There won't be any national or international movement on climate policy for the rest of this year, at the very least. And while Washington waits to act on climate change, at least one group is benefiting. The natural gas industry is flourishing, despite reports that its practices lead to flammable tap water, poisoned aquifers, and multiple health problems.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), who is emerging as a new leader in Congress on these issues, said this week that a comprehensive climate bill had little chance of passing through the Senate in the next two years. Furthermore, the expectations for the next round of international climate negotiations, to be held this winter in Cancun, are abysmally low, as Inter Press Service reports.
Say no to the status quo
In the past, the volatility of gas prices limited the industry's share of the energy market, but now, hydrofracking techniques guarantee a more steady supply, meaning steadier prices. It helps that green leaders have talked up natural gas as a clean energy source.
Natural gas does emit less carbon than coal, but the process of extracting it through hydrofracking-pushing chemical-laden water into the ground to create cracks and allow gas to bubble up to the surface-has serious environmental impacts.
Sandra Steingraber, in Orion Magazine, calls the rise of hydrofracking "the environmental issue of our time." Environmentalists based support for natural gas production on the premise that natural gas would serve as a "bridge fuel" while renewable energy infrastructure grew enough to provide much of the country's fuel needs. But without stronger support from Washington for renewables, that bridge may never reach the other side.
The high cost of hydrofracking
The alliance between the environmental movement and the natural gas industry has always been uneasy. Both sides regard each other suspiciously. As evidence mounts that hydrofracking pollutes air and water, posing health risks, the worries of local environmentalists are beginning to outweigh the advantages of gas.
"Fracking is linked to every part of the environmental crisis-from radiation exposure to habitat loss-and contravenes every principle of environmental thinking," Steingraber writes in Orion. "It's the tornado on the horizon that is poised to wreck ongoing efforts to create green economies, local agriculture, investments in renewable energy, and the ability to ride your bike along country roads."
On the ground, fracking is frightening, as Kate Sinding, an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council told Change.org's Jess Leber.
"Drinking water wells are being contaminated, livestock are being poisoned, explosions are occurring when methane has gotten backed up inside a drinking water well after the underground water supply became contaminated," Sinding said.
Facing down gas companies
Steingraber argues that these effects-the true impact of natural gas extraction-should be factored into the cost of gas and that the public health implications deserve the benefit of the doubt. Even weighed against a lower level of carbon emissions, these considerations make gas look much more like a bridge to nowhere.
In New York, the state government is trying to reign in the industry, Sinding says. "Culturally and politically, I think New Yorkers may be more skeptical about a new heavy industry coming in," she told Leber. While the promise of jobs is as tempting in New York as it is in places like Pennsylvania and Wyoming that had rushed ahead with fracking, New Yorkers are seeing, Sinding says, that "now residents still face the same problems as they did before, but now, in addition, also can't drink their water."
Outside of New York, there are other initiatives that could slow the momentum behind fracking. The Nation's Peter Rothberg suggests supporting United for Action, a group that's fighting the practice, or pushing congressional reps to support the FRAC Act, which would increase regulation of the fracking process. (FRAC stands for Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals.)
Fracking and flammable tap water
Fracking can pollute water supplies, as the flammable tap water in fracking areas demonstrates. But the process also demands huge volumes of water as a matter of course. Fracking companies mix chemicals into the water and use it to keep the cracks in the earth open in order to access gas.
But fracking isn't the only water-guzzling energy process. Keith Schneider, speaking for a network of journalists and scientists called Circle of Blue, told Inter Press Service that "the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve."
More than 200 billion gallons of water go to cooling power plants each day. Harvesting solar energy also demands huge quantities of water.
As water resources grow scarcer, this demand could drive huge conflicts, both internationally, and in the United States. As Making Contact reports, in Michigan, lawmakers are weighing the idea of putting water resources into a public trust, but already the ecological arguments for that idea and the economic arguments against it are clashing. Imagine how much harder it will be to divvy up water if energy companies got involved.
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 sixth article in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.
Today, we examine Ohio's 15th Congressional District, which includes downtown Columbus and parts of neighboring Franklin, Madison and Union counties. Columbus is home to the Ohio State University and has the highest proportion of young professionals, aged 25-34, of any city in the country. In 2008, Mary Jo Kilroy became the first Democrat elected in the district since 1982, when she narrowly (by less than 2,500 votes) defeated Republican Steve Stivers. Kilroy and Stivers will be matched up again this fall.
Since coming to Washington, Rep. Kilroy has consistently voted for environmental protections and moving America to a clean energy economy. In her first year in the House, she received a perfect 100% rating from the League of Conservation Voters, which means she voted the right way on every environmental vote. This includes voting for the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), the first climate bill to ever pass in a chamber of Congress. In a statement following the vote, Kilroy said "The clean energy economy is the future of our country and of central Ohio...We are seeing the consequences of not investing in the next big idea with our auto industry. [ACES] secures Ohio's strong position to make the solar panels and wind turbines that will power our nation in the very near future. It will also benefit Ohio's agricultural sector, which can provide the plant material needed for the bio mass products that boost energy production." She added, "This bill puts the central consumers first and insulates them from shifts in prices. For less than a trip to the movie theater, Americans are going to create 1.7 million (jobs), end the stranglehold foreign countries have on energy and work to save our planet."
In sharp contrast, Steve Stivers falsely calls cap and trade a "job killer" that will lead to higher electricity bills for Ohio families. In reality, strong clean energy and climate legislation would create a net of 1.9 million jobs, according to in-depth study by the University of Illinois, Yale University and the University of California. In Ohio, this would mean 61,000 new, good-paying jobs created over the next ten years. And, as analysis by the experts in the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office shows, the effect of ACES on electricity bills will be, as Rep. Kilroy said, less than going to the movies once a month.
Stivers doesn't just stop at opposing clean energy and climate legislation, he also "disagree[s]" with the statement, "Man-made global warming is a scientific fact and immediate action to lower CO2 emissions is necessary to prevent an environmental catastrophe." And, if denying the unassailable science behind climate change wasn't enough, Stivers also opposes our right to hold the government accountable in court for protecting our public health and environment.
Koch Industries is privately owned by Charles and David Koch, who, according to Greenpeace, have "quietly funneled [$50 million] to climate-denial front groups that are working to delay policies and regulations aimed at stopping global warming." Robert Murray, the head of Murray Energy, is an outspoken climate denier, who said in testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee that global warming is "one of the biggest con jobs in the history of the Republic." Murray continued to criticize the legacy of Rachel Carson, saying that "She and her environmental followers killed millions of human beings around the World with the ban on DDT." Murray concluded by claiming that climate change legislation will "result in no environmental benefit." Finally, the Texas Freedom PAC is headed by Joe Barton, who infamously apologized to BP, and who also called the BP escrow fund that will pay businesses that lost money because of the Gulf disaster a "$20 billion shakedown."
These are a few of Stivers' big donors, all major polluters or supporters of major polluters, which makes you wonder what they think they're getting for their large donations to the Steve Stivers for Congress campaign.
The NRDC Action Fund believes that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
On July 4th, Americans are supposed to celebrate their independence. We may no longer have to worry about a greedy, distant monarch. But our country is still held in thrall to powerful interests that prize profit over individuals and their freedom-the energy industry comes to mind. As Jason Mark puts it at AlterNet:
"We're in an abusive relationship and unable to leave our abuser. The plight of the people in Louisiana proves the point. Louisianans have been punched in the face by the hand that feeds them, and yet their biggest worry is that the oil and gas industry is going to walk out the door and leave them."
Where's the love?
It's clear that BP, for instance, isn't playing carefully with our country or its resources. At Mother Jones, David Corn relates the latest example of the company's callousness. Its recovery plan had no stipulations about handling even a small storm like the one that stopped clean-up this week. It did, however, include plans to save sea life that hasn't lived in the Gulf for millions of years. As Corn put it, the company was "prepared for walruses, not prepared for hurricanes."
The biggest problem, of course, is that BP wasn't prepared to handle a blow-out to begin with. The leak has gone on for so long that governmental officials are now taking unprecedented measures to protect the wildlife most vulnerable to its effects. Beth Buczynski reports at Care2 that official are going to dig up about 700 sea turtle nests on Alabama and Florida beaches that are at risk from the oil.
"Once the eggs have hatched, the young turtles will be released in darkness on Florida's Atlantic beaches into oil-free water," she writes. "Translocation of nests on this scale has never been attempted before."
Halliburton
No matter how badly these companies treat us, it seems we can't get rid of them. Take Halliburton. The company has latched its talons into the country and will not let go. It is second only to BP in shouldering responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon spill. As Jason Mark reports for the Earth Island Journal, just before the oil spill, Halliburton took over Boots & Coots, a company that deals with oil-well blowouts; that company now has a contract with BP to help with the relief well.
"Halliburton is essentially making money from causing the accident and then helping to repair it," Mark writes. "Halliburton's many-fingered tentacles is just the latest illustration of how powerful the company is."
Wimpy Washington
Washington isn't strong enough to fight back against that sort of corporate power. Over the past year, energy interests have whittled down the climate change legislation to a tepid half-step. Right now it looks most likely that a bill that passes will regulate only the utilities sector.
"We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further," Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) told Politico this week after a White House meeting on the bill.
"If you're looking for the sorry state of American energy politics distilled into one line, there it is," writes Jonathan Hiskes at Grist. "Kerry fights harder for clean energy than just about any national politician."
Still, if anything passes the Senate, Washington will celebrate. As Aaron Wiener explains at the Washington Independent, "For all the disappointment among environmentalists over the repeated compromises Democrats have made on climate legislation to win over moderates, some argue that a utilities-only cap would achieve most of the goals of an economy-wide carbon pricing scheme. The question now is whether Democratic leaders in the Senate can muster 60 votes for even a weakened bill to overcome a Republican filibuster."
Our friends abroad
On an international level, our governing bodies might be doing a better job, but not by much. Inter Press Service reports that the countries at the meeting promised to scale back taxpayer subsidies of fossil fuels. Even that promise is limited, however. "Countries agree to phase out "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies" but each country decides what those are," IPS reports. "Some countries like Japan, Australia, Italy and others have already said they don't have any."
Johnson spoke to Kim Carstensen, who leads the World Wildlife Fund's Global Climate Initiative, who compared this meeting's report to that of the last G20 summit and found that climate issues had dropped off the radar. "There were eight references to clean energy in the final report from Pittsburgh (the last G20 Summit) and they have been completely vacuum cleaned," he said. "That is kind of scary."
Fight back
In situations like this, it takes massive pressure from outside to move the political apparatus forward. At AlterNet, Heetan Kalan has some ideas about how to progress-reach beyond the environmental community; enlist "doctors, nurses, public health officials and patients speaking out about the connection between consumers of coal energy and their immediate health concerns." Kalan writes:
"After all, climate change is not solely an environmental problem - it is a human/planetary problem. If we are going to rely on a small base of environmentalists to carry us through this crisis, we are in trouble. Our spokespeople on this issue have to come from a wide spectrum of citizens and leaders."
"Lawmakers aren't facing much in the way of public pressure," he writes. "The polls look encouraging, suggesting the public is inclined to back the Democratic proposals, but that support hasn't translated into aggressive advocacy - phone calls to lawmakers' offices, letter-writing campaigns, district meetings, sizable rallies, etc....If engaged constituents want more, Congress will have to feel considerably more heat than they are now."
In other words, if America wants to be free of coal, oil, gas, and the energy industry, we're going to have to fight for it.
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.
Wall Street reform news the Audit the Fed amendments were voted on this morning. The Sanders amendment conducting a one-time audit to make the Fed bailout recipients known passed 96-0. The Vitter amendment requiring all Fed monetary movements, past, present and future, to be made public was defeated 37-62.
Senators are currently in their weekly caucus lunches. At the Democratic caucus lunch, Dems will decide whether or not to file cloture on the overall bill today.
More Pennsylvania Senate polls coming Franklin and Marshall, which has consistently produced some really suspicious polls featuring 40-50% of the electorate undecided in general elections, will release a poll tomorrow showing Joe Sestak ahead of Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. For whatever F & M polls are worth, and I don't think they are worth that much, they do confirm the Rasmussen and Muhlenberg polls showing Sestak up 5% and 4%, respectively.
Quinnipiac will also release a poll tomorrow morning. Research 2000 will release one on either Thursday or Friday.
Post-primary, North Carolina Senate competitiveThe first two general election polls in North Carolina to be released following the May 4th primary show Elaine Marshall within 4.5% of Republican incumbent Richard Burr, on average. Marshall's opponent in the June 22nd runoff for the Democratic nomination, Cal Cunningham, is further back, but still within 9.0% of Burr.
Before the primary, those same two pollsters (PPP and Rasmussen), showed Marshall down by an average of 12.0%, and Cunningham down by an average of 15.0%. effectively, the competitive primary gave Democrats a chance in this campaign. This is why having a June 22nd run-off between Marshall and Cunningham is actually a very good thing--it keeps Democrats in the news, and allows them to strengthen their campaigns.
First poll on Kagan In its typically quick fashion, Rasmussen pumped out a poll on Elana Kagan already. The polls shows 33% in favor of confirming Kagan, with 34% opposed. Last year, Rasmussen's first poll on Sonia Sotomayoor showed 45% in favor of confirmation, and 29% opposed, although they did eventually produce a poll showing 37% in favor, and 39% opposed. As is always expected with Rasmussen, no other polling outfit even came close to these kind of negative numbers on Sotomayor, and so it is reasonable to expect that no other pollster will even come close to these negative numbers on Kagan.
But really, polling does not matter much in these fights. Opposition to any recent Supreme Court nominee, including Harriet Miers, has never risen above 43%. Support does not usually run very high either, usually hovering either just below, or just above, 50%. The truth is that because the public is generally disengaged and apathetic on this matter, no Senator will probably pay any general election price for voting for or against Kagan, or any other Supreme court nominee, like ever. Republicans may be able to scare their own Senators into opposing Kagan through the threat of primary challenges (similar to the success they had on Miers), and the Clarance Thomas fight became a big enough story to have consequences in the 1992 election, but typically that the public is too disengaged on this subject for it to have electoral consequences. Very hard to imagine Kagan becoming a big fight.
Kerry-Lieberman climate bill to be released tomorrowLooks like climate and energy legislation is the next big Senate fight after Wall Street reform. The Kerry-Liberman bill will be released tomorrow. Dave Roberts provides some good context on what to look for.
This is an open thread. What stories are you following?
The good news for environmentalists: Three of the country's big five oil companies have agreed to support the bill, as has the Edison Electric Institute, the leading utility industry group. While EEI did eventually support the House climate bill that passed last June, the oil industry was largely in opposition, so this news could help bring oil-state senators like Mary Landrieu (D-La.) on board, particularly since Kerry thinks the American Petroleum Institute will stop running ads bashing the legislation.
That's the good news?
No surprise, then to hear the bad news:
The bad news for green advocates: This new support comes at a steep price, with heavy concessions to oil, agriculture, industry and dirty energy. Kate has the rundown:
* The bill would remove the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, and the states' authority to set tougher emissions standards than the federal government.
* There will be no fee-or "gas tax"-on transportation fuels. Instead, oil companies would also be required to obtain pollution permits but will not trade them on the market like other polluters. How this would work is not yet clear.
* Agriculture would be entirely exempt from the cap on carbon emissions.
* Manufacturers would not be included under a cap on greenhouse gases until 2016.
* The bill would provide government-backed loan guarantees for the construction of 12 new nuclear power plants.
* It will contain at least $10 billion to develop technologies to capture and store emissions from coal-fired power plants.
* There will be new financial incentives for natural gas. * The bill would place an upper and lower limit on the price of pollution permits, known as a hard price collar. Businesses like this idea because it ensures a stable price on carbon. Environmental advocates don't like the idea because if the ceiling is set too low, industry will have no financial incentive to move to cleaner forms of energy.
* The energy bill passed by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year will be adopted in full. This measure has sparked concerns among environmentalists for its handouts to nuclear and fossil fuel interests.
With all the above, it's not just impossible that the bill could accomplish the needed goal of combatting climate change. It's pretty much impossible to imagine how it could be any worse at not accomplishing the goal, while actually handing huge rewards to those most responsible for causing the problem in the first place. Nothing could serve as a stronger demonstation of the utter absurdity of calling Obama a "pragmatist". This is top-down neoliberal ideological planning on steroids.
It was convened by Bolivian President Evo Morales in response to the failure of the Copenhagen summit, and to give the poor and the Global South a chance to respond in a pro-active, rather then a reactive manner. It was held in Tiquipaya, just outside of Cochabamba, the site of a massive, successful battle against water privatization a decade ago.
There's an excellent round-up diary about the summit here at OL from the Media Consortium, "Weekly Mulch: Citizens Lead Cochabamba Climate Negotiations". I'll quote a bit from that diary, and add more information and observations of my own on the flip.
Some senators are skeptical lawmakers will be ready to tackle another huge issue after finishing health care. "After you do one really, really big, really, really hard thing that makes everybody mad, I don't think anybody's excited about doing another really, really big thing that's really, really hard that makes everybody mad," Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said. "Climate fits that category."
Well, dagnabbit, I wish I'd thought of that when discussing future goals with ex-managers during performance reviews. 'No, no, I don't need to move on to any next project, I already did one really, really hard thing this year. And hold my calls, would you? They interrupt my Mahjong Titans time.'
But look, I've seen some of the Senate's other really, really hard work this year, and it sucked. Also, it was clearly written mostly by lobbyists anyway. Which is not only sleazier than having your Mom do your homework, it's lazier. It means these Senators didn't so much as have to supervise the staff manager that told the policy writers to stop screwing around and get that subparagraph on their desk, ASAP. That's like having your Mom's secretary do your homework.
This is some Subgenius level slacking going on up there in the Senate. If these Senators were on the government dime, why, someone might get angry about this. If we were paying for ... oh, right.
In closing, I can only sputter at this point. So I'm turning you over to the immortal inspirational speaking of George W. Bush. Here, in a 2004 debate with John Kerry, our former president laid out a nobler vision of a public service work ethic that, sadly, may deeply disturb Sen. Claire McCaskill:
STATE BLOGS
