Illinois and Ohio Bribery Scandals Show the Perils of Mixing Utilities and Politics

For utilities, all things take a back seat to profit, and their power can be bad for customers and the climate.

Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder. Credit: State of Ohio
Republican Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder pushed through legislation that a politically influential utility has been calling for, and it’s raising eyebrows. Credit: State of Ohio

BY DAN GEARINO Inside Climate News

COLUMBUS, Ohio—Among other things, the king-size bribery scandals in Illinois and Ohio dominating the headlines lately are a vivid illustration of how utilities routinely exert financial and political power to shield themselves from the risks of doing business, often at the expense of consumers.

The dynamic is so pervasive that some analysts and advocates say they thought they had lost the ability to be shocked by it—until the revelations of the last 10 days.

“I was gobsmacked,” said Ned Hill, an Ohio State University economist who had testified against the legislation now at the center of the bribery probe. The behavior described in legal documents, he said, looks “like the outtakes from The Godfather.”

Hill and other close observers of the legislative process say utilities have too much political power and operate in a campaign finance system that makes it too easy for them to get what they want, and that often leads to unfair competition.

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On July 17, federal prosecutors in Illinois announced that the utility Commonwealth Edison had allegedly provided jobs and favors to people associated with the Illinois House speaker, in exchange for legislation that included a bailout of nuclear power plants. Four days later, federal prosecutors in Ohio made a more startling announcement in an unrelated but similar case, charging the Ohio House speaker, Republican Larry Householder, and four other people, with taking more than $60 million from the utility FirstEnergy in exchange for passing a nuclear bailout. 

The utilities’ unrestrained influence also has implications for climate change and the environment, although those factors differ widely in the Illinois and Ohio cases because of differences in the bills passed in each state. But environmental advocates say both the Illinois and Ohio examples are alarming because they show a system in which all concerns take a back seat to profits of utilities.

“When companies like ComEd and FirstEnergy have billions of dollars at stake, spending tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions, bribes and other activities is sort of a down payment, and that’s sad,” said Howard Learner, president and executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center in Chicago.

The Illinois and Ohio scandals touch on hotly contested policy debates about the transition to renewable energy and whether nuclear power, which is carbon-free, is so important to that transition that it needs to be subsidized.

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Trump sending more federal agents to reinforce Portland courthouse

By Devlin Barrett and Nick Miroff Washington Post
July 27, 2020 at 1:27 p.m.

The Trump administration is sending more federal agents to Portland, Ore., as officials consider pushing back harder and farther against the growing crowds and nightly clashes with protesters, vandals, and rioters, The Washington Post has learned.

To strengthen federal forces arrayed around the city’s downtown courthouse, the U.S. Marshals Service decided last week to send 100 deputy U.S. Marshals to Portland, according to an internal Marshals email reviewed by The Post. The personnel began arriving Thursday night.

The Department of Homeland Security is also considering a plan to send an additional 50 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel to the city, but a final decision on the deployment has not been made, according to senior administration officials involved in the federal response.

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Such moves would mark a significant expansion of the federal force currently operating at the courthouse — there were 114 federal agents there in mid-July — though it is unclear how many personnel there now would be relieved and sent home once the reinforcements arrive.

Spokesmen for the Marshals Service and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately address requests for further information.

White House officials are expected to discuss the plans privately Monday afternoon.

Inside Operation Diligent Valor, the federal effort to quell unrest in Portland

Portland has been the scene of long-running protests over police mistreatment of minorities, centered largely around the large federal courthouse downtown. Confrontations between the heavily-armed federal agents and black-clad protesters have intensified in recent weeks, and Trump administration officials have pledged to defeat the “violent anarchists” who they say are trying to burn down the building.

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Desperate to party through the coronavirus

Cops in Jackson bust another overflowing New Jerseys houseparty. This time 700 clog local streets leading to bash at an Airbnb rental. As cops chase them away, latecomers continue to arrive .

It took officers from seven law enforcement agencies to quell a party at an AirBnB rental in Jackson on Sunday evening, police said.
It took officers from seven law enforcement agencies to quell a party at an AirBnB rental in Jackson on Sunday evening, police said. (Shutterstock)

By Karen Wall, Patch Staff

JACKSON, NJ — A homeowner and two others are facing charges after a party at an Airbnb rental drew more than 700 people to a home in Jackson on Sunday, shutting down roads as they became jammed with vehicles, police said.

Yaakov Weiss, 40, of Jackson, who owns the home, and Patience Guanue, 23, and Alicia Hinneh, 22, both of Newark, were issued summonses for violating the governor’s executive order limiting gatherings to 500 people or fewer in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Jackson Capt. Steven Laskiewicz said. There were no injuries reported.

Police were called about 8:30 p.m. to a Mill Pond Road home in the Whispering Hill neighborhood, off Leesville Road, and were told by several residents of a large party at a home that was disturbing the neighborhood. Officers contacted Weiss, who told police he had rented out his home on Airbnb for the large party, and that he had left as nearly 200 people arrived.

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Laskiewicz said the crowd grew to more than 700 people with more than 100 vehicles parked in the area, and police started receiving 911 calls from other homeowners in the area reporting disturbances and trespassing.

Law enforcement began sending the partygoers home, but the roads were jammed because people continued to arrive even as police were breaking up the party, he said.Subscribe

It took all of Jackson’s on-duty police officers, along with help from the Freehold, Howell and Lakewood police departments, New Jersey State Police, the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office and the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, to clear the crowd and direct traffic as people left the area, Laskiewicz said.

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Seaweed to the rescue for Covid-19 and renewable fuel?

Seaweed

Renewable energy researchers have been turning to seaweed as a source of biofuel, and while that’s bubbling up in the background, the COVID-19 crisis has brought renewed attention to the all-around sustainability aspect of harvesting renewable resources from the sea. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some new developments in the field of seaweed, aka macroalgae.

Tina Casey reports in CleanTechnica

No. Do not run out and buy random seaweed to treat yourself for COVID-19 symptoms. However, new research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York does indicate that an extract from seaweed could “substantially” outperform the current go-to COVID-19 treatment, remdesavir.

The paper is available online at the journal Cell Discovery under the title, “Sulfated polysaccharides effectively inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.“

That’s in vitro, not in people, meaning that the research is still in early stages. Nevertheless, it is promising. The Rensselaer team deploys a “decoy” approach that has worked on dengue, Zika, and Influenza A, among other viruses.

The decoy material distracts the virus from latching onto human cells, and locks the virus into a safe space where it can degrade harmlessly.

Tricky!

COVID-19 Treatment, Seaweed Edition

For those of you keeping score at home, the seaweed extract used in the study consists of several variations of the common anticoagulent heparin.

And this is where it gets interesting. Heparin has been manufactured for 100 years or so, but almost all of it has been derived from animals, not seaweed. Our friends over at the National Institutes of Health journal Molecules have the backstory.

“The purification of heparin from offal is an old industrial process for which commercial recipes date back to 1922,” they write. “Although chemical, chemoenzymatic, and biotechnological alternatives for this production method have been published in the academic literature, animal-tissue is still the sole source for commercial heparin production in industry.”

They were saying that back in 2017, but since then it seems that research on the seaweed alternative has picked up steam.

Cost is still an obstacle for commercial interest in seaweed-derived heparin. However, with an unprecedented pandemic well under way and no end in sight, demand for COVID-19 treatments could help jumpstart the seaweed-to-heparin supply chain globally.

The renewable energy angle comes in because the seaweed-to-biofuel supply chain has also attracted little interest on a commercial level. If the heparin market spurs investor interest in seaweed farming for medical applications, economies of scale could also kick in and help bring down costs on the biofuel side as well.

Renewable Energy From The Sea, Heparin Industry Edition

The big question is why the heparin industry needs an alternative to offal. After all, the world is awash in offal. It’s cheap, it’s available, and something must be done with it.

Part of the answer could lie in mad cow disease, which sparked new restrictions on the re-use of offal. Consolidation in the rendering industry is also raising concerns about supply chains and price volatility. Over the long term, offal supplies could shrink as global demand for red meat fades (most pharmaceutical heparin is derived from cattle lungs and pig intestines).

More to the point, seaweed-derived heparin-type drugs could be more efficient than conventional heparin, as suggested by a 2019 study.

Kickstarting The Renewable Energy Market, Seaweed Edition

If all of that falls into place and COVID-19 helps stimulate commercial seaweed farming beyond its current scale, the implications for biofuel could be significant.

The US Department of Energy began prepping for such a venture in 2017, when it launched a new round of funding for the MARINER (Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources) initiative, which aims to propel seaweed farming into the 21st century and deploy it as a renewable energy resource.

MARINER comes under the Energy Department’s cutting edge ARPA-E office, which specializes in high risk, high reward research.

Of particular interest is a project that involves ramping up farming methods for the brown seaweed Sargassum, which has also been studied for heparin extraction.

That project comes from the University of Mississippi, which received $500,000 in funding to create a system of semi-autonomous, wave powered tugboats that will reposition “paddocks” of Sargassum for optimum nutrient intake.

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About the Author

Tina Casey specializes in military and corporate sustainability, advanced technology, emerging materials, biofuels, and water and wastewater issues. Tina’s articles are reposted frequently on Reuters, Scientific American, and many other sites. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter @TinaMCasey and Google+.

We’re always looking for stories that might interest our readers. If you come across something so interesting that it cries out to be shared, please send it to editor@enviropolitics.com  If we agree, you’ll see it here soon.   

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As the Culture Wars Flare Amid the Pandemic, a Call to Speak ‘Science to Power’

A growing number of National Academy of Science members sign a statement decrying the Trump administration’s “denigration of scientific expertise.”

Medical workers from New York handle test samples at temporary testing site for Covid-19 in Houston, Texas. Credit: Go Nakamura/Getty Images
Medical workers from New York handle test samples at temporary testing site for Covid-19 in Houston, Texas. Credit: Go Nakamura/Getty Images

BY JUDY FAHYS Inside Climate News

More than a thousand of the nation’s top scientists say it’s time to speak “science to power,” as Covid-19 deaths top 141,000 nationally and cases continue to rise in 43 states. The scientists are calling on policymakers to restore evidence-based decision-making—especially when it comes to managing life-and-death challenges like the global pandemic and climate change. 

More than 1,240 National Academy of Science members have now registered their personal concern about the Trump administration’s denigration of science.

The effort began when 375 academy members signed an open letter in 2016 warning that then-candidate Trump’s threatened withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement would harm American credibility and leadership. Hundreds more added their signatures to a statement posted online in 2018, after President Trump set the withdrawal in motion. 

And several hundreds more members have signed the statement in recent weeks, speaking out as public health experts warning about surging Covid-19 cases have been attacked for perpetrating a “hoax” and overstating the seriousness of the disease. 

Climate scientist Benjamin D. Santer helped initiate the open letter in 2016 and fielded signatures this spring as the scientific community grew increasingly alarmed about the Trump administration’s handling of climate change and the pandemic. 

At a time when a cohesive and science-based approach is crucial, Santer said, the Trump White House has doubled down on attacking the government’s most prominent infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, over his advice to respond more aggressively to Covid-19.

“It’s a teachable moment,” said Santer, who works at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, one of the nation’s 17 national laboratories. “And the hope is that the lesson learned from the last few months is that science matters. Ignore it at your peril.”

The “Statement to Restore Science-Based Policy in Government” was posted by NAS members calling themselves Scientists for Science-Based Policy in 2018. Now, the signatures represent 43 percent of academy members, all of whom emphasize they are speaking for themselves and not for NAS or their institutions. 

The online statement notes that the United States is the only nation to have left the Paris Agreement. 

“The decision to withdraw is symptomatic of a larger problem: the Trump Administration’s denigration of scientific expertise and harassment of scientists,” the statement says. “The dismissal of scientific evidence in policy formulation has affected wide areas of the social, biological, environmental and physical sciences.”  

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