Here's a real shocker for you: the same people who deliberately misread climate science are now offering a phony explanation for the Alaska primary loss of incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who conceded the race yesterday.
If you listen to the wing nut brigade, they will tell you clean energy/climate legislation did in Murkowski. Phil Karpen -- who, as the policy director of Americans for Prosperity, is as good as on the payroll of Dirty Energy -- said this even before Murkowski bowed out, in an op-ed on FoxNews.com:
"Joe Miller has a narrow lead over Sen. Lisa Murkowski in a surprising Alaska Senate primary. If the absentee ballots break hard for Murkowski she may narrowly escape, but at the moment it looks at least as likely that Miller will pull the upset. If he does, Murkowski's support for energy taxes may be one of the major reasons."
In a sad commentary on modern journalism, this unfounded, inaccurate notion was echoed by Reuters who said, "Murkowski, the most senior Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, has been considered a moderate on several issues and a potential compromise vote on national climate legislation. Miller is on record as denying that human-caused emissions are responsible for climate change."
Even the usually very sharp team at ClimateWire took the bait: "Republican Joe Miller, a former judge with a Yale law degree, showcased Sen. Lisa Murkowski's past support for climate legislation, among other things, before slipping by her at the voting stations Tuesday to capture a 1,900 vote lead with several thousand absentee ballots still being counted."
Well, if there was even a shred of evidence that it was true, this would qualify as an interesting bit of political analysis. Given the lack of evidence, it is just another lie that has filtered in from the crackpot world of climate science deniers to mainstream political reporting.
Tuesday's Republican primary in Alaska may still be undecided, (currently incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski trails her tea-party challenger Joe Miller by approximately 2,000 votes) but that hasn't stopped anti-environment pundits from speculating that if Murkowski loses, it will be because of her support for climate legislation. Now I follow the climate debate pretty closely, (even if it wasn't my job, as a political junkie I'd follow it nonetheless) and I just don't remember Murkowski being a climate champion. That isn't to say she's another James Inhofe in the Senate, but being open to negotiations on climate legislation does not make her the zealous supporter her opponent portrays her to be.
Fact is that Lisa Murkowski is far from an environmental champ. The League of Conservative Voters(LCV) gives her an 18% career rating, meaning that she votes the right way on less than one out of five environmental issues. And, more recently, she gave us environmentalists heartburn by leading an assault on the Clean Air Act - only one of the most successful environmental laws of all time.
Murkowski's effort to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency's scientific finding that global warming threatens our health and welfare was bad, but at least she was polite enough to claim her attack "has nothing to do with the science of global warming." That's a far cry from her opponent, Joe Miller, whose campaign website says that "The science supporting manmade climate change is inconclusive." The last thing that Alaska needs is a climate denier representing it in the Senate. Even the late Ted Stevens, never an environmental champ himself, recognized that "Alaska is harder hit by global climate change than any place in the world."
To say this primary suggests that climate change is a political non-starter in Alaska shows a selective memory. Just two short years ago, Alaska elected a real climate champ, Mark Begich, to the Senate. Climate change was a top issue during Begich's campaign, when he called for an 80% reduction in carbon pollution by 2050 and adaption strategies to help Alaska deal with the effect of climate change. Since coming to the Senate, he has continued to work to advance clean energy and climate solutions, earning an 82% rating from LCV in his first year. Last August, he introduced a package of seven bills aimed to help Alaska prepare for the changes and challenges created by a warming planet. And, in June, he voted against Murkowski's Clean Air Act attack.
This is just another case of anti-environment pundits not letting the facts get in the way of propagating their backward agenda. I'm interested to see how they'll change their tune if the absentee ballots put Murkowski in the lead. If she wins in the end, I wonder if they'll claim her victory was due to her steadfast support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Or maybe it'll be her support for offshore drilling?
The only thing I know is if she wins, they won't be crediting her position on climate.
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.
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."
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.
Alaska: Land Without Counties. You may have noticed every election results website (that I saw) showed you results by county for every state except Alaska. That's because their vote is tallied by State House district instead, and it takes a bit of effort to reorganize the data for different geographic units - of which the closest equivalent to counties are boroughs and census areas. Here's the map of the 2008 election results by State House district:
Click to enlarge.
Each district had somewhere between about 5000 and 12000 votes cast. Democratic strength is centered in Anchorage and Juneau, while Republican strength is in the South Central region (outside of Anchorage) and Fairbanks.
So what about the Native Alaskan vote, about 10% of the total voters?
In order to complete today's story we return to travelling the seas around the High Arctic...and in telling the first half of the story we were introduced to a sea captain and his parrot, we examined the destruction of a tribal village by United States Marines-and we learned that "tricing up" someone is not some kind of weird dating ritual.
The story has already raised questions of race and culture; and as we move forward it's going to encompass whaling, an incredible rescue, and more personal trials and tribulations-not to mention the Brewery Worker's Union-and if all that wasn't enough, we'll even bring in a few thousand reindeer to round the whole thing out.
So put on your caribou fur, clean up your sled runners--and let's head north to Alaska, before the rush is on.
We have an epic tale of history to tell today, and it has everything you'd want in your standard-issue epic tale: the vast expanse of ocean, exploration on the shores of an unknown land, questions of race and slavery and opportunity and torture...and in the center of it all, a real larger-than-life sea captain (and his parrot) who some say was more powerful in Alaska than the Territorial Governor and Circuit Judges who were his frequent shipboard guests.
Such was his influence on the Revenue Cutter Service (later to become the United States Coast Guard) that two Coast Guard Cutters operating today are named with him in mind: the USCGC Bear, named after the most famous ship our sea captain commanded, and the USCGC Healy, the newest icebreaker in the Coast Guard's fleet.
And with that, Gentle Reader, allow me to introduce you to Captain Mike "Hell-Roaring" Healy-and the Arctic which was his domain.
(Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis is one of Alaska's leading blogs. I'm HIGHLY suspicious of election shenanigans, but that only makes it more important to not go off half-cocked. This is a good, sober local perspective on what's happening up there. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Many people are shocked that convicted felon Ted Stevens could possibly be ahead of Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich in the fight for his US Senate seat, or that under-investigation Congressman Don Young has probably held on to his seat against Ethan Berkowitz. This seems especially dubious as polls that were correct in every other state were seemingly way off in Alaska. An article in the Anchorage Daily News titled "The Pollsters missed the mark" discusses this:
"The real question is where were the all the Democrats?" Dittman said, noting the voter turnout was supposed to be in record proportions. Instead, only an estimated 57 percent of registered voters had a say - a far drop from the 66 percent turnout in the 2004 presidential election, according to state elections division figures.
The issue of the incorrect polls has triggered some concern both here and in other parts of the country, especially on the "interwebs" where folks have raised the specter of a "rigged election." It's understandable that we're all having flashbacks to Alaska 2004, where the Division of Elections reported some precincts had over 100% turnout. (Voting "early and often" is not just a tongue-in-cheek saying in Chicago!)
However, we should all subscribe to the "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" mantra of "Don't Panic!" I can think of at least four five reasons why:
Veterans For America has long been focused on issues surrounding our National Guard soldiers and assessing the problems that they face when returning home from Afghanistan and Iraq. Through VFA's nonpartisan National Guard efforts, the group has conducted reports and examined National Guard units on a state-by-state basis to determine their needs and analyze the issues they face.
1. He stands behind what he has done and is not guilty of any wrong doing.
2. He understands that he has done things that are illegal and may be subject to fines or jail time.
Well, which is it? Looks like Stevens is more interested in saving his own hid from his own wrong doings than actually representing the people of Alaska.
*Titles and affiliations of each individual are provided for identification purposes only.
Governor Palin's cavalier approach to learning about U.S. national security policy is offensive, given that she is well aware of the horrific impact that the war in Iraq has had on the Alaska National Guard.
When I read the preliminary findings from Veterans for America National Guard Program's work in Alaska, I was outraged. It is unconscionable to think that the citizens of Alaska are suffering in part from her neglect while she - and others associated with the McCain-Palin campaign - uses them to boost her own national security policy credentials.
I have spent the better part of a year trying to get our presidential (and now, vice presidential) candidates to recognize the unprecedented sacrifices that have been asked of our National Guard, but, to date, the response has been inadequate.
Sarah Palin was ambushed by Charlie Gibson with a gotcha question about the Bush Doctrine. Well, maybe Palin isn't an expert on the current president's doctrine, but, as her hero Virginia Woolf would have it, the governator has a doctrine of one's own, the Palin Doctrine, which strikes a balance between governmental largess and governmental neglect.
Over the past couple of days, both John McCain and Sarah Palin have asserted that Palin knows a lot about energy, especially as it is related to national security issues, because she is governor of Alaska which "produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy."
McCain has repeated this claim. Apparently, they have been using it for at least a week. It is going to be one of their talking points. It is a lie.
STATE BLOGS
