​We’re delighted to welcome back Poppy Alexander, a founding partner at the law firm Whistleblower Partners, a law firm dedicated to representing whistleblowers reporting fraud and misconduct in:

• Healthcare
• Procurement
• Securities and Commodities
• Taxes
• Money Laundering and Sanctions Evasion
• Customs
• Environmental Remediation
• Vehicle Safety

Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in qui tam lawsuits, as well as under the various agency whistleblower programs including those administered by the Internal Revenue Service, Securities and Exchange Commission, FinCEN, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Department of Transportation. Poppy’s practice focuses on issues of international corruption and financial misconduct, with a specialty in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering cases. She writes and speaks regularly about emerging topics in financial fraud, including sanctions violations, SPACs, and cryptocurrency.
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We last spoke with Poppy back in July of 2022 when she had already established an impressive track record representing whistleblowers at Constantine Cannon. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 2012. She was the co-editor-in-chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and an active participant in the Human Rights Clinic, working on issues related to corporate accountability for human rights violations in Africa and military abuses in Southeast Asia. She was awarded the Dean’s Award for Community Leadership in recognition for her contributions to the school community. Poppy has been named to the Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016. Prior to law school, Poppy worked on election reform issues before beginning graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied political and critical theory.

We’ve invited Poppy to talk about her new work, and her new firm, Whisteblower Partners.
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Topics Discussed Include:

• Poppy’s new law firm, Whistleblower Partners. Why Poppy left her old firm to establish this new legal partnership in March 2024. She describes a comprehensive approach to whistleblowers and not just file cases.
• The laws Whistleblower Partners uses in environmental cases and how they have changed since the episode we published in July 2023. Qui tam False Claims Act, SEC, IRS, Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships (APPS), and various wildlife protection laws.
• Examples of Whistleblower Partners victories.
• Pitfalls of whistleblowing and filing lawsuits and administrative tips programs.

Further Reading / Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• Mighty Earth vs. JBS in protecting the Brazilian rainforest
• The Securities and Exchange Commission’s 90th birthday

Support the show

Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!

We’re pleased to have as our guest Melissa Valliant, Director of Communications for Beyond Plastics, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending plastic polution. She grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and graduated from Syracuse University with a plan to pursue magazine journalism. Somewhere along the way, she became hooked on environmental conservation and discovered a love for leveraging her communications abilities to make the world a better place. Melissa had her first letter to the editor published in a kids' science magazine at the age of 11 and has since been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, among others. Prior to her role at Beyond Plastics, she managed communications for Oceana's plastics campaign and worked for the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Topics Discussed Include:

• How environmental and health problems are connected with micro plastic and nano plastic particles and why scientists are alarmed.
• Why only 9 percent of plastic waste recycled.
• How the plastics lobby/greenwashing industries that were against abatement and reform.
• How the Fossil Fuel believes they can make up for future oil market loss with plastics production.
• How plastic manufacturing is highly polluting, where in the country we produce it, and impacts on local communities.
• What is currently being done to reform and what ultimately needs to be done to start to fix the problem.

Further Reading / Topics Discussed in this Episode:

· Consider the positive and aspects of “The crying Indian” commercial on American society.

· How do prominent projects such as “Mr. Trash Wheel” encourage plastics removal/recycling versus reduction of plastics production affect public perception?

· Media Briefing on Polution in Port Arthur, TX

· Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act

· The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act

· Beyond Plastics Affiliates

· Beyond Plastics petitions

Support the show

Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!

Doug founded Earth Track to more effectively integrate information on energy subsidies. For the past three decades, he has written extensively on natural resource subsidies for organizations such as the International Institute for Sustainable Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Stockholm Environment Institute. He has analyzed scores of government programs and made important developments in subsidy valuation techniques. He has provided input on subsidy reform legislation, served as a peer reviewer on subsidy papers from all over the world, and has published his own work in major journals and as book chapters. In recent years, his work has focused on subsidies to fossil fuels, nuclear power, and the impact of multi-sector natural resource subsidies on biodiversity and critical habitats.

Working collaboratively with other organizations, Earth Track focuses on ways to more effectively align the incentives of key stakeholder groups and to leverage market forces to help address complex environmental challenges.

He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BA in economics from Wesleyan University.

Topics Discussed Include:

• Government subsidies - why they are important to think about as we try to decarbonize our economy.
• How oil and gas subsides work in general and why they are outdated and harmful to climate goals.
• How taxpayers’ subsidies distort the market for oil and gas produced in Permian Basin.
• The role of different levels of government in supporting oil and gas and whether there are specific challenges trying to reform state-level policies.
• How some subsides were passed in the 1920s when oil extraction was a new industry and haven’t been changed to match the times.
• How three quarters of the subsides support exploration and production, potentially creating a disincentive to phasing out fossil fuel energy.
• How transparency of information on costs and how is paid is often lacking
• Particularly egregious subsidies in the federal realm, in Texas, and New Mexico.
• Examples of federal and state regulations and environmental exemptions that allow the fossil fuel production pollution to walk away from their production pollution and how that is affecting the Permian Basin’s environment for the people.

Further Reading:

· The High Cost Well subsidy

· The Good Jobs First organization

Support the show

Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!