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.
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.
On June 15, 2010 the US Department of Energy announced that a group of federal and independent scientists convened by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, and Chair of the National Incident Command's Flow Rate Technical Group (FRTG) Dr. Marcia McNutt (Director of the U.S. Geological Survey) had developed a new estimate for the amount of oil gushing from the ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico that indicated the leak could be spewing up to 2.52 million gallons of crude oil per day into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico from British Petroleum's Macondo Well.
"This estimate brings together several scientific methodologies and the latest information from the sea floor, and represents a significant step forward in our effort to put a number on the oil that is escaping from BP's well," said Chu, who then expanded with "As we continue to collect additional data and refine these estimates, it is important to realize that the numbers can change. In particular, the upper number is less certain - which is exactly why we have been planning for the worst case scenario at every stage and why we are continuing to focus on responding to the upper end of the estimate, plus additional contingencies."
Estimates from both BP and from the US Government of the amount of oil gushing from the blown out wellhead on the gulf seabed have been almost continually revised upwards since the well blowout and leak began on April 20, with widespread suspicions that BP has deliberately understated the leak rate in attempts to limit liability for the company.
It now appears that Chu may have been somewhat prescient with his statement that "it is important to realize that the numbers can change", and that the estimate of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico may need to be increased again, since an undated internal BP document (.PDF) obtained by Chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) was released by Markey on Sunday June 20 showing that BP's own internal analysis believed that a worst-case scenario, based on damage to the well bore, could result in a leak rate from the well of 55,000 to 100,000 barrels of oil per day.
One of my first real memories of tragedy was when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. My entire school was cheering on teacher Christa McAuliffe, and when the shuttle blew up in midair, I remember standing with my sobbing classmates, trying to make sense of what we had witnessed.
As an adult, I felt a similar connection the day after September 11. In the midst of a national crisis, Congressmen from both parties and both chambers stood on the Capitol stairs and sang "God Bless America." I will never forget that moment and the sense of common cause it inspired in all who heard it.
"....it takes the administration more than a week to really get moving."
The NY Times thinks that President Obama has not responded aggressively enough to this spill. Let's be clear:
No way is this oil spill Barack Obama's fault.
The fault lies with the ideology and mores of the Republican party and its theory of government.
Their solution to this country's energy's future is to drill anywhere and everywhere.
In their theory of government, government has no right to control who, what, where and how the natural resources of this country or this planet are exploited or not exploited. Resources that are needed by us all and is needed to protect us all. Like my friend Jim Gilliam said in a private email, government is supposed to regulate corporate behavior not just be their willing partner/follower. This is a lesson that we all need to keep in mind, including the president.
In their theory of government, government regulation is inherently evil or at least counterproductive. So under George Bush etal, the only regulation in the Gulf has been self regulation.
This oil spill is the fault of Republican ideology.
On Monday, climate activists, nonprofit leaders, and governmental officials will gather in Cochabamba, Bolivia, to look for new ideas to address climate change. The conference, organized by leading social organizations like 350.0rg, "will advocate the right to "live well," as opposed to the economic principle of uninterrupted growth," as Inter Press Service explains. In the absence of real leadership from the world's governments, the conferees at Cochabamba are looking for solutions "committed to the rights of people and environment."
The United States certainly isn't stepping up. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), were supposed to release their climate legislation next week, just in time for Earth Day. But yesterday the word came down that the release was being pushed back by another week, to April 26.
No matter when it finally arrives, like other recent environmental initiatives, this round of climate legislation falls short. Even if Congress manages to pass a bill-and there's no guarantee-it will likely leave plenty of room for the coal, oil, and gas industries to continue pouring carbon into the atmosphere. And a wimpy effort from Congress will hinder international work to limit carbon emissions: As a prime polluter, the United States needs to put forward a real plan for change.
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman
Although the text of the bill is not public yet, it is likely that this attempt at Senate climate legislation will limit carbon emissions only among utilities and gradually phase in other sectors of the economy. On Democracy Now!, environmentalist Bill McKibben called the bill "an incredible accumulation of gifts to all the energy industries, in the hopes that they won't provide too much opposition to what's a very weak greenhouse gas pact."
Climate reform began with a leaner idea, a cap-and-trade system that limited carbon emissions while encouraging innovation. The Nation's editors document the transformation of climate reform from the Obama administration's original cap-and-trade proposal to the behemoth tangle it has become. Both the House and the Senate fattened their versions of climate legislation with treats for the energy industry. The Senate's new idea to gradually expand emissions reduction through a bundle of energy bills only opens up more opportunities for influence.
"Some of these pieces of legislation may pass; others may fail; all are ripe for gaming by corporate lobbies," the editors write. "Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also skew subsidies in the wrong direction, throwing billions at "clean coal" technologies, nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, a questionable gambit favored by the Obama administration to garner support from Republicans and representatives from oil-, gas- and coal-producing states."
Even with these goodies, the climate bill may not pass. The Washington Independent rounds up the D.C. players to watch as the next fight unfolds, including the Chamber of Commerce's William Kovacs and the Environmental Protection Agency's Lisa Jackson.
Green leftovers
In theory, the climate bill should not be America's only ride to a greener future. But the other vehicles for green change choked during start-up. The EPA was going to regulate carbon emissions, but Congress has reared against that effort. The climate bill could snatch away that power from the executive branch.
If companies won't limit their carbon emissions, individuals still have the option for action. But as Heather Rogers explains in The Nation, carbon offsets, one of the most popular mechanisms for minimizing carbon use "are a dubious enterprise."
"To begin with, they don't cut greenhouse gases immediately but only over the life of a project, and that can take years--some tree-planting efforts need a century to do the work. And a project is effective only if it's successfully followed through; trees can die or get cut down, unforeseen ecological destruction might be triggered or the projects may simply go unbuilt."
The pull of carbon offsets should diminish as energy use in buildings, cars, food, and flights gains in efficiency and uses less carbon. But if the green jobs sector is any indication, that revolution has been slow in coming. ColorLines reports that "there are no firm numbers on how many newly trained green workers are still jobless. But stories abound of programs that turn out workers with new, promising skills-in solar panel installation and weatherization, in places like Seattle and Chicago-and who nonetheless can't find jobs."
Cochabamba's unique approach
These failures and setbacks don't just affect Americans; they keep our leaders from negotiating with their international peers. The United Nations led a conference last winter in Copenhagen that promised to hash out carbon limits, yet produced no binding agreement. This coming winter, the UN will try again in Mexico, but if the United States shows up with the scant plan put forward by Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman, those negotiations have little promise.
In Cochabamba, leaders from inside and outside the government will attend a summit to discuss the future of climate change action. In The Progressive, Teo Ballve writes that,
"One of the bolder ideas is the creation of a global climate justice tribunal that could serve as an enforcement mechanism. And conference participants are already working on a "Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights" meant to parallel the U.N.'s landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948."
With U.S. government action paling, it might take outside ideas like these to revitalize the push towards a green future. By the end of next week, we'll see if the Cochabamba group made any more progress than the bigwigs at Copenhagen.
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.
Last week, President Obama announced a plan to open 167 million acres of ocean for offshore oil and gas drilling, a vast area that even George W. Bush — a former oil executive and great ally of the oil industry — didn’t open for drilling.
Obama’s plan will deepen our country’s addiction to oil, and open pristine oceans off America’s East and Alaskan coasts to the massively polluting oil industry.
Tell President Obama today: don’t expand offshore drilling!
Obama’s plan would allow the fossil fuel industry to drill in a great expanse of ocean that has been off-limits for two decades. [1]
This proposed giveaway of our ocean to Big Oil, an industry notorious for environmental devastation, was announced soon after we discovered that the Obama administration is considering a deal to loosen the international ban on commercial whaling.
Our planet does not need more oil drillin g and commercial whaling. We need more energy conservation and clean renewable energy like solar and wind power.
Tell President Obama now: don’t expand offshore drilling to another 167 million acres of ocean!
Notes:
1. David Usbourne, “Drill, Barack, Drill: Obama to open up US East Coast for oil exploration.” Independent (UK), April 1, 2010.
For my own interest, I went back through Obama's history on the drilling issue, and was shocked to come across this piece by Matt Stoller:
And Obama Caves on Drilling by: Matt Stoller
Fri Aug 01, 2008 at 21:30
Obama said he might support more drilling if it were paired with comprehensive energy conservation measures and alternative energy development. So what's the headline?
Obama shifts, says he may back offshore drilling
I'm sure the Republicans are going to praise Obama for his flexible stance now that he's decided to push a compromise with their oh so practical agenda. There's no way they will use this to push the idea that he's unprincipled. They wouldn't dare set up a web site called http://www.bothwaysbarack.com/
Awesome. And awesome position that he's put Pelosi in, who has refused to allow a vote on driling in the House.
This was back when the right was pushing for a vote in the House on the issue. Drilling has always been on the list of expendable issues- back in the election for votes during a period when gas prices were an issue of public concern, and now for (seemingly, at least) legislative concessions. I'm saying this merely to express that I'm not surprised or shocked on this, because as others have said in this space repeatedly, and even as Obama has said himself, folks should take Obama at his word. From a July 2008 post by Chris regarding Obama's statements describing himself:
Fourth, Obama says, bluntly, to take him at his word. Since it is now vogue to believe that Obama has secret plans to stand up for left-wing policies that differ from his public statements, it is nice to have confirmation from Obama himself that we should stop believing in such secret plans.
Obama has long been more conservative on a number of environmental issues including offshore drilling, nuclear power, "clean coal", and said so publicly. Lo and behold, it turns out he is what he said he would be, at least on this issue. I remember e-mailing strong environmental advocate friend of mine last month about this article- "Environmental Advocates Are Cooling On Obama"- and she replied:
I have always, and continue to give Obama credit for keeping to his word. So far, he's done pretty much everything he said he would do during the campaign, and this is no exception. It seems to me that far-lefties deluded themselves into thinking he was one of theirs, and is now surprised that he continues to be as centrist as he's always been (had a conversation in which a friend was so disappointed that he was increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. When I pointed out that it's exactly what he said he'd do, she said she knew, but was hoping that once he got elected he would abandon centrist pretense and be really far left. I thought that was dumb).
In other words, while I see headlines in other progressive media spaces "Obama flip-flops on drilling!!" and "which guy did we elect President again?!", I see it less as a flip-flop than a validation of (a) a previously-held position and (b) that he is more of a Conservadem than many are willing to admit.
Lindsey Graham, one of the several Senators who was likely targeted by the Obama amdinistration with their announced expansion of offshore srilling yesterday, wants even more. Since he is writing the bill, he will likely get it:
Graham called the White House plan a "good first step" but added, "there is more that must be done to make this proposal meaningful and the game-changer we all want it to become."
"Among the areas we still need to address - encouraging states to allow exploration by sharing a portion of the revenue raised from oil and gas drilling, opening even more areas of the Eastern Gulf to exploration, the inclusion of viable drilling sites in the Atlantic and Pacific, and expanding the list of areas we inventory for possible reservoirs of oil and gas," Graham said.
Graham plans to unveil broad climate change and energy legislation later this month with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).
A lot of people criticized the White House yesterday for giving in on negotiations over offshore drilling long before it was assured that either Lindsey Graham, or the various coastal conservative Democratic Senators who support offshore drilling, had actually pledged support for the climate bill. Basically, giving in to offshore drilling like this is bad enough, but giving while getting nothing in return is worse.
However, as bad as people though yesterday's announcement on offshore drilling was, it is likely that it was always intended to just be a starting point, and that the final deal on offshore drilling would be even worse. Even though it is comforting for many to believe so, the Obama administration is well aware of things like basic legislative negotiating strategy. As such, giving some ground now on offshore drilling is likely a sign that they always intended to give even more in the future, and just put this up as an opening offer.
We're all tired of capitulation. We all think offshore drilling is pretty darn evil. But are we willing to give up a crack at something we need for the hubris of those reasons?
Let's talk about the New Energy Reform Act of 2008. If you haven't been paying attention, that's the name of the proposed energy bill sponsored by the "Group of 10" Senators in order to address all those concerns everyone has about energy. There are certainly a good bushel of bad apple policies in the bill, but some pretty awesome oranges in there too that might make the bill worthwhile. Let's take a look at both, plus some context, in the extended entry.
Kagro X has a piece up right now that indicates Democrats have been defeated on offshore drilling. Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Mark Udall all appear to now favor the "compromise" legislation that will repeal the drilling ban in some areas. So, we got beat, and it seems like a done deal.
After reading the piece, I had a typical progressive moment, wondering something like "do we ever win any legislative fights?" I thought of Social Security and the recent health care bill, but in general I couldn't think of much. However, then I got to thinking differently: maybe higher gas prices are, in and of themselves, a progressive victory.
Unlike any compromise legislation, higher gas prices have created a broad shift in American behavior that is good for the environment and good for progressives. Specially, mass transit ridership is way up, while driving is down. This accomplishes quite a bit:
It helps the environment, by reducing our carbon emissions.
It makes people more invested in social investment programs like mass transit.
It will stunt, if not stop altogether, population growth in Republican leaning areas like exurbs.
It creates a positive feedback loop, as the first three points here continue to reinforce each other in an upward spiral.
This all strikes me as a real progressive victory, and much more important than a few offshore oil rigs. This is a societal change toward more progressive behavior patterns caused by higher gas prices. As such, we should probably consider the higher gas prices a major progressive victory, in and of themselves. Even better, it is a long-term victory, since gas prices are not going down. They will drop a bit in the fall, as per usual, but then rise back to these levels, or even higher, come next spring and summer.
So, did we really lose? I'm not convinced. Over both the short and the long run, we may have won, big time.
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