The National Oil Spill Commission released its report on last year's BP oil spill this week. The report laid out the blame for the spill, tagging each of the three companies working on the Deepwater Horizon at the time, Halliburton, Transocean and BP, and also offered prescriptions for avoiding similar disasters in the future.
"I think the recommendations are pretty tepid given the severity of the crisis," Jackie Savitz, director of pollution campaigns at the advocacy group Oceana, told Sheppard. "Even the small things they're suggesting, I think it's going to be hard to convince Congress to make those changes."
No transparency for you!
Last summer, after the spill, the Obama administration tried hard to look like it was pushing back against the oil industry, even though just weeks before the spill, the president had promised to open new areas of the East Coast to offshore drilling.
This week brought new evidence that, despite some posturing to the contrary, the administration is not exactly unfriendly to the energy industry. One of the key decisions the administration faces about the country's energy future is whether to support the Keystone XL, a pipeline that would pump oil from tar sands in Canada down to Texas refineries. And one of the key lobbyists for TransCanada, the company intending to build the pipeline, is a former staffer for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, filed a Freedom of Information requesting correspondence between the lobbyist, Paul Elliott, and his former boss, but the State Department denied the request.
"We do not believe that the State Department has legitimate legal grounds to deny our FOIA request, and assert that the agency is ignoring its own written guidance regarding FOIA requests and the release of public information," said Marcie Keever, the group's legal director, The Michigan Messenger's Ed Brayton reports. "This is the type of delay tactic we would have expected from the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, which has touted its efforts to usher in a new era of transparency in government, including elevated standards in dealing with lobbyists."
Tar sands' black mark
What are the consequences if the government approves the pipeline? As Care2's Beth Buczynski writes, "Communities along the Keystone XL pipeline's proposed path would face increased risk of spills, and, at the pipeline's end, the health of those living near Texas refineries would suffer, as tar sands oil spews higher levels of dangerous pollutants into the air when processed."
What's more, the tar sands extraction process has already brought environmental devastation to the areas like Alberta, Canada, where tar sands mining occurs. Earth Island Journal's Jason Mark recently visited the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Ft. McMurray, Alberta, which he calls "impressively forthright" in its discussion of the environmental issues brought on by oil sands. (The museum is run by Alberta's provincial government.) Mark reports:
The section on habitat fragmentation was especially good. As one panel put it, "Increasingly, Alberta's remaining forested areas resemble islands of trees in a larger network of cut lines, well sites, mine, pipeline corridors, plant sites, and human settlements. ... Forest disturbances can also encourage increased predation and put some plants and animals at risk."
Not renewable, just new
The museum that Mark visited also made clear that extracting and refining oil from tar sands is a labor-intensive practice. He writes:
Mining, we learn, is just the start. Then the tar has to be "upgraded" into synthetic petroleum via a process that involves "conditioning," "separation" into a bitumen froth, then "deaeration" to take out gases, and finally injection into a dual-system centrifuge that removes the last of the solids. Next comes distillation, thermal conversion, catalytic conversion, and hydrotreating. At that point the recombined petroleum is ready to be refined into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. It all felt like a flashback to high school chemistry.
Why bother with this at all? In short, because with easily accessible sources of oil largely tapped out, techniques like tar sands mining and deepwater drilling are the only fonts of oil available. This problem is going to get worse, as The Nation is explaining over the next few weeks in its video series on peak oil.
Energy and the economy
Traditional ideas about energy dictate that even as the world uses up limited resources like oil, technology will create access to new sources, find ways to use limited resources more efficiently, or find ways to consume new sources of energy. These advances will head off any problems with consumption rates. The peak oil theory, on the contrary, argues that it is possible to use up a resource like oil, that there's a peak in supply.
Once the peak has been passed, the consequences, particularly the economic consequences, become dire, as Richard Heinberg, senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute explains. "If the amount of energy we can use is declining, we may be seeing the end of economic growth as we define it right now," he told The Nation. Watch more below:
Light green
Part of the problem is that the energy resources that could replace fossil fuels like oil-wind and solar energy, for instance-likely won't be in place before the oil wells run dry. And as Monica Potts reports at The American Prospect, our new green economy is getting off to a slow start.
Although the administration has talked incessantly about supporting green jobs, Potts writes that the federal government hasn't even finalized what count as a "green job" yet. The working definition, which is currently under review, asserts that green jobs are in industries that "benefit the environment or conserve national resources" or entails work to green a company's "production process." But what does that actually mean?
"That definition was rightly criticized as overly broad," Potts writes. She continues:
While nearly everyone would include installing solar panels as a green job, what about an architect who designs a green house? (Under the proposed definition, both would count.) ... Another problem comes in weighing green purposes against green execution: We could count, for example, public-transit train operators as green workers. But how do we break down transportation as an industry more broadly? Most would probably agree that truckers who drive tractor-trailers running on diesel fuel wouldn't count as green workers even if they're transporting wind-turbine parts. And many of the jobs we would count as green already exist.
It doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the country is moving swiftly toward a bright green future.
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When I and about 50 other Friends of the Earth representatives from around the world showed up at the Bella Center (site of the climate negotiations) over the course of about an hour this morning, the security staff who scanned our UN ID cards told us that they were not valid and we would not be allowed in.
Given that all of us had appropriate accreditation, as well as the "secondary badges" the UN is now requiring for admission so it can restrict the number of people inside the Bella Center at any given time, we were surprised and confused by our inability to get in.
We'd planned to spend the day monitoring the process of negotiations, working to generate media coverage of the need for a strong and just agreement, and working with delegates from developing countries to draft text that could form such an agreement.
But instead, we were denied access. UN staff told Friends of the Earth International's chair, Nnimmo Bassey, that we were considered a security threat. This begged the question of why we were singled out from the many other peaceful non-governmental organizations taking part in the talks.
In this video, our team provides an on-the-ground narrative of how the day unfolded.
When about 15 members of the UN security team surrounded us, and then asked us to leave, we refused, sitting down in the registration area and demanding that we be let in and be provided with an explanation for the UN's refusal to admit us.
UN climate chief Yvo de Boer came out and spoke to us after a while and said access had been restricted because there was not enough room in the Bella Center and that he wanted to resolve the situation.
A few of our representatives went to talk to UN officials while we sat there, but our lack of access remained unresolved. We had both a member of the Norweigan and a member of the Canadian parliament come speak to us to lend us their support. Initially there were a lot of reporters, but the UN then cordoned us off and closed access to media.
Eventually they made us an offer to allow a small portion of our delegation into the conference, even though the full delegation met all the entry requirements that had allowed other groups (except Avaaz, which had also been kicked out) to gain admission.
The UN still has yet to give us a coherent reason for our having been denied access. It's hard to see how de Boer's "no room" explanation makes sense, as the UN continued to allow other NGO observers to enter even as we were denied access. And as for the security threat, we're a bunch of policy wonks and youth activists who have been participating in the negotiations every day for two weeks and represent no threat at all.
One of the key roles Friends of the Earth has played at the conference has been to advocate for climate justice and the interests of the poor countries that have done the least to cause the climate crisis but will feel some of its strongest impacts. Negotiators from those countries are tremendously under-resourced here. For example, I've worked with negotiators who have no media officers (I do media work) to help them communicate their position. They are totally outgunned by the massive delegations of the rich countries, and now thanks to the UN's decision to exclude us, they will have even less support inside the Bella Center to fight for a fair agreement. An agreement that already feels so far out of reach. It's really frustrating, and shameful.
It's been a discouraging day. But even if negotiators fail to produce a strong agreement this week, there is something we can be proud of. We're not backing down in our calls for climate justice, and we're not alone. The international climate justice movement is growing.
When progressive groups fail to challenge what they oppose in Congress because they think the other side is too big, has too much money, or has already won the public opinion war, they should take a lesson from Friends of the Earth [FOE] this past week.
I just got off the phone with a Congressional staffer, who couldn't quite focus on the issue we were supposed to discuss because she is working overtime on the floods in the Midwest. So I turned on cable news, and found out that the floods are plastered all over, much as the wildfires in California were in October of 2007. And just like 2007, the major environmental groups are AWOL on the most covered climate event of the year so far.
Here's an answer to a vexing question for lots of liberals. If you want to know why there is no action on global warming, do the following simple exercise. Turn on cable news right now, or do a Google News search for floods. Here are some news headlines you might find.
Today in Roll Call, I'm reading a funny little exchange about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act which subsidizes businesses and sort of imposes an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions. The bill is strongly backed by Barbara Boxer and most of the major green groups, with the prominent exception of Friends of the Earth (and a weaker opposition from LCV and the Sierra Club).
"We are about to take up the most important fight of our generation, and we have no strategy, no message and no plan to get out of this," one senior Senate Democratic aide said....
"Boxer is walking us off a cliff," another senior Senate Democratic aide said.
Until quite recently, those who focused primarily on energy and global warming issues could see reasons to be supporting Hillary Clinton and/or Barack Obama. In this arena, both have plans and records with strengths ... and weaknesses. Both could learn from each other and strengthen their own programs. Thus, with real legitimacy, an "environmentalist", those concerned about Peak Oil or Global Warming or related issues, could easily defend their position supporting either (or neither) of the candidates. And, again, their platforms/records are certainly light years ahead of this Administration's and of McSame McCain's, but have weaknesses and are 'reasonably good' but not the best that they could be. Thus, many of us were 'sitting on the sidelines' when it came to the Presidential campaign.
Photo to the right is Boxer's fundraising appeal for Landrieu just after Landrieu provided the 41st vote for Bush against a historic green energy bill. And the Al Wynn primary ripples begin. Donna ran against the energy industry, with ads like this one and this one put up to the tune of a million dollars or so by her campaign and outside groups. And now, one of those outside groups, the Sierra Club, is feeling emboldened to pursue a more aggressive approach on global warming and taking on Barbara Boxer in the process.
Carl Pope, head of the Sierra Club, has come out against Lieberman-Warner, Boxer's baby. Here's how he compares the legislation with the Clean Air Act.
Fast-forward to present day: the carbon industries are lobbying to get a deal done this year that would give away carbon permits free of charge to existing polluters -- bribing the sluggish, and slowing down innovation. And politicians are telling us that while it would be better to auction these permits and make polluters pay for putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, creating that market unfortunately gets in the way of the politics.
We are being urged to compromise -- to put a system in place quickly, even if it is the wrong system. Given that we only have one chance to get this right before it's too late, our top priority must be to make sure that we do not settle prematurely and sign a weak bill into law in the name of doing something about global warming. With momentum for strong action and a friendlier Congress and White House building every day, it's no coincidence that some wish to settle their accounts now.
Kicking Wynn off Energy and Commerce immediately makes Congress friendlier, but significantly, it's the huge number of new liberal anti-carbon energy voters out there that are going to allow the public to get a sustainable deal on climate change next Congress. There's some evidence that Obama might make global warming his highest priority, having promised to begin negotiating a new Kyoto-style treaty even before taking office.
All of this is excellent and game-changing news that we've seen happen in the last week or so. As a reminder, here's what Boxer said just two weeks ago about Friends of the Earth, which has waged a campaign called 'Fix it or Ditch it' about the massive Lieberman-Warner bill to subsidize polluting industries.
"They're sort of the defeatist group out there," she said. "They've been defeatists from day one. And it's unfortunate. They're isolated among the environmental groups."
This nasty slur, while not true at the time (Greenpeace was opposing the bill), is now silly. At least one big green group has moved in response to Wynn's loss to get a better deal, and the business right, the coal producers, the nuclear industry, and the oil guys know they will have to deal soon. The Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth have said that we must work on global warming, but that it must be done smart and sustainably.
Good job, Donna. And great job, Sierra Club, for your work putting her into office and making everyone in Congress look over their left shoulder. I think it's pretty clear that primary challenges, while quite expensive upfront, are much more efficient than advocacy alone.
I just got this email from Environmental Defense about their massive clusterfuck coal subsidy bill to 'deal' with global warming. They combine a nice defensive whine from Barbara Boxer and ED's Fred Krupp, as well as a pitch for Senators to buy blogads. I like how the criticism from Friends of the Earth is forcing the other side to actually start organizing. That's kind of neat.
I love it when top down liberals like Barbara Boxer unmask themselves as Beltway village creatures. The global warming issue is pretty simple. There is a level of CO2 that will kill all of us. Lieberman-Warner does not keep us under that level and will probably prevent another bill from passing for many years. Barbara Boxer is pushing to pass Lieberman-Warner because she wants to just 'get something done'.
Friends of the Earth alone among environmental groups pointed this out, and Boxer has swung back hard with every right-wing argument she can, calling them defeatists and unwilling to engage in negotiations.
I'm reading through this complaint the Al Wynn campaign just filed against Donna Edwards with the FEC. He literally accuses SEIU, the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, Anna Burger, EMILY's List, the Arca Foundation, ACORN, and the Tides Foundation of campaign finance violations, though as you can see it's kind of hilarious what independent experts think. I hope you're proud of your endorsee, Speaker Pelosi. And I hope the rest of these groups come out forcefully against Wynn, mocking him mercilessly for his nonsensical claims. Let's go through the problems.
First of all, the complaint is signed by Lori Sherwood, Al Wynn's campaign manager and a former Comcast lobbyist. Here's Wynn in the Baltimore Sun.
"There seems to be a vast, dare I say, left-wing conspiracy designed to circumvent campaign finance laws," Wynn told reporters during a conference call. "Within this scheme, her supporters are coordinating efforts to exceed fundraising limits and engaging in illegal campaign activities."...
An attorney with the independent Campaign Legal Center in Washington who was asked by The Sun to review the complaint said it didn't appear to contain any facts that would constitute illegal collaboration.
"Interestingly, and unlike most complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission, there's not a single provision of federal campaign finance law directly cited in the complaint," attorney Paul Ryan said. "Several of the allegations, in my view, make clear the complainant doesn't really have a clear understanding of what constitutes coordination under federal law."
And then there's the campaign problem, where Wynn radically underreports the amount of money he's taking in. On his original July 15th Quarterly Report, Wynn reported receiving $61,582.69 in contributions between April 1, 2006 and June 30, 2006. Two days later, he filed an amended report saying he actually received $107,132.69 - almost double what he originally reported. Two weeks later he filed yet another version of his July 15th Quarterly Report saying he actually raised $157,275.69. Last week the FEC sent a letter asking him to explain these discrepancies and threatening an audit of his political committee....
His willingness to tangle with the FEC and flout campaign finance laws is not new. In 2000, Wynn was forced to return contributions from MSFBDA Management Group, a company that laundered money through its employees to Wynn...
There's more. That year, Wynn's campaign was one of 45 campaigns that failed to file a pre-General election report. In 2001, he was fined for filing his report late.
And let's not even go near the massive electoral problems in the 2006 primary election. There's also a lot more nasty stuff on Wynn out there, and it hasn't come out yet. I imagine he's going to get really personal and vicious; he's already accused nearly a dozen powerful, important, and extremely lawyered-up and careful progressive groups of lawbreaking.
Let's get rid of this guy. Donna needs volunteers and money, especially volunteers (which you can do from anywhere as long as you have a broadband connection)! Sign up here or go through Blue Majority.
UPDATE: And let's not forget Al Wynn's fake news video, which you can tell is produced by Wynn's campaign not because it's disclosed as campaign material, but because it is an incredibly shitty and incoherent production. It of course was taken down immediately, though I did manage to grab a copy and upload it for posterity.
John Edwards will need a virtuoso performance at tonight's debate to achieve the dramatic come-from-behind win he needs to stay alive. He's facing an opponent in Barack Obama who proved with his amazing Iowa victory that he is an extraordinary organizer, possibly a strategic genius, and above all an inspiring presence who captured Iowans' hunger for change. And he's got momentum. And let's not forget Hillary Clinton, who can count on lots of money, a ruthless campaign operation, and real affection for her and Bill Clinton in the state.
But Edwards can definitely win - with a slight retooling of his message.
- Give us a little hope
The first thing Edwards has to do is combine his anti-corporate message with an inspiring vision of a hopeful future. Anti-corporate attacks, though they strike a chord with many Democratic voters, can only go so far. You also need to give voters a great hope that you can do better, especially now that most Democrats and most Americans are feeling excited about the possibility of real change that the Iowa result represented. Obama has been very effective at wrapping himself in hope. Reviving Edwards's successful 2004 speech line, "Hope is on the way," would be a great start.
- Talk about Bringing People Together, but the Right People
Obama's message about "bringing people together" to achieve real change clearly resonated with voters. But too often in the past, Obama has brought together the wrong people: corporate executives and right-wing Republicans, resulting in his support for items like expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement to Peru, nuclear power, liquid coal, George Bush's 2005 energy bill (full of billions in subsidies to oil, coal, and nuclear companies).
I've been meaning to blog more about climate change politics, but there's so much there, so I wound up getting into this 'I'm going to write one mega-blog post' and then never got around to it. So I'll just give a general framework and then blog shorter posts in the future.
The essential problem is greenwashing, which is environmental groups granting credibility to figures that don't deserve it, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Newt Gingrich, in order to seem more credible. Gingrich, with his new 'Contract with the Earth' book, is now considered a 'moderate' with regards to climate change, simply because he admits it's happening and despite his long record fighting against dealing with climate change and slashing spending on the technology he now says is the answer.
And yet Gingrich is being embraced. All DC-based green groups are guilty of allowing this to happen to some extent, though NRDC is probably the most insidious, while Environmental Defense is the most corrupt. Senator Barbara Boxer is a particularly bad actor here, pushing a massive transfer of wealth from consumers to business known as the Warner-Lieberman legislative package, which is partially authored by NRDC and the business community.
Meanwhile, the IPCC came out with a grim projection of climate change scenarios, and the first Presidential forum on energy and climate change was held last week. There's a huge amount of momentum and energy in the global warming arena, but the combination of cowardice by DC-based groups and their unwillingness to hold bad actors accountable means that people like Arnold Schwarzenegger are being lauded as leaders on transforming society towards a more sustainable path while cutting mass transit funding.
The science is getting much worse, though there are new groups emerging that could take over from the corroded Beltway model of failure. It's very similar to lauding John Ashcroft as a leader in civil rights litigation for standing up to Bush on wiretapping. The desire to greenwash and call a person a leader when they cheaply say 'global warming is happening' is the essential institutional problem.
I realize this is all very vague, and it's mostly just my impression from reading and talking to a variety of stakeholders in the green community over the past few months. I'm going to try to go into more specifics going forward.
Rather than working to protect vulnerable communities like this in Southern California, the Bush administration has spent years protecting timber companies in Northern California.
If there's a message to take home from this tragedy, it's that we are woefully unprepared for the type of catastrophes we expect to see more and more of with global warming. Scientists have found that increasing temperatures in recent years have stretched the wildfire season by nearly two months. And hotter, drier conditions will lead to mega-fires unlike anything we've seen in the past.
If we want to prevent this scenario from happening again and again, we need to focus our energy and money on making communities safer, figuring out how to best respond to large-scale disasters like this, and combating global warming.
Both groups are being extremely careful about the science, refusing to demagogue excessively on climate change as the cause of these fires. Wildfires have long been a thorny issue for environmental groups, because they bring them smack dab into a political thicket of local development patterns and unfavorable Western political winds. Environmentalists are also the favorite target of the right in the media, blamed for the wildfires.
It's good to see activity around climate change, rebuilding and combating wildfires. One wonders if this pattern of disaster followed by rebuilding along more sustainable lines won't be repeated many times.
UPDATE: Gene Karpinski of the League of Conservation Voters also weighed in.
UPDATE: If leaders Carl Pope, Fred Krupp, Frances Beinecke, or Brent Blackwelder have comments on this, I'll happily update my post.
When there's a major environmental disaster, it's interesting to see how the major environmental groups think through their response. And one small tell is what they put on their websites. So let's take a tour.
It's Getting Hot in Here has as its top blog post titled 'Megafires in California Force Evacuation of 1 Million'. Step It Up has a blog post hidden down the page on the fires.
Websites do not tell the whole story. The Sierra Club after all has a press release out on the Wildfires, and that's good, except that the press release is defending the Sierra Club from right-wing attacks. And one of two of NRDC's press release yesterday was 'Environmental Victory in New York Harbor Dredging Court Battle'. Now it's possible these groups don't update their websites with their priorities, but I doubt it. And given the interesting social media coverage of the fires, that seems like a poor choice, if indeed it is a choice.
When California is burning down due to extreme drought and unusual winds, and there's drought across the Southeast and new and much more pessimistic scenarios on carbon emissions, perhaps this is something environmental groups might want to jump on.
When an emergency like this happens, it's possible to make a large discontinuous leap in the political system. It's possible to say 'throw out last years projections, we have to stop emitting carbon now and use the money to build new global warming proof infrastructure.' Put a sense of the Senate resolution in there that carbon emissions are extremely dangerous, if you don't have a plan ready. 9/11 changed everything because the right was ready. We weren't ready when Katrina happened. Thankfully, though, we'll have more extreme weather to contend with so it's not hard to plan for it.
A few years ago, liberal provocateurs Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote a provocative essay called 'The Death of Environmentalism' (PDF), arguing essentially that the 'environmental movement' operated as a narrow set of interest groups. Focusing on the need to protect the environment, instead of framing arguments around values, translated directly into a stunning loss of political power over 30 years. They put forward the notion that investment choices are the key drivers of a new movement, and the essay in general had remarkable parallels to Crashing the Gates in terms of describing an ossified advocacy structure. This argument has basically taken fundamental root throughout the group that was once known as the environmental community, and it seems to be working.
And now, in Kansas, thanks to Governor Sebelious and the recent Supreme Court case declaring carbon a pollutant, Kansas Department of Health and Education Secretary Rod Bremby rejected a permit by Sunflower Electric Power Corp to build two new coal-fired power plants. It's the first case which takes into account that carbon will soon be regulated by the EPA.
The AP has a wonderful timeline here. It was a mix of organizational competence from the Sierra Club and EarthJustice, Attorney Generals from around the country, hundreds of people showing up at multiple local hearings, and a Governor willing to listen to reasonable arguments.
Innovative approaches like Step It Up and Architecture2030 are emerging to drive the movement orientation of carbon reduction, as well as creating the capacity for the economy to move to a carbon neutral frame. Businessweek is running 'Sustainability Rankings' for business schools (Stanford is tops), and sustainability specialist employment fields are stretched ridiculously thin. On the social front, norms are emerging faster than anyone could possibly track them, from facebook applications like 'Greenbook' to the carbon offset business.
The move in Kansas to cut off coal investment will have ripple effects throughout the country and the world. It's not clear where the new energy supplies will come from, though the wind lobby in Kansas made a difference, and when I met with Tim Walz he spoke of rural sustainable energy as a new growth driver.
I'm impressed. A switch flipped on the new carbon neutral economy a few years ago, and we'll see how far and how fast we can take it.
STATE BLOGS
Photo to the right is Boxer's fundraising appeal for Landrieu just after Landrieu provided the 41st vote for Bush against a historic green energy bill.