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For Immediate Release
December, 05 2018, 11:00pm EDT
Contact:
Brian Willis, 202.675.2386, Brian.Willis@sierraclub.org
Senate Recklessly Confirms Coal Bailout Architect and Fossil Fuel Proponent Bernard McNamee to FERC
WASHINGTON
The U.S. Senate confirmed coal bailout architect and fossil fuel proponent Bernard McNamee to the technology-neutral Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) today, despite strong opposition from public health groups, environmental organizations, and elected leaders. In addition to being a lifelong fossil fuel lawyer, McNamee has proven to be an overt opponent of America's clean energy revolution, going so far as to belittle the solar and wind industry's growth in front of a major fossil fuel group and awkwardly promoting coal, oil, and fracked gas use on Earth Day.
Given the pivotal role that FERC serves in protecting consumers, ensuring reliability, and robust competition, it is critical that all parties appearing before the Commission have confidence that it is technology-neutral and guided by the evidence and law. McNamee's expressed hesitation to recuse himself on issues related to the coal bailout scheme he engineered while serving in a political capacity at the Department of Energy has raised red flags by ethics watchdogs. The bailout was widely panned by an diverse array of groups and stakeholders, and unanimously voted down by FERC. Many of these groups are encouraging McNamee to preemptively recuse himself from considerations to both protect FERC's independence and avoid legal challenges to FERC decisions in the future.
In response, Mary Anne Hitt, Senior Director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, released the following statement:
"The Senate's reckless decision to place Bernard 'coal bailout' McNamee on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is a major threat to the Commission's independence and integrity. From this day forward we will do everything we can to guarantee that he follows the law, treats clean energy sources fairly, and recuses himself from all matters pertaining to his failed coal bailout scheme. It's essential that we have a fair and lawful FERC moving forward."
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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NDP Candidate Avi Lewis Calls for 'Public Options' to Fight High Costs of Groceries, Housing, and Telecoms in Canada
“When people are being gouged at the checkout aisle, on their phone bills, and in their rents, it’s clear that the market is failing,” Lewis said.
Nov 24, 2025
As Avi Lewis moves forward with his bid to become the next leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, the progressive activist, filmmaker, and journalist, announced his first major policy proposal on Monday: an array of "public options" for groceries, housing, phone bills, and other necessities aimed at combating Canada's cost-of-living crisis.
After two failed parliamentary bids in 2021 and 2025, the Vancouver-based Lewis in September launched his bid to take Canada's leftmost party in a more economically populist direction following a series of defeats under its long-serving, Jagmeet Singh.
He hopes his laser focus on corporate greed, which he says is driving Canada's cost-of-living crisis, will help set him apart from other front-runners, including Edmonton Member of Parliament Heather McPherson and British Columbia union leader Rob Ashton.
“It’s a moral outrage that so many people in Canada can’t afford the basics of a dignified life at a time when corporate profits are only skyrocketing,” Lewis said as he unveiled an array of new proposals Monday. “When people are being gouged at the checkout aisle, on their phone bills, and in their rents, it’s clear that the market is failing.”
Lewis called for the creation of a public not-for-profit grocery store chain that would operate coast to coast to combat the growing crisis of food insecurity.
According to data published earlier this year by the Canadian Income Survey, approximately 10 million Canadians—over 25%—lived in food-insecure households in 2024, nearly doubling since 2021 amid skyrocketing food prices.
Lewis described it as a "market failure" that so many Canadians could struggle to pay for food while Galen Weston, the owner of Canada's largest grocery chain, Loblaw, has a net worth of over $18 billion.
Lewis called for the government to create "a low-cost alternative to the big grocery chains, using a high-volume, warehouse-style model supported by local and regional food hubs." He likened the proposal to Mexico's chain of state-owned grocery stores and the government-run commissaries that provide affordable food to US servicemembers and their families, both of which cost less on average than shopping at major grocery chains.
"Think Costco—but run as a public service," Lewis explained in a policy document.
Lewis proposed a similar solution for the cost of cell phone and internet service, which are higher in Canada than in other peer countries.
Attributing this to "an oligopoly of telecom providers that dominate cellphone and internet services in Canada and gobble up smaller competitors," he proposed that the nation create a network of public telecom providers modeled after SaskTel. This publicly owned company serves the province of Saskatchewan and has led to "substantially lower” prices for customers than in other parts of Canada, according to the nation's Competition Bureau.
To combat the spiking cost of rent and a growing homelessness crisis, Lewis also pledged that his NDP would once again prioritize the construction of public housing, which Canada built prolifically until the early 1990s.
He pledged that under his leadership, Canada would establish a public builder to create a million new units of social, co-op, non-profit, and supportive homes within five years.
Lewis also championed the return of nationwide postal banking as an antidote to the predatory fees and interest rates of Canada's financial institutions.
He plans to leverage the nation's national postal service, which is already the only option for financial services in many remote parts of the country, as a competitive alternative to Canada's six largest banks, which brought in more than $50 billion in profits last year, and to predatory payday loan and check-cashing companies.
Finally, he proposed the reestablishment of Canada's government-owned nonprofit pharmaceutical company, Connaught Labs, which created and cheaply mass-produced life-saving vaccines and other medications like insulin for free public distribution. The company was privatized in the 1980s under former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.
"During the Covid pandemic, for-profit pharmaceutical companies made billions while countries competed with one another for vaccine supplies instead of distributing them globally to stop the virus's spread across borders," Lewis said.
He said that his new version of Connaught would invest in the public development of innovative pharmaceuticals, such as mRNA vaccines and cancer immunotherapies, and share that technology with low-income countries.
"It's time to take the power back from the price-fixing corporate cartels that have a stranglehold on our economy and put it in the hands of the people," Lewis said. "It's time to build a new generation of public options to reduce costs and raise our quality of life."
Lewis described his "next generation" of public options as following in the footsteps of those pursued by NDP-led provincial governments.
"Whether it's public auto insurance in Manitoba, the agricultural land reserve to protect food security in British Columbia, a public telecom provider in Saskatchewan, or, of course, Medicare, our party has created public institutions that continue to make people's lives better and more affordable decades after their creation."
"The cost of living crisis we face today demands bold solutions," he added. "That means expanding public ownership to lower bills and improve services while creating good union jobs in the process."
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Warning of Superbugs, Groups Urge Trump EPA to Ban Use of Important Drugs as Pesticides
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops," one expert said, calling out industry for the "recklessness and preventable suffering."
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Just a month after the head of the World Health Organization warned that "antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide," a coalition of conservation, farmworker, and public health groups on Monday petitioned the Trump administration to ban the use of crucial drugs as pesticides.
The legal petition provides a list of "active ingredients that are themselves, or whose use can promote cross-resistance to, medically important antibiotics/antifungals," and requests that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cancel registrations under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of all products that contain them.
"Research is clear that the use of antibiotics and antifungals as pesticides poses a threat to public health because it contributes to the evolution of pathogens that are resistant to medicine," the petition states, referring to what are often called "superbugs."
"Petitioners make this request because of the critical nature of these drugs and drug classes to human and veterinary medicine, along with scientifically established concerns related to increasing resistance and declining efficacy rates as a result of prophylactic and other uses of these antimicrobials outside of the medical field," the filing continues.
"More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths."
Noting that the use of antibiotic pesticides also "directly threatens the well-being of humans and animals through contamination of food supplies and crops," the filing adds that "petitioners believe that the most effective way to safeguard human and environmental health is to disallow the use of these ingredients in pesticide products."
The petitioners are the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, Californians for Pesticide Reform, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, CRLA Foundation, Friends of the Earth US, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, UNI Center for Energy & Environmental Education, and US Public Interest Research Group.
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. "This kind of recklessness and preventable suffering is what happens when the industry has a stranglehold on the EPA's pesticide-approval process."
Donley and other campaigners have previously called out the Trump administration for spouting pesticide companies' talking points in the September Make America Healthy Again report, installing an ex-industry lobbyist in a key EPA post, and doubling down on herbicides including dicamba and atrazine—the latter of which is commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States, and last week was labeled probably carcinogenic to humans by a WHO agency.
Underscoring the urgent need for EPA action, the new petition highlights that "more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths," according to a 2019 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Citing another CDC report, the filing points out that "the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the issue due to longer hospital stays and increased inappropriate antibiotic use, leading to an upsurge in the number of bacterial antibiotic-resistant hospital-onset infections by 20%."
Globally, antimicrobial resistance "has increased in 40% of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored for global temporal trends between 2018 and 2023, with annual relative increases ranging from 5% to 15%," according to the WHO analysis released last month. By the end of that period, "approximately 1 in 6 laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections worldwide were caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics."
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that "we must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines. Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose, and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests."
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Federal Judge Tosses Comey, James Cases Over 'Unlawful' Appointment of Trump Prosecutor
"This case was not about justice or the law; it was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged," said Letitia James' lawyer.
Nov 24, 2025
A federal judge on Monday threw out criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that President Donald Trump's handpicked prosecutor was illegally installed.
Judge Cameron McGowan Currie, a Clinton appointee, wrote in her Monday orders that former White House official Lindsey Halligan "has been unlawfully serving" as interim US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and that "all actions flowing" from her appointment "constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside."
Halligan is a Trump loyalist with no prior experience as a prosecutor—something that quickly became apparent as she made glaring mistakes in pursuit of charges against Comey and James, frequent targets of the president's ire. The charges against Comey and James were widely seen as flimsy and politically motivated.
Halligan was installed in late September, just two days after Trump fired off a since-deleted social media post complaining about the lack of action against Comey and James. Currie highlighted the post in her order.
"Lindsey Halligan is a really good lawyer, and likes you, a lot," Trump wrote, directing his message at Attorney General Pam Bondi. "We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility."
Halligan's predecessor, Erik Siebert, resigned under pressure from the Trump administration for declining to seek indictments against Comey and James. Siebert privately voiced concern that there wasn't enough evidence to pursue charges.
Currie ruled that Halligan's Trump-directed appointment violated 28 US Code § 546 and the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. The Comey and James cases were dismissed without prejudice, meaning the Trump administration could try to install a new prosecutor to revive the charges—though the statute of limitations in Comey's case expired at the end of September.
Democracy Docket notes that Halligan "is the fourth Trump-appointed acting US attorney deemed to be serving unlawfully."
James, who brought a civil suit against Trump in 2022 for "fraudulent and misleading asset valuations," said Monday that she was "heartened by today’s victory and grateful for the prayers and support I have received from around the country."
"I remain fearless in the face of these baseless charges as I continue fighting for New Yorkers every single day," James added.
Abbe David Lowell, James' attorney, said Monday that "this case was not about justice or the law; it was about targeting Attorney General James for what she stood for and who she challenged."
"We will continue to challenge any further politically motivated charges through every lawful means available," said Lowell.
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