Latest news with #Bookbinder
Boston Globe
01-05-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Trump company strikes Qatari golf resort deal in a sign it's not holding back from foreign business
Advertisement 'You want a president making decisions that are in the best interest of the United States, not his bottom line,' said Bookbinder, who leads Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In addition to a Saudi Arabian partner, called Dar Global, the planned resort north of the Qatari capital of Doha will be developed by a Qatari company called Qatari Diar, which is owned by the Qatari government. That would appear to violate the Trump Organization's much weaker, second-term ethics pledge that, while it would pursue foreign deals, none would include foreign governments. When asked for clarification, the Trump Organization said its deal was with the Saudi firm, not the Qatari one, though Trump's son Eric, who is in charge of the business, mentioned both companies in an earlier statement. Advertisement 'We are incredibly proud to expand the Trump brand into Qatar through this exceptional collaboration with Qatari Diar and Dar Global,' he said. The deal Wednesday for the Trump International Golf Club and Trump Villas is unlikely to be the last of its kind. It follows several other deals made before Trump was sworn in, including one for a golf resort in Vietnam late last year with a firm with ties to the Communist Party. The deals have drawn outrage from government watchdogs but mostly silence from Trump's fellow Republicans in Congress. The Associated Press reached out to the two Republicans who chair the foreign relations committees in the Senate and House, Sen. James Risch of Idaho and Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, but neither responded. Any deal with Saudi Arabia is seen as especially problematic in foreign policy circles. Trump's close ties to Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, drew heavy criticism in his first term after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post who had written critically about the monarchy. Khashoggi is believed to have been dismembered, a killing that the U.S. intelligence community concluded was approved by the crown prince. The deal on Wednesday with the Saudi firm Dar Global, a London-based international arm of developer Dar Al Arkan, follows deals with it for two Riyadh projects in December. Dar Global is not owned by the Saudi government, but it has close ties to the royal Saudi family. Another government tie to Trump is through his son-in-law Jared Kushner. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund has reportedly invested $2 billion in an investment fund run by Kushner. And the Saudi government-backed LIV Golf has hosted tournaments at Trump's Doral resort near Miami. Advertisement Despite Trump's pledge in his first term to not make moves that would appear to conflict with his personal financial holdings and business, he ended up opening the doors to all sorts of potential pay-to-play deals. His hotel down the street from the White House hosted scores of corporate lobbyists, CEOs, members of Congress and diplomats. Trump once suggested holding a G7 meeting of global leaders at Doral before he backed down after an outcry over ethics concerns. Several lawsuits were filed against the first Trump administration, alleging it violated the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bans a president from accepting gifts or payments from foreign or domestic governments. One case was appealed to the Supreme Court but was never heard because Trump had already left the presidency at that point and the issue was moot. This time, the hotel is gone, sold to a Miami investment firm, but other sources of potential conflicts of interest have emerged. The Trump Organization also owns much of the publicly traded parent company of social media platform Truth Social, which allows Trump to financially benefit from traffic to the site where his postings as U.S. president are widely followed. The family also has a stake in a cybercurrency trading platform called World Liberty Financial as Trump has pushed for less regulatory oversight on cybercurrencies.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump is bypassing community input to fast-track energy projects that risk pollution
This story is part of a Grist package examining how President Trump's first 100 days in office have reshaped climate and environmental policy in the U.S., and is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan. When President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency on his first day in office, he directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to use emergency permitting for projects to boost energy supplies, including oil, natural gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, hydropower, and critical minerals. Doing so effectively created a new class of emergency permit to fast track energy projects across the country. But environmental advocates worry this will harm the ability of the public to weigh in on projects that will contribute to climate change and harm sensitive ecosystems. Speeding up permitting for high-profile proposals will likely gain attention and trigger lawsuits, said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. But he worries that under the order, there will be less scrutiny paid to less well-known projects. 'The one thing that is clear is they're cutting back,' he said. 'They're shortening the amount of time for public comment.' Three laws grant the Army Corps authority to permit projects that impact wetlands and waters, including assessing their environmental effects: the Clean Water Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act, and the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act. The agency typically uses emergency permitting for projects that prevent risk to human life, property, or of unexpected and significant economic hardship, such as rebuilding infrastructure after a hurricane. Creating emergency procedures to address energy supplies is new. And according to Bookbinder, it's illegal. The corps has allowed the president to amend its regulation without going through the required process, he said, 'And the president can't do that.' Emergency procedures will be determined by each Army Corps district, a process Bookbinder called 'rather opaque.' For instance, he said, it's not clear whether or how the corps will go through the environmental analysis required by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. The landmark 1970 law requires the federal government to account for environmental impacts before permitting a project, and is sometimes the only opportunity for people to weigh in on projects that will affect them. This is part of a much larger effort to increase energy production, including through drilling and mining; last week the Interior Department announced it would fast-track such projects on public lands. The Trump administration has also moved to unravel and decentralize how NEPA is implemented. Doug Garman, a spokesperson with the agency headquarters, said in an email the Army Corps is still required to comply with 'all applicable laws and regulations,' including NEPA, and that 'coordination of these reviews will be subject to the emergency declared under [the executive order.]' Garman said current regulations do allow the agency to respond to the declared emergency in this manner. Concrete changes are already taking place. Two Clean Water Act permits for Texas projects — that the corps designated as emergencies — now have shortened comment periods lasting less than two weeks: the Texas Connector pipeline supplying Port Arthur liquefied natural gas and the Rio Grande liquefied natural gas ship channel. The Army Corps also announced it will speed up its review of a contentious tunnel under the Great Lakes that would house a section of the Line 5 pipeline, which carries oil and natural gas liquids from Wisconsin to Ontario. The 72-year-old pipeline currently runs about four miles underwater in the straits between lakes Michigan and Huron. Read Next Trump's quest for 'energy dominance' is all about the vibes Kate Yoder Shane McCoy, a regulatory branch chief with the corps' Detroit District, told reporters the emergency procedures 'truncated' its timeline but that they weren't 'eliminating any of the steps' in the process. The corps said the project qualifies as an emergency and that a faster review will allow it 'to address an energy supply situation' which would risk life, property, and unexpected and significant economic hardship. The pipeline's owner, Canada-based Enbridge, first applied for a federal permit to build the tunnel in 2020. It says doing so would make the pipeline safer by reducing the risk of an oil spill and calls it 'critical energy infrastructure.' But the permitting process had been deeply flawed even before it had been fast tracked, according to seven tribal nations in Michigan that withdrew from federal talks on the tunnel. 'The Straits of Mackinac is spiritually, culturally, and economically vital to Tribal Nations,' tribal leaders wrote in a letter to the corps, saying that the agency's environmental review process 'disregards this deep place-based connection and instead seems designed to ensure that oil — and its associated threats — will continue to exist throughout the treaty ceded territory, including in the Great Lakes and the Straits.' The decision to speed up that review was the 'final straw,' according to Whitney Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community. 'We will continue to defend the rights of the Great Lakes. See you in court,' she said in an emailed statement after the change was announced. There's also the matter of the energy emergency itself. The executive order holds that the country's 'insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to our Nation's economy, national security, and foreign policy.' But many energy experts have said that isn't accurate, adding to numerous legal questions surrounding the order. Under former President Joe Biden, the United States produced record amounts of oil and gas, and remained the world's largest liquid natural gas exporter, though that administration cut back on leasing federal lands for drilling and slowed some gas exports. The White House did not respond to an emailed request for comment. 'Overall, our production levels for fossil fuels were quite high,' said David Spence, a professor of energy law at the University of Texas at Austin. 'So on the oil and gas side of things, to the extent that the Trump administration wants to increase production, it's going to be incremental at best because the market will only take as much as the market wants, and we were doing a pretty good job of satisfying that demand beforehand.' Faster permitting will likely benefit individual projects, Spence said, along with oil companies and exporters of products like liquefied natural gas. While Trump's executive order doesn't directly mention wind or solar, it implied that such energy made the grid unreliable. It also includes critical minerals in its push for domestic extraction — minerals used in renewable technologies. Spence said the supply of critical minerals is less secure because the U.S. relies on foreign imports. 'If that's what the emergency is aimed at, then you can sort of make that case with more of a straight face.' Still, he said in an email, 'I generally think that 'energy independence' is a silly idea. Trade happens because it benefits both parties. Getting in the way of that takes away those benefits.' Enbridge is among IPR's financial sponsors. Financial sponsors have no influence on IPR's news coverage. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump is bypassing community input to fast-track energy projects that risk pollution on Apr 29, 2025.
Mint
24-04-2025
- Science
- Mint
A sunscreen for Earth? Assess the risks first
More than a dozen private companies around the world are looking to profit from extreme measures to combat global warming—filling the sky with sunlight-blocking particles, brightening clouds or changing the chemistry of the oceans. We live in precarious times when it's not hard to find the technology and money to change the Earth's climate. The problem is that nobody knows how to control the unintended consequences. Some scientists who've studied and modelled the complexity of Earth's oceans and atmosphere say any 'geo-engineering' scheme big enough to affect the climate could put people at risk of dramatic changes in the weather, crop failures, damage to the ozone layer, international conflict and other irreversible problems. Environmental lawyer David Bookbinder is more afraid of geo-engineering than he is of climate change. 'The consequences of geo-engineering could happen a lot faster and with much less warning," he said. 'And could provoke a really bad geopolitical crisis." The world got an early warning about this Wild West situation in 2022 when a small startup called Make Sunsets caused a scandal by launching a small balloon-borne experiment over Mexico to spray sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, it's joined by richer, more serious players, including an Israel-based company called Stardust, which is researching a plan to dim the skies with a particle of undisclosed chemistry. In theory, sulphur dioxide or similar chemicals can cool the planet by forming suspended particles of sulphuric acid that act to scatter sunlight. When I wrote about the Make Sunsets incident, the company's founder said he thought it could profit by selling carbon credits under the belief that its actions would offset emissions. They won't. Such a particle release does nothing but mask the effect of the carbon build-up in the atmosphere. If those releases are abruptly stopped, the temperature could rise suddenly in what's been called 'termination shock." Bookbinder said that presidents, governors or even private individuals might be authorized to make such decisions. 'Right now, anyone can… There are literally no rules." He warned that if a cooling scheme initiated in one country coincided with floods, droughts or crop failures in another, the affected country might retaliate without direct evidence that the geo-engineering caused the problem. One justification for geo-engineering comes from the 2015 Paris Agreement, which included an imperative to keep warming below 1.5° Celsius. We've already surpassed that mark. Preventing us from reaching even more dangerous temperatures will require more than just stopping carbon emissions. We might need to find a way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere on a global scale. That was the stated goal of California businessman Russ George back in 2012 when he released iron into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of British Columbia. The iron, in theory, would fertilize algae, which would absorb carbon. There was never any documented scientific evidence that it helped. Now, several companies, such as Canadian startup Planetary Technologies and US startup Vesta, are beginning to dump chemicals into the oceans in an attempt to increase the pH level of the water. This should, in theory, trigger more carbon uptake from the atmosphere. Planetary Technologies has found a way to make money by selling carbon credits. With for-profit organizations already releasing chemicals into the oceans, it's important for scientists with no financial stake in this industry to collect data, said geo-chemist Adam Subhas of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The American Geophysical Union believes monetary gains should not be prioritized in small-scale research either. There's a catch, according to Stanford's Jacobson. Small-scale experiments won't detect damage that might ensue if the projects were scaled up enough to actually affect global warming. In his view, we aren't coming close to realizing the world's potential to switch our energy needs to renewable resources. He convincingly argues that it makes no sense to resort to exotic and dangerous solutions when we haven't fully exploited what we know is safe and clean. Right now, some of these companies have sunk millions of dollars in investor money, giving them incentives to convince the public and politicians that their particular brand of geo-engineering is necessary to save the world. What we need instead is more scientific data and some rules to protect us all from rash decisions and their unintended consequences. ©Bloomberg The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science.
