December, 15 2016, 03:30pm EDT
FCC Chairman Wheeler Fought to Defend the Open Internet and Protect the Rights of Consumers
WASHINGTON
On Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler announced his intention to step down from the federal agency on Jan. 20, 2017, at the end of President Barack Obama's term.
Wheeler was appointed by Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2013. A series of significant and even historic victories for the public marked his tenure, including passing strong Net Neutrality rules, restoring the agency's authority under Title II of the Communications Act, preventing the dangerous merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, reforming the Lifeline program, and establishing broadband-privacy protections.
Free Press President and CEO Craig Aaron made the following statement:
"When Tom Wheeler was named to head the FCC, we voiced serious reservations about how a former industry lobbyist could do the job. But he proved us wrong. We haven't agreed with him on every decision, but time and again Wheeler showed a willingness to stand up to industry pressure, listen to voices outside the Beltway and -- perhaps most importantly -- to change his mind.
"His legacy will be as one of the most effective chairs ever to hold the post -- judged rightfully not by the number of unanimous votes but by actual accomplishments. Wheeler didn't come into this job as a Net Neutrality champion, but he will be remembered first and foremost for his leadership on that crucial issue and for the standing ovations he earned on the day of the FCC's historic vote.
"He shares the credit with two colleagues, Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel, for the Net Neutrality victory and for many of the FCC's most important accomplishments in a generation, including reforming the Lifeline program, standing against the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, and establishing broadband-privacy protections.
"Unfortunately, the next administration has promised to undermine and overturn the major accomplishments of the Wheeler FCC. Industry lobbyists are dusting off their worst proposals. And the team leading the agency's transition has even called for abolishing the FCC.
"We thank Tom Wheeler for his public service. And we promise to fight any attempts to attack the best policies advanced during his tenure. We call on the next administration and the new Congress to build on Wheeler's legacy by appointing future chairs and commissioners who are willing to put people first -- instead of rubber-stamping industry demands."
Free Press was created to give people a voice in the crucial decisions that shape our media. We believe that positive social change, racial justice and meaningful engagement in public life require equitable access to technology, diverse and independent ownership of media platforms, and journalism that holds leaders accountable and tells people what's actually happening in their communities.
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As Historic Heatwave Grips Europe, Coalition Says 'No to a Climate Law for Polluters'
"Will the European Commission propose a climate law that ends fossil fuel use and reflects the E.U.'s fair share of climate responsibility? Or will it choose political convenience?"
Jun 30, 2025
As yet another dangerous heatwave pushes temperatures well into the triple digits across much of Europe, climate defenders on Monday renewed calls for stronger action to combat the planetary emergency—including by ensuring that the impending European Climate Law ends fossil fuel use and eschews false solutions including international carbon offsetting.
Croatia, France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain are among the countries where near- or record-high temperatures have been recorded. Portugal and Spain both recorded their hottest-ever June days over the weekend. El Granado in southwestern Spain saw the mercury soar to nearly 115°C (46°C) on Saturday. The heatwave is expected to continue into the middle of the week, with authorities warning of elevated wildfire risk and potential severe health impacts.
"Extreme heat is no longer a rare event—it has become the new normal," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Sunday on social media. "I'm experiencing it firsthand in Spain during the Financing for Development Conference. The planet is getting hotter and more dangerous—no country is immune. We need more ambitious #ClimateAction now."
On Monday, Real Zero Europe—"a campaign calling on the European Union to deliver real emissions reductions and real solutions to the climate crisis, instead of corporate greenwashed 'net zero' targets"—published a call for an E.U. Climate Law that does not contain provisions for international carbon offsetting, in which countries or corporations compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by funding projects that reduce emissions in other nations.
🔴 OUT NOW📢 69 NGOs call on the EU to deliver a Climate Law that rejects international carbon offsetting & Carbon Dioxide Removals (#CDR), commits to a full fossil fuel phase-out, and reflects Europe’s fair share of climate responsibility!Read the statement👇www.realzeroeurope.org/resources/st...
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— Real Zero Europe (@realzeroeurope.bsky.social) June 30, 2025 at 2:40 AM
A draft proposal of the legislation published Monday by Politico revealed that the European Commission will allow E.U. member states to outsource climate efforts to Global South nations staring in 2036, despite opposition from the 27-nation bloc's independent scientific advisory board. The outsourcing will enable the E.U. to fund emissions-reducing projects in developing nations and apply those reductions to Europe's own 2040 target—which is a 90% net decrease in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels.
The proposal also embraces carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies like carbon capture and storage, whose scalability is unproven. Climate groups call them false solutions that prolong the fossil fuel era.
"E.U. climate policy stands at a crossroads: Will the European Commission propose a climate law that ends fossil fuel use and reflects the E.U.'s fair share of climate responsibility?" the Real Zero Europe letter says. "Or will it choose political convenience—abandoning that goal under pressure from corporate and populist interests, and turning to risky, unjust carbon offsetting and other false solutions?"
"Taking responsibility for the E.U.'s past and present role in causing the climate crisis means doubling down on a just and full fossil fuel phaseout not hiding behind false solutions as currently proposed," the letter continues. "The law as planned will send a dangerous signal far beyond E.U. borders. The climate and biodiversity crises are already harming people, especially vulnerable communities and populations largely in the Global South, who have least contributed to the climate crisis."
The 69 groups stress that international carbon offsetting "is a smokescreen for giving license to fossil fuel use beyond 2050" that diverts critical resources and public funds from real climate solutions and climate finance."
"Given the scale of climate catastrophe, for the E.U. to allow international offsets and technological CDR gives a lifeline to polluting industries such as the fossil fuel, agribusiness, plastics, and petrochemical industries," the letter states.
"We say no to an E.U. Climate Law that puts polluting industries over people and climate by embracing the use of international offsets and CDR approaches," the letter's signers said. "We call on the Commission to deliver an E.U. Climate Law and its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the U.N. climate negotiations that clearly reflects the bloc's responsibility for the climate crisis. That means a full fossil fuel phaseout and a just transition."
This heatwave is brutal. Temperatures above 40°C in June across France, Spain, Italy...We still hear from right-wing politicians that “it’s just summer.” It’s not. This is the climate crisis courtesy of the fossil fuels industry. It’s not normal.
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— European Greens (@europeangreens.eu) June 30, 2025 at 7:01 AM
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk also addressed the European heatwave on Monday, saying that "the climate crisis is a human rights crisis."
"Rising temperatures, rising seas, floods, droughts, and wildfires threaten our rights to life, to health, to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and much more," he continued. "The heatwave we are currently experiencing here shows us the importance of adaptation measures, without which human rights would be severely impacted."
"It is equally clear that our current production and consumption patterns are unsustainable, and that renewables are the energy source of the future," Türk asserted. "Production capacity for renewables increased five-fold between 2011 and 2023. What we need now is a roadmap that shows us how to rethink our societies, economies and politics in ways that are equitable and sustainable. That is, a just transition."
"This shift requires an end to the production and use of fossil fuels and other environmentally destructive activities across all sectors—from energy to farming to finance to construction and beyond," he added. "This will be one of the greatest transformations our world has ever seen."
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'Hell No,' Say Critics as Trump's Megabill Poised to Drastically Expand ICE's Dragnet
"This is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades—the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century—become logistically possible and politically likely," wrote one observer.
Jun 30, 2025
Critics are sounding the alarm as congressional Republicans edge closer to passing a sweeping tax and spending bill desired by U.S. President Donald Trump that would inject tens of billions of dollars of funding into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency at the forefront of the president's immigration crackdown.
"Republicans' Big, Bad Betrayal Bill shovels BILLIONS OF DOLLARS more into ICE's budget. Yes, the same ICE that has arrested U.S. citizens, carried out illegal deportations, and denied members of Congress access to detention facilities. HELL NO," wrote Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) on X on Sunday.
On Monday, the Senate kicked off a vote-a-rama process where senators can demand an unlimited number of votes on amendments to the reconciliation package.
While negotiations on the legislation are still ongoing, the version of the reconciliation bill that was narrowly advanced in the Senate on Saturday includes $29.85 billion for ICE to "remain available through September 30, 2029" for personnel recruitment, technology for "enforcement and removal operations," and other priorities. It also includes $45 billion "for single adult alien detention capacity and family residential center capacity," also available through the same period.
The bill text also includes $46.5 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to spend on border infrastructure, to remain available through September 30, 2029.
Journalist Nicolae Viorel Butler, who reports on immigration for the outlet Migrant Insider, reported on Sunday that all told the measure proposes in excess of $175 billion in "direct immigration-related funding for fiscal year 2025."
This, Butler wrote, reflects "a historic expansion of immigration enforcement operations under a Republican-controlled Congress and the Trump administration."
This money would be a big addition on top of what these agencies already receive. For example, a National Immigration Forum explainer focused on the House version of the reconciliation package noted that $45 billion for ICE detention capacity constitutes an 800% increase in detention funding compared to fiscal year 2024.
"This is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades—the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century—become logistically possible and politically likely," wrote the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on Bluesky, commenting on the infusion of funding.
In every state, immigration arrests carried out by ICE have sharply increased. Also the number of those arrested and detained by ICE who have no criminal record is up more than 1,400% compared to a year ago, according to The Washington Post.
Increased funding for ICE and immigration enforcement is not the only part of the bill drawing scrutiny.
In May, nonpartisan budget scorekeepers said that the U.S. House of Representatives-passed version of the legislation would, if passed, cut household resources for the bottom 10% of Americans while delivering gains to the wealthiest in the form of tax breaks. Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, called the House version of the legislation the "the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history."
"If the Republican budget passes, a lot of Americans will indeed suffer. But so too will millions of noncitizens who came to the U.S. seeking better lives for themselves and their families," wrotePost columnist Philip Bump of the increase in funding for ICE.
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UN Expert Calls for 'Defossilization' of World Economy, Criminal Penalties for Big Oil Climate Disinformation
Fossil fuel companies have for decades "instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables," said U.N. climate expert Elisa Morgera.
Jun 30, 2025
As health officials across Europe issued warnings Monday about extreme heat that could stretch into the middle of the week in several countries—the kind of dangerous conditions that meteorologists have consistently said are likely to grow more frequent due to human-caused climate change—a top United Nations climate expert told the international body in Geneva that the "defossilization" of all the world's economies is needed.
Elisa Morgera, the U.N. special rapporteur on climate change, presented her recent report on "the imperative of defossilizing our economies," with a focus on the wealthy countries that are projected to increase their extraction and use of fossil fuels despite the fact that "there is no scientific doubt that fossil fuels... are the main cause of climate change."
"Despite overwhelming evidence of the interlinked, intergenerational, severe, and widespread human rights impacts of the fossil fuel life cycle," said Morgera, "these countries have and are still accruing enormous profits from fossil fuels, and are still not taking decisive action."
World leaders must recognize the phase-out of fossil fuels "as the single most impactful health contribution" they could make, she argued.
Morgera named the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada as wealthy nations where governments are still handing out billions of dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel companies each year—direct payments, tax breaks, and other financial support whose elimination could reduce worldwide fossil fuel emissions by 10% by 2030, according to the report.
"These countries are responsible for not having prevented the widespread human rights harm arising from climate change and other planetary crises we are facing—biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, and economic inequalities—caused by fossil fuels extraction, use, and waste," said Morgera.
She also pointed to the need to "defossilize knowledge" by holding accountable the companies that have spent decades denying their own scientists' knowledge that continuing to extract oil, coal, and gas would heat the planet and cause catastrophic sea-level rise, hurricanes, flooding, and dangerous extreme heat, among other weather disasters.
Defossilizing information systems, said Morgera, would mean protecting "human rights in the formation of public opinion and democratic debate from undue commercial influence" and correcting decades of "information distortions" that have arisen from the public's ongoing exposure to climate disinformation at the hands of fossil fuel giants, the corporate media, and climate-denying politicians.
Morgera said states should prohibit all fossil fuel industry lobbying, which companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron spent more than $153 million last year in the U.S. alone—with spending increasing each year since 2020, according to OpenSecrets.
"More recent research has documented climate obstruction—intentional delaying efforts, including through media ownership and influence, waged against efforts for effective climate action aligned with the current scientific consensus," wrote Morgera. "Fossil fuel companies' lobbyists have increased their influence in public policy spaces internationally... and at the national level, to limit regulations and enforcement. They have instilled doubt about the need to act on, and the viability of, renewables, and have promoted speculative or ineffective solutions that present additional lock-in risks and higher costs."
While a transition to a renewable energy-based economy has been portrayed by the fossil fuel industry and its supporters in government as "radical," such a transition "is now cheaper and safer for our economics and a healthier option for our societies," Morgera toldThe Guardian on Monday.
"The transition can also lead to significant savings of taxpayer money that is currently going into responding to climate change impacts, saving health costs, and also recouping lost tax revenue from fossil fuel companies," she said. "This could be the single most impactful health contribution we could ever make. The transition seems radical and unrealistic because fossil fuel companies have been so good at making it seem so."
In addition to lobbying bans, said Morgera, governments around the world must ban fossil fuel advertising and criminalize "misinformation and misrepresentation (greenwashing) by the fossil fuel industry" as well as media and advertising firms that have amplified the industry's disinformation and misinformation.
Several countries have taken steps toward meeting Morgera's far-reaching demands, with The Hague in the Netherlands introducing a municipal ordinance in 2023 banning fossil fuel ads, the Australian Green Party backing such a ban, and Western Australia implementing one.
The fossil fuel industry's "playbook of climate obstruction"—from lobbying at national policymaking summits like the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference to downplaying human rights impacts like destructive storms and emphasizing the role of fossil fuels in "economic growth"—has "undermined the protection of all human rights that are negatively impacted by climate change for over six decades," said Morgera.
Morgera pointed to three ways in which states' obligations under international humanitarian laws underpin the need for a fossil fuel phaseout by 2030:
- The survival of states that contributed minimally to climate change is impaired by loss of territory to sea-level rise and/or protracted unsafe climatic conditions;
- People are substantially deprived of their means of subsistence because of the severe deterioration of entire ecosystems due to climate change due to flooding, drought, and extreme heat; and
- The cultural survival of the populations of small island developing states, Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, peasants and small-scale fishers is impaired by loss of territories, protracted unsafe climatic conditions and/or severe ecosystem degradation.
Morgera's report was presented as more than a third of Tuvaluans applied for a visa to move to Australia under a new climate deal between the two countries, as the Pacific island is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to rising sea levels and severe storms.
Morgera said that fossil fuel industry's impact on the human rights of people across the Global South—who have contributed little to the worsening of the climate emergency—"compels urgent defossilization of our whole economies, as part of a just, effective, and transformative transition."Keep ReadingShow Less
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