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.

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]

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The Chamber's Sick Swine Flu Lobbying

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Nov. 19, 2009 4:39 PM PST

See update below.

The US Chamber of Commerce, which has been busy this year fighting everything from climate change legislation to health care reform to financial regulation, has taken on a new battle: It's come out against congressional measures intended to curb the spread of the H1NI virus, which has sickened 22 million Americans since April and killed an estimated 3,900 people.

The bills, introduced in the Senate by Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and in the House by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and George Miller (D-Calif.), would provide American workers with five days of paid sick leave. The provision would sunset after two years, but the idea is to keep swine flu carrying workers from infecting their collleagues and adding to the epidemic.

Chamber Vice President Randel K. Johnson told the New York Times that they oppose paid sick leave because "the vast majority of employers provide paid leave of some sort." Except, many employers don't--one third of workers don't have any paid sick leave. Less than half of service-sector employees have paid sick leave, and only 39 percent of construction and farming workers get leave. Low-wage workers are the least likely to have paid sick leave, and the most likely to come to work sick because they need the money.

Yet the lack of paid sick leave is causing many people to go to work while ill, despite admonitions to stay home. This is a particular concern for service-sector employees, like waiters, child care providers, and health care workers who interact with the public as part of their job and can easily transmit the virus to others.

The Chamber insists that a global epidemic is not a good reason to start treating employees like human beings all of a sudden. "The problem is not nearly as great as some people say," said Johnson. "Lots of employers work these things out on an ad hoc basis with their employees."

The Service Employees International Union is now circulating a petition against the Chamber, asking them to "cease lobbying" against the measure.

UPDATE: Over on the Chamber's blog, the group argues that they have not formally opposed this legislation in particular, and believes that SEIU is attacking them unfairly.

"[T]he U.S. Chamber recognizes that this issue has many dimensions and is exploring whether legislation in this area would be helpful to employees without overburdening employers and limiting their options to provide benefits tailored to their workplace," they wrote.

Kerry to World Bank: Don't Be Dirty

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Nov. 19, 2009 3:42 PM PST

John Kerry gave a barn-burner of a speech at the World Bank on Wednesday, laying into development banks for pouring massive sums into dirty energy projects in poor countries. "Reducing energy poverty and combating climate change cannot be mutually exclusive challenges," said Kerry. "We won't solve climate change unless we also seriously tackle energy poverty, and we haven't really solved energy poverty if we ravage our planet in the process."

World Bank and other development banks notoriously pay little or no attention to the carbon footprint of the energy projects they fund. Since 1994, the World Bank and other multilateral development banks and export credit agencies have directed $37 billion to the construction or expansion of 88 coal-fired power plants, according to an Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) study released earlier this year. This sum was matched by approximately $60 billion from private funders and local governments—bringing the total investment in dirty energy projects to more than $100 billion.

Those 88 plants will spew 791 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Yet the Bank classifies 40 percent of its energy lending as "low carbon" even if the recipients of its loans are massive coal plants. Why? Because the new plants pollute a little less than the old ones. Financing such projects, EDF concluded, is "hamstringing the fight against global warming."

Kerry was unusually agressive in his critcism of development banks. "There is no excuse," he said, for the Inter-American Development Bank's decision to back two new coal-fired power plants in Brazil. And the World Bank, he argued, should take the lead by including emissions as a key criteria when deciding which energy projects to finance. Kerry called on the Bank to weigh not only estimates of construction and operation costs when funding new projects, but also projected emissions. The Bank should also work harder to present low-carbon alternatives to its aid recipients, and fund clean energy projects whenever possible.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

US, China Climate Talks: Getting Warmer

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Nov. 18, 2009 12:50 PM PST

World leaders may have failed to lay the necessary groundwork to sign a climate treaty in Copenhagen. But some good news did emerge from President's Obama's trip to China this week. Obama's meeting with Chinese president Hu Jintao on Tuesday provided a few hopeful clues that the world's two heavyweight polluters are inching toward a climate consensus.

China and the US account for roughly 37 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, so what they decide to do about climate change will determine the success or failure of a global treaty. Following the meeting, Obama said that he and Hu had agreed that any treaty at Copenhagen should have an "immediate operational effect." He added, "We agreed that each of us would take significant mitigation actions and stand behind these commitments."

Of course, with any international negotiation the devil is in how you define vague terms like "significant mitigation actions." Obama and Hu's announcement was short on specifics, although a joint statement said they had agreed to collaborate on, among other things, designing electric and other clean-fuel vehicles, improving the energy efficiency of building stock, and developing carbon-capture-and-sequestration for coal plants, according to the New York Times.

But perhaps the most significant development was that the leaders appeared to agree that China and the US can take different paths to reducing emissions. Hu touted the acknowledgement that the two nations could have "common but differentiated responsibilities." Translation? This language allows for a scenario in which rapidly developing countries like China commit to reducing emissions—but not at the same level as developed nations.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Oliver North Goes Off the Climate Deep End

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Nov. 18, 2009 9:12 AM PST

Oliver North is using climate change denialism to fundraise for his non-profit group Freedom Alliance. In a six-page stream-of-consciousness fundraising letter, North warns of the "liberty killing 'Cap and Trade' boondoggle" that socialists are plotting in response to the "phony climate 'crisis.'" The solution? Write him a check.

Climate change would appear to have little connection to Freedom Alliance's stated mission, which is "to advance the American heritage of freedom by honoring and encouraging military service, defending the sovereignty of the United States and promoting a strong national defense." And it's not clear which roles on North's resume—his past notoriety in the Iran-Contra scandal or his current gig as a Fox News host and commentator—best qualify him to weigh in on climate science.

Nevertheless, in his letter and a petition sent to supporters, North mashes together all manner of wacky climate change denier talking points. The basic premise is that Barack Obama, Democrats in Congress, and climate scientists are socialists hell-bent on using a faked climate crisis to control the masses. North argues that "there is no proof of man-made global warming," that "the world has actually been cooling for the last ten years," and that "there is no evidence that greenhouse gases have anything to do with global warming in the first place." Plus, he points out: "If man is solely responsible for the warming of the earth, how did the ice age ever end without the help of automobiles and coal burning factories?"

"[T]he bottom line is this," North writes. "The entire 'global warming' scare is based on a series of accepted myths put forward by socialists looking to redistribute wealth, phony politicians, greedy scientists and dim-witted wealthy elites (see Hollywood)."

North asks supporters to sign a petition to Obama that questions whether glaciers are really melting, and argues that limiting emissions via a "cap-and-tax" scheme would be an attempt to "change nature or God's will." He also asks supporters to shell out money—up to $1,000—to help his group defend America from this sinister plot.

He adds this P.S. at the end:

Again, ever wonder why the liberals now always try to use the new term "catastrophic climate change" rather than "global warming." It's because it allows them to blame EVERY weather event (heat waves, blizzards, floods, draughts, hurricanes, etc.) on you, me, and our current use of fossil fuels. The goal? To destroy our way of life and con us into giving away billions of dollars to solve a non-crisis we have no power to prevent, even if it were real! I hope and pray that you understand – and that you will sign our PETITION TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA and rush it and your gift of $20, $25, $35, $50, $75, $100, or more back to me here at Freedom Alliance today.