Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Jonathan Hiskes

David Brooks writes about the ‘60s and ‘70s crime wave that scared a generation of Americans—or a
generation of white, mobile Americans—away from urban living:

[P]eople in all classes lived in fear. “Mugging was nothing
unusual. Everybody got mugged,” [John] Podhoretz writes. A serial killer nicknamed
Charlie Chop-Off menaced the Upper West Side, emasculating little boys and then
killing them, and such was the general disorder that his crimes were barely
mentioned in the city’s newspapers.

Many of the people living in cities during that era moved to the suburbs and bought cars (or second cars). Crime has since dropped
off, but the psychological understanding of cities as hotbeds of crime and
decay remains among Baby Boomers.

For those who see
cities as key testing grounds for sustainable living, the good news is that today’s
young adults don’t share the same fear. A recent Brookings study found young whites moving into urban centers in record numbers. Harvard Business Review recently advised
businesses to consider moving into cities if they want to attract bright young
workers of any race.

The challenge is that Boomers still fill the ranks of policymakers and power brokers, and during their formative years, American cities were floundering. How do we make Congress—where the median age is 58—able to see the potential gains of reinvesting in cities?

 

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U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

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Big Green and little green clash over the American Power Act

by Agence France-Presse

Photo courtesy 12fh via FlickrNEW ORLEANS—The United States Tuesday closed off a
large chunk of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, while fears grew that a giant oil
slick could be swept to Florida’s beaches and coral reefs.

The cautionary closure,
totaling 45,728 square miles—around 19 percent of the Gulf’s federal waters—was announced as politicians in Washington raged over the apparent lax
enforcement of safety standards and grilled government officials over what went
wrong.

The chief of the
U.S. agency monitoring the spill warned that the “unprecedented and
dynamic” slick was on course to sweep along the region’s coastline.

“The
proximity of the southeast tendril of oil to the loop current indicates that
oil is increasingly likely to become entrained in the loop current if it is not
already,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, told a press conference. “When that occurs, oil could
reach the Florida Strait in eight to 10 days,” she said.

Experts are
analyzing at least 20 tar stains found on several beaches on Florida’s southern
Keys to determine if they were from the spill.

Sen. Bill Nelson
(D-Fla.), meanwhile, speaking before a congressional hearing on the disaster,
described the prospect of oil hitting his state of Florida and heading up the
U.S. eastern seaboard as his “worst nightmare.”

The bleak
warnings obscured BP’s positive reports Tuesday of progress in its month-long
effort to contain the leak: a tube inserted into a gushing oil pipe is now
sucking up about 40 percent of the crude, twice as much as a day earlier. The
company said its “riser insertion tube tool” is carrying about 2,000
barrels a day of oil up to the Discoverer Enterprise drill ship on the surface
via a mile-long pipe.

BP reckons about
5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, of crude is spewing each day from the
wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon rig, although analysis from independent
experts suggests the flow rate could be many times that.

In Washington,
the political firestorm was raging over accounts of lax enforcement of safety
standards and other regulation for offshore drilling, with Interior Secretary
Ken Salazar pledging to revamp his agency’s Minerals and Management Service with “more tools, more resources,
more independence.” In that effort, Salazar also said there was a
“need to clean up that house,” amid scathing criticism of the body.

Worries over the
ecological impact of the huge oil spill, and even the efforts to contain it,
are growing with worries focused on the Florida Keys.

With hugely
popular tourist beaches and fragile coral reefs around the southern tip of the
peninsula, the loop current has the potential to take the economic and
environmental impact of the spill to a whole new level.

“I think
the threat to South Florida is real and we should get ready,” said Igor
Kamenkovich, a scientist at the University of Miami. “It’s hard to predict
but … if it does happen, it is bad news for us.”

There are also
concerns that huge underwater plumes of crude could be starving the Gulf of oxygen, meaning the slick is having a
far greater impact on the marine environment than previously thought.

An expert from
the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies told AFP that deepwater
spills posed greater risks due to these plumes, which some experts have warned
may be linked to dispersants that
stop the oil from rising.

“Normally,
in a shallow spill, everything pretty much shoots up to the surface and the
impacts are primarily to surface organisms like turtles, dolphins, whales, and
birds,” explained Paul Montagna. However, “under this really cold, high-pressure environment, the
oil is getting dispersed through the water column.”

Louisiana’s
Department of Wildlife and Fisheries on Tuesday requested data from BP on the
use of dispersants, with agency chief Robert Barham complaining that
“little or no substantive data has been provided … concerning the
efficacy and risks associated with deep injection of dispersants.”

Salazar, in
testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he
expected BP to attempt a “dynamic kill” to further contain the oil
spewing from the well.

“The
expectation is that this Saturday or this Sunday the triggers will be pulled
for a dynamic kill of the well,” he said, explaining this would involve
injection of fluids and other materials to stem the flow.

Salazar said the
maligned MMS would be reconfigured in order to tighten regulation and promised
to work with the White House and lawmakers on broader reforms, based on input
from a national commission probing the spill to be named by President Barack Obama.

Congressional
hearings have revealed multiple warning signs that were overlooked before the
April 20 blast on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 people and touched off the catastrophe.

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Obama’s ocean chief dismisses loop current threat: ‘Very little tarballs!’

A new oil rush endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the planet

by Umbra Fisk

Photo: pfly via FlickrDearests, with yesterday’s
Clorox wipes letter on my mind, I was intrigued to read the following
headline in today’s Wall Street Journal: Can
Dirt Do a Little Good?

The story talks about the new film Babies, a Focus feature following the
first year of life for four babies living in Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San
Francisco, and the varying standards of hygiene in these kids’ lives. The flick
doesn’t even mention hygiene, per se, but it brings up an interesting question,
as posed by the WSJ piece and seemingly enforced by the reader question about
overcleaning in yesterday’s column: Are we too clean?

On a small family farm in Mongolia,
a rooster struts around little Bayar’s bed, a goat drinks from his bathwater
and livestock serve as babysitters.

By contrast, Mari, growing up in
high-rise, high-tech Tokyo, and Hattie, whose doting parents live a
“green” lifestyle in San Francisco, both have modern conveniences and
sanitation.

Statistically, Mari and Hattie are
healthier. Some 42 out of 1,000 children in Namibia, and 41 out of 1,000 in
Mongolia die before their 5th birthday; compared with only 8 in 1,000 in the
U.S. and only 4 in Japan.

Yet the upscale urban infants are at
higher risk for some health problems—including allergies, asthma and autoimmune
diseases like Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel
disease—than the babies in the rural developing world.

Obviously, we in the developed world
get the way better deal—allergies instead of a far-too-early demise—but is our
obsession with cleanliness (Clorox wipes, hand sanitizers, antibacterial soap,
etc.) what’s causing an increase in allergies and autoimmune diseases? This
article raises some compelling questions.

But during the regular flu season
(or the swine flu craze of ‘09/‘10), you’d be hard pressed to find someone
without hand sanitizer at the ready or sneezing into their elbows like the CDC
taught us. And with good reason, as these illnesses are highly contagious.
However, I think we may have taken our anal-retentive nature too far.

Many
experts advise common sense. “We don’t want to say to children, ‘OK, play
by the dirty river bank and catch whatever you can,’” says Dr. [Joel]
Weinstock, [chief of gastroenterology/heptology at Tufts Medical Center in
Boston]. “But we can say there’s nothing wrong with kids playing in the
dirt. They don’t have to live in total sanitation, and they won’t die from
eating something off the floor. It’s probably more healthy than not.”

Excuse me while I go after the grape I dropped at lunch.

 

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by Brad Johnson

Cross-posted from the Wonk Room.

Yesterday, Obama’s ocean chief said that the threat of the BP oil
disaster getting caught in the Loop Current “sounds scarier than it is.”
As she was making these statements, satellites imagery showed the
Maryland-sized slick being entrained in the Loop Current, which
loops through the Gulf of Mexico and out the Florida Strait, feeding the
powerful Gulf Stream current that sweeps along the Atlantic seaboard.

Speaking with Gwen Ifill on PBS Newshour, Dr. Jane Lubchenco,
administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), admitted that the growing slick is “likely” to be entrained by
the current, but only a “very small stream” that would be “very, very
diluted,” weathered into tarballs, and “not likely to have a very
significant impact.” When queried by Ifill how big the tarballs would
be, Lubchenco squeezed her fingers together in front of her face, and
declared, “Very
little tarballs!”:

LUBCHENCO: There’s a very small stream of oil
that is a very light sheen that is getting close to the Loop
Current. And it’s likely that, at some point, it will be entrained by
the Loop Current. But that current, if there is oil entrained in it, it
would be probably nine to 12 days before that would reach the Florida
Strait. And, during that time, it gets highly diluted, parts per
billion, and it weathers naturally. And, so, any oil that
would be reaching Florida Strait might be in the form of tarballs, for
example. And whether it ever comes ashore or not would be a function of
whether there were good onshore winds bringing it. So …

IFILL: You say tarballs, you mean [softball-sized] tarballs or
[human-sized] tarballs?

LUBCHENCO: Probably little, very little tarballs.

Watch it:

“By the time the oil is in the loop current,” Lubchenco concluded,
“it’s likely to be very, very diluted. And, so, it’s not likely to have a
very significant impact. It sounds scarier than it is.”

NOAA—the agency responsible for measuring and predicting the extent
of the oil disaster—completely
failed to predict the entrainment of a huge band of the slick into
the Loop Current on May 17. NOAA is not currently publishing any maps or
predictions of subsea extent of the dispersed oil plumes.

Meanwhile, yesterday tarballs the size of softballs were found washed
up on Key West. According to news reports, at least some of the tarballs
come from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which means that the
leading edge of the oil disaster reached the Loop Current eight to ten
days ago.

Related Links:

U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

A new oil rush endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the planet

10 ways MMS makes FEMA look good

by Michael T. Klare

The oil spill viewed from NASA’s Terra satellite on May 17.Photo: NASA’s Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of
Mexico in staggering
quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of
human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough
Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic,
hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we’re entering the
danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at
stake. 

It may never be possible to pin down the precise cause of the massive
explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April
20, killing 11 of its 126 workers. Possible culprits include a faulty
cement plug in the undersea oil bore and a disabled cutoff device known
as a blow-out
preventer. Inadequate governmental oversight of safety procedures
undoubtedly also contributed to the disaster, which may have been set
off by a combination of defective equipment and human
error. But whether or not the immediate trigger of the explosion
is ever fully determined, there can be no mistaking the underlying
cause: a government-backed corporate drive to exploit oil and natural
gas reserves in extreme environments under increasingly hazardous
operating conditions.

The new oil rush and its dangers

The United States entered the hydrocarbon era with one of the world’s
largest pools of oil and natural gas. The exploitation of these
valuable and versatile commodities has long contributed to the nation’s
wealth and power, as well as to the profitability of giant energy firms
like BP and Exxon. In the process, however, most of our easily
accessible onshore oil and gas reservoirs have been depleted, leaving
only less accessible reserves in offshore areas, Alaska, and the melting
Arctic. To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons—and the
continued prosperity of the giant energy companies—successive
administrations have promoted the exploitation of these extreme energy
options with a striking disregard for the resulting dangers. By their
very nature, such efforts involve an ever increasing risk of human and
environmental catastrophe—something that has been far too little
acknowledged.

The hunt for oil and gas has always entailed a certain amount of
risk. After all, most energy reserves are trapped deep below the
Earth’s surface by overlying rock formations. When punctured by oil
drills, these are likely to erupt in an explosive release of
hydrocarbons, the well-known “gusher” effect. In the swashbuckling
early days of the oil industry, this phenomenon—familiar to us from
movies like There Will Be Blood—often caused human and
environmental injury. Over the years, however, the oil companies became
far more adept at anticipating such events and preventing harm to
workers or the surrounding countryside. 

Now, in the rush to develop hard-to-reach reserves in Alaska, the
Arctic, and deep-offshore waters, we’re returning to a particularly
dangerous version of those swashbuckling days. As energy companies
encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies—
largely developed in more benign environments—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.

The Deepwater Horizon operation was characteristic of this trend. BP, the company which leased the rig and was overseeing the drilling
effort, has for some years been in a rush to extract oil from ever
greater depths in the Gulf of Mexico. The well in question, known as
Mississippi Canyon 252, was located in 5,000 feet of water, some 50
miles south of the Louisiana coastline; the well bore itself extended
another 13,000 feet into the earth. At depths this great, all work on
the ocean floor has to be performed by remotely-controlled robotic
devices overseen by technicians on the rig. There was little margin for
error to begin with, and no tolerance for the corner-cutting,
penny-pinching, and lax oversight that appears to have characterized the
Deepwater Horizon operation. Once predictable problems did arise, it
was, of course, impossible to send human troubleshooters one mile
beneath the ocean’s surface to assess the situation and devise a
solution.

Drilling in Alaska and the Arctic poses, if anything, even more
perilous challenges, given the extreme environmental and climatic
conditions to be dealt with. Any drilling rigs deployed offshore in,
say, Alaska’s Beaufort or Chukchi Seas must be hardened to withstand
collisions with floating sea ice, a perennial danger, and capable of
withstanding extreme temperatures and powerful storms. In addition, in
such hard-to-reach locations, BP-style oil spills, whether at sea or on
land, will be even more difficult to deal with than in the Gulf. In any
such situation, an uncontrolled oil flow is likely to prove lethal to
many species, endangered or otherwise, which have little tolerance for
environmental hazards. 

The major energy firms insist that they have adopted ironclad
safeguards against such perils, but the disaster in the Gulf has already
made mockery of such claims, as does history. In 2006, for instance, a
poorly-maintained pipeline at a BP facility ruptured,
spewing 267,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska’s North Slope in an
area frequented by migrating caribou. (Because the spill occurred in
winter, no caribou were present at the time and it was possible to scoop
up the oil from surrounding snow banks; had it occurred in summer, the
risk to the Caribou herds would have been substantial.) 

If it’s oil, it’s okay

Despite obvious hazards and dangers, as well as inadequate safety
practices, a succession of administrations, including Barack Obama’s,
have backed corporate strategies strongly favoring the exploitation of
oil and gas reservoirs in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and
other environmentally sensitive areas. 

On the government’s side, this outlook was first fully articulated in
the National Energy Policy (NEP) adopted by President George W. Bush on
May 17, 2001. Led by former Halliburton CEO Vice President Dick
Cheney, the framers of the policy warned that the United States was
becoming ever more dependent on imported energy, thereby endangering
national security. They called for increased reliance on domestic
energy sources, especially oil and natural gas. “A primary goal of the
National Energy Policy is to add supply from diverse sources,” the
document declared. “This means domestic oil, gas, and coal.”

As the
NEP made clear, however, the United States was running out of
conventional, easily tapped reservoirs of oil and natural gas located on
land or in shallow coastal waters. “U.S. oil production is expected to
decline over the next two decades, [while] demand for natural gas will
most likely continue to outpace domestic production,” the document
noted. The only solution, it claimed, would be to increase exploitation
of unconventional energy reserves—oil and gas found in deep offshore
areas of the Gulf of Mexico, the Outer Continental Shelf, Alaska, and
the American Arctic, as well as in complex geological formations such as
shale oil and gas. “Producing oil and gas from geologically
challenging areas while protecting the environment is important
to Americans and to the future of our nation’s energy security,” the
policy affirmed. (The phrase in italics was evidently added by the
White House to counter charges—painfully accurate, as it turned out —that the administration was unmindful of the environmental
consequences of its energy policies.)

First and foremost among the NEP’s recommendations was the
development of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal
that generated intense media interest and produced widespread opposition
from environmentalists. Equally significant, however, was its call for
increased exploration and drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf, as
well as the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off northern Alaska. 

While drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was, in the
end, blocked by Congress, an oil rush to exploit the other areas
proceeded with little governmental opposition. In fact, as has now
become evident, the government’s deeply
corrupted regulatory arm, the Minerals Management Service (MMS),
has for years facilitated the awarding of leases for exploration and
drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while systematically ignoring environmental regulations and concerns. Common practice during the Bush
years, this was not altered when Barack Obama took over the
presidency. Indeed, he gave his own stamp of approval to a potentially
massive increase in offshore drilling when on March 30—three weeks
before the Deepwater Horizon disaster—he announced that vast areas of the Atlantic, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and
Alaskan waters would be opened to oil and gas drilling for the first
time. 

In addition to accelerating the development of the Gulf of Mexico,
while overruling government scientists and other officials who warned of
the dangers, the MMS also approved offshore drilling in the Chukchi and
Beaufort Seas. This happened despite strong opposition from
environmentalists and native peoples who fear a risk to whales and other
endangered species crucial to their way of life. In October, for
example, the MMS gave Shell Oil preliminary
approval to conduct exploratory drilling on two offshore blocks in
the Beaufort Sea. Opponents of the plan have warned that any oil spills
produced by such activities would pose a severe threat to endangered
animals, but these concerns were, as usual,
ignored. (On April 30, 10 days after the Gulf explosion, final
approval of the plan was suddenly ordered withheld by President Obama, pending a review of offshore drilling
activities.)

A BP hall of shame

The major energy firms have their own compelling reasons for a
growing involvement in the exploitation of extreme energy options. Each
year, to prevent the value of their shares from falling, these
companies must replace the oil extracted from their existing reservoirs
with new reserves. Most of the oil and gas basins in their traditional
areas of supply have, however, been depleted, while many promising
fields in the Middle East, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union
are now under the exclusive control of state-owned national oil
companies like Saudi Aramco, Mexico’s Pemex, and Venezuela’s PdVSA. 

This leaves the private firms, widely known as international oil
companies (IOCs), with ever fewer areas in which to replenish their
supplies. They are now deeply involved in an ongoing oil rush in
sub-Saharan Africa, where most countries still allow some participation
by IOCs, but there they face dauntingly stiff competition from Chinese
companies and other state-backed companies. The only areas where they
still have a virtually free hand are the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, the
North Atlantic, and the North Sea. Not surprisingly, this is where
they are concentrating their efforts, whatever the dangers to us or to
the planet.

Take BP. Originally known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, still later British Petroleum), BP got
its start in southwestern Iran, where it once enjoyed a monopoly on the
production of crude petroleum. In 1951, its Iranian holdings were
nationalized by the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadeq. The
company returned to Iran in 1953, following a U.S.-backed coup that put
the Shah in power, and was finally expelled again in 1979 following the
Islamic Revolution. The company still retains a significant foothold in
oil-rich but unstable Nigeria, a former British colony, and in
Azerbaijan. However, since its takeover of Amoco (once the Standard Oil
Company of Indiana) in 1998, BP has concentrated its energies on the
exploitation of Alaskan reserves and tough-oil locations in the deep
waters of the Gulf of Mexico and off the African coast. 

“Operating at the Energy Frontiers” is the title of BP’s Annual Review for 2009, which proudly began: “BP
operates at the frontiers of the energy industry. From deep beneath the
ocean to complex refining environments, from remote tropical islands to
next-generation biofuels—a revitalized BP is driving greater
efficiency, sustained momentum, and business growth.” 

Within this mandate, moreover, the Gulf of Mexico held center stage. “BP is the leading operator in the Gulf of Mexico,” the review
asserted. “We are the biggest producer, the leading resource holder, and
have the largest exploration acreage position … With new discoveries,
successful start-ups, efficient operations, and a strong portfolio of
new projects, we are exceptionally well placed to sustain our success in
the deepwater Gulf of Mexico over the long run.”

Clearly, BP’s top executives believed that a rapid ramp-up in
production in the Gulf was essential to the company’s long-term
financial health (and indeed, only days after the Deepwater Horizon
explosion, the company announced that it had made $6.1
billion in profits in the first quarter of 2010 alone). To what
degree BP’s corporate culture contributed to the Deepwater Horizon
accident has yet to be determined. There is, however, some indication that the company was in an unseemly rush to complete the cementing of
the Mississippi Canyon 252 well—a procedure that would cap it until
the company was ready to undertake commercial extraction of the oil
stored below. It could then have moved the rig, rented from Transocean
Ltd. at $500,000 per day, to another prospective drill site in search of
yet more oil.

While BP may prove to be the principal villain in this case, other
large energy firms—egged on by the government and state officials—
are engaged in similar reckless drives to extract oil and natural gas
from extreme environmental locations. These companies and their
government backers insist that, with proper precautions, it is safe to
operate in these conditions, but the Deepwater Horizon incident shows
that the more extreme the environment, the more unlikely such statements
will prove accurate.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion, we assuredly will be told, was an
unfortunate fluke: a confluence of improper management and faulty
equipment. With tightened oversight, it will be said, such accidents
can be averted—and so it will be safe to go back into the
deep waters again and drill for oil a mile or more beneath the
ocean’s surface. 

Don’t believe it. While poor oversight and faulty equipment may have
played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the ultimate
source of the disaster is big oil’s compulsive drive to compensate for
the decline in its conventional oil reserves by seeking supplies in
inherently hazardous areas—risks be damned. 

So long as this compulsion prevails, more such disasters will
follow. Bet on it.

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U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

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10 ways MMS makes FEMA look good

by Randy Rieland

1. You got a
problem with paper towels?  One big reason
the means of cleaning up oil spills have barely changed since the Exxon Valdez spill is that the Minerals
Management Service’s budget for oil-spill research has been stuck at roughly $6
million a year since 1990.  That’s one-tenth
of a penny for every dollar MMS has collected in royalties from oil companies for
offshore drilling rights over the same period.
In real numbers, that’s $129 million spent on research over 20 years while
$107 billion was collected. Almost two-thirds of what MMS spends on
research goes to maintaining a wave pool in New Jersey where it tests cleanup
equipment. The
Houston Chronicle has more.

2. What’s $10
billion among friends? In January 2007, the head of MMS, a former energy
exploration executive from Wyoming named Rejane “Johnnie” Burton, came under
fire from the Interior Department’s inspector general for ignoring or not
addressing a leasing error that could have let oil companies avoid paying up to
$10 billion in royalties.  The auditor
general described it as a “jaw-dropping example of bureaucratic bungling.”  Burton resigned four months later. See
the New York Times story.

3. They aim to
please. Noting an annual savings of $340,000 per oil rig, the MMS in 1998 cut
in half the number of pressure tests on valves of blowout preventers.  An industry executive praised the
“flexibility” of MMS regulators.  The
blowout preventer on the Deepwater Horizon rig failed.  Follow
the AP’s investigation.

4. Wonks just
gotta have fun. In September 2008, the Interior Department’s inspector general
delivered reports to Congress detailing a sex and cocaine scandal within MMS as
well as numerous cases of employees getting gifts from energy companies,
including golf and ski trips and even a paintball outing.  He characterized the agency as having “a
culture of ethical failure.”  Get
the lowdown from The New York Times.

5. Now you see us,
now you don’t. During the past five years, MMS became increasingly lax
about making monthly safety inspections of the Deepwater Horizon rig.  Which explains why, since
January 2005, inspectors had issued just one minor infraction for the rig. And
that helps explain why last year MMS was able to single out the Deepwater well
as an industry model for safety.  See the AP’s
report. 

6. Ooooops. Last year, MMS gave BP an exemption from doing an environmental impact analysis
on the Deepwater Horizon because a massive oil spill was
considered unlikely. In fact, the agency over the past year has routinely
issued drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico without obtaining federal permits
related to potential environmental threats.  Read
about it in The Washington
Post.

7. Scientists
are such drama queens. MMS
routinely overruled its staff biologists and engineers who raised concerns
about the safety and the environmental impact of certain drilling proposals in
the Gulf and in Alaska, according to a half-dozen current and former agency
scientists. Those scientists said they were also regularly pressured by agency
officials to change the findings of their internal studies if they predicted
that an accident was likely to occur or if wildlife might be harmed. See the New York Times article.

8. Details, details. Recently, an MMS
engineer who gave BP the go-ahead to drill an exploratory well under the
Deepwater Horizon rig admitted he never got assurance from the firm that a
last-ditch mechanism at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico would be able to slice
through its drill pipe to shut off the well in an emergency.  Get
the full story from the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

9. But they
gave their hand such a slap. MMS red-flagged potential violations of
government safety standards in five out of 20 accident investigations it
completed at BP offshore operations since 2005, including rigs and platforms.
But only one incident resulted in a fine, according to a
Houston Chronicle investigation.

10. You be safe now, okay? MMS apparently
followed a pattern of setting broad safety goals for offshore drilling, but
largely leaving it up to the oil companies to decide how—and whether—to
meet them.  The
Wall Street Journal has the details.

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by Grist

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by Jonathan Hiskes

When Sens. John Kerry
(D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) unveiled their long-awaited American Power Act last week, it drew two sharply different responses from two collections of
activist groups.

Two hundred groups that
might be called “little green” immediately condemned the climate and energy
bill in a joint
letter, calling it “greenwashing in the extreme.” The coalition consists of
regional environmental, peace, and religious groups—such as Don’t Waste
Arizona, the Snake River Alliance, and the Turtle Island Restoration Network.

“This bill is just
business-as-usual: taxpayer giveaways to giant nuclear and other energy
corporations wrapped in the guise of doing something about our climate crisis,”
they wrote.

Big Green issued its own
statement the same morning. It was neither an endorsement nor an attack on
the bill. It was thoroughly—impressively—devoid of any clear opinion of the
bill.

“It is time for
America’s leaders to get serious … the Gulf Coast oil catastrophe is yet
another reminder … President Obama and leaders of both parties in Congress must
provide the leadership necessary to develop a clean energy and climate
solution,” said the joint letter from 23 larger and more D.C.-centric groups,
including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Sierra Club, Audubon, and the
League of Conservation Voters.

The Kerry-Lieberman
bill is undoubtedly flawed from an environmental perspective; in addition to
giveaways for the nuclear, oil, and coal industries, there are the weak
emission-reduction targets and the heavy reliance on carbon offsets. Every
concession to polluter interests was added in hopes of luring enough
fossil-fuel-beholden senators to reach the painfully difficult 60-vote
threshold. That’s considered the only realistic way to pass a climate bill in
2010. Kerry, in
a Grist post, implored greens not to slam the bill because it’s too weak,
saying it’s better to get started with an imperfect bill.

This all puts green
groups in the thorny position of having to either endorse flawed,
compromise-laden legislation or oppose the closest thing to a decent climate
bill we’re going to see this year, and perhaps for years to come.  Many big green groups will probably end up
supporting the bill, but don’t want to tip their hand while there’s still a
chance to improve it. Hence the awkward non-comment last week. Many
activist-oriented groups—including the 200 signees and notable big dogs Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth—have
already made their opposition known.

Last fall groups mocked cap-and-trade programs by handing out $2 trillion “carbon market” bills.Courtesy Climate SOSThis is far from the first
inter-movement dispute among green groups. Last fall I reported on a “no
compromise” faction of liberal groups that attacked Al Gore, the Waxman-Markey
House bill, and carbon markets that allow polluters to buy and sell
emissions credits. They argued that larger environmental groups had given away
too much in collaborating with businesses and Democratic lawmakers. Reps from
EDF, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Center for American
Progress found this, shall we say, annoying.

Two kinds of hope

So which approach is,
y’know, better for saving the earth?

It’s worth noting that
all the groups involved have shown they understand the scientific urgency of an
aggressive clean-energy plan. And they all want President Obama to use his
bully pulpit to give the issue more attention. The disagreement is about
political strategy.

At first blush, the
left wing of the environmental movement seems to have the more optimistic approach,
refusing to settle for a faulty bill and betting that it can create a
groundswell of support for more hard-hitting climate legislation over the
coming year or two—enough to force members of Congress to turn its way, or
force out members of Congress who
don’t. 

The Big Green groups look
to have the more pessimistic approach by supporting a crappy
bill.  They say they don’t see a path
to a better one in the immediate future. Even getting the Kerry-Lieberman bill passed
would be a
huge uphill battle. And with Republicans poised to gain a number of seats
in both the House and Senate in November’s midterm elections, the chances of
passing any climate bill at all next year or the year after—let alone a
better bill than Kerry-Lieberman—seem even more remote. 

Here’s the
counter-argument: Big Green is embracing a different kind of optimism. They are
banking on the notion that building a clean-energy economy will be cheaper and easier
than expected, and that once we get started, even with weak half-measures,
success will follow upon success. 

David
Roberts explained this view last week: “Right now, policy is being
made out of fear: fear by the private sector that decarbonization will be a
crushing burden; fear by consumers that their energy prices will skyrocket;
fear by politicians that the project will prove electorally
unpopular.”  But there are
“huge opportunities for low-cost (or negative-cost) emission reductions
just waiting to be exploited,” he argues. If a weak bill gets that process
started, it can alleviate fears, begin moving the country in the direction of a
clean-energy economy, and make it easier to pass stronger legislation down the
line.

So either camp can
claim to be more hopeful—one in the short term and one in the long term.

The problem is that by
working against each other, they sap enthusiasm for building a popular movement
for climate action. Lots of Americans would like to see the U.S. move toward a
clean-energy economy and address the climate threat—61 percent of respondents
said so in
a recent poll. But squabbles among environmentalists risk turning them off.

And building a diverse movement
should be goal No. 1, according to author and 350.org organizer Bill McKibben. He argues that lawmakers don’t yet feel pressure from
the public to take the climate threat seriously. “There are lots and lots and
lots of groups lobbying Congress,” he told
Grist in January. “But Congress members are good at telling whether
there’s anything behind that lobbying or not. I think we have to figure out how
to put some pressure behind that lobbying.” Until then, he argues, the focus on
Congress is premature.

He may be right that
movement-building—the focus
of 350.org—is the long-term imperative. But there’s a bill in the Senate
that demands a response right now.

So how should environmental
organizations and concerned citizens respond to the bill?  What’s the best way to built momentum toward
a strong climate movement? And how do we get started with solutions as soon as
possible?

Related Links:

David Brooks to old folks: cities are better now

U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

Battle of the Carbon Titans

by Emilie Karrick Surrusco

We’ve all seen the horrifying footage of the oil leaking,
leaking and still leaking into the Gulf of Mexico.
And we’ve watched as BP’s CEO Tony Hayward has made such ludicrous statements
as the Gulf is a big place, there really isn’t that much oil if you compare it
to all that water. What’s more, we’ve read that BP repeatedly told Minerals
Management Service (MMS), the federal agency charged with overseeing offshore
drilling in our nation’s waters, that their proposed plans for the Deepwater
Horizon rig posed minimal risk to the environment so there really was no reason
to prepare for a disaster. And, MMS took them at their word.

Fast forward 43 days and we could be watching the same story
unfold in one of our nation’s last pristine, untouched places—Alaska’s
Arctic Ocean.

Right now, Shell Oil is moving forward with plans for
exploratory drilling, the very same type that Deepwater Horizon was doing in
the Gulf, in the Arctic’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. As they await the final
permits from MMS, Shell has submitted their final assurances on the soundness
of their plans—a letter sent on Friday contains such common sense-defying
assertions as “in Arctic conditions, ice can aid oil spill response.” Like BP,
they never bothered to put together much of a plan for a blowout because “a
large oil spill, such as a crude release from a blowout, is extremely rare and
not considered a reasonably foreseeable impact.” And just as they did with BP,
MMS thus far has taken Shell at their word. 

There are some differences between the Gulf and the Arctic.
One difference, that Shell continues to trot out as their top
nothing-to-worry-about-here talking point, is that the Arctic
is much shallower than the Gulf. While this may be true and this may sound
oddly reassuring to those of us who like to be able to see the bottom of the
pool when we’re treading water, it doesn’t mean much when it comes to an
offshore well blowout. In fact, according to a recent report by Elmer P.
Danenberger III, who was an expert witness in front of Congress just last week,
blowouts are more likely in shallow waters than in deep waters.  From 1992
to 2006, the majority of the blowouts that occurred in our nation’s offshore
waters were from shallow water wells. So much for Shell’s “we don’t need to
plan for a blowout because it would never happen in shallow water” messaging.

And the ice thing. First thing I should mention is that not
only does sea ice cover the Arctic Ocean for much of the year but the weather
conditions that come with it are far from hospitable to activities such as
cleaning up an offshore oil spill. In the Gulf, clean up was held up by 8-foot
waves. In the Arctic, the waves tend to form
20-foot crests, with gale force winds and negative temperatures in October. It
could be months before the clean-up crews could travel the hundreds of miles
between them and an Arctic spill site—and find conditions that would lend
themselves to effective spill response. In the Gulf, there were 32 vessels on
hand within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. In the Arctic,
that capacity is 13 vessels. The closest boat dock is 250 miles away from the
proposed well sites in the Chukchi Sea and it abuts the tiny village of
Wainwright (population: 546). As numerous other federal agencies
(including MMS) and the U.S. Coast Guard have said: “There has been little
experience with under-ice or broken-ice oil spills, and there is little
evidence to suggest that the capability exists currently to successfully clean
up a spill of this type up in a timely manner.”

But all that’s okay because in Shell’s world, the ice will
take care of things and the oil will be easier to clean up because it will be
contained within the ice that forms the basis of one of our planet’s most
abundant and unique ecosystems. This isn’t just ice we’re talking about people—the ice plays host to algae, that feeds a phytoplankton bloom in the water
beneath the ice, that feeds crustaceans and other invertebrates, that feeds numerous
fish species, that feed seals, birds and whales, that feed polar bears and
humans. I’m no scientist, but that sounds like a lot of life under that ice
that would be destroyed by oil. And, as a young man in Point Hope, Alaska,
who grew up hunting, eating and celebrating fish, birds, seals, whales, and
polar bears and now feeds his own family with the same subsistence traditions,
said: “The ice may contain the spill but who will contain the ice?”

Folks like that young man, who call the Arctic Ocean their
garden because it feeds their past, their future, their way of being, have been
watching the footage in the Gulf with a horrific sense of foreboding. We and
the Obama administration owe it to them—not to mention our planet—to stop
taking oil companies at their word. The Gulf disaster has shown us what can
happen. Let’s not tempt fate and wait for worse to happen in the Arctic.

Related Links:

U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

Obama’s ocean chief dismisses loop current threat: ‘Very little tarballs!’

A new oil rush endangers the Gulf of Mexico and the planet

by Robert Stavins

As with the Waxman-Markey bill (H.R. 2454), passed by the House of Representatives
last June, there is now some confusing commentary in the press and
blogosphere about the allocation of allowances in the new Senate
proposal—the American Power Act of 2010—sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.). As before, the mistake is being made of confusing the share of allowances that are
freely allocated versus auctioned with (the appropriate analysis of) the
actual incidence of the allowance value, that is,
who ultimately benefits from the allocation and auction revenue.

In this essay, I assess quantitatively the actual incidence of the
allowance value in the new Senate proposal, much as I did last year with the House legislation. I find
(as with Waxman-Markey) that the lion’s share of the allowance value—
some 82 percent—goes to consumers and public purposes, and only 18 percent accrues
to covered, private industry. First, however, I place this in context
by commenting briefly on the overall Senate proposal, and by examining
in generic terms the effects that allowance allocations have—and do
not have—in cap-and-trade systems.

The American Power Act of 2010

You may be wondering why I am bothering to write about the
Kerry-Lieberman proposal at all, given the conventional wisdom that the
likelihood is very small of achieving the 60 votes necessary in the
Senate to pass the legislation (particularly with the withdrawal of
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) from the former
triplet of Senate sponsors). Two reasons. First, conventional wisdoms often turn out to be wrong (although I must say that the vote count on Kerry-Lieberman does not
look good, with the current tally according to Environment & Energy
Daily being 26 Yes, 11 Probably Yes, 31 Fence Sitters, 10 Probably No,
and 22 No). Second, if the conventional wisdom turns out to be correct,
and the 60-vote margin proves insurmountable in the current Congress,
then when the Congress returns to this issue—which it inevitably will
in the future—among the key starting points for Congressional
thinking will be the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Lieberman proposals.
Hence, the design issues do matter.

The American Power Act, like its House counter-part, is a long and
complex piece of legislation with many design elements in its
cap-and-trade system (which, of course, is not called “cap-and-trade”—but rather “reduction and investment”), and many elements that go well
beyond the cap-and-trade system (sorry, I meant to say the
“reduce-and-invest” system). Perhaps in a future essay, I will examine
some of those other elements (wherein there is naturally both good news
and bad news), but for today, I am focusing exclusively on the allowance
allocation issue, which is of central political importance.

Before turning to an empirical examination of the Kerry-Lieberman
allowance allocation, it may be helpful to recall some generic facts
about the role that allowance allocations play in cap-and-trade systems.

The role of allowance allocations in cap-and-trade systems

It is exceptionally important to keep in mind what is probably the
key attribute of cap-and-trade systems:  the particular allocation of
those allowances which are freely distributed has no impact on the
equilibrium distribution of allowances (after trading), and therefore no
impact on the allocation of emissions (or emissions abatement), the
total magnitude of emissions, or the aggregate social costs. (There are some caveats, about which more below.) By the way, this independence of a cap-and-trade system’s performance
from the initial allowance allocation was established as far back as
1972 by David Montgomery in a path-breaking article in the Journal of
Economic Theory (based upon his 1971 Harvard
economics PhD dissertation). It has been validated with empirical evidence repeatedly over the years.

Generally speaking, the choice between auctioning and freely
allocating allowances does not influence firms’ production and emission
reduction decisions (although it’s true that the revenue from auctioned
allowances can be used for a variety of public purposes, including
cutting distortionary taxes, which can thereby reduce the net cost of
the program). Firms face the same emissions cost regardless of the
allocation method. When using an allowance, whether it was received for
free or purchased, a firm loses the opportunity to sell that allowance,
and thereby recognizes this “opportunity cost” in deciding whether to
use the allowance. Consequently, the allocation choice will not—for
the most part—influence a cap’s overall costs.

Manifest political pressures lead to different initial allocations of
allowances, which affect distribution, but not environmental
effectiveness, and not cost-effectiveness. This means that ordinary
political pressures need not get in the way of developing and
implementing a scientifically sound, economically rational, and
politically pragmatic policy. With other policy instruments—both in
the environmental realm and in other policy domains—political
pressures often reduce the effectiveness and/or increase the cost of
well-intentioned public policies. Cap-and-trade provides natural
protection from this. Distributional battles over the allowance
allocation in a cap-and-trade system do not raise the overall cost of
the program nor affect its environmental impacts.

In fact, the political process of states, districts, sectors, firms,
and interest groups fighting for their share of the pie (free allowance
allocations) serves as the mechanism whereby a political constituency in support of
the system is developed, but without detrimental effects to the
system’s environmental or economic performance. That’s the good news,
and it should never be forgotten.

But, depending upon the specific allocation mechanisms employed,
there are several ways that the choice to freely distribute allowances
can affect a system’s cost. Here’s where the caveats come in.

Some important caveats

First, as I said above, auction revenue may be used in ways that reduce the costs of the existing tax system or fund
other socially beneficial policies. Free allocations forego such
opportunities.

Second, some proposals to freely allocate allowances to electric
utilities may affect electricity prices, and thereby affect the extent
to which reduced electricity demand contributes to limiting
emissions cost-effectively. Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Lieberman both
allocate a significant number of allowances to local (electricity)
distribution companies, which are subject to cost-of-service regulation
even in regions with restructured wholesale electricity markets.
Because the distribution companies are subject to cost-of-service
regulation, the benefit of the allocation will ultimately accrue to
electricity consumers, not the companies themselves. While these
allocations could increase the overall cost of the program if the
economic value of the allowances is passed on to consumers in the form
of reduced electricity prices, if that value is instead passed on to
consumers through lump-sum rebates, the effect can be to compensate consumers for increased electricity prices without
reducing incentives for energy conservation. (There are some legitimate
behavioral questions here about how consumers will respond to such
rebates; these questions are best left to ongoing economic research.)

Third, “output-based updating allocations” can be useful
for addressing competitiveness impacts of a climate policy
on particularly energy-intensive and trade-sensitive sectors, but
these allocations can provide perverse incentives and drive up the costs
of achieving a cap if they are poorly designed. This merits some
explanation.

An output-based updating allocation ties the quantity of allowances
that a firm receives to its output (production). Such an allocation is
essentially a production subsidy. While this affects firms’ pricing and
production decisions in ways that can, in some cases, introduce
unintended consequences and increase the cost of meeting an emissions
target, when applied to energy-intensive trade-exposed industries, the
incentives created by such allocations can contribute to the goal of
reducing emission leakage abroad.

This approach is probably superior to an import allowance requirement, whereby imports of a
small set of specific commodities must carry with them CO2 allowances, because import allowance requirements can damage
international trade relations. The only real solution to the
competitiveness issue is to bring key non-participating countries within
an international climate regime in meaningful ways, an obviously
difficult objective to achieve. (On this, please see the work of the Harvard Project on International Climate Agreements.)

Is the Kerry-Lieberman allowance allocation a corporate give-away?

Perhaps unintentionally, there has been some potentially misleading
coverage on this issue. At first glance, about half of the allowances
would be auctioned and about half freely allocated over the life of the
program, 2012-2050. (In the early years, the auction share is smaller,
reflecting various transitional allocations that phase out over time.) But looking at the shares that are auctioned and freely allocated can be
very misleading.

Instead, the best way to assess the real implications is not as “free
allocation” versus “auction,” but rather in terms of who is the
ultimate beneficiary of each element of the allocation and auction, that
is, how the value of the allowances and auction revenue are
allocated. On closer inspection, it turns out that many of the elements
of the apparently free allocation accrue to consumers and public
purposes, not private industry. Indeed, my conclusion is that over the
period 2012-2050, less than 18 percent of the allowance value accrues to
industry.

First, let’s looks at the elements which will accrue to consumers and public purposes. Next to each allocation element is the respective share of allowances
over the period 2012-2050:

I.  Cost Containment

a.  Auction from cost containment reserve, 3.1 percent

II.  Indirect Assistance to Mitigate Impacts on Energy
Consumers

b.  Electricity local distribution companies, 18.6 percent

c.  Natural gas local distribution companies, 4.1 percent

d.  State programs for home heating oil, propane, and kerosene
consumers, 0.9 percent

III.  Direct Assistance to Households and Taxpayers

e.  Allowances auctioned to provide tax and energy refunds for
low-income households, 11.7 percent

f.  Allowances auctioned for universal tax refunds, 22.3 percent

IV.  Other Domestic Priorities

g.  State renewable and energy efficiency programs, 0.6 percent

h.  State and local agency programs to reduce emissions through
transportation projects, 1.9 percent

i.  Grants for national surface transportation system, 1.9 percent

j.  Auctioned allowances for Highway Trust Fund, 1.9 percent

k.  Domestic adaptation, 1.0 percent

l.  Rural energy savings (consumer loans to implement energy
efficiency measures), 0.1 percent

V.  International Funding

m.  International adaptation, 1.0 percent

VI.  Deficit Reduction

n.  Allowances auctioned for deficit reduction, 7.4 percent

o.  Remaining allowances auctioned to offset bill’s impact on
deficit, 6.1 percent

Next, the following
elements will accrue to private industry, again with
average (2012-2050) shares of allowances:

I.  Allocations to Covered Entities

a.  Energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, 7.0 percent

b.  Petroleum refiners, 2.2 percent

c.  Merchant coal-fired electricity generators, 2.2 percent

d.  Generators under long-term contracts without cost recovery, 0.9 percent

II.  Technology Funding

e.  Carbon capture and sequestration incentives, 3.8 percent

f.  Clean energy technology R&D, 0.7 percent

g.  Low-carbon manufacturing R&D, 0.3 percent

h.  Clean vehicle technology incentives, 0.3 percent

III.  Other Domestic Priorities

i.  Manufacturing plant energy efficiency retrofits, 0.1 percent

j.  Compensation for early action emissions reductions prior to cap’s
implementation, 0.1 percent

The bottom line? Over the entire period from 2012 to 2050, 82.6 percent of the allowance value goes
to consumers and public purposes, and 17.6 percent to private industry. Rounding error brings the total to
100.2 percent, so to be conservative, I’ll call this an 82/18 percent split.

Moreover, because some of the allocations to private industry are—
for better or for worse—conditional on recipients undertaking specific
costly investments, such as investments in carbon capture and storage,
part of the 18 percent free allocation to private industry should not be viewed
as a windfall.

I should also note that some observers (who are skeptical about
government programs) may reasonably question some of the dedicated
public purposes of the allowance distribution, but such questioning is
equivalent to questioning dedicated uses of auction revenues. The
fundamental reality remains: The appropriate characterization of the
Kerry-Lieberman allocation is that about 82 percent of the value of
allowances go to consumers and public purposes, and 18 percent to private
industry.

Comparing the Kerry-Lieberman 82/18 split with recommendations from economic analyses

The 82-18 split is roughly consistent with empirical economic
analyses of the share that would be required—on average—to fully
compensate (but no more) private industry for equity losses due to the
policy’s implementation. In a series of analyses that considered the
share of allowances that would be required in perpetuity for
full compensation, Bovenberg and Goulder (2003) found that 13 percent
would be sufficient for compensation of the fossil fuel extraction
sectors, and Smith, Ross, and Montgomery (2002) found that 21 percent
would be needed to compensate primary energy producers and electricity
generators.

In my work for the Hamilton Project in 2007, I
recommended beginning with a 50-50 auction-free-allocation split, moving
to 100 percent auction over 25 years, because that time-path of numerical
division between the share of allowances that is freely allocated to
regulated firms and the share that is auctioned is equivalent (in terms
of present discounted value) to perpetual allocations of 15 percent, 19
percent, and 22 percent, at real interest rates of 3, 4, and 5 percent,
respectively. My recommended allocation was designed to be consistent
with the principal of targeting free allocations to burdened sectors in
proportion to their relative burdens, while being politically pragmatic
with more generous allocations in the early years of the program.

So, the Kerry-Lieberman 82/18 allowance split (like the 80/20 Waxman-Markey allowance split) turns
out to be consistent—on average, i.e. economy-wide—with independent
economic analysis of the share that would be required to fully
compensate (but no more) the private sector for equity losses due to the
imposition of the cap, and consistent with my Hamilton Project
recommendation of a 50/50 split phased out to 100 percent auction over 25
years.

The path ahead

Going forward, many observers and participants in the policy process
may continue to question the wisdom of some elements of the
Kerry-Lieberman proposal, including its allowance allocation. There’s
nothing wrong with that.

But let’s be clear that, first, for the most part, the specific
allocation of free allowances affects neither the environmental
performance of the cap-and-trade system nor its aggregate social cost.

Second, we should recognize that the legislation is by no means a
corporate give-away.  On the contrary, 82% of the value of allowances
accrue to consumers and public purposes, and some 18% accrue to covered,
private industry. This split is roughly consistent with the
recommendations of independent economic research.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that the much-lamented
deal-making for shares of the allowances for various purposes that took
place in the deliberations leading up the announcement by Senators Kerry and Lieberman was a
good example of the useful, important, and fundamentally benign
mechanism through which a cap-and-trade system provides the means for a
political constituency of support and action to be assembled, without
reducing the policy’s effectiveness or driving up its cost.

Related Links:

The American Power Act and California’s AB 32

Battle of the Carbon Titans

Big Green and little green clash over the American Power Act

by Seth Shulman

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Scott Luthcke weighs Greenland—every 10 days. And the island has been losing weight, an average of 183
gigatons (or 200 cubic kilometers)—in ice—annually during the past six
years. That’s one third the volume of water in Lake Erie
every year. Greenland’s
shrinking ice sheet offers some of the most powerful evidence of global
warming.

Luthcke is a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center
in Greenbelt, Maryland. He specializes in space geodesy, a
branch of earth sciences that monitors Earth from space by measuring changes in
the planet’s shape, orientation, and gravitational field.

Lutchke “weighs” Greenland by processing and
interpreting data from one of the most sophisticated gravitational “scales”
ever built: the U.S.-German satellite mission called GRACE—the Gravity Recovery
and Climate Experiment.

GRACE consists of two satellites which orbit
Earth in tandem at a relatively low altitude (450 to 500 kilometers). The pair operate in much the same way as a
scale that uses a spring to gauge weight.
“If you use a spring scale and attach a bucket full of tennis balls to
it, the spring expands,” explains Luthcke. “When you take some of the balls out
of the bucket, the spring correspondingly contracts and you can measure that
variation.”

The two GRACE satellites can measure the
distance between them with remarkable accuracy. Even though the satellites
travel 220 kilometers (137 miles) apart from each other (roughly the distance
from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.), their sophisticated ranging systems,
developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, can detect variations in that
distance down to a micron-or one-hundredth the width of a strand of human hair.

The GRACE ranging system functions as a giant
scale by measuring variations in the gravitational pull of different land
masses. Big land masses such as mountains exert a slightly stronger
gravitational pull upon the satellites, causing minute fluctuations in their
speed as they fly over.

For example, the two GRACE satellites fly
over Greenland several times each day. As the
first satellite approaches, the island’s mass causes the satellite to
accelerate and thereby move slightly away from its trailing companion. Over
time, the Grace mission carefully records fluctuations in the distance between
the two satellites each time  they pass over
Greenland. 

By examining the GRACE data, Luthcke can
monitor subtle changes in the gravitational pull that the land mass exerts on the
satellites to get a reliable measure of Greenland’s
shrinking mass. The system, says Luthcke, is accurate enough to “detect the
loss of just a centimeter of ice over an area the size of Delaware.”

Luthcke says he got
hooked on space geodesy when, as a physics major in college, he landed a summer
job at NASA. He never left, working his way “up from the mailroom” and contributing
over the years to many NASA missions. “Space geodesy is a fantastic field,” Luthcke says. “I love my work because not only do I
get to help develop and refine new space-borne sensors, but I get to be
involved in using them to gather useful information. It is the best of both
worlds.”

Because so many important decisions are
likely to rest on his data, the key for Luthcke is accuracy. The challenge, he
says, is being sure to “carefully analyze how well we know all the steps
involved to turn the satellite’s raw observations into usable data.”

Luthcke strives to come up with a usable,
regional calculation of the size of Greenland’s
ice sheet. To do so, he uses sophisticated techniques to correct for “errors” that
can creep into the data due to localized variations in mass or to other factors
such as solar radiation pressure on the satellites themselves.  “My goal is to do everything I can to minimize
the uncertainties involved in these measurements,” he says. “It’s a good job
for me because I’m a cautious person by nature who always wants to know how
things will stand up under scrutiny.”

The good news for Luthcke is that a separate
team using an entirely different method has come up with measurements of
Greenland’s melting ice that, he says, are almost identical to his GRACE data.
The bad news, of course, is that both sets of measurements make it all the more
certain that Greenland’s ice is melting faster
than anyone expected.

 

This is the second installment of America’s
Climate Scientists: A series from the Union
of Concerned Scientists.

Click here to read all the climate scientist profiles.

 

 

Related Links:

Battle of the Carbon Titans

American PRIDE – alternative to the Lieberman-Kerry Disaster

Finding evidence of climate change in the caves of the American Southwest

by David Roberts

The Kerry-Lieberman climate bill is out now, and with it comes a fateful decision for the political left in the U.S.

If the left’s institutions and messaging infrastructure succumb to internal squabbling or simple indifference; if the public is not actively won over and fired up; if President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) stick their fingers in the wind to see which way it’s blowing … the bill will fail. The default outcome now is failure. Very few people in Washington, D.C., today believe the bill has a chance of passing.

The odds are long, but the bill could be saved if the left—and I mean the whole left, not just environmentalists—pulled together and fought like hell. What’s needed is concrete political pressure. That means tracking who’s for it and against it; relentlessly pressing for commitments; actively organizing in a few key Republican and centrist Democratic states; pressing establishment pundits and media figures to cover it; calling out those who stand in the way of progress; and never, ever letting Obama and Reid have a moment’s peace until they fulfill their promises.

The left hasn’t shown itself particularly capable of that kind of single-minded campaign. And there’s no guarantee it would succeed even if attempted. Without it, the bill’s failure is all but inevitable.

So is it worth doing? Is the bill worth fighting for with the kind of passion that was brought to health care or even the presidential election?

I believe the answer to that question is an absolute, unqualified, overwhelming yes. However flawed and inadequate, Kerry’s bill would represent a sea change in American life. It would lend desperately needed momentum to the global fight against climate change. Failure would be a tragedy and passage a huge, vital victory.

I know many of my fellow travelers on the left disagree. Some have convinced themselves that not only is the bill flawed, it’s worse than passing nothing at all; many others view it with distaste or resignation. Both left and right have attacked the bill relentlessly since its inception in the House, and for the vast muddled middle the lesson has been simple: if both sides hate it, it must not be worth supporting. A climate bill has come to Congress and it has almost no passionate supporters.

Nevertheless, the fact remains: It’s overwhelmingly important to pass the damn thing. I’ll argue as much in my next few posts, but to begin with I want to emphasize two reasons we ought to have an overwhelming bias toward immediate action, even compromised, inadequate action. One is physical, one political.

The physical argument in favor of immediate action

Geographically, CO2 reductions are fungible—from the climate perspective, a reduction here is as good as a reduction there; the source is irrelevant. However, the same is not true temporally. Present and future CO2 reductions do not have equal value. A ton of reduction today is worth more than a ton of reduction 10 years from now.

The reason is simple: For every molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere today, future emission rates must be slashed more to return to safe levels in time. (This is the point of the famous bathtub analogy.) Every bit of delay makes the ultimate task more abrupt, difficult, and expensive. Neither the public nor policymakers seem to understand this ineluctable fact of atmospheric physics, but it is absolutely central to climate policy. Here’s a visual representation:

“A slow start leads to a crash finish.”Science: Doniger, Herzog, Lashof

The longer action is postponed as we wait for a sufficiently ambitious climate bill, the more ambitious it needs to be—the target recedes. Getting started quickly, even with less force than most climate campaigners would like, makes the hill less steep and every future battle easier.

The political argument in favor of immediate action

By almost all projections, Republicans are going to clean up in 2010. Democrats’ current large majorities are anomalous and unlikely to return any time soon. (They couldn’t even hold on to 60 in the Senate for a full session.) Meanwhile, the remaining Republican moderates are being vigorously purged from the party by the teabaggers. It’s hard to see Republicans getting sensible on climate any time soon, when every internal dynamic is pushing the other way. If this bill doesn’t pass this year (and the filibuster remains in place), it could be another four to eight years before it comes up again, likely in weaker form. That’s 10 to 20 percent of the time left between now and 2050, at which point emissions in the U.S. ought to be getting close to zero. Meanwhile the bathtub keeps filling up.

If the American Power Act dies, state cap-and-trade programs will still proceed. The administration will do what it can through executive branch action at the Department of Energy and elsewhere. The EPA will wade into greenhouse-gas regulations (and a fog of lawsuits). But without a declining carbon cap in place, the market won’t get the 20-to-40-year predictability sought by large energy investors. There won’t be the massive shift in private capital needed to kickstart a green economy. It won’t be enough.

Meanwhile, the international climate process, which has effectively been idling for 12 years as it waits for the U.S. to get its act together, could well fall apart. Maybe it can limp along if the U.S. is allowed to count non-carbon-market reductions toward its Copenhagen commitments—Obama could probably hit America’s tepid 17 percent by 2020 target through executive action alone. But it will send an unmistakable signal to other countries. If you thought Copenhagen was difficult, with the U.S.  insisting it might pass legislation, wait until Cancun after it’s clear the U.S. won’t. We can say goodbye to leverage, or good faith, or the ability to look Tuvalu’s representative in the eye.

Leaning forward

Donald Rumsfeld was wrong about the problem but right about the posture: When it comes to greenhouse-gas reductions, we should be “leaning forward.” Our bias should be toward action, even if it means making unpleasant policy or political concessions in the short term. As I said earlier:

Right now, policy is being made out of fear: fear by the private sector that decarbonization will be a crushing burden; fear by consumers that their energy prices will skyrocket; fear by politicians that the project will prove electorally unpopular. Campaigners can organize marches, think tanks can put out reports, scientists can issue dire warnings, but ultimately, that fear simply can’t be overcome in advance. The only way to overcome it is through experience.

Does the American Power Act get us started? Yes: it’s got mandatory targets. In my mind, that alone gives it an overwhelming presumption of support. It would have to contain a lot of extremely bad stuff to overcome that presumption, and while there’s certainly some lamentable provisions, I don’t think any of them are bad enough to meet that threshold. More on that soon.

Related Links:

The American Power Act and California’s AB 32

Battle of the Carbon Titans

Big Green and little green clash over the American Power Act

by Tom Philpott

When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web.

Get ‘em while they’re hot. 

New rules, old mindset

Everyone should read this article, posted on Chewswise by Joe Cloud, who co-owns a “small-scale locally focused” slaughterhouse outside of Washington, D.C. It’s about proposed new USDA rules for slaughterhouses that might have the potential for reducing the frequency of what has become almost a routine industry event: the nationwide release of hundreds of thousands of pounds of tainted meat from a single massive facility.

Unfortunately, they don’t address the root causes of tainted meat: the cramming of livestock together over their own manure; sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics in livestock feed rations; the practice of finishing cows on corn, which appears to be the origin of the deadly E coli 0157 strain; the growing popularity of corn-ethanol waste (distillers grains) as feed, which appears to increase the incidence of E coli 0157 in cows; and the rapid speed of kill lines in industrial-scale slaughterhouses that ups the odds of meat coming into contact with fecal matter.

But as Cloud shows, if the proposed rules don’t address this big issues, they could place a crushing burden on small-scale slaughterhouses: the ones who serve farms that keep their animals on pasture and don’t use antibiotics in feed. In other words, they could further entrench the industrial-meat model that creates the safety problems in the first place.

Research and seizure

Over at Yale Environment 360, Bruce Stutz has an important article on the agrichemical industry’s control over scientific research into genetically modified organisms. Last year, 24 scientists wrote a letter to the EPA complaining that the industry’s restrictions on research “inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good” and make independent analysis of GMOs impossible. As if to prove their case, the scientists declined to sign their names, out of fear of reprisal from the companies: the pursuit of scientific knowledge wiggling under the boot of brute corporate power.

Stutz has an update to this story. Following the EPA letter, the industry—represented by the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA)—agreed to “allow researchers greater freedom to study the effects of GM food crops on soil, pests, and pesticide use, and to compare their yields and analyze their effects on the environment,” Stutz writes.

But there remain concerns with the ASTA agreement, Stutz reports. For one, the new rules are voluntary. The industry still has the power to control research; it has simply vowed to do so benevolently. For another, it applies only to already-commercialized crops, not to ones in development.

Finally, it doesn’t address the fact that in addition to controlling the research terms, the companies also control the funding. “Making things worse was that with fewer public monies available for farm research, scientists, and their universities, found themselves increasingly dependent on the seed companies for funding,” Stutz writes.

“That a company with an interest in the outcome of a study should make itself arbiter of what’s good science and what’s not good science, I find offensive as a matter of principle,” Doug Gurian-Sherman of Union of Concerned Scientists, tells Stutz. “The scientific process is much more subtle than that.”

Attack of the GMIs

For one species of writer—I’ll call them genetically modified intellectuals, or GMIs—the scientific process isn’t that subtle at all. The latest geegaws conjured up by the GMO industry represent science incarnate, and anyone who dares question them is an anti-science “denier.” The New Yorker‘s Michael Specter is probably the leading proponent of this deeply naïve school of thought. (I reviewed his recent book Denialism here). He is by no means the only GMI. Indeed, they are popping up like the transgenic corn plants now surging skyward on Iowa’s vast, monocropped fields. Two leading GMIs—UC Davis plant pathologist Pamela Arnold and Texas State University historian James McWilliams—landed an op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times.

In it, they deplore the heavy regulatory regime imposed on the GMO seed industry and fret that U.S. and European policymakers will “allow propaganda to trump science” and that therefore “the potential for global agriculture to be productive, diverse and sustainable will go unfulfilled.”

The argument is mostly fanciful. True, Europe has taken a skeptical view toward GMOs. But here in the United States, transgenic crops are regulated like conventional crops—that is to say, barely at all. Three of our four largest crops—corn, soy, and cotton—are mostly genetically modified. Walk the inner aisles of a typical supermarket, or cruise to a fast-food drive-through window, and the food you’ll get, mainly clever manipulations of corn and soy, will be genetically modified. The clothes on your back? If you buy cotton clothes, they’re from transgenic plants (unless you go exclusively organic).

The explosion of GMOs in the United States has only further entrenched industrial-scale monocrops and the dominance of processed food. Should we, as the GMIs insist, push a similar food regime onto Africa?  In their zeal to advance that agenda, the GMIs never address the homogenizing effect the technology has had on U.S. domestic food. Nor do these champions of science reflect on the above-mentioned distortions of science imposed by the industry.

One of the impacts of weak oversight and government control of research is that, as Don Lotter showed in a paper in the International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture, there has actually been shockingly little research done on the long-term health effects of eating GMO foods—and most of what has been was conducted by the industry itself. That void opens space for a key industry talking point, repeated by Arnold and McWilliams:

Opponents of genetically engineered crops have spent much of the last decade stoking consumer distrust of this precise and safe technology, even though, as the research council’s previous reports noted, engineered crops have harmed neither human health nor the environment.

The bit about about not harming the environment is patently absurd; even the New York Times editorial page has noted the rise of herbicide-resistant superweeds, ushered in by the widespread use of herbicide-resistant corn, soy, and cotton.

The case of human health is more subtle. GMO corn and soy were first planted in 1994. By 2000, half of soy and a third of corn, were transgenic. Today, those figures have surpassed 90 percent for soy and 60 percent for corn, according to the USDA. GM corn and soy suffuse the food system—they make up the great bulk of fat and sweetener used by the food industry; provide the raw materials for a dizzying array of ingredients and additives; and are the empty calories for animals kept in concentrated animal feeding operations. Given the rapid rise of GMOs and their immediate takeover of the food system, they clearly pose no acute health threats. The experiment, conducted on a nation of 300 million, has been a success. GMOs don’t make you keel over and die. Hurray!

But what if the effects are not acute, but chronic—that is to say, are low-level and cumulative, not immediate and dramatic? Ours is a nation with rising rates of food-related maladies, a diet based largely on highly processed, low-quality sweeteners and fats, and a food system that routinely exposes people to toxic chemicals.  In this unhappy milieu, you  could plausibly introduce yet another toxin into the mix without causing much of a stir.

Are GMOs toxic? As noted above, there has been scant research to examine that question. But the few independent studies that have been done paint a disturbing picture. Here’s my discussion of a 2008 study, funded by the Austrian government, on the effects of GMO corn on mice. Short story: in the third and fourth generations, mice fed GMOs showed “statistically significant” reproductive dysfunction compared to the control mice.

And last year, three French university researchers analyzed data (study here) from tests done on rats by GMO seed giant Monsanto and another biotech firm, Covance Laboratories, submitted to European government in 2000 and 2001. The firms conducted the tests to prove that their products were safe to eat; scrutinizing the same data years later, the researchers arrived at a different conclusion.

The three products in question are still quite relevant: one strain of Roundup Ready corn, engineered to withstand Monsanto’s flagship herbicide; and two strands of Bt corn, engineered to contain the insect-killing gene from the Bt bacteria. Roundup Ready and Bt products are ubiquitous in the U.S. seed supply, often “stacked” into the same seed. The researchers found “that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal [i.e., kidney] toxicity”  in rats and have a “clear negative impact” on the their livers.

Reproduction dysfunction, damage to vital internal organs … these are not the hallmarks of a technology we should be backing to feed the world. Granted, the data are scarce and isolated. More independent research needs to be done. But who will fund it, and will the industry allow it to happen without interference?

The GMIs do science no favor by ignoring these issues.

 

Related Links:

Did Elena Kagan really flunk a food-policy litmus test?

Ask Umbra’s Book Club: WTFood?

Industrial meat comes with antibiotics and endocrine disruptors

by Agence France-Presse

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has named Costa Rica’s Christiana Figueres to be the organization’s top official on climate change, his spokesman announced Monday.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said the 53-year-old Costa Rican, currently San Jose’s climate-change negotiator, would succeed Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands as the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

“Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders, and valuable hands-on experience from the nonprofit sector and the private sector,” the spokesman said.

De Boer tendered his resignation after last year’s Copenhagen climate change talks, which ended in widespread disappointment with only vague promises by nations to cut emissions.

Figueres is to assume her post on July 1, five months before the next round of scheduled climate change talks in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.

She has been a negotiator of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol since 1995 and has played a role in designing key climate-change instruments.

Chief U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern welcomed Figueres’ appointment, calling her “well-qualified with a deep background in U.N. climate-change negotiations.”

“The United States looks forward to working with Ms. Figueres and partners around the world to build on the progress made in Copenhagen to meet the climate-change challenge,” Stern said in a statement.

Environmental group Greenpeace noted that Costa Rica has set an ambitious goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2021, “the type of attitude we need on the global stage.”

“We hope she can really engage all countries in a fast-moving dialogue to get agreement on a global deal that will save the world from dangerous climate change,” said Wendel Trio, Greenpeace’s climate policy coordinator.

Figueres’s family has a long history of work in government and international affairs. Her father Jose Figueres Ferrer was a three-time president of Costa Rica who abolished Costa Rica’s military in 1948. Her mother, Karen Olsen Beck, was born in the United States to Danish immigrants and later adopted Costa Rican nationality. Figueres’s older brother, Jose Maria Figueres Olsen, was elected president of Costa Rica for four years at the age of 39, the nation’s youngest president in the 20th century.

Figueres completed her university studies at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and at the London School of Economics and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Related Links:

David Brooks to old folks: cities are better now

U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

10 ways MMS makes FEMA look good

by Agence France-Presse

Slideshow by ForestEthics

OTTAWA – Forestry companies announced Tuesday a pact with environmentalists to stop logging huge swathes of Canada’s boreal forest and protect caribou herds in exchange for suspending protests.

Twenty-one members of the Forest Products Association of Canada, who manage two-thirds of Canada’s forests, agreed to suspend new logging on nearly 71 million acres of the boreal forest.

They also will adopt strict new environmentally sensitive forestry practices in an area twice the size of Germany, or 178 million acres, and develop conservation plans for endangered species in this region, including caribou.

Nine environmental groups led by Canopy, ForestEthics, and Greenpeace, for their part, will end a decades-long “Do Not Buy” campaign for wood products from the 620-mile-wide belt across Canada’s north.

“We’re thrilled that this effort has led to the largest commercial forest conservation plan in history, which could not have happened without both sides looking beyond their differences,” said Steve Kallick of the Pew Environment Group.

The 1.3-billion-acre Canadian boreal forest—made up of mostly spruce, fir, pine, birch, poplar, and cottonwood trees—is one of the largest intact ecosystems remaining in the world.

Its valleys, wetlands, lakes, and tundra are home to wolves, bears, and the largest caribou herds in the world, as well as a nesting ground for more than 300 bird species. Its trees and peat moss also store an estimated 200 billion tons of CO2.

“It is one of the last truly vast wilderness spaces that we have left on the planet and we’ve been fighting this environmental fight for many years,”
said Greenpeace’s Richard Brooks, spokesman for participating environmental groups.

“This is our best chance to save woodland caribou, permanently protect vast areas of the boreal forest, and put in place sustainable forestry practices,”
he said. “It really is a truce after many years of fighting each other,” he added.

Included in the pact are forestry giants AbitibiBowater, Canfor, Kruger, West Fraser Timber, and Weyerhaeuser.

“This is a business strategy for us,” Avrim Lazar, president of Forest Products Association of Canada, told reporters. “We know where the future is and the marketplace is going to reward the environmental progressives.”

The deal will not interrupt fiber supplies to mills, worth billions of dollars annually, the two groups told a press conference.

Talks with provincial governments, local communities, and aboriginal groups across Canada are still being held to solicit their backing. Implementation of the agreement is expected to take three years.

Related Links:

David Brooks to old folks: cities are better now

U.S. bans more Gulf fishing as oil fears grow for Florida

10 ways MMS makes FEMA look good

by David Roberts

Glenn Greenwald notes the rapid, bipartisan erosion of basic civil liberties, which didn’t even hit a speed bump with the transition to the Obama administration:

A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations.  Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind.  The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Miranda protections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow “public safety” exception, and now Eric Holder explicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion. [etc.]

Meanwhile, Brad DeLong notes that the last time unemployment was at 10 percent, in 1983, the country’s political class was running around like its hair was on fire. Today …

… nobody much in DC seems to care. A decade of widening wealth inequality that has created a chattering class of reporters, pundits, and lobbyists who have no connection with mainstream America? The collapse of the union movement and thus of the political voice of America’s sellers of labor power? I don’t know what the cause is. But it does astonish me.

Meanwhile, there was recently an oil spill that may well become the largest environmental disaster in American history. It’s ongoing. It was, it now appears, the result of lax regulation and the coziness of the oil industry with the U.S. government. And this is on the heels of a coal mine explosion that killed dozens in West Virginia. And a whole slew of bizarre weather events, one of which effectively drowned Nashville.

And yet where are the protests? Where are the people in the streets? Where is the popular movement demanding an end to fossil-fuel addiction and promising to eject legislators who stand in its way? I don’t see it. Sure I’ve seen Facebook petitions and the odd cluster of people outside the White House waving signs, but there’s no uprising. No politician feels threatened or fears the consequences of voting against a clean energy bill.

All these observations raise a question that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately: Where’s the left? There is a healthy elite class of politicians, journalists, and thinkers, but where’s the progressive movement? From what I can tell, there just isn’t one. There’s a decent labor lobby, a decent immigration lobby, but nothing larger than the sum of its parts.

One of the most exciting aspects of Obama’s 2008 victory was that it seemed to herald a resurgent progressivism, organized from the ground up, at the community level, and ready to mobilize behind a set of legislative goals. Yet what has the grassroots left achieved under Obama? On what issue has it been able to command the public’s assent and drive real shifts in policy?

Consider: The country was brought to the brink of catastrophe by eight years of Republican misrule, culminating in a huge round of corporate bailouts. Obama spent the first several months of his administration just attempting (successfully) to avoid total meltdown. Has there been a populist progressive uprising? Well, yes. But people aren’t in the streets demanding more progressive taxation, higher wages, stronger unions, and tighter regulations. They’re not, per DeLong, demanding more aggressive monetary and fiscal policy to drive unemployment down. They’re not demanding clean energy.

No, the populist anger is coming entirely from the right, in the form of the Tea Party movement. Think about it: After all that happened in the last decade, just about the only angry people in the streets are white conservatives! It’s a stunning state of affairs.

Where is the left to slow the descent into ever-greater inequality? To slow the inexorable rise of defense spending? To slow the erosion of civil rights? To slow the possibly irreversible degradation of the earth’s climate?

It is true that in the U.S. system of government, the left faces unique challenges. There are few barriers to the extraordinary flow of money into politics—fewer now after Citizens United. There are choke points throughout the legislative process where a small, determined minority can grind things to a halt (the biggest one is called the Senate). America contains far more self-identified conservatives than self-identified liberals. To add to the challenge, Obama has done almost nothing to reach out to or mobilize the left. Indeed he’s let Rahm Emanuel give the base the finger numerous times.

So yeah, the left has plenty of constraints and plenty to complain about. And complain it does. Oh how it complains! Here’s how the right works, from a Politico story on the increasingly open boasting from Republicans that they’ll retake a majority in the House in 2010:

[T]here is a motivational strategy behind the bombast. GOP leaders call it “selling the fight.” This means convincing their colleagues, party leaders, candidates and donors that there is a real path to a Republican majority. Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, chairman of the Republican leadership, has been tapped to head this “selling the fight” program.

“In many ways, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said a senior GOP aide. “If you talk the talk and walk the walk, then members, donors, activists and potential candidates are going to want to join the fight.”

This is more than bombast, it’s just an instinctive understanding of the fact that whatever they may say, people like winners. So no matter what is happening, Republicans act like they’re winning. They rarely get everything they want, but every incremental gain is trumpeted as a triumph. Check out (former Inhofe staff propagandist) Mark Morano’s blog: virtually every other post is about how the tide is turning and victory for climate-change deniers is nigh.

It’s a message to activists and donors that their work is worth something. It’s paying dividends. They are part of something grand, inevitable, and right. That kind of affirmation is energizing and it has tangible results; no matter what befalls it, the conservative movement keeps swimming, like a shark. It’s always fighting, always pressing advantage.

For reasons I’ve never understood, lots of folks on the left fear that celebrating victories might make people apathetic. They might think the problem is solved, and why fight if you’re not losing, right? I once asked a leader of a prominent progressive advocacy group whether he found the constant drumbeat of dissatisfaction and failure depressing and he replied, “I like uphill battles.” They energize him! I wanted to ask: How many beyond the circle of lefty activists feel that way? It’s not really a matter of speculation. Psychological research shows that the “facts” of failure are disempowering unless accompanied by a compelling and plausible alternative vision. If the situation is dire, everyone is corrupt, and nothing available is worth a spit, what is the route to success? Why bother?

Anyway, the sad-sack nature of the left has been on my mind because, to be frank about it, I’ve been hugely disappointed by its performance on climate change. I’m going to spend some time in the coming week arguing that the left should mobilize behind the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill and go all-out to get it passed. For arguing this I will no doubt catch all manner of sh*t. But the fact is, the American Power Act is a result of the balance of power in U.S. politics. The left rejecting the bill won’t change the balance of power. Failure and status quo reinforce it. The left will change the balance of power by getting people out in the streets, writing their legislators, and voting for/against candidates based on their climate vision in sufficient numbers to pose a threat.

There’s no sign that’s happening now, but perhaps it will. Does it make sense to postpone legislation while we wait?

Related Links:

The Yes Men send an intern to the Bolivia Climate Summit

How environmental groups are protesting the oil spill

Al Gore, Bill McKibben and the urgency of now

by Daniel J. Weiss

As hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil continue to gush from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico four weeks after the tragic BP disaster, AP reports that:

President Barack Obama will establish the commission by executive order. It will be similar to panels created to investigate the space shuttle Challenger disaster and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a public announcement.

The New York Times reports:

The president will create the panel by executive order “in coming days,” a White House official said. “The commission will take into account the investigations underway concerning the causes of the spill and explore a range of issues including: industry practices; rig safety; Federal, state, and local regulatory regimes; federal governmental oversight, including the structure and functions of M.M.S.; and environmental review and other protections,” the official said, requesting anonymity to discuss the matter in advance of the presidential announcement.

White House sources indicated to CAP that an official announcement about this executive order could occur on Tuesday or Wednesday.

In addition to the horrible loss of eleven lives on the now sunken Deepwater Horizon oil rig, the BP oil disaster could be the most devastating environmental disaster to ever befall the United States.  To understand what caused this oil nightmare, in early May CAP proposed that President Obama appoint “an independent commission to completely examine the causes of the BP disaster and offer guidance for how we can make sure it never happens again.”

This would enable investigators to conduct an independent assessment of the causes of the disaster, and determine the responsibilities born by BP, Transocean, and Halliburton. An independent inquiry would also be able to determine whether the Minerals Management Service of the Department of Interior fulfilled its oversight duties.

Representatives Lois Capps (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), introduced the “BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Inquiry Commission Act of 2010,” H.R. 5241.  Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) have a companion proposal.  These measures would create a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the BP oil disaster.

Rather than wait for legislation, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan used executive orders to create independent commissions to investigate the near nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the Challenger Space Shuttle accident.  The orders were signed two and one week after these events, respectively, and the panels completed their work six months and three months after the events.

These were discrete incidents, while the BP oil disaster is an ongoing event so it may take longer to investigate and draw conclusions about the causes and damages.  By using an executive order, President Obama can get this inquiry started much more quickly than by waiting for Congress to pass legislation.  This will enable investigators to question witnesses while their memories are still fresh, and promptly order BP, Transocean, and Halliburton to preserve all relevant communications and documents.

Related Links:

Limbaugh: ‘When do we ask the Sierra Club to pick up the tab for this leak?’

Obama and Dem senators call for spill inquiries; head of MMS retires

The real trouble from the oil spill is brewing deep under the sea

by Grist

Related Links:

Obama to establish presidential commission to investigate Gulf oil spill

Obama and Dem senators call for spill inquiries; head of MMS retires

The real trouble from the oil spill is brewing deep under the sea

by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will establish an
independent presidential commission to probe the huge oil spill from a wrecked
BP-leased rig in the Gulf of Mexico, an official said Monday.

The commission,
similar to other presidential-ordered probes into civilian disasters, will be
established by executive order, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Reports said
that the commission will be officially unveiled in the next few days, and will
supplement existing government inquiries into the disaster sparked by an
explosion aboard a drilling rig last month.

Obama has
gradually ratcheted up criticism of BP over the spill of millions of gallons of
oil into the Gulf in an unfolding ecological disaster, betraying more and more
frustration over the company’s failure to stop the leak. A visibly angered
president on Friday hit out at oil companies for trying to avoid blame over a massive slick, and vowed an all-out effort to stop the leak
pouring into the Gulf of Mexico.

“I will not
tolerate more finger-pointing or irresponsibility. The people of the Gulf Coast
need our help,” Obama said, as he also unveiled a review of the
environmental safeguards to be put in place for oil and gas exploration.

He slammed the
three oil companies linked to the Deepwater Horizon rig—BP, Transocean, and
Halliburton—for seeking to pass the blame, denouncing what he called a
“ridiculous spectacle” by their top officials during congressional
hearings.

Senators join in

Eight senators urged Attorney General Eric Holder on
Monday to investigate possible civil and criminal misdeeds by British energy
giant BP in connection to a disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

“We are
writing to ask that you open an inquiry into whether British Petroleum made
false and misleading statements to the federal government regarding its ability
to respond to oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico,” the lawmakers, all
Democrats, wrote to Holder [PDF].

The group, led
by Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer, urged
Holder to investigate whether BP misled U.S. regulators on its ability to
respond to catastrophic oil spills.

They cited a
Feb. 23, 2009 document BP submitted to the federal Minerals Management
Service expressing confidence in its ability to contain an oil spill and
mitigate any impact on the environment. “In the event of an unanticipated
blowout resulting in an oil spill, it is unlikely to have an impact based on
the industry wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such
responses,” that document said.

“In the
wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, it does not in any way appear that
there was ‘proven equipment and technology’ to respond to the spill, which
could have tragic consequences for local economies and the natural resources of
the Gulf of Mexico,” the lawmakers wrote.

They also cited
a May 10 document in which BP said all of its potential strategies for
containing the disaster “involve significant uncertainties because they
have not been tested in these conditions before.”

The senators
pressed Holder to evaluate BP’s actions “with respect to civil and
criminal laws related to false statements to the federal government” as
well as “any federal law or regulation that may have been violated in
connection with issues surrounding the spill.”

Head of MMS to retire

Chris Oynes, a top official overseeing offshore energy
for the Minerals Management Service—an agency blamed for lax inspection in the
Gulf of Mexico oil spill—announced his retirement Monday, his agency said.

“After 35
years of service he will be retiring from the agency,” an official at the
Department of the Interior, which includes MMS, told AFP on condition of
anonymity.

Oynes was named
in 2007 as the associate director of the Offshore Energy and Minerals
Management Program in the MMS, with responsibilities including administering
the Outer Continental Shelf oil and gas program.

His retirement
comes amid scathing criticism of the agency for being too lax on enforcement of
safety standards in offshore drilling. Last week, President Barack Obama himself
slammed it as being too “cozy” with the companies it regulates.

After the Gulf
of Mexico disaster at a BP-leased offshore oil rig that ruptured an undersea
well which continues to spew crude into the water, the Obama administration
announced a breakup of the agency’s leasing and regulatory functions into two
separate entities.

Obama ordered
“top to bottom” reform of MMS after allegations it had allowed BP and
other oil companies to drill in the Gulf without first obtaining required
permits. “For too long, for a decade or more, there’s been a cozy
relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them
to drill,” he said.

The Washington
Post said the retirement would come May 31 and that Oynes, who oversaw oil and
gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico for 12 years before being promoted to MMS
associate director, had come under fire for being too close to the industry
officials he regulated.

MMS separately
drew criticism from senators Monday by failing to send an official to a hearing
on the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

“There’s
one set of witnesses that are not here, and I must say that’s from MMS,”
said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who heads the committee on homeland
security. “I regret that the MMS leadership has chosen not to appear
before our committee today because, really, they need to be asked the same
questions I’m going to ask Homeland Security, Coast Guard, and BP, because MMS,
as I’ve mentioned, must approve or reject the oil-spill response plans for
wells, which is where this accident occurred before those wells can be
drilled.”

Last week, one
MMS official told a hearing in New Orleans that the oil and gas industry
largely policed its own drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico with little
government supervision.

An MMS official
said the regulatory agency did not enforce compliance with its “safety
alerts” on underwater blowout preventers and allowed oil companies to
inspect their own drilling equipment.

“I am not
aware of who does the self-certification,” Michael Saucier, the Minerals
Management Service regional supervisor, said when asked about the inspections.

Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans to break up the functions of the MMS to
eliminate a conflict of interest in its role as oil industry regulator and a
lessor of lucrative federal oil rights.

Related Links:

Obama to establish presidential commission to investigate Gulf oil spill

Limbaugh: ‘When do we ask the Sierra Club to pick up the tab for this leak?’

The real trouble from the oil spill is brewing deep under the sea

by Joseph Romm

It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record.

The record temperatures we’re seeing now are especially impressive because we’ve been in “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” It now appears to be over. It’s just hard to stop the march of manmade global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.

Most significantly, NASA’s March prediction has come true: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.”

Software engineer (and former machinist mate in the U.S. Navy) Timothy Chase put together a spreadsheet using the data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In NASA’s dataset, the 12-month running average temperature record was actually just barely set in March—and then easily set in April.

Actually, NASA first made its prediction back in January 2009:

Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

Of course, there never was any global cooling—see must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira—“To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

In fact, the 12-month record we just beat was set in … 2007!

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of recent warming went right
where scientists had predicted— into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening”):

Total Earth Heat Content [anomaly] from 1950 (Murphy et al.  2009). Ocean data taken from Domingues et al 2008.

Another 2009 article details an analysis of “monthly gridded global temperature and salinity fields from the near-surface layer down to 2000 m depth.”

Time series of global mean heat storage (0–2000 m),  measured in 108 Jm-2.

Still warming, after all these years! And just where you’d expect it. This study makes clear that upper ocean heat content, perhaps not surprisingly, is simply far more variable than deeper ocean heat content, and thus an imperfect indicator of the long-term warming trend. And the surface temperature is even more variable.

NASA’s recent draft paper reported: “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the
past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming
trend of 0.15-0.20 degrees C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”

NOAA points out that both satellite data sets show about the same
amount of warming as the land-based record, “which increased at a rate
near 0.16 degrees C/decade (0.29 degrees F/decade) during the same 30-year period”—
once you remove the expected stratospheric cooling from the satellite
records (see NOAA discussion here).

For the record, it was the second hottest April in both satellite
records (UAH and RSS),
which appear more sensitive to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
than the land records.

I asked NASA’s James Hansen last month about the apparent 12-month
record confirming his prediction, and he noted, “that conclusion is
sensitive to how the global mean is defined … We will compare several
alternatives in an invited review paper for Reviews of Geophysics—it should be ready within a few weeks.”

That caveat noted, it is also worth pointing out that “there are no
permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on
Earth that has been warming fastest,” as New Scientist explained (see here and here). “The U.K.‘s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the
NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the
nearest land-based stations.” Thus it is almost certainly the
case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA
says, and especially more than the U.K.’s Hadley Center says (see Why
are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public? and Finally,
the truth about the Hadley/CRU data).

After the endless disinformation-based global cooling stories of the past few years, it’s time for the media to start do some serious fact-based global warming stories (unlike this piece of he-said, she-said journalistic crap from the Boston Globe).

Related Post: Arctic poised to see record low sea ice volume this year

Related Links:

Virginia’s AG slammed for ‘witch hunt’ against climate scientist Michael Mann

Finding evidence of climate change in the caves of the American Southwest

Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential ca