Saturday, October 31, 2015

Senators to Exxon: Are You Still Funding Climate Denial?

Senators to Exxon: Are You Still Funding Climate Denial?
The full text of the letter is below.  The PDF of the signed letter is available here.
----------------------------------
October 28, 2015
Dear Mr. Tillerson,
We’ve been following ExxonMobil’s response to the recent investigations into your company by the Los Angeles TimesInsideClimate News, and others.  You and other Exxon spokespeople acknowledge that Exxon has been conducting climate change research since the 1970s.  A post on ExxonMobil’s website on October 21, 2015, quotes Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil’s vice president of public and government affairs, as saying ExxonMobil has worked to develop “climate science in partnership with governments and academic institutions, and did and continue[s] to do that work in an open and transparent way.”  
Over the years, we have seen Exxon support climate denial and anti-climate policy advocacy through a variety of foundations and advocacy groups, such as the Heartland Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  In the mid-2000s, ExxonMobil pulled its funding from some of those organizations. Soon thereafter, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund began to increasingly support climate denial groups.  According to research by Dr. Robert Brulle of Drexel University, the Donors Trust/Donors Capital Fund operation does double duty:  it is the “central component” and “predominant funder” of the denier apparatus, and at the same time it is the “black box that conceals the identity of contributors.”
The correlation between ExxonMobil’s decision not to fund some groups openly associated with climate change denial, and the increase in anonymous funding from a group that does is “suggestive of an effort”1 to simply reroute its support.  That would not be consistent with Mr. Cohen’s claim that ExxonMobil continues to work in an “open and transparent way.”  To assess the accuracy of Mr. Cohen’s statement, please detail whether ExxonMobil, the Exxon Foundation, or any of your company’s affiliates has contributed or matched employee donations to Donors Trust and Donors Capital since 2000, and if so, how much each has contributed. 
Sincerely,
Sheldon Whitehouse
Richard Blumenthal
Edward J. Markey
Elizabeth Warren

South Dakota scientist says USDA censored pesticide research and its affect on bees

USDA researcher files whistleblower complaint alleging retaliation

itemprop

MICHAEL REILLY, ASSOCIATED PRESS - AP


A highly regarded federal scientist filed a whistleblower complaint Wednesday against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), charging that he was punished for publicizing research showing a link between pesticides and the decline in bees and other pollinators.

by Josephine Marcotty, The Star Tribune, October 29, 2015


A highly regarded federal scientist filed a whistleblower complaint Wednesday against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), charging that he was punished for publicizing research showing a link between pesticides and the decline in bees and other pollinators.
Jonathan Lundgren, a USDA entomologist in Brookings, S.D., said in civil service documents that while the agency did not stop publication of the research, supervisors harassed him, tried to stop him from speaking out, and interfered with new projects.
His complaint caps months of speculation among beekeepers and other scientists who have been following his case. It was filed within the federal civil service system with support by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a national nonprofit that defends government scientists on controversial environmental issues.
“We think the USDA is reflecting complaints from corporate stakeholders,” said Jeff Ruch, the group’s executive director. “This research is drawing consternation, which flows down the USDA chain of command to the researchers doing the work.”
Officials from the Agricultural Research Service, the USDA branch where Lundgren works, declined to answer questions about the case. In a prepared statement, spokesman Christopher Bentley said the agency is committed to scientific integrity.
“The USDA has implemented a strong scientific integrity policy to promote a culture of excellence and transparency,” he said. “That includes procedures for staff to report any perceived interference with their work, seek resolution, and receive protection … for doing so.”
Lundgren is just one of many USDA scientists and employees who have come to PEER with similar complaints about harassment related to pesticide and pollinator research, Ruch said. But, he added, so far Lundgren is the only one willing to go public.

Lundgren’s decision was applauded by beekeepers, who long have regarded him as a leading scientific voice on the risks of the class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, which have been implicated in the decline of honeybees and other insects.


Steve Ellis, a Minnesota beekeeper who has been on the forefront of the neonicotinoid fight, said he was glad to see the USDA “called out on the rug.”

Other scientists have publicly expressed concern about scientific integrity at the agency where Lundgren works. This month, a co-researcher came to his defense in a published research paper, saying in a postscript that the agency had forced Lundgren to remove his name from it.

“I believe this action raises a serious question concerning policy neutrality toward scientific inquiry,” wrote Scott Fausti, a professor at South Dakota State University.

Lundgren did not respond to a request for an interview, but Ruch said he has been fighting with the research service internally for two years.

“His going public was a last resort,” he said. “He’s at the brink of professional elimination.”

Ruch said that Lundgren, an 11-year veteran of the agency, was highly regarded until 2014, when he published a research paper showing that neonicotinoids were harmful to monarch butterflies.

According to Lundgren’s complaint, his supervisor angrily confronted him about publishing a paper about a “sensitive” issue without permission. In the following weeks, he was widely quoted in the news media about the role of neonicotinoids in the decline of insects, and he was an external reviewer on a report on the same issue published by the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group.

That was when “improper reprisal, interference and hindrance of my research and career began in earnest,” he said in his complaint. His supervisors pressured him not to talk to the media anymore, and weeks later they launched an investigation into him for “unprofessional behavior.”

His supervisors also thwarted new research projects, and harassed him about minor things like using an outside e-mail account and travel documentation.

A year ago, Lundgren filed a complaint with the USDA, charging that it was violating its scientific integrity policy, but the complaint was not upheld internally. Last August, he was suspended for two weeks without pay.

But a letter from one of Lundgren’s supervisors, also released by PEER, tells a different story of Lundgren’s case.

The letter said he was suspended because of a complaint by one of his lab employees, which triggered a five-month investigation, as well as falsification of travel charges, failure to follow supervisory instructions and other infractions.

His allegations of retaliation are unfounded, the letter said, and a two-week suspension was justified because he demonstrated “blatant disregard for agency rules and regulations.”

“Your continuing to engage in misconduct despite the imposition of previous disciplinary action suggest a low potential for rehabilitation,” the letter said.

Ruch said the whistleblower complaint will expose the internal record of Lundgren’s case to outside civil service scrutiny. It will produce internal agency documents, testimony from managers and employees, and require an evidentiary hearing before a panel of administrative judges.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Evidence stretching back 40,000 years shows that global warming will increase drying in a region of East Africa where drought already causes humanitarian crises

by Alex Kirby, Climate News Network, October 10, 2015

LONDON – One of Africa’s most volatile regions has become increasingly dry over the last century and faces a future of rising tension if this trend continues, US researchers say.

They say the rate of drying in the Horn of Africa is both unusual in the context of the last 2,000 years and in step with human-influenced warming. And they think the drying will continue as the region warms.

“Right now, aid groups are expecting a wetter, greener future for the Horn of Africa, but our findings show that the exact opposite is occurring,” says one of the study’s co-authors, Peter deMenocal, who heads the Center for Climate and Life at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

“The region is drying, and will continue to do so with rising carbon emissions.” The study, published in the journal Science Advances, was based on evidence stretching back for 40,000 years.

Sediment core

The researchers used a sediment core they had extracted from the Gulf of Aden to infer past changes in temperature and aridity. After matching the core’s record with 20th-century observations, they concluded that drying is likely to continue across Somalia, Djibouti and Ethiopia.

That contradicts other models, which have suggested that future warming might bring rainier weather patterns that could benefit East Africa.

“What we see in the paleoclimate record from the last 2,000 years is evidence that the Horn of Africa is drier when there are warm conditions on Earth, and wetter when it is colder,” says lead author Jessica Tierney, associate professor of geosciences at the University of Arizona.

Global-scale models used to predict future changes as the climate warms suggest that the region should become wetter, primarily during the “short rains” season from September to November.

However, the new study suggests that those gains may be offset by declining rainfall during the “long rains” season from March to May, on which the region’s rain-fed agriculture relies.

The authors say the region has been racked with political instability and violence as it has dried. The Horn of Africa has suffered droughts every few years in recent decades − creating humanitarian crises as famine and violence spread.

In Somalia, as the political situation deteriorated amid the droughts of the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the country, and pirates began raiding ships off the coast.

The 40,000-year-old sediment core has already yielded insights into Africa’s climate. In 2013, Tierney and deMenocal showed that the Sahara, which once used to burst into verdant life with regular rainfall, suddenly dried out over a century or two, during a warm period about 5,000 years ago – not more gradually, as many researchers had thought.

Their work provided evidence that climate shifts can happen quite suddenly, even if the forces driving them are gradual.

This latest study uses isotopes from leaf waxes found in the sediment sample to compare rates of drying over the past 2,000 years.

Plants reflect the environment that sustains them. When the climate is drier, leaf waxes are more enriched with deuterium, or heavy hydrogen isotopes, while leaf waxes from wetter climates reflect the more abundant rainfall through the presence of the normal hydrogen isotopes.

The researchers found an increasing shift toward heavy hydrogen in the last century as the climate − which had experienced a wet period during the Little Ice Age (1450-1850 AD) − dried out.

Climate modelling

Their findings suggest that climate modelling, frequently done at a global scale, would benefit from region-specific studies with higher-resolution results in high-impact areas such as the Horn of Africa

Tierney says: “If we can simulate rainfall in these arid tropical and subtropical regions better, we can understand the future impact of climate change.”

The development agency Oxfam says Ethiopia is facing a major emergency, with 4.5 million people needing food aid because of successive poor rains this year.

Oxfam’s representative in Ethiopia describes the situation − attributed to the El Niño periodic climate phenomenon in the Pacific − as “the start of a major emergency, which is expected to be serious and long.”

Meanwhile, parts of West Africa are suffering from the aftermath of severe floods − also attributed to El Niño − that have ruined crops and destroyed homes in Burkina Faso and Niger. 

2.6 Billion Pounds of Monsanto’s Carcinogen Glyphosate Sprayed on U.S. Farmland in Past Two Decades

by Mary Ellen Custin, Environmental Working Group, EcoWatch, October 12, 2015
Farmers sprayed 2.6 billion pounds of Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicide on U.S. agricultural land between 1992 and 2012, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Glyphosate has been the go-to weed killer for use on genetically engineered, or GMO, crops since the mid-1990s, when Monsanto introduced its “Roundup Ready” corn and soybeans.
Click here to watch a time-lapse video of the spread of glyphosate across America over the 20-year period.
Photo credit: USGS, Pesticide National Synthesis Project
Photo credit: USGS, Pesticide National Synthesis Project
Recent research has found that exposure to glyphosate doubles the risk of developing cancer. Since the use of the herbicide on GMO crops has exploded in recent years, it’s no wonder people overwhelmingly want GMO-containing food products to be labeled.
Here are the states that spray the most glyphosate year by year:
Photo credit: USGS, Pesticide National Synthesis Project
Photo credit: USGS, Pesticide National Synthesis Project
Glyphosate primarily blankets fields of GMO corn and GMO soybeans—the two most widely planted crops in the U.S. This table shows how many acres of these herbicide-tolerant GMOs were grown in 2014 in the states that produced the most.
Photo credit: USDA NASS Acreage Report
Photo credit: USDA NASS Acreage Report
But no matter where you live, you should have the right to know if the food your family is eating was produced with GMOs. While people in 64 other countries have that right already, Americans do not.
Tell Washington that it’s time to stand with the 90% of Americans who want mandatory GMO labeling.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/10/12/monsanto-glyphosate/

Exxon's conflicting concerns about climate change: A tale of 2 investigations

by Malavika Vyawahare, E&E reporter, ClimateWire, October 28, 2015

Many environmentalists believe that the oil and gas major Exxon, now known as Exxon Mobil Corp., is on the wrong side of history when it comes to climate change. Two new investigations into the company's early history of climate research have deepened the antagonism toward the company.
In recent weeks, these probes into the corporation's early climate research have painted a picture of a behemoth that not only led path-breaking research on climate, but in the process became aware of the financial risks to its own business from climate change decades ago. Then, it decided to take measures to protect its business interests while publicly claiming that uncertainty about climate change was too great to warrant immediate action.
"Almost uniquely, Exxon could have short-circuited 25 years of faux debate. Had they merely acknowledged that the scientists spreading the alarm were right, the world could have gotten to work," said Bill McKibben, one of the more vocal critics of Exxon's behavior. The investigations even generated a Twitter hashtag: #Exxonknew.
Gas prices
Exxon Mobil Corp.'s fortunes flourished in April 2014, when this picture was taken in Brownsville, Texas. Since then, gasoline prices and Exxon's reputation have taken some hits. Photo by Brad Doherty, courtesy of AP Images.
In recent years, media attention focused on the company's vociferous doubts about the emerging climate science, but the earlier chapter of its research history has remained buried till now. It came to light because of the efforts of two groups of highly qualified and competitive groups of journalists who had the patience to piece together the oil giant's outside messaging and its trail of conflicting internal research.
On Thursday, InsideClimate News (ICN), an independent, nonprofit, news organization, published the last dispatch in its six-part series "Exxon: The Road Not Taken." The next day, the Los Angeles Times, in collaboration with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, published the second installment in their series about Exxon that is anchored around the same premise. The first piece of the Times-Columbia series was posted October 9, 2015. It explored Exxon's climate research in the Arctic and detailed how it kept both the public and its own shareholders in the dark about the perceived business threat from climate change.
The Columbia project was a yearlong excavation of hundreds of documents housed in university archives and other institutions of public record, review of research papers, and interviews with experts and former employees at Exxon. The reporting, mostly carried out by recent graduates of the journalism school, is led by Susanne Rust, an investigative journalist who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 for her reporting on the presence of bisphenol A, an industrial chemical also known as BPA, in everyday household items.
Among the professors overseeing the project is the dean of Columbia Journalism School, Steve Coll, a two-time Pulitzer winner who is also the author of "Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power."
As early as 2012, Coll suggested that there was a backstory to Exxon's public position on climate change. In an interview with PBS's "Frontline," he observed: "In time, perhaps we will understand what the internal reaction among scientists within Exxon Mobil was to this campaigning, because there's some evidence that within Exxon Mobil, there was study going on about how global warming could affect oil discovery, for example."
He later suggested in the same interview that the company could become the target of litigation by victims of climate change, which would uncover internal records about what its own scientists were telling the company about climate change.

Columbia's probe begins in the fall of 2014

No major litigation of that nature was brought against Exxon. However, inspired by Coll's findings, Columbia Journalism School launched a reporting project in the fall of 2014 to investigate exactly this aspect of Exxon's research. "Much of the inspiration was from his previous reporting," Rust said, explaining why the school started to look into Exxon. "But of course, a year into it, the story ideas, lines of investigation, have evolved as information has come in."
InsideClimate News is a small, Brooklyn-based outfit of about a dozen journalists that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2013. It is funded in part by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Ford Foundation and the Marisla Foundation, and ICN launched its own project earlier this year. Its team stumbled upon the story, according to Neela Banerjee, one of the key reporters on the project. As she described it, it was "almost by accident." Banerjee is a veteran environment reporter who has spent many years at The Wall Street JournalThe New York Times and most recently at the Los Angeles Times, where she covered environment and energy before joining ICN in December 2014.
"At the beginning of the year, we were looking into early climate research by academics and the government," she said. "In the process, speaking to some scientists, someone mentioned, I can't remember who, I wasn't involved in the project then, that Exxon had scientists who had submitted peer-reviewed papers in the early 1980s."
The big break for her came in the form of a 1979 congressional hearing transcript. "I got, unrelated to the project, a transcript of a 1979 congressional hearing on climate change," Banerjee said, "As a lark, I was just sitting there, procrastinating or something, and I decided to search the PDF to see if someone from Exxon was there, too," she said. As luck would have it, she hit a name: Henry Shaw.
Shaw, it turned out, was heading an in-house effort at Exxon to measure carbon dioxide concentrations in seawater and the atmosphere. According to part of his biography that is available on the ICN website, he was collaborating with Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory on this project that involved equipping one of Exxon's oil tankers with instruments for sampling carbon dioxide.
Banerjee made this discovery in February of this year, and, according to her, for the next seven months, the ICN team set out to unearth everything it could about Exxon's early climate research program. During the process of hopscotching from one source to the other, Banerjee said, the team became aware that a team at Columbia was working on a similar project. "We weren't surprised, we knew that they were working on it," Banerjee said of her reaction to the story in the Times.

Crisscrossing each other's paths

"When we called our sources, some of them would ask, 'Are you from Columbia J-School?' so we knew," said John H. Cushman, Jr., the principal editor for the Exxon project at ICN. In a recent interview, he described it as hearing the "footsteps" of another journalist, which sometimes happens in the world of investigative journalism. "Later, we heard that they [Columbia] had partnered with the LA Times and that they were going to publish in spring of 2016," Banerjee said. ICN wasted no time in getting its reporting together, according to Cushman. The knowledge that another team was in hot pursuit of the same story lent its project a sense of urgency.
The Times published the first part of its series earlier than expected, less than three weeks after ICN came out with its first story. "The time was ripe for this kind of reporting. It's not at all surprising other journalists were looking into this. Climate change is arguably the most important environmental issue -- if not straight-up issue -- of our time," Rust said of the Times and Columbia's work, adding that after a year of reporting they believed they had enough to run the story.
Despite being centered on the same company, the reporting from the two series follows different document trails that intersect at some points. In the work that has been published till now, they zoom in on different eras of the company's research. The ICN series tracks an arc that starts in the late 1970s and '80s and traces it into the early 2000s, when the company had established a reputation as a climate change opponent, at least in its public posturing.
The first part of the Times-Columbia series takes off from the 1990s, when it would seem the gulf between what Exxon was practicing in its business and what it was saying with regard to climate change was already very wide. The second part scrutinizes how the company pivoted from being a leader in climate change research to a leader among the skeptics.
The stories seemed to have hit their mark, and not just with environmentalists. The revelations sparked calls for investigations into Exxon Mobil for potential fraud for concealing what it knew about climate change. Presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) shot off a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking for a task force to determine if the executives could be prosecuted. Two House Democrats also wrote to the attorney general asking for a probe into the company's actions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Ken Cohen, vice president of public and government affairs at Exxon, characterized the fallout as political theater and has maintained that Exxon did not suppress its early research and that it has continued to invest in climate change research. He accused both ICN and the Times of cherry-picking documentary evidence to fit a narrative. "We take great exception to what is contained in the ICN piece and the LA Times, they are taking great liberties with the facts, the allegations are inaccurate, and it appears to me that they are deliberately misleading," Cohen said in a recent interview.
Banerjee dismissed the argument that ICN's reporting was selective. "If we had cherry-picked, we would have just included the quotes," she said. The Times did a story on Exxon and the Arctic but did not digitize the documents, she added, but "we did." The trove of almost 30 digitized documents, available on ICN's website, however, does not include the 1979 transcript that led it to investigate Exxon.
"We are happy that the LA Times investigation reached the same conclusion," Cushman at ICN said, emphasizing that both ICN's and the Times' series complement each other. He went on to compare the way the two teams made inquiries into Exxon to how one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in human history was made. "Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution," he said.
Twitter: @MalavikaVy Email: malavikav@eenews.net

http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060027024

Exxon's Funding of Climate Deniers: Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading on Exxon's Funding of Climate Deniers:

ExxonMobil's Funding of Climate Science Denial,DeSmog Blog, October 2015


Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years,” by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, July 8, 2015.
Exxon: The Road Not Taken” series by Inside Climate News. See in particular “Exxon Sowed Doubt About Climate Science for Decades by Stressing Uncertainty,” by David Hasemyer and John H. Cushman Jr., InsideClimate News, October 22, 2015.
What Exxon Knew About the Earth's Melting Arctic,” by Sara Jerving, Katie Jennings, Masako Melissa Hirsch and Susanne Rust, Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2015.
Exxon's climate lie: 'No corporation has ever done anything this big or bad,'” by Bill McKibben, The Guardian, October 14, 2015.
Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago,” by Shannon Hall, Scientific American, October 26, 2015.
Should Exxon Be Prosecuted for Suppressing Climate Science?” by Joseph Davis, Climate Science and Policy Watch, October 27, 2015.

JOINT LETTER: THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE MUST INVESTIGATE EXXONMOBIL

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 10/30/2015
CONTACT: RL Miller, rlm@climatehawksvote.com

Leaders of many of the country’s largest environmental groups, civil rights organizations, and indigenous people’s movements issued a joint letter today calling on the Department of Justice to investigate ExxonMobil, after revelations that the company knew about climate change as early as the 1970s, but chose to mislead the public about the crisis in order to maximize their profits from fossil fuels.

“ExxonMobil has known for decades that their product is deadly, and then used tobacco-industry tactics to cover that up. It's time for them to pay," said Climate Hawks Vote President RL Miller. "We at Climate Hawks Vote are proud to have so many groups join our campaign to demand a federal investigation of their climate crimes.”

The letter is a remarkable show of unity, with groups ranging from the Audubon Society to the Foundation of Women in Hip Hop, and will help keep the spotlight on Exxon as new revelations continue to emerge. Over the last week, pressure has continued to build for a federal investigation, with all of the Democratic presidential candidates—Martin O'Malley, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton—calling on the DOJ to act.

Climate Hawks Vote was the first group to call for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch a racketeering investigation of ExxonMobil and the fossil-fuel industry in response to the recent news reports.

Here is the full text of the letter and list of signatories:

Dear Attorney General Lynch,

As leaders of some of the nation’s environmental, indigenous peoples and civil rights groups, we’re writing to ask that you initiate a federal probe into the conduct of ExxonMobil. New revelations in the Los Angeles Times and the Pulitzer-prize-winning InsideClimate News strongly suggest that the corporation knew about the dangers of climate change even as it funded efforts at climate denial and systematically misled the public.

Given the damage that has already occurred from climate change—particularly in the poorest communities of our nation and our planet—and that will certainly occur going forward, these revelations should be viewed with the utmost apprehension. They are reminiscent—though potentially much greater in scale—than similar revelations about the tobacco industry.

These journalists have provided a remarkable roadmap to this corporation’s potential misconduct. We would ask that you follow that map wherever it may lead, employing all the tools at your disposal to uncover the truth.

Signed,

Margie Alt, Executive Director of Environment America
Kenny Ausubel, Nina Simons, Founders of Bioneers
Sally Bingham, President and Founder of Interfaith Power and Light
May Boeve, Bill McKibben, Founders of 350.org
Michael Brune, Executive Director of Sierra Club
Robert Bullard, Author and John Muir Award winner, 2013
Andrea Carmen, Executive Director of International Indian Treaty Council
Faith Gemmill, Executive Director of REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands)
Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network
James Hansen, Director, Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions Program, Columbia University Earth Institute
Reverend Fletcher Harper, Executive Director of Greenfaith
David Helvarg, Executive Director of Blue Frontier
Gene Karpinski, President of League of Conservation Voters
Jane Kleeb, Bold Nebraska
Steve Kretzmann, Executive Director and Founder of Oil Change International
Fred Krupp, President of Environmental Defense Fund
Winona LaDuke, Executive Director of Honor the Earth
Annie Leonard, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA
RL Miller, President of Climate Hawks Vote
Matt Nelson, Managing Director of Presente.org
Brant Olson, Campaign Director at Climate Truth
Erich Pica, President of Friends of the Earth
Cindy Shogan, Executive Director of Alaska Wilderness League
Reverend Fred Small, President of Creation Coalition
Gus Speth, Former Dean Yale School of Forestry and the Environment
Tom Steyer, Founder of NextGen
Rhea Suh, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council
Vien Truong, Director of Green for All
Joe Uehlein, Executive Director of Labor Network for Sustainability
Tripp Van Noppen, President of Earthjustice
David Yarnold, President of the Audubon Society
Reverend Lennox Yearwood, President of Hip Hop Caucus
Trip Van Nopen, Earth Justice
Rich Stolz, Executive Director of OneAmerica
Resilience Collaborative, LLC
A Philip Randolph Institute
Green America
Energy Action Coalition
Divest Invest Individual
Bean Soup Times
Ecumenical Poverty Initiative
Beats Rhymes & Relief
Freddie Gray Project
Beloved Community Center
Neighbors United of Southeast Greensboro, NC
The Foundation of Women in Hip Hop
The Gathering for Justice/Justice League NYC
J Dilla Foundation
J.A.M.N.
http://www.climatehawksvote.com/the_department_of_justice_must_investigate_exxonmobil