“It’s A Question Of When”: Study Predicts Keystone Pipeline Will Spill
Republicans have sought to frame the Keystone XL pipeline as a job-creating project being thwarted by “radical environmentalists.” Is it? A new Cornell University study claims that the pipeline could actually have a negative impact on the economies of the states it would pass through.
“In the national debate, job creation has been set alongside environmental concerns in a rigid either-or fashion,” says Sean Sweeney, one of the study’s authors, “But oil spills also kill jobs, they consume resources, they have an impact on health, and can also lead to a lower quality of life.”
The range of estimates of jobs vary widely. TransCanada claims the pipeline will create 20,000 jobs. A State Department report estimates that only 20 permanent operating jobs would be created in the six states along the pipeline route. By comparison, those same states are home to robust agricultural, ranching and tourist industries that are dependent on water and vulnerable to environmental contamination. Across the six states agriculture employs 571,000 workers and tourism 780,000; the total revenue from those sectors, respectively, is $76.3 billion and $67 billion.
Sludge not crude
Tar sands oil — known in energy circles as diluted bitumen — may be more damaging to environments and communities than regular crude. Said Sweeney, “Diluted bitumen is an irregular substance — it runs thick and thin, hot and cold. It’s basically a sludge, not like regular crude — it behaves differently.” Tar sands also seem more likely to spill than conventional crude: The spill rate for diluted bitumen in the northern Midwest between 2007-2010 was three times the national average for conventional oil. This may be because the heavy, corrosive material puts greater stress on pipelines.
The already existing Keystone I pipeline, which runs 2,100 miles from Alberta to Illinois, began operating in 2010; in the two years since, 35 spills have occurred. In the pipeline’s first year of operation alone, its spill rate was 100 times TransCanada’s projection. All told the amount of tar sands oil being transported through the United States has more than tripled in the past decade to 600,000 barrels in 2010. Keystone XL, if built, would add another 830,000 barrels per day.
John Stansbury, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Nebraska, analyzed spill data from the Keystone I pipeline to estimate that 91 spills would occur over the course of 50 years of Keystone XL’s operation — close to two spills each year. In a worst-case scenario, he says, a spill could contaminate 4.9 billion gallons of groundwater in Nebraska’s Sand Hills with benzene, a known carcinogen.
The threat the pipeline poses to Nebraska’s Ogallala Aquifer, which provides 30 percent of the irrigation water in the U.S., has been much-discussed, but the pipeline would also cross another 1,747 bodies of water, including the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers and the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer, the third largest aquifer in Texas.
If Keystone were to leak — or worse, rupture — the consequences could be serious. In July 2010, a pipeline operated by the company Enbridge ruptured — the company has never explained why — spilling 1 million gallons of tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. The oil drifted 40 miles upstream, causing 145 reported instances of illness and health problems for people living in the riverside community of Marshall, Mich. Marshall residents living within 200 feet of the river were eligible for a buyout program; about 130 people sold their houses to Enbridge, leaving some areas uninhabited.
The Kalamazoo cleanup has cost $725 million so far — twice as much as Enbridge estimated — and the river remains closed to fishing, hunting and other recreational activities over a year and a half after the spill occurred. Officials in the Calhoun County Health Department have said some bitumen will likely remain in the river “indefinitely.” Sweeney points out that the rural areas along pipeline routes are unprepared to cope with spills. “They had to bring someone in from the Gulf to deal with Kalamazoo,” he explained.
While the Kalamazoo spill was the biggest-ever tar sands spill, pipeline spills occur with startling frequency. In 2011 alone, there were 600 reported pipeline incidents. TransCanada’s website argues that “if they do occur, pipeline leaks are small,” yet pipeline spills caused 17 deaths and 68 injuries, and over $335 million in property damage. In 2010, when the Kalamazoo spill occurred, the damages from pipeline spills topped $1 billion. While pipeline spills don’t get the attention of disasters like the Exxon-Valdez and BP, they point to a familiar pattern of underestimating risk and underpreparing for disaster.
TransCanada insists that it will comply with all federal regulations, and construct and operate Keystone XL “to the highest industry standards.” Danielle Droitsch, an attorney with the National Resources Defense Council, argues that we don’t know enough about diluted bitumen to be able to transport it safely. “We’re building these pipelines as if they were conventional oil pipelines,” she said. “We don’t have any special regulations in place to deal with the fact that these are tar sands pipelines and they are very different. Until we have a new regulatory system in place there are no safety measures proposed that would make this pipeline safer.”
And in the meantime? “There’s no question this pipeline will spill — it’s a question of when.”
By: Allyssa Battistoni, Salon, March 19, 2012
Rick Santorum Cashes In On The Very Tax Credit He Claims To Hate
Rick Santorum regularly knocks the stimulus bill that the Democratic Congress passed, and President Obama signed into law, back in early 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act “cost American jobs,” he told CNN last July. But that didn’t stop Santorum from claiming a tax credit for home efficiency funded through the stimulus plan that year.
According to his 2009 tax form, which was released last week, Santorum claimed a $3,151 expenditure on new exterior windows and skylights, one of the “qualified energy efficiency improvements” for homes that was granted a tax credit through the stimulus bill. The stimulus bill revived a tax credit that had expired at the end of 2007 and increased the amount of money homeowners could claim. This allowed the Santorum family to knock $945 off their taxes.
The purpose of the tax credit was to help homeowners save money by using less energy, while at the some time generating fewer emissions. But the efficient choices can often cost more upfront—hence the desire to create a tax credit to incentivize that kind of expensive upgrade. The measure was also intended to benefit the manufacturing and construction industries by creating more opportunities for them to make and install the windows and other efficient products.
Santorum has made attacking the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies a prime plank in his platform, implying just last week that the president is some kind of dirt-worshiping hippie aligned with “radical environmentalists.” He’s also used his position on the subject as a way to distance himself from rival Mitt Romney, who has at times shown sympathy for protecting the environment.
“Who would be the better person to go after the Obama administration on trying to control the energy and manufacturing sector of our economy and trying to dictate to you what lights to turn on and what car to drive?” Santorum told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month. “Would it be someone who bought into man-made global warming and imposed the first carbon cap in the state of Massachusetts, the first state to do so in the country?”
Despite the major boost that the stimulus bill gave to the manufacturing sector, Santorum has accused Obama of “talk[ing] about how he’s going to help manufacturing, after he systematically destroyed it.” The stimulus is also one of the many things Santorum targets when he criticizes Obama’s “radical agenda.” “We’re not like the liberals. Every time we see a problem, we don’t have to find a government program to fix it,” Santorum said on the campaign trail in Michigan this week. “We encourage others to fix it without the government’s heavy hand.”
Santorum has also said he thinks that “all subsidies to energy should be eliminated.” He doesn’t, however, seem to have a great grasp on what those subsidies are, as he also claims that “there are not a lot of them” to eliminate—when in fact we provide about $20 billion worth every year. Nor did he comment on whether the tax credit he claimed just a few years ago would qualify as one.
By: Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, February 24, 2012
The Hypocrisy And Stupidity Of The GOP’s Hatred Of The EPA
GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has taken advantage of his newfound popularity to get on board the Republican war against clean air and water.
According to Santorum, the new EPA rule that will finally place limits on how much mercury the nation’s coal and oil fired power plants can spew into the air —a regulation specifically created to protect young children and developing fetuses from the damage known to be caused by mercury, a dangerous neurotoxin—will shut down 60 power plants in the US and is “not based on any kind of science.”
Nonsense.
What Santorum is not telling you is that we have long had regulations on mercury emissions for other types of emission sources such as waste incinerators. Why? Because it is no secret that mercury is highly damaging to our health, particularly the health of children and developing fetuses. Yet, coat and oil fired power plants, the single-largest source of mercury emissions, were never included in the limits —until now.
Indeed, the only thing not based on any kind of science is Santorum’s determination that causing some private power plant operators to install the technology required to stay within the new emission limits is more important than the estimated 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 asthma attacks that will be prevented each and every year as a result lowering the level of mercury in the air.
While it may not play well with the GOP base and Tea Party members committed to ending federal government regulations—even when they make sense—the new EPA rules are the result of a peer-reviewed study that has taken twenty years to complete.
But it’s not like one requires a degree in chemical engineering to appreciate that mercury in the air can’t be a good thing.
If you doubt this, just listen to the never-ending GOP complaints over the dangers of mercury escaping from the compact florescent light (CFL) bulbs the government will soon require us to use in place of the highly inefficient incandescent bulbs. While the supposed dangers of mercury from a broken CFL bulb falling to the carpet is enough to motivate conservatives to fill their basements with stockpiles of old-school style light bulbs as if they were preparing for electric-Armageddon, they don’t seem to have a problem with coal plants pouring this neurotoxin into the air where it can cause all sorts of serious health problems for the entire population.
How does that make any sense? You would think that these Republicans and their children breathe different air than the rest of us.
But then, maybe they do. You don’t find a lot of coal burning power plants in upper-class neighborhoods – only the people who own the plants and would prefer not to have to spend the money to upgrade their technology to meet the new standards to protect the rest of their fellow citizens.
While you may wish to argue that the amount of mercury exposure resulting from a busted CFL bulb in your house is, somehow, more dangerous than being exposed to mercury 24/7, you would be wrong. Despite the horror stories being pitched suggesting that people in hazmat gear will be required to clean up a busted light bulb, the truth is a broken CFL bulb will be swept up (not vacuumed) just as broken bulbs have always been swept up. A little more care is required in disposal just as more care is required when disposing of used batteries.
And yet, despite these obviously contradictory impulses, the GOP is ready to shut down the EPA because the agency dared to require power plants to reduce the amount of mercury it pumps into the air.
If this behavior fails to strike you as sufficiently odd, consider the hypocrisy of a man like Rick Santorum—as dedicated a pro-lifer as you will find—who argues, in defense of life, that a physician who performs an abortion should be treated as a criminal and thrown in jail but defends the practice of spreading the very neurotoxins through the air that damage the development of many unborn children along with the many already born children who will grow up to be sickly adults—or worse— due to the illnesses caused by mercury.
If you are going to protect life, then protect all life — not just the ones that will win you some votes. To do otherwise is the ultimate in hypocrisy.
We all understand that, from time to time, the government can get carried away and over regulate. If it can be shown that a regulation is causing far more harm than good, I have no problem doing away with that regulation.
However, when it comes to our health and the health of our children, is over-regulation even possible? Does it ever make sense to balance the need to drive profit against the desire to have healthy children?
The bottom line here is that the GOP has picked the wrong enemy in taking on the EPA. You simply can’t argue that you are pro-life and then be unwilling to protect that life because you believe it is bad for business.
With the exception of the die hard GOP base, it’s a losing pitch as voters just aren’t going to buy it.
And we all know what that means.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, January 3, 2012
Non-Equivalence: The Continuing Curse Of “On The One-Handism”
In Time magazine’s recent profile of Herman Cain, author Michael Crowley writes of Cain’s now famous “9-9-9” plan, “Conservative economists applaud the idea, but many others say it dramatically favors the rich and would actually raise taxes on the poor and require huge spending cuts.”
Sentences like these in magazines like this one tell us a great deal about what’s wrong with political coverage in the United States. In the first place, the sentence treats America as if it is made up of only two groups of people: “the rich” and “the poor.” It does not even allow for the existence of the vast majority of Americans who exist somewhere in-between (generally referred to—and exalted as—“the middle class”). Most egregious of all, however, is the implied equivalence between the alleged approval by “conservative economists” on the one hand and what “others” say on the other.
Now, a few questions. Who are these “others?” Are they also economists or are they, say, garbage men? And do these unnamed conservative economists applaud the idea because it “would actually raise taxes on the poor and require huge spending cuts” or in spite of it? And finally, what, Mr. Time Magazine, would the plan actually do? What is the point, Time, if not to offer readers some guidance on competing claims by “conservative economists” and “others” when it comes to the proposals of leading presidential candidates?
It’s not like it would have been so hard. The Tax Policy Center broke down the numbers behind Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan, and Neil Klopfenstein even offered a visualization of the plan based on the Tax Policy Center’s analysis.
What we have here is a prime example of what I have called “on the one-handism,” what Paul Krugman calls “the cult of balance” and what James Fallows calls the problem of “false equivalence.” The phenomenon derives from a multiplicity of causes but rests on two essential insights.
First, conservatives have figured out that even the most high-minded members of the media will publish their claims without prejudice, even if they lack any credible supporting evidence. They will do this because they consider it both “unfair” and nonobjective to take a position between the two parties even when it involves passing along a falsehood.
Second, because of the relentless effectiveness of the right’s effort to “work the refs,” reporters and editors are particularly reluctant to invite the hassles and angry accusations certain to arrive whenever anyone prints an unfavorable truth about anyone associated with the right. Conservatives have gotten so good at this, as a matter of fact, that they even get reporters to thank them for it—as well as to misidentify their complaints with those of average everyday American citizens.
Just one case in point: In his profile of Jill Abramson, the recently named New York Times executive editor, Ken Auletta quotes her discussing her time as the paper’s Washington bureau chief, confusing the two: “All my years in Washington, and in some ways being attacked by conservatives, made me more conscious of how a story might be seen in the rest of America,” Abramson explained.
Fallows has done the world a favor in this respect by risking his reputation for moderation and overall reasonableness by getting a metaphorical bit in his mouth on the topic of false equivalence. In doing so, he demonstrates one of the blogosphere’s key blessings: the ability to return to a topic over and over for the purposes of clarification and intensification. In his discussion of a story by The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake entitled “Democrats thwart Obama’s bipartisan goals again,” Fallows notes that the story in question “manages not to use the word “filibuster” while describing why the administration’s programs have not gotten through a Senate that the Democrats ‘control.’”
This is a shame. For as I noted in Kabuki Democracy, “Accurate numbers can be difficult to discern because in most cases the mere threat is enough to win the battle at hand.” But if we examine a close corollary—cloture votes—these rose from fewer than 10 per two-year congressional session during the 1970s to more than 100 in both the 2006–2008 and 2009–2010 sessions. Political scientist Barbara Sinclair estimates that these threats have affected 70 percent of all Senate bills since 2000, nearly 10 times the average in the previous century.
The same numbers suggest that Democrats, who were no paragons of virtue on cloture votes when they were in the minority under President George W. Bush, are still no match for their opponents when it comes to using and deploying the body’s tactical weaponry of obstruction. Since the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress in 2006, Republicans have more than doubled the 130 cloture motions Democrats had managed to force during the four previous years under George W. Bush.
Fallows reprints one of journalist Ezra Klein’s charts demonstrating the degree to which Senate Republicans have abused the filibuster relative to its use in the past. As Fallows notes, the “blue line shows just some of the filibuster threats that McConnell’s minority has used to block consideration of even routine legislation and appointments.”
Fallows also notes, “[The Post story] reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself … [and] Republicans end up voting against the bill, because that is the Republican strategy.” Fallows devotes most of his attention to The Post’s coverage but he actually began with a dissection of a Times version of the same story, demonstrating how widespread the problem is at the highest reaches of mainstream media.
Of course the issue goes well beyond mere politics. Because so much mainstream media misinformation is perpetuated based on the manipulation of data by conservatives unconcerned with evidence—and often even with reality—in the service of both ideology as well as their funders’ fortunes, Americans are actually worse informed about the reality of global warming than they were years ago, and hence the threat is going unmet.
Global warming misinformation is perhaps the most dramatic case, but almost everywhere, the refusal of so many in the media to even bother with the question of truth and falsehood is at the root of the problem. Boring as it may be to hear and see and read over and over, it bears repeating until it stops.
By; Eric Alterman, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress, October 20, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 