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.

Old Energy Interests Try Hand at 'New Media' to Defeat Climate Bill

—By Kate Sheppard

| Thu Oct. 22, 2009 7:00 AM PDT

There's another anti-climate bill advocacy group to watch out for: the Cost of Energy Information Project (CEIP). It's a new organization, but it's apparently organized and funded by a lot of the same old critics of climate-change policy.

CEIP is organized by Democratic lobbyist Morris Reid and Republican Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a climate change skeptic and former big-time dirty energy lobbyist who was a key player in the Bush administration's climate and energy policy. Republican lobbyists Ed Gillespie (also a former Bush adviser) and Ed Rogers helped form the organization. "The group plans to reach outside of the Beltway to engage citizens who, organizers insist, have been excluded from the lawmaking process," reports the Washington Times.

CEIP's website includes a "cap-and-trade cost calculator" that is built on a deeply flawed report on the House climate bill funded by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation. The group is apparently "backed by energy-producing interests," according to the Washington Times, but there aren't any details available on what those interests might be.

I also have to note the headline on the Washington Times piece—"Group uses new media in climate-change debate"—and point you to CEIP's website, possibly the ugliest to launch since 1998. Not only that, their "cap-and-trade cost calculator" also manages to forget Washington, D.C., and their deft use of "new media" includes...Twitter and email to senators. Slick!

They're also competing for the CEIP acronym with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the California Emerging Infections Program. Good luck with that!

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MoveOn Targets Toyota's Chamber Membership

—By Kate Sheppard

| Wed Oct. 21, 2009 7:32 AM PDT

The liberal activist group MoveOn is pressuring Toyota—maker of the eco-status-symbol Prius— to leave the embattled US Chamber of Commerce.

With the Chamber under fire for its opposition to climate change legislation, advocates for action are pushing for more environmentally conscious businesses to quit the group, or at least publicly distance themselves from the Chamber's rhetoric. (Another business, Mohawk Fine Paper, left the group yesterday.)

MoveOn is asking members who own Priuses (Prii?) to send in photos asking Toyota to resign its membership. So far, they've gathered more than 770 images, which they plan to deliver to the company's New York headquarters and dealerships around the country.

"There are a lot of people out there who really did buy a Toyota saying, 'I feel better doing business with this company because of their green image,'" Steven Biel, MoveOn's clean energy campaign director, told Mother Jones. "Our members who own Priuses or other fuel efficient Toyotoa automobiles find this really outrageous, it just doesn't make sense to them."

More photos of pissed-off drivers can be found here.

Yes Men Descend on Capitol Hill

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 20, 2009 3:21 PM PDT

After creating quite the spectacle at the Press Club yesterday, the Yes Men were on Capitol Hill on Tuesday showing off their Survivaball suits to unsuspecting senators and passersby.

The Survivaball, as they describe it, is "the stupidest costume known to humankind," intended to "highlight the absurdity of the Senate's slow pace in responding to climate change." They market the climate-change survival suits to potential customers as a "gated community for one."

Today's activities apparently included harassing Arlen Spector (D-Pa.), a senator who has been on the fence about passing climate change legislation this year. From their blog:

At another point, a fleet of Survivaballs chased Senator Arlen Spector outside the Hart Senate Office Building. "Anyone as wishy-washy on climate issues as the Senator, who thinks that clean coal is an answer, needs a Survivaball," said Ross Finlayson, a top Surviva-model involved in the chase. "Maybe he ran away because he knew that even he couldn't afford one."

Obama's Radioactive Regulator

Why did the White House pick a cheerleader for nuclear energy to oversee the industry?

—By Kate Sheppard

| Tue Oct. 20, 2009 1:11 AM PDT | Scheduled to publish Tue Oct. 20, 2009 1:11 AM PDT

Should a booster of nuclear power with undisclosed business connections to nuclear energy firms be allowed to regulate the industry? By nominating William Magwood to serve on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, President Barack Obama is doing just that.

Magwood served as the head of the Office of Nuclear Energy within the Department of Energy from 1998 to 2005, and in that capacity was the US government's senior nuclear technology official. But both before and after his time in government, he has worked as an enthusiastic advocate for nuclear interests in the private sector—including for at least one company likely to have business before the NRC in the near future. Good-government groups say that this background should preclude him from serving as a regulator for an agency whose stated mission is to "regulate the nation's civilian use of byproduct, source, and special nuclear materials to ensure adequate protection of public health and safety, to promote the common defense and security, and to protect the environment."

"William Magwood has devoted his career to promoting nuclear power," said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste watchdog at Beyond Nuclear. "The NRC is supposed to be a safety regulator. They're not supposed to advocate for expansion."

[Read the full article]

US Chamber of Commerce Responds to Yes Men Hoax

—By Kate Sheppard

| Mon Oct. 19, 2009 1:20 PM PDT

The US Chamber of Commerce (the real one) issued a response to the fake press conference we reported on earlier, saying they will be "asking law enforcement authorities to investigate this event."

The "irresponsible tactics" that the Yes Men used "are a foolish distraction from the serious effort by our nation to reduce greenhouse gases," said Chamber Senior Vice President for Communications and Strategy Thomas J. Collamore said in the statement. "Public relations hoaxes undermine the genuine effort to find solutions on the challenge of climate change," he added.

"The U.S. Chamber believes that strong climate legislation is compatible with the goals of improving our economy and creating jobs," he said. "We continuously seek opportunities to engage in a constructive dialogue to achieve these goals."

It's not clear exactly what legal course the Chamber can pursue. Copyright infringement, for using their logo? Misrepresentation? Fraud? In any case, the seriousness with which they're taking the prank far outweighs the seriousness with they've taken climate change for all these years—underscoring the point of today's parody.

Notably, the press release the real Chamber sent out today repeats the claim that the group represents "more than 3 million businesses and organizations," a figure that Josh Harkinson set straight last week. The Chamber was then forced to correct their number. The fake press release, however, says they have 300,000 members--a figure closer to their real membership total.