Six Trump Interior Department appointees are under investigation

Inspector General’s Office inquiry comes a week after it launched a probe of Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.

Posters of former Interior secretary Ryan Zinke were plastered on street corners near the Interior Department offices in November 2018. (Robert Miller/The Washington Post)

Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni in the Washington Post
April 23 at 2:11 PM

The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General has opened an investigation into whether six of President Trump’s appointees have violated federal ethics rules by engaging with their former employers or clients on department-related business.

The new inquiry, which the office confirmed in an April 18 letter to the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, is looking into senior Interior officials, including Assistant Secretary for Insular and International Affairs Doug Domenech, White House liaison Lori Mashburn and three top staffers at the Office of Intergovernmental and External Affairs. The Campaign Legal Center detailed the officials’ actions in a Feb. 20 letter to the inspector general’s office, suggesting a probe was warranted.

To avoid conflicts of interest, Trump signed an executive order days after taking office that requires appointees to recuse themselves from specific matters involving their former employers and clients for two years. The complaint, which cites reports in HuffPost and the Guardian as well as extensive public records, outlines how a half-dozen political appointees at Interior continued to discuss policy matters with organizations that had employed them in the past.

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The Guardian reported in May 2018 that Domenech, the highest-ranking official named in the complaint, continued to interact with the conservative think tank that used to employ him before he joined Interior.

Domenech’s calendars indicated that he twice met with representatives from the Austin-based Texas Public Policy Foundation on an endangered species listing and a property dispute. The group had lawsuits pending with Interior over both issues and settled the endangered species case with the department six months after the meeting with Domenech.

Cassidy, a former lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, has also attracted significant attention since joining the department for his work on gun-related issues.

Calendars released by Interior show Cassidy participating in a December 2017 meeting regarding Trump’s decision to scale back two national monuments in Utah, even though Cassidy had lobbied Congress on a bill addressing the president’s ability to establish national monuments just months earlier. This activity, first reported by HuffPost, could violate the federal ethics pledge because Cassidy was prohibited from engaging in particular matters on which he had lobbied during the two years before joining the department.

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Mining at New Hope quarry halted by Pennsylvania regulators

The controversial quarry in Solebury failed to finish reclamation work by a March 19 deadline.


Kyle Bagenstose reports for the Bucks County Courier-Times

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has brought the hammer down on a controversial quarry in Solebury, suspending any active mining operations there until the quarry can complete overdue reclamation work, according to officials and a notice sent to the quarry last week.

The 165-acre quarry, owned by the New Hope Crushed Stone & Lime Co., has for years drawn the ire of the township, local residents and the adjacent Solebury School, which blamed quarrying operations for the formation of sinkholes on its property. Several lawsuits were filed and settled, and the DEP’s Environmental Quality Board ultimately declared the site a nuisance in 2014, leading the DEP to require a reclamation plan in 2015.

Operations at the quarry were briefly halted in August 2017 after the DEP said the quarry fell behind on the reclamation plan, which involves filling the quarry’s pit, grading it to a safe slope and seeding it, and restoring the nearby Primrose Creek. The two-week cessation was lifted after the quarry demonstrated it was working to catch up.

But operations are now halted again after the quarry missed a March 19 deadline to complete the work. Solebury Supervisor Kevin Morrissey wrote in an email last week that the DEP then drafted a “consent order and agreement” to the quarry to address the work, due April 12. After the quarry failed to execute the agreement, the DEP brought the cessation

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Trump isn’t fully funding a U.N. Climate program, so Michael Bloomberg is

BY DINO GRANDONIwith Paulina Firozi

THE LIGHTBULB (a Washington Post blog)

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

When Michael Bloomberg announced he was not running for president, the 77-year-old former New York mayor said would rather spend his remaining days (and considerable wealth) addressing issues dear to him — including climate change.

On Earth Day, Bloomberg put his money where his mouth is. 

The businessman-turned-politician-turned-philanthropist announcedMonday that he will donate $5.5. million to the climate agency of the United Nations, filling in a funding gap left by the Trump administration after it said it would withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord.

For a billionaire such as Bloomberg, that amount of money put toward the U.N.’s Climate Change Secretariat may amount to a drop in the bucket. But the donation is the latest in a series of donations to help global climate efforts from the former mayor, who has emerged as a major political and environmental donor after leaving office in 2013.

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This is the second year in a row that Bloomberg has helped fund efforts at the United Nations to help countries meet voluntary goals under the Paris agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The administration of President Barack Obama, who helped broker the landmark international climate agreement a year before Trump’s election, initially promised to put up $15 million through 2019 toward those U.N. efforts.

“We are really making good on our promise — really on the U.S. commitment previously from the Obama administration,” said Shara Mohtadi, Bloomberg Philanthropies’ environment program liaison to the UN.

Under Trump, that funding from the federal government had been scaled back to just $2.5 million last year, with another $2.5 million expected this year, according to Bloomberg Philanthropies. Bloomberg’s donations over the past two years will fill in that $10 million shortfall.

The donations to the United Nations constitute a remarkable instance of a private individual replacing funding once promised by the federal government — one that highlights the urgency some technocrats such as Bloomberg feel about the climate issue.

“The idea of a Green New Deal — first suggested by the columnist Tom Friedman more than a decade ago — stands no chance of passage in the Senate over the next two years,” Bloomberg wrote in a March op-ed explaining his decision not to run for president. “But Mother Nature does not wait on our political calendar, and neither can we.”

Bloomberg’s spending seems to have only accelerated since Trump’s election. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the former mayor’s charitable arm, has plowed tens of millions of dollars into various activities meant to reduce climate-warming emissions since 2016.

The spending includes $70 million for efforts by 20 U.S. city mayors to reduce their carbon emissions, $64 million to the Sierra Club and other groups to try to shut down domestic coal-fired power plants and another $50 million to help other nations move away from coal.

And those totals do not include the tens of millions Bloomberg personally gave last year to help Democrats flip the House.

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Self-driving vehicles. Tesla CEO plans to hand the car keys to robots next year

Michael Liedtke and Tom Krisher, AP Business Writers
Updated: April 22, 2019- 8:30 PM

Tesla CEO plans to hand the car keys to robots next year
CHRISTOPHE ENA / AP

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tesla CEO Elon Musk expects to start converting the company’s electric cars into fully self-driving vehicles next year as part of an audacious plan to create a network of robotic taxis to compete against Uber and other ride-hailing services.

The vision sketched out Monday during an event at Tesla’s Silicon Valley headquarters requires several leaps of faith — something that the zealous investors and consumers who view Musk as a technological genius often are willing to take.

But self-driving-car experts fear Musk is shirking public safety in an effort to boost Tesla’s stock and sell more of the company’s electric cars. This amid lingering questions about whether the 15-year-old automaker can consistently make money.

“It sounds like a pipe dream that he’s selling people,” said Raj Rajkumar, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “I think it’s basically overpromising, which is typical of Elon Musk.”

To prove his skeptics wrong, Musk will have to persuade regulators that Tesla’s technology for transforming potentially hundreds of thousands of electric cars into self-driving vehicles will produce robots that are safer and more reliable than humans.

And to do that, Musk will have to be correct in his bet that Tesla has come up with a better way to produce self-driving cars than virtually every other of the more than 60 companies in the U.S. working toward the same goal.

Some of those companies are aiming to have their fully autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in small geographic areas as early as this year, but many experts don’t believe they’ll be in widespread use for a decade or more.

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Unlike most of those other companies, Tesla’s cars won’t come with the light beam sensors called Lidar that many industry experts consider to be essential equipment for robotic vehicles to navigate the road.

Musk trashed Lidar as a “fool’s errand” and “frigging stupid” in a put-down of companies such as Google spin-off Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise Automation that are including the light beam sensors in their systems.

“They are going to dump Lidar,” Musk assured investors and analysts gathered at Tesla’s Palo Alto, California, office for the 2½ hour presentation.

Musk, widely known for his swagger as much as his smarts, spent much of the time trying to persuade both the investors and consumers that he had figured out a better way to teach robots how to drive.

“It is fundamentally insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,” Musk said at one point, arguing that purchasing a vehicle from any other automaker would be like getting a horse.

Musk’s quasi-sales pitch came two days before Tesla is expected to report a disappointing performance for the first three months of the year. Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first quarter net loss based on disappointing car sales, a setback after Musk pledged heading into the second half of last year that Tesla would be profitable from that point onward.

Tesla’s stock sank by nearly 4 percent to close Monday at $262.75.

From Musk’s vantage point, Tesla has a huge advantage over autonomous vehicle competitors because it gathers a massive amount of data in the real world. This quarter, he said Tesla will have 500,000 vehicles on the road, each equipped with eight cameras, ultrasonic sensors, and radar gathering data to help build the company’s neural network, which will serve as the digital equivalent of the self-driving cars’ consciousness.

The network allows vehicles to recognize images, determine what objects are, and figure out how to deal with them. To become fully self-driving, the cars also need a special computer that fits behind the glove box and is powered by a special chip Musk boasted is better than any other processor in the world “by a huge margin.”

Currently the self-driving computer costs $5,000, but the price rises to $7,000 if it’s installed after delivery.

Finally, Tesla will deliver software updates to those computers to make it possible for its electric cars to be driven by a robot, without a human in position to take over in case something goes awry. There will be a slight chance of some “fender benders,” Musk acknowledged Monday, and indicated Tesla will be liable for accident caused by a vehicle under the control of its robot.

“People will die,” Rajkumar predicted. “I can tell you that right now. Because in the real world, crazy things happen.”

Musk predicted that the technology for fully self-driving Tesla will roll out at some point from April to June next year. Then, Tesla will need to get regulatory approval for the fully autonomous cars to drive on roads, something Musk predicted would happen in a few states by the end of next year. He didn’t specific where Tesla will try to gain approval first.

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Pa. utility regulator speaks out against state Senate’s nuclear bailout bill

Andrew Place: If Three Mile Island is the only plant in trouble right now then the bill is “quite an expensive solution to the issue.”

Three Mile Island nuclear facility

Marie Cusick reports for StateImpact

A state utility regulator is voicing opposition to a bill aimed at propping up Pennsylvania’s nuclear power industry.

Public Utility Commissioner Andrew Place sent a memo to members of the state Senate last week outlining why he thinks SB 510 is a bad idea.

“While human health and environmental quality; job creation and retention; and maintaining a robust tax base are all cornerstone public policy goals, this bill, in its current form, is far from the least cost mechanism to achieve these goals,” Place wrote.

Place listed alternatives, such as putting a price on carbon (requiring polluters to pay for their emissions), promoting energy efficiency, and investing in zero-emission generation.

Exelon’s Three Mile Island plant in Dauphin County, and FirstEnergy’s Beaver Valley plant in Beaver County are both slated for retirement within the next few years, as the nuclear industry has struggled amid flat-lining demand for electricity, high operating costs, and competition from natural gas and renewables. Nuclear plant operators have sought subsidies in Pennsylvania and other states — including New Jersey —  arguing, among other things, that the current market for electricity does not adequately account for the plants’ carbon-free attributes.

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The other four Public Utility commissioners also sent a statement to the Senate last week. Although they take a neutral position on the proposal, their memo notes that, “only [Three Mile Island] is clearly financially troubled at this time,” and the bill would be a “marked shift away from the goals of the Competition Act passed in 1996,” — a reference to the law that restructured the commonwealth’s power market, making the generation of electricity competitive.

Place said if Three Mile Island is the only plant in trouble right now then the bill is, “quite an expensive solution to the issue.”

State senator Ryan Aument (R-Lancaster) sponsors SB 510 and declined to comment on the criticism. The measure recognizes nuclear plants as carbon-free energy and adds them to the state’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard — a 2004 law requiring electric utilities to buy power from a list of clean and alternative energy sources, like wind and solar. The PUC has estimated the cost of the measure at $458.9 million to $551 million annually — amounts that would be borne by the state’s electric customers.

The state House is also advancing a similar measure, HB 11, to subsidize the nuclear industry. Place said the PUC has not been asked to weigh in on the House bill.

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NJ’s revised Energy Master Plan won’t go public before December

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight
APRIL 22, 2019

Murphy administration’s overhaul of New Jersey’s Energy Master Plan is put off while urgent energy issues are being dealt with

Offshore wind

The state is pushing back adoption of a presumably radically revamped Energy Master Plan until the end of year.

The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is notifying stakeholders the plan, touted as a road map to guide the Murphy administration’s goal of achieving 100 percent clean energy by 2050, will not come out in draft form until June and now, in a final version by December.

Gov. Phil Murphy issued an executive order last spring ordering a new plan from the agency, asking it to be finalized by this June as part of his clean-energy agenda. With the BPU wrestling with an array of more timely and urgent energy issues, that time frame has been dropped, although not surprisingly to some.


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It comes after the agency this week made a significant decision about the state’s energy mix for the future, approving a controversial $300 million a year ratepayer subsidy to keep PSEG Power’s three nuclear units open for at least the next three years, and possibly longer.

It also comes less than two weeks after BPU president Joseph Fiordaliso had told reporters the draft plan would be come out in “the next few weeks.’’ The plan is of intense interest because it is expected to dramatically shift the focus of the existing EMP, which concentrated on building out the state’s natural gas infrastructure.

Subject of many rumors

The extent of the shift has been a matter of wide-ranging speculation in and around Trenton. Rumors abounded that the administration was considering some type of moratorium on new natural gas projects, a priority of a coalition of environmentalists.

When asked earlier this month about the plan and whether natural gas would be phased out of the mix, Fiordaliso only would say that it, along with nuclear power, would be part of the state’s future energy mix.

At least nine natural gas pipeline projects are pending in New Jersey, as well as another four proposals to build natural gas power plants. Cheap natural gas has led to lower electricity prices for customers and huge drops in monthly bills for those who rely on the fuel to heat their homes during cold-weather months.

With 40 percent of the state’s electricity coming from natural gas and roughly 70 percent of homes and businesses heated by the fuel, it is unclear how the state can seamlessly phase out its use without huge impacts on consumers and the economy.

Peter Peretzman, a spokesman for the agency, said “we pushed backed the dates because we wanted to incorporate outstanding studies and additional stakeholder input to ensure a truly comprehensive and holistic plan.’’

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