Category Archives: Environment

03.01.17
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Water Wednesday: Wisconsin’s Walker Woes and Things That Don’t Begin With W. Like Lake Erie

 

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I’m sure there’s a metaphor here somewhere, but my first thought is: whoa! A deer in Lake Erie? What the hell? Image (and explanation) from Cleveland Scene

A quick rundown of some top water stories, which remind us that while we can impact nature, we’re really not in charge. 

I realize that there is a weird-seeming contradiction in saying that we can bring great change to nature, but that we’re still at its mercy. But when we say “great change”, we don’t mean permanent. The earth will eventually repair itself, and time will smooth over our cataclysms. We just won’t be here. But you want the real image? Imagine a 7-yr-old jamming a hatpin into his mother’s ankle. He can do that, and cause great damage, but really, the storm will redound upon him.

So let’s start this week’s “hey, who cares about clean water?” news with Wisconsin.

Continue reading →

02.24.17
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Sad DHS Memos Don’t Reflect Full Faith in the Alternate Facts

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Pictured: unfavorable facts

In the last post, we linked to an article about the how the Trump administration approved DAPL and Keystone: essentially, throwing out every agreement they didn’t like. There’s a quote in the article that I think is a perfect summation.

Two days before the Trump administration approved an easement for the Dakota Access pipeline to cross a reservoir near the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation, the U.S. Department of the Interior withdrew a legal opinion that concluded there was “ample legal justification” to deny it.

The withdrawal of the opinion was revealed in court documents filed this week by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the same agency that requested the review late last year.

“A pattern is emerging with [the Trump] administration,” said Jan Hasselman, an attorney representing the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “They take good, thoughtful work and then just throw it in the trash and do whatever they want to do.”

Which is pretty much perfect. But it doesn’t just pertain to pipelines, of course. From Lawfare. 

CNN also reports that the White House is pushing officials in the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to provide information in support of the supposed security rationale behind the executive order banning entry into the U.S. for citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries. The administration rejected an earlier DHS report contradicting the White House’s assertions on the security benefits of the travel ban and now is asking for a revised report, leading to concern within DHS and DOJ over the potential politicization of intelligence.

This is what happens when you have a faith-based organization. Everything has to fit that belief, and that which doesn’t is fake. It’s faith in the bigoted mantras of the Bannon-Gorka-Sessions axis, and faith in whatever idiot things Trump improvised on the campaign. It’s an odd miracle of this peculiar catechism that these are happily aligned.

02.24.17
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Trump’s Pipeline Policies: As Bad As Everything Else They Do

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The aftermath of the Enbridge oil spill in Michigan. Image from salmonguy.org

How many pipeline spills do you think there were last year? Three? Ten? 85? Maybe you remember reading about a few, and think, well, things were pretty hectic last year, what with the dying-fish floparound of liberal democracy, so maybe I missed one here or there.

There were, at least, 220 “significant” leaks220 “significant” leaks, when you count oil (in all its manifest and increasingly sludgy forms), natural gas, and refined gasoline. Because that’s what pipelines do. They burst. Whether they are lurking under the Great Lakes or right at the edge of your town, coursing under the fields where you ran as a child, they are a time bomb, ready to go off.

Of course, we need pipelines. Our economy is still based on dead dinosaurs (which, though not strictly accurate, sort of is, and is actually sort of cool, when you think about it), and that matter needs to be transported. It’s a devil’s deal, maybe, but it’s the one we have. Which is why you think it would be super really important to make sure that those pipelines, which are aging, increasingly prone to busting, and more susceptible to extreme weather (which we’re having more of), are monitored, protected, and upgraded.

Now, the upgrading might be part of the administration’s infrastructure plan, though it seems like they are already planning to “punt” that to 2018, partly because they have other priorities (taking away health care from millions, tax cuts for the wealthy), and mostly because Republicans really don’t want to spend any money on infrastructure, as Yglesias reminds us. So let’s not put our eggs in the upgrade basket.

And, of course, the “monitor and regulate our aging pipelines so as to not poison our air, water, and land” is DOA as well. They are looking to “ease” regulations that the Obama administration imposed that call for strict monitoring.

Regulators in the waning hours of the Obama era wrote rules aimed at changing that, and the industry is looking forward to the new administration rolling them back. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration “has gone overboard,” said Brigham McCown, a former head of the PHMSA who served on President Donald Trump’s infrastructure transition team. “They built a Cadillac instead of the Chevrolet that Congress told them to build.”

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While Obama was president, the PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration)budget grew by 61 percent. Then, seven days before Trump’s inauguration, the agency finalized a rule toughening up inspection and repair demands, mandating, for example, that companies have leak-detection systems in populated areas and requiring they examine lines within 72 hours of flooding or another so-called extreme weather event. The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main trade group, characterized it all as overreaching and unnecessary.

Unsurprisingly (though inconclusively, as it was a small sample size) the total number of spills and leaks actually dropped last year, from 462 in 2015 to 417 (the 220 number above was “significant” leaks, obviously a few hundred are no biggie). So yeah, the new energy team thinks that having the Cadillac of pipelines protection is way worse than having the Chevy.

So let’s sum up.

  • No money for upgrades
  • Fewer regulations
  • Less monitoring
  • No admittance that old pipelines are in more danger due to climate change, because what’s that?
  • More reliance on the materials that lead to climate change
  • More pipelines (even if you have to ignore reasonable arguments against)

It’s a maddening and lunatic philosophy. It’s one thing to want to rely entirely on fossil fuels; it is another altogether to deliberately oppose making the usage of them even slightly safer. I don’t even know if you can call that a philosophy. It’s just insanity, and it is the insanity that is running our country.

Anyway, this was another reminder that Donald Trump is a right-wing Republican who governs like a right-wing Republican.

02.22.17
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“Please find attached a short white paper with some talking points that you might find useful to cut and paste…”

 

“I’m just thrilled as a bird dog in an aviary to be destroying the environment for my corporate buddies!” 

That line is from an email sent to Scott Pruitt by “Roderick Hastie, a lobbyist at Hunton & Williams, a law firm that represents major utilities, including Southern Company, urging Mr. Pruitt’s office to file comments on a proposed E.P.A. rule related to so-called Startup, Shutdown and Malfunction Emissions.”

I like it because it doesn’t even pretend that Pruitt might want to think independently. It’s not “some thoughts that might inform your thinking” or “a few suggestions on combatting this rule”, but “here’s exactly what you should say.” It’s openly disdainful. And Scott Pruitt loves every moment of it.

That’s the big takeaway from the data dump, the thousands of emails detailing his master/sub relationship to energy. This man is one of the great climate villains of our time, because he’s willing to climb to power specifically to propitiate the short-term profit hunger of the extraction energy. And now he’s the head of the EPA.

(In a way, maybe the delay on the emails is a good thing, since anyone else running the EPA would be nearly as venal, though not as transparently so. Maybe this will blow up and consume his time, and weaken his attempts to weaken the agency. But there is still a lot of damage he can get done, a lot of long-term terrifying damage. Luckily, the working white class doesn’t need clean air or water. They just need liberals to stop being so condescending, and everything will be all right.)