Featured image: Supporters of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments during a rally Saturday, Dec. 2, 2017 in Salt Lake City. AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
On Dec. 4, President Trump traveled to Utah to sign proclamations downsizing Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly 50 percent. “[S]ome people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington,” Trump said. “And guess what? They’re wrong.”
Native American tribes and environmental organizations have already filed lawsuits challenging Trump’s action. In our analysis as environmental and natural resources law scholars, the president’s action is illegal and will likely be overturned in court.
Contests over land use
Since 1906 the Antiquities Act has given presidents the authority to set aside federal lands in order to protect “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest.”
History of the Antiquities Act.
When a president creates a national monument, the area is “reserved” for the protection of sites and objects there, and may also be “withdrawn,” or exempted, from laws that would allow for mining, logging or oil and gas development. Frequently, monument designations grandfather in existing uses of the land, but prohibit new activities such as mineral leases or mining claims.
Because monument designations reorient land use away from resource extraction and toward conservation, some monuments have faced opposition from local officials and members of Congress. In the past two decades, Utah has been a flashpoint for this debate.
In 1996 President Clinton designated the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a region of incredible slot canyons and remote plateaus. Twenty years later, President Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument, an area of scenic rock formations and sites sacred to Native American tribes.
Utah’s governor and congressional delegation have long argued that these monuments are larger than necessary and that presidents should defer to the state about whether to use the Antiquities Act.
Zinke’s review
In April President Trump ordered a review of national monuments designated in the past two decades. Trump directed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to recommend steps to eliminate or shrink these monuments or realign their management with Trump administration priorities.
Secretary Zinke’s review was an arbitrary and opaque process. During a rushed four-month period, Zinke visited only eight of the 27 monuments under review. At the end of the review, the Interior Department released to the public only a two-page summary of Zinke’s report.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visiting Bears Ears National Monument, May 9, 2017. DOI, CC BY-SA
In September the Washington Post published a leaked copy of Zinke’s detailed recommendations. They included downsizing, changing management plans or loosening restrictions at a total of 10 monuments, including three ocean monuments.
Trump’s proclamations
Trump’s proclamations on Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante note the long list of objects that the monuments were created to protect, but claim that many of these objects are “not unique,” “not of significant scientific or historic interest,” or “not under threat of damage or destruction.”
As a result, Trump’s orders split each monument into smaller units, excluding large tracts that are deemed “unnecessary.” Areas cut from the monuments, including coal-rich portions of the Kaiparowits Plateau, will be reopened to mineral leasing, mining and other uses.
The key question at issue is whether the Antiquities Act empowers presidents to alter or revoke decisions by past administrations. The Property Clause of the Constitution gives Congress the power to decide what happens on “territory or other property belonging to the United States.” When Congress passed the Antiquities Act, it delegated a portion of that authority to the president so that administrations could act quickly to protect resources or sites that are threatened.
Critics of recent national monuments argue that if a president can create a national monument, the next one can undo it. However, the Antiquities Act speaks only of designating monuments. It says nothing about abolishing or shrinking them.
Two other early land management statutes – the Pickett Act of 1910 and the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897 – authorized the president to withdraw other types of land, and specifically stated that the president could modify or revoke those actions. In contrast, the Antiquities Act is silent on reversing past decisions.
Ruins at Chaco Culture National Historic Park, New Mexico, originally protected under the Antiquities Act by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 to prevent looting of archaeological sites. Steven C. Price/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA
In 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered abolishing the Castle-Pinckney National Monument – a deteriorating fort in Charleston, South Carolina – Attorney General Homer Cummings advised that the president did not have the power to take this step. (Congress abolished the monument in 1951.)
Congress enacted a major overhaul of public lands law in 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, repealing many earlier laws. However, it did not repeal the Antiquities Act. The House Committee that drafted the 1976 law also made clear in legislative reports that it intended to prohibit the president from modifying or abolishing a national monument, stating that the law would “specifically reserve to the Congress the authority to modify and revoke withdrawals for national monuments created under the Antiquities Act.”
Since that time, no president until Trump has attempted to revoke or downsize any national monument. Trump’s changes to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante depend on an argument that presidential declarations about what a national monument protects are subject to second-guessing by subsequent presidents. These claims run counter to every court decision that has examined the Antiquities Act.
Courts have always been deferential to presidents’ use of the law, and no court has ever struck down a monument based on its size or the types of objects it is designed to protect. Congress, rather than the President, has the authority to alter monuments, should it decide that changes are appropriate.
The value of preservation
This summer 118 other law professors, as well as California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and a number of conservation organizations, cited our analysis in letters to Secretary Zinke concluding that the president does not have authority to downsize or revoke national monuments.
Although many national monuments faced vociferous local opposition when they were declared, including Jackson Hole National Monument (now part of Grand Teton National Park), over time, Americans have come to appreciate them.
Indeed, Congress has converted many into national parks, including Acadia, the Grand Canyon, Arches and Joshua Tree. These four parks alone attracted over 13 million visitors in 2016. The aesthetic, cultural, scientific, spiritual and economic value of preserving them has long exceeded whatever short-term benefit could have been derived without legal protection.
Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are home to many natural and archaeological wonders, including scenic bluffs, petroglyphs, burial grounds and other sacred sites and a rich diversity of plant and animal life. The five Native American tribes that supported protecting Bears Ears, led by the Navajo Nation, have vowed to defend the monuments in court. President Trump’s effort to scale back these monuments oversteps his authority and is unlikely to stand.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 27, 2017.
The narrative being pushed today is that renewables, particularly wind and solar, will save us. By “save us” they mean allow us to continue our way of life unhindered into the future, despite a lower (and eventually zero, they tell us) reliance on oil. This view is so prevalent, it seems, that reactions of denial, or even confusion, are met with indignation and insistence.
I know the claims of this hope-filled crowd for what it is: fantasy. Part of me wants to go through every piece (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) and point out their individual flaws. But I have a particular ability to see the heart, or essence, of the issue, and I am compelled to make this simple.
The push to “renewables” is very… overhyped, I suppose is the right word. Industrial civilization was built on an oil EROEI(Energy Return On Energy Invested) of 100 to 1. Nowadays we’re down to somewhere about 12 to 1. Conventional oil (the cheap, easy to access stuff) peaked back in 2005. This is not really argued against by anyone at this point. Unconventional oil has filled the gap. But – and here’s the huge but –
1) unconventional oil sources have been funded through increasing amounts of debt and many of these companies are going bankrupt (33% in 2016, a projected 33% more in 2017, leaving only 1/3rd of those companies standing by 2019) [link], and
2) the greatest source of unconventional has been shale oil and gas – the great majority of which is in the USA. Unfortunately, shale oil and gas both peaked in 2015 and are now declining.*
* Edit: In November 2017, shale production slightly exceeded this mark and production is set to increase a bit further into 2018. I am currently writing an article on shale explaining this which will be up soon. We can expect shale output to rise into next year, but then will decline. This is known and expected.
So, that leaves us with “renewables.” I put the word in quotes because it’s a misnomer – none of these sources are actually renewable. They are completely dependent on oil to build, maintain, and transport. All renewable technology and construction, as well as the infrastructure and transportation needed to get their product to consumers, is dependent entirely on oil (fossil fuels). Another giant problem is that these are all sources of producing electricity. The problem with this is twofold:
1) most of the energy we use isn’t electric – electricity production is only 18% of total world energy demand, and
2) all of the electricity we do produce employs fossil fuels. It is important to note here too that transportation (big 18-wheelers, ships, planes, mining equipment trucks, etc) cannot transition to electricity to run them – the batteries are absurdly too heavy (in some cases 50,0000 times too heavy) and with current or projected technology this problem will not conceivably be fixed anytime soon. Transitioning the consumers to electric cars won’t fix the problem whatsoever.
”Peak oil” is primarily a liquid fuels transportation crisis because of this very issue.
Another point to make is that there is no national infrastructure currently that can replace any significant fraction of oil with renewable energy. Building such an infrastructure has been estimated by countless studies to cost literally trillions of dollars and take at least 20 years – and when we are currently facing a global economic slowdown we don’t have the money to invest in that. And we don’t have the time to wait because the crisis will hit before such an infrastructure would be built even if we did invest the money today, which we can’t. This brings us to the point: we will have to face a world-changingly profound loss of overall energy, even as demand and populations continue to increase.
But make no mistake – a greater dependence on renewables is inevitable. The problems occur when you realize that these renewables are themselves dependent on oil, which is being funded by debt that won’t last and is ending in bankruptcies and has an ever-lower EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested).
The outcome of all this is that, yes, we will become more and more heavily reliant on intermittently-available renewables. But (and this is the point that many miss) as we become more reliant on renewables on a small scale (personal use, business use, town use), we will be living with increasingly less and less overall energy on a large scale (geographically, nationally, globally). All the systems that are geographic (grid systems), national (the economy), and global (trade, imported goods, etc), will inevitably fail and we will have to make due with local solutions. Renewables will power a fraction of our current way of life at best – and they will not be sufficient to continue business as usual as we have known it. Wind and solar last for about 20 years before they need to be replaced – with energy outputs only available through oil. As John Michael Greer has said:
“The question isn’t whether or not sun and wind are useful power sources; the question is whether it’s possible to power industrial civilization with them, and the answer is no.”
All of the promises of the hope-addicted crowd of course also rest on the false premise that fossil fuels themselves will be cheap and easy to obtain for the next 35 years or so in order to pave a smooth road for this transition.
I’m afraid the result of all this is a staggeringly significant reduction in the standards of living for the vast majority of the world.
Eventually everything will even out and humanity will live a much more sustainable way of life – just like humanity has for ten thousand years before the industrial age. In the meantime, expect turbulence.
In closing, let’s end with a simple but profound thought: You can’t use fossil fuels to extract all the resources to make solar panels and wind turbines and then expect these less efficient means of energy production to save a society with ever-increasing energy needs.
WASHINGTON —Hours after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation taking an axe to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, conservation organizations today filed a lawsuit attacking the order as an abuse of the president’s power. Earthjustice is representing eight organizations in a suit charging that the president violated the 1906 Antiquities Act by stripping monument protections from this national treasure: The Wilderness Society, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Natural Resources Defense Council are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit and represented by in-house counsel.
“President Trump has perpetrated a terrible violation of America’s public lands and heritage by going after this dinosaur treasure trove,” said Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney in Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains office. “While past presidents have used the Antiquities Act to protect unique lands and cultural sites in America, Trump is instead mangling the law, opening this national monument to coal mining instead of protecting its scientific, historic, and wild heritage. We will not let this stand. We will use the power of the law to stop Trump’s illegal actions.”
The Grand Staircase-Escalante contains dinosaur fossils found nowhere else in the world. Since its designation, 21 new dinosaur species have been unearthed by scientists in the monument, leading some to call these lands a “Dinosaur Shangri-la,” and a “geologic wonderland.” Grand Staircase holds one of the richest collections of fossils from the Late Cretaceous Period, which gives scientists and the public alike an unparalleled window into the dinosaurs that lived in these lands 10 million years ago. In mid-October, scientists airlifted one of the most complete tyrannosaur skeletons ever found out of Grand Staircase. These fossils are largely found in the Kaiparowits Plateau, where the coal industry has long coveted access for coal mining that would wreak havoc on this dinosaur treasure trove that belongs to the American people.
“I’m a resident of Kanab, and there are a lot of local businesses that are completely dependent on tourism related to Grand Staircase-Escalante,” said Laura Welp of Western Watersheds Project, and a former BLM botanist at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “The entire ‘staircase’ of spectacular geological layers, with its world-class fossil resources, deserves to be protected intact from the threat of coal mining and other types of commercial exploitation.”
President Trump’s executive order to revoke and replace Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument came on the heels of a review conducted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Over 2.7 million Americans voiced their support for national monuments across the country, and public participation in the comment period was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping these public lands and waters protected just as they are.
“President Trump is attempting an unauthorized remodel of the Grand Staircase, knocking out not only geologic steps but cornerstones of the evolution of species, human history, and our cultural heritage as well,” said Tim Peterson, Utah Wildlands program director with the Grand Canyon Trust. “We’ve spent 20 years working to preserve Grand Staircase, and now we’re asking the courts to help us reconstruct what was torn down today.”
“The Trump administration’s effort to sell out our public lands is deeply unpopular and goes against American values,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “We will work to ensure our lands and waters remain open to the public and protected for future generations to explore and enjoy.”
“For more than two decades, through Democratic and Republican Administrations alike, we have worked with the BLM, paleontologists, local landowners, ranchers and business owners to ensure the monument’s resources are protected,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society. “This unlawful, short-sighted action by President Trump is an affront to that collaborative work happening and to the benefits the monument provides to research, the local economy, and all Americans.”
“Despite the call for public comments, Trump never cared that we, the public, wanted him to keep his hands off our monuments,” said Chris Krupp, public earth guardian at WildEarth Guardians. “He’s not concerned with those of us that camp, hike, fish and hunt. He’d rather give another handout to oil, gas and coal companies.”
President Bill Clinton protected the lands of Grand Staircase as a national monument on Sept. 18, 1996 using the Antiquities Act, a century-old law that has been used by 16 presidents since Theodore Roosevelt to protect some of our nation’s most cherished landscapes and cultural heritage. Congress enacted the law in 1906, granting presidents the authority to create national monuments on federal lands to protect significant natural, cultural, historic or scientific features. The Antiquities Act does not, however, grant presidents the authority to diminish or rescind the monument designations of their predecessors.
“Grand Staircase is a cradle of biodiversity and losing even an acre would be a crime,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Scientists have identified nearly four dozen new species of butterflies here. We must protect this monument’s wildlife, stunning landscapes and cultural treasures for future generations. Trump and the fossil-fuel industry have picked the wrong battle.”
“If the Trump administration thinks Grand Staircase-Escalante can be sold out without a fight, they’re in for a huge surprise,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. “We’ll be seeing them in court.”
“The Trump administration has ignored overwhelming support for the monument. It’s a punch in the face to local businesses who support it, and all of us who treasure it,” said Shelley Silbert, executive director of Great Old Broads for Wilderness. “Our organization got its start in the Escalante Canyons nearly three decades ago and we’ve worked tirelessly for proper management of the national monument since its designation. We will fight this illegal action to take any portion of this monument away from the American people.”
“Americans from across the nation should be outraged by President Trump’s unlawful attempt to eviscerate the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, one of our country’s wildest and most scientifically significant federal public landscapes,” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Utah’s largest conservation organization. “No one will look back on this decision in 15, 25 or 50 years and say Trump did the right thing by protecting less of this magnificent place. And by promoting this illegal act, Utah’s parochial congressional delegation and local politicians have firmly come down on the wrong side of history.”
After President Clinton designated Grand Staircase, an intricate land swap between the state and federal government was completed. Congress passed legislation modifying the monument’s boundaries in 1998 and then approved a land swap in which the state of Utah received 145,000 acres of mineral-rich federal lands and $50 million from the federal treasury. That $50 million has since gone to support Utah’s public schools, and the swap would be incredibly difficult to unravel. The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration established the Land Exchange Distribution Account to dole out the proceeds from these state-federal trades. At least 27 Utah counties have since received a total of $441 million.
Grand Staircase-Escalante has proven a tourism and economic boon for Southern Utah since its designation. Between 2001 and 2015, the population in the two counties bordering Grand Staircase grew by 13 percent, jobs increased 24 percent and real personal income grew 32 percent. Travel and tourism boomed in the region, offering 1,630 jobs around Grand Staircase. In the big picture, recreation from adventure-seekers, hikers, amateur geologists and families simply getting outdoors now funnels more than $12 billion into Utah’s economy.
Editor’s note: Suzanna Jones is an off-the-grid farmer who lives in Walden, Vermont. She was among those arrested protesting the Lowell wind project in 2011. This originally appeared in VTDigger; republished with permission of the author.
There is a painful rift among self-described environmentalists in Vermont, a divide that is particularly evident in the debate on industrial wind. In the past, battle lines were usually drawn between business interests wanting to “develop” the land, and environmentalists seeking to protect it. Today, however, the most ardent advocates of industrial buildout in Vermont’s most fragile ecosystems are environmental organizations. So what is happening?
According to former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges, this change is symptomatic of a broader shift that has taken shape over many years. In his book “Death of the Liberal Class,” Hedges looks at the failure of the Left to defend the values it espouses – a fundamental disconnect between belief and action that has been corrupting to the Left and disastrous for society as a whole. Among other things, he argues, it has turned liberal establishments into mouthpieces for the power elite.
Historically, the liberal class acted as watchdog against the abuses of capitalism and its elites. But over the last century, Hedges claims, it has traded that role for a comfortable “seat at the table” and inclusion in “the club.” This Faustian bargain has created a power vacuum – one that has often been filled by right-wing totalitarian elements (think Nazi Germany and fascist Italy) that rise to prominence by ridiculing and betraying the values that liberals claim to champion.
Caving in to the seduction of careerism, prestige and comforts, the liberal class curtailed its critique of unfettered capitalism, globalization and educational institutions, and silenced the radicals and iconoclasts that gave it moral guidance – “the roots of creative and bold thought that would keep it from being subsumed completely by the power elite.” In other words, “the liberal class sold its soul.”
From education to labor to agriculture and environmentalism, this moral vacuum continues to grow because the public sphere has been abandoned by those who fear being labeled pariahs. Among the consequences, Hedges says, is an inability to take effective action on climate change. This is because few environmentalists are willing to step out of the mainstream to challenge its root causes – economic growth, the profit system, and the market-driven treadmill of consumption.
Hedges’ perspective clarifies a lot. It explains why so many environmental organizations push for “renewable” additions to the nation’s energy supply, rather than a reduction of energy use. It explains why they rant and rail against fossil fuel companies, while studiously averting their eyes from the corporate growth machine as a whole. In their thrall to wealthy donors and “green” developers (some of whom sit on their boards), they’ve traded their concern about the natural world for something called “sustainability” – which means keeping the current exploitive system going.
It also makes clear why Vermont environmental organizations like the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and the Vermont Natural Resources Council – as well as the state’s political leadership – have lobbied so aggressively to prevent residents from having a say regarding energy development in their towns. By denying citizens the ability to defend the ecosystems in which they live, these groups are betraying not only the public, but the natural world they claim to represent. Meanwhile, these purported champions of social justice turn their backs as corporations like Green Mountain Power make Vermonters’ homes unlivable for the sake of “green” energy.
Hedges’ perspective also explains why environmental celebrity Bill McKibben advocates the buildout of industrial wind in our last natural spaces – energy development that would feed the very economy he once exposed as the source of our environmental problems. Behind the green curtain are what McKibben calls his “friends on Wall Street,” whom he consults for advice on largely empty PR stunts designed to convince the public that something is being accomplished, while leaving the engines of economic “progress” intact. Lauded as the world’s “Most Important Environmental Writer” by Time magazine, McKibben’s seat at the table of the elites is secured.
In this way the “watchdogs” have been effectively muzzled: now they actually help the powerful maintain control, by blocking the possibility for systemic solutions to emerge.
Environmentalism has suffered dearly at the hand of this disabled Left. It is no longer about the protection of our wild places from the voracious appetite of industrial capitalism: it is instead about maintaining the comfort levels that Americans feel entitled to without completely devouring the resources needed (at least for now). Based on image, fakery and betrayal, it supports the profit system while allowing those in power to appear “green.” This myopic, empty endeavor may be profitable for a few, but its consequences for the planet as a whole are fatal.
Despite the platitudes of its corporate and government backers, industrial wind has not reduced Vermont’s carbon emissions. Its intermittent nature makes it dependent on gas-fired power plants that inefficiently ramp up and down with the vicissitudes of the wind. Worse, it has been exposed as a Renewable Energy Credit shell game that disguises and enables the burning of fossil fuels elsewhere. It also destroys the healthy natural places we need as carbon “sinks,” degrades wildlife habitat, kills bats and eagles, pollutes headwaters, fills valuable wetlands, polarizes communities, and makes people sick – all so we can continue the meaningless acts of consumption that feed our economic system.
Advocates for industrial wind say we need to make sacrifices. True enough. But where those sacrifices come from is at the heart of our dilemma. The sacrifices need to come from the bloated human economy and those that profit from it, not from the land base.
We are often told that we must be “realistic.” In other words, we should accept that the artificial construct of industrial capitalism – with its cars, gadgets, mobility and financial imperatives – is reality. But this, too, is a Faustian bargain: in exchange we lose our ability to experience the sacred in the natural world, and put ourselves on the path to extinction.
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the United States, Colorado River v. Colorado, was filed September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
Denver, CO – The Colorado Attorney General has threatened the attorney who filed the first federal rights of nature lawsuit with sanctions if he does not voluntarily withdraw the Complaint.
Rights of Nature activists will gather at dusk (4:30 pm) on Friday, December 1st, outside the Alfred A. Arraj Federal Courthouse, 901 19th St, Denver, CO 80294 in a display of creative resistance. They will demand that the Colorado River have her day in court, condemn the Attorney General’s intimidatory tactics, and call for the American legal system to grant the Colorado River Ecosystem the same rights as corporations.
Attorney Jason Flores-Williams, in a letter he sent to the Colorado Attorney General’s office Tuesday morning, November 27th, stated, “The Attorney General’s threat of sanctions is a legally baseless attempt to harass and intimidate a civil rights attorney in good standing who has dedicated his career to protecting the powerless from the powerful.” A copy of the letter is published here.
“They didn’t threaten to sanction Exxon attorneys for lying about global warming, or Bank of America attorneys for fraudulently foreclosing on people’s homes, or Nestle attorneys for privatizing our water and selling it back to us—but try to equal the playing field between corporations and the environment and they try to personally damage you,” Flores-Williams has also pointed out. “It’s the playbook.”
Will Falk, a writer, attorney, and one of the next friends in the lawsuit, denounced the Attorney General’s threats, saying, “The Attorney General is duty-bound to work solely for the good of the people, but through these threats the Attorney General is working solely for the good of corporations.”
IN AN ATTEMPT TO INTIMIDATE US AND SILENCE THE RIGHTS OF NATURE MOVEMENT, THE COLORADO ATTORNEY GENERAL HAS THREATENED SANCTIONS AGAINST OUT LAWSUIT, COLORADO RIVER V. COLORADO.
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the United States, Colorado River v. Colorado, was filed September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
Denver, CO—The Colorado Attorney General has issued an ultimatum to the attorney who filed the first federal rights of nature law suit: voluntarily withdraw the Complaint or face sanctions.
“They didn’t threaten to sanction Exxon attorneys for lying about global warming, or Bank of America attorneys for fraudulently foreclosing on people’s homes, or Nestle attorneys for privatizing our water and selling it back to us—but try to equal the playing field between corporations and the environment and they try to personally damage you,” says Jason Flores-Williams. “It’s the playbook.”
Will Falk, a writer, attorney, and one of the next friends in the lawsuit, denounced the Attorney General’s threats, saying, “The Attorney General is duty-bound to work solely for the good of the people, but through these threats the Attorney General is working solely for the good of corporations.”
The response to the Attorney General stating the reasons for why the suit will not be withdrawn can be found here.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 27, 2017.
