By: David Sirota, a Senior Writer at The International Business Times; The National Memo, March 13, 2015
“Why Did Christie Settle With Exxon?”: At This Moment In History, Good Policy And Good Politics Are Not Often Synonymous
Last week, Republican governor Chris Christie’s administration settled New Jersey’s long-standing environmental lawsuit against ExxonMobil Corp. for pennies on the dollar. For a decade, the state had been seeking $8.9 billion in damages for pollution at two refineries in the northern part of the state, and yet Christie’s top officials abruptly proposed closing the case for just $225 million.
In the aftermath, as environmentalists express outrage and legislators move to block the settlement, the question on many observers’ minds has been simple: Why did Christie settle?
One possible answer is just as simple: money — more specifically, campaign cash.
According to federal records, ExxonMobil has donated more than $1.9 million to the Republican Governors Association since Christie’s first run for governor in 2009. That includes $279,000 during Christie’s election and re-election races, and also another half-million when he chaired the organization in 2014. Additionally, one of Exxon’s law firms in the New Jersey case also donated $30,000 to the RGA since 2013.
Another possible answer could be relationships.
Christie’s first attorney general worked for Exxon for seven years. His deputy chief of staff in 2014 left the governor’s office for a job with Exxon’s lobbying firm in Trenton. And weeks before the settlement was announced, one of his cabinet secretaries took a job with Exxon’s New Jersey law firm.
Still another possible answer about why Christie settled the Exxon case could be found in a little-noticed provision his administration slipped into the annual budget in 2014.
The language in question empowers the governor to divert money obtained from environmental litigation away from pollution cleanup programs and into the state’s general fund, where it can be used to fill budget gaps or finance corporate subsidies. The provision explicitly takes precedence over other state laws designed to direct proceeds from environmental lawsuits into New Jersey’s environmental protection programs.
Because the provision is temporary, remaining in force only until a new budget is enacted, critics say that it effectively encourages Christie’s administration to settle cases as quickly as possible to free up cash that the governor can then tap however he sees fit. The most expedient way to accelerate a settlement is to lessen the fines sought from the company facing the lawsuit.
“This is money that rightfully belongs to the people of New Jersey to make up for the injury to the environment,” said Jeffrey Tittel, executive director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “Instead, the governor is diverting it for other purposes. It’s a twofer: Reduced settlements help the oil companies before Christie’s presidential campaign, and Christie can quickly get more money for the record amounts of corporate subsidies he is handing out.”
So which answer is correct? Is the settlement a product of campaign cash, relationships or budget machinations? It is hard to say for certain, but in all likelihood it is probably a little bit of all three — plus some presidential campaign calculation sprinkled in.
In politics, as rare as it is to see a policy decision made on the substantive merits of an issue, it is even rarer that a decision is only about one thing. Most often, decisions represent a mixture of motivations. In agreeing to such a small settlement in the Exxon case, Christie placates his politically connected colleagues and gets himself some extra cash to spend on his budget’s new tax cuts. He also gives a gift to an oil industry donor just as he starts raising money for a 2016 White House bid.
Sure, the settlement may not be great policy, but it may be shrewd short-term politics. That divergence is hardly surprising — at this moment in history, good policy and good politics are not often synonymous.
“The Pipeline To Nowhere”: A Monument To Wasting Colossal Sums Of Money On Dirty-Energy Infrastructure
When Maria van der Hoeven summed up the 20-year outlook for global energy investment in London last year, she identified a couple of daunting challenges.
The amount of money required by 2035 is a staggering $48 trillion, the International Energy Agency chief and former Dutch economy minister said. And it’s not clear how many of those trillions of dollars will power climate-friendly options.
“Will policymakers succeed in steering investment towards a cleaner, more secure energy system — or are we locking in technologies and patterns of consumption that store up trouble for the future?” she asked.
There’s no better example of what van der Hoeven meant by “storing up trouble for the future” than the Keystone XL pipeline.
After years of being flustered by President Barack Obama’s procrastination, the pipeline’s conservative backers in Congress are trying to force him to green-light this conduit for some of the world’s dirtiest, most expensive, and most dangerous oil.
The House recently voted in favor of building the 1,200-mile pipeline for the 10th time. The Senate is poised to approve it too. Although dozens of Democrats are siding with Republicans in favor of this boondoggle, those lawmakers lack the votes, so far, to override the veto Obama has threatened.
Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican and a leading Keystone XL proponent, has turned into a broken record touting what he calls “vital energy infrastructure legislation.”
Despite their similar names and obsession with all things energy, Hoeven and van der Hoeven are polar opposites. She’s a leading player in the effort to wean the world off its dependence on oil, gas, and coal. He’s a “drill, baby, drill” type.
There are many good arguments against the $8 billion pipeline on environmental and labor grounds. People like 350.org founder Bill McKibben and groups like Media Matters need no help explaining them.
Here’s another reason why the pipeline shouldn’t be built: It’s a waste of money.
First, plunging oil prices matter. A lot. They’ve sunk below $47 a barrel, losing more than half their value since last June. Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi declared a few weeks ago that he doesn’t care whether oil goes as low as $20 a barrel, a 16-year low. It just might.
By some estimates, a barrel of oil must fetch at least $95 for profits to be extracted from Canada’s tar sands. It’s impossible to say when prices will rebound to that level or if companies will give up on that oil patch, leaving the Keystone XL without much (if any) heavy crude to move.
Ultimately, there could be no oil to haul from Alberta to Louisiana to be refined — or not, if the U.S. scraps its ban on exporting crude — and then shipped to, say, China.
More importantly, tar sands oil production may stop within a few years even if it does prove profitable. You see, global climate talks are heading in a direction that’s likely to result in countries and companies leaving large amounts of oil, gas, and coal in the ground.
A new study published in the journal Nature spelled out where and what kind of fossil fuels would need to be left unexploited. Its authors predict that virtually all Canadian tar sands oil production will stop by 2020.
If it’s built by then, there’d be nothing for the Keystone XL to transport. As a pipeline to nowhere, it would become a monument to wasting colossal sums of money on dirty-energy infrastructure.
John Hoeven should listen to Maria van der Hoeven. If he did, he’d realize the benefits of losing this political battle.
“Aura Of Invincibility Is Gone”: Obama’s Keystone Veto Threat Is Proof That Climate Activism Works, No Matter What The ‘Insiders’ Say
When the news arrived from the White House on Tuesday that Barack Obama would veto the GOP’s Keystone pipeline bill – or at least “that the president would not sign this bill” as is – I thought back to a poll that the National Journal conducted of its “energy insiders” in the fall of 2011, just when then issue was heating up. Nearly 92% of them thought Obama’s administration would approve the pipeline, and almost 71% said it would happen by the end of that year.
Keystone’s not dead yet – feckless Democrats in the Congress could make some kind of deal later this month or later this year, and the president could still yield down the road to the endlessly corrupt State Department bureaucracy that continues to push the pipeline – but it’s pretty amazing to see what happens when people organize.
The fight against the XL pipeline began with indigenous people in Canada, and spread to ranchers along the pipeline route in places like Nebraska. And then, in the spring of 2011, when the climate scientist Jim Hansen pointed out the huge pool of carbon in the Canadian tar sands, the fight spread to those of us in the nascent climate movement. We had no real hope of stopping Keystone – as the National Journal poll indicated, this seemed the most done of deals – but we also had no real choice but to try.
And so people went to jail in larger numbers than they had for many years, and wrote more emails to the Senate than on pretty much any issue in history, and made more public comments to the government than on any infrastructure project in history. And all that effort didn’t just tie up this one pipeline in knots. It also scared investors enough that they shut down three huge planned new tar-sands mines, taking $17bn in capital and millions of tons of potential emissions off the table. And it helped embolden people to fight every other pipeline, and coal port, and frack field, and coal mine. The Keystone fights helped spur a full-on fossil-fuel resistance that now mounts a powerful challenge to the entire fossil-fuel industry at every single turn.
It’s not as if we’re winning the climate fight – the planet’s temperature keeps rising. But we’re not losing it the way we used to. If the president sticks to his word, this will be the first major fossil-fuel project ever shut down because of its effect on the climate. The IOU that the president and the Chinese wrote in November about future carbon emissions is a nice piece of paper that hopefully will do great things in the decades ahead – but the Keystone denial is cash on the barrelhead. It’s actually keeping some carbon in the ground.
The fossil-fuel industry’s aura of invincibility is gone. They’ve got all the money on the planet, but they no longer have unencumbered political power. Science counts, too, and so do the passion, spirit and creativity of an awakened movement from the outside, from the ground-up. So the “energy insiders” of Washington are going to have to recalculate the odds. Because no one’s going to believe that any of these fights are impossible any more.
By: Bill McKibben, The Guardian, January 9, 2015
“A Pipeline And A Pie In The Sky”: The Challenge Is To Build For The Future, Not Steal From It
The Koch brothers Congress, purchased with the help of about $100 million from the political network of the billionaire energy producers, got down to its first order of business this week: trying to hold off the future.
Meanwhile, here on the other coast, one of the most popular politicians in America, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, bounced into his fourth and final term by trying to hasten that future. The contrasts — East and West, old and new, backward-looking and forward-marching, the beholden and behold! — could not have been more stark.
The 114th Congress is trying to rush through the Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from the dirty tar sands of Canada to the Gulf Coast. The State Department has estimated that the total number of permanent new jobs created by the pipeline would be 35 — about the same as the handful of new taco trucks in my neighborhood in Seattle. This, at a time when the world is awash in cheap oil.
Governor Brown, having balanced a runaway California budget and delivered near-record job growth in a state Republicans had written off as ungovernable, laid out an agenda to free the world’s eighth-largest economy — his state — from being tied to old energy, old transportation and old infrastructure. He doubled down on plans to build a bullet-train network and replumb the state’s water system, while setting new goals to reduce dependence on energy that raises the global temperature.
“The challenge is to build for the future, not steal from it,” said Governor Brown, who is the embodiment of the line about how living well is the best revenge — political division. He is 76, but said he’s been pumping iron and eating his vegetables of late so he can live to see the completion of the high-speed rail system, about 2030, when Governor Brown would be a frisky 92.
Russia, which is ranked below California in overall economic output, is teetering as world commodity prices provide a cold lesson in what can happen to a country tied to the fate of oil’s wild swings. The Republicans should take note. The Keystone pipeline, though largely symbolic in the global scheme of things, does nothing for the American economy except set up the United States as a pass-through colony for foreign industrialists. Well, not all foreign: The Koch brothers are one of the largest outside leaseholders of acres in Canadian oil sands, according to a Washington Post report. I’m sure that has nothing to do with the fierce urgency of rushing Keystone XL through Congress now.
At the same time, the Republican hold-back-the-clock majority announced plans to roll back environmental regulations. Fighting hard for dirty air, dirty water and old-century energy producers, the new Senate leaders are trying to keep some of the nation’s oldest and most gasping coal plants in operation, and to ensure that unhealthy air can pass freely from one state to the other. One strategy is to block money to enforce new rules against the biggest polluters.
For intellectual guidance, Republicans can count on 80-year-old Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the incoming chairman of the environment committee. Inhofe calls the consensus scientific view on human-caused warming “the greatest hoax.” He plans to use his gavel to hold back regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions, fighting the obvious at every turn.
The headache, for the rest of us, will come when the nations of the world meet in Paris at year’s end to discuss how to address the problem that knows no nationality. We’ll talk about China and its climate-warming coal plants. Critics will point to the United States, its knuckle-dragging Congress and the industries it is shielding from responsibility.
The Republican agenda is frozen in time. It’s all frack-your-way-to-prosperity, and Sarah Palin shouting, “Drill, baby, drill.” The problem, of course, is that the world doesn’t need any more oil, not now; the price is down by 50 percent over the last year with no bottom in sight. Cheap petro is killing not just Russia but Iraq, Venezuela, Saudi monarchs and, soon, assorted other dependencies — like Alaska and Texas. At some point, the only way the Keystone XL can be profitably built and operated is with a huge subsidy from taxpayers.
Nature, also, is weighing in. Earthquakes in Texas and Oklahoma are raising alarms about the relationship between the hydraulic byproducts of fracking and the temblors rolling through a huge swatch of land that’s been perforated for oil and gas drillers.
Governor Brown and another West Coast governor, Jay Inslee of Washington, view the cheap oil era as a golden opportunity for an energy pivot. Inslee wants to tax the biggest carbon emitters to pay for new infrastructure. The motto is tax what you burn, not what you earn.
Governor Brown is quick to note the big forces at play between the West Coast and the pollution panderers along the Potomac. “California is basically presenting a challenge to Washington,” he told reporters earlier this week.
A big piece of that challenge is the $68 billion high-speed rail project, which would zip passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in just under three hours. It’s bogged down in legal and financial muck, and critics call it pie in the sky.
But Governor Brown is undaunted. What he has going for him is an old strain in the American character, dormant for much of the Great Recession — the tomorrow gene. There’s no legacy, no long-term payoff, in defending things that are well past their pull point. And, seriously, which would you rather have: a futuristic, clean-energy train, or a pipeline that carries a product produced in a way that makes the world a worse place to live?
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, January 8, 2014
“Destructive In The Long Run”: The Red State Economic Miracle That Wasn’t
For years progressives in blue states have had to put up with listening to conservatives in red states bray about their supposed economic “miracles” of low-tax, low-investment paradises of low employment in places like Texas and North Dakota.
The fact that these economies were creating mostly minimum-wage jobs with terrible safety nets and awful infrastructure fell on deaf ears. So did the response that those jobs were temporary and fossil-fuel based, and would not last. Undiversified economies based on a single natural resource tend to fare poorly over time.
And indeed it looks like progressives are getting the last laugh due to low oil prices:
States dependent on oil and gas revenue are bracing for layoffs, slashing agency budgets and growing increasingly anxious about the ripple effect that falling oil prices may have on their local economies. The concerns are cutting across traditional oil states like Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alaska as well as those like North Dakota that are benefiting from the nation’s latest energy boom.
“The crunch is coming,” said Gunnar Knapp, a professor of economics and the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Michael Hiltzik at the L.A. Times had more on the topic earlier this week:
A greater danger to the state’s boom-era reputation is that the receding tide may expose a lot of economic wreckage to public view. One consequence of the state’s low-tax, low-service credo is that infrastructure spending has been starved, just at the moment when it’s most needed. As the Texas Tribune reported last year, local roads have become so damaged by heavy oil-patch traffic that in some districts the only option has been to convert paved roads to gravel — there’s no money for repaving, despite the state’s burgeoning wealth.
That shows how little pressure has been placed on the oil industry to carry its fair share of the public cost of the boom or contribute adequately to public investment. When the boom becomes a bust, there will be even less money, and you can bet that the oil industry will be pleading poverty.
When it isn’t simply padding the bottom lines of the wealthiest Americans, most conservative economic policy tends to be about taking the easiest, most aggressive and short-sighted approach to any problem. Eliminating taxes so you can entice corporate grifters may net some immediate transitory gains, but it’s destructive in the long run. Similarly, putting your eggs into the fossil fuel basket doesn’t just destroy your local environment and add to the climate change already ravaging your state, it also puts you at severe risk of economic seizures if fossil fuel prices decline.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, December 27, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 