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.

Chamber Sues the Yes Men

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 27, 2009 5:15 AM PDT

The Chamber of Commerce is suing the Yes Men over the parody press conference the group pulled off last week.

The Chamber has filed a civil complaint in the US District Court of Washington, DC, accusing Yes Men Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (also known as Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, respectively) of trademark infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. The Chamber's suit also lists several members of the DC-based activist group the Avaaz Action Factory as co-defendants. The conduct of those who organized the event was "destructive of public discourse," the Chamber argues.

As the Yes Men have a new film in theaters currently, The Yes Men Fix the World, the Chamber also alleges that the prank was part of a "comprehensive scheme to promote their movie by wrongdoing against the plaintiff"—rather than an event meant to call attention to the organization's views on climate change.

"The defendants are not merry pranksters tweaking the establishment," said the Chamber in a press release issued with the suit. "Instead, they deliberately broke the law in order to further commercial interest in their books, movies, and other merchandise."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

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Chamber Uses Yes Men 'Attack' to Fundraise

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Oct. 26, 2009 4:54 PM PDT

The US Chamber of Commerce is turning their run-in with the Yes Men last week into a fundraising opportunity.

TPMMuckraker got a hold of a fundraising email sent to Chamber supporters late last week, calling on them to send money because the "U.S. Chamber is under attack."

Help us fight back!As you probably have seen in the news -- the U.S. Chamber is under attack.

MoveOn.org and other extremist groups are harassing our members...

A group of pranksters held a fake news conference falsely claiming to be the U.S. Chamber...

They're attacking us for having the audacity to oppose legislation that would be harmful to American employers and cost vital American jobs.

The letter is signed by the Chamber's senior vice president and national political director, Bill Miller. It takes supporters to a webpage where they can make a donation to the Chamber. "Don't let them muzzle us. Stand up for free speech by making a contribution below," it urges.

Meanwhile, the Chamber has unleashed their lawyers on the Yes Men in order to get their parody Chamber site yanked from the interwebs. Because they truly believe in free speech, of course.

EPA Finds Kerry-Boxer Would Come at Low Cost to Households

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Oct. 26, 2009 8:26 AM PDT

Families that are worried about climate change but also concerned about the cost of fighting it can breathe easy. Climate change legislation pending in the Senate will combat global warming and won't burden families with huge costs, the Environmental Protection Agency has found.

The Environment and Public Works Committee released the EPA's economic analysis of the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill on Friday night along with a more detailed version of the legislation. The EPA found that the Senate bill's impact would not be significantly different from the bill that passed the House in June: "[A]verage household consumption would be reduced by less than 1% in all years," and the whole package will cost households $80 to $111 per year, or 22 to 30 cents per day.

The EPA bases its calculations on a "business-as-usual" scenario. But with a different, more realistic baseline, the actual cost of the climate bill could be even lower. That's because the EPA's economic analysis cannot account for the costs of inaction. Unmitigated climate change could have a devastating on the American economy. And the EPA's modeling focuses on the legislation's cap-and-trade provisions; It doesn't account for measures like a renewable electricity standard, efficiency enhancements, and other programs meant to complement the cap.

Even with those limitations, the EPA concludes that the climate bill will produce significant environmental and energy-use improvement, with little negative impact on households:

Four key messages from the EPA analysis of H.R. 2454 would remain unchanged: (1) the cap-and-trade policies outlined in these bills would transform the way the United States produces and uses energy; (2) the average loss in consumption per household will be relatively low, on the order of hundreds of dollars per year in the main policy case; (3) the impacts of climate policy are likely to vary comparatively little across geographic regions; and (4) what we assume about the actions of other countries has much greater implications for the overall impact of the policy than the modeled differences between the two bills.

There are a few differences between the House and Senate bills. The Senate bill has a higher emissions-reduction target for 2020, at 20 percent below 2005 levels. And it also includes stronger market-stability provisions that could make the costs slightly higher, though ideally more stable. The Senate bill also allows landfill and coal mine emissions capturing to be a source of offsets, while the House bill subjected them to performance standards. But, overall, the EPA concludes that they are "relatively small differences in estimated costs and may even cancel each other out on net."

Who Gets to Pollute?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Oct. 26, 2009 6:57 AM PDT

Who gets to spew carbon dioxide into the air for free, and who has to pay for the right?

The first draft of the Senate version of the climate change bill left a number of unanswered questions, including the much-discussed allocation of pollution permits under a carbon-pricing plan. Exactly which industries will get pollution permits has been a hot topic among senators who haven't decided how they're going to vote. The fence-sitters got the information they were waiting for late Friday, when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) released her "chairman's mark." The mark is the version of the bill that Boxer wants the committee to use as a baseline when it considers the legislation, which is cosponsored by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)

Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee will begin hearings on the bill on Tuesday with testimony from a panel of top officials: EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff. Hearings will continue nearly all day on Wednesday and Thursday, and the President will weigh in, too, with a major speech on Friday and another planned for Tuesday. But Boxer's "mark" sets the stage for what everyone will be talking about.

Here's what you need to know:

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Obama (Finally) Enters Climate Debate

—By Kate Sheppard

| Fri Oct. 23, 2009 1:36 PM PDT

Barack Obama on Friday gave a speech long-anticipated by advocates for climate legislation, calling for a bipartisan effort to pass legislation that will limit emissions and help transition to a new energy economy.

While the speech put some momentum behind the issue as the Senate committee dealing with the legislation prepares to begin hearings next week, it was scant on specific directives. It did, however, position the legislation as an economic and security imperative.

"There are those who will suggest that moving toward clean energy will destroy our economy—when it's the system we currently have that endangers our prosperity and prevents us from creating millions of new jobs," said Obama, addressing a crowd at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It seems this is going to be the first of several Obama speeches on the subject. According to a press scheduled released Friday afternoon, Obama will travel to the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Florida on Tuesday for a second speech. That speech falls on the day that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will kick off legislative hearings on the Kerry-Boxer bill, with a panel featuring a number of administration officials.

This level of attention is something that advocates have long been hoping for from the president, who has thus far focused much of his public speaking on health care. While he did make a big (and rather unimpressive) speech at the UN last month, today's speech was the first aimed at a domestic audience solely on the topic of climate and energy.

In his speech on Friday, Obama praised Senate climate bill sponsor John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the lone Republican who has signaled he is willing to cooperate on the bill. "This should not be a partisan issue," said Obama. "Everybody in America should have a stake in legislation that can transform our energy system into one that's far more efficient, far cleaner, and provide energy independence for America."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]