Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones' Washington bureau. She was previously the political reporter for Grist and a writing fellow at The American Prospect. She can be reached by email at ksheppard (at) motherjones (dot) com.

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Her work has also been featured in the New York Times' Room for Debate blog, the Guardian's Comment Is Free, Foreign Policy, High Country News, The Center for Public Integrity, the Washington Independent, Washington Spectator, Who Runs Gov, In These Times, and Bitch. She was raised on a vegetable farm in southern New Jersey (yes, they do exist), but has adapted well to life in the nation's capital. She misses trees and having a congressional representative with voting power, but thinks DC is pretty great anyway.

Fertile Opposition to Pesticide-Pushing Ag Nominee

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Nov. 24, 2009 11:56 AM PST

Since Obama tapped Islam "Isi" Siddiqui, an executive for the pesticide lobby, to serve as the chief agriculture negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, discontent with the pick has grown so quickly you'd think it had been genetically modified. On Friday, statements from 90,000 citizens and 80 advocacy groups were delivered to Capitol Hill protesting Siddiqui's nomination.

The Finance Committee was expected to move his nomination forward on Friday, but pushed its business meeting back until sometime after the holiday. Opponents want to make that delay a permanent one. Siddiqui's critics say he is too close to agri-business interests to perform the job adequately. Since 2001, Siddiqui worked at the agribusiness trade group CropLife America, first as lobbyist and later as vice president of science and regulatory affairs.

Last week, Pesticide Action Network North America delivered a petition to the White House signed by 77,000 people calling for Obama to remove Siddiqui’s name from consideration. Another 14,000 people have emailed their senators about the nomination, and 80 organizations—including sustainable agriculture, farmworker, environmental, trade, and anti-hunger advocacy groups— sent a letter to the Senate Finance Committee urging it to reject him.

"All eyes are on the U.S. to demonstrate international leadership in this arena by withdrawing support for the current industrial model of agriculture, which imperils both people and the planet by undermining food security and worsening climate change," reads the online petition.

The petition also asks Obama to "reconsider" his appointment of Roger Beachy to serve as director of the new National Institute of Food and Agriculture within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Beachy was the long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, the nonprofit arm of Monsanto, and his selection also angered sustainable agriculture groups who were hoping that this new USDA office would embrace alternatives to industrial agriculture. But his position did not require Senate confirmation, and at this point it's unlikely that it would be rescinded.

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Coming Soon: Obama's Copenhagen Plans

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Nov. 23, 2009 1:40 PM PST

The White House will announce soon whether President Barack Obama will make an appearance at the Copenhagen climate summit in December.

The administration also expects to be able to announce a target for US emissions reductions before the meeting. The figure will likely fall somewhere between the targets set by the House climate bill (which mandates a 17 percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2020) and the Senate measure (which calls for a 20 percent reduction over the same time period.)

Whether Obama shows up at the summit or not, the administration is working hard to convince observers that his administration has already made significant progress on the climate front, despite Congress' failure to enact legislation before the international talks begin. "We have done more than anyone could have ever expected us to do in a relatively short time frame," a senior administration official told reporters on Monday. "[Obama's] turning around an ocean liner and he has done an extraordinary amount to turn that ocean liner around."

Investors Call for Companies to Disclose Climate Risk

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Nov. 23, 2009 10:34 AM PST

What will climate change cost the US economy? To date, the political debate has been fixated almost exclusively on fears that carbon regulations will impose heavy burdens on American companies. But what about the costs that companies will incur if climate change continues unabated? Or the new opportunities that a carbon cap may create for some businesses, such as firms that make windmills or solar panels? Faced with a lack of reliable analysis of the full costs and benefits of both climate change and climate policies, a group of major investors wants the Securities and Exchange Commission to step in. On Monday, the investors wrote to the SEC asking the agency to come up with guidelines to help businesses properly account for climate-related factors that will affect their bottom lines.

The letter was signed by 20 institutional investors from the US and Canada who represent $1 trillion in assets. Signatories include the state treasurers from Oregon, North Carolina, Connecticut, Maryland and Vermont, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ceres, a sustainable business coalition, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the biggest public pension fund in the US. "CalPERS protects workers’ retirement benefits, and climate change poses both great risks and opportunities to these investments,” said CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll in a statement. "The SEC should strengthen and enforce its current requirements so investors' decisions fully account for climate change’s financial effects."

Last month, the SEC issued new rules at the behest of Ceres and investor groups that require companies to disclose how climate regulation could affect their earnings, if investors request such information. But most companies haven't even started to assess these potential financial risks, in part because the tools for doing are still in their infancy. This latest investor request is an attempt to hurry up the process of ensuring that clmate change is factored into every company's balance sheet—and a sure sign that business leaders and investors believe some kind of climate regulation is coming, and coming soon.

West Va. Chamber of Commerce Plays Dirty With Health Care Reform

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri Nov. 20, 2009 11:46 AM PST

The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce is playing dirty with health care reform. It's pressuring its homestate Democratic senators, Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, to block health care legislation unless the Obama administration ends what the Chamber calls a "war on coal."

The Obama administration and Congress have waged "a growing campaign against the mining and use of coal," said West Virginia Chamber President Steve Roberts in a press release. He cited both the administration's efforts to cut carbon emissions via climate legislation, as well as its tougher enforcement of environmental standards for mining practices. "This needs to end before irreparable damage sets in," Roberts threatened. "It seems counterintuitive to ask taxpayers in this country to pour money and take on a trillion dollars in future debt to expand health care coverage and benefits while at the same time the Obama administration and Congress are working to destroy jobs, eliminate good health care benefits and hurt people's well-being."

Coal, however, does not "improve the health and well-being" of either miners or local residents. Coal mining, combustion, and disposal can cause serious health problems, including black lung, asthma, and mercury pollution, to name a few. And the number of coal-related jobs is on the decline in West Virginia and the rest of the country, in part because coal has laid off workers after mechanizing much of its operations. There are fewer than half as many jobs in the coal sector now as there were in the early '80s, according to the Energy Information Administration. There are now more jobs in the wind industry than in mining.

A third of non-elderly West Virginians were uninsured at some point in 2007-2008—most of them for six months or more. Yet the state's Chamber wants its congressional delegation to block legislation that would provide those residents with access to health care. "Votes to advance national health care reform are at razor-thin margins in both houses of Congress," Roberts concludes. "West Virginia’s congressional delegation needs to use this time—and their clout and seniority—to get this anti-coal situation stopped."

The Coal Industry's $47 Million PR Spending Spree

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri Nov. 20, 2009 4:00 AM PST

The coal industry's major lobby group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, shelled out a stunning $47 million last year on lobbying, advertising and "grassroots outreach" efforts to fight climate legislation and tout the benefits of "clean coal." Its efforts to actually develop clean coal technology, however, were a lot less impressive.

ACCCE's most recent IRS filing, obtained by Greenwire (sub. req'd), lists the contributions to the coalition by the nation's biggest coal companies. Arch Coal Inc., Consol Energy Inc., and Peabody Energy Corp. each chipped in $5 million; Foundation Coal Corp. gave $3 million, Southern Co. $2.1 million, and American Electric Power Co. Inc. and Duke Energy Corp. (which has since left the group) gave $2 million. ACCCE is among the biggest spenders when it comes to influencing the debate on climate and energy.

But for all their expensive efforts to sell the public on the wonders of clean coal, ACCCE isn't working quite as hard to make the technology a reality. The coalition's members have committed the comparatively paltry sum of $3.6 billion to research the technology between 2003 and 2017, according to an April report from the Center for American Progress. That's just $257 million on average each year to develop the technology to capture and sequester carbon. To put that in perspective, ACCCE's members made a combined total of $297 billion in profits between 2003 and 2008—meaning, as the report notes, that they're spending less than two cents on clean coal research for every $1 of profit.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]