Michael Copley
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Hamilton was ousted from FEMA last year after telling lawmakers he didn't think the agency in charge of responding to disasters should be eliminated.
He made the statement shortly after Kristi Noem, then Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had reiterated Trump's wish to get rid of FEMA.
But Noem has gone from DHS, which oversees FEMA, and a council of disaster experts appointed by Trump recently recommended overhauling but not eliminating FEMA.
The council's recommendations include making it simpler for disaster survivors to get money and raising the threshold for the federal government to get involved in disaster recovery.
The Justice Department says Minnesota should be barred from suing the fossil fuel industry over the impacts of climate change.
Because, it argues, the federal government has sole authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Minnesota's lawsuit, filed in 2020, alleges the fossil fuel industry misled people for decades about the dangers of burning fossil fuels.
The state says it's already suffered billions in economic damage from rising temperatures.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said this new DOJ suit is meritless and should be dismissed.
The oil and gas industry says the same for climate lawsuits like Minnesota's, and that climate change is an issue for Congress to deal with, not the courts.
The Interior Department said companies agreed to abandon plans for an offshore wind farm off the coast of New York and New Jersey and another offshore California and instead invest in conventional energy projects, including natural gas.
In exchange, the administration said it will return nearly $900 million the companies paid for offshore wind leases.
The administration announced a similar deal in March.
It calls for the government to pay a company nearly a billion dollars to invest in fossil fuel projects instead of building wind farms off the Atlantic coast.
Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has said he's investigating whether the March agreement is legal.
Plaintiffs claim that State Farm's alleged cost-cutting initiative relies on two main tactics, assessing insurance claims using definitions and exclusions that don't appear in customers' policies and restricting claims adjusters from independently deciding when roofs should be replaced.
Oklahoma's Republican Attorney General Gantner Drummond has joined one lawsuit against State Farm, saying the company's alleged misconduct undermines confidence in the insurance system and exposes homeowners to unacceptable financial risk.