John Kerry says Trump’s climate policies ‘destroyed’ US credibility on world stage – as

Leanna First-Arai for the Guardian, and Carrington Tatum for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism:

The only things Karmen Johnson-Tutwiler has left to remind her of her mother are a few photographs and just under a quarter acre of land covered in bramble and wildflowers that backs up to a railroad track. When her mother, Sharon Watson, died in 2010, she and her sister inherited it. “She always told me it was important to have a piece of property as your own,” Johnson-Tutwiler said.

While visiting as a child, Johnson-Tutwiler coasted on bikes down hilly roads alongside the property, passing a few modest houses and land where residents grew fruit and vegetables to feed their families. The land is on the edge of a neighborhood called Boxtown, a community built by formerly enslaved people and annexed by the city of Memphis during the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, residents of the neighborhood, which is 99% Black, had to organize to demand the city extend essential services to it, such as water lines, indoor plumbing and bus routes. Like other neighborhoods in south-west Memphis, Boxtown is surrounded by industrial facilities, including a Valero oil refinery.

Since February 2020, the Byhalia Pipeline, a joint venture of Valero and Plains All American Pipeline, has been trying to gain control of part of Johnson-Tutwiler’s land, which is along the route of the proposed 49-mile Byhalia Connection oil pipeline. The route would run through multiple majority-Black neighborhoods in south-west Memphis, and researchers and activists say a spill could threaten the city’s public water source: an aquifer the size of Lake Michigan.

Johnson-Tutwiler does not currently reside on the stretch of land the company wants – .08 of an acre temporarily and .11 of an acre permanently – but it would prevent her or other family members from ever building a house. “That was the only thing that I had that my mom left with us that we could pass down through the lines of the family,” she said.

The legal battle over the proposed pipeline has become a flashpoint in a national conversation about environmental justice and eminent domain, a right of the government to seize private property for public use, which is increasingly being used by oil and gas companies to take private land.

Johnson-Tutwiler and her sister are among at least 10 south-west Memphis families who have already lost or stand to lose some property rights to Byhalia Pipeline. The company has been trying to buy easements, or rights to pieces of property, from Shelby county landowners since 2020. If they refuse, the company has been taking them to court using eminent domain, a power embedded in the fifth amendment and conferred to states through the fourteenth amendment. The federal government and states have allowed energy companies, including oil and gas pipeline builders, to use it for more than 100 years; since fracking was commercialized in 2007, fossil fuel companies have used it more often to build projects including the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.

On 14 May, a circuit court judge will hear oral arguments from Byhalia Connection, and their opponents, to determine whether any crude oil pipeline developer, including Byhalia Pipeline, has the right to exercise the power of eminent domain under Tennessee law.

It will be the first decision of its kind to be made in a Tennessee court, said Scott Crosby, an attorney representing the landowners, and the outcome could set legal precedent. Legal scholars and activists argue the continued use of eminent domain for fossil fuel development – a power granted by federal law for natural gas pipelines that cross state lines but at the state level for oil pipelines and energy plants – is due for reform amid climate and racial justice crises.

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