synthesis or by extraction from other substances.” A few months later, in October, the BOP received its first batch of the API for pentobarbital, according to a declaration by Raul Campos, then-associate warden of the BOP’s Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The declaration was submitted as part of litigation over the Trump administration’s lethal injection protocol.

(The Intercept requested Absolute Standards’ applications to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital in August 2023. On Monday, the DEA declined to hand over those records, stating that they were exempt from disclosure, in part because they included “information that is classified to protect national security.”)

For years, pharmaceutical companies refused to sell pentobarbital for use in capital punishment, creating shortages that halted executions in some states that relied on the drug. Acquiring the API marked the end of a yearslong search for the BOP.

“We were looking for the drugs domestically and internationally,” a former BOP official with knowledge of the situation told The Intercept last year. The official asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the procurement of execution drugs. “There were a number of leads that looked promising and then ended up being dry.”

Eager to restart executions, the Trump administration had prioritized locating lethal drugs. But U.S. manufacturers did not want their products to be associated with killing people because they feared it would hurt their bottom line. “There’s such a lobby against the death penalty that any company who becomes identified as providing the drugs gets boycotted,” the BOP official said. “Those companies make more money from legitimate uses of the drug than they do from executions.” It was equally difficult to find drugs internationally, the official added, because of “shady characters” and issues confirming the legitimacy of suppliers.

A team within the BOP general counsel’s office, led by then-general counsel Kenneth Hyle, was in charge of vetting potential suppliers. “More often than not, the companies they identified turned out to be nonviable,” the official said. Hyle did not respond to requests for comment.

The former official did not remember how the BOP identified Absolute Standards but said there was a team of people calling suppliers off a list. “I know that we had people that were just calling every company that they could to find out if they were able and willing to produce it.”

Only a small group of people knew the name of the API supplier, according to the official, who was only aware that it was a small company based in Connecticut. “I had no reason to ask for the name,” the official said.

The API failed its first quality assurance test in October 2018, according to the declaration submitted by Campos. Another batch of the pentobarbital ingredient passed testing in February 2019 and was sent to a compounding pharmacy to be made into an injectable solution. The BOP has not revealed the identity of the compounding pharmacy. The former BOP official told The Intercept that they did not remember the name of the pharmacy, only that it was located somewhere in the South.

Typically, the government logs payments to vendors in an online database, but there is no public record of any BOP payments to Absolute Standards. “I don’t recall how it was done. It was probably not done through their normal payments process,” the former BOP official said. “Everything was done discreetly, because again, the fear was that publicity would result in this company no longer wanting to be willing to do business.”

After learning that the BOP had secured execution drugs, officials from other states started inquiring about whether they could buy from the same company. An official from Nebraska, which was prevented in 2015 from importing drugs from India, asked the BOP about its source. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services did not respond to questions about the communication.

In April 2019, an attorney adviser from the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs emailed colleagues to notify them that a staffer from South Carolina Rep. William Timmons’s office had asked about the federal government’s execution drugs. “Specifically, they ask 1. Does the Federal Government have the ‘cocktail’? 2. Could they transfer it to states under existing law?” the email read.

Timmons’s deputy chief of staff, Heather Smith, told The Intercept that the employee who inquired with the BOP no longer worked for the representative. Smith did not know whether the employee ever talked to Absolute Standards.

South Carolina has not conducted an execution since May 2011 due to drug shortages. But last September, officials announced that the state had secured pentobarbital. After The Intercept requested records detailing communications between the South Carolina Department of Corrections and Absolute Standards, the corrections team replied that such information was exempt from disclosure, citing in part a state secrecy law that shields records disclosing the identity of people and companies involved in executions. The corrections department did not comment when asked whether its response meant that Absolute Standards was providing the state with execution drugs.

In the summer of 2020, as the federal executions got underway, Reps. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., started to raise questions about Absolute Standards’ involvement. They sent a letter to the company on July 14, the same day the government killed Daniel Lewis Lee, the first person to die in the execution spree, stating that they’d seen redacted testing reports “indicating that your company has assisted DOJ in securing and/or testing pentobarbital for death penalty executions.” The lawmakers posed a list of 11 questions to Absolute Standards about its work in the executions. The company did not reply, emails obtained by The Intercept show.

There is no public record of further investigation by the lawmakers into Absolute Standards.

Pressley’s office did not return multiple requests for comment, and Raskin’s press secretary told The Intercept to contact the House Oversight Committee. Nelly Decker, the communications director for Oversight Committee Democrats, wrote in an email that she had “nothing more to add” on the inquiry.

“The risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”

In April 2021, Jennifer Lamb, the district director for Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., brought Absolute Standards to the attention of state Attorney General William Tong. “It appears the company may have supplied the US Department of Justice with ingredients used to make pentobarbital for use in federal executions,” Lamb wrote.

“There are several states that are now actively looking to follow the federal government’s lead in acquiring this drug and resuming executions,” she continued. Describing Absolute Standards as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for capital punishment, Lamb warned that Connecticut could be complicit in clearing the way for executions across the country.

The following month, Tong sent a letter to Absolute Standards informing its owners that “Connecticut has a strong public policy against executions.” Providing drugs to carry them out, he wrote, “is contrary to the values and policies of this state.” Tong requested details about the company’s activities, expressing concern that the business might “also be providing pentobarbital, or contemplating providing the drug, for use by individual states in their attempts to execute human beings.” Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Joshua Perry, named in the letter as the point of contact for future correspondence, declined to comment.

After John Oliver named Absolute Standards as the BOP’s source, a spokesperson for Tong told CT Insider that the attorney general was reviewing the company but had not launched an investigation. The outlet also reported that state lawmakers are now exploring legislation to ban Connecticut companies from selling lethal injection drugs.

Absolute Standards is known for its flexibility in the scientific industry. “They can pivot pretty easily as far as what the needs are of whatever industries,” said Meredith Millay, director of product management at Emerald Scientific, a company focused on cannabis science that has worked with Absolute Standards for a decade and sells products made by the Connecticut business. “If you need something and you can’t find what you need … they are small enough to where you can put in a special request and get custom standards made.”

Absolute Standards has boasted about the “world class manufacturing” and “internationally recognized quality” of its analytical reference materials and performance evaluation samples, compounds used to calibrate lab equipment and increase the precision of scientific analysis conducted by a wide range of entities. Criscio started the business in 1990, later employing his son and daughter. The company is registered with the DEA to manufacture Schedule II through V drugs, according to documents filed with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection. When asked about Absolute Standards and the API for pentobarbital, the DEA said it “does not comment on specific registrants.”

In recent years, the company netted contracts with the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, contracts and invoices obtained through records requests show. In 2017, for example, the company sold the Interior Department $88,500 worth of analytes in substances such as ethanol and soil. State agencies such as the California State Water Resources Control Board and the New York Office of Cannabis Management list Absolute Standards as one of a handful of vendors approved to conduct testing to ensure the quality of lab results.

Criscio has vehemently denied his company’s role in executions. Last October, The Intercept visited the Absolute Standards office, a small one-story building covered in weathered aluminum siding. When The Intercept inquired about Criscio at the reception desk, a woman said that he was out for the rest of the week. But later in the afternoon, Criscio arrived at the office, wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the NASA logo.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nothing to talk about,” Criscio told The Intercept in the parking lot after being asked whether his company supplied execution drugs. “You’re on private property. If I have to, I’ll call the police. Is that what you want me to do?” He then went inside.

After The Intercept approached another man outside to ask about pentobarbital, Criscio reemerged and called the police, telling the operator, “I have two people on my property refusing to leave, harassing my employees.”

“I’m ready to have a fucking heart attack right now. Get off my fucking property,” he said, growing increasingly agitated. “I do not know what you’re talking about. That’s all I have to say. I’m not gonna say no more.”

The Intercept left a note at an address listed for Arpie, the company’s director. He did not reply and has not answered subsequent phone calls, text messages, or emails.

In early April, after the John Oliver segment, Criscio maintained that his company did not supply drugs for the federal executions.

“Yeah, no, we don’t make that material,” he told The Intercept. “I’m the owner of the company. I’m telling you there’s no comment. Thank you, goodbye.”

This story was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

The post “Little Home Market”: The Connecticut Company Accused of Fueling an Execution Spree appeared first on The Intercept.

When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S.

The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos in an accident at a fertility clinic, heightened the conflict between ideology and electability, already about as high as it could get after June 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization freed the states to snub overwhelming public opinion, enact radical abortion bans — and then lose badly in the midterms. 

But now the ideologues have more than a political problem. They have a moral one too.

When most of Alabama’s fertility clinics suspended operations in fear that dropping a vial might be prosecuted as manslaughter and patients were left anguished in the middle of time-sensitive treatments, the GOP faced the present, palpable harms inflicted on real people by its abstract religious pieties. And these harmed parties were not baby killers. They were among the 1 in 7 women afflicted by infertility, and they were desperate to have babies.

Related

Alabama Court Rules Frozen Embryos Made by IVF Are “Children”

The predicament landed hard. As the national press closed in on the Alabama Legislature, its panicked Republican supermajority hurried through a bill giving full legal and criminal immunity to IVF providers for the death or destruction of embryos. The bill passed the House by a vote of 94 to 6, including most of the chamber’s 27 Democrats, and unanimously in the Senate. Some Democrats objected that the blanket immunity exposed patients to malpractice without recourse, while Republican opponents still wanted protection for the embryos. The GOP’s state PAC defended supporters as casting “a pro-life vote.”

The more radical elements of Alabama’s “pro-life” community did not agree. The American Action Fund posted a petition on Facebook attacking Republican lawmakers who “voted to give immunity to any IVF provider who ‘intentionally causes the death of an unborn child,’” putting quotation marks around a phrase that is not in the statute and pressing for repeal. D.J. Parten, founder of a group that crafted legislation to prosecute self-managed abortion as murder, called the IVF legislation the “immunity for murder” bill. Eric Johnston, president of the Alabama Pro-Life Coalition and author of the state’s abortion ban, told AL.com that he’d contacted the Senate pro tempore to work out the next steps, which sounded like a reversal. “If [embryos] are destroyed,” Johnston said, “there needs to be some repercussions for that.” Then what for IVF? He didn’t say.

And while the Republicans were busy biting each other’s backs, Democratic candidate Marilyn Lands walked away with a special election for a vacant state House seat. Having focused her campaign on abortion rights, she added the threat to IVF. On March 26, she beat her opponent 2 to 1.

The battle moved north to Capitol Hill. Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth introduced a bill to protect “access to assisted reproductive technology, and all medical care surrounding such technology.” A Republican senator blocked the bill because it imperiled embryos, and it died on the floor.

House Republicans released a 2025 budget containing the Life at Conception Act, which would grant full legal rights “from the moment of fertilization.” It had 120 sponsors. The Senate version made an exception for IVF, but the senators couldn’t sway the lower chamber. The Republican National Committee urged candidates to come out strongly for fertility care.

Conflict churned, not just between religious morality and political reality, but also between Republicans crusading to deregulate everything public — from greenhouse gas emissions to payday lenders — and Republicans pouring their hearts and political capital into regulating everything personal, particularly what people do with their bodies.

At least one prominent player tried to split the difference. The fiercely anti-regulation Heritage Foundation released a position paper titled “Why the IVF Industry Must Be Regulated.”

“You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood. … You are not fooling anyone.”

Unsurprisingly, it is a weird document. “The well-being of children, not profit margins, should be the top priority when it comes to IVF and embryonic cryopreservation,” proclaims the writer, senior research associate Emma Waters, sounding like a perfect socialist-feminist. She goes on to decry preimplantation testing for heritable conditions, which disability justice advocates also oppose, and preselection for sex or eye or skin color, which many feminists of color and critics of human genetic engineering condemn. Waters refers to these practices, provided by the majority of U.S. fertility clinics, as “eugenics,” which they are. 

The paper proposes regulations including “true informed consent,” based on full explication of the risks and success rates of the treatment, and the prohibition of embryonic genetic testing and sex selection “in pursuit of the ‘perfect’ child” — regulations common throughout the EU and the U.K.

But if Europe promulgates rules to protect patients and children born through reproductive technologies, the children whose well-being most concerns the Heritage Foundation are the unborn ones. The paper’s first recommendation not-so-obliquely endorses embryonic personhood: “Impose a standard of care in IVF clinics sufficient to prevent the wanton or careless destruction of embryonic human beings.” Waters praises the Alabama judge, whose ruling “reassures parents who rely on IVF that their children will receive the same legal protections as everyone else’s.”

Alas, even a pro-regulation encyclical from the mother church of deregulation did not resolve the GOP’s dilemma. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., put it succinctly: “You cannot support IVF and support fetal personhood laws. They are fundamentally incompatible!” she said. “You are not fooling anyone.”

Aside from the Heritage Foundation, there is another group of pro-lifers who believe they can have it both ways. That is, the practitioners of embryo adoption, a small but growing niche occupying the space where the fertility and adoption industries meet, inside a community populated almost entirely by evangelical Christians. The embryo adoption communities both condone IVF out of compassion for the infertile and are working to liberate, one by one, the treatments’ leftover embryos, which Catholic bioethicist Kent Lasnoski describes as the “frozen generation” and Baptist preacher John Piper calls the “orphaned unborn.”

These agencies match donors who’ve been through IVF and have unused fertilized embryos with would-be parents, most of whom have already tried and failed in multiple rounds of IVF, fostering, and/or traditional child adoption. The agents interview and screen both sides, suggest propitious pairings, and facilitate the delivery and implantation — called transfer — of the thawed frozen embryos. Some programs are all-inclusive, with their own clinics and home study experts; others offer services a la carte and recommend outside providers. Donors are not paid, yet the exchange promises them the satisfaction and security, and perhaps the relief from guilt, of giving their “children” a good home. Recipients get a bespoke baby, selected for genetic health, sex, race, and other characteristics, plus the experience of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and “early bonding.”

But the agents do not view themselves only as individual adoption brokers. They are missionaries: rescue teams searching out “snowflake babies” shivering in cryostorage and bringing them into the warmth and shelter of womb, family, and church. “Just as each snowflake is frozen, unique and a gift from heaven, so are each of our Snowflakes Babies,” explains the Snowflakes Embryo Adoption Program, founded in 1997 by the Christian adoption nonprofit Nightline. “We hope to help each donated embryo grow, develop, and live a full life. In the intricate design of each flake of snow, we find the Creator reflecting the individual human heart.”

And if it doesn’t work, if an embryo dies while thawing or a pregnancy ends in miscarriage — even if a couple never ends up with a child — all is understood as God’s plan. “If God puts it on our heart to adopt a child, we know that one doesn’t always come home,” one would-be mother told the anthropologist Risa Cromer.

In “Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics,” Cromer calls this “embryo saviorism,” whose ultimate aim is to build the material and spiritual infrastructure “to leverage a niche family-making process for realizing the potential for a conservative Christian country.” And not just Christian. The website photo galleries feature healthy, unambiguously gendered children surrounding coupled, unambiguously heterosexual parents (at the National Embryo Donation Center, adopters must be “a genetic male and a genetic female married for at least three years”). And although women of color suffer far higher rates of infertility than their white counterparts, these families are almost all as white as Easter lilies.

Christian embryo adoption appears to be the embodiment of the anti-abortion slogan “Love them both,” mother and child. But the interests of parents and children, or parents and fetuses or embryos, are not always identical — they are sometimes in mortal battle. Nor can the born and the “unborn” have equal rights. “There is no way to add fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses to the Constitution without subtracting women,” says reproductive justice attorney and advocate Lynn Paltrow in the film “Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America.”

The IVF-embryonic personhood debate has taught Republicans that you sometimes have to choose a side.

Embryo adoption grew out of the anti-abortion movement. It found a fortuitous place where the adult’s needs and desires and the embryo’s survival are not at odds. But that does not mean it is neutral when it comes to adult needs and desires that clash with the embryo’s. In the 1990s, embryo adopters joined the National Right to Life Committee in lobbying against stem-cell research because it could result in the destruction of fertilized embryos. They continued to push throughout the 2000 elections and beyond, even as public opinion shifted toward valuing potential cures over potential life. In 2006, a group of “snowflake families” stood beside President George W. Bush when he vetoed a bipartisan bill to restore federal funding to the research. Prominent among the families were John and Marlene Strege and their child Hannah, the first “snowflake baby,” born on New Year’s Eve, 1998.

The Streges are still taking sides. In 2021, the family — identified as Hannah S., “a former IVF frozen embryo,” and John and Marlene S., “adoptive parents of the first ‘adopted’ frozen embryo in America” — filed an amicus brief in Dobbs supporting Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Faster than anyone expected, the Supreme Court’s ruling set the U.S. moving toward a time when cells in petri dishes have more rights than the people whose bodies give them life. And when we get there, not even the hand of God will be able to unlock access to the medical procedures and products that allow millions to exercise their human right to have a baby — or not.

The post Pro-Lifers Are Up Against a Real-Life Crisis appeared first on The Intercept.

Tennessee and Oklahoma are the latest states where Republicans are seeking to criminalize “abortion trafficking,” a felony committed when a person “knowingly or intentionally recruits, harbors, or transports a pregnant minor … to procure an illegal abortion or to obtain an abortifacient” without her parent’s consent.

Oklahoma’s proposed law carries a penalty of two to five years’ imprisonment; Tennessee’s, up to 15 years. In addition to criminal prosecutions, these bills allow civil actions on behalf of the aborted “unborn child.” Some authorities in Texas have prohibited abortion-related travel on the roads in their jurisdictions.

The language of the bills is based on the National Right to Life Committee’s model anti-abortion legislation, developed by James Bopp Jr., the far right’s go-to attorney and the man behind Citizens United. Abortion trafficking is one of the novel offenses Bopp fashioned to prevent the “abortion industry” from circumventing bans using such federally regulated practices as telemedicine and fundamental liberties as the right to travel. But the word was not chosen randomly. “Trafficking” was a propitious choice.

For as long as laws have targeted human trafficking, they have paired forced farm, factory, or domestic labor with sex work, conflating incontrovertible economic exploitation with the presumed moral corruption of prostitution.

The Page Act of 1875, perhaps the first U.S. anti-trafficking statute, aimed to control the “importation” of low-wage “coolies” from China and other “Oriental” countries. It charged authorities with intervening when a worker was tricked or coerced into servitude or lured for “lewd and immoral purposes” — that is, prostitution. The Page Act attracted support from diverse, even mutually antagonistic, constituencies: xenophobes and racists, defenders of American labor, opponents of slavery.

In the 1990s, conservative feminists and their evangelical Christian allies, after losing the battle to outlaw pornography, drew support through the same conflation of unsexy labor trafficking with sensationalized accounts of “sex trafficking.” Like 19th-century prostitution abolitionists, they considered voluntary sex work an oxymoron.

Their efforts have been immensely successful. Under the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act and its subsequent iterations, simply doing sex work — even if not by “force, fraud, or coercion,” as the law defines trafficking — makes a person a trafficking victim. And even though other forms of forced labor are three times more prevalent globally than “forced commercial sexual exploitation,” the U.S. State Department recognizes only two categories of human trafficking: sex trafficking and everything else.

The U.S. criminal justice system has also been captured by the zeal to eliminate sex work, regardless of what the sex workers wish. In New York’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, for instance, women engaged in sex work are arrested and given the Hobson’s choice of social services aimed at their reformation or prosecution and incarceration. Legal scholars Aya Gruber, Amy J. Cohen, and Kate Mogulescu call this “penal welfare.”

In law and popular discourse, “trafficking” means sex work and sex work means exploitation — whether you’re talking about slavery under armed guard, survival sex by runaway teens, or escort services advertised online by self-employed adults.

“Abortion trafficking” resonates with all these insinuations of deceit, coercion, violence, and exploitation. The language of the new state bills echoes the White-Slave Traffic Act, or Mann Act, of 1910: “a person who shall knowingly transport … a woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery”; “aid or assist”; “procure or obtain.”

Like the woman or girl of the Mann Act or the arrested sex worker in New York, the pregnant minor in the imagery of abortion trafficking is passively moved around to be harmed by others — needless to say, against her will. Abortion opponents have long contended that no one would have an abortion if not crushed by poverty, forced by an abusive boyfriend or parent, or misled by feminists and profiteering abortionists. Like prostitution in the eyes of its abolitionists, there is no such thing as a voluntary abortion to a “pro-lifer.”

As for the sex that led to the minor’s pregnancy, it too is presumed to be coerced. Statutory rape law defines the minor as someone too young to make a rational decision to act on her desire — or even to experience real desire. The age of consent for sex is 18 in Tennessee; in Oklahoma it is 16.

The subject’s passivity and inability to know her own mind are inscribed in the new bills in other ways as well. Along with other relatives of the “unborn child,” the pregnant minor may seek civil damages for the fetus’s “wrongful death.” Yet her stated consent to be given an abortion is irrelevant: It does not exculpate the perpetrator.

“Abortion trafficking” is a crime premised on the idea that any young person who has sex, gets pregnant, and seeks an abortion is a victim. But it is not only the antis who deploy the abortion-seeker’s victimhood to draw sympathy and support.

A research letter published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine calls attention to the plight of pregnant rape survivors in red states. “In the 14 states that implemented total abortion bans following the Dobbs decision, we estimated that 519,981 completed rapes were associated with 64,565 pregnancies during the 4 to 18 months that bans were in effect,” write the authors, a group of physicians and public health scholars. Nine of the state abortion bans have no exception for rape. Those that do require that the victim report the assault to the police, which often doesn’t happen.

The number of rapes is extrapolated from data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. The former two instruments survey people about their experiences of sexual violence, whether reported or not. The FBI uses only incidents reported to law enforcement.

The statistics presented in JAMA are horrific. They would be horrific even if the researchers were off by a long shot. In fact, they might be. Samuel Dickman, a doctor at Planned Parenthood Montana and the study’s lead author, told the Dallas Morning News that the numbers were “shockingly high.” A co-author said she was “surprised by the very high numbers.” When scientists are shocked by their results, there might be something wrong with the results.

Quantifying sexual assault is a vexing project. Criminal statutes define the same behavior differently, and people — both offenders and victims — define behavior differently from statute and from each other. Not everything illegal is harmful (like abortion in red states), and not everything harmful (poverty, hunger) is illegal.

These variations show up in the widely divergent BJS and CDC statistics. Estimates from the BJS victims surveys counted 162,940 victims of rape or sexual assault in 2016 and 208,960 in 2017. In comparison, the CDC 2016-17 survey reported that 2.9 million women and 340,000 men had been subject to rape or attempted rape in the previous 12 months.

It boils down to what you call rape. The CDC includes in its rape statistics all incidents of “forced and/or drug-facilitated or alcohol-facilitated penetration.” The BJS does not include the drug- or alcohol-facilitated part. The abortion-ban researchers reached their figure of 519,981 rapes over four to 18 months in 14 states using the CDC’s broader definition, “which adheres more closely to current legal (and publicly accepted) definitions,” they claimed.

But the CDC’s definition is not universally accepted. In 2014, when the agency reported that 1 in 5 women had been raped in their lifetimes, critics homed in on the question that yielded the estimate: How many times had the respondents been vaginally penetrated while “drunk, high, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent?” So was “‘unable to consent’ just one of several situations in which the respondent had had vaginal intercourse,” asked Cathy Young in Time; were those situations lumped in with the times the respondent was drunk or high and had sex, as people frequently do? Where had each respondent drawn the line, Young asked, between being high enough to be incapacitated and incapacitated enough to meet the legal definition of rape?

The distortions yielded by the imprecise question are not trivial. “Incapacitated rapes” comprised nearly two-thirds of the previous-year assaults in the CDC’s findings.

My point is not to reanalyze the rape-related pregnancy study’s statistical analysis. I’m not a statistician, and this is a research letter, which is to a peer-reviewed journal article what a book review is to a book. It doesn’t thrill me that a demonstration of the cruelty of abortion bans may arouse doubt. Credibility is critical.

But more than the numbers themselves, what’s troubling is a methodology that counts people as victims who may not consider themselves victimized and calls acts coercive that may be consensual.

Just as the abortion trafficking bills do.

Naming a victim is a time-honored tactic of political speech: Inspire compassion or outrage for the victim, then present your rescue plan. Here, the pregnant person is a victim if she’s abducted to a clinic where her unborn baby will be “ripped from her womb,” or if she has been raped and now is suffering the additional pain of carrying the rapist’s fetus.

Reproductive coercion — sabotaging birth control, causing an unwanted pregnancy, or controlling its outcome — is not uncommon in abusive heterosexual relationships. But it is exceedingly rare for a man to force a woman to have an abortion; more likely, he’ll try to stop her. Forced abortion by people other than the fetus’s father no doubt also exists, but as a major phenomenon, it is a fantasy of the anti-abortion movement. As for rape, 1 to 5 percent of women who seek abortions do so because they became pregnant through sexual assault.

Of course, a rape survivor should receive compassionate care and the option of a morning-after pill or an abortion. But both anti-trafficking bills and an argument for reproductive rights that foregrounds rape and possibly inflates its incidence contribute to what the scholar Janet Hadley called the “awfulization of abortion.” Both associate the termination of a pregnancy with secrecy, shame, crime, and trauma. With victimization.

A person who is raped is a victim. An abortion-seeker is not a victim. She is a pregnant person who has decided not to have a baby — a normal problem of reproductive life whose solution should be safe, affordable, and simple. Abortion is traumatic only if it is made to be.

The post An Abortion-Seeker Is Not a Victim appeared first on The Intercept.

As Smith’s execution began that evening in November 2022, the building shook as Rieber and his neighbors banged on the steel doors of their cells, a tradition meant to show solidarity. It usually took a while for news of an execution’s outcome to reach death row. Sometimes that came in the form of watching a body being loaded into a coroner’s vehicle. Smith, however, left the death chamber alive. Officials had called off his execution.

“I was blown away,” Rieber told The Intercept in a telephone interview. The celebration that erupted on death row soon turned to anger as they learned that executioners had stuck Smith with needles for two hours as they tried, and failed, to establish IV access to deliver lethal drugs. Smith was the second person in Alabama that year, and the third in four years, to survive execution because of problems finding a vein. Smith is “universally loved” on death row, Rieber said, and his neighbors were upset about what happened. “There was a lot of anger, a lot of unrest, a lot of tension. And the tension is building again.”

Alabama is slated to execute Smith on January 25. This time, the state is planning to suffocate him with nitrogen gas, an untested method that has never been used in an execution. Experts retained by Smith’s lawyers have warned that Alabama’s protocol could cause Smith to suffer a stroke, choke to death on vomit, or be left in a vegetative state.

The Alabama Department of Corrections, or ADOC, is planning to administer the gas through a hose hooked up to a respirator mask, but the state has kept many of the specifics a secret. “Within seconds, Smith will have no available oxygen to breathe inside the mask,” a court document filed last month by the office of Attorney General Steve Marshall stated. “That will render him unconscious and cause death.”

“Alabama has chosen to pick somebody they just tortured to use as a guinea pig for a brand-new method.”

In the face of the unknown, the state has offered little scientific evidence or expertise to assuage concerns, primarily relying on internal tests to ensure the system will work as planned. Smith’s lawyers, who are challenging the execution method, have accused the department of flouting safety guidelines and ignoring warnings from an expert in assisted suicide about the unreliability of the equipment they intend to use. In depositions, ADOC officials have acknowledged foregoing medical advice that could protect against problems arising during the execution.

Rieber likened Smith’s execution to a science experiment. “Alabama has chosen to pick somebody they just tortured to use as a guinea pig for a brand-new method because the one they used before didn’t work,” he said.

Smith was sentenced to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire plot. Charles Sennett, a minister in the Church of Christ, recruited Smith and John Forrest Parker to kill his wife, Elizabeth, at their home in northwestern Alabama. The pair were paid $900 each, court documents show. Sennett died by suicide a week after the killing. Parker was sentenced to death and executed in 2010.

Smith was convicted of capital murder in 1989, but the courts ordered that his case be retried because the prosecution had illegally struck Black jurors. At his second trial, in 1996, the jury voted 11-1 to spare Smith’s life and sentence him to life without parole. Because judicial override was legal in Alabama until 2017, however, the judge was able to quash the jury’s recommendation and sentence him to death.

Alabama’s first attempt to carry out Smith’s death sentence was part of a string of botched executions in the state. Executioners jabbed needles in Smith’s arms and hands, according to a filing by his lawyers, then tilted the gurney in an “inverse crucifixion position.” They injected him with an “unknown substance” believed to be a sedative or anesthetic, the lawyers wrote, arguing that the execution subjected Smith to cruel and unusual punishment. The state denied placing Smith in this position or administering a sedative, which would run afoul of official policy. An executioner proceeded to use a large needle to try to establish IV access in Smith’s collarbone. The experience left Smith with “severe physical pain and emotional trauma,” he wrote in an affidavit.

Alabama lawmakers authorized nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method in 2018 after legal challenges alleging that condemned people had remained awake during painful lethal injections held up the state’s ability to carry out death sentences. The move followed the passage of similar bills in Oklahoma and Mississippi. Former Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian asked his legislature to adopt the method after watching the BBC documentary “How to Kill a Human Being,” which followed a British Parliament member-turned-journalist in his search for the perfect execution method. “It’s foolproof,” Christian said of nitrogen hypoxia.

The method works by depriving the brain of oxygen and replacing it with nitrogen, an odorless gas that makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere but is lethal when inhaled on its own. Nitrogen poisoning has killed nearly 100 people since 1992 in accidents at industrial plants, laboratories, and medical facilities. Since introducing nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, however, neither Oklahoma nor Mississippi has come up with a way to carry it out. Oklahoma has reverted to lethal injection.

ADOC released a heavily redacted protocol last summer that detailed how it would carry out Smith’s execution.

The execution team will strap the mask on Smith’s face and monitor his oxygen levels with a pulse oximeter. Smith will pray and deliver his final statement with the mask on, according to the protocol. Officials then plan to administer nitrogen gas for either 15 minutes or five minutes after a flat line shows that Smith’s heart has stopped beating.

Not much is known about the architects of ADOC’s plans. Officials have been tight-lipped about the manufacturer of the system, making it difficult to evaluate its efficacy. They have also kept the nitrogen supplier a secret, although the gas is widely available for purchase. The state has entered into publicly available contracts with just two companies related to the use of nitrogen gas, and both have denied creating the protocol.

In 2019, officials hired FDR Safety, a workplace safety consultancy in Tennessee, to “research process methods,” “conduct task-based risk assessment,” “develop job instructions including safety requirements,” and “conduct hazard communication training.” The company terminated its contract in 2022 after pressure from anti-death penalty activists. Alabama refused to disclose its contract with FDR Safety or any reports the company drafted. Chief Operating Officer Steve Hawkins has maintained that his employees did not work on the execution protocol.

“The work that FDR Safety performed was limited to protecting the health and safety of the guards who work for the Alabama Department of Corrections,” Hawkins said in a statement at the time. “It was in no way associated directly with the protocols used to administer capital punishment.

Officials also tapped Daniel Buffington, a Florida pharmacist and founder of the drug consulting firm Clinical Pharmacology Services, to consult on nitrogen gas. An investigation we conducted for ProPublica found that Buffington made at least $354,000 testifying in favor of states’ lethal injection protocols between 2015 and 2023 and that his testimony “seemed to be exaggerating or misrepresenting the scope of what he could do as a licensed pharmacist.” (Buffington contested the investigation’s findings.)

In a 2022 interview, Buffington told us that he was asked by Alabama to answer questions “for a very brief period of time … about the pharmacology of the substances.” He said he did not perform any work on the state’s protocol.

The attorney general’s office and ADOC did not respond to questions from The Intercept about the development of the execution protocol.

As director of the assisted suicide organization Exit International, retired physician Philip Nitschke has spent more than two decades developing expertise in elective death procedures via lethal drugs, poisons, and gases like nitrogen, earning him the moniker “Dr. Death.”

Nitschke recently developed a euthanasia pod, an enclosed device that fills with nitrogen with the push of a button. But the way Alabama planned to conduct its nitrogen executions alarmed him. His work in the assisted suicide movement taught him that masks were ineffective, he said, because they failed to protect against leaks that could introduce outside oxygen. It was his opinion that the execution method would not bring about a “peaceful, reliable death.”

Facial hair could break the mask’s seal, Nitschke said, prolonging the process of dying even when people were fully cooperative. In other instances, facial muscles relaxed once unconsciousness kicked in, loosening the mask. In Alabama, Nitschke warned, these problems could prohibit enough nitrogen from reaching Smith and leave him in a vegetative state with permanent brain damage.

“Problems of mask fit, facial hair, and dynamic changes associated with alteration of the user’s facial and or muscle tone (as consciousness is lost or the person speaks) have been found to be unsolvable,” Nitschke, whom Smith’s team retained as an expert witness, wrote in a November court declaration. “The smallest air leak greatly increases the time to loss of consciousness and uncertainty regarding the outcome.”

Officials have dismissed those concerns. ADOC Commissioner John Hamm testified in a December deposition that he wasn’t aware that the mask needed to be airtight, a claim that Smith’s lawyers say contradicts the user manual.

Another doctor retained by Smith’s legal team warned that oxygen leaking into the mask could cause Smith to suffer a stroke or be left brain dead, which the state rejected as speculative. The doctor also said that Smith might vomit inside the mask, causing him to die by choking. Hamm said that his team considered that possibility but did not seek medical advice to mitigate the risk and will not intervene if Smith vomits once nitrogen starts flowing.

“If the person vomits while the nitrogen is engaged, we know that we cannot remove that mask,” ADOC Regional Director Cynthia Stewart confirmed in a December deposition.

“So you just let them sit there with the vomit in the mask?” Smith’s lawyer asked.

“They won’t know,” she replied. “They will be unconscious and probably deceased.”

Public documents show that officials have relied on state employees to conduct tests to ensure the protocol will work as intended.

After Nitschke laid out his initial concerns about Alabama’s protocol, Stewart wrote in an affidavit that she had “observed multiple persons wearing the mask with supplied breathing air, and none have reported any problems breathing.” She added, “I have also worn the mask under these conditions, and I was able to breathe comfortably.”

But the circumstances Stewart described would be drastically different than those during an execution, Smith’s lawyers argued, because the employees were breathing oxygen rather than nitrogen and were not experiencing the feelings associated with being executed. “Defendants’ evidence amounts to nothing more than their assurances that nothing will go wrong,” they wrote.

In an experiment conducted in August, ADOC officials placed the mask on top of sheets and a towel, according to a brief submitted by Smith’s legal team in December. An oxygen monitor was positioned beneath the mask to “document how quickly the oxygen decreased in the mask after the introduction of nitrogen,” a relevant metric to determine how quickly someone might become unconscious.

Dr. Joseph Antognini, a retired anesthesiologist who regularly testifies on behalf of states defending new execution methods, observed this demonstration and evaluated the nitrogen system at Holman. Antognini “did not find any issues related to how the air and nitrogen will be delivered,” Smith’s lawyers wrote, but he had limited experience administering gasses through a mask and did not evaluate how the mask would fit on Smith.

“I think that the trials effectively show very little at all, and I wouldn’t be drawing too much comfort from it.”

Nitschke said his fears about Alabama’s new method were confirmed when Smith’s lawyers invited him to Holman last month to evaluate the system for himself.

He was given the chance to replicate Smith’s experience up until the introduction of nitrogen. After climbing onto the execution gurney and having the mask strapped onto his head, it filled with oxygen, he told The Intercept. Nitschke discovered that by simply straining his jaw, he could displace the mask’s straps, a feature he said could introduce an oxygen leak.

Nitschke also said he was shown about a half dozen videos of tests that Alabama had conducted on the mask. He remained unconvinced that the execution would proceed as planned.

“I think that the trials effectively show very little at all, and I wouldn’t be drawing too much comfort from it,” he said. Referring to state officials, he added, “I’m surprised that they provide them with much comfort.”

Smith’s lawyers are continuing to challenge the state’s use of nitrogen hypoxia in the courts. Last week, they filed an appeal with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a lower court judge rejected Smith’s claims that he had been unfairly singled out for execution and the method violated his constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Meanwhile, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay to review whether it’s constitutional for officials to try to execute Smith twice. “It will be only the second time in U.S. history that a state follows through with a second execution attempt after a previous, failed attempt,” the lawyers wrote.

Smith’s legal team is also urging Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to halt Smith’s execution because of proposed legislation that would give people sentenced to death by judicial override a chance at resentencing. As governor, Ivey has the power to grant Smith clemency. Since taking office in 2017, however, she has overseen 13 executions and rejected all clemency applications submitted by people on death row, including Smith’s.

In an emailed statement to The Intercept on Monday, Ivey said that the current law on judicial override “honors the promises made to the family members of capital murder victims who have long waited for closure and justice.” She was optimistic about Alabama becoming the first state to carry out an execution with nitrogen. “This method has been thoroughly vetted,” she said. “I am confident we are ready to move forward.”

Smith has been nauseous and vomiting, according to a medical report filed by his lawyers. Doctors have prescribed him an anti-nausea medication. A judge on Monday refused to consider how that would weigh on his execution.

If the courts greenlight Smith’s execution, Smith’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, will be present in the execution chamber. Hood invited the governor to join him, he said, but has not received a response.

Rieber plans to do what he always does. He’ll join others on death row in beating on the doors around 6 p.m., then try not to pay attention to the clock. It’s customary for people scheduled for execution to give away their belongings. Smith, an artist, gave Rieber two paintings. One, of a red betta fish, Smith painted recently. The other, of puppies, Smith made in the 1990s, when the two men first became friends. The paintings hang opposite one another in Rieber’s cell, an arrangement he hopes will protect them from fading in the sun.

Rieber knows his opinion of Alabama’s turn to nitrogen gas might ring hollow because he’s on death row for killing someone himself. But he shared it anyway. “Every time there’s a change in method, it’s always supposed to be a more humane method,” he said. “We’re waiting for people to understand that it’s not the method that’s humane or inhumane. It’s the killing of other citizens.”

“There’s not a method they can come up with that’s going to make people happy and content with killing.”

This story was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

The post Alabama Plans to Carry Out the First Execution Using Nitrogen Gas. A Lot Could Go Wrong. appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the Supreme Court demolished the right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last June, the GOP has been trying to douse the fury of reproductive justice defenders and dam the torrent of their victories at the polls.

They’ve been failing.

At first, they banked their hopes on changing the subject, from the pesky question of women’s existential equality to the rising prices of gas and groceries. That hopey-changey stuff did not work out for them in the 2022 midterms. After that, Republicans turned to election interference, trying to subvert reproductive freedom initiatives by making it harder to amend state constitutions. In both Ohio and Arkansas, that tactic lost big.

Where they couldn’t stand in the way of steamrolling support for a pro-abortion measure, they returned to a time-honored tactic: lying — replacing the texts of proposed constitutional amendments on the ballots with their own, baldly inaccurate summaries. The ruse didn’t stop Ohio voters from enshrining abortion rights in their constitution by healthy margins this week. Missouri’s attorney general is trying the same trick in anticipation of a 2024 initiative. But advocates are fighting back, and he looks weak.

So, after 18 months of watching its take-no-prisoners politics repudiated at the polls, the anti-abortion movement has adopted a new look: “moderation.” The centerpiece of this strategy is a “limit” on terminations after 15 weeks’ gestation, which proponents describe as “reasonable” and “commonsense.”

The first test of anti-abortion neo-moderation was in Virginia this week. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned hard for his party members, leading his pitch with a “15-week bill.” His star candidate — and perhaps the most persuasive propagandist of this approach, after presidential contender Nikki Haley — was three-term state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant. “Abortion should remain legal up to 15 weeks. After 15 weeks there should be reasonable exceptions, for rape, incest, life of the mother, and severe fetal anomalies,” said the OB-GYN and mom in a campaign ad. Claiming (falsely) that her state “allows for abortion up to the moment of birth,” she called current policy “unnecessary, extreme, and heartbreaking.” The Washington Post characterized Dunnavant’s approach as “a nuanced stance on a polarizing topic.” But, it turned out, not a convincing one.

Youngkin’s goal was to flip the Democrat-controlled Senate and, with an all-red statehouse, pass a conservative agenda that would set him up as Donald Trump’s 2028 heir apparent. Instead, the lower house flipped blue, and the Dems held the Senate — thanks, in part, to Dunnavant’s loss. In a term-limited seat, Youngkin is a lame duck. And neo-moderation took a hit.

Despite the setback in Virginia, the GOP is unlikely to ditch this strategy. National-level candidates are adopting it, following the lead of the influential Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, whose president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, has vowed that SBA will “oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections.”

In the second Republican presidential primary debate, in September, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed the 15-week federal limit. In the third, on November 8, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott did too. Haley has said she’d sign one but has also hedged, citing the unlikelihood of such a bill getting through Congress. In the debate she espoused, as usual, “consensus.” The next day, one New York Times commentator called her “sensible and realistic on abortion.” Another thought Haley’s stance would “connect with both primary and swing voters.”

Of course, not everyone in the movement is on board. Abortion abolitionists such as Students for Life of America and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul will accept nothing less than constitutional rights for every fertilized egg. National Right to Life Committee President Carol Tobias has called the 15-week limit a “mistake,” because it would permit most abortions, which occur before that time. 

Given the sensitivities of the anti-abortion base, it’s not surprising that many candidates are remaining as vague as possible. On ABC News, for instance, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., spoke of a “middle ground,” which she defined as “some sort of gestational limits, not at nine months but somewhere in the middle.”

Against this thrust from the right, the left has not yet parried strategically. So far two responses have dominated. One is simply to assert that 15 weeks is not a limit or a standard. “Now they’re pushing for a 15-week ‘standard’ on abortion — which, to be clear, would be a ban,” wrote Jessica Valenti in the New York Times. “A ban is a ban,” said Schuyler VanValkenburg, Dunnavant’s Democratic opponent in Virginia, “and she’s proposing a ban.”

The other is to call the 15-week proposals undemocratic, because Americans show high levels of support for abortion in all or most cases. In an editorial condemning a North Carolina law shortening the period of legal abortion from 20 weeks’ gestation to 12, the Charlotte Observer referred to polls finding majority support in the state for the rights the old law protected. The ban’s partisans call it “mainstream,” said the Observer, but it “is anything but.”

These arguments have some strengths. Indeed, a 15-week limit does ban abortions after 15 weeks, which are now legal, for instance, in Virginia. A federal 15-week limit would slash abortion rights in the 24 states that have either left legal abortion in place or succeeded in protecting or expanding those rights. In another interview, VanValkenburg clarified: “If something’s legal and then it becomes illegal, it’s a ban.”

Majorities do support abortion in all or most cases, and that support has reached record highs since Dobbs, including in red states. But here’s the rub: The “most cases” that two-thirds of Americans support fall in the first trimester — before 12 weeks. Might this squishy pro-choice bloc look at a federal 15-week limit as a step in the right direction — a law protecting some abortion rights, when we’ve never had a federal law explicitly protecting any? 

Denying America’s nuanced — and yes, moderate — views on abortion does not magically make them more pro-abortion. Calling a law that doesn’t ban all abortions a ban is not effective argument. Facing a suddenly warm and fuzzy-looking opponent, how should defenders of reproductive justice proceed?

Seize the enemy’s most reliable weapon: fear.

What’s moved voters is not the exhortations of our side but the viciousness of theirs.

The purpose of moderation is to calm. If total bans, election interference, and transparent lies are fire, the 15-week limit is aloe. If you can’t win the other side over, you can soothe the middle into inaction. With electoral margins so slim, you don’t need many middle-of-the-roaders to roll over and go back to sleep on Election Day.

But if moderation calms, fear mobilizes. In fact, what’s moved voters thus far is not the exhortations of our side but the viciousness of theirs. Republicans have always been better at deploying fear than Democrats. The joke on them is that Americans have been pushed, trembling in fear, to the left.

Our job is to wake up the sleepy middle by scaring the bejesus out of them.

The first task is to disarm the disarming: expose the currently moderate as only temporarily moderate.

Dunnavant has lovely bedside manner. But her record belies the sweetness. NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia gave her 0 percent ratings in her first two terms, 25 percent in the third, and 17 percent in 2022. If she’d won, there’s no knowing what she’d have supported.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America is leading the charge on 15 weeks. But it is patently speaking to this moment. Its website declares that it “exists to end abortion” and that “every human life begins at conception.” Where does a 15-week limit fit in that vision? The organization’s dishonesty and expediency will attract and encourage more dishonesty and expediency. Case in point: Ron DeSantis. A month before he signed onto SBA’s pledge, he averred that abortion policy should be left to the states. To cover his bases, he signed two different bans in Florida: in April, six weeks; in September, 15.

Another peril to publicize is the one blowing from Washington. If the neo-moderates pull in enough middle-of-the-road voters in national elections, the gusts will build to a Category 5 hurricane. Not least of the coming destruction: A Republican Senate and White House will finish filling the federal bench with extreme right-wing judges, who hold lifetime appointments.

Anti-abortion activists, including many of these judges, never intended to stop at states’ rights to decide on abortion. Federalism was only a way station in the quest for the true grail, a nationwide ban superseding all state legal frameworks. Hence, the challenge in Texas federal courts to the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was the first brick in an edifice of precedent that could uphold the federal criminalization of abortion. If the court hears the FDA case, a ruling in the challengers’ favor might be the next.

Remember that the subject of Dobbs was Mississippi’s 15-week ban. But Mississippi was not defending a 15-week ban. Two weeks after the ruling freed it to do so, the state criminalized all abortion.

These arguments are mostly rational. They’re meant to invoke fear by unmasking the truth, exposing the pussycat’s claws. The left trusts reason more than emotion; the abortion rights movement has used facts to counter the other side’s lies, even as facts lose their persuasive potency. Truth is still good political discourse. But politics are 90 percent emotional.

The right’s advantage in stirring political emotion is the willingness to lie. When there’s not enough to fear (or the wrong things are fearsome, like the climate crisis), the right invents monsters: the Mexican rapist, the woke gender ideologue or critical race theorist, the abortion profiteer. The beauty of an imaginary opponent is that it can morph and multiply to fulfill any brief. 

Many on the left consider the political use of fear to be intrinsically dishonest and generative only of division and violence. They see instrumentalizing fear as fearmongering, the antithesis of progressive values, including the value of truth. But right now, both truth and fear are on our side. In case you haven’t noticed, reality is terrifying.

The most terrible of realities — the one that has driven millions to the polls to vote to protect reproductive rights — is the permanent loss of bodily freedom. And that is the post-Roe endgame: the enshrinement of fetal personhood, which is the denial of the personhood of already born pregnant people.

If bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, it is nonnegotiable.

Roe had its flaws, starting with the wobbly foundation on privacy rather than freedom. But the ruling changed the status of the pregnant and potentially pregnant in more than one monumental way. “While we conventionally think of Roe as the decision that defined the constitutional right to not be pregnant, it also delineated — and was in fact the first articulation of — rights a woman has while pregnant,” wrote Lynn Paltrow, Lisa Harris, and Mary Faith Marshall in the American Journal of Bioethics. That lasted 50 years.

In a short 18 months, their predictions about looming abortion bans have come hideously true: “Anyone who becomes pregnant … will become newly vulnerable to legal surveillance, civil detentions, forced interventions, and criminal prosecution.” As they warned, the red states have created “a new class of persons for whom fundamental constitutional rights don’t apply.”

Dobbs turned 25 million women of reproductive age into second-class citizens. But coast-to-coast criminalization will make of every uterus-bearing person what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called a “margizen,” a nominally legal citizen of a nation-state, who lives both inside society and outside it. The margizen — the prisoner, the homeless person, the migrant — exists in a “state of exception,” their rights suspended until such time as full social and legal citizenship can be attained. It may never be attained.

Those who have been denied abortions, particularly when they or their fetuses are sick or dying, already have felt themselves slip from the inside to the outside. Those who live within the historical legacies of unfreedom and exclusion have felt it before, and the Dobbs decision reanimates that feeling. If you have not been there yet, imagining yourself or your daughter or partner in that place should be enough to displace comfort with legitimate anxiety. Enough to wake the complacent.

Fifteen weeks is not a step in the right direction. It is a step rightward, and downward. But even to be drawn into haggling over six weeks or 15, 26, or 40 sets us plunging. If bodily autonomy is a fundamental right, it is nonnegotiable. No compromise can be reached. From 15 weeks the distance down is immeasurable, and of that we should all be very afraid.

The post To Defeat Anti-Abortion “Moderation,” Mobilize Fear appeared first on The Intercept.

William Nordhaus, who turned 82 this year, was the first economist in our time to attempt to quantify the cost of climate change. His climate-modeling wizardry, which won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018, has made him one of the world’s most consequential thinkers. His ideas have been adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, global risk managers, the financial services industry, and universities worldwide that teach climate economics. Nordhaus’s work literally could affect the lives of billions of people. This is because his quantification of the immediate costs of climate action — as balanced against the long-term economic harms of not acting — is the basis of key proposals to mitigate carbon emissions. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of nations and a sizable portion of humanity depends on whether his projections are correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assumed Nordhaus is to be trusted. The integrated assessment models used at the IPCC are based on Nordhausian visions of adaptation to warming that only marginally reduces global gross domestic product. If future GDP is barely affected by rising temperatures, there’s less incentive for world governments to act now to reduce emissions.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work. Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist and professor of economics at Columbia University, told me recently that Nordhaus’s projections are “wildly wrong.” Stiglitz singled out as especially bizarre the idea that optimization of the world economy would occur at 3.5 C warming, which physical scientists say would produce global chaos and a kind of climate genocide in the poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In a journal article published last year, Stiglitz and co-authors Nicholas Stern and Charlotte Taylor, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, declared that Nordhausian integrated assessment models are “inadequate to capture deep uncertainty and extreme risk.” They fail to incorporate “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment.”

Climate change is one of the instances, Stiglitz and Stern told me in an email, in which “it is generally agreed there is extreme risk — we know there are some really extreme events that could occur — and we know we cannot pretend (i.e., act as if) we know the probabilities. Nordhaus’s work doesn’t appropriately take into account either extreme risk or deep uncertainty.”

In other words, the economist who has been embraced as a guiding light by the global institution tasked with shepherding humanity through the climate crisis, who has been awarded a Nobel for climate costing, who is widely feted as the doyen of his field, doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Among most scientists, it’s lunacy to discuss optimization of anything anywhere when the globe hits even 2 C warming. Climate researchers Yangyang Xu and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, in a widely cited 2017 paper, defined 1.5 C warming as “dangerous” and 3 C or greater as “catastrophic,” while above 5 C was “beyond catastrophic,” with consequences that include “existential threats.” The late Will Steffen, a pioneering Earth systems thinker, warned alongside many of his colleagues that 2 C was a critical marker. At 2 C warming, we could “activate other tipping elements in a domino-like cascade that could take the Earth system to even higher temperatures.” Such “tipping cascades” could lead quickly to “conditions that would be inhospitable to current human societies,” a scenario known as hothouse Earth.

But the path to hothouse Earth will be long and tortured. When I interviewed him in 2021, Steffen, who died last January at age 75, was concerned about “near-term collapse” of the global food system. Drought and heat have already reduced global cereal production by as much as 10 percent in recent years, according to Steffen. “Food shocks are likely to get much worse,” he wrote in a 2019 piece co-authored with Aled Jones, director of the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. “The risk of multi-breadbasket failure is increasing, and rises much faster beyond 1.5 C of global heating. … Such shocks pose grave threats — rocketing food prices, civil unrest, major financial losses, starvation, and death.” 

In a 2022 report titled “Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios,” 11 leading Earth systems and climate scientists, Steffen among them, concluded there is “ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic … at even modest levels of warming.” According to the report:

Climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. … It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

What these scientists are describing is global civilizational collapse, possibly in the lifetime of a young or even middle-aged reader of this article. 

According to the “Climate Endgame” report, the current trajectory of carbon emissions puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 C and 3.9 C by 2100. This is a horrific prospect. Earth systems analysts tell us that habitable and cultivable land in a 3 C to 4 C warming regime would be so reduced and ecosystem services so battered that the deaths of billions of people could occur in the next eight decades or less.

Terrible numbers get thrown around. But scientists mean what they say. Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and Uppsala University in Sweden, asserts that “something like 10 percent of the planet’s population — around half a billion people — will survive if global temperatures rise by 4 C.” He notes, with a modicum of hopefulness, that we “will not make all human beings extinct as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 C.”

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century. Writing in the Economic Journal, Stern set Nordhaus straight in the harshest terms: “We could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world,” he wrote. “It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.”

In an email to The Intercept, Nordhaus characterized his colleagues’ critiques as “a distorted and inaccurate description of the work and my views. I have long supported carbon pricing and climate-focused [research and development], which are key to slowing climate change. The proposals in my writings have pointed to targets that are FAR more ambitious than current policies.” He declined to elaborate on any distortions or inaccuracies.

To understand the gap between climate scientists and climate economists, one must first understand that most economists — the folks we call mainstream or neoclassical economists — have little knowledge of or interest in how things really work on planet Earth. The problem of their ecological benightedness starts as a matter of training at university, where a typical undergraduate course in economics prepares students for a lifetime of abject ignorance about the complex underpinnings of the thing called the “market.”

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a circular flow diagram that shows “households” and “firms” exchanging money and goods. This is called the market. Households are the owners of land, labor, and capital, which they sell to firms for the manufacture of goods. Households then buy the goods, enriching firms, which allows the firms to buy more land, labor, and capital, enriching households. The quantity in the flow diagram, in ideal circumstances, is ever expanding: The profits of firms grow and so does the income of households.

A simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

“I taught that foolish little diagram to undergraduates at Louisiana State University for 30 years,” the late Herman Daly, one of the 20th century’s great dissenters from standard economics, told me in an interview before his death at age 84 last year. “I thought it was just great. I was well beyond a Ph.D. before it came crashing in on my head that this is a very bad paradigm.”

In the 1970s, working at the University of Maryland, Daly pioneered the field of ecological economics, which models the biophysical reality that delimits all economies. “The human economy,” wrote Daly, “is a fully contained wholly dependent growing subsystem of the non-growing ecosphere” — a commonsense observation that amounted to heresy in mainstream economics. Daly emphasized that the economy depends on nonrenewable resources that are always subject to depletion and a functioning biosphere whose limits need to be respected. His most important contribution to the literature of this renegade economics was his famous (in some circles, infamous) “steady state” model that accounts for biophysical limits to growth. Daly paid the price of heterodoxy. His fellow economists declared him an apostate.

E.F. Schumacher arrived at similar conclusions about mainstream economics in his 1973 book “Small Is Beautiful,” which became a bestseller. “It is inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on the natural world,” Schumacher wrote, the emphasis his. Economics, said Schumacher, only touches the “surface of society.” It has no capacity to probe the depths of the systemic interactions between civilization and the planet. Faced with the “pressing problems of the times” — the negative environmental effects of growth — economics acts “as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.”

Purely quantitative analysis is the amphetamine of the mainstream economist. The steady dosing keeps his pencil sharp and his eyes blind. It has not gone unnoticed that graduate schools produce a kind of ingenious hollowness in economists who race to the finish on the schools’ assembly line. As early as 1991, a report from a commission on “graduate education in economics” warned that the university system in the United States was churning out “too many idiot savants,” economists “skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues” — unable, that is, to look into the real nature of things.

By what mathemagical sorcery has Nordhaus, celebrated member of the Ivy League elite, arrived at projections that are so out of line with those of climate scientists?

The answer is in something called DICE, the mother of integrated assessment models for climate costing. It stands for dynamic integrated climate-economy. Nordhaus formulated DICE for the first time in 1992 and updated it most recently last year.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks. Earth systems scientists will tell you that to assume exogenously determined growth is the height of hubristic arrogance. By contrast, Nordhaus assures us in his DICE model that growth continues like a cruising Cadillac on the California coast with an occasional pothole. But the reality is rainstorms, mudslides, earthquakes, and other drivers on the road.

This blithe presumption of constant growth in a climate-damaged future is the first of Nordhaus’s errors, as Stern and Stiglitz point out. “Nordhaus’s model doesn’t fully take into account the fact that if we don’t do more to avert climate change, climate change will affect growth rates,” they told me in an email. “We will have to spend more and more repairing damage, leaving us less and less to spend on growth-enhancing investments.” And, they add, some outcomes arising from weak climate action could profoundly alter what is possible in terms of economic activity. Extreme heat, submergence, desertification, hurricanes, and so on: Such weather events and broad climatic shifts could render large areas of the world low productivity, unproductive, or uninhabitable.

The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes. Among the properties of a quadratic is that it permits no discontinuities; there are no points at which the relationship implied by the function breaks down. But smooth functions chart smooth progressions, and climate change will be anything but smooth. Such calculations do not account for extreme weather, vector-borne diseases, displacement and migration, international and local conflict, mass morbidity and mortality, biodiversity crash, state fragility, or food, fuel, and water shortages. There’s no measurement of amplifying feedbacks and tipping points such as Arctic sea ice loss, shutdown of vital ocean currents, collapse of the Amazon, and the like.

The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place. So, if in 2023 it’s a certain temperature in London, and the GDP in London is such-and-such, it’s reasonable to assume that when latitudes north of London rise in temperature in the future, GDP will rise to be the same as London’s today. Make of this what you will — it’s foolishness on a grand scale, and yet it’s central to the Nordhaus model.

The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate. Nordhaus’s list of the indoor activities free of any effects from climate disruption include manufacturing, mining, transportation, communication, finance, insurance, real estate, trade, private sector services, and government services. Nordhaus appears to be conflating weather with climate. The one can make trouble for outdoor dining plans on your yacht. The other sinks the yacht. 

Ignorance of systems has its way of plowing forward, juggernaut-like. Nordhaus has opined that agriculture is “the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change,” but because it accounts for just 3 percent of national output, climate disruption of food production cannot produce a “very large effect on the U.S. economy.” It is unfortunate for his calculations that agriculture is the foundation on which the other 97 percent of GDP depends. Without food — strange that one needs to reiterate this — there is no economy, no society, no civilization. Yet Nordhaus treats agriculture as indifferently fungible.

This crude mess of a model is what won him the Nobel. “It shows how little quality control goes into selecting a winner in economics that he was even nominated for the prize,” Steve Keen, a research fellow at University College London and self-described renegade economist, told me. Keen has authored numerous books that question the orthodoxy of mainstream economics. He was an early critic of the integrated assessment models at the IPCC that owe their optimistic sheen to Nordhaus’s methodology. His caustic 2021 essay, “The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change,” delved into the problems of Nordhausian models.

“When it comes to climate, the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

“Any investigative journalist who overcame a fear of equations and simply read Nordhaus’s texts would have known that his work was nonsense,” Keen told me. “Assuming that 87 percent of the economy would be ‘negligibly affected by climate change’ because it takes place in ‘carefully controlled environments’?”

“When it comes to climate,” Keen said, “the guy is an idiot: an idiot savant, but still fundamentally an idiot.”

And it’s not just Nordhaus. Climate economists have followed dutifully in his footsteps and come up with cost models that appear to have no relationship with known laws of physics, the dynamics of climate, or the complexities of Earth systems.

A 2016 study by economists David Anthoff of University of California, Berkeley; Francisco Estrada of the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam; and Richard Tol of the University of Sussex offers one of the more egregious examples of Nordhausian nonsense. (Tol is one of Nordhaus’s protégés, and Nordhaus is listed as a reviewer of the paper.) The three academics boldly assert that shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC — a pivotally important Earth system that loops warm equatorial water toward the Arctic and cold water back south — could have beneficial effects on the European economy.

Over the last several thousand years, the AMOC, also known as the thermohaline circulation, has functioned to keep Europe relatively warm in winter because of the warm water it draws northward from the equator. The slowing and eventual shutdown of this system could plunge Europe and broad parts of the Northern Hemisphere into extreme cold. Such a shutdown is a growing likelihood as glacial melt pours into the North Atlantic and alters the delicate balance of salt water and fresh water that drives the looping current. 

For Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, however, collapse of one of the Earth systems that undergirds the climatic stability of the Holocene might be a good thing. “If the [AMOC] slows down a little, the global impact is a positive 0.2-0.3 percent of income,” they concluded. “This goes up to 1.3 percent for a more pronounced slowdown.” They argued that while climate heating cooks the rest of the world, European countries will benefit from a cooling effect of the current’s collapse.

This sunny assessment comes as a surprise to James Hansen, father of climate science, who has calculated that a massive temperature differential between the poles and the equator would occur with an AMOC shutdown, producing superstorms of immense fury across the Atlantic Ocean. According to Hansen, the last time Earth experienced those kinds of temperature differentials, during the interglacial Eemian era roughly 120,000 years ago, raging tempests deposited house-sized boulders on coastlines in Europe and the Caribbean. Waves from the storms were estimated to have surged inland to 40 meters above sea level.

Under these extreme conditions, what would happen to shipping lanes, coastal cities and ports, and trans-Atlantic traffic of all kinds? For the climate simpletons Tol, Anthoff, and Estrada, the question doesn’t come up. “It will be a helluva lot stormier on the North Atlantic, especially for Europeans,” Hansen told me in an email. His study team concluded that shutdown of AMOC “is in the cards this century, possibly by mid-century, with continued high emissions.”

It gets worse. Simon Dietz, at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and his fellow economists James Rising, Thomas Stoerk, and Gernot Wagner have offered some of the most ignorant visions of our climate future, using Nordhausian math models. They examined the consequences to GDP of hitting eight Earth system tipping points that climate scientists have identified as existential threats to industrial civilization. The tipping points are as familiar as a funeral litany to anybody schooled in climate literature: loss of Arctic summer ice; loss of the Amazon rainforest; loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets; release of ocean methane hydrates; release of carbon in permafrost; collapse of the AMOC; and collapse of the Indian monsoon.

Dietz and friends came to the astounding conclusion that if all eight were tipped, the economic cost by 2100 would amount to an additional 1.4 percent of lost GDP on top of the roughly 8 to 12 percent that Nordhaus projected.

Think of this projection in commonsense terms: A negligible effect on world affairs when the Arctic during summer is deep blue rather than white; when the jungle of the Amazon is no longer green but brown savannah or desert; when in Greenland and the West Antarctic, white ice is barren rock. A transformation of immense proportions on the Earth’s surface, in the atmosphere, and in terrestrial biotic communities. Ocean methane hydrates have an energy content that exceeds that of all other fossil fuel deposits. Permafrost holds an amount of carbon roughly twice the current carbon content of the atmosphere. With the weakening or collapse of the AMOC, Europe could be plunged into conditions akin to the Little Ice Age, with drastic reduction of the land area suitable for wheat and corn farming. Increased variability of the Indian monsoon would jeopardize the lives of over a billion people.

“The claim that these changes would have effectively zero impact upon the human economy is extraordinary,” wrote Keen. The reality is that if all eight Earth system tipping points were reached, humanity would be in terrible trouble.

An uncharitable view of the work of climate economists in the Nordhaus school is that they offer a kind of sociopathy as policy prescription. Nordhaus estimates that as economic activity heads poleward with warming, the massive reduction in GDP in the tropics will be offset by optimal adaptation in the Global North. “Massive reduction in GDP,” of course, is not explicitly understood by Nordhaus as food system collapse across the equator, followed by social collapse, mass death, wars, and biblical exoduses that produce cascading nonlinear effects drawing the world into a nexus of unknowns.

Nothing to worry about, assures Nordhaus: The violent extinction of low-GDP nations will hardly affect the outlook for economic growth because things will improve in the cold Global North. This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

This is an embrace of imagined silver linings in a climate genocide.

Do governments, policymakers, and the public have any clue that the message from climate economist elites is unhinged? So far, we have followed along in the belief that all is well. One of the better indicators of this lemming-like fealty to a narrative of delusory optimism is in the financial sector.

Keen authored a report for investors this year in which he noted that pension funds have swallowed whole the Nordhausian projections of our sunny future as the climate system collapses. “Following the advice of investment consultants, pension funds have informed their members that global warming of 2-4.3 C will have only a minimal impact upon their portfolios,” Keen wrote. “This results in a huge disconnect between what scientists expect from global warming, and what pensioners/investors/financial systems are prepared for.” Keen does not expect things to end well for investors.

When I asked him what needed to be done to alter policy at the IPCC, Keen replied, “We need everyone to be as angry as I am.” Negligence by economists like Nordhaus, he said, “will end up killing billions of people.”

Andrew Glikson, who teaches at Australian National University in Canberra and advises the IPCC, has written about the coming era of mass human death, what he calls the Plutocene, the natural successor to the Anthropocene. Global governments, he charges, are “criminals” for ushering in the Plutocene in pursuit of short-term political and economic gain. I first reached out to him during the black summer of bushfires that raged across Australia in 2020. Glikson’s mood was foul then, and it has not gotten better since.

“The governing classes have given up on the survival of numerous species and future generations,” he told me, “and their inaction constitutes the ultimate crime against life on Earth.” Part of the reason for inaction is the false cheer that Nordhaus has spread with his math-genius, climate-idiot models.

The post When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics appeared first on The Intercept.

Three days before Hamas committed the bloodiest attack on Israeli civilians in that country’s history, four days before the Israel Defense Forces responded with the most devastating collective punishment of Palestinian civilians in a long history of collective punishment, Palestinian and Israeli feminists gathered to demand peace.

On October 4, hundreds of them, dressed in white and turquoise, in hijabs and sun hats, met at the wall between West Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank (many Palestinian women missed the event because they could not get authorization to cross). Under a canopy of white umbrellas, they walked to the Tolerance Monument in Jerusalem for a rally, then rode to the Dead Sea. On the beach around a symbolic negotiating table, alongside diplomats and other public figures, they read a “mothers’ call” for a nonviolent resolution to the conflict.

Written jointly by the Israeli organization Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian Women of the Sun, the declaration begins: “We, Palestinian and Israeli mothers, are determined to stop the vicious cycle of bloodshed and to change the reality of the difficult conflict between both nations, for the benefit of our children.”

Or, as Huda Abu Arqoub, director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace, put it: “We want our kids to be alive rather than dead.”

Calling the document a “mothers’ call” is both heartfelt and strategic. “Women and children,” especially “mothers and children,” is both powerful and pernicious. For the press, it is convenient shorthand for “human.” For propagandists, it raises any stakes. Hamas is “a murderous terror group, responsible for the murders and kidnappings of babies, women, children and the elderly,” declares the IDF. For some feminists, it signals that the biological capacity to give birth makes women naturally pacific and confers a unique responsibility to oppose violence.

At the same time, the trope “women and children” infantilizes women. It’s worse to kill a woman than a man because women, like children, are defenseless, passive, innocent. This is ironic in Israel, a nation that prides itself on gender equality as a founding principle and mandates military service for all adult Israeli citizens (except Arab Israelis and Orthodox Jews). It is insulting in a conflict where women, both Israeli and Palestinian, are the boldest peacemakers.

Should women speak as women against war? It’s a point of perpetual feminist debate. But this much is indisputable: Feminists should, and must, speak as feminists against this war, against Israel’s occupation and its current pummeling of Gaza. Said the veteran Israeli feminist Hannah Safran: “How can you ask freedom for yourself if you don’t ask it for other people?”

In fact, as the guardians of everyday life, women are disproportionately affected by war and occupation. A 2022 statement from the director of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, a feminist human rights organization in the West Bank city of Ramallah, describes how Israeli policies such as home demolition, movement restrictions, night raids, and child arrests increase the burdens of family and household, reinforcing women’s “traditional roles within the Palestinian patriarchal society.” Coupled with discriminatory laws pertaining to family reunification and marriage and cultural policing by radical Islamists, these policies exaggerate male domination and female dependency and trap women in abusive relationships.

Women are also differently affected: Violence is gendered. “In conflict settings, rape and sexual violence are used as strategic, systematic, and calculated tools of war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,” write the authors of a recently published study of wartime rape in Ethiopia. They cite some rough prevalence rates: 39 percent of women raped during the Rwandan genocide, 25 percent in Azerbaijan, 33.5 percent in Liberia. Rape, they write, may also be “a final act of humiliation before killing the victim.” Those who survive often become social pariahs, their children banished from the community as spawns of the enemy. 

But if this specificity of experience inspires women to speak as women against war, it is the embrace of universal human rights that has mobilized contemporary feminist movements for Palestinian liberation and nonviolent reconciliation.

For Palestinian feminists both in the Middle East and the diaspora, the connections between male domination and colonial oppression are self-evident. The U.S.-based Palestinian Feminist Collective, for instance, describes itself as “a body of Palestinian and Arab feminists committed to Palestinian social and political liberation by confronting systemic gendered, sexual, and colonial violence, oppression, and dispossession.” The Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling bridges “the need to address discrimination and violence against women within Palestinian society, and the need to support the national struggle for freedom and independence from Israeli occupation.”

Filastiniyat, which supports female journalists, particularly from Gaza, and publishes their work on the NAWA Online Women Media Network, also advocates “on issues related to freedoms, media development, women’s rights, and human rights.” Lest anyone think this media organization is a neutral platform, its hashtag is #GazaGenocide.

It took Israeli feminists a while to connect the dots. “In the past we would say we are feminist to struggle for women’s rights and to go to the army, and it had no relationship to the situation of Palestine,” Safran told the journalist Peter Beinart. The Israel Women’s Network, founded in 1984 by the recently deceased second-wave leader Alice Shalvi, has long advocated for women’s equal participation in every aspect of Israeli public life, including the military.

But not every second-wave feminist wanted in on everything Israeli men were doing. Marcia Freedman, a U.S.-born left-wing feminist who was the first openly lesbian member of the Knesset, was early to champion a two-state solution. The IDF’s rhetoric about protecting women and children notwithstanding, she saw the link between militarism and violence against women. In 1976, Freedman introduced the issue of domestic violence to the governing body, where she was ridiculed and dismissed.

The Israel Women’s Network “were fighting for women to be pilots. [They believed] we have to be in every place where there is decision-making power,” said Safran. In Israel, a high military rank is almost a prerequisite for high political office. “We did not support women” — or anybody — “joining the army.”

On this point, liberal feminism won the day. Thanks to decades of lawsuits and legislative battles, women’s presence in the IDF has steadily increased in every function and at every rank. But a thoroughly militarized society like Israel’s — basic training “turns civilians into soldiers,” boasts the IDF — is a masculinist society. And that means women must be feminized, even while carrying guns. Women are exempted from service when they start doing womanly things, like marrying and having children. They are rarely called up as reservists, 360,000 of whom have been mobilized to fight in Gaza. And while women have risen in the ranks, male soldiers keep them in their place. A 2021 government report found that over a third of women serving in the armed forces had been sexually harassed.

The public demonstration by Israelis of the conviction that a movement for women’s full citizenship must be for everyone’s full citizenship was a first step toward collaboration across the checkpoints. During the Second Intifada, the leaderless Women in Black began vigils every Friday against the occupation. Soon, Arab Israelis joined the demonstrations, and Women in Black spread to Palestine and around the world.

Eventually, some liberal feminists came around too. In 1991, after more than a decade directing an experimental school in Jerusalem for Orthodox girls, Shalvi was forced to resign. It was not because she instituted controversial programs, like classes in family planning and conflict resolution, but because she invited Arab girls to those classes, participated in dialogues with Palestinian women, and supported the Israel–Palestine peace process.

If not every feminist, whether Palestinian or Israeli, makes these links among women’s, Palestinians’, and human rights, their enemies certainly do. The situations are not exactly parallel, but feminists in both Israel and the Palestinian territories are under attack by the most tribalist elements of their societies, each of which envisions its own version of a “pure” society, whose achievement requires the modesty, piety, and subservience of women.  

In forming a coalition between his own Likud and the extreme-right Religious Zionists, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu created the most radically nationalist and religiously influenced government in Israel’s history. Among its targets for destruction are women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. It turned the formerly independent Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women into a politically appointed body. It rescinded support for the Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and weakened anti-discrimination laws and enforcement of protection orders against domestic abusers — even as femicide is reportedly rising, with most of the murders committed by male partners or family members.

The messianic Zionists who want to expand Jewish ownership to every inch of territory from the Jordan River to the sea are equally eager to erase women from every inch of public life. The effort to kneecap the Supreme Court is coupled by efforts to fortify the rabbinic courts and, indeed, transform Israel into a theocracy where civil, criminal, and personal life conforms to rigid halachic, or religious Jewish, law. One of the goals of the religious parties is to end gender integration in the army and finally get women out altogether. Women’s job is to make and raise as many Jewish babies as possible.

In Netanyahu’s administration, only nine of 64 positions are occupied by women. Perhaps the most cynical appointment is May Golan as minister for the advancement of women. A virulent hawk and self-proclaimed “proud racist,” Golan is also no friend of feminist peaceniks, to say the least. “I’ve never seen so many feminists being silent at the same time,” she told a sycophantic interviewer on TalkTV last week. “The only time they’re silent is when a Jewish woman or an Israeli woman is being raped or murdered.” During a 20-minute rant, she invoked her bona fides “as a woman and as the minister for the advancement of women” to legitimize her conviction that Palestinians in Gaza, all of them, deserve no mercy. “I know the situation of Arab women around the world,” she declared. “This is a dark, dark culture. … The difference between us and them [is] between good and evil.”

Meanwhile, in Gaza and the West Bank, radical Islamists including Hamas are growing increasingly repressive and aggressive. At mosques and on social media, campaigns against child marriage and gender-based violence, and for safe abortion, gender equality within the marriage, LGBTQ+ rights, and sexual freedoms are denounced as corrupting “foreign agendas” in violation of Shariah law. Attacks on feminists, journalists, LGBTQ+ people, and human rights advocates are constant, and sometimes fatal. These are not the acts of rogue terrorists. The Ministry of Education in the West Bank, for instance, is cracking down on women’s studies and eliminating many secular, rights-based programs in public schools.

According to Amnesty International, “Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip continued to heavily restrict freedom of expression, association, and assembly. They also held scores of people in arbitrary detention and subjected many to torture and other ill-treatment.” Twenty-nine killings of women and girls by family members were reported in the occupied territories in 2022, but the courts impeded complaints of domestic violence. In July of that year, “security forces stood by and watched as a mob beat youths and children participating in a parade … in Ramallah that included rainbow flags.”

Religious fundamentalists on both sides accuse feminists of fomenting chaos by undermining gender and the patriarchal family. Ultranationalists condemn feminist human rights advocates for muddying the lines of battle by insisting on the equal value of every life. These accusers are right.

Feminism is, at heart, a movement against domination. It is feminist to demand an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. Feminism is a movement against violence. It is feminist to denounce barbarity, no matter how enormous the crimes that motivate it. To oppose domination and violence, feminists — not as women or mothers, Israelis or Palestinians — must demand an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege, an arms embargo from the Western powers, and the implementation of a massive humanitarian operation in Gaza.

Feminism is a movement built on the possibility of profound human transformation. That means sustaining a belief in the possibility of a negotiated solution in Israel–Palestine, whether one state or two, with freedom and democratic rights for all.

The post It’s Feminist to Demand a Ceasefire in Israel–Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Al Jaber wore a sage green kandura, round glasses, and a white headdress. He spoke slowly and deliberately, laying out his vision for COP28, which will be held in the UAE in December. But his assured manner belied the barrage of criticism he was facing in the press.

Al Jaber is not just this year’s COP president. He also heads the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, known as Adnoc. It is the first time any CEO, let alone one from the fossil fuel industry, has been COP president. The announcement was met with fury from climate activists. Kerry, meanwhile, the U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, appeared nonplussed.

During his speech at the Global Energy Forum — an event the Atlantic Council, an American think tank, has hosted in the UAE for the past six years — Al Jaber said that when the time comes, the oil-rich nation will celebrate “the last barrel of oil.” He spoke about his time leading the UAE’s state-owned renewable energy company Masdar and called for “practical solutions” to the climate crisis at COP28.

What he didn’t say was that as CEO of Adnoc, he is currently overseeing a major expansion of the company’s oil and gas output. And the oil company’s staff has played a critical role in shaping the summit. At least a dozen Adnoc employees have been appointed to roles on the hosting team, including two staffers designated as negotiators for the UAE. The fossil fuel industry has been deeply involved in the annual COPs since they began in the 1990s, sending hundreds of lobbyists each year, as The Intercept previously reported. But this year, the industry is closer than ever to one of the most important international climate forums.

When he left the stage, Al Jaber returned to the vacant seat next to Kerry, who stood to shake his hand. Kerry has met with Al Jaber more than a dozen times since taking up the role of U.S. climate envoy in 2021, more than he has met with almost any other foreign official. A few days after the Global Energy Forum, Kerry described Al Jaber as a “terrific choice” to lead the summit.

Al Jaber’s first speech as COP28 president had many of the hallmarks of his closely choreographed public appearances: an event organized by a respected international institution; foreign dignitaries in the audience; no questions afterward. It was followed by a press release sent out to scores of journalists by Edelman, a major U.S. public relations firm.

Al Jaber’s reputation has been shaped by some of the world’s most influential PR agencies, which have used his roles as CEO and chair of the UAE’s renewable energy company and visionary behind the futuristic Masdar City to make him the face of the country’s fight against climate change.

The Centre for Climate Reporting and Drilled, in collaboration with The Intercept, reviewed hundreds of pages of U.S. Justice Department filings and internal communications strategy documents that reveal the careful curation of Al Jaber’s image over the years. We also interviewed a number of Al Jaber’s former colleagues and advisers, who asked that their names be withheld for fear of professional repercussions. Despite stalled progress on Al Jaber’s acclaimed eco-city and questions over his green credentials as he ramps up oil and gas production, PR agencies and consultants secured him the support of global leaders and institutions and placed him at the helm of COP28.

The Fixer

Al Jaber wears many hats. In addition to being a Cabinet minister and chair of Masdar, he has spent the past three years serving as both an oil boss and the UAE’s special envoy for climate change — positions that many would see as diametrically opposed. His supporters point to this as an asset, reflecting an ability to bridge the gap between the fossil fuel industry and the climate movement. But even before his presidency was announced, Al Jaber was wary of what the media might say.

Most of the major news outlets in the UAE are state-owned or controlled by press groups with ties to the government. Al Jaber is more comfortable than most with the local press; he previously served as chair of the National Media Council. The international press poses an entirely different challenge. Without the ability to control what he’s asked or how he’s portrayed, Al Jaber has relied on the help of highly paid consultants to manage his image.

They have built Al Jaber a reputation as a dependable technocrat, a “fixer.” One of the UAE’s “objectives” for COP28 has been to position Al Jaber as a “climate action leader” and “consensus-enabler,” an internal document from the office of the UAE’s climate envoy shows.

But behind closed doors, Al Jaber is said to be an exacting boss with a domineering approach. Two former COP28 team members claimed Al Jaber once threw a laptop at a wall in a fit of anger; one of them said he had a reputation as a “bully.” COP staff and the PR agencies he’s hired to help with the summit have been expected work around the clock, and morale has hit rock bottom, according to three sources who worked with the COP team.

Al Jaber declined to be interviewed for this story and did not respond to questions about his behavior toward staff members.

The COP presidency is supposed to be impartial, and critics are concerned that the person with the power to shape summit negotiations will not be able to separate himself from his duties as CEO of an oil company undertaking a major expansion. Al Jaber has rebuffed calls to step down from Adnoc, insisting there is no conflict of interest. But the line between the oil company and COP28 has “blurred,” one former summit staffer said. At one point, the COP team was working out of Adnoc headquarters.

Concerned about crossover, the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international body that oversees the COP process, sent questions to the team in January to ensure a firewall was in place, querying whether staff from the oil company had access to COP28 strategic documents. Yet Adnoc employees were still being consulted on how to respond to media inquiries about the summit as recently as June, according to reporting by The Guardian.

One of Al Jaber’s advisers at Adnoc was signing off on communications leaving the COP28 team while still employed at the oil company, according to people who worked with him. While attending a U.N. conference in June, Oliver Phillips registered as a representative of Adnoc. But according to two sources who worked on COP28 communications, Phillips had already played a key role in steering PR efforts for the summit.

Phillips doesn’t declare any affiliation with the oil company on his LinkedIn account, which states that the former CNN and MSNBC producer has been a senior adviser at the UAE’s climate envoy office and the ministry Al Jaber oversees since 2015. But multiple sources said that until recently, Phillips was an employee of Adnoc.

COP28 spokesperson Alan VanderMolen said that Phillips is “now working full-time” on the summit. He did not respond to questions about when Phillips’s employment with the oil company ended. Neither Phillips nor Adnoc responded to requests for comment.

VanderMolen defended Al Jaber’s qualifications to lead the climate summit. “It is in our common interest to have someone with deep experience across the entire energy value chain in this role,” VanderMolen said. “His experience as a climate diplomat, serving two terms as the UAE’s climate envoy and attending over 10 previous COPs, makes him ideally suited to lead a consensus-driven process.”

“The COP28 presidency has its own independent office, staff, and a standalone IT system,” VanderMolen added. “The COP28 staff are separate from any other entity and operate in coordination with the UNFCCC.”

Since the UAE began its bid to host the summit, major players in the PR industry have also been involved in handling communications for the COP28 team, including APCO, Burson Cohn & Wolfe, Edelman, and Teneo. Even the agencies have struggled to see the line between COP28 and Al Jaber’s other roles. Some agencies acting on behalf of COP28 were engaged by Adnoc and Masdar rather than the COP team, according to sources with direct knowledge and filings with the U.S. Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires U.S. companies to report their dealings with foreign governments.

Lindsay Clifton, former spokesperson for the Republican National Committee and deputy press secretary for President Donald Trump, was recently included on a list of Edelman staff working on Al Jaber’s COP team, according to an internal communications strategy document. At the White House, she defended Trump’s stance on climate change as his administration rolled back policies intended to help abate global heating. Clifton has been working at Edelman since 2019 and is now managing director of its global advisory arm. She was listed as Al Jaber’s direct “media support” during the U.N. General Assembly in September, the strategy document indicates. Clifton did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s not the first time a COP summit has been held in a petrostate; Qatar, another Middle Eastern nation, hosted in 2012. But Al Jaber’s role as both summit president and Adnoc CEO is unprecedented. Amnesty International labeled it a conflict of interest and said Al Jaber was “unfit” to lead the climate talks, while activists have compared his appointment to putting a tobacco company in charge of an anti-smoking campaign. Former Vice President Al Gore characterized his presidency as a sign that the fossil fuel industry has “brazenly seized control” of the COP process. In May, 130 U.S. and EU lawmakers signed a letter calling for Al Jaber to be removed from his post.

“It’s very clear by now that when companies set their own targets and create their own rules, the outcome spells disaster.”

Melissa Aronczyk, media studies professor at Rutgers University and co-author of “A Strategic Nature,” a book about the history of environmental PR, said the increased fossil fuel presence at COP is part of the industry’s decadeslong attempt to avoid regulation. “Working with U.S. PR firms, oil and gas companies, car companies, and petrochemical companies all conspired 30 years ago to create campaigns and programs around ‘sustainability’ with the goal of telling the world that the fossil fuel industry was helping to ‘solve’ the problem of environmental degradation and climate change,” Aronczyk said. “It’s very clear by now that when companies set their own targets and create their own rules, the outcome spells disaster.”

Al Jaber has never seen his green credentials so publicly questioned. But ever since he emerged as the UAE’s climate advocate, he has been searching for a solution to a difficult puzzle: How do you convince the world that a petrostate is genuinely interested in addressing climate change?

The COP28 team has already parted ways with three major PR firms, including Edelman, whose contract was abruptly terminated in April. In August, the UAE brought in reinforcements, hiring a small New Jersey-based strategic communications firm called First International Resources to “counteract all negative press and media reports,” according to FARA filings first reported by the Washington Post. “The consultant must not allow negative impressions to take hold, especially in the runup to COP28,” the contract states. COP28 confirmed that Teneo and Edelman, which was recently rehired, are currently working on the summit. APCO and Burson Cohn & Wolfe, whose contracts were terminated, did not respond to requests for comment.

For Kerry, Al Jaber’s sensitivity to criticism is a plus point. “If he can’t get this done, if oil and gas won’t show up and do something real here, then the UAE will look really bad, and he knows it,” Kerry said. “They’re going to have to fight a little bit, but if they do, they could be the all-time catalyst.”

“Amazing, Isn’t It?”

In a nation where power is typically held by a select group of royal families, Al Jaber was not destined for leadership. After a brief stint as an engineer for Adnoc, he was tapped to work for the energy platform of one of the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds, Mubadala. In 2006, he was promoted to CEO of the program and his rise in public life began — just as the country’s rulers reeled from an international PR disaster.

The government-owned Dubai Ports World had been set to spend billions of dollars to take over the management of several major American ports. But a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., argued the purchase threatened national security. Their campaign effectively killed the deal.

“This was a transformational moment for the UAE. … They were completely blindsided,” said Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. “It was a wake-up call for everyone in Abu Dhabi to actually say, ‘Look, we need to invest more into influence and shaping perception.’”

In his early 30s, Al Jaber was chosen to be the first CEO of Masdar, the renewable energy company funded by the UAE government. He fit the mold of a new type of Emirati statesman, which had been shaped by the embarrassment of the ports affair. He had studied in the United Kingdom and the United States and represented to the world that the authoritarian UAE was in fact a modern meritocracy.

Masdar was the first step in a long-term plan that was supposed to lead the oil-rich country away from fossil fuels. The company promised to plow billions of dollars into clean energy. But Krieg believes Masdar had a more covert purpose. “It’s a tool of economic statecraft,” he said. “It’s about pouring money into a country to gain strategic leverage in the long run.”

“It’s about pouring money into a country to gain strategic leverage in the long run.”

A year after Al Jaber became CEO, Masdar inked a lucrative contract with Edelman to help promote one of its flagship projects: Masdar City, a proposed zero-carbon “city of the future” in the Abu Dhabi desert.

With plans drawn up by a top British architectural firm, Masdar City would be built on 6 square kilometers of scrubland not far from the Abu Dhabi airport. General Electric announced that it would open the world’s first Ecomagination Center there to showcase next-generation technologies, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched the MIT and Masdar Institute Cooperative Program, focused on innovation in alternative energy.

The money Al Jaber spent on Edelman paid off. The agency managed to convince White House staff to add a visit to review plans for Masdar City to George W. Bush’s final foreign trip as president.

“Amazing, isn’t it? This country has gotten its wealth from the ground and is now reinvesting in alternative forms of energy,” Bush remarked as he and Al Jaber stood before the media. “I hope that my visit shines a spotlight on the Middle East … and shows people the truth about what life is like here in the UAE.”

When Al Jaber was invited to speak in front of a congressional select committee in 2008, Sen. Ed Markey (who was recently among the lawmakers calling for Al Jaber’s removal as COP28 president) heaped praise on Masdar City, saying it represented “the future of green communities.”

“Make no mistake, Masdar is our new Sputnik. It should be a wake-up call to America and a challenge to each of us,” the Massachusetts senator said.

In 2009, Al Jaber faced the first true test of his international PR campaign. He announced that the UAE would “aggressively pursue” a bid to host the headquarters of the International Renewable Energy Agency, or IRENA, at Masdar City. The campaign was officially overseen by the country’s then-minister of foreign affairs, but Al Jaber was managing day-to-day operations, according to a person involved in the campaign. Little would be left to chance. He brought on heavyweight Democratic campaigner Jim Margolis and his strategic communications firm GMMB, which had just helped Barack Obama take the White House.

GMMB and Edelman worked in concert to run an enormous global campaign. Edelman tracked how each member country might vote on a “whip grid” and researched how much aid the UAE was sending those countries. When a country said they would vote for the UAE, Edelman sent personalized thank you notes.

GMMB handled the marketing materials, which included promotional videos, a glossy pitch book, speeches, and presentations. When the date of the vote finally arrived and delegates arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, GMMB arranged for a video promoting Masdar City to be played in their hotel rooms. The UAE reportedly offered twice as much money to help run IRENA as its closest rival, Germany. Included in the UAE’s funding was a $1 million contract for Edelman to work with the agency, according to FARA filings. The UAE won the vote.

As Edelman built Masdar’s reputation, the energy company promised to deliver on more and more renewable projects. It pledged to invest $2 billion into thin-film photovoltaics manufacturing for solar panels, and when Shell announced that it was pulling out of the London Array project in the U.K. — one of the world’s largest offshore wind farms — Masdar stepped in and purchased a 20 percent stake.

Al Jaber was founding CEO of Masdar and became chair — the position he still holds — in 2014. He was also CEO of the energy platform for Mubadala, the UAE’s strategic investment arm, making him the person most responsible for building out renewable energy in the UAE for more than a decade. In 2015, Masdar was part of an IRENA-led group that committed to doubling global renewable energy capacity by 2030. The same year, the UAE government pledged that 24 percent of its entire energy mix would come from renewables and nuclear energy by 2021.

According to the Energy Information Administration and the International Energy Agency, only 2 percent of the UAE’s total energy mix was derived from renewables and nuclear by 2021. Masdar, on the other hand, made slow but steady progress. From 2006 to August 2020, the company was involved with projects delivering around 5 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity worldwide. As 2020 came to a close and the campaign to secure COP hosting rights began, that number suddenly doubled in press statements, although there were no project announcements that accounted for the sudden increase. In late 2022, in the months leading up to Al Jaber’s appointment as COP28 president, Masdar’s claimed renewable energy capacity doubled again, this time to more than 20 GW.

The company declined to explain these numbers, but its 2021 sustainability report sheds some light on Masdar’s rapid growth. More than half comes not from developing new projects, which would add to global renewable energy capacity, but from acquiring stakes in existing projects, and from a strategic partnership the company inked with Mubadala, Adnoc, and the UAE’s power and water utility. In his chair statement for the report, Al Jaber wrote that this partnership, finalized in 2022, would allow Masdar to “almost double its renewable energy capacity overnight.”

Masdar noted that the partnership would “have a combined current, committed, and exclusive capacity of over 23 GW of renewable energy.” But moving capacity numbers from one balance sheet to another is not building new renewable energy capacity.

When asked what he thought of Masdar’s and the UAE’s progress on renewables, Kerry responded only, “Ugh, I know.”

Al Jaber’s supporters have pointed to his work with Masdar and Masdar City as proof of what he might do for COP: map a pathway for a profitable transition off fossil fuels that the industry can get behind. But if Masdar City is the exemplar, climate advocates are right to be concerned about Al Jaber’s ability to deliver real emissions reductions.

According to Federico Cugurullo, a geography professor at Trinity College, Dublin, who focuses on urban sustainability and has conducted extensive research in Masdar City, the goal of the project is to generate revenue for the UAE via the development and sale of clean-tech products, so “when environmental or social goals are at odds with those profits, they are quickly abandoned.”

The city was initially planned to be car-free and fully reliant on an electrified personal rapid transit system. But because most people who work in Masdar City opt to live in Abu Dhabi, and because Masdar has partnered with various automotive companies interested in conducting electric vehicle research, the car-free idea was scrapped and the PRT proposal scaled back.

“Masdar City stopped being a laboratory for alternative transport and embraced a traditional car-friendly layout to support partnerships with automakers,” Cugurullo said. In his case study, he quoted a Masdar Initiative manager on that decision: “The PRT costs a fortune and Masdar City is not an environmental crusade.” Plans for the city to be zero-carbon and zero-waste were also scaled back to cut costs.

“The podium at the core of the city remains car-free, and visitors can use several shared electric transportation options,” Amy Robertson, communications manager for Masdar City, said. “The rest of the UAE is still largely dependent on private vehicles, however, and Masdar City’s master plan takes those social norms into account.”

“A ‘green’ city is not truly sustainable if it does not meet community needs, and if it is not financially viable,” Robertson added.

“It’s not wrong to take into account the economics of sustainable developments,” Cugurullo said. “But it is wrong if that is the only focus of your projects, and that was the case with Masdar City.”

Al Jaber’s green pedigree continued to grow, even after he took over the national oil company in 2016 — the same year that Masdar City was supposed to have been completed. Instead, the government had downgraded its commitments and announced that the project would be completed by 2030. Maybe.

Friends in High Places

Following the announcement of his COP28 presidency, Al Jaber set off across the globe on a monthslong “listening tour.” He met with politicians, business leaders, and public figures, including King Charles III, Emmanuel Macron, Michael Bloomberg, and of course, Kerry.

Al Jaber has long recognized the importance of surrounding himself with credible allies; engaging “thought leaders” was a key task for Edelman during its early work on the Masdar account. Masdar’s money put Al Jaber into partnerships with the likes of GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi, and Edelman’s Rolodex put him into rooms with the elite of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

By 2010, Al Jaber was the UAE’s special envoy on climate change and attending COP16 in Cancun, where he met Kerry, then Massachusetts senator. The two have since been photographed together innumerable times. Their seemingly close relationship is part of a broader collaboration on climate change: Last year, the U.S. and the UAE launched the Partnership for Accelerating Clean Energy, which promised to mobilize $100 billion in funding for renewable energy. Kerry was among the first to come out in defense of Al Jaber’s COP presidency.

“I think he and his team are committed to bringing other oil and gas interests to the table in a real way and I think we need that,” Kerry said.

During the U.N. General Assembly in September, Edelman worked with the COP28 team to find influential figures to voice their support for the UAE’s efforts on the summit, according to an internal communications strategy document. Dubbed “validators,” the targets included Bill Gates, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, and German climate envoy and former Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan.

Other prominent acquaintances who have endorsed Al Jaber include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whose government consultancy firm has a long track record of working for the UAE. Bloomberg, the U.N. special envoy for climate ambition and solutions, took to the pages of his eponymous publication to scold those criticizing the appointment and point to Al Jaber’s time as CEO of Masdar as proof that he was the right man for the job.

Bloomberg has also attached his philanthropic arm, Bloomberg Philanthropies, to Al Jaber’s presidency and is partnering with Al Jaber on an initiative to include mayors and local priorities in the COP28 agenda. Bloomberg Philanthropies staffers and campaigners, who asked that their names be withheld, said many people in the organization, which has a major focus on climate, think it’s a conflict of interest to support an oil boss as the head of COP.

Meanwhile, the head of the Atlantic Council, Fred Kempe, who introduced Al Jaber to the Global Energy Forum stage, wrote an op-ed for CNBC that described him as “the ideal person” to lead the summit. Kempe failed to declare that his organization had received millions of dollars in funding from the UAE, and that Adnoc and Masdar are both sponsors of the think tank’s energy forum. The op-ed was later amended with a note stating that “the obvious conflict of interest” was not disclosed to CNBC prior to publication.

Adnoc Becomes an Oil Major

As the Masdar City project ground to a snail’s pace, the UAE’s crown prince set Al Jaber a new challenge: modernize one of the country’s most important assets, the national oil company. By this point, Al Jaber had become “one of the most powerful men in the country,” according to Krieg, the security studies lecturer.

His appointment as Adnoc CEO came at a time of shifting narratives in the fossil fuel industry: Oil and gas companies were pitching themselves as allies in the fight against climate change, a trend that had largely bypassed the state-owned players.

Al Jaber hired Adnoc’s first communications team, bringing on Omar Zaafrani, the man he’d tasked with forging international partnerships at Masdar. By the end of 2017, the oil company had contracted three external PR firms — Burson Cohn & Wolfe, APCO, and Teneo, all of which would later work on COP28 — to show the world that Adnoc was no longer “a sleeping giant” but an efficient, responsive operation ripe for investment.

In essence, Al Jaber wanted Adnoc to act less like a state-owned behemoth and more like an oil major. “It is a bold, new, and ambitious approach,” he said at the time. “One that will allow Adnoc to compete, lead, and thrive in the new energy era.” He is currently overseeing a $150 billion expansion plan centered around ramping up Adnoc’s oil and gas production. The company began drilling in partnership with international oil companies for the first time in 2018 and accelerated its timeline in 2022. By last month, it had hit 4.5 million barrels per day, making it the third largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the seventh largest in the world.

Adnoc considered dropping the word “oil” from its name as part of a green rebrand ahead of COP28.

Despite this, under Al Jaber’s leadership, Adnoc has pushed its credentials as “one of the least carbon-intensive oil and gas companies in the world.” Last year, it even considered dropping the word “oil” from its name as part of a green rebrand ahead of COP28. Adnoc has plans to reach net-zero operational emissions by 2045. The plans depend heavily on carbon capture, where the greenhouse gas is collected and stored instead of being released into the atmosphere, meaning the burning of oil would not need to be phased out as quickly. But the technology has not yet been scaled to meaningful levels, and the need to phase out fossil fuels is increasingly urgent.

In 2021, when Al Jaber spearheaded the bid to host COP28, the UAE again turned to GMMB. At a summit in Abu Dhabi that April with representatives from across the Middle East, Kerry allegedly urged the participating countries to support the UAE’s bid and sang the praises of the country’s efforts in sustainable development “via big communications operations organized by GMMB,” according to a report by Intelligence Online, which cited anonymous sources. The same month, Adnoc hired APCO for “strategic communications and media relations services within the United States to represent the UAE’s climate envoy,” according to FARA filings.

Al Jaber’s COP28 presidency has become emblematic of a deeper rift among those involved in international climate diplomacy. The Adnoc CEO’s supporters maintain that oil companies are a necessary partner for a successful transition to clean energy. But after decades of lobbying, spin, and deceit, some now question whether the fossil fuel industry can ever be an ally in the fight against the climate crisis.

Christiana Figueres, longtime executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris climate accord, has publicly revoked her support of the industry. “When I saw them making record profits in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I thought, ‘Terrific, now they have plenty of capital to invest in the energy transition,’” she said. “But instead, they dug in their heels and doubled down on fossil fuel growth.”

“When companies want a seat at the table where climate policy is at stake, it’s primarily so they can control what happens,” Aronczyk, the media studies professor, said. “Having the head of an oil company presiding over COP28 represents the culmination of 30-plus years of capitulation to the power and money of the fossil fuel industry.”

To date only about 2 of the planned 6 square kilometers of Masdar City have been built. Masdar’s chief operating officer has admitted that “the plug was more or less quietly pulled” on the idea of 6 square kilometers as early as 2008, after the financial crash — before Edelman and GMMB had even begun to promote Masdar City as “the world’s most ambitious sustainable development.” Less than half of the promised $22 billion investment has been spent.

Yet the site is still used as a shining example of the UAE’s transformation. APCO says it has facilitated visits for Ban Ki-moon, Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Narendra Modi, and Joe Biden. Last year, the Atlantic Council paid for U.S. congressional aides to travel there.

Once touted by Al Jaber as “a blueprint for cities around the world striving for sustainability,” Masdar City risks becoming a ghost town. Fifteen thousand people currently work and live there, according to Robertson, the communications manager, who did not clarify how many live in the development versus commute. At best, that’s 25,000 below the goal that was announced in 2008. GE shuttered the Ecomagination Center in 2018. And while Masdar City boasts plenty of solar panels, the city’s planners say it won’t be fully renewable until construction is complete. Far from being a zero-carbon, car-free eco-utopia, Masdar City is fossil fuel-dependent and car-centric.

“Masdar City is not built on sand, it is built on oil,” Cugurullo, the urban sustainability expert, said. “Black is the color that sustains this supposedly green city.”

Al Jaber’s critics worry the same will be true of the UAE’s climate summit.

The post Inside the Campaign That Put an Oil Boss in Charge of a Climate Summit appeared first on The Intercept.

The four companies that have raised objections are Baxter International Inc., B. Braun Medical Inc., Fresenius Kabi, and Johnson & Johnson. In addition to manufacturing drugs, they make IV catheters, syringes, medical tubing, and IV bags, products states rely on to administer lethal injection. In statements to The Intercept, the companies said that the use of their equipment in executions contradicts their values.

“Johnson & Johnson develops medical innovations to save and enhance lives,” Joshina Kapoor, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson, wrote in an email. “We do not condone the use of our products for lethal injections for capital punishment.”

Fresenius Kabi, a German company that specializes in IV devices, told The Intercept that it would seize its products from corrections departments if it became aware of their use in lethal injection. B. Braun, which is also headquartered in Germany, said it prohibits its U.S.-based distributors from selling products to prisons for executions. Baxter International, a health care company based in Illinois, confirmed through a spokesperson that a 2017 statement opposing the use of its products in lethal injection applied to medical equipment as well as drugs.

For more than a decade, pharmaceutical companies have forbidden state corrections departments from using their drugs in U.S. execution chambers. The restrictions have led states to track down execution chemicals through unscrupulous suppliers, devise new lethal injection protocols using untested drug combinations, or pursue alternative methods of execution.

But there has been little inquiry into the equipment used to perform lethal injections. The manufacturers’ newly public positions are representative of the growing role private companies are playing in the future of lethal injection and could fuel a new swath of legal challenges as lawyers seek information about the products utilized to kill their clients.

“Once manufacturers and companies find out that their product is being used to kill people, rather than to heal people, they’re concerned, and they don’t want their brand identified with that process,” said Dale Baich, a former federal defender who has represented death row prisoners. “This may be the next step in challenging methods of execution.”

Until now, the bulk of legal challenges to lethal injection have focused on the sources of the drugs and questions about their safety. “It does seem like a natural sort of evolution, that you would start looking at other kinds of things, the manufacturers of the equipment,” Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert and director of Fordham University’s Neuroscience and Law Center, told The Intercept. “Either directly or indirectly, that information may become available.”

Because many states have enacted laws that allow them to conceal the provenance of the equipment employed in executions, it’s unclear whether prison officials are using products from any of the four companies.

Prisons typically buy their medical equipment from wholesalers or distribution companies. To ensure their products don’t end up in the wrong hands, some manufacturers have provisions in their contracts with distributors banning sales for executions. A spokesperson for B. Braun said the company’s contract specifies that its distributors “will not knowingly sell products to any entity that intends to sell or use such products for capital punishment.”

The company reviews its sales records and monitors for misuse, according to the spokesperson. “If we are made aware, we would enforce our rights under our distribution agreements to address any contractual violations and use of our products in an unauthorized manner,” they said.

But it appears that wholesalers may have previously interpreted restrictions more narrowly and applied them solely to drugs, not equipment. In a statement on its website, the medical wholesaler Henry Schein Inc. states that it “restricts the sale or other transfer of medications to prisons/correctional facilities for use in lethal injections, based on our manufacturer agreements.” A spokesperson declined to comment on whether those restrictions include equipment.

McKesson Corp. and Cardinal Health Inc., two of the biggest U.S. medical wholesalers, did not return requests for comment. Both have contracts to provide medical equipment to states that actively employ the death penalty, records show. In 2018, McKesson released a statement declaring that it would decline to sell drugs for lethal injection in compliance with manufacturers’ restrictions. The statement did not discuss its policy on equipment. (The company previously sued Arkansas after officials deceptively purchased a banned drug for executions.)

Notably, McKesson sold IV catheters made by B. Braun to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections between July 2021 and July 2023, purchase records obtained by The Intercept show. The state executed nine people during that period. Kay Thompson, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma corrections department, declined to say whether those catheters were used in executions, stating that the information “cannot be released” because of the state’s secrecy law.

When asked about the purchase records, B. Braun spokesperson Patrick Witmer said the company had confirmed “to the best of our knowledge” that those products were not used for executions. “We are not aware of any other B. Braun products that have been used by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for capital punishment,” Witmer told The Intercept. He said that as an additional precaution, B. Braun sent letters to Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, and the corrections department “affirming the restrictions on the use of B. Braun products for capital punishment.”

Oklahoma has taken secrecy so seriously that Baich, who toured the Oklahoma execution chamber a few years ago, said officials covered the brand name of every product in the room, including the clock and refrigerator. When asked about Baich’s recollection, Thompson replied, “We protect all vendors.”

According to Crystal Chapman, who worked as a nurse at Alabama’s Holman Correctional Facility, the site of the state’s death chamber, the equipment states use in executions does not always come from prison infirmaries, making the products even more difficult to track. Between 2021 and 2022, Chapman was required to maintain an inventory of every item in the infirmary, and although the state executed several people during her tenure, she noticed that nothing was taken. She said she suspected the execution team was responsible for bringing in its own equipment.

“Everything in the infirmary is kept under lock and key,” she said. “And at the end, really, you count every needle, you count every scissor, you count everything. They never go missing, so they don’t use anything from within the facility.”

The Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to this assertion.

The Intercept asked a dozen corrections departments that have executed people since 2015 to provide details of the equipment they used and respond to manufacturers’ stance against using their products. The corrections departments either declined to comment, often pointing to secrecy laws, or did not answer.

Some say that it’s unlikely that prison officials know they’re not allowed to use certain equipment for executions. “I doubt anyone at the prison would stop to think about that,” said Kelley Henry, a Tennessee federal public defender who works on lethal injection cases. Henry noted that documents she has obtained during discovery in death penalty lawsuits and from public records requests related to execution protocols have not specified restrictions on medical equipment.

The opposition of health care companies to the use of their equipment for capital punishment follows more than a decade of clashes between pharmaceutical companies and state officials seeking to obtain drugs for executions. In 2011, the pharmaceutical company Hospira Inc. (now part of Pfizer Inc.) announced that it would stop production of sodium thiopental, a barbiturate used to induce anesthesia, over concerns the drug would be used for lethal injection. That same year, the European Union voted to prohibit the exportation of drugs used in lethal injection, leading to supply shortages. As part of that rule, the EU created a list of tightly controlled drugs it would not sell to the U.S. That included pentobarbital, which many states also used in executions.

Even as the number of pharmaceutical companies that refused to sell to prison agencies mounted, states continued to find ways to obtain drugs. Missouri, for example, gave an employee $11,000 to travel to neighboring Oklahoma to purchase pentobarbital. Ohio tried to have its department of mental health obtain drugs for use in executions to avoid tracking. In response, lawyers for death row prisoners sought to stop executions over questions about the drugs’ safety.

In the face of these challenges, some states resorted to making their own drugs through compounding pharmacies, but replicating lethal injection equipment will prove more difficult. “You can’t just compound catheters,” said Joel Zivot, an associate anesthesiology professor at the Emory School of Medicine. “It’s a much harder thing to make.”

Adding to the problem, Zivot said hospitals have experienced shortages of IV equipment since 2014. “Sometimes these products are in short supply. So if the state would actually be able to get their hands on something, and hoard it, something I actually need to treat patients, that just seems to be … untenable,” he said. “These products are for healing and not for killing.”

“These products are for healing and not for killing.”

Over the years, Fresenius Kabi was at the forefront of challenges over the misuse of its products. In 2012, after learning that states were attempting to obtain propofol for executions, it warned that misuse of the drug could lead the EU to impose restrictions on sales to the United States. The medication is an anesthetic administered more than 50 million times each year in the U.S. to sedate patients for medical procedures. In 2018, Fresenius Kabi sued Nebraska for purchasing its drugs for lethal injection.

The company’s spokesperson, Matt Kuhn, told The Intercept that Fresenius Kabi had previously focused on drugs but also told prison officials that its equipment should not be used in lethal injections. (Letters sent to Nebraska officials in 2016 and 2018, which were reviewed by The Intercept, show that while the company stated that officials should not use its products for the purposes of capital punishment, it did not specifically mention medical equipment.) Kuhn said that Fresenius Kabi has not been made aware of any states using its technologies in executions and would take action if needed.

“We would take whatever steps are required to ensure that the product is returned,” Kuhn said. “Depending on how it actually was acquired, we would pursue every option that we have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Manufacturers will likely face an uphill battle in figuring out whether their supplies are being used in executions. Unlike controlled substances, once products such as syringes and IV tubing have been approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration, they’re not closely tracked.

“The FDA does have a certain amount of post-market surveillance, but it’s not going to be really tracking these supplies that are not opioids or some other restricted product,” Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, told The Intercept. “I think as a practical matter, it’ll be very, very difficult for the company to control who gets access to its products.”

Five states have conducted 17 executions this year, all of them by lethal injection. More than two dozen other executions are planned through the end of 2024.

This story was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.

The post Companies Already Ban the Use of Their Drugs for Lethal Injection. Now They’re Blocking IV Equipment. appeared first on The Intercept.

The last time she felt this deep well of hope, it was 1944, she was 11 years old, and she was cheering the ascension of Juan José Arévalo, the father of the now president-elect. Along with the rest of her country, she had waited decades for a dream deferred: the revival of the “Guatemalan spring,” the 10-year democratic window between military dictatorships. “She was out there yelling in the night,” Noe Muñoz’s granddaughter, Alba González Molina, said. “We had to give her a little cup of tea to get her to sleep.”

The recollection of the Guatemalan spring — kept alive by a generation who guarded the historical memory of a free and open society through decades of war, genocide, corruption, and impunity — helped lift Arévalo’s unlikely campaign to power last month. It was the restoration of a process that began in 1944 with Arévalo’s father, the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, and was torn apart in 1954 by the CIA-backed overthrow of the Guatemalan government. Arévalo’s election represents the first real opening for Guatemalan democracy since almost anyone can remember. But it’s those like Noe Muñoz who kept the promise close. According to her granddaughter, “It wasn’t just the university students that voted for him. It was the senior citizens — the ones who lived it and who want those times to return.”

But a long and bitter electoral process, sullied by interference from officials associated with what Guatemalans refer to as the “pact of the corrupt,” dark campaigning from the opposition candidate, and efforts to undermine Arévalo’s Movimiento Semilla, or Seed Movement, has many wondering if the spring will actually arrive or the same forces will block his ascension. All of this has played out in the aftermath of a 36-year genocidal war, which left an estimated 200,000 people dead, and waves of immigration and remittances that have transformed the country, expanding the middle class and creating a new set of expectations for Guatemalan leaders.

The salient issue for voters was the absolute corruption of their government. The pact of the corrupt is shorthand for the shadowy alliance of business, mafia, and military interests united to rob the country and maintain a status quo of opacity and impunity, driving violence, eroding the rule of law, and convincing millions of young people that immigration to the U.S. is their only shot at a better life. Three of the four Guatemalan presidents who served from 1999 to 2015 did time for corruption. Voters were fooled in the last two elections by candidates who promised justice but in the end seemed to join in the game. More than two dozen jurists and investigators who worked to prosecute these individuals, including two former attorneys general, currently live in exile in the United States, chased out by replacements co-opted by corrupt interests. The U.S. Department of State maintains a sanctions list of corrupt actors, which includes the current attorney general, María Consuelo Porras. One of Guatemala’s leading journalists, José Rubén Zamora, is serving a six-year sentence for what are widely regarded as trumped-up charges related to his corruption investigations.

A traditional Mayan dancer from Rabinal, Guatemala, performs at a campaign rally for presidential candidate Bernardo Arévalo in Guatemala City on Aug.16, 2023.

Earlier this year, as parties jockeyed to enlist their candidates, election officials seen as connected to this cabal issued a series of questionable edicts that disqualified three of the top candidates, all of them espousing anti-corruption platforms. At the time, Arévalo’s Semilla party, formed amid anti-corruption protests that gripped the country in 2015, was stuck deep in eighth place, having shown little ability to electrify the voting public. But the edicts backfired, leading to a first-round win for a combination blank and “null” vote, a silent protest against the electoral manipulations. When the dust cleared, former first lady and perennial candidate Sandra Torres was in the lead. And just behind, squeaking through a small electoral hole, was Arévalo and his Semilla party. No one saw him coming.

After the first round of voting, the machine went into overdrive trying to end Arévalo’s campaign. Party offices were raided, a ballot review was ordered, and a top prosecutor tried to suspend Semilla. A week before the second round of the elections, a few hundred protesters gathered along Guatemala City’s central drag, the pedestrian corridor known as the Sexta. They carried signs denouncing corruption and election interference, adorned their hair with flowers, and carried bouquets symbolizing the democratic flowering they hoped lay ahead. Eschewing the billboards, posters, and painted storefronts that usually define political campaigns in Guatemala, Arévalo’s Semilla party had run an unorthodox operation that played out mainly in the ether. A squadron of young, ironic, fed-up, and extremely online volunteers stuffed social media networks with the gifs, memes, inside jokes, and vertical videos of the information age. TikTok posts flew through the country faster than good gossip, eventually making their way to family members in the U.S., who sent back messages asking, “Have you heard of this guy Arévalo?”

Meanwhile, the capital was plastered with Torres’s face and the green and white of her UNE party. The former first lady — who in 2011 divorced her husband to circumvent electoral laws prohibiting the candidacies of the president’s immediate relatives — was vying for her third shot at the office, running hard to the right of her upstart rival. Two days after the democracy march, the Guatemalan press corps, accompanied by a contingent of international reporters, converged on a compound in a run-down neighborhood in Zone 6 to see Torres make what looked to many Guatemalans like a deal with the devil. The Guatemalan Military Veterans Association, a powerful group of ex-military members who insert themselves on the hard-right side of politics in the country, had invited her to address their ranks.

For those unfamiliar with the baroque intricacies of Guatemalan politics or the genocidal mayhem of the country’s “armed internal conflict,” it might be hard to grasp the inherent weirdness of the scene. Torres and her former husband, President Álvaro Colom, were once seen as center-left reformers who had introduced important, if halting, social welfare programs. Now she was making common cause with proud paranoiacs and executors of the brutal counterinsurgency war who had opposed both of her previous runs for president. She climbed the stage, donned a ball cap with their logo, and launched into an anti-communist, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-progressive tirade shaded with allusions to “strange ideologies.” The crowd cheered when she asked them to “defend Guatemala” against the leftist Arévalo. Torres’s alliance with the association capitalized on veterans’ fears that after years of war crimes convictions of former military leaders, an Arévalo administration would unleash a new wave of prosecutions. In a sign of desperation, Torres, who herself spent time in jail over corruption accusations, bent over a table and signed a promise to increase veterans’ retirement benefits.

Otonil, a 62-year-old veteran of the Guatemalan special forces, known as the Kaibiles, took in the scene from the front row. He said he was conscripted at 14 and underwent the legendary Kaibil training in 1984, at the height of the counterinsurgency war. The Kaibiles are known for their participation in many of the emblematic massacres that amounted to genocide in Guatemala. Otonil’s politics hadn’t shifted much with the peace, and he was convinced that “if Arévalo wins, they’re going to create alliances with Venezuela, with Nicaragua, with Cuba. Guatemala is going to be swept away.” But his conviction was sincere, if paranoid, and he was voting for Torres because he needed her help. “The thing with Sandra is she understands the needs of the humble, simple people in their communities.” He begged pardon and tucked into the real draw of the day: Attendees jostled to receive ham-and-cheese sandwiches, packs of cookies, and sodas, along with 250 quetzales, around $32, for coming out.

The next night, the closing campaign rally for Bernardo Arévalo in front of the historic Palacio Nacional de la Cultura presented a distinct contrast. The vibe was inclusive, forward thinking. A contingent of Mayan Achí dancers performed, and kids gathered at tables to have their faces painted. Arévalo, a diplomat and academic born in exile in Uruguay, had put forward detailed policy proposals emphasizing public investment in health and education, much like his father. But what won the country over was his implacable condemnation of the corruption and dysfunction Guatemalans saw all around them.

For some observers, Arévalo’s candidacy awoke something vital in the electorate, a leftward tendency long thought extinguished by the exhaustion of the war years. Sandra Morán is a former congressperson and women’s rights activist who lived in exile for years as a musician and member of Guatemala’s revolutionary movement. In a working-class neighborhood of the capital, where she lives with her 93-year-old mother, Concepción, she reflected on Arévalo’s victory as the culmination of years of hard work by the Guatemalan left. “The first job was to defeat defeatism,” she said. “And we succeeded. This win for Arévalo wasn’t just a win by Semilla — it was the sum of lots of work.”

Morán is convinced that the influence of elderly folks like her mom, who remember the first Arévalo, were key to the victory of the second, “that important intergenerational connection. It’s fabulous right? Their historical memory, recovering history.” For Morán, the election also represents an endorsement of voting as the ultimate tool for change in Guatemala. After years of guerrilla warfare, after the failure of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, a U.N.-backed anti-corruption commission, after the repression of social movements and the criminalization of the judiciary, “What other tool did we have in this country? The last thing we had was the vote.”

Early on the morning of August 20, crowds of indigenous Kaqchikel speakers gathered outside Mass at the central church in San Juan Sacatepéquez, an hour and change from the capital. Election authorities had consolidated the number of polling locations, which observers worried would hamper turnout. But as Mass let out, residents made their way to the polls. Buses honked and smoke rose from the stalls of vendors warming breakfast for the throng. Rosa Sequen, 35, a Mayan mother of two and a nurse’s assistant, strolled out of the colonial-era portico in the central square after casting her ballot. “I voted for Semilla because we want to see a change,” she said. She was convinced by Arévalo’s commitments to education and public health and hoped that the improvements would spread to other areas of concern. “There isn’t a single day that you don’t hear about violence in this country.”

That night, as word spread of Arévalo’s impending victory, people started to gather outside the Hotel las Américas in one of the tonier districts of Guatemala City, where the Semilla party had announced a press conference. Guatemalans wore “Arévalo Presidente” shirts and “Tio Bernie” hats and carried potted plants to symbolize Semilla and the return of spring. Kids rode on their parents’ shoulders, Carolina blue and white Guatemalan flags swayed, and traffic stood stone still. Guatemalan journalists with decades of experience had never seen anything like it. Arévalo had no official victory party planned, but his supporters supplied one.

Suddenly, a roar went up from the crowd, and necks craned upward. On a balcony ledge above them, Bernardo Arévalo and Vice President-elect Karin Herrera appeared. They waved down to the crowd, flanked by tense, newly assigned bodyguards. Earlier that day, Arévalo had been advised of a plot to assassinate him, dubbed “Plan Colosio” for the Mexican presidential candidate murdered in 1994. But history was calling, and thousands of Guatemalans had gathered to place their hopes on his shoulders. He addressed the crowd. “Thank you for not losing hope. Thank you for not surrendering to the corrupt. Thank you for not surrendering to fear and intimidation,” he said. “Your confidence in us is what makes it possible that today Guatemala is changing its history.”

In the end, it wasn’t even close. Arévalo won 61 percent of the vote and 17 of the country’s 22 departments. But there were dark clouds on the horizon. A week after Arévalo’s victory, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal finally certified the election results but also issued a ruling suspending his Semilla party, more of the same harassment. Arévalo denounced the effort as an attempted coup, but the move left Guatemalans uneasy; the actual handover, on January 14, was still a long way away.

Concepción, Morán’s mother, remained optimistic. As a 16-year-old member of the student movement in 1944, she had agitated for Arévalo Sr.’s election. When she first heard of Bernardo’s candidacy, she couldn’t believe it. “When I heard the name, I wondered, ‘Could it be? Is it possible that he is the son of Arévalo?’” She noted some differences. “He looks a bit like him, not much,” she said. Arévalo Sr. “was a doll, he was gorgeous.” But like others who saw the promise of another Guatemalan spring, she was convinced that the son could bring back “the peace and tranquility that will better our country.” “He has the seed of his father, who came to liberate us back then. That’s what everyone had hoped for.”

The post Guatemalans Guarded the Memory of Democracy Through Years of War and Corruption. Now They See an Opening. appeared first on The Intercept.

The dead include hundreds of adults who’ve expired from heat, vehicle collisions during Border Patrol chases, and mishaps in rivers — mostly the Rio Grande and its canals. Children, too, have died in droves, mainly by drowning. But as current polling suggests, you don’t have to like Donald Trump to be hostile or indifferent to this suffering.

Here are the children known to have drowned or disappeared in 2022, the last year with complete data, on the 55-mile length of the Rio Grande between the towns of Del Rio and Eagle Pass, Texas:

Victoria Mayor, 7, of Venezuela. Ismael Patiño, 4, from Uruguay. Angelica Silva, 4, Nicaragua. A 7-year-old boy from Angola; his 9-year-old brother also swept away but not reported found. Another 4-year-old Nicaraguan, no name provided to the media. A 3-year-old from Nicaragua and his 2-month-old brother dead weeks later of injuries sustained in the water. Christopher Alvarado, 14, from Honduras, drowned while trying to cross the river to reunite with his mother in Houston. A Cuban girl, 2. A 1-year-old from Brazil. A 9-year-old whose mother was trying to take her from rural Guatemala to Indiana. On Christmas Eve, an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy.

This wave of child death has elicited nothing remotely comparable to the national outpouring of grief and anger that erupted in 2019 for Valeria Martinez. She was the 23-month-old Salvadoran toddler who died in the arms of her father, Oscar, as they tried to cross the Rio Grande to Brownsville, Texas. Their entwined bodies were photographed only minutes after they died. Valeria looked pristine, like a Victorian daguerreotype of a child just deceased from diphtheria. Her post-mortem intactness made her photo publishable, just as the image of Alan Kurdi, the 2-year-old Syrian refugee washed up on a beach in Turkey, was publishable in 2015.

But you will not see photos of the vast majority of children drowned at our southern border because they are deemed too grotesque for American media and its audience. “Floaters” is what rescue personnel call these bodies. They have been in the water for hours or days by the time they are retrieved. Their bellies, limbs, and faces are bloated, rotted to terrible distortion. Such was the appearance of a 5-year-old found in a border canal near El Paso in 2019, entangled with a drowned man whom authorities told the press was her father. It turned out that the two were not related. The little girl, from Central America, had crossed with her mother. Both had fallen into the canal, drowned, and floated downstream to where the canal forks. The mother went one way. The child went the other. Her corpse collided with that of the man, also from Central America. It took days to sort out the confusion. The error was never corrected in the media.

I got the photos months later because I had done an open records request for drowning death files for that year. Until then, only officers from the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices knew how the girl looked when she was pulled from the water. Her body had ballooned to almost twice the normal size, and one of her eyes was so bloated that it popped from its socket. She looked like a Cyclops.

I will not publish her post-mortem visuals. The child’s dad was in Central America when she died; I’m not in touch, and it would be up to him to request the photos and permit publication. And maybe it’s better that the U.S. public not view such images. Given the recent polling, it’s not clear that seeing them would improve America’s negative opinion about migrants — even though study after study has found that newcomers, legal and illegal, don’t take jobs from citizens and constitute a boon to the American economy. They pay more in taxes than they use in entitlements. We have a national labor shortage that they could help alleviate. But their fatalities during the crossing fail to move most of us. Nine migrants drowned in a single incident last September near Eagle Pass. Reporting on eight of the deaths before the ninth was discovered, the Washington Post called them the biggest mass drowning along the border in years. The article racked up 162 comments, many of them derisive:

poverty-ridden a$ylum scammer$ looking for a “better life”

Here come the Anchor-Babie$!

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

No sympathy at all for illegal people.

People dying for a free bus ride to Washington D.C. or NYC.

Where does this meanness come from? Why does it persist during the Biden administration and seem to be growing? A slim book published during the Trump administration offers an explanation.

It has a jarring title: “Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy.” The conjoined words seem at first glance like oxymorons. Citizenship and cruelty? Democracy as something white?

The author, New York University political scientist Cristina Beltran, uses the German word “Herrenvolk” to anchor these connections, expanding it into a phrase: “Herrenvolk democracy.”

That term was first coined in the 1960s by anthropologist and sociologist Pierre van den Berghe. Herrenvolk means “master race,” and van den Berghe defined Herrenvolk democracy as a form of government regnant in South Africa under apartheid and in the slavery-based and Jim Crow United States until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before 1964, people defined as white, male property owners (and later the white, male propertyless, and then white women) participated fully in voting and other perks of citizenship, while those considered less than white were, by law and everyday terror, denied voting and many other rights.

The former entitlements of Herrenvolk democracy for white Americans have created in many a profound sense of belonging, merit, and respect for traditionally Herrenvolk government. This, Beltran writes, is why many resent their beloved democracy’s extension to people historically considered nonwhite. It’s a zero-sum game for the Herrenvolk: What others gain, they lose. Despite the anxiety, even rage, elicited by this attitude, today it’s not acceptable for white-identified people to publicly impugn the civic merits of Black and brown Americans. After all, they are U.S. citizens. And the moral imperatives of the Civil Rights Movement are already almost boomer-aged: over six decades old.

This leaves one group to obsess about, resent, and disdain: a group with a long history of demonization in this country, who today remain susceptible to open expressions of Herrenvolk animus or, at best, indifference in the face of such hostility. That group is noncitizen people of color. In Herrenvolk thought, they are conscienceless Untermenschen, the Nazi term for inferior races. The have the temerity to traverse the border illegally and roam America at will, in brazen pursuit of the happiness of democracy — or, as Spanish-speaking immigrants often call it, el sueño americano, the American dream.

By law, immigrants who haven’t been naturalized are not citizens, and they live with highly restricted rights in America, whether they’re present legally or without authorization. They cannot vote. They can be deported for minor, nonviolent crimes, including those for which they’ve served their time. This is so even though millions of noncitizens, including those without papers, work and have U.S.-citizen kids and spouses. Beltran posits that it’s soothing, if not pleasurable, for Herrenvolk-identified people to scapegoat these newcomers, even as the Herrenvolk deem themselves committed partisans of democracy.

Beltran’s analysis extends these attitudes to some people of color. An exemplar is Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. His South Asian-born parents immigrated legally to the U.S., and now he denounces immigrants crossing the border as an “invasion.” (Though his parents came here from India, he does not mention that Herrenvolk politics barred almost all South Asian Indian immigration to the U.S. from 1917 to 1965. Nor does he acknowledge the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh veteran of the U.S. military. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1920, but the Supreme Court revoked his citizenship three years later, deeming him not white according to “the understanding of the common man” in America.

Fear that people of color threaten white Americans is such a deeply engrained civic impulse that it sometimes runs independently of other feelings traditionally considered aspects of the culture wars. The New York Times recently polled Republicans about their views on abortion. Blue-collar white people living mainly in the U.S. Northeast constitute about a fifth of the party, and they overwhelmingly told pollsters they supported Trump. But a clear majority also said abortion should be legal, and that they supported same-sex marriage. At the same time, over a third said that the declining white share of America’s population was bad for the country. And here’s what they were even more willing to express openly: An overwhelming majority — 85 percent — said they opposed comprehensive immigration reform.

How else do Herrenvolk democrats publicly communicate their attitudes?

There are words. One is habitually used by Trump and his supporters and thus denounced by liberals: migrant “invasion.” There’s also the word that appears so habitually in mainstream media (AP, CBS News, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Politico, WNYC host Brian Lehrer) that it’s normalized: “surge,” as in “the surge of migrants.” What’s wrong with “surge,” you might ask? It indicates something unexpected, sudden, and dangerous. In weather talk, it’s about flooding. In electrician talk, an uncontrolled power event that can crash your computer or burn down your house.

As for the media drumbeat about our “migrant crisis,” it echoes the now defunct “Negro problem” and Europe’s old “Jewish question.” The cause of the problem and the question wasn’t Black people or Jews; it was white racism and antisemitism. Today it’s not migrants. It’s the crisis of an embedded type of Americanism.

And there are visuals. Menacing rolls of concertina wire on the once sweet and welcoming Rio Grande. Images in the media of ever taller border walls, many originally erected years before Trump. A Department of Homeland Security video sent to reporters recently, showing an agent with grossly bulked muscles and “tactical-style,” bald-headed tonsure. His bicep is tattooed with blood-red swords, flames, and pitchforks — tattoos similar to those of the murderous Central American and Mexican gangs that migrants are often fleeing. The agent uses that arm to frisk a skinny youth and put him on a deportation plane to Guatemala.

Meanwhile, there’s quieter noise from those who nominally reject Herrenvolk democracy. New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, says the community is depleted and can’t accept more migrants because there are no more beds in the shelters. He and Gov. Kathy Hochul ask President Joe Biden for federal funding and help to make the newcomers immediately eligible to work. Their petitions go largely unheeded. Meanwhile, no protest marches on Washington are organized from New York.

Some of my left-liberal friends wonder if their communities now have too large a “surge.” “Shouldn’t we spend our money,” they ask, “to shelter our own homeless?” These people think of themselves as fighters for social justice. Yet when it comes to immigration, they’re now thinking zero-sum and scapegoat. Such is the power of Herrenvolk democracy. Such is the need to face the floaters, including when they float within ourselves.

The post Floaters: Our Reflection in the Rio Grande appeared first on The Intercept.

Most of the Republicans on the Milwaukee debate stage on August 23 were vying less to win the primary than to be anointed Donald Trump’s running mate. In either case, Nikki Haley has little chance. The debate gave the former South Carolina governor and Trump administration U.N. ambassador no more than a minor boost. Among potential Republican primary voters polled by the Washington Post, Ipsos, and FiveThirtyEight, she came in third, at 15 percent, behind Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy (fourth if you count the absent frontrunner); before that, she’d polled in the single digits.

If her odds of winning the primary are slim, those of receiving DJT’s blessing are less than zero. Haley betrayed her former boss by deciding to run. Then she called him out for raising the national debt. On top of that, she is a brunette — not Trump’s type.

But Haley’s presence, in figure-fitting white boucle amid a marching formation of dark suits and red ties, is important in another way: It brings the GOP’s gender politics out of the closet. Sure, gender is a big deal for the party — when it’s somebody else’s. The 2022 midterms revealed the saliency of abortion for women voters and the advantage that gives Democrats. And, as these candidates tell it, transgender people are the greatest threat to U.S. security, right alongside China and the teachers unions.

But what about gender among their own? How does Haley’s gender play in her life as a politician? What does her rising stardom say about the Republicans’ future?

The morning after Milwaukee, Vox politics reporter Li Zhou argued that Haley had “leveraged” her gender “as an asset.” In Politico, Megan Messerly wrote that she “leaned into” it. Both noted Haley’s quip, interjected during a volley of disses between Ramaswamy and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie: “This is exactly why Margaret Thatcher said, ‘If you want something said, ask a man. If you want something done, ask a woman.’”

It’s a line she quotes often. In fact, “If You Want Something Done: Leadership Lessons From Bold Women” is the title of Haley’s book, and Thatcher claims Chapter 1. But if you’re looking for a champion of women, the Iron Lady is famously not your person. The Ronald Reagan of Britain, Prime Minister Thatcher inaugurated her party’s demolition of the welfare state. She evinced no sympathy for the low-income mothers — or any mothers, for that matter — who did not have the rich, supportive husband and staff of nannies that she had. She despised feminism and dismissed female assertiveness. “‘I didn’t get here by being a strident female. I don’t like strident females,’” quoted Jenni Murray, then-host of BBC Radio’s “Woman’s Hour,” in The Guardian the day after Thatcher’s death in 2013. “What did Margaret Thatcher do for women?” Murray asked. “Nothing.”

Like Thatcher, Haley is worried more about spending than the well-being of the vulnerable, assumed to be a top concern for women politicians. At a recent rally, Haley came out for “entitlement reform” of Social Security and Medicare, aka privatization and cuts. At the debate, she decried bipartisan pandemic-era policies that expanded eligibility for government assistance — and lifted millions, most of them children, out of poverty. When Congress “passed that $2.2 trillion Covid stimulus bill, they left us with 90 million people on Medicaid, 42 million people on food stamps,” Haley declared. “No one has told you how to fix it.”

Don’t mistake Nikki Haley for a moderate — or a feminist. In a field of candidates falling off the right side of the earth, she only looks like one.

As examples of Haley’s feminine approach, Zhou named her promotion of “consensus” and respect for individual difference. “Can’t we agree that contraception should be available? Can’t we all agree that we are not going to put a woman in jail or give her the death penalty if she gets an abortion?” the candidate asked, allowing that abortion is “personal for every woman and man.” Haley added, “Let’s … humanize the situation and stop demonizing the situation.”

Is the 20-week abortion ban (19, she now claims) with no exceptions for rape or incest that Gov. Haley signed in 2016 humanizing or demonizing? It was, at any rate, unconstitutional seven years before Roe v. Wade was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Early this summer, Haley pledged to work for a federal 15-week abortion ban, though her answers on this question during the debate were vague. That a 15-week ban is a reasonable compromise and not killing people for ending their pregnancies a moderate stance probably says more about where we’ve come since Dobbs than it does about Haley. But don’t mistake her for a moderate — or a feminist. In a field of candidates falling off the right side of the earth, she only looks like one.

The hard-right, proto-misogynist Thatcher may be Haley’s role model. But the person who inspired her to get into politics is on the other side: “The reason I actually ran for office is because of Hillary Clinton,” she told the New York Times in 2012. “Everybody was telling me why I shouldn’t run: I was too young, I had small children, I should start at the school board level.” Then Haley attended Clinton’s keynote address to a leadership institute at Birmingham University. Such advice not to run, Haley recalled Clinton insisting, constituted “the reasons why we need you to do it.” Haley “walked out of there thinking, ‘That’s it. I’m running for office.’”

But Clinton did not just lend Haley the gumption to run. For decades, she trod a rugged track, smoothing it for successors of both parties to follow without stumbling.

From the moment she mounted the national stage, when Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, Hillary’s feminism was at odds with the femininity demanded of her. In the couple’s first interview, on “60 Minutes,” she was questioned about his infidelities. “I’m not sittin’ here, some little woman standin’ by my man, like Tammy Wynette,” she spat. The same year, challenged about her intention to continue her law practice if Bill won, Hillary replied: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession.” Cookiegate would haunt her for years. And during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, she was flamed for standing by her man.

During her own 2008 presidential primary fight, against Barack Obama, Clinton again faced the impossible: looking feminine enough to get elected as the first “woman president” yet tough (that is, masculine) enough to serve as the Leader of the Free World. One metric of electability at the time was “likability.” In August 2007, Obama was the only candidate averaging over 50 — 53, to be exact — among both Democrats and Republicans on Gallup’s zero-to-100-degree “feeling thermometer.” Clinton trailed at 49. The moderator of the debate preceding the New Hampshire primary asked her to comment on the fact that voters were impressed by her resumé but “seem to like Obama more.” Clinton smiled knowingly. “Well, that hurts my feelings,” she responded. “But I’ll try to go on.” The audience laughed. This was where Obama committed one of the few gaffes in a scrupulously disciplined campaign: “She’s likable enough,” he said.

Obama was likable, charming even. But as a man, he didn’t have to be. Even the vicious, petty Rudy Giuliani had earned a 50 on the feeling thermometer. And Clinton did go on. But she wearied, and three days after the debate, talking to voters in a coffee shop, she briefly choked up. Against all predictions, she shellacked Obama in New Hampshire, with greatest support from women and low-income voters. People say the tears humanized her; I think they feminized her. But they didn’t save her. On the internet she was still being called a cunt. And it wasn’t until her second presidential run, nearly a quarter-century after the “‘60 Minutes’ debacle,” that Clinton could revive the cookie remark, this time with cheeky pride.

The gender politics of the Clinton-Obama matchup — her refusal to fold into conventional white femininity, his millennial Black middle-class masculinity — had a permanent effect not only on women in subsequent political races but also on men and trans candidates of any gender. Arguably, Obama cleared the way for the openly gay Pete Buttigieg; the 118th Congress has more LGBTQ+ members than any before it. Even the Republican field has more space for diverse masculinities, from the staid, white, Christian patriarch Mike Pence to the slight, jittery, Indian American Vivek Ramaswamy.

And space for diverse femininities? A decade ago, a University of California, Los Angeles study found that the more conservative a female politician’s voting record, the more gender-stereotypically pretty she was — and, on the whole, Republican women are still a femme-y bunch. But Haley resembles Clinton more than she does her conservative colleagues and predecessors. She is handsome and well put-together. But unlike the beauty queen turned anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, Haley doesn’t trade on her looks. And unlike Phyllis Schlafly, who always thanked her husband Fred for letting her out of the house to campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, Nikki waved Michael Haley off this summer to a National Guard deployment in Africa while she carried on campaigning at home.

Though staunchly uni-gender, Nikki Haley is combative but not masculine, feminine but not girly. She is, in a sense, a 21st-century Republican Hillary Clinton. But thanks to feminism — and its liberal standard-bearer Clinton — Haley does not have to wager likability against credibility, femininity against humanity.

For a candidate of any gender, likability may be obsolete as a criterion for election. As with so many other things, Trump bashed the meaning out of it. Its qualities circa 2008 — tolerance, courtesy, warmth, generosity — define the anti-Trump. The ex-president is adulated for his bigotry, rudeness, and egomania. Misogyny is another positive: According to the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, the most sexist Republicans are Trump’s biggest fans; among them he leads his nearest competitor, the goofy, whiny DeSantis, 74 percent to 13 percent.

Haley’s evident human mien masks her inhumane leanings.

Would a Trump bro vote for a woman? Hard to know. But for the non-pussy-grabbing Republican forced to choose between a woman and a Democrat (who might also be a woman), the party could not do better than Haley. Aside from her please-all-comers gender presentation, she is of attractively indeterminate race, a hyphenate who passes for white. (Like Ramaswamy, Haley is Indian American.) Her evident human mien masks her inhumane leanings. Mother of two adult children, wife of a soldier, and owner of dogs, the requisite pet of higher officeholders, she can play the woman card and, like her heroine Thatcher, do nothing, or worse, for women — not to mention LGBTQ+ people, racial minorities, children, or anyone with the spinelessness to need protection or help.

Hillary Clinton didn’t get the chance to demonstrate that a woman can be strong enough to run a country. Margaret Thatcher did but also showed — as did Golda Meir and Evita Perón — that being a woman says nothing about how she will run it. Nikki Haley probably won’t make it to the hustings this election cycle, but she seems destined to do so soon enough. When that happens, her colleagues would be wise to embrace her, because she is a gift to the GOP: a wolf in women’s clothing, lipstick on the pigs.

The post Nikki Haley Brings the GOP’s Gender Politics Home appeared first on The Intercept.

Melgar was appointed vice minister of defense by left-leaning President Xiomara Castro in 2022; he is the highest-ranking officer in the Honduran military, which is headed by Castro’s civilian nephew. Last year, Melgar met with U.S. Army Gen. Laura Richardson, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, to discuss “strengthening cooperation to support mutual security goals,” according to a press release from SOUTHCOM, which runs Joint Task Force Bravo, an airbase in Honduras. “Honduras is a valued & respected security partner,” Richardson tweeted after the meeting. U.S. training of Honduran soldiers, which tapered off as the previous administration was engulfed in drug scandals, has openly resumed under Castro.

In June, Melgar publicly announced his resignation after a riot at a women’s prison in Honduras left dozens of people dead, fueling concerns of a failing security strategy. But contrary to popular perception, he remains in his post. A human rights attaché for the Honduran military told The Intercept that Melgar is still vice minister of defense, and a high-level government minister said he continues to appear at meetings. While questions remain about what prompted his announcement, the defense official has a troubling history that has never been fully reported.

During the trial of Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez in federal district court in Manhattan, U.S. prosecutors suggested the possibility that Melgar himself had links to the drug trade. Fuentes was convicted in March 2021 of conspiring with high-ranking Honduran politicians and military officials to traffic tons of cocaine into the United States. One of Fuentes’s “military contacts,” according to prosecutors, was Melgar.

Meanwhile, a decade before becoming the de facto head of the Honduran military, Melgar was stationed as an intelligence officer in the Aguán Valley, a stretch of Caribbean coast home to industrial African palm plantations. The Aguán has been the site of protracted land disputes between farmer cooperatives and palm oil barons, whose private security guards, working alongside soldiers deployed to the region, have unleashed violence against peasant activists contesting corporate ownership claims.

While Melgar was posted in the Aguán, according to multiple sources — including local farmers, journalists, and a lawyer who worked with land rights activists — he participated in the operations of a notorious private security firm contracted by the largest palm corporation in the region. Peasant groups accused the company of waging a campaign of terror to chase farmers off plantation land — including targeted killings.

“It is not correct to write accusations of this type without the other side,” Melgar wrote in response to detailed questions from The Intercept, communicating through the Honduran military’s human rights attaché. “It is illegal and unfair since clearing my name and that of my family is not and should not be my responsibility, but rather the media should be more responsible.” Melgar repeatedly declined to elaborate, saying that he would only accept an in-person interview.

Representatives for the Castro administration did not respond to requests for comment. U.S. Southern Command declined to comment.

“I’ve always expressed my fear of returning to Honduras because of Melgar,” Gerardo Argueta, a member of the Francisco Cano cooperative who fled the Aguán and sought asylum in the U.S., told The Intercept. “Imagine, now he’s vice minister of defense. … He could order anything now with all that power.”

Building a Narco-State

For decades, the U.S. has supported Honduran governments whose security forces have violently repressed protest, protected select figures in the drug trade, and executed perceived criminals with so-called extermination squads. Since 2009, when a military coup greenlit by the State Department ousted former President Manuel Zelaya, the husband of current president Castro, the U.S. has supported sweeping security initiatives to militarize Honduran forces in the name of the war on drugs — even as they engaged in widespread human rights abuses.

From 2009 to 2020, Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez ran a high-level drug ring that trafficked South American cocaine through Honduras, relying on protection from Honduran military and police commanders, as well as former President Juan Orlando Hernández, according to testimony in U.S. federal court. The former president allegedly promised to deploy soldiers to protect a cocaine laboratory run by Fuentes. After years of close collaboration with the Obama and Trump administrations on security and anti-migrant initiatives, Hernández was arrested last February before being extradited to the U.S., where he awaits trial on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

During the period that Fuentes was trafficking cocaine, Melgar rose in the ranks of elite Honduran anti-narcotics units: first as a military intelligence officer, then as a commander of the country’s first military police battalion, and then as a Caribbean coast commander for a task force called FUSINA, where he was charged with directing military and police special forces units to combat drug traffickers and gangs.

Court documents filed in the case against Fuentes indicate a possible connection between Melgar and the drug trafficker. At Fuentes’s trial, federal prosecutors unveiled a list of contact information for various Honduran officials found on the defendant’s phone, which included a phone number under the name “Coronel Melgar Cmdte. Fusina,” or Col. Melgar, FUSINA commander. The prosecutors did not suggest that they had identified any specific communications between Melgar and Fuentes.

After Fuentes was convicted of drug trafficking and related firearms offenses, prosecutors filed a memo asking the court to impose a life sentence. In the August 2021 sentencing submission, they argued that Fuentes’s operation thrived thanks to his “corrupt contacts in the military and police.”

“The defendant received support from the highest levels of the Honduran military,” the memo read, describing a general named Rene Orlando Ponce Fonseca, who led the 105th Battalion in San Pedro Sula and later became head of the Honduran armed forces, as providing “assistance, military equipment, uniforms, and weapons” to Fuentes, including AR-15 assault weapons and bulletproof vests. The memo continued: “Other of the defendant’s military contacts include Colonel Leandro Flores, head of an anti-gang unit; and Colonel Melgar, a commander in an anti-narcotics multi-agency task force.”

Ponce Fonseca and Flores could not be reached for comment.

“The armed forces have been the key for turning Honduras into a narco-state.”

The appearance of Melgar’s name in the trial record was largely overlooked by journalists, who focused on Fuentes’s relationship with then-President Hernández, according to Cristián Sánchez, head of the Pro-Honduras Network, an nongovernmental organization based in Washington, D.C., that investigates corruption in Honduras. Sánchez, who attended the trial, called attention to the court references to Melgar earlier this year.

“The armed forces have been the key for turning Honduras into a narco-state,” Sánchez told The Intercept. “In the most recent trial, against Geovanny Fuentes, who has been associated directly with Juan Orlando Hernández, it was talked about how a large amount of the contacts that Fuentes had on his phone were members of the armed forces.”

U.S. officials have continued to collaborate with the Honduran military. In October, two U.S. National Guard brigades deployed to Honduras to train local troops. Honduran forces participated in a training course in Guatemala organized by U.S. Southern Command, and in July, Honduras hosted a training course for the First Special Forces Battalion carried out by members of the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group.

A Pattern of Violence

Land conflicts in the Aguán Valley date back to the 1990s, when palm oil corporations began wresting control of farms from the region’s smallholders in order to plant the lucrative commodity. The corporations and the government engaged in coercive purchases, according to peasant farmers, or campesinos, who formed co-ops, occupied land, and fought in the courts to reclaim their titles. Their resistance was met with violence.

The largest landholder in the Aguán was Dinant Corporation, owned by the late Honduran business mogul Miguél Facussé. One of the most powerful men in the country and a force behind the 2009 coup, Facussé also came under suspicion for links to drug traffickers, who landed cocaine-laden planes on his heavily guarded property, according to a 2004 State Department cable leaked by WikiLeaks (no charges were ever filed). The Aguán has served as a strategic transshipment point for traffickers, and the vast palm plantations are riddled with hidden landing strips.

After the 2009 coup, long-running tensions over land boiled over into a wave of assassinations. By 2014, more than 100 members of the campesino movement in the Aguán would be dead. Peasant groups and civil society organizations attributed the violence to state security forces, including members of the military’s 15th Battalion, and palm oil private security companies, including a firm known as Orion that Dinant contracted to guard its plantations.

Melgar, who eyewitnesses say was deployed to the Aguán between approximately 2009 and 2013, played a role in the region that has yet to be brought to light. (An affidavit filed in Argueta’s asylum case also placed Melgar in the region during this period.) Seven people who lived or worked in the Aguán at the time said that while Melgar was stationed at the military’s 15th Battalion base in Rio Claro, he also participated in on-the-ground Orion operations.

In 2013, a United Nations working group on the use of mercenaries from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights singled out Orion as the company most referenced in complaints by civil society organizations. “The working group was profoundly disturbed at the alleged involvement of private security guards in the killing, disappearance, forced eviction, and even sexual violence to which peasants have been subjected in Bajo Aguán, often acting in concert with the police and the military,” the group wrote.

A report published by Rights Action the same year, which analyzed acts of violence against the campesino movement that witnesses attributed to the military, noted, “Testimonies received in the course of documenting these abuses indicate an extremely close working relationship between the 15th Battalion and the Orion security company.” The report’s author, human rights worker and regional expert Annie Bird, concluded: “Members of the 15th Battalion and other security forces in the region collaborate in what can only be characterized as death squad activity.”

The allegations against Dinant’s security operatives were so damning that they sparked an internal audit at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, which had agreed to loan the company $30 million to develop its plantations. The resulting investigation by the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, released in December 2013, noted that specific allegations linked 40 killings to “Dinant properties, Dinant security guards, or its third party security contractor.” The report found that the investment in Dinant violated multiple IFC policies, including “failure to investigate credible accusations of abuse by security personnel,” but the oversight body did not have the authority to weigh in on the merit of the peasant groups’ allegations.

Most of the crimes carried out in the Aguán remain unsolved. “In the vast majority of cases police did not perform the most basic investigative steps necessary to identify suspects and bring them to justice,” Human Rights Watch reported in 2014, describing an atmosphere of “virtually complete impunity for crimes tied to land conflicts.”

Only one Orion operative was successfully prosecuted for murders committed in the Aguán. In 2016, Rigoberto Rodríguez Tomé, identified by the Honduran public ministry as Orion’s former security chief, was convicted of the November 2011 killings of two peasant farmers. By cross-referencing filings in the case with corporate registration records, The Intercept determined that the security firm that officially employed Rodríguez Tomé was incorporated by Melgar’s family members.

The case file at the courthouse in the city of Trujillo refers to Rodríguez Tomé as wearing an Orion uniform and driving an Orion truck when the murders were carried out. A document in the same case file lists his employer at the time as SION Private Security LLC. The articles of incorporation for SION on file with the Honduran Chamber of Commerce were signed in March 2011 by Melgar’s daughter and mother-in-law, according to the country’s National Registry of Persons. Both were listed as shareholders in the company, which the Chamber of Commerce still lists as active. Melgar’s daughter was also designated general manager, even though she was in dental school in San Pedro Sula until 2013. SION’s records were amended in 2015 to grant Melgar’s wife general power of attorney.

The vice minister of defense declined to respond to repeated requests for comment on his relationship to the security companies.

Melgar was one of the most visible connections between military forces and private security operatives as they carried out what many saw as a terror campaign, campesino activists told The Intercept. A member of the farmer cooperative MARCA recalled seeing Melgar at joint military checkpoints manned by soldiers and armed Orion operatives multiple times in 2011 and 2012. “The army and Orion worked together,” he said. “When they did operations, they went together.” The farmer and other residents asked that their names be withheld because they remain in the Aguán, where land and water defenders still face the threat of violence.

“The army and Orion worked together. When they did operations, they went together.”

Fourteen members of MARCA were assassinated or disappeared at the hands of private security operatives, police, or 15th Battalion soldiers between 2009 and 2013, according to the farmer and two other MARCA members, a number consistent with the findings of the Rights Action report.

The MARCA members, along with three journalists who covered land conflicts in the Aguán and a lawyer who worked with campesino movements, allege Melgar was frequently seen on joint patrols with Honduran soldiers and armed Orion operatives, who at times wore the uniforms of the 15th Battalion. One of the MARCA members recalled witnessing Orion guards physically receiving uniforms from the military in the lead-up to a violent eviction.

“There were lots of guards dressed as soldiers,” the MARCA member said. “A soldier has to be put together. But a lot of these ‘soldiers’ went with tennis shoes, their shirts unbuttoned.”

Two of the journalists said that they frequently saw Melgar in an Orion truck wearing an Orion patch on his military uniform. The journalists, both of whom later fled to the U.S. after receiving threats from another 15th Battalion officer, asked that their names be withheld for fear of retaliation should they return to Honduras.

In a statement to The Intercept, Dinant spokesperson Roger Pineda declined to comment on Melgar’s ties to Orion, noting that many years had passed since the period in question. “Most, if not all, of those with knowledge of events then have moved on for various reasons,” he wrote. “We have no relevant records pertaining to that period.” Pineda has been a Dinant executive since at least 2011.

Pineda categorically denied any inappropriate relationship between the company’s security operatives and military or police forces. “At no time has Dinant ever asked for, directed, or acquiesced to mixing our private security guards with military personnel on patrols or in operations,” he wrote. “Nor have we ever lent uniforms or exchanged uniforms with Honduran police or military personnel. To allege otherwise is to fabricate stories out of whole cloth.”

Argueta, the campesino activist who fled the Aguán, recalled a phone call he received in 2012, after Orion guards and 15th Battalion troops evicted members of the Francisco Cano cooperative from a plantation claimed by Dinant. Argueta was familiar with intimidation and death threats. But this was different. He said he recognized the voice on the other end of the line as Elias Melgar.

In a sworn affidavit filed in support of Argueta’s application for asylum in the United States, a human rights worker relayed the accusation that Melgar made menacing phone calls, arguing that staying in Honduras would put Argueta’s life at risk. The activist is in the asylum process. According to Argueta, the colonel said that “the order from the army wasn’t to capture me” but “to put a bullet in my head.”

“A person with the trajectory of Elias Melgar … it’s astonishing he would be taken in by a ‘leftist’ government,” one of the journalists said.

Dinant ceased contracting with Orion in 2014, but the palm oil company now has a new private security force conducting armed patrols in collaboration with the Honduran military. And the killing has resumed in the Aguán. Between December and June, seven activists who took a stand against Dinant and a mining business linked to the Facussé family were assassinated, along with two of the activists’ family members. No one has been arrested in connection with the murders.

The post Honduras Defense Official and U.S. Drug War Ally Tied to Narco-Trafficker, Notorious Mercenary Firm appeared first on The Intercept.

The defeat of Ohio Issue 1 on August 8 demonstrated the strength of the pro-abortion rights vote. Activists secured an initiative to be placed on the November ballot constitutionally enshrining the right to abortion until fetal viability. To head off what promises to be a slam dunk for the pros, Ohio’s anti-abortion Republican legislature proposed its own amendment, to raise the bar to amend the state constitution. That was Issue 1, the sole question on the ballot of the special August election.

Issue 1 was a transparent ruse — polls showed 58 percent support for the abortion rights measure; the lawmakers specified a 60 percent majority to pass an amendment instead of the current simple majority — and voters soundly rejected it.

Now Ohio is set to follow the six states that have conferred the highest level of state protection on reproductive freedom through popular referendum. Campaigners for a similar 2024 ballot measure in Arizona are psyched by Ohio’s victory, and Nebraska is gearing up for one as well. Virginia Democrats were moved to elevate reproductive liberty to the top of their platform, in hopes of winning back the state House of Representatives and firewalling abortion from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s attempts to impose the most extreme prohibitions.

In Ohio, democracy prevailed — and the spirit is spreading.

Still, you could see it the opposite way. Ohio’s GOP contrived to upend a process of governance that’s been uncontroversial since 1912. The party introduced a bill to allow for an August election on a constitutional amendment — formerly one could be held only in the case of a “fiscal emergency” — and when the bill stalled in committee, they held the election anyway. The party of skinflints magnanimously allocated $20 million in taxpayer funds to run the referendum, which set in motion the spending of another $26.6 million in advertising by organizations for and against the initiative. All in all, that’s a slew of monkey wrenches in the gears of democracy, with one purpose: to force women to have children they don’t want.

You can have abortion bans, or you can have democracy. You can’t have both.

Criminalizing abortion is undemocratic in the most basic sense: Increasing majorities of Americans are against it. In fact, a new poll shows that given the chance, two in three would vote to protect the right to abortion in their state constitutions. That includes nearly half of Republicans.

Abortion bans, moreover, could not have been achieved without a long prehistory of dubiously legal, anti-democratic shenanigans like those the legislature pulled in Ohio. The conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade would be a mere, potentially negotiable majority had Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell not refused to hold confirmation hearings for President Barack Obama’s nominee, the moderate Merrick Garland, to fill the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death in 2016.

Republicans would not hold seemingly permanent control of Ohio’s statehouse if the party had not radically gerrymandered election districts and ignored seven court rulings rejecting the maps it drew. Anti-abortion initiatives on the 2022 ballots in Kansas and Kentucky also emerged from legislatures gerrymandered to insulate members from the will of the people.

Ballot initiatives aren’t perfect: The biggest spenders tend to win. Still, when representative government is disabled by election rigging and voter suppression, direct democracy may be the citizens’ last resort. Watching ballot initiatives land repeated blows against minority rule, Republicans in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, Utah, and Michigan are doing their damnedest to waylay referenda on the way to the polling booth.

In Michigan, Republicans on the Board of State Canvassers voted to keep two legitimately petitioned referenda off the 2022 ballot. One measure, unironically, instituted pro-voting reforms; the other constitutionally enshrined abortion rights. Both were blocked on technicalities — the latter because of spacing errors in the document. After the state Supreme Court restored the initiatives, voters approved both. Similarly, the anti-abortion measures in Kansas and Kentucky were rejected at the ballot box. In 2024, Arizona and Florida Republicans will attempt to limit the ability of voters to direct ballot or amend the constitution— but they’ll have to do it through popular referenda.

Enforcement of abortion bans requires the violation of basic constitutional and human rights. Using legislation crafted by the National Right to Life Committee, South Carolina has passed a law and Texas a bill that stomp on free speech by shutting down websites that offer information on abortion. If the laws stand in the courts, other states are likely to follow.

In Idaho this month, six public university professors and two unions brought a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s 2021 No Public Funds for Abortion Act, which criminalizes the use of public funds not just to perform abortions but also to “promote [or] provide counseling in favor of abortion.” Educators have bowdlerized their syllabi, scrubbed their resumes, and pulled art from an exhibition in fear of overstepping the vague bounds of the law and losing their jobs or facing felony convictions that carry penalties of heavy fines and imprisonment. “This law censors teaching, discussion, and scholarship about abortion at Idaho’s public universities, effectively stripping professors of their First Amendment right to academic speech,” said the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the professors.

Not content with prosecuting pill distributors as drug traffickers or prohibiting the “trafficking” of fetal tissue, the antis have minted a new species of criminal trafficking. A statute signed this spring by Idaho Gov. Brad Little prohibits “abortion trafficking”; it defines as a trafficker anyone who “procures an abortion” or “obtains an abortion-inducing drug for [a] pregnant minor to use for an abortion by recruiting, harboring, or transporting the pregnant minor” — language that suggests child sex slavery. Although “transporting” refers only to the in-state portion of the trip, the law contravenes both the constitutional right to travel and, arguably, the human right to asylum from persecution.

The persistence and prevalence of pill abortions in defiance of the bans has compelled red-state law enforcers to step up surveillance, and we can expect more violations of privacy in the future. If the Supreme Court upholds the recent Texas ruling severely limiting distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone, the Comstock Act of 1873 could be resuscitated and the U.S. Postal Service authorized to open mail in search of contraband. Last year, Nebraska prosecutors used private Facebook messages and federally protected medical records to charge a teenager, Celeste Burgess, and her mother, Jessica, with self-managing the daughter’s abortion using medication at about 28 weeks’ gestation and attempting to burn the stillborn fetus.

But the invasion of the Burgesses’ privacy was the least of it. Jessica faces up to five years in prison for violating Nebraska’s abortion laws by buying the pills online and giving them to her daughter. (The law back then prohibited abortion after 20 weeks; in May 2023, Nebraska’s governor signed a 12-week ban.) Celeste, who was 17 at the time and had no criminal record, pleaded guilty to the felony offense of “removing, abandoning, or concealing human skeletal remains.” And while anti-abortion propagandists allege that they seek compassion, not punishment, for women who abort, the judge gave Celeste 90 days’ jail time plus two years’ probation. “Confinement is necessary,” he wrote, because its omission “would depreciate the seriousness of the crime or promote disrespect for the law.”

Which law? It is fair to conclude that this teenager was locked up for three months for ingesting a legal drug to return her own body to its former, unpregnant state. So much for due process and proportional justice — the time fitting the crime.

The more intimate the target, the more intrusive the surveillance. That’s why several states have deputized private citizens to inform on, and sue, those who “aid and abet” abortions — the new American Stasi. At the same time, the more numerous the aspects of personal life the state seeks to police — sexual behavior, gender expression, unsavory thought — the more pressing will be people’s desire and need to disobey the laws, just to carry on ordinary life. The more widespread such disobedience becomes, the greater will be the perception of crime and, with it, the state’s self-justification for repression.

The Grand Old Party has long since abandoned even the appearance of caring about democracy. It wants only power, and to get power its politicians pander to the base of nosy, self-righteous, cruelly unchristian evangelical Christians, who care even less. American democracy has never been perfect, but for duking out our differences, it’s all we’ve got. Still, some things are not proper subjects of democratic debate. Among these are people’s decisions about whether and when to have a baby. In this case, democracy means leaving our bodies alone.

The post Abortion Bans or Democracy — You Can’t Have Both appeared first on The Intercept.

“My first thought was, maybe surgery can fix this, but I was told, ‘Sorry, your daughter is incompatible with life, she will be born without a skull,’” Casiano said in a Texas district court hearing on Wednesday. “She was going to die inside or outside of my womb.”

Her doctors bluntly told her she had “no options” in Texas as a result of the state’s abortion laws, handing her only a prescription for antidepressants. Casiano considered traveling to New Mexico for pregnancy termination, but the barriers were too steep. She could not take time off work and lacked reliable transportation, funds to pay for the procedure, and child care. Casiano came to the realization that she would have to carry the high-risk pregnancy to term. She felt like a “prisoner” in her own body.

Her due date was in May, but Casiano went into labor in March. She delivered her baby, then watched her slowly die: She was “gasping for air” and turning from pink to red to purple. Her eyeballs started bleeding. “I watched my baby suffer for four hours,” Casiano sobbed. “I told her, I am so sorry I couldn’t release you to heaven sooner. … There was no mercy for her.”

In the middle of recounting her harrowing ordeal, Casiano began vomiting on the witness stand, attorneys rushing to provide her a wastebasket.

Casiano is one of 13 women who have joined a landmark lawsuit against the state of Texas after being denied abortion care despite life-threatening pregnancy complications. She and others offered a stream of emotional testimony during a two-day hearing in Austin.

Since March, when the Center for Reproductive Rights filed Zurawski v. Texas, the lawsuit has grown from eight plaintiffs to 15, including two OB-GYNs. The patients suing are still just a fraction of the “countless” people in Texas denied life-saving care, attorneys say. Requesting a temporary injunction, the plaintiffs are not necessarily looking to halt the Texas abortion laws. But they hope to at least force the state to clarify the scope of the laws’ ambiguous carveout for medical emergencies and affirm that physicians can provide abortion care when emergency conditions arise — a “bare minimum” request that could save lives. Meanwhile, Texas is asking state District Judge Jessica Mangrum to dismiss the case.

“Texans have been living under strict abortion bans for nearly two years, longer than residents of any other state in the country,” Molly Duane, an attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in an opening statement. “While Texas’s abortion bans ostensibly have a medical exception, that exception simply does not function in practice. [These women] all wanted children and all suffered unimaginable tragedy. The harms these women suffered were all directly caused by the state’s ban on abortion.”

Duane and her colleagues say “inconsistencies” in the language of Texas abortion laws, the use of “non-medical terminology,” and “sloppy” legislative drafting have resulted in confusion throughout the medical community, leading physicians to over-comply with the laws or risk harsh criminal and civil punishment, placing patient lives in jeopardy.

Attorneys with the Center for Reproductive Rights say the lawsuit not only marks the first time women denied abortions have sued a state since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, but it’s also likely the first time abortion patients denied care have testified against a state since the historic reproductive rights case was filed in Texas in the early 1970s.

“We’re All Paralyzed”

As the first — and largest — state in the country to outlaw abortion, Texas has felt the disastrous impact of a post-Roe world longer than other red states. Nearly 10 months before the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Texas lawmakers enacted Senate Bill 8, a near-total ban with a novel private enforcement provision that empowered anti-abortion vigilantes to file civil suit against a provider or anyone who “aids or abets” care. Following Roe’s demise, politicians allowed a complete abortion “trigger ban” to take effect. Neither S.B. 8 nor the trigger law have exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or severe fetal abnormality. The trigger law carries harsh penalties for doctors, including revocation of their medical licenses, civil fines of at least $100,000 per violation, and up to 99 years in prison.

While the Texas abortion laws make an exception for medical emergencies, they are vaguely defined as “risk of death or a substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” The nonscientific nature of the language — coupled with the severe consequences of violating the law — has instilled confusion and fear in Texas doctors, who are erring on the side of extreme caution to avoid liability. Physicians are either waiting until a patient is on “death’s door” before offering abortion care — or failing to intervene at all. The result has been a stream of horrific stories of pregnant patients experiencing life-threatening medical complications, including organ failure, sepsis, and hemorrhaging.

Dr. Damla Karsan, an OB-GYN in Houston, routinely provided abortions to patients, including those with a wide array of high-risk complications, including ectopic pregnancy and preeclampsia. But since S.B. 8, the threat of being “targeted” with punitive charges has forced her to halt the provision of potentially life-saving care. In court, she described a pregnant patient who visited her in the ER at 15 weeks, bleeding profusely and carrying a nonviable fetus. While her risk of hemorrhage was high, Karsan could not offer her pregnancy termination. The patient was forced to make a 14-hour drive out of state for care and ended up developing kidney complications.

“I feel like my hands are tied. I have the skill, training, and experience to provide care but I’m unable to do so — it’s gut-wrenching.”

“I feel like my hands are tied. I have the skill, training, and experience to provide care but I’m unable to do so — it’s gut-wrenching,” Karsan said. “I am looking for clarity, for a promise that I’m not going to be prosecuted for providing care.” The law has also made it difficult to recruit doctors to Texas. They don’t want to practice in the state because “we’re all paralyzed at providing standard obstetric care,” she added.

Texas officials have not only offered little direction for uncertain doctors but have also gone out of their way to prevent assistance. Last year, a Trump-appointed federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s effort to provide emergency abortion guidance for doctors under protections in federal law after a suit filed by ardently anti-abortion Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is named as a defendant in the Zurawski case. (In May, the Texas House impeached Paxton, alleging a series of offenses including bribery, abuse of office, and obstruction. Currently suspended, he faces a Senate impeachment trial this fall.)

Despite pleas from Democrats, Republican lawmakers remained largely unwilling to engage on the issue of medical exceptions during the five-month legislative session that began in Texas in January. At the eleventh hour, however, the Legislature quietly passed a bill that ostensibly seeks to offer more legal protection for doctors performing emergency abortion. Intentionally kept under the radar to ensure its passage, House Bill 3058, slated to take effect on September 1, covers treatment of ectopic pregnancies, where a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, and pre-viable premature rupture of membranes, in which water breaks before the stage of viability. Doctors who can prove they “exercised reasonable medical judgment” in these cases could potentially be protected from liability.

The law — authored by Democratic Rep. Ann Johnson and sponsored by Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of S.B. 8 — was seen as a “compromise” with Republicans who didn’t have the “appetite” to fully resolve the glaring problem. Defendants invoked the law during the two-day hearing, asking the plaintiffs if they were aware of its provisions.

But even under H.B. 3058, doctors must be indicted or sued to assert the “reasonable medical judgment” defense, and they would still face the same draconian penalties. Duane said the law was “wholly insufficient” to address the widespread suffering of patients across Texas.

“Under this bill, doctors who provide an abortion will still have to defend themselves in court to prove the abortion was necessary,” Duane said. “Imagine doing that in a state whose government has been zealously hostile towards abortion providers. Doctors can still be hauled into court where they face cripplingly high fines, life in prison, and loss of their medical license.”

H.B. 3085 also leaves out a litany of other pregnancy complications. On the stand, Dallas resident Ashley Brandt described how she and her husband were overjoyed to welcome twins last May. However, like Casiano, Brandt learned that one of her twins had developed anencephaly and would not survive birth. Despite the condition placing Brandt’s life and the life of the healthy twin at risk, doctors refused to terminate her pregnancy under Texas law. Spending thousands in savings, Brandt was forced to travel to Colorado for life-saving care. “If I could not go out of state, I would have had to give birth to a daughter with no skull or brain, I would have held her until she died,” Brandt said.

Deflecting Blame

Confronted with the horror stories the women shared on the stand, state officials made clear that they believe they are absolved of any responsibility. The patients’ “alleged injuries” were not traceable to the actions of the defendants, they argued, but rather the result of the “independent actions” of individual medical providers. To reinforce this circular logic, state attorneys repeatedly asked each plaintiff if Paxton “directly” told them they could not get an abortion.

All of the women reiterated on the stand that they did not place blame on the physicians who denied them care, but on the politicians who crafted the dangerous laws that their doctors were compelled to abide by. “Given the nature of plaintiffs’ past experiences, it is understandable that they are seeking to place blame, but the blame directed at defendants is misplaced,” Assistant Attorney General Amy Pletscher responded.

The state’s sole witness, Dr. Ingrid Skop, initially repeated the idea that the onus rested with individual doctors and that the Texas abortion laws were clear. However, when reading Skop’s deposition out loud, plaintiffs’ attorneys revealed that she had been “begging” medical organizations like the Texas Medical Board to give “confused” doctors “guidance” on the law.

Either way, Skop is hardly an impartial expert. Part of the anti-abortion “research” organization Charlotte Lozier Institute as well as the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Texas doctor is also one of the plaintiffs behind the shadowy lawsuit seeking to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone. The lawsuit’s claims are based in pseudoscience. Skop, who has been criticized for “spreading medical misinformation,” has also argued in favor of forcing rape and incest victims as young as 9 or 10 to carry pregnancies to term. “If she is developed enough to be menstruating and become pregnant and reach sexual maturity, she can safely give birth to a baby,” Skop told the House Oversight Committee in 2021.

Attorneys for the state, who aggressively questioned the plaintiffs’ experiences and often interrupted tearful testimony with objections, claimed the women and “abortionists” who filed suit had embarked on an “ideological crusade” and “media tour.” They even alluded to supposed financial incentives, pointing to Casiano, who started a GoFundMe page when she was unable to pay for her fetus’s funeral. “Plaintiffs simply do not like Texas’s restrictions on abortion,” an attorney for Texas said.

Perhaps even more dismissive, the state sought to invalidate the women’s standing to sue by claiming that some plaintiffs were unlikely to become pregnant again and therefore wouldn’t face life-threatening complications in the future. Their experiences are “tragic, but in the past,” an attorney for the state said. Lead plaintiff Amanda Zurawski stressed the irony of the state’s argument, pointing out that the scarring and damage to her reproductive organs that led to potential infertility was caused by the infection she incurred due to the abortion restrictions.

“What they are arguing is infuriating and disgusting,” Zurawski said. “Do they not realize the reason why I may not be able to get pregnant again is because of what happened to me as a result of the laws that they support?”

Zurawski nearly died after she was refused abortion care in May 2022. The Austin woman’s water broke at just 18 weeks. Carrying a nonviable fetus, she desperately needed a pregnancy termination, but her doctors refused because she “wasn’t sick enough.” They also warned her that it would be too dangerous to make the 11-hour drive to New Mexico for care because she could develop an infection en route. Zurawski’s health quickly deteriorated, and she was rushed to the ICU with septic shock. She lost control of her bowels and her ability to sit up unassisted. Doctors battled to keep her alive.

“I went from feeling physically OK to shaking uncontrollably. I was freezing cold even though it was 110 degrees out,” she said. “I couldn’t get a sentence out. My husband, Josh, asked me how I was feeling on a scale from one to 10. I didn’t even know the difference between the numbers one and 10. It was terrifying.”

Zurawski miscarried three days later. As a result of the sepsis, one of her fallopian tubes is permanently closed, and she has undergone several procedures to reconstruct her uterus after it collapsed.

“I don’t feel safe to have children in Texas anymore.”

Others have made the painful choice to avert future pregnancies while living under the Texas abortion bans, even if that means altering their long-term life plans. While Brandt had wanted to keep expanding her family, after her traumatic ordeal, her husband underwent a vasectomy to prevent the same outcome. “I don’t feel safe to have children in Texas anymore,” Brandt said through tears. “I knew it was very clear my health didn’t matter, but my daughter’s health didn’t really matter either.”

Casiano is terrified of becoming pregnant again, likening her experience to “torture.” She made the choice to receive a tubal ligation. “I decided the only way I can save myself from that harm and pain — and going through that torture again — would be to get my tubes removed,” Casiano said.

Mangrum, the judge, elected as a Democrat in 2020, is expected to rule on the case in the coming weeks. The party interested in appealing the ruling will likely do so at the Third Court of Appeals, which sees a full Democratic bench. Then, the case could make its way to the Texas Supreme Court, whose judges are all Republicans.

Following the first day of trial, Duane lauded the bravery of the women who publicly shared their stories and stressed that they were far from the only ones suffering in Texas.

“No one should be subjected to this punishment just for needing health care,” Duane said to reporters outside the courthouse. “But Texas politicians continue to evade responsibility for the agony they have caused and continue to cause. Since this case was filed, even more women have reached out to us to say, ‘The same thing happened to me.’”

“I can guarantee you more messages are waiting in my inbox now.”

The post Testifying Against Texas, Women Denied Abortions Relive the Pregnancies That Almost Killed Them appeared first on The Intercept.

The case was brought on behalf of two Guyanese citizens, Frederick Collins and Godfrey Whyte. They accused the EPA of failing to enforce the requirements of its own permits by never securing a guarantee from Exxon or its subsidiary, Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, that the company would cover all costs related to a possible oil spill.

“Guyana taxpayers are currently exposed,” Tom Sanzillo, director of financial analysis for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said. “The potential consequences for Guyana are catastrophic.”

That’s because Exxon’s drilling project in Guyana is the riskiest kind: deep-water offshore drilling, which involves intense pressure bearing down on complex equipment. The conditions are similar to those that preceded the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010, which spewed oil and gas throughout the Gulf of Mexico, costing BP $69 billion.

Exxon’s own environmental impact assessments indicate that such a disaster in Guyana could send oil to the beaches of 14 different Caribbean islands, most of which depend on fishing and tourism — and all of which could hold Guyana liable for damages. The costs would be astronomical, which is why the permits for offshore drilling in Guyana require not only an independent liability insurance policy from Esso, but also an unlimited financial guarantee from its parent company to cover costs that exceed those covered by insurance.

Esso joined the case with the EPA, arguing that the plaintiffs were misinterpreting the law, that a deal had been worked out between the company and the agency, and that Guyanese citizens didn’t have standing to bring these sorts of cases anyway. Justice Sandil Kissoon ruled in favor of Collins and Whyte across the board, concluding that the insurance and guarantee requirements were clearly stated in Esso’s permit, the EPA failed to secure those assurances, and Guyanese citizens had every reason to question that failure.

“The EPA has relegated itself to a state of laxity of enforcement … putting this nation and its people in grave potential danger of calamitous disaster,” Kissoon wrote in a blistering 56-page ruling that called Esso “disingenuous and deceptive” and the EPA “derelict, pliant, and submissive.” Taking aim at the government and Exxon Mobil at the same time is a bold move that has some in the country worried for Kissoon’s safety, but advocates point to the ruling as confirmation that Guyana’s courts, at least, have not been captured by the oil business.

In Guyana, it’s become hard to distinguish where the oil company ends and the government begins. Exxon executives join the Guyanese president in his suite at cricket matches, and the vice president regularly hosts press conferences to defend the oil company. Vincent Adams, a Guyanese petroleum engineer and former head of the country’s EPA, has been one of the agency’s harshest critics.

“When I was working in the United States, we always had people at the offshore site 24/7 with the oil companies,” said Adams, who spent decades at the U.S. Department of Energy. “Because 99 percent of the time what they tell you is happening out there is not what is happening.” When Adams was tapped to run Guyana’s EPA, he planned to have monitors on board Exxon’s floating production vessels. “That’s all been canceled. Even Exxon’s files and permits, which used to be in the document center with everyone else’s, are under lock and key in the director’s office,” he said. “There’s no oversight happening because Exxon does not want oversight.”

“There’s no oversight happening because Exxon does not want oversight.”

“We have complied with all applicable laws at every step of the exploration, appraisal, development, and production stages,” said Meghan Macdonald, who handles media and communications for Exxon Mobil in Guyana. “We are committed to responsibly developing the resources offshore Guyana to maximize value for all stakeholders, including the government and people of Guyana.”

Nonetheless, Kissoon ordered the EPA to issue an immediate enforcement action against Esso, requiring that it provide an unlimited financial guarantee from ExxonMobil and proof of sufficient liability insurance, or its drilling permit would be suspended. The EPA appealed, and on June 8, an appeals court judge temporarily stayed the order until the appeal is heard but required Exxon to put up a $2 billion guarantee in the meantime. It’s a significant pumping of the brakes on Exxon’s operation in Guyana, which the company has projected could outpace the Texas Permian Basin, making Guyana Exxon’s top oil-producing region, responsible for more than a quarter of the company’s global output, within five years.

The local attorney on the case, Melinda Janki, has been working to stop oil drilling in her home country for more than a decade. For Janki, the ruling is significant no matter the outcome of the appeals process. “The top line is that two ordinary citizens in this little country, which most people can’t find on the map, have gone to court and they’ve beaten the EPA, but they’ve also beaten Exxon Mobil, and this is really a victory for the people, by the people.”

Janki said the ruling should send a message to people on the ground that they have the power to oppose projects like these. “Justice Kissoon put the rule of law above the interests of Exxon Mobil, and that’s massive,” Janki said. “That’s what every judge in every country should be doing, and I think this decision sets the standard for judges everywhere, not just in Guyana.”

What’s been happening over the past five years in Guyana is emblematic of a broader wave of extractive colonialism playing out in countries across the Global South. As Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, put it, “Countries that don’t have a history or any significant history of oil and gas development or oil and gas dependence are being pushed into that at the very moment when the world knows we need to be phasing out fossil fuels.”

Right to a Healthy Environment

In 2015, when Exxon Mobil announced it had found oil — lots of it — off the coast of Guyana, only a handful of people there knew what that news really meant. One of them was Janki. “My heart just sank,” she said. “Because I know oil is a disaster, and it’s the worst possible thing that could have happened to Guyana.”

Janki came to her conclusions about oil in a somewhat surprising way: working for BP in the U.K. Janki grew up in Guyana, but her family left when she was around 12 due to political turmoil kicked off by U.S. and U.K. concerns that Guyana was becoming a “new Cuba.” Infiltrating various political groups and stoking racial tensions, the CIA and its allies in Britain successfully destabilized the country and installed a leader who suited them. Janki’s family moved to Zambia and then Trinidad. Eventually, Janki made her way to the University of Oxford. She went to law school and, after a few years working at a corporate firm in London, started looking for a new challenge.

“At the time, it seemed like BP was a good place to go,” she said. Janki negotiated deals and traveled all over Europe for BP, learning some key lessons along the way. “I think sometimes people don’t realize that the purpose of an oil company is to make money, and they have no other purpose,” she said. “They’re not there to promote human rights. They’re not there to protect the environment. They’re there to put the share price up and to give big, fat dividends to their shareholders. … They’re very good at what they do, and they’re very good at telling people a story about how beneficial they are for the world.”

When the appeal of working for BP wore off and political tensions back home had cooled, Janki returned to Guyana, moving back to the capital, Georgetown. At the time, Guyana was just beginning to build an independent democracy. In 1992, the country had its first completely free elections, and Cheddi Jagan — the candidate the CIA had spent decades trying to defeat — was elected president. His government made two significant moves: It proposed major reforms to the constitution and passed a comprehensive Environmental Protection Act that established Guyana’s EPA. Although she was still working in the corporate sphere at the time, Janki had a keen interest in environmental law.

The government began drafting the Environmental Protection Act in 1994. “There was a meeting at the Pegasus Hotel, which is this big hotel in Georgetown,” Janki said. “I had no way to go because I was just this completely unimportant individual.” But a friend helped her score an invite.

“It was interminably boring, but in the break, I was able to talk to one of the government officials and say to him that I had looked at their draft environmental act and I thought that it was inadequate.”

It wasn’t the sort of thing that a “completely unimportant individual” would generally say, but the official didn’t brush her off. “He said, ‘Well, send me something about it,’ and maybe that was a brush-off, but I saw it as a really exciting opportunity,” Janki said. “So I wrote a paper explaining why I thought this act was inadequate.”

The official asked Janki if she’d like to work as a consultant on drafting the act, and she jumped at the chance. “I put in all the stuff on the environmental impact assessments,” she said. “I put in the impact on the climate, the impact on the atmosphere, and I put in principles of environmental management, so things like the polluter pays and the precautionary principle and principles of natural capital.”

Janki’s version of the act was ratified by Jagan’s government in 1996. Just a few years later, the country signed its first contract with an oil company: a partnership between Exxon Mobil and Shell. The contract granted the partnership the right to explore for oil in Guyana, but for several years, the companies didn’t do much with their permits. Oil was plentiful and easier to get in other South American countries, so Guyana wasn’t a priority.

Meanwhile, Janki began lobbying Guyana’s Constitutional Reform Commission to add an amendment protecting the human right to a healthy environment. “I looked at constitutions around the world that, at that time, had the right to a healthy environment written into them. And then I put forward the arguments for having it in Guyana’s constitution.”

Once again, it worked. The right to a healthy environment for current and future generations was ratified as part of Guyana’s constitution in 2003.

The Boom

It wasn’t until 2008, a few months after Venezuela nationalized oil and booted out most of the foreign oil majors, that the companies began exploring the waters offshore Guyana in earnest. Still, they came up empty. Shell left the partnership in 2014, while Exxon brought on two new partners: Hess Corporation, an independent American oil company best known as an early mover in the fracking boom, and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. The very next year, Exxon announced it had found oil, more than 10 billion barrels of it. And not just any oil: It was light, sweet crude, the oil that’s easiest to refine, commanding the highest price on the global market.

“Suddenly, in 2015, Exxon announced that they had found oil, and people were going crazy talking about oil wealth,” Janki said.

It wasn’t just people talking about oil wealth. Exxon was pushing this idea, and so was the government. The company moved quickly to capture the hearts and minds not only of state officials, but also other members of civil society. One of Exxon’s first big public investments in Guyana was to sponsor the Caribbean Premier League, a popular regional cricket tournament, and the country’s cricket team, the Amazon Warriors. Players have Exxon Mobil emblazoned across the front of their uniforms. The company also helped get cricket games broadcast on TV.

“When you walked in the streets, you would hear every Guyanese saying, ‘Thank God for Exxon!’”

“When you walked in the streets, you would hear every Guyanese saying, ‘Thank God for Exxon! If it wasn’t for Exxon, we would’ve never been able to see cricket live on television,’” Glenn Lall, the publisher of a local newspaper, Kaieteur News, said. “You see how dangerous that is?”

The company and the government hired journalists working on the oil and gas beat away from the country’s papers and into corporate public relations and state-run newsrooms. One such journalist, who asked that their name be withheld to avoid retaliation, said the standard offer included a big pay bump, a lofty title, and a free car.

“I had some journalists that used to work with me, and the government tried to steal them with big pay. And it worked — they left,” Lall said. “A few of them after a while said, ‘No man, I can’t do what you want me to do,’ so they left there too, but none of them are doing journalism anymore.”

As a consequence, Lall said, there are few journalists left who report on oil drilling with a critical eye. Of the six reporters who once covered oil and gas for Kaieteur News, only one remains.

Since Exxon shipped its first barrel of oil in 2019, Janki has filed seven separate lawsuits against the Guyanese government asking it to do one thing: enforce the environmental laws she helped draft.

She had an early win in 2020 when the government reduced Exxon’s drilling permit from 23 years, as it was originally issued, to five years, the maximum allowed by law. And the recent insurance ruling, if it stands, will require the EPA to follow the country’s environmental and permitting laws. The rest of Janki’s cases are still making their way through the Guyanese courts. One argues that the offshore drilling project violates citizens’ constitutional right to a healthy environment. Others urge the government to do something about the constant burning of excess gas from Exxon’s offshore production platforms, a practice called flaring.

Janki said she’s struggled to find lawyers and clerks to work with her. Given how many firms Exxon and its partners, subsidiaries, and suppliers have contracted with in Guyana, it’s hard to find someone who’s not conflicted out. “I couldn’t get anybody to help with cases until a senior counsel who was based in Trinidad agreed to do it with me,” she said. “We had no clerk. I had to go and line up at the court registry with the documents and wait my turn.”

Exxon has also funded conservation organizations that might object to oil drilling in the country, including the Iwokrama International Center for Rain Forest Conservation and Development, Guyana’s crown jewel of conservation and a global leader on sustainable forestry.

“Yes, the obvious question is, you know, should we be taking money from the oil company?” Iwokrama CEO Dane Gobin said. “And my answer to that is, OK, oil will be there. We are not advocates. We run a rainforest. We don’t get involved in politics. But we have to take care of our people. And if somebody is saying, ‘Here’s a grant. You can do capacity building and training. You could improve the livelihoods of Guyanese. You could do all kinds of things, mangroves, all of that.’ Why should we say no?”

For Janki, the reason is simple: If you’re taking the oil companies’ money, you’re helping them deceive the public.

“I think it’s disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuel sector.”

“The oil industry always tells you how good it is for you,” Janki said. “And that has a way of removing every other narrative. … They say, ‘Well, we power the world. We are the energy that keeps the economy going. We heat your homes, we enable you to cook.’ And people say, ‘Oh yes, that’s wonderful.’ The companies don’t say, ‘We’re frying the planet so that we can make money, and we are going to make sure that renewable energy doesn’t get anywhere because that will put us out of business.’”

Whenever it can, Exxon reminds the public of its cricket sponsorship and conservation efforts. A marketing video the company released last year to address controversy around its contract with Guyana is a perfect example. Even the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, traditionally conservative and pro-oil, have described the deal as unfair to Guyana. So Exxon’s marketing team put together a Facebook video that starts — where else? — at the national cricket stadium. The first minute and a half focuses on the company’s investments in cricket before Exxon’s public relations lead takes to the streets, picking people “at random” to talk to about the contract. And then back to the cricket stadium for a recap.

It’s a master class in building social license. And the cricket sponsorship must be paying off because in March, Exxon increased its investment in Guyanese cricket in a big way, announcing funding for a new stadium in the easternmost part of the country, near the border of Suriname. The Greater Guyana Initiative, a local nonprofit funded by Exxon and its partners in Guyana, is paying $17.7 million to build the state-of-the-art facility, which will host sporting events and concerts in a region that will soon be home to a major oil and gas export port.

“If they didn’t give, they’d be knocked for not giving something back,” Gobin said. Since 2017, his organization has received $7 million from the Exxon Mobil Foundation.

“I think it’s disingenuous to be claiming to be a conservation organization and at the same time trying to make allowances for the fossil fuel sector,” Janki said.

But it’s an approach the government has taken as well. Guyana’s vice president, Bharrat Jagdeo, often talks about how the oil project will fund climate adaptation — and how the country needs to get the oil extracted and sold before anyone has to make good on their net-zero commitments. “We support the vision of a fast-paced development of the resources offshore, particularly in the context of net zero,” he told a crowd of oil executives at the annual CERAWeek conference. “We believe it’s a wise strategy to do as much exploration as possible now, prove the resources, and then have them removed and transferred into financial assets to transform the country.”

The trillion-dollar question is whether Guyana can get rich off oil before it suffers a catastrophic spill, the bottom falls out of the oil market, or the country’s coast — where 90 percent of the population lives — is swallowed by the sea, which is predicted to happen by 2030.

The Resource Curse

Throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, the fossil fuel industry is very busy telling the story of fossil fuels as the solution to poverty. As more and more Global North countries pass laws regulating emissions or incentivizing a shift away from fossil fuels, the race is on for the industry to sell as much oil and gas as possible before they have to strand assets. No one wants to be the company left with the most untapped, unmonetized oil and gas reserves dragging down their balance sheets.

In the Global South, the message is simple: Having your own fossil fuel industry means everyone will have access to energy and your country will get rich. Only that story hasn’t panned out for any Global South country in decades. Even when it comes to solving energy poverty — a term that describes inadequate access to energy for basic needs like cooking, lights, and temperature control — the industry has not delivered on its promises. Nigeria, which has been in the oil business for more than 50 years, has the lowest access to electricity globally; about 92 million of the country’s 200 million people lack access to power.

Janki knows that Guyana needs money to lift its people out of poverty. She just doesn’t think another cycle of what development economists call “the resource curse” — the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources winding up with less economic growth, democracy, or development — is going to do that. “Where is the money from the gold? Where is the money from the bauxite? Where is the money from the diamonds? Where is the money from the sugar? Where is the money from the agriculture? Where is the money from the fishing, etc.? The list is almost endless because we are so full of wealth,” she said. “And yet the people in this country are poor.”

She’s in favor of Guyana monetizing its value to the world as a carbon sink, although she doesn’t endorse the government’s recent move to sell $750 million worth of carbon credits to Exxon’s partner, Hess Corporation. Critics of carbon credits argue that they should only be used to offset the emissions of “difficult to abate” sectors — industries or processes for which there are no alternatives — not continued fossil fuel expansion.

Ultimately, Janki said she’d like to see those in the Global North take some responsibility for hundreds of years of colonialism and step up to prevent companies from leading yet another round of it.

“I think it’s really important that people stop thinking of Guyana as a developing country that needs to be helped and start looking at us and saying, ‘Wow, these guys are a carbon sink, and they are under threat because of Exxon Mobil and other oil companies,” Janki said. “And we have a responsibility to rein in those oil companies because those are oil companies coming from the Global North.”

Meanwhile, the outcome of her insurance case could set a precedent that changes the math entirely for drilling in Latin America and the Caribbean. If the ruling is overturned, the case could be taken up by the Caribbean Court of Justice, which sets legal precedents for the entire region. The industry will be watching to see whether bets placed not just in Guyana, but also in Suriname, Trinidad, Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia will suddenly become a whole lot riskier. Whether the ruling sticks or not, the case is likely to inspire similar legal action, according to Muffett of the Center for International Environmental Law.

“Lawyers from around the world who are fighting oil and gas — off the coasts of southern Africa, off the coast of Mozambique, and in other places in the Caribbean — are going to be looking at this decision,” he said, “paying close attention to whether the financial guarantees being provided in other oil and gas exploration and development permits are at an equivalent level.”

Additional reporting: Kiana Wilburg

The post How Exxon Captured a Country Without Firing a Shot appeared first on The Intercept.

For industry operatives like Milloy, air pollution, especially the regulation of particulate matter, has long been a greater concern than climate policy. Regulations on PM2.5 — fine inhalable particles generally smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — would require many of the same reductions in the combustion of fossil fuels that climate policy would, but without any of the politicization that has obstructed climate action for decades. It’s never been easy for politicians to publicly fight against clean air and water, and it’s doubly hard when the country’s largest city is wrapped in smoke. So Milloy took to the conservative airways to dismiss concerns about wildfire smoke, which peer-reviewed public health research has linked to higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and emergency respiratory and immune responses.

That research means little to Milloy, who claims that the peer-review process is biased against corporate interests. Although he has a degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, Milloy is not, even by his own account, a medical expert. Nor is he an epidemiologist. But while it might be easy to dismiss him, Milloy has a knack for accessing power and attention. His recent media tour is a good predictor of where we’re likely to see conservatives headed should they regain control of the government in 2024. Spoiler alert: He’d like to see the Environmental Protection Agency go away.

In early 2020, Milloy was basking in the glory of multiple wins under President Donald Trump, posting pictures with his pals inside the EPA and bragging about “eating the greens’ lunch.”

Trump’s EPA declined to tighten air pollution standards, rolled back mercury regulations, and disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, or as Milloy put it: “blowing out that particulate matter sub-panel, another huge win.” Plus he finally got to introduce an idea he’d been trying to get into the EPA regulatory framework since the 1990s: the so-called secret science proposal. It would lend more weight to studies that make data available to the government and other researchers, which sounds good but would have the effect of discrediting most epidemiological studies because they include human test subjects and are subject to privacy laws. “I’ve got huge wins under my belt,” Milloy told me in a 2020 interview. “It’s been tremendously satisfying for me.”

That’s a lot of policy shifts coming from someone whose ideas have often been considered fringe by his fellow conservatives. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Milloy called public health officials “COVID creeps” and likened quarantine to communism. He criticizes oil companies for pandering to climate activists, whom he calls “bedwetters” or “watermelons”: green on the outside but “red” on the inside. In a 2017 presentation at the annual Heartland Institute climate conference, he compared the EPA to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

But the Trump EPA normalized a lot of previously fringe ideas, and Milloy was an adviser on the transition team. “I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” he said. That meant he had real influence on environmental policy. And that influence is likely to grow if Republicans retake control of the government. In the meantime, Milloy works for Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm leading the charge against renewable energy projects and regulation of fossil fuels. Ultimately, the secret science proposal didn’t make it through the final approval process before Trump left office. When I asked Milloy if he thought a Republican-led EPA would take up the proposal again, he replied, “That is on my agenda.”

Also on the agenda: defunding the EPA and handing environmental regulation over to the states. But most of all, reclaiming his Trump-era wins on air pollution, particularly stalling or rolling back regulations on PM2.5. Those regulations are all the more critical to the climate fight today given the legal attack on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions are mostly generated by the same activity — the combustion of fossil fuels — so if the agency can’t regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it can accomplish similar goals by tightening restrictions on particulate matter, something Milloy has been pointing out to conservatives for decades.

After Trump left office, the EPA’s disbanded Particulate Matter Review Panel went ahead and published their work in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they wrote. Under President Joe Biden, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee agreed, and the EPA is in the process of strengthening the standards.

“It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed.”

Milloy is hoping a lawsuit before the D.C. District Court will roll those efforts back. His latest battle against air pollution regulations is happening amid not only an endless respiratory health pandemic, but also a steady stream of studies pointing to the millions of people around the world still dying early thanks to air pollution. According to Milloy, it’s all fraud.

“What I think the right wing has done is try to saw the legs off the infrastructure that holds up environmental decision-making,” Eric Schaeffer, an EPA employee-turned-whistleblower and executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, said. “It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed. … We’re seeing right now the impacts of a decades-long campaign to undermine science.”

From Tobacco to Wildfire Smoke

Like many of the folks who went on to battle climate regulation, Milloy got his start working for the tobacco industry in the 1990s, particularly dealing with the issue of secondhand smoke. He ran the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, a front group for Philip Morris that worked to counteract efforts to regulate air pollution. Memos outlining the creation of TASCC could pass as mission statements for Milloy’s enterprise today.

TASCC operated under the principle that if an economic argument can’t keep regulation at bay, the next best move is to undermine the science that regulation is based on. Almost as soon as he started working on air pollution, Milloy had new science to contend with: a 1993 epidemiological study that looked at 8,000 people across six American cities and found that exposure to fine particulate matter — PM2.5, or soot — was correlated to reduced life expectancy. Not what you want to hear when the companies you work for sell the products that produce PM2.5: cigarettes, cars, coal, oil.

Milloy started by picking apart the methodology: The subject group was too small, researchers hadn’t controlled for other factors, and epidemiology’s reliance on observational data made it suspect. He manufactured controversy around the researchers keeping their data private, producing a paper that would become the basis for the secret science proposal. And he targeted the scientists themselves, particularly lead researcher Steven Dockery and one of the statisticians involved, C. Arden Pope.

But it’s hard to discredit scientists who are cautious about the implications of their own findings. “It was a bit bigger than we expected, and we were a bit concerned about it,” Pope said of the correlation between exposure to PM2.5 and premature death. That led the scientists to ask the American Cancer Society to rerun the analysis with an independently collected cohort of subjects. The cancer society got similar results, as did the Health Effects Institute, an organization half-funded by the EPA and half-funded by the automotive industry. Milloy kept fighting, but nothing worked. In 1997, the EPA passed its first regulation on particulate matter. It tightened those regulations every eight years or so right up until Scott Pruitt became administrator of the agency under Trump. Milloy said he put the old secret science paper “in the transition plan and talked with Pruitt about it.”

It wasn’t new science or a new strategy that handed Milloy a win after 25 years; it was just access. Being on Trump’s EPA transition team enabled him to smuggle in all sorts of ideas from his pals, including James Enstrom, a tobacco industry-funded scientist who published one of the few studies contradicting the Six Cities data. While Milloy points to Enstrom’s study as proof that Pope et al. are peddlers of “junk science,” Pope points to the 25 years’ worth of additional studies that have consistently replicated the Six Cities result.

The obscure journal that put out Enstrom’s paper in 2017 is published by another friend of Milloy’s, toxicologist Ed Calabrese, whose research focuses on the idea that a little bit of pollution and radiation are actually good for you. When Pruitt announced in 2018 that the EPA would not strengthen the regulations on particulate matter, he cited Enstrom’s study as evidence that the science on PM2.5 was “too uncertain” to act upon.

Regulating Air Pollution

Almost as soon as the U.S. government began to mandate quarantine in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Milloy took to Twitter to take aim at one of his favorite scientific targets, epidemiology, and warn that Covid lockdown would lead to climate lockdown. Aside from political ideology, there’s also a PM2.5 connection with Covid. Studies have found that both chronic exposure to particulate matter and short-term exposure are Covid-19 risk factors.

Milloy’s wins on PM2.5 under Trump illustrate just how much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus the administration was able to dismantle in a short amount of time, but they’re an indicator of something else too: a willingness to go further than conservatives ever have in the battle against environmental regulation, to actually attack clean air and water. Why? In a word, climate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the EPA’s hands are somewhat tied when it comes to regulating the emissions of power plants. One of the few remaining ways the agency can target CO2 is by regulating particulate matter, since both are emitted via fossil fuel combustion. As Milloy put it to me recently: “PM2.5 is the most important backdoor science scheme for regulating fossil fuel emissions.”

As New York and D.C. residents choked on wildfire smoke from Canada, many saw in the apocalyptic landscape a window into a climate-changed future. The link between climate change and wildfire is nuanced: Climate change doesn’t “cause” wildfires, but it does create the low-moisture, high-heat conditions that make fires more likely and keeps them burning longer. Irregular plant growth driven by climate change can also result in excess fuel for those fires, but forest management and building development choices matter too. The data is unclear on which of these factors played the largest role in Canada’s fires, but it is very clear that climate change will bring bigger fires more frequently in the future.

For Milloy, though, no matter what the data says, there can be no lines drawn between climate change and fire or smoke and respiratory illness. Such a connection would make his clients liable for tens of millions of dollars in health costs, and then they couldn’t afford to fund him anymore.

The post The Right-Wing War on Clean Air appeared first on The Intercept.

The case was filed by a wealthy Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, who were annoyed that they were required to get a special permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to build on their land because of its proximity to Priest Lake. The Sacketts’ land contains wetlands, but because the wetlands are separated from the lake by a road, they argued the permit was unnecessary. It’s almost certain they would have gotten the permit had they applied, but they opted to sue instead. The court took the Sacketts’ case as an opportunity to open up a broader discussion about what exactly the Clean Water Act is meant to protect, changing the law completely and removing protections from any wetland not immediately connected to a body of water.

Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who broke with his conservative colleagues, accused the majority of having effectively “rewritten” the Clean Water Act, which was originally passed in 1972 and updated in 1977.

“Since 1977, when Congress explicitly included ‘adjacent’ wetlands within the act’s coverage, the Army Corps has adopted a variety of interpretations of its authority over those wetlands — some more expansive and others less expansive,” Kavanaugh wrote. “But throughout those 45 years and across all eight presidential administrations, the Army Corps has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like.”

In the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court applied a new interpretation of the word “adjacent,” removing protections for any wetlands that are not immediately adjoining lakes, streams, rivers, or oceans, which will have a profound impact on coastal communities around the country. “Wetlands are essential for protecting disadvantaged communities, which are often in low-lying areas, from flooding,” Nick Torrey, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, said. Torrey added that wetlands are also critical to the many fishing businesses in the southeast, where he practices. “We have a saying: No wetlands, no seafood,” he said.

“The court’s approach today was to disregard several decades’ worth of precedent interpreting the Clean Water Act,” Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, said. For the past 40 years, the court has interpreted the word “adjacent” to mean what it does to everyone else; in this ruling, five justices said “well actually” adjacent means adjoining, so if there is anything in between a wetland and the water, that wetland doesn’t need to be protected.

It’s not a decision underpinned by science, but rather a legal invention known as the “clear statement rule,” a term the justices use when they want to assert their power to ignore Congress’s wishes and interpret the law solely as written. “The court is increasingly using the clear statement rule to narrow laws written years ago by Congresses that sought to create environmental protections like the Clean Water Act,” Sankar said.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority used the clear statement rule as a “thumb on the scale for property owners — no matter that the Clean Water Act is all about stopping property owners from polluting.” Referring to conservative justices’ reliance on the rule to weaken environmental regulations, Kagan added, “These pop-up ‘clear statement’ rules give the court a way to cabin the anti-pollution actions Congress thought appropriate by appointing itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy.”

The clear statement rule is a close cousin of the “major questions doctrine,” another bit of legalcraft that the court has increasingly used to gut regulations on industry. “The Supreme Court maybe invoked it only five times in its whole history before 2021, in cases that were actually quite exceptional,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law and administrator of information and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, said. “But in the last couple of years, it’s a doctrine that’s been invoked promiscuously by opponents of regulation and the court has shown great interest in embracing it. It basically says if an agency decision is going to have vast economic or political significance, it needs to be authorized explicitly by Congress.”

The court invoked the major questions doctrine last year in West Virginia v. EPA to curtail the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Now in Sackett v. EPA, it has invoked the clear statement rule to apply a narrower interpretation of the Clean Water Act than Congress intended. It’s an interpretation that benefits not only the wealthy couple who brought the case, but also polluting industries. “Mining, oil and gas, development, anyone that pollutes, and a whole lot of them joined or sent in separate briefs in support of the Sacketts,” Jon Devine, director of federal water policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said.

Organizations representing industries ranging from animal and industrial agriculture to mining, timber, residential development, and fossil fuel filed briefs in support of the Sacketts. Dark-money-funded anti-regulatory organizations like the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Atlantic Legal Foundation also weighed in on the couple’s behalf. Supporters of the case cheered the ruling as a “win for property owners.” The Sacketts were represented by the libertarian law firm Pacific Legal Foundation, which counts the Koch-funded Donors Capital Fund as well as Searle Freedom Trust, Exxon Mobil, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation among its donors.

According to Sankar, the ruling represents an end run around the legislative process; these interests have been trying to weaken the Clean Water Act for years. “This ruling is the result of a decades-long push by many of these industries,” he said. “They couldn’t cut back on the Clean Water Act by persuading Congress. They tried and failed. … But they succeeded in building a judiciary willing to take this kind of action to rewrite the laws when they’re not able to do so legislatively. What the court has done is rewrite the law in an extraordinarily aggressive way, going beyond even what the Trump administration would have done.”

The Trump administration’s proposed “Waters of the United States” rule would have stripped protection from about half as many wetlands as the Supreme Court’s Sackett ruling did.

In the wake of the decision, environmental advocates are calling on Congress to make explicit that these wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act. “The court has spoken and now we need to look at ways to restore these protections,” Jim Murphy, director of legal advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation, said. “The primary way is to go back to Congress and have them make clear through legislation that these protections are in place as they were intended to be.”

Murphy said that shouldn’t be a hard sell, as clean water tends to be popular with voters. “Seventy-five percent or so of Americans support strengthening the Clean Water Act across the board,” he said.

States can also act to safeguard wetlands within their borders, thus protecting clean drinking water and improving flood protection for residents. “States are already authorized by federal law to protect more than the limited number of wetlands that the Supreme Court now allows,” Devine said. But nearly half of U.S. states have opted instead to follow the Clean Water Act, so wetlands that are no longer protected due to the Sackett ruling are not protected by those state governments either. Those laws can be changed, but it will take time. “We’re going to need to engage in that fight,” Devine said. “We can’t take as acceptable the gross loss that this opinion would allow.”

The post In a Gift to Polluting Industries, Supreme Court Rolls Back Clean Water Act Protections appeared first on The Intercept.

When she went looking for research that would help answer that question, she found none, at least not for the transportation sector, which was her area of focus. “I saw forecast after forecast that assumed basically a binary of the future,” she said. “Either we stay with the fossil fuel status quo and the existential crisis that that is causing for the planet and all of its people. Or we transition to an electrified, renewably powered future, but that doesn’t really change anything about how these sectors or economic activities are organized.”

Riofrancos wanted to look at multiple ways to design an electrified future and understand what the costs and impacts of different scenarios might be. So she linked up with other Climate and Community Project researchers and put together a report mapping out four potential pathways to electrification for the transportation sector. Titled “Achieving Zero Emissions With More Mobility and Less Mining,” the report concluded that even relatively small, easy-to-achieve shifts like reducing the size of cars and their batteries could deliver big returns: a 42 percent reduction in the amount of lithium needed in the U.S., even if the number of cars on the road and the frequency with which people drive stayed the same.

It’s the sort of thing politicians and electrification advocates need to think through now, when decisions can be made to guide the energy transition in one direction or another. It’s also critical to an underdiscussed component of climate action: demand for products and services and the role energy plays in fulfilling those demands. Which connects right up to another topic that American politicians don’t want to touch with a 10-foot pole: consumption.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put out a report on mitigation of climate risks that included a chapter on demand for the first time in the IPCC’s history. Relying on more than a decade of peer-reviewed research, it concluded that people’s needs — food, shelter, water, transportation — are not always explicitly connected to energy, and even when they are, there are ways to dramatically reduce the amount of energy required to meet them.

That conclusion contradicted several decades of economic theory that suggested that increased energy use and, by extension, increased consumption would always equate to a longer lifespan and improved quality of life. Julia Steinberger, an ecological economist and professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, contributed to the demand chapter. “In phases of economies when everybody’s in poverty, there’s a lot of demand that drives production,” she explained. “After a certain point, though, you have an overproductive industry that’s constantly driving productivity and competitiveness. … And the outlet for that is various kinds of over-consumption or things like planned obsolescence. Basically you wind up with products looking for markets.”

Steinberger says we reached that point with fossil fuels years ago. She’s led several peer-reviewed studies that prove it, as have dozens of other economists. “The fossil fuel industry is using this fake narrative of demand-driven production to excuse their activities,” Steinberger said. “But as soon as you look at demand, the story crumbles. Because all we need is services; that’s what there is demand for. We don’t need the energy use itself. So let’s think about how we deliver those services in a more efficient way.”

Steinberger says the link between increased fossil fuel use and increased life expectancy or quality of life has also been disproven. “This idea of the fossil fuel industry as this grubby titan who’s sort of holding up the industrial basis for the rest of us, they love that narrative, but it’s simply not true,” she said. “Fossil fuel use does not contribute significantly to improvements in life expectancy.”

Which is not to say that there isn’t a global energy access problem, or even that fossil fuels have no short-term role to play in addressing it. Yale economist Narasimha Rao argues that we need to see a reduction in consumption in the Global North so that we can close the energy gap in the Global South without increasing emissions. But so far, all executives and politicians have been willing to talk about is expanding energy development in the Global South. Tackling consumption in the Global North has been painted as radical austerity, “taking our hamburgers,” or a slippery slope to communism.

But the IPCC report laid out several straightforward steps countries could take to enable a decrease in energy usage without sacrificing quality of life. Increasing the availability of car-free and electrified transportation, improving energy efficiency, and basic things like not setting the default temperatures on thermostats to excessively cold or warm levels could all move the needle in a big way while delivering reductions in monthly bills, according to the report. “Forty to 70 percent of the 2050 level of projected emissions can be reduced by working on the demand side,” Indian economist Joyashree Roy, the lead author of the IPCC report’s demand chapter, said. “I think we really need to communicate this more. With the substitutes we’re talking about, a new economy is going to grow. Rather than, you know, an old economy.”

Building a New Economy

The transportation sector is the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., which is why it’s a primary target for decarbonization. And thanks to the availability of both electric vehicles and Inflation Reduction Act-related incentives to purchase them, American consumers are embracing the shift, with EV purchases expected to represent half of all vehicle purchases by 2030.

But that shift will bring with it other environmental impacts related to mineral mining and the land required for large-scale renewable projects to provide the electricity all those cars plug into. Policies that reduce car dependency and encourage the use of mass transit can speed decarbonization, make the energy transition more just, reduce environmental impacts, and ease tensions around increasingly scarce resources. Such policies could also help decarbonization advocates get in front of a burgeoning anti-electrification movement that includes folks like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is suddenly very concerned about the impact of cobalt mining on children in the Congo.

Policies that reduce the need for mining and land tend to be popular with voters too. They enable things like more public transit options, which consistently polls well with American voters, and rooftop solar, which has broad bipartisan support across the country.

They’re not so popular with entrenched corporate interests, though. The automotive industry, for example, is not only unlikely to get behind measures to reduce car dependency, but it’s also working hard to sell Americans on the largest possible electric vehicles. According to data from the advertising data firm MediaRadar, the top five largest ad budgets for electric vehicles over the last two years were all for SUVs, not the sedans or compacts that run on smaller batteries. Brands with multiple electric car models, including Chevrolet, Nissan, and Volkswagen, spent more than twice as much money advertising their largest models as their more efficient compact models.

The most recent example was a move by the California Public Utilities Commission to reduce by more than 75 percent the amount utilities pay for excess energy from solar rooftops. That change, driven largely by utilities, went into effect April 15. Even solar advocates had agreed that the state’s net metering policy — the amount of money residents with rooftop solar can earn by selling excess energy back to the utility — needed to be updated. It was written when far fewer residents were installing solar. But few thought the reduction needed to go quite so far.

“It’s not as draconian as the utilities wanted, but it’s still in line with their political agenda,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute.

Utilities complained that the change didn’t go far enough, claiming to be advocating on behalf of low-income Californians, not their own investors. “This final decision was a missed opportunity,” Kathy Fairbanks, spokesperson for Affordable Clean Energy for All, a group headed by the state’s investor-owned utilities, said in a statement. “The current solar subsidy program forces low-income families, renters, seniors, and anyone who doesn’t have rooftop solar to bankroll wealthier Californians’ solar systems.”

“We do want to make sure the benefits of rooftop solar are extended to everyone and are equitable,” Pomerantz said. But “I have a really hard time hearing that argument from utilities that are disconnecting their poorest customers’ power over a few dollars owed, and who have historically sited toxic coal plants in poor communities and communities of color, and who continue to advocate for regressive fixed charges.”

Just as public transit wouldn’t eliminate the need for electric vehicles, unfettered rooftop solar wouldn’t eliminate the need for utility-scale solar projects, but it would reduce the number of them required. And given the major issues with permitting, land use, and conservation around grid-scale renewable projects, that means fewer tensions and fewer environmental impacts.

“We should maximize every bit of rooftop solar that we can,” Pomerantz said. “It won’t solve the tensions between utility-scale renewables and conservation, but rooftop solar doesn’t suffer from any of those thorny issues, so every megawatt of it we can deploy could be a thornier utility renewable project that we might not need.”

Utilities make money off large-scale projects, though, so they don’t love the idea of reducing the number of them. Pomerantz said many of the utilities fighting rooftop solar across the country — including Southern Company in the South, Sempra Energy in California, and Duke Energy in the Midwest and Southeast — are misleading in their arguments. “Utilities love to say that their own renewables that they build and own are cheaper than rooftop solar, but it’s a red herring,” he said. “The problem with that argument is that most utilities are not making a choice between distributed and utility-scale renewables, they’re building and running gas plants and coal plants.”

Despite a whole lot of messaging about how much Americans love trucks and coal, poll after poll shows them loving public transit and rooftop solar even more.

Ultimately, the most efficient, environmentally friendly way to decarbonize might be the path that offers people the most choices. Despite a whole lot of messaging about how much Americans love trucks and coal, poll after poll shows them loving public transit and rooftop solar even more.

“When I look at the transportation system and also my own interaction with it … I experienced a lack of choices, a lack of freedom,” Riofrancos said. “I have lived in places where it was not only not required, but actually more annoying to have a car than to use a bike or bus or a subway or something else. And I now live in a place where the opposite is true. … The vast majority of Americans use cars to get around because they live in contexts where there really is no other option. I don’t blame individuals for those choices, but nor do I see our current transportation system as a paragon of freedom.”

With the Inflation Reduction Act unleashing a wave of incentives for electrified energy and transportation across the country, the United States sits at a key turning point. It can electrify the status quo or use the opportunity of a large-scale energy transition to substantively change systems that haven’t been touched in a hundred years. Letting “the markets” solve climate change without reining in the companies that have been warping those markets for more than a century seems like a shaky foundation for a new economy. Decisions made today could put the country on a very different path and ensure that the Inflation Reduction Act delivers on the emissions cuts it promised, but the window of opportunity is closing.

The post The “Electrify Everything” Movement’s Consumption Problem appeared first on The Intercept.

A month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Houston mother of two experienced an unplanned pregnancy with her now ex-husband and allegedly sought abortion care with the help of her friends. For nearly a year, Texas had imposed a six-week abortion ban, and a full “trigger” ban would be enacted in just a few weeks. Silva needed to act fast and extricate herself from what appeared to be an emotionally unhealthy relationship with a husband she would go on to divorce in February. Her friends offered their unwavering support.

“I just worry about your emotional state,” wrote Carpenter, who had advocated that Silva “remove” herself from her husband, according to court documents. “He’ll be able to snake his way into your head.”

“I know either way he will use it against me,” Silva said of her pregnancy. “If I told him before, which I’m not, he would use it as [a way to] try to stay with me. And after the fact, I know he will try to act like he has some right to the decision.”

“Delete all conversations from today,” Noyola wrote. “You don’t want him looking through it.”

Not only did Marcus Silva access the private conversations his ex-wife had with her friends, he also filed an unprecedented lawsuit in March accusing Carpenter, Loyola, and Texas abortion rights activist Aracely Garcia of wrongful death, alleging the trio “conspired” to help his ex-wife obtain medication to terminate her pregnancy with a self-managed abortion. Attorneys for Silva also hope to sue “into oblivion” the manufacturer of the abortion pills procured. The complaint, filed in state court in Galveston County, Texas, seeks a stunning $1 million in damages from each woman.

In the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe was struck down, the legal filing, riddled with sensitive information, instills a chilling effect on anyone who wishes to assist in abortion care, raising the threat of surveillance and public scrutiny, legal experts say. Filed by an influential conservative legal figure, the lawsuit also offers a window into the anti-abortion movement’s growing push for fetal personhood.

An Influential Figure

The lawsuit claims that aiding a self-managed abortion is tantamount to murder under state law, allowing Marcus Silva to bring a wrongful death case. Texas law specifically exempts the abortion patient from facing prosecution, leaving Brittni Silva out of the legal crosshairs.

The alleged abortion occurred prior to enactment of the state’s criminal trigger ban, which makes performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to life in prison. Marcus Silva’s attorneys appear to rely instead on Texas’s pre-Roe criminal ban, a 1925 statute that penalizes anyone who “furnishes the means for” abortion with up to 10 years in prison. The status of the antiquated law is murky. In July, the Texas Supreme Court temporarily ruled in a case filed by abortion providers that the law could only be enforced civilly. Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the law was obsolete, as it had been repealed by implication following Roe, a finding that reaffirmed a 2004 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.

Some legal experts consider the lawsuit’s argument highly tenuous. Since Brittni Silva is immune from prosecution, her alleged abortion shouldn’t be considered a crime, leaving no basis to bring a wrongful death suit.

“For this to be wrongful death, you would have to have committed that criminal act, and because the pregnant person cannot be charged for homicide for her self-managed abortion, it’s not criminal,” said Joanna Grossman, a gender and family law professor at Southern Methodist University. “So there is no reason to think what her friends did to help is facilitating crime.”

The suit might be easy to write off if it weren’t for the figure behind it: Jonathan F. Mitchell, former Texas solicitor general and architect of the state’s six-week abortion ban, Senate Bill 8. Mitchell filed the complaint along with Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain and the Thomas More Society, a religious-right law firm known for pushing anti-abortion views through litigation.

Dubbed a “brilliant legal mind,” Mitchell has a prolific background litigating right-wing causes, including anti-LGBTQ+, anti-union, and anti-abortion lawsuits. A former law clerk for the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Mitchell has ties to the Federalist Society, a group aligned with the court’s right-wing bloc. Mitchell’s legal crusades are often successful. He recently represented an anti-LGBTQ+ Texas activist who struck down a nationwide Obamacare provision that required insurance companies to cover a range of preventive care services, including HIV prevention measures such as PrEP.

While reticent in the public spotlight, Mitchell has developed a reputation as a powerful actor behind the scenes, namely for crafting the novel legal provision at the heart of Texas’s S.B. 8. Enacted in 2021 as a result of inaction by the U.S. Supreme Court, the law allows private citizens to act as vigilantes and sue abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure.

Mitchell’s legal efforts have often laid the groundwork for a larger plan: In 2019, he helped mastermind a string of local “sanctuary for the unborn” ordinances, which became the blueprint for S.B. 8, compelling cities to declare themselves abortion-free by imposing a similar civil enforcement mechanism. The ordinances — which have proliferated in 65 towns across the U.S. — also sought to revive the Comstock Act, an archaic law that has emerged as the next weapon in the arsenal of the anti-abortion movement.

Personhood Is the “Long Game”

Central to Mitchell’s controversial and “dangerous” ideology is his belief that old, unenforced laws never really die. Only legislatures that enacted laws can formally repeal them, he argues. In addition to seeking to resurrect the century-old Texas ban, Mitchell has signaled an interest in reviving the Comstock Act in Marcus Silva’s wrongful death suit.

The dormant 1873 anti-obscenity law bars any materials associated with abortion care — from pills to surgical equipment to information pamphlets — from shipment by mail, providing a possible foundation for a nationwide abortion ban. Initially intended to ban contraceptives, the law has not been enforced since the 1930s and has seen its scope narrowed over time. Violations can result in up to 10 years in prison.

In a memo issued last year, the Department of Justice clarified that the 150-year-old law did not prohibit mailing abortion medication to patients in states where abortion remains legal, yet that has not deterred anti-abortion actors. In the wrongful death suit, Mitchell argued that the Biden memo was “not entitled to deference” from state courts and that anyone involved in the distribution of the pills Silva obtained — including the manufacturer — committed a “wrongful act” in violation of Comstock. Mitchell doubled down on the push to revive Comstock in another recently filed suit, asking a New Mexico judge to declare that the outdated law supersedes any state law protecting abortion access.

Signaling a coordinated campaign among anti-abortion conservatives, Texas-based U.S. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk also exhibited eagerness to revive the Comstock Act in his recent ruling to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone, as did the Trump-appointed justices of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who partially upheld Kacsmaryk’s ruling. While the U.S. Supreme Court halted restrictions on the drug from taking effect in April, sending the case back to the 5th Circuit for review, it remains to be seen how the appellate court — and possibly the Supreme Court down the line — might handle the issue of Comstock. Since 2019, the anti-abortion group Alliance Defending Freedom, a plaintiff in the mifepristone case, has paid Mitchell’s Austin-based law firm at least $92,000 for services listed as “sanctity of life” and “religious liberty,” according to IRS filings.

Mitchell’s broader ambition in the wrongful death lawsuit may be judicial recognition of fetal personhood, or classifying fetuses as equal to people with protected constitutional rights, according to Mary Ziegler, abortion historian and law professor at the University of California, Davis. Comstock, while a parallel strategy, helps push the similar view that all abortion violates federal criminal law. Fetal personhood has been the defining end goal of the anti-abortion movement since the 1960s, and with Roe’s demise, extremists have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve it.

“The lawsuit gets the ball rolling on the idea of how to bring fetal rights claims forward.”

Mitchell’s suit, Ziegler said, helps establish a personhood trend that the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority could “seize” on. It “advances a particularly chilling vision,” she said: shaming and intimidating people who end pregnancies, incarcerating anyone who helps secure abortion care, and vindicating the will of men who oppose it.

“The lawsuit gets the ball rolling on the idea of how to bring fetal rights claims forward. It’s part of a long game,” Ziegler said. “Mitchell is hoping this builds to something bigger, and ultimately adds precedent to the recognition of fetal personhood by the courts.”

Two bills filed by Texas lawmakers this session appear to push for personhood; they would roll back criminal and civil protections for self-managed abortion and classify a fertilized embryo as an “individual,” opening the door for abortion to be treated as capital murder, punishable by the death penalty. The bills are awaiting committee hearings before the legislative session ends on May 29.

Photos: Abortion rights demonstrators rally in New York City against the decision of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court in Amarillo, Texas, who overruled FDA approval of the abortion medication mifepristone on April 15, 2023. Olga Fedorova/SOPA Images/Sipa USA

A Chilling Effect

Recently revealed documents call into question Marcus Silva’s claims that he was wholly unaware of Brittni Silva’s alleged abortion, possibly undercutting his argument that he suffered emotional harm due to purported secrecy and should be awarded damages. A status hearing on the case is scheduled for June 8 before a Republican judge who has a history of verbal abuse in his courtroom, including erupting at a pregnant woman. But no matter how the case is resolved, Grossman said, the damage is already done, and that’s by design.

The lawsuit featured the word “murder” nearly 30 times, likening the women to killers. Notice of the suit was sent to the women’s private employers, as well as the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, where Garcia was employed, demanding that they preserve all evidence of their relationship with the defendants so that attorneys could investigate whether the employers would be held liable.

“It’s an attempt to weaponize a woman’s most intimate medical decision and try to make it a crime.”

“It’s an attempt to weaponize a woman’s most intimate medical decision and try to make it a crime,” said Rusty Hardin, a high-profile Houston defense attorney who is representing two of the women targeted. “And it’s extremely unfortunate when lawyers use language to demonize people they disagree with.”

Despite the fact that no discovery has been taken, the legal complaint featured several pages of intimate text messages between the women — including Brittni Silva’s ovulation calendar — captured through photos of her phone, presumably (but not definitively) by her ex-husband. According to police records obtained by NPR, Marcus Silva searched through his ex-wife’s phone and purse on more than one occasion, reportedly finding abortion pills. The complaint also included a photo of the women in “Handmaid’s Tale” Halloween costumes to further the argument that they “celebrated the murder.” Their addresses have been made public, and their photos have been shared online by anti-abortion activists.

“This is going to scare away and intimidate anyone who now tries to help a friend or loved one obtain a self-managed abortion,” Grossman said. “The surveillance and violation of private conversations is going to instill so much fear. This sends a message that your personal ID, your photos, your text messages could all be fair game in a public case against you, and nothing you say is safe.”

“And it doesn’t matter if the case is thrown out or struck down — your lives are already likely ruined,” Grossman added. “I think that’s a major purpose of the suit. The chilling effect is part of the whole strategy, and it’s been very successful for Mitchell.”

Grossman pointed to the fact that even before any lawsuit was filed under S.B. 8, clinics in Texas halted the majority of their abortion services out of fear of liability.

Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel with the reproductive rights legal advocacy organization If/When/How, stressed that lawsuits like this publicly reinforce and empower “vindictive” partners, giving them another tool to exert control. It’s common for abusers who learn of their partners’ self-managed abortions to coerce them into continuing the relationship by threatening to go to law enforcement, Diaz-Tello said.

“Cases like this one essentially serve to isolate victims of abuse who are often turning to self-managed abortion, a pregnancy termination method that is easier to conceal,” she said. “It’s telling people, if you need help accessing abortion, you’re really on your own or else your friends or family members will get swept up in the net of criminalization.”

From 2000 to 2020, the group documented 61 cases in which people were criminally investigated or arrested for self-managing their abortions or helping someone else do so, often using other criminal laws, including homicide laws. The majority of the cases involved abortion medication, which is under an unprecedented legal threat. The number is likely the “tip of the large iceberg,” not accounting for dropped charges or plea bargains.

While it once seemed like a pipe dream for the anti-abortion movement, fetal personhood may be slowly making its way into mainstream judicial thinking. In his ruling, which echoed the inflammatory rhetoric and unscientific claims employed by anti-abortion activists, Kacsmaryk defended his use of the medically inaccurate terms “unborn human” and “unborn child” rather than fetus or embryo — a telling embrace of fetal personhood.

“The fall of Roe has emboldened the radical fringe and shifted the Overton window on the idea that people should be criminalized for having abortions. The more you push these ideas, the more you normalize them,” Diaz-Tello said. “And this Texas lawsuit is a piece of that.”

The post The First “Wrongful Death” Case for Helping a Friend Get an Abortion appeared first on The Intercept.