The argument against natural gas got a boost this week, when a congressional investigation turned up evidence that oil and gas companies were using diesel gas to extract gas from the ground.
Natural gas companies have insisted that their newly popular hydraulic fracturing (known as "fracking") techniques are safe, but as Care2's Kristina Chew reports, "environmentalists and regulators have become increasingly concerned that the fracking chemicals-including toluene, xylene and benzene, a carcinogen, which are all from diesel gas---are seeping out into underground sources of drinking water, in violation of the Safe Water Drinking Act."
The mix-up
The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting an inquiry into the environmental impacts of fracking, and some states are considering more stringent regulations of the practice, including disclosure of the chemicals that go into fracking fluid. Gas companies have argued that the blend of chemicals is a trade secret and must be kept private, but the findings of the congressional investigation suggest otherwise. Eartha Jane Melzer reports at The Michigan Messenger, "In a letter to EPA administrator Lisa Jackson... Reps. Henry Waxman, Edward Markey and Diana DeGette reported that although the EPA requires permits for hydraulic fracturing that involves diesel none of the companies that admitted using diesel have sought or received permits."
And, as Melzer reports, diesel is the only chemical used in fracking that's currently regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act. That companies have been sneaking it into the ground does not strengthen the industry's case for independence.
Ensuring that natural gas companies do their work without threatening water supplies is becoming ever more crucial, as the fuel becomes one of the go-to replacements for coal. In Massachusetts, for instance, some legislators are pushing for a coal plant in Holyoke to start using natural gas or renewable energy, rather than being shut down, as Nikki Gloudeman reports at Change.org.
Supporting renewables
And although renewables are thrown in there as an option, right now the clearest way to replace the amount of energy generated by coal is natural gas. This year's line on energy policy from Washington, however, is that the country should support innovations in clean energy.
Will Obama's new direction on this issue go anywhere? Grist's David Roberts has been arguing that any energy policy that leaves out climate change is missing the point.
However, Teryn Norris and Daniel Goldfarb (also at Grist), of Americans for Energy Leadership, a California-based non-profit, have a smart rebuttal. They argue that clean energy needs the boost in research and development that Obama is promising. Ultimately, they, write, "these investments will drive down the price of low-carbon energy and pave the way for stronger deployment efforts - perhaps even including a strong carbon price at some point - both here and in the developing world, where the vast majority of future emissions will originate."
But, about climate change!
And to be fair, the federal government is trying to lead the way on investing in renewables. As Beth Buczynski reports at Care2, the Department of Energy is working on a $2.3 million solar energy project that would power its Germantown, Md., location.
Not every one is willing to wait for investments to take hold, however. On the National Radio Project's show, "Making Contact", Andrew Stelzer examines what climate activists are doing, post-Cancun, to push forward debates on climate change. Ananda Lee Tan, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alterantives argues, for instance, "Community-led climate justice in the U.S. has been winning. The largest amount of industrial carbon that has been prevented in this country has been prevented by community-led groups, grassroots groups fighting coal, oil and incinerators."
Cause and effect
Whether the solution comes from industry, government, or grassroots groups, the country's energy policy will change over the next few decades. And what's troubling is that it's not clear what the impact will be. Take natural gas: Washington favors it right now because it's thought to have lower carbon emission than coal. But any time humans introduce new factors into the environment, they can have unexpected consequences.
That's not only true for the energy industry, too. In Texas, for instance, the government is trying to eradicate an invasive plant species, a type of giant cane called Arundo that is growing all over the Rio Grande Valley. As Saul Elbein reports for The Texas Observer, it's been hard to eradicate:
There are three primary ways to control invasive plant species: Kill them with herbicides, clear them with bulldozers and machetes, or attempt to introduce a new predator. The least controversial approach, clearing the cane, is not going to work. There are thousands of square miles of the stuff, and Arundo cane is nearly impossible to cut out. Each stalk has a thick taproot that sends shoots in every direction. You can bulldoze or chop the cane down, and it will grow right back. Worse, any stress on the plant-say a machete blow-causes it to send out more root stalks. Every chopped-up joint of cane that floats downstream can sprout another stand.
But, Elbein reports, scientists have come up with a different solution: They've bred wasps that originate in the same region as the cane to come in and eat it. They've also taken precautions that the wasps won't have their own adverse impact on the environment by ensuring that they can only survive on this particular type of plant. But even then, it's a tricky business.
"The wasps have to survive," John Adamczyk, an entomologist running the project, told Elbein. "They have to not all get eaten. Then it becomes a question of whether they can keep the cane in check."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is asking the USDA to approve a pilot program that would prevent his city's residents from buying sugar-sweetened soda with food stamps. Some have called the proposal paternalistic. However, at In These Times, Terry J. Allen argues that Bloomberg's proposal makes sense.
Allen notes that New Yorkers may spend up to $135 million in food stamp benefits on sodas. Nationwide, the food stamp program funnels about $4 billion into the pockets of soda manufacturers. Sugary carbonated drinks are artificially profitable for Big Pop because they are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, a heavily subsidized by-product of our broken agricultural system.
There are already restrictions on what you can buy with food stamps. Nobody thinks it's patronizing that alcohol is off-limits, even though alcoholic beverage are a potential source of calories. A little discussed benefit of ending the soda subsidy within the food stamp program would be the incentive it gives to small storekeepers in poor neighborhoods to devote less floor and refrigerator space to carbonated drinks and more room to real food. Many low income New Yorkers struggle to buy healthy food in their neighborhoods. Soda subsidies only make the "food desert" problem worse.
Impatient to die
Prisoners on Death Row in Texas spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. The death house in Texas is one of the most restrictive in the nation. Conditions are so bad that many inmates are actively looking forward to their execution day to put an end to the crushing isolation, Dave Mann reports in the Texas Observer. There is a growing consensus among psychiatrists that solitary confinement is a form of torture. Some experts, and many inmates, believe that solitary confinement is literally driving Texas death row inmates insane.
Daniel Lopez is in a hurry to die: "I don't see no point in waiting 20 years for them to finally decide to execute me." That's the first thing he tells me when I sit down to interview him. We are seated in the Polunsky Unit's visiting room. Lopez is encased in a small booth. We are separated by thick, soundproof glass and talk through phones. [...] [Lopez] says he has no desire to remain on death row. He says he's looking forward to execution day. He doesn't want to live much longer in his small cell. "I don't think that's a life for somebody," he says.
Health reform and the courts
Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones takes a closer look a the legal challenges to health care reform. Republicans in Virginia have been given the green light to challenge the constitutionality of the individual mandate in court. In October, a U.S. District judge in Detroit refused to issue a preliminary injunction to stop the implementation of health care reform in Michigan. On Monday, a U.S. District judge in Lynchburg, VA, dismissed Liberty University's anti-health reform lawsuit. Another Virginia judge says he will rule on a similar suit by the State Attorney General by the end of the year.
The current crop of politically motivated lawsuits challenging the individual mandate are legally tenuous at best. Aziz Huq wrote in The Nation: "Among constitutional scholars, the puzzle is not how the federal government can defend the new law, but why anyone thinks a constitutional challenge is even worth making."
As Columbia law professor Gillian Metzger explained to Chris Hayes of The Nation earlier this year, the constitutionality of the individual mandate is basically a "no-brainer." The way the Affordable Care Act is written, everyone who doesn't have health insurance from some provider has two options: Buy subsidized health insurance or pay a tax. The federal government obviously has the right to collect taxes. The case is expected to go all the way to the Supreme Court, but it seems unlikely to prevail. The real fear is that a lower court will paralyze the implementation of health care reform while the decision is pending.
Crisis pregnancy center bill
Shakthi Jothianandan of Ms. Magazine has the latest on proposed legislation that would force so-called crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) in New York City to disclose that they are not real reproductive health clinics. The New York City Council held a hearing on the proposed legislation in mid-November, which brought together officials from the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, Planned Parenthood, Concerned Clergy for Choice and staff from CPCs around the city. The representatives for the CPCs claimed that the bill violates their free speech rights, but the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union testified that requiring organizations to disclose that they are not real health care facilities and don't provide a full range of services does not infringe on any First Amendment right.
CeCe Heil, senior counsel with the Christian anti-abortion group American Center for Law and Justice, claimed the legislation was unnecessary because women are already smart enough to know that "abortion alternatives" means "alternatives to abortion." Many of the CPCs have "life" in their name, which should signal to potential clients that they do not provide abortion or abortion referrals. But if it's really so obvious that CPCs are just anti-choice ministries posing as reproductive health clinics, why oppose a law that simply requires all facilities to disclose the obvious?
Boehner meets with anti-choice extremist
Future Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) met with anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry, as Miriam Perez of Feministing reports. Terry is the founder of the radical anti-choice group Operation Rescue, which has a long record of advocating violence against abortion providers. After Dr. George Tiller, one of the country's last high-profile late-term abortion providers, was assassinated, Terry called Tiller a "mass murderer" who "horrifically, reaped what he sowed."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders spent this week trying to stand up to the oil industry. In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Obama pushed BP to siphon $20 billion into a escrow fund that will cover liability claims, and Congress grilled BP CEO Tony Hayward and other oil bigwigs as to how they were protecting the country's coastal waters.
While these developments are promising, mopping up the current crisis and guarding against future incidents will take more momentum than a speech, a meeting, or a few hearings can deliver.
$20 billion
BP's escrow fund indicates that the company is willing to take some responsibility for the damage this spill has visited on the Gulf Coast. But not everyone in Washington is pleased with the fund. As TPMDC's Eric Kleefeld writes, "some Republicans have come out strongly against it-with the sum total of charges being that it will turn into a political slush fund procured through dirty Chicago thug tactics that will be paid out to ACORN."
Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) became the poster boy for this sentiment when, at a Thursday hearing, he apologized to BP for the president's actions. TPM sheds some light on the Congressman's possible motivation. It seems Barton might have his own interests at heart, not the needs of the spill's victims (or of the Republican Party-by the end of the day, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) forced Barton to retract his apology).
"Barton's number one career campaign contributor, Anadarko Petroleum, has 25% ownership in the well where the April 20 rig explosion occurred," Justin Elliott writes. "The firm, which has given Barton $146,500 over the years, has been sent a bill by BP for cleanup costs."
Clean-up coasting
As far as the clean-up efforts, Mother Jones' Mac McClelland reports that the company is not doing all it can for Elmer's Island Wildlife Refuge. McClelland talked to one clean up worker who said:
"They're up to 120 guys on Elmer's now, but I can't see any considerable difference. They're only working five sites and it's eight miles of beach. No one seems concerned about cleaning it up. The contractors are getting their money; they don't care. They've got all these people out there, but they're not accomplishing anything."
So far it doesn't seem like BP-or the oil industry-is learning from these failures, either. Also at Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard reports that as bad as BP's clean up response has been, at this week's hearing, the public "got a glimpse of how ridiculous it was on paper." The clean up plan, Sheppard writes, referenced a deceased sea turtle expert and ways to protect walruses and sea lions, which do not live in the Gulf Coast.
"It gets even worse," Sheppard says. "The other four oil giants are using almost the exact same plans."
The next disaster?
BP, at least, needs solid disaster plans, and not just for spills like the one in the Gulf. As Truthout reports, the Deepwater Horizon site isn't the only BP project that poses a safety risk. In Alaska, the Prudhoe Bay oilfield is host to "a long list of safety issues that have not been adequately addressed," reporter Jason Leopold writes. Marc Kovac, a BP employee, told him:
"The condition of the [Prudhoe Bay] field is a lot worse and in my opinion a lot more dangerous. We still have hundreds of miles of rotting pipe ready to break that needs to be replaced. We are totally unprepared for a large spill."
More energy disasters
These sorts of dangers are not limited to BP's operations or the oil industry. As Forrest Whittaker writes for The Texas Observer, "In the past three months, each of the three major fossil fuels-coal, oil and natural gas-has had its own Kaboom! moment. It's almost like Mother Nature is trying to tell us something about our energy policy."
In addition to the BP spill, Whittaker is thinking of the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in April, and two more recent blowups of natural gas wells in Texas.
"On June 7, workers struck a 36-inch gas pipeline near Cleburne, causing a massive eruption of flames seen miles away," he writes. "One worker was killed, and eight others were severely injured. An eyewitness described the heat from 300 yards away as "unbearable." The next day, another pipeline explosion in the Panhandle killed two workers when their bulldozer punctured another gas pipeline."
GritTV reports on yet another oil spill-this one in Utah, where a hole in a Chevron pipeline starting pouring thousands of gallons of oil into a Salt Lake City creek a week ago.
"Oil is a messy business, even when it's legal," filmmaker Joe Berlinger tells GritTV's Laura Flanders.
Colorado drilling
In Colorado, on-shore drilling is most definitely legal, and BP is looking to restart natural gas drilling there, the Colorado Independent reports.
"[BP] found the jackpot," Josh Joswick, a Colorado organizer, said. "Not only are they on top of the most productive coal-bed methane field in the United States, they are paying next to nothing compared to what they would be paying elsewhere."
The BP disaster in the Gulf is resonating here, too. "Several much smaller incidents in Colorado and neighboring states are quietly highlighting the need for increased onshore oil and gas drilling regulation," the Colorado Independent's David O. Williams writes.
There is an opportunity right now for lawmakers at the federal and state level to push for real reform; it's not clear yet that anyone's jumping at that chance.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
This week's roundup features mayors' reactions to Arizona's immigration law, a Supreme Court ruling on deportation laws, and more...
On Tuesday, the U.S. Conference of Mayors approved a resolution condemning Arizona's new immigration law. Our own Alan Jenkins has more on that story here. Meanwhile, some Arizona lawyers are concerned that the law, which goes into effect next month, could result in an influx of new cases that might overwhelm the state's court system. And some Arizona lawmakers have proposed an additional law that would deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants born in the United States.
A cap placed over a severed pipe is siphoning some oil from the broken BP well in the Gulf Coast, the company said today. The company's CEO said this morning on CBS that it was possible that this fix could capture up to 90% of the oil, but that it will take 24 to 48 hours to understand how well this solution is working. Adm. Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard chief and oil spill incident commander, called the cap "only a temporary and partial fix."
President Barack Obama is in Louisiana today, and BP is saying it will know in 48 hours if its attempt to "top kill" the leaking oil well in the Gulf Coast by pouring mud and cement over it has worked.
If the scramble to stop the leak has ended, the slog to clean up is just beginning. Thousands of fisherman are still out of work, as ColorLines notes. But there are new jobs in Louisiana. This week Mother Jones' Mac McClelland visited workers raking oil off a beach in Louisiana. One man, she writes, "can't count how many times he's raked this same spot in the 33 hours he's worked it since Thursday, but one thing he's sure of, he says, is that he'll be standing right here tomorrow and the next day, too."
Next moves
Although the regulatory infrastructure that was supposed to oversee companies like BP failed in this case, the administration is stepping up to ensure that the spill is stopped and the clean-up begun. "I take responsibility," the president told reporters yesterday. "It is my job to make sure everything is done to shut this down."
Kevin Drum calls this performance and the media affirmation that came after it "the kabuki of our times"-a show that only pretends that the government has the wherewithal to stop the leak without the resources of private industry.
"The president has to be In Charge whether he can actually do anything or not," Drum writes. "What everyone should be asking is not what the feds are going to do about capping the leak, but what they're going to do to make sure all the oil is cleaned up afterward."
Going forward, the government needs to make sure that BP fulfills its clean-up promises. Without strong oversight, the company could slip out of paying its debts. That's what happened last time an energy company left a lake of oil in American waters, as Riki Ott's Not One Drop documents. The book "describes firsthand the impacts of oil companies' broken promises when the Exxon Valdez spills most of its cargo and despoils thousands of miles of shore," according to Chelsea Green.
BP's behavior
BP has little incentive to clean up its operations or to take responsibility for the damage it has already incurred. As Care2 reports, another BP rig had to shut down this week when a power outage caused crude oil to spill from its storage tank to "secondary containment." And on the Hill, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) charged that the company was deliberately low-balling its estimates of the Gulf spill's size to avoid additional fines.
At The American Prospect, Monica Potts delves into the logic behind BP's operations. Even when using one of the highest estimates of the spill's volume-70,000 barrels a day, or more than 2 million barrels overall-she writes, "Americans burn about 10 times that, 21 million barrels, each day. It would only take us a couple of hours to use up everything in the Gulf. This is despite everything we know about how bad burning oil is. Given that, it's not surprising that an oil company might rank our desire for oil more highly than our undemonstrated desire to avoid ecological disaster."
Environmental obscenities
In Texas, activists tried this week to demonstrate to BP that consumers do desire to avoid such disasters, AlterNet reports. A group of women traveled to the company's headquarters and, wearing little more than sandwich boards, tried to expose "the naked truth about drill, baby, drill."
AlterNet reports that Diane Wilson, who organized the protest "doesn't take nudity lightly." Growing up in rural Texas, "I was taught that flesh is sinful, it's the devil," she said. "So for me, using nudity to expose the truth about BP was WAY outside my comfort zone. But I realized that it's the destruction of our ecosystem by corporate greed that's obscene, not a woman's body."
Real responsibility
It's important to realize that such destruction is not limited to this one catastrophe in the Gulf. As David Roberts writes at Grist:
"We don't get back the land we destroy by mining. We don't get back the species lost from deforestation and development. We don't get back islands lost to rising seas. We don't get back the coral lost to bleaching or the marine food chains lost to nitrogen runoff. Once we lose the climatic conditions in which our species evolved, we won't get them back either."
Fixing the system
If Obama is ready to take responsibility for the oil spill, he might want to focus on strengthening the government regulators who oversee these dangerous industry. The lack of oversight from the Minerals Management Service-which was rotting from the inside-out long before Obama came into office, TPM reports-played a huge role in this spill. Across the country, the government bodies that are supposed to be guarding the environment have stepped away from that responsibility.
Consider, for instance, Forrest Whittaker's report about his state's environmental oversight agency. "In decision after decision, the Texas agency that's supposed to protect the public and the environment has sided with polluters," Whittaker writes.
President Obama may not be able to fix Texas' problems, but he can provide leadership by correctly regulating corporations that pollute. In that way, the president can take responsibility not just for cleaning up this spill, but for preventing the next one.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Another big state has taken steps to modernize voter registration at its motor vehicle offices. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees state driver licenses and identification cards, has instituted a new system that simplifies the voter registration process.
Oil has hit shore in Louisiana, and despite BP's best efforts to keep the media away, reporters can now touch the greasy stuff with their hands and feet. The onrush of oil into the Gulf has continued for over a month now, and while BP is still trying to staunch both the spill and media spin, the company is losing control over the information that's reaching the public.
The Environmental Protection Agency demanded this week that the company use a less toxic dispersant to clean up the spill, and independent scientists are releasing estimates of the spills volume that dwarf BP's numbers in terms of magnitude.
Right now, a catastrophe of this scope seems like an unprecedented, one-off event. But across the energy industry, at other drilling sites, in other industries, companies are taking risks and courting environmental disasters on the same scale.
"Bayou Polluter"
BP, which was operating the rig before the spill, has other sins on its head. In Louisiana, "fishermen say BP spills oil every year and they point out marshes still dead from dispersants that were sprayed there," marine biologist Riki Ott writes for Yes! Magazine.
The latest disaster could cause more exponentially more damage, but it is far from unique. On Democracy Now!, former EPA investigator Scott West, describes a case in which one of the company's Alaska pipelines burst, spilling oil out onto the frozen tundra. BP had ignored workers' concerns about the integrity of the pipeline, West says, and during warmer months, the resulting spill could have reached the Bering Sea and created a much bigger mess.
"Now we're seeing the same sort of thing in the Gulf, in this catastrophe," West said. "And information is coming to light that corners were cut and that employees' concerns were being ignored. It's the exact same pattern that we saw with BP in Alaska."
Beyond BP
But a new report, which combs over the oil industry as a whole, shows that "BP can't be singled out," writes Public News Service. The report "found that operating errors and incidents around the globe are more common than the public likely realizes because most events don't make the news."
As countries like the United States become more desperate for fuel, accidents like the spill in the Gulf Coast become more likely. Extracting oil from tar sands, hydrofracking, deep-sea oil drilling: these are tricky techniques for extracting fossil fuel that are becoming popular only because the world's store of easily accessible energy is almost gone. In The Nation, Michael Klare writes about the new quest for "extreme energy options" and the contingent risks.
"By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever increasing risk of human and environmental catastrophe-something that has been far too little acknowledged," Klare writes. "As energy companies encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies...often prove incapable of responding adequately to the new challenges. And when disasters occur, as is increasingly likely, the resulting environmental damage is sure to prove exponentially more devastating than anything experienced in the industrial annals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."
Tar sands a slow-motion spill
It's not just BP that's playing fast and loose with its environmental impact. Extracting fuel from tar sands, a source for oil that's gaining in popularity as an alternative to off-shore drilling, takes a dramatic toll on the environment.
Inter Press Service writes that, according to a new report, "Oil sands development is "kind of like the gulf spill but playing out in slow motion."
The extraction process demands lakes of water, which, once contaminated, are held in pools. "Those toxic ponds pose a hazard to migrating birds, risk contaminating nearby soil and water resources, present health problems to downstream communities and, the report notes, pose the risk of "a catastrophic breach,"" IPS explains.
A director at the National Resource Defense Council described tar sand extraction as "a slow-motion oil spill every day, writes The Texas Observer's Forrest Whittaker. The United States is poised to consume even more oil from this source, too, he reports:
"In the works is a 2,000-mile underground pipeline from Alberta to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, including BP's Texas City facility. The high-pressure pipeline, proposed by TransCanada, would be capable of carrying 900,000 barrels per day, enough to more than double consumption of tar-sands oil in the U.S."
Government intervention
As Whittaker reports, the Obama administration has been supportive of these sorts of efforts, and this week questions about the government's leniency towards BP and the energy industry started bubbling up. In this climate, the government should be stepping in to defend the safety of the country's people and its environment; instead, even the Obama administration is giving the energy industry a long leash to pursue its projects. On Democracy Now!, Scott West, the EPA investigator, described the pattern he saw during his investigation:
"What the government has done over the past several years is taught BP that it can do whatever it wants and will not be held accountable. So, decisions have been made, very poor decisions have been made, to increase profits and put workers at risk and been allowed and endorsed by the federal government."
The current oversight has not much improved. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and his colleagues are pushing for a $10 billion cap on liability for oil companies, for instance, but the administration has argued for a lower limit, the Washington Independent reports.
"In the Exxon Valdez spill, people counted on the oil company to respond to and clean up the mess, and we counted on Congress and the legal system to hold the oil industry accountable for damages to the environment and local communities and economies. In hindsight, these turned out to be bad ideas," she writes. "Exxon dodged penalties through long court battles, systematically underestimating the scope of the spill, and leveraging the costs of clean-up to avoid fines and penalties."
BP doesn't need to escape accountability in the same way, though; Ott has suggestions for actions that anyone can take to ensure the company pays the price for the damage it has caused.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
This is the second part of two posts analyzing the Texas panhandle, a rock-hard Republican stronghold. It will focus upon two quite unique counties. The first part can be found here.
Strange Counties
Two counties are labeled in the above map: Cottle County and King County. This is the case because the two are the sites of several unique and quite inexplicable voting patterns. One example: although the counties are located beside each other, their two patterns can be characterized as polar opposites.
This is the first part of two posts examining the Texas panhandle, a rock-hard Republican stronghold. The second part can be found here.
In the Texas panhandle and the empty plains surrounding it, Democrats go to die. There is no place in the country more Republican than this rural region, where conservatism is ingrained bone-deep and from birth. Not even the most Mormon stretches of Utah, or whitest areas of the Deep South, exceed the Republicanism of this part of Texas.
Yet, in the vast emptiness of the Texas prairie there are a number of interesting patterns - some of which are quite strange to behold.
Two disasters flared up this week, one environmental, the other political. Off the coast of Louisiana, oil from a sunken rig is leaking as much as five times faster than scientists originally judged, and the spill reportedly reached land last night. And in Washington, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) jumped from his partnership with Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) just before the scheduled release of the draft of a new Senate climate bill.
The trio had worked for months on bipartisan legislation on climate change. After Graham's defection, his partners promised to press on, but the bill's chances of survival are dimmer.
The next Exxon Valdez?
As Grist puts it, the spill off the Louisiana coast is "worse than expected, and getting worser." The oil rig sank on April 20, and since then, oil has been pouring out of the well and into the Gulf of Mexico.
British Petroleum (BP), which operates the rig, along with the Coast Guard and now the Department of Defense, has pushed to contain and clean up the spill. The problem is deep under water and difficult to measure, but by mid-week, experts estimated that it was gushing 5,000 barrels a day from three different leaks.
Interior department officials said the spill could continue for 90 days. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum looks at a couple of estimates for how much oil could end up in the Gulf and concludes, "An Exxon Valdez size spill might only be a few days away."
The federal government has rallied to respond. Administration officials have traveled to Louisiana, and both the executive branch and the legislative branch have announced investigations into the spill. But, as Care2 writes, the White House is saying that the explosion should not derail plans for future drilling.
"In all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters, according to Care2.
New drilling, no regulations
Just a few weeks ago, President Barack Obama announced that the government would open up areas off the East Coast for offshore oil and gas drilling. The proposal already had some opponents, and the spill makes the politics of new drilling that much trickier. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports that White House energy and climate adviser Carol Browner acknowledged the issue, along with energy experts around Washington.
"This reopens the issue: Is the risk worth the reward?" Lincoln Pratson, a professor of energy and environment at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, told Sheppard.
And even though BP is relying on the Coast Guard and the Department of Defense for help managing this spill, the company is pushing back on efforts to minimize those risks, Lindsay Beyerstein reports for Working In These Times.
The company "continues to oppose a proposed rule by the Minerals Management Service (the agency that oversees oil leases on federal lands) that would require lessees and operators to develop and audit their own Safety and Emergency Management Plans (SEMP)," Beyerstein writes. "BP and other oil companies insist that voluntary compliance will suffice to keep workers and the environment safe."
Climate bill catastrophe
The country might also have to rely on companies' "voluntary compliance" with measures to combat global warming: Congress doesn't seem likely to pass a bill regulating carbon any time soon. Sen. Kerry and friends were supposed to release their version of climate legislation Monday, but over the weekend, Sen. Graham backed out. His reason? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had floated the idea of prioritizing immigration reform, which Graham argued would undermine work on energy legislation.
"It seems like the senator...has a bit of an attitude problem," wrote The American Prospect's Gabriel Arana. "He storms out of climate talks because Democrats have dared consider working on two things at once? The degree to which movement in the Senate hinges on this single, mercurial senator, seemingly the only one whose agenda includes something more than stymieing Democrats, is remarkable."
Call the clean up crew
After Graham's announcement (Arana called it a "hissy fit"), congressional democrats scrambled to prove that the climate bill was not knocked entirely off course. On Monday, Sen. Kerry and Sen. Lieberman met with their wayward colleague; by Wednesday, Sen. Reid had promised that he would "move forward on energy first;" and by Thursday, Kerry and Lieberman had asked the EPA to start evaluating the bill's environmental and economic impacts.
Although a draft of the bill was supposed to come out on Monday, no one has seen it. At Mother Jones, Kate Sheppard reports that even the EPA, which is supposed to analyze the bill, hasn't received the full draft.
"According to the EPA, the senators submitted a "description of their draft bill" for economic modeling," she writes. "The agency confirmed in a statement to Mother Jones the senators "have not sent EPA any actual legislative text." The agency is determining whether it has enough information about the bill to produce an analysis of its economic and environmental impacts."
Despite assurances from the Senate leadership, it's not clear if climate legislation will come to the floor this year or, if it does, that it will pass.
Not a disaster
There was one bright spot of news for environmentalists this week: the United States will build its first off-shore wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod. The project, called Cape Wind, has a host of opponents, but Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar decided to approve it. The scale will be smaller than originally planned-130 rather than 170 turbines, the Washington Independent reports-which could mollify critics who worried about its visual impact.
Cape Wind is a prime example of how clean energy projects can still cause harm or anger the people who live in their shadow. The Texas Observer recaps opposition to clean energy projects: A working-class neighborhood fought against efforts to build a biomass plant in their town, and won.
"Despite some activists touting these projects as solutions to global warming, and politicians promoting them as the key to economic prosperity, renewable energy projects tend to have their own sets of problems for local residents," reports Rusty Middleton.
Biomass is one thing: burning materials like waste wood might produce fewer greenhouse gasses, but a biomass plant still dirties the air around it. But if the choice is between an off-shore wind farm that could mar a pleasant vista or an off-shore drilling operation that could spill gallons of oil onto your coast, it seems clear which is the better option.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Down in the Lone Star State, they like to say that everything is bigger in Texas. I am not sure they were talking about the lies Texas companies like to try and sell the good people of California, but they should have been. In fact, with April 1st just around the corner, it seems that Texas Oil Companies bankrolling the initiative to suspend AB 32 are counting on Californians to be willing to be fooled again (remember what Enron did to Golden State anyone?)
Anti-AB 32 groups first relied on the now completely debunked "Varshney Study" to "prove" that passing this legislation would be the ultimate job killer and lead to skyrocketing consumer costs. But now that the Legislative Analyst's Office has torn the research to shreds, calling it "unreliable" and "essentially useless", the anti-AB32 force is focusing on some new junk science to stand in as a replacement.
The California Manufacturers and Technology Association (CMTA) is using an oil industry-funded study conducted by the Pacific Research Institute to support its argument of the negative impacts of clean energy legislation. And it's no surprise that CMTA is the voice promoting this study, since the group has already announced its support for "AB 32 Suspension" in a recent press release as well as shelling out big bucks as one of the main sources funding the "AB 32 Implementation Group" (which contrary to the title, is code for the force working to suspend AB 32).
But like we saw with the Varshney Study, just because you paid a scientist to create it doesn't make it true. So before you buy into the "facts", make sure you are aware of the variables that are manipulating the data behind the scenes:
The oil industry: Valero is a leading member of CMTA, contributing over $500,000 to help suspend AB32. Also, Valero lobbyist Michael Carpenter happens to be one of the board members of the Pacific Research Institute, which has funded the study.
The author of the study Thomas Tanton: consultant to the oil and gas industry and Senior Research Fellow with the Pacific Research institute where a Valero lobbyist sits on his board. He is also a former VP at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), an organization funded by oil and gas interests, which has received over $200,000 of funding from ExxonMobil.
CMTA's VP of Government Relations, Dorothy Rothrock: was an industry energy consultant for years before joining CMTA. From the moment AB 32 was signed into law Rothrock criticized it - even though unemployment was 4.8% at the time - which makes her support for enacting the initiative when unemployment levels reach that low again very doubtful.
Now that this report is in the same trashcan as the Varshney Study, we're sure that another one is on the way. Wouldn't it be better if the oil companies just stood up and said, look, we don't want progress on clean energy because we will lose in billions in dollars in profits? Wouldn't that be more honest? We doubt that will happen but in the meantime, don't be a fool this April.
AB 32 is a proven job creator and will continue to drive innovation and success for California. It's bad news for big oil companies, and we don't need to create a fake study to know that.
Although the 2008 presidential election showed unprecedented increases in turnout from underrepresented citizens, their rates of voter registration and participation were still well behind the electorate in general. As we approach election season, this pattern may only continue. Instead of taking steps to improve the administration of elections to encourage and facilitate voter participation from eligible citizens, lawmakers and elected officials are back to raising barriers to voting by implementing strict voter ID laws, as illustrated through high profile court battles, ballot initiatives, and fast-moving legislation
An appeal to an Indiana's court's decision to shut down the state's notorious voter ID law as unconstitutional was heard last week in the state Supreme Court.
If you were to look out to the horizon of the clean energy field right now, you would see the hazy outlines of nuclear reactors. President Barack Obama announced this week that two new nuclear plants will go up in Georgia, built on the promise that the federal government will guarantee $8.3 billion in loans-nearly the entire estimated cost of the project.
"It is a slap in the face to environmentalists," says Matthew Rothschild at The Progressive. "Though these will be the first nuclear reactors constructed in more than three decades, Obama still labeled them, somehow, as part of the "technologies of tomorrow.""
The president's announcement wasn't the only environmental downer this week. Expectations for the next international climate negotiations, to be held in Mexico at the end of 2010, are already low, and yesterday Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate negotiator, said he would step down this summer and join the private sector. To top it all off, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now faces sixteen lawsuits that would block its ability to decrease carbon emissions, including one backed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R).
A nuclear error
Although the Georgia reactors would be the first new nuclear construction in the country in decades, they mark the beginning of what the Obama administration hopes will be a shift towards nuclear energy. In the 2011 budget, President Obama proposed an expansion of the loan guarantee program that funds projects like these from $18.5 billion to $54.5 billion.
These nuclear projects deserve close scrutiny. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman details the problems with the Georgia reactors. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) already rejected the initial designs for the plant. That means the estimated cost could well exceed the projected $8.5 billion, which Wasserman says, was low at the start.
"Over the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each, in some cases to more than $12 billion today," he explains.
Risky business
In the past, energy firms like The Southern Company, the Atlanta-based group that is building the plants, could only imagine securing funding for new nuclear projects. These projects have a high risk of failure, and private investors do not dream of touching them.
Inter Press Service's Julio Godoy reviewed several European studies on the feasibility of financing nuclear plants. One study from Citibank concluded that "the risks faced by developers ... are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially," Godoy reports. These risks include uncontrollable construction costs, long delays, and the possibility of low power prices that would not support that plants' operation.
That's one reason that green advocates disapprove of nuclear energy: The money could be better spent elsewhere. "People tend to think that environmentalists have some sort of allergic reaction to nuclear because they're scared of radioactive waste and unsecured nuclear materials," writes Aaron Wiener at The Washington Independent. "But when it comes down to it...It's simply a bad investment to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into a nuclear sinkhole when proven technologies such as wind and solar would provide guaranteed benefits."
Wind to fly on
While the administration lavishes attention on nuclear, other clean energy industries are trying to move forward. In Wisconsin, a Spanish company is opening up a plant to build wind turbine components, which will bring much-needed jobs to the Milwaukee area, as Kari Lydersen reports for Working In These Times.
There's always the threat, however, that gains like this will be rolled back by competition from China. Clean energy jobs can still be sent overseas, Lydersen points out. She argues that the United State could be providing a boost to the solar and wind industry in order to keep jobs here.
"Manufacturing in the United States could be driven both with incentives to the actual producers - like the tax break to Ingeteam [the Spanish company building the Wisconsin plant] and support for renewable energy through renewable energy portfolio (RPS) standards and other incentives," she writes.
China as competition
From a purely environmental perspective, China's headway into green technology is not a problem. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum reminds us that the whole world can benefit from advances in clean energy, wherever they happen. Climate change is, after all, a global crisis. But Drum concedes that fear of Chinese competition does serve some purpose:
"I've lately become more receptive to the idea that, for better or worse, the only way to get Americans to take this stuff seriously is to kick it old school and start hauling out that old time Cold War evangelism," he says. "Frame green tech as a matter of vital economic and national security superiority over the Reds and quit worrying overmuch about whether that's really technically accurate. Just figure that it's close enough, it's language everyone understands, and it'll do a better job of motivating development than a couple hundred more PowerPoints about receding glaciers."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Texas has seen more than its share of controversy surrounding forensic science in recent months.
Most recently, the Houston Chronicle reported that an audit of the Houston Crime Lab’s fingerprint division identified problems in more than half of the 548 cases selected for review.The problems discovered were serious enough to lead the authorities to require that more than 4000 violent crime cases from the past six years be reanalyzed—a process that no doubt will be very costly for the city of Houston. According to the Chronicle, the Latent Prints Comparison Unit suffers from “significant deficiencies with staffing, a lack of proper supervisory review, inadequate quality control, technical competence inconsistent with industry standards, insufficient training and inadequate standard operating procedures.”The Houston Police have confirmed that a criminal investigation into misconduct by at least one employee of the fingerprint unit has been opened.In addition to the shoddy work that was done, the unit faces a backlog of some 6000 cases.
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