The Week in Climate Hearings: Droning On Amid Pink Slime

In October, residents of Morton County, North Dakota, received a mailed copy of the Central ND News, which looks like a newspaper but is fracking propaganda. The “pink-slime” publication featured glowing profiles of the fracking billionaire Kelcy Warren’s company Energy Transfer and decrying the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protesters. Reporters Miranda Green (with the climate news nonprofit Floodlight News) and Michael Standaert (with the local news nonprofit North Dakota News Cooperative) noticed that this fake newspaper was distributed just as jury selection is about to begin in Morton County, North Dakota, for Energy Transfer’s lawsuit against Greenpeace over the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protesters.

And now there’s an oily money trail trailing behind the pink slime. As Emily Sanders (with the non-profit Center for Climate Integrity) reports, the Central ND News circular—which also praised Donald Trump and Gov. Doug Burgum (R-N.D.), Trump’s pick for Secretary of Interior—is a publication of the pink-slime operation Metric Media, owned by Brian Timpone, a director of Northern CB Corp., which received $250,000 on September 19th from the super PAC Turnout for America, which received $5 million from Kelcy Warren on September 5th. Sanders writes:

The judge in the case, James Gion (who ran unopposed for re-election this fall), has not yet decided whether to investigate this brazen act of jury tampering, as Mary Steurer (of the news nonprofit North Dakota Monitor, part of the States Newsroom network) reports.

As the above parentheticals make clear, non-profit journalists are holding the line against fossil-fuel billionaire propaganda. Meanwhile, our for-profit news media is chasing will-o’-the-wisps. Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has taken up stargazing in his retirement and claiming he’s seeing drones (as credulously reported in the for-profit The Hill), while New Jersey reporters (working for the for-profit Gannett) are photographing flight-school helicopters and claiming they’re seeing drones.

“If the federal government has the technology to address the epidemic of non-stop drone sightings, we should do everything we can to help,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) responded unhelpfully, to people seeing lights in the sky and panicking blindly.

The lame-duck Congress is back in session this week, with a Friday deadline to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running through March. The text of the funding stop-gap has not yet been released.

On Wednesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is holding his last climate hearing as Budget chair for at least the next two years, with Next to Fall: The Climate-Driven Insurance Crisis is Here – And Getting Worse. The testifying witnesses are real-estate economist Dr. Benjamin Keys, insurance agent Ernest Shaghalian Jr., and Dr. insurance-market expert Dr. Robert Hartwig, formerly of SwissRe and now at the University of South Carolina.

Wisconsin climate hawk Michelle Regalado Deatrick is running to be one of the vice chairs of the Democratic National Committee. The daughter of a Latina teenage mom and a telephone lineman in a small Wisconsin town, Deatrick is the founding chair of the DNC Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis, and is a union member, farmer, and local elected official. She serves on the advisory boards of Climate Power, OnePointFive Climate Strategies, and the Jane Fonda Climate PAC.

People and organizations can add their name in support of her candidacy.