SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
February, 06 2009, 10:15am EDT
Contact:
Erin Jensen,Email:,EJensen@foe.org
Landmark Global Warming Lawsuit Settled
Environmental groups and ‘cool cities’ force U.S. financing agencies to take action on climate as precedent-setting seven-year-old suit ends
WASHINGTON
A federal lawsuit that sought to force two U.S. agencies to address the
global warming implications of their overseas financing activities was
settled today after more than six years; the suit established important
legal precedents related to global warming.
Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the city of Boulder, Colorado, filed the suit (Friends of the Earth, Inc., et al. v. Spinelli, et al.)
in August 2002 and were later joined by the California cities of
Arcata, Santa Monica and Oakland. The plaintiffs alleged that
Export-Import Bank of the United States and the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation illegally provided more than $32 billion in
financing and insurance to fossil fuel projects over 10 years without
assessing whether the projects contributed to global warming or
impacted the U.S. environment, as they were required to do under the
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Fossil fuel projects financed
by the two agencies from 1990 to 2003 produced cumulative emissions
that were equivalent to nearly eight percent of the world's annual
carbon dioxide emissions, or nearly one third of annual U.S. emissions
in 2003.
In August 2005, a federal judge found that the U.S. cities suffering
economic and other damages from climate change had standing to sue
under NEPA, opening up the courthouse doors for the first time to those
injured by climate change. Testimony from the case, which successfully
asserted that climate change is real and caused by human activities,
later informed the Mass. v EPA
decision, in which the Supreme Court held that carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean
Air Act.
Under the settlement agreed to today, the Export-Import Bank will begin
taking carbon dioxide emissions into account in evaluating fossil fuel
projects and create an organization-wide carbon policy. The Overseas
Private Investment Corporation will establish a goal of reducing
greenhouse gas emissions associated with projects by 20 percent over
the next ten years. Both agencies will commit to increasing financing
for renewable energy.
The settlement represents an important victory in the continuing
campaign to hold both agencies accountable for their contributions to
climate change. The settlement agreement was filed this morning in the
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The
plaintiffs in the suit were represented by the law firm of Shems
Dunkiel Kassel & Saunders PLLC (Burlington, Vermont) and Natural
Heritage Institute (San Francisco, California).
Reactions from the plaintiffs:
"This settlement is a substantial victory for our climate. It
will force federal agencies to move away from fossil fuel projects and
account for the climate impacts of their lending. As President Obama
said in his inaugural address, 'We can no longer consume the world's
resources without regard to effect.' The settlement agreed to today is
a first step toward making Obama's vision a reality for these
institutions."
- Michelle Chan, Senior Policy Analyst, Friends of the Earth
"When we launched this lawsuit in 2003, we were deep in the Bush global
warming dark ages. We were able to prove that climate change harms
American cities and citizens and we forced these agencies to change
their behavior. Now that we have entered the brighter Obama age,
Greenpeace hopes that sweeping reform of global warming policy will
reach every corner of the government."
- Kert Davies, Research Director, Greenpeace
"This case was one of the very first climate change lawsuits and
established the framework for other climate change cases. The claims
here are no longer considered novel. The settlement reached today will
help ensure that the federal government takes a close look at its
contributions to climate change and that the courts are available if
the government fails in this critical obligation."
- Ron Shems, lead council for the plaintiffs
"For far too long, American tax dollars have funded highly
irresponsible and damaging fossil fuel projects in countries where
environmental laws simply don't exist. These projects have not only
hurt people in those countries-they have also contributed significantly
to global climate change, and in doing so, pose a direct threat to the
American people, the U.S. economy and the residents of Oakland. This
settlement represents a major step in the campaign to bring real
transparency and responsible environmental standards to energy projects
subsidized by our tax dollars. On behalf of the residents of Oakland,
California, I want to thank Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the
other plaintiffs for their work on this important case."
- Oakland City Attorney John Russo
"The city of Boulder is pleased with the outcome of this lawsuit. As
the first city to enact a carbon tax to address climate change, the
Boulder community is committed to the principles of environmental
sustainability and this result will further that impact. The coalition
forged in the lawsuit demonstrates that together, committed
organizations can make a positive difference toward protecting our
planet."
- Boulder City Manager Jane S. Brautigam
"The Arcata community is committed to leaving future generations a
safer, cleaner planet. This landmark victory reflects how local
leadership can take small steps to chart a more sustainable path. We
are proud to have been part of this forward thinking coalition and will
work to raise awareness about the need for immediate and long term
actions to mitigate our global footprint."
- Arcata Mayor Mark Wheetley
"Santa Monica has a strong commitment to protecting our environment.
Our participation in this case and the important settlement that was
achieved results from our continuing advocacy of sound environmental
stewardship."
- Santa Monica Mayor Ken Genser
Resources:
Friends of the Earth: Michelle Chan, Senior Policy Analyst, Friends of the Earth, 202-427-3000 (in California)
Greenpeace: Kert Davies, Research Director, Greenpeace, 202-319-2455
Plaintiffs' Council: Ron Shems, Shems Dunkiel Kassel & Saunders PLLC, 802-860-1003 ext 103
City of Oakland: Alex Katz, Oakland City Attorney's Office, 510-238-3148
City of Arcata: Mark Wheetley, Mayor, at (707) 845-7664, or Mark Andre, Director Environmental Services, at (707) 822-8184.
City of Boulder: City Manager's Office, 303-441-4020 or the City Attorney's Office, 303-441-3020.
City of Santa Monica: Adam Radinsky, Head, Consumer Protection Unit, Santa Monica City Attorney's Office, 310-458-8327
Background information about the case is available at https://www.foe.org/climatelawsuit.
Friends of the Earth fights for a more healthy and just world. Together we speak truth to power and expose those who endanger the health of people and the planet for corporate profit. We organize to build long-term political power and campaign to change the rules of our economic and political systems that create injustice and destroy nature.
(202) 783-7400LATEST NEWS
'Tariffs Haven't Helped': 72,000 Manufacturing Jobs—and Counting—Obliterated Since Trump's Liberation Day
“There’s very little in our product portfolio that has benefited from tariffs,” said the CEO of one North Carolina-based steel product company.
Feb 03, 2026
US President Donald Trump pledged that the manufacturing industry would come "roaring back into our country" after what he called "Liberation Day" last April, which was marked by the announcement of sweeping tariffs on imported goods—a policy that has shifted constantly in the past 10 months as Trump has changed rates, canceled tariffs, and threatened new ones.
But after promising to turn around economic trends that have developed over decades—the shipping of jobs overseas, automation, and the obliteration of towns and cities that had once been manufacturing centers—Trump's trade policy appears to have put any progress achieved in the sector in recent years "in reverse," as the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Federal data shows that in each of the eight months that followed Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, manufacturing companies reduced their workforce, with a total of 72,000 jobs in the industry lost since April 2025.
The Census Bureau also estimates that construction spending in the manufacturing industry contracted in the first nine months of Trump's second term, after surging during the Biden administration due to investments in renewable energy and semiconductor chips.
"But the tariffs haven’t helped," said Hanson.
Trump has insisted that his tariff policy would force companies to manufacture goods domestically to avoid paying more for foreign materials—just as he has claimed consumers would see lower prices.
But numerous analyses have shown American families are paying more, not less, for essentials like groceries as companies have passed on their higher operating costs to consumers, and federal data has made clear that companies are also avoiding investing in labor since Trump introduced the tariffs—while the trade war the president has kicked off hasn't changed the realities faced by many manufacturing sectors.
"While tariffs do reduce import competition, they can also increase the cost of key components for domestic manufacturers," wrote Emma Ockerman at Yahoo Finance. "Take US electric vehicle plants that rely on batteries made with rare earth elements imported from overseas, for instance. Some parts simply aren’t made in the United States."
At the National Interest, Ryan Mulholland of the Center for American Progress wrote that Trump's tariffs have created "three overlapping challenges" for US businesses.
"The imported components and materials needed to produce goods domestically now cost more—in some cases, a lot more," wrote Mulholland. "Foreign buyers are now looking elsewhere, often to protest Trump’s global belligerence, costing US firms market share abroad that will be difficult to win back. And if bad policy wasn’t enough, US manufacturers must also contend with the Trump administration’s unpredictability, which has made long-term investment decisions nearly impossible. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that small business bankruptcies have surged to their highest level in years."
Trump's unpredictable threats of new tariffs and his retreats on the policy, as with European countries in recent weeks when he said he would impose new levies on countries that didn't support his push to take control of Greenland, have also led to "a lost year for investment" for many firms, along with the possibility that the US Supreme Court could soon rule against the president's tariffs.
“If Trump just picked a number—whatever it was, 10% or 15% to 20%—we might all say it’s bad, I’d say it’s bad, I think most economists would say it’s bad,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Yahoo Finance. “But the worst thing is there’s no certainty about it.”
Constantly changing tariff rates make it "very difficult for businesses... to plan," said Baker. “I think you’ve had a lot of businesses curtail investment plans because they just don’t know whether the plans will make sense.”
While US manufacturers have struggled to compete globally, China and other countries have continued exporting their goods.
“There’s very little in our product portfolio that has benefited from tariffs,” H.O. Woltz III, chief executive of North Carolina-based Insteel Industries, told the Wall Street Journal.
US Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) noted Monday that the data on manufacturing job losses comes a week after Vice President JD Vance visited his home state to tout "record job growth."
"Here’s the reality: Families face higher costs, tariffs are costing manufacturing jobs, and over $200 million in approved federal infrastructure and manufacturing investments here were cut by this administration," said Kaptur. "Ohio deserves better."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump's DHS Using Secretive Subpoenas to Demand Critics’ Personal Data: Report
"These types of abusive subpoenas are designed to intimidate and sow fear of government retaliation," said a lawyer for the ACLU.
Feb 03, 2026
The Department of Homeland Security is using a little-known legal power to surveil and intimidate critics of the Trump administration, according to a harrowing report published Tuesday by the Washington Post.
Experts told the Post that DHS annually issues thousands of "administrative subpoenas," which allow federal agencies to request massive amounts of personal information from third parties—like technology companies and banks—without an order from a judge or a grand jury, and completely unbeknownst to the people whose privacy is being invaded.
As the Post found, even sending a politely critical email to a government official can be enough to have someone's entire life brought under the microscope.
That is what Jon, a 67-year-old retiree living in Philadelphia, who has been a US citizen for nearly three decades, found out after he sent a short email urging a DHS prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, to reconsider an attempt to deport an Afghan asylum seeker who faced the threat of being killed by the Taliban if he was forced to return to his home country.
In the email, Jon warned Dernbach not to "play Russian roulette" with the man's life and implored him to “apply principles of common sense and decency.”
Just five hours after he sent the email, Jon received a message from Google stating that DHS had used a "subpoena" to request information about his account. Google gave him seven days to respond to the subpoena, but did not provide him with a copy of the document; instead, it told him to request one from DHS.
From there, he was sent on “a maddening, hourslong circuit of answering machines, dead numbers, and uninterested attendants,” which yielded no answers.
Within weeks of sending the email, a pair of DHS agents visited Jon's home and asked him to explain it. They told Jon that his email had not clearly broken any law, but that the DHS prosecutor may have felt threatened by his use of the phrase "Russian Roulette" and his mention of the Taliban.
Days later, after weeks of hitting a wall, Google finally sent Jon a copy of the subpoena only after the company was contacted by a Post reporter. It was then that Jon learned the breadth of what DHS had requested:
Among their demands, which they wanted dating back to Sept. 1: the day, time, and duration of all his online sessions; every associated IP and physical address; a list of each service he used; any alternate usernames and email addresses; the date he opened his account; his credit card, driver’s license, and Social Security numbers.
Google also informed him that it had not yet responded to the subpoena, though the company did not explain why.
But this is unusual. Google and other companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, told the Post that they nearly always comply with administrative subpoenas unless they are barred from doing so.
With the ACLU's help, Jon filed a motion in court on Monday to challenge the subpoena issued to Google.
"In a democracy, contacting your government about things you feel strongly about is a fundamental right," Jon said. "I exercised that right to urge my government to take this man's life seriously. For that, I am being investigated, intimidated, and targeted. I hope that by standing up for my rights and sharing my story, others will know what to do when these abusive subpoenas and investigations come knocking on their door."
As the Trump administration uses DHS and other agencies to compile secret watchlists and databases of protesters for surveillance, targets people for deportation based solely on political speech, and asserts its authority to raid residences without a judicial warrant, administrative subpoenas appear to be another weapon in its arsenal against free speech and civil rights.
According to “transparency reports” reviewed by the Post, Google and Meta both received a record number of administrative subpoenas during the first six months of the second Trump administration. In several instances, they have been used to target protesters or other dissidents for First Amendment-protected activity:
In March, Homeland Security issued two administrative subpoenas to Columbia University for information on a student it sought to deport after she took part in pro-Palestinian protests. In July, the agency demanded broad employment records from Harvard University with what the school’s attorneys described as “unprecedented administrative subpoenas.” In September, Homeland Security used one to try to identify Instagram users who posted about [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids in Los Angeles. Last month, the agency used another to demand detailed personal information about some 7,000 workers in a Minnesota health system whose staff had protested Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s intrusion into one of its hospitals.
“These types of abusive subpoenas are designed to intimidate and sow fear of government retaliation," said Stephen A. Loney, a senior supervising attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. "If you can’t criticize a government official without the worry of having your private records gathered and agents knocking on your door, then your First Amendment rights start to feel less guaranteed. They want to bully companies into handing over our data and to chill users’ speech. This is unacceptable in a democratic society.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Smear Campaign' Detected as DHS Claims About Pair Shot by Border Patrol Unravel in Court
"You don’t see evidence of gang association," said one legal expert. "It just feels like a dirtying up of the defendant."
Feb 03, 2026
After a US Border Patrol Agent shot two Venezuelan immigrants in Portland, Oregon in January, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the two victims were "vicious Tren de Aragua gang members" who "weaponized their vehicle" against federal agents, who had no choice but to open fire in self-defense.
However, court records obtained by the Guardian reveal that a Department of Justice prosecutor subsequently told a judge the government was "not suggesting" that one of the victims, Luis Niño-Moncada, was a gang member.
The Guardian also obtained an FBI affidavit contradicting DHS claims about the second victim, Yorlenys Zambrano-Contreras, being "involved" in a shooting in Portland last year, when in reality she was a "reported victim of sexual assault and robbery."
Attorneys representing Niño-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras, who both survived the shooting and were subsequently hospitalized, told the Guardian that neither of them have any prior criminal convictions.
Legal experts who spoke with the Guardian about the shooting said it appeared that DHS was waging a "smear campaign" against the victims.
Sergio Perez, a civil rights lawyer and former US prosecutor, noted in an interview that prosecutors filed criminal charges against Niño-Moncada and Zambrano-Contreras just two days after they were shot, even before it had obtained crucial video evidence of the incident.
"This government needs to go back to the practice of slow and thorough investigations," he told the Guardian, "rather than what we consistently see in immigration enforcement activities—which is a rush to smear individuals."
Carley Palmer, a former federal prosecutor, told the Guardian that the court records obtained by the paper don't show DOJ presenting any of the usual evidence that prosecutors use to establish defendants' alleged gang membership.
"What’s interesting about the filings is that you don’t see evidence of gang association," said Palmer. "It just feels like a dirtying up of the defendant."
DHS in recent months has made a number of claims about people who have been shot or killed by federal immigration officers that have not held up to scrutiny.
Most recently, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that slain Minneapolis intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was a "domestic terrorist" intent on inflicting "maximum damage" on federal agents, when video clearly showed that Pretti was swarmed by multiple federal agents and was disarmed before two agents opened fire and killed him.
Noem also openly lied about the circumstances and actions that resulted in the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by a federal agent weeks earlier.
In November, federal prosecutors abruptly dropped charges against Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot multiple times by a US Border Patrol agent in October in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood.
In the indictment filed against Martinez, prosecutors said that the Border Patrol agent who shot her had been acting in self-defense, and that he had only opened fire after Martinez’s car collided with his vehicle.
However, uncovered text messages showed the Border Patrol agent apparently bragging about shooting Martinez, as he boasted that he “fired five rounds and she had seven holes” in a message sent to fellow agents.
An attorney representing Martinez also claimed that he had seen body camera footage that directly undermined DHS claims about how the shooting unfolded.
No explanation was provided for why charges against Martinez were dropped.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular