Obviously the biggest news of the past two days is Trump firing Jim Comey and then meeting some Russians and hanging out with Henry Kissinger, because the President-fires-guy-investigating-the-President parallel to Richard Nixon wasn’t quite clear enough. But even as we gorge on gifs of Anderson Cooper’s eyeroll, there are other important things going on.
Foremost on everyone’s mind is Trump can-kicking his decision on Paris, which bodes well for the agreement. Sean Spicer (before the Comey debacle sent him to hide in the bushes) told reporters Trump wanted more time to judge the agreement’s impact on American competitiveness and jobs, something of a break from past language that was more decidedly negative. And from the Bureau of Reporting in the Age of Orwell, Rebecca Leber points out that “Among things that have disappeared from Trump’s new website, his pledge to withdraw from Paris deal within 100 days.” Even as Trump erases small bits of history, the website adjustment and his less threatening language about the agreement are reasons for hope.
With the decision now scheduled for after the G7 meeting at the end of the month, Trump has a chance to extract some nominal concessions from world leaders who will lobby and “fact check” him on the agreement. The hope now is that he decides to remain in the agreement in exchange for some token assistance for the fossil fuel industry. So the news is as good as the news gets these days.
Case in point, the Senate failed to pass the last CRA it could before the window expired, leaving in place an Obama regulation on oil and gas drilling on public lands. The rule forces drillers to capture and sell the methane (a potent greenhouse gas) they would otherwise burn off and waste. This means that instead of allowing companies drilling on public lands to pollute, they’ll need to sell that methane, resulting in additional revenue to the public.
A clearer win for taxpayer pockets and the climate has been hard to come by lately, so some celebration is certainly in order! (And a word of thanks to John McCain?)
Okay celebration over, because the rule might not stand anyway. The Department of Interior has this regulation in its sights for review and revision, so even though it’s good for the public, it may not survive since it’s not so beloved by the oil industry.
Speaking of whom, the oil-industry funded group Energy in Depth has started pushing its latest counter-attack on the anti-fracking community. This time, in what the Daily Caller’s Andrew Follet generously described as an “investigation,” EiD has really dug deep to uncover and expose an “Anti-Fracking donor memo” that purportedly details how advocates can “attack oil and gas with questionable health claims.”
By the way Follet and EiD describe it, this nefarious document is a smoking gun that proves advocates use underhanded methods to “trick the media” into attacking fracking. Since surely sneaky advocates wouldn’t want anyone to know about their salacious tactics, you would think EiD must have gone through some great lengths to turn up this document.
But like EiD often is, you would be wrong. Their key piece of evidence is a document from 2012 that’s readily available and publicly linked to on the Fracking page on the Physicians for Social Responsibility website, in the Resource Section so clearly something they want people to read and understand. So much for the secret conspiracy.
Womp womp.
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