Category: environment

Shave the Whales

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The International Court of Justice in The Hague has just made formal the blatantly obvious and ruled that Japan’s so-called “research” whaling has nothing to do with research, and so is illegal:

The decision to ban Japan’s annual whaling drive off Antarctica, handed down by the United Nations’ highest court on Monday, was a hard-won victory for conservationists who long argued that Tokyo’s whaling research was a cover for commercial whaling.

The ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague halts a Japanese program that has captured more than 10,000 minke and other whales in the Southern Ocean each year since 1988 in the name of biological research.

Japan may not be ready to lay down its harpoons entirely. Though the ruling is final, it allows the Japanese to continue to hunt whales under a redesigned program, said Nanami Kurasawa, who heads a marine conservation group in Tokyo.

And the court’s decision does not affect smaller hunts that Japan carries out in the northern Pacific, or coastal whaling carried out on a smaller scale by local fishermen.

“It’s an important decision, but it also leaves the Japanese government a lot of leeway,” Ms. Kurasawa said. “The Japanese government could start research whaling again but under a different name, and it would be out of the ruling’s purview.”

In a 12-to-4 judgment, the court found that Japan was in breach of its international obligations by catching and killing minke whales and issuing permits for hunting humpback and fin whales within the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, established by the International Whaling Commission.

Reading a summary of the judgment, the presiding judge, Peter Tomka of Slovakia, said that the latest Japanese program, which was expanded in 2005, had involved the killing of thousands of minke whales and a number of fin whales, but that its “scientific output to date appears limited.” The ruling suggested that Japan’s whaling hunt was based on politics and logistics, rather than science.

The driving force behind Japanese whaling is stupid, brutal, and mindlessly destructive nationalism, something which the residents of Nanking may recall.

And they will continue to butcher porpoises in local waters.

But it is a start.

Reconstruction Was Ended Way Too Soon

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And now the s%$4 has hit the fan coal ash has hit the drinking water ………

Maddow is all over how NC Governor Pat McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources Department of Environment and Natural Resources is aggressively protecting lawbreaking polluters like Duke Energy, by aggressively preventing private actions against the firm, as opposed to actually enforcing the law:

North Carolina regulators’ penchant for seemingly protecting Gov. Pat McCrory’s (R) former employers from repeated lawsuits over their environmental practices was only stopped following a devastatingly toxic spill, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported on Monday.

 On two prior occasions, Maddow said, officials at the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) invoked a provision in the federal Clean Water Act allowing them to step in as plaintiffs against Duke Energy when Duke was being sued by environmental activists over the toxic coal ash ponds at its facilities. The state reached settlements worth a collective $99,000 for those incidents.

 But Monday night, she explained, a third such settlement was delayed in the wake of a pond spill that produced up to 82,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated water — the third-biggest spill of its’ kind in U.S. history.

 And despite not making any statement about the Feb. 3 disaster until four days after it happened, McCrory — who worked with the company for 28 years — used the first two DENR settlements to boast that his administration took “legal action” against Duke Energy.

 “Right,” Maddow said skeptically. “By stepping in and blocking other peoples’ lawsuits against the company, and then settling with the company for nearly no money, and, importantly, [requiring] no promise from Duke Energy that they would fix what they were doing wrong.”

Talk about a cheap date.  Even the Department of Justice requests a lie from the offenders to refrain from future wrongdoing.

Just a Reminder: Big Ag is Evil, Not Just Monsanto, and it is US Policy to Subsidize them Through International Agreements

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You really need to read this account of a systematic program of harassment and libel against Tyrone Hayes for his research showing that Syngenta’s herbicide atrazine was dangerous:

In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

………

[Former student Roger] Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

………

In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.

After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”

………

Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.………

The Supreme Court has said that corporations are people in the Citizens United case.

Why isn’t Syngenta being criminally prosecuted for stalking?

H/t The Washington Monthly.

Because ……… Freedumb!

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Specifically, Freedumb Industries, who just dumped massive quantities of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol-methylcyclohexane methanol into West Virginia’s Elk River upstream of the water treatment plant, leaving hundreds of thousands without water:

A chemical spill along a West Virginia river on Thursday triggered a tap water ban for up to 300,000 people, shutting down schools, bars and restaurants and forcing residents to line up for bottled water at stores.

 Governor Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency for nine counties following the spill of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, a chemical used in the coal industry.

 The spill occurred on the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia’s capital and largest city, just upriver from the eastern U.S. state’s largest water treatment plant.

Why did this Happen? Because ……… Freedumb!

Today, at the time they were shutting off water for all those people, the House of Representatives voted to gut the Superfund act.

Why, Because ……… Freedumb!

The House passed legislation Thursday aimed at easing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules and requiring more cooperation between the EPA and states on environmental cleanup projects.

 Members voted 225-188 in favor of the Reducing Excessive Deadline Obligations Act, H.R. 2279. The bill is made up of three Republican bills that were combined together, and it includes some provisions that House Democrats found unobjectionable while they were considered in committee.

 The bill was supported by just five Democrats in the final vote, while four Republicans voted against it.

 Specifically, it removes a requirement that the EPA revise solid waste disposal regulations every three years, and prohibits the government from imposing solid waste regulations on states that overlap current state-wide rules.

 Other language in the bill would require all federally owned facilities to comply with state rules on hazardous substances, and require the government to consult more closely with states before imposing cleanup requirements under Superfund, the federal program that funds the cleanup of abandoned waste sites.

 The legislation would also ensure that if a state has rules requiring companies in polluting industries to post a bond or offer other financial sureties for possible cleanup costs, those rules cannot be affected by possible rules the EPA might develop in the future.

 ………

 But several Democrats criticized the legislation as an attempt to weaken current law. Many argued that the bonding language would let companies avoid the cost of cleaning up pollution, and pass those costs onto taxpayers.

 “The outcome of enacting this bill should be obvious,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). “If polluters don’t pay to clean up their pollution, then it just becomes one more burden to the taxpayer, and none of us should want that.”

 Others argued that the bill could further confuse how the federal government and the states must work together on clean-up efforts, which could slow down that process. That argument was also made by the Obama administration earlier this week, in a statement saying President Obama would veto the bill.

 “H.R. 2279 would unnecessarily increase the potential for litigation between the Federal government and the States, negatively impacting the timeliness and number of cleanups,” the White House wrote.

Why are they doing such a stupid thing, and why are they doing it on the day of what looks to be one of the worst chemical spills?

Because ……… Freedumb!

Un-Dirtyword, Believable

This is an Affront to Human Decency

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For anyone who has followed the conservative movement, it comes as no surprise when they alter reality to match their own conclusions.

However, the recent actions of dead eyed Canadian PM Stephen Harper go far beyond this. He is aggressively destroying historical documents in an attempt to prevent to double down on Canada’s fossil fuel economy:

Back in 2012, when Canada’s Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was simply sent to landfill or burned.
Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives’ war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.

An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger’s 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age. Update: a copy of these logs survives overseas.

The destruction of these publicly owned collections was undertaken in haste. No records were kept of what was thrown away, what was sold, and what was simply lost. Some of the books were burned.

The news source The Tyee has what I think is the money quote on all of this:

“It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits,” said [Dalhousie University biologist Jeff] Hutchings. “What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn’t think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science? Or is it the idea that a good government is stripped down government? “

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of “fear and insecurity” within the Harper government, “about how to deal with science and knowledge.”

That pattern includes the gutting of the Fisheries Act, the muzzling of scientists, the abandonment of climate change research and the dismantling of countless research programs, including the world famous Experimental Lakes Area. All these examples indicate that the Harper government strongly regards environmental science as a threat to unfettered resource exploitation.

“There is a group of people who don’t know how to deal with science and evidence. They see it as a problem and the best way to deal with it is to cut it off at the knees and make it ineffective,” explained Hutchings.

They are now literally book burning fascist barbarians, and they are destroying our heritage (all of us, not just Canadians) to pursue an agenda of greed and spoil.

This is unalloyed evil.

OK, I Get That This Guy Was Scum Who Ripped off the EPA

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But it seems that every story is some variant of, “EPA reels as climate-change expert awaits sentencing for $1m CIA fraud.”

This is simply not true.  Not the “fraud” part, nor the “EPA” part, nor the “CIA”, part, they are all true:

It is a story that flummoxed investigators – how a highly paid climate-change expert at the Environmental Protection Agency managed to defraud the government of nearly $1m, by pretending for a decade to be an undercover CIA agent.

John Beale, 65, is to undergo sentencing in a DC federal court on Wednesday, after pleading guilty to defrauding the government of $900,000 in salary and other benefits. Beale, who used his ruse to disappear for months at a time, has agreed to pay some $1.3m in restitution. He faces up to three years in jail.

The scandal could rebound against the current administrator of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, and her efforts to carry out President Barack Obama’s climate-change agenda. Last week, an official investigation found that she knew of the fraud for more than a year. Other officials who worked with Beale at the agency are under investigation and in a report last week, the EPA inspector general said senior agency officials had “enabled” Beale by failing to challenge any of his stories or expense claims amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Beale, who retired last April after learning he was under investigation, earned salary and bonuses of $206,000 a year, far more than his supervisors. His fraud consisted largely of failing to turn up for work – in one instance for 18 months – and offering excuses connected to his fake intelligence role at the CIA.

(emphasis mine)

It’s the “climate change expert” bit that is wrong.  He’s not a scientist, his background in public affairs and law, with a Master’s Degree from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a Law Degree from New York University (PDF, and here is the Google cache if they purge it).

Yes, this sh%$ is mind boggling, but this guy managed (when he was actually, like, you know, there) the office.

But every story that I’ve seen has something like, “Lead Scientist,” or “Lead Expert.”

Still, engineering what is in effect a no show job for over a decade is a pretty remarkable bit of bureaucratic Jiujitsu.

Fracking Assholes Literally Think That They are Above the Law

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And no, I am not invoking Battlestar Galactica.

I am referring to the hissy fit that drillers in Pennsylvania are having about being prosecuted for illegal dumping:

Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s decision to prosecute a major Marcellus Shale natural-gas driller for a 2010 wastewater spill has sent shock waves through the industry.

But environmentalists Wednesday hailed the prosecution of the Exxon Mobil Corp. subsidiary as a departure from the soft treatment they say the industry has received from Pennsylvania regulators.

………

Kane’s office announced charges Tuesday against XTO Energy Inc. for discharging more than 50,000 gallons of toxic wastewater from storage tanks at a gas-well site in Lycoming County.

XTO in July settled federal civil charges over the incident by agreeing to pay a $100,000 fine and deploy a plan to improve wastewater-management practices. The consent decree included no admissions of liability.

The Fort Worth, Texas, drilling company, which Exxon acquired in 2010, said it had worked cooperatively with federal and state authorities to clean up the spilled waste, known as “produced water.” XTO excavated and removed 3,000 tons of contaminated soil from the site.

“Criminal charges are unwarranted and legally baseless because neither XTO nor any of its employees intentionally, recklessly, or negligently discharged produced water on the site,” XTO said in a statement.

Kane’s office said it did not need to prove intent to prosecute the company for crimes. XTO is charged with five counts of unlawful conduct under the Clean Streams Law and three counts of unlawful conduct under the Solid Waste Management Act.

Industry leaders said the prosecution of a company for what they called an inadvertent spill creates a hostile business environment.

Because prosecuting criminals is constitutes a “hostile business environment.”

YOU see, laws are only for the little people.

The official story from XTO also stinks to high heaven:

The XTO spill received very little public attention when it occurred.

A DEP inspector discovered wastewater leaking from an open valve on a storage tank during an unannounced visit to the Marquardt well site on Nov. 16, 2010. The wastewater spilled into a tributary of the Susquehanna River and also contaminated a spring. Pollutants were present in the stream for 65 days after the spill.

The grand jury’s presentment does not say who opened the valves on the tank or why. XTO officials at the time suggested vandals might be responsible. But it noted that the drilling site had no secondary containment, little security, and no alarm system for leaks.

Yes, “vandals”.

It’s gotta be vandals, and not some corporate drone who decided that it made business sense to just dump the water, even if every now and again you get caught and have to pay a 100 Grand fine.

A tip of the hat, to Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

Hope & Change ……… Not!!! Environment Edition………

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The White House is slow walking major environmental regulations:

The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.

The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days. Regulatory review times at the White House Office of Management and Budget are now the longest in 20 years, having spiked sharply since 2011.

………

The proposed rules would require that refrigerators, light bulbs and electrical equipment use less energy, much as the Obama administration in its first term required automakers to commit to make cars more energy efficient.

With a sweeping climate bill having died in the Senate in Mr. Obama’s first term, his only options for major action on the issue in the second term appear to involve executive action. In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, he vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

What it comes down to is that Barack Obama does not believe in regulation. That’s why he had Cass Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The slowdown stems from a combination of factors, including high-level vacancies and election-year politics. Analysts and former administration officials said the White House, sensitive to Republican charges that it was threatening the economy by pushing out dozens of so-called job-killing regulations, reined in the process last year, leaving many major rules awaiting action for months beyond legal deadlines.

Some administration officials are also concerned that regulations have the potential to do more harm than good. “If we make refrigerators lousy, that’s a big problem,” Cass R. Sunstein wrote in “Simpler: The Future of Government,” a book published this year about his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a small unit of the budget office responsible for reviewing regulations.

………

Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former top Environmental Protection Agency official who tangled with Mr. Sunstein over a number of environmental regulations in Mr. Obama’s first term, said in a recent article that such demands for detailed analysis become “a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole: every time the agency meets one demand for a piece of information about the costs or benefits of a rule, it finds itself met with a new and different demand.”

She said the decision of how quickly to move now rested with Mr. Obama. “The cabinet does not need a presidential directive telling the agencies to do their work,” she said, “rather, it needs presidential support for the work they are trying to do.”

I think that Ms. Heinzerling is missing the point: If Obama wanted regulations to progress with alacrity, they would be.

Regulations are stalled because that is what he wants. 

Cass Sunstein was head of the OIRA, QED.

EU Bans Neonicotinoid Pesticides

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They are cioncerned that these pesticides are causing colony collapse disorder:

Environmentalists hailed a “victory for bees” today after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations.

Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states voted for a two-year restriction on neonicotinoid insecticides. That gave the European Commission the support it needed to push through an EU-wide ban on using three neonicotinoids on crops attractive to bees.

Tonio Borg, the EC’s top health official, said they planned to implement the landmark ban from December. “I pledge to do my utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over €22bn annually to European agriculture, are protected,” he said.

Britain was among eight nations which voted against the motion, despite a petition signed by 300,000 people presented to Downing Street last week by fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett. The Independent has also campaigned to save Britain’s bee population.

Four nations abstained from the moratorium, which will restrict the use of imidacloprid and clothianidin, made by Germany’s Bayer, and thiamethoxam, made by the Swiss company, Syngenta. The ban on use on flowering crops will remain in place throughout the EU for two years unless compelling scientific evidence to the contrary becomes available.

More than 30 separate scientific studies have found a link between the neonicotinoids, which attack insects’ nerve systems, and falling bee numbers. The proposal by European Commission – the EU’s legislative body – to ban the insecticides was based on a study by the European Food Safety Authority, which found in January that the pesticides did pose a risk to bees’ health.

The argument against this is that the evidence is not sufficiently conclusive.

Hopefully, the two year ban should provide some good data, though the Wiki indicates that the pesticide can persist in the environment for more than two years.

Expect a Major Fruit and Nut Shortage

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Because we are killing the bees necessary for these crops in unprecedented numbers:

A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.

In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.

They talked to a bee keeper who was planning to take 13,000 hives to California for the almond season, but only had 3000 because of hive losses.

The long-persistence neonicotinoids are being fingered as the likely cause, but given the mode of both the EPA and the Department of agriculture will demand definitive proof of harm, rather than requiring proof of safety, particularly when big Ag, like the seed suppliers who have taken to using said pesticides to pre-treat the seeds (Monsanto and their ilk), we are in for a bumpy ride.

As God as My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly

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So not the f%$#ing Onion, but they are dosing mice with Tylenol and dropping them from helicopters on Guam:

Something about this just does not sound like a good idea. In the coming months, toxic mice will rain down on the jungles in Guam. They are the solution to the intrusion of the brown tree snake which has wiped out much of Guam’s native bird species after first arriving on the island in U.S. naval ships after World War II. With an estimated 2 million of the snakes on the island, the military has decided to carpet bomb the island with dead mice laced with lethal painkillers. Italy carpet bombed one its islands with poison to combat a similar rat problem. The brown tree snakes have been cutting power lines and even biting residents. However, there is the obvious problem of other animals eating the mice. To reduce this problem, the scientists have developed a flotation device with streamers designed to catch in the branches of the forest foliage, where the snakes live and feed. Yet, if anything goes wrong, we have replaced a brown tree snake problem with an army of airborne paratrooping zombie toxic mice with addiction problems.

What the hell?

Seriously, someone has jumped the f%$#ing shark!

How Many Jobs Does the Keystone Pipeline Create?

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Only 20.

Call me a political Little Orphan Annie, but I think that if you have to lie this much, it’s probably not a good idea:

TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline, heralded by supporters as a major job creator, will add few permanent positions once the $7 billion project is built.

The number of people needed to operate and maintain the 1,661-mile (2,673-kilometer) pipeline may be as few as 20, according to the U.S. State Department, or as many as a few hundred, according to TransCanada.

“I don’t see a big jobs impact,” Stephen Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia, said in an interview. “It gets the oil into refineries that already exist. It’s like replacing a bridge on the highway.”

The debate in Washington has focused on short-term construction and manufacturing jobs, rather than on permanent ones. Estimates for construction and manufacturing employment range from 2,500 to 20,000, depending on assumptions of how much of the project’s budget will be spent in the U.S. The company says some of the steel will be made in Canada and India.

TransCanada Vice President Robert Jones said permanent jobs would be “in the hundreds, certainly not in the thousands,” in a Nov. 11 interview on CNN.

Calgary-based TransCanada says construction will create 20,000 “new, real U.S. jobs.”

What a surprise, TransCanada is a bunch of lying sacks of sh%$.

And the bitumen that they will be extracting is an ecological disaster as well.

China Moves Toward Carbon Tax

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It looks like the Chinese have learned a lesson from their recent near lethal smog incidents in Beijing:

China’s Ministry of Finance has announced that the country will levy a tax on carbon emissions, reports Xinhua. Policy experts in the United States and Europe have long argued that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, but implementing one in most large industrialized countries has always seemed politically infeasible.

In the same announcement, China’s Ministry of Finance said that direct taxes on resources, including coal and water, will also be forthcoming.

Details on the carbon tax are scant, but previous reports indicated that it would come into force by 2015 and might start at 10 yuan ($1.60) per tonne of carbon, rising to 50 yuan ($8) per tonne by 2020. Notably, the tax would be collected by local tax authorities, and not municipal environmental protection bureaus.

BTW, I did some quick back of the envelope calculations.

If you look at the weight of carbon in a gallon of gasoline (4.2 lbs of carbon per gallon based on a chemical formula of C8H18), 10 yuan per gallon is a bit less than ⅓ of a penny a gallon, and 50 yuan, about 1⅔ cents a gallon.

It’s not a whole bunch of money, though it’s probably about twice that per BTU for coal, but it’s a start, which puts it ahead of the United States.

Also I approve of a carbon tax, because, unlike cap and trade, it does not prevent Wall Street from using “financial innovation” to rip the rest of society off.

We Love Those Little Fuzzy Murderous Psychopaths

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Awww!!! It’s so cute!!!

A new study has revealed that cats are merciless killing machines cutting a wide swath through indigenous wildlife:

For all the adorable images of cats that play the piano, flush the toilet, mew melodiously and find their way back home over hundreds of miles, scientists have identified a shocking new truth: cats are far deadlier than anyone realized.

In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.

The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

Peter Marra of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and an author of the report, said the mortality figures that emerge from the new model “are shockingly high.”

I loves my cute little black hearted merciless killing machines.

They are so cute.  Squeeee!!!!

The Reality is That Obama is Preparing for a Post Election F%$# You to Environmentalists

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Obama is in election mode.

He’s criticizing Republicans and trying for a new jobs program.

And now the State Department as delayed a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the election.

They want a study on another route, one that might be a bit less likely to contaminate the Ogallala aquifer.

This is not a policy change.  This is an cynical exercise in electioneering, and once Obama doesn’t need the environmentalists, he will once again go out of his way to sh%$ all over them once again.

Holy Sh%$!!!

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Click for full size

This is scary

It’s rained so hard world wide that ocean levels fell in 2010:

Guest Blogger on Oct 2, 2011 at 12:40 pm
by Barry Saxifrage, via the Vancouver Observer

“The year 2010 was one the worst years in world history for high-impact floods. But just three weeks into the new year, 2011 has already had an entire year’s worth of mega-floods. “ – Meteorologist Jeff Masters

I spend hours a day researching what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls “global weirding”: the destabilization of our weather system fueled by the three million tonnes of fossil fuel pollution we inject into it each hour. So it is a rare day when something shocks me as much as a recent U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) report on last year’s extreme rainfall.

As most locals know from soggy personal experience, our corner of planet Earth since last spring has been a bit wetter and greyer than normal. And next door, our Washington neighbours donned their gum boots and slogged through their fourth wettest year since 1895.

Still, we got off lucky. Very lucky it turns out.

According to this jaw-dropping NASA report, worldwide rainfall and snowfall were so extreme, in so many places last year, that sea levels fell dramatically.

Great googly moogly.

I’ve Had it With These Motherf%$#ing Republicans on This Motherf%$#ing Plane!M

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Alligator 0, Snake 0, Let’s call it a tie.

The latest regulation that the Republicans are objecting to and trying to repeal, is one that literally forbids snakes on a plane.

I’m not kidding here. They are literally trying to roll back regulations on the transportation of snakes on airplanes:

Democrats and Republicans all agree that the nation needs to move on a jobs agenda. And Republicans have a new plan: unleash the reins of snake commerce.

GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today called attention to a proposed regulation that would restrict the transportation and importation of nine types of snakes, including the Burmese Python.

In a new report entitled “Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama’s Promise of Regulatory Reform,” GOP members cited the proposed snake ban as one of seven examples of red tape choking off job growth in an already ailing economy.

One witness invited to testify, snake breeder David Barke, told lawmakers that the rules “threatens as many as a million law-abiding American citizens and their families with the penalty of a felony conviction for pursuing their livelihoods, for pursuing their hobby, or for simply moving with their pet to new state.”

Politico reports that Florida officials, led by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), are pushing for the new rules because the Everglades are under attack by 100,000 gigantic Burmese pythons who have been accidentally introduced by negligent pet owners. The outside invaders have been on a rampage, devouring native birds and other creatures. One python grew so big that it managed to devour a six-foot alligator before exploding. No really. This actually happened. There’s a photo.

No, this is not The Onion, and I wish that I didn’t live in a world where I cannot tell the difference between reality and satire.

Meet the New Boss, Same As the Old Boss

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What can I say, but, “Let’s see some windmill chords”

Obama just killed the EPA’s attempt to make our air cleaner:

President Barack Obama today directed EPA to drop its highly controversial effort to set, under the auspices of the Clean Air Act, more stringent standards for ground-level ozone pollution, a key constituent of smog. Obama cited the need to reduce regulatory burdens and uncertainty among the business community in light of the struggling economy.

“With that in mind, and after careful consideration, I have requested that [EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson] withdraw the draft Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards at this time,” the President said.

The Clean Air Act requires EPA to review the standards for ground-level ozone once every five years. The standards include a “primary” standard for protecting public health and a “secondary” one aimed at safeguarding crops and the environment.

In 2008, the George W. Bush Administration set both standards at 75 ppb. But In January 2010, Jackson proposed tightening the standards to somewhere between 60 and 70 ppb, a range recommended by the agency’s scientific advisory committee.

Obama noted that the current ozone standard is due for review and possible revision again in two years.

It appears that there is not a single bit of Bush administration malfeasance that Obama won’t go to the wall to support.

What’s a few thousand dead kids and seniors over the prospect of a few million dollars in campaign contributions from polluters, after all?

Remember when Obama ran these f%$#ers over the coals? Remember when BP execs were clapped in irons and given life sentences for crimes against humanity?

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Me neither.*

In case you are wondering, why yes, the Deepwater Horizon is spilling oil again:

Oil is once again fouling the Gulf of Mexico around the Deepwater Horizon well, which was capped a little over a year ago.

Tuesday afternoon, hundreds of small, circular patches of oily sheen dotted the surface within a mile of the wellhead. With just a bare sheen present over about a quarter-mile, the scene was a far cry from the massive slick that covered the Gulf last summer.

Floating in a boat near the well site, Press-Register reporters watched blobs of oil rise to the surface and bloom into iridescent yellow patches. Those patches quickly expanded into rainbow sheens 4 to 5 feet across.

Each expanding bloom released a pronounced and pungent petroleum smell. Most of the oil was located in a patch about 50 yards wide and a quarter of a mile long.

Because playing nice with the least safety conscious energy company in the western world is such a winning strategy.

Not feeling that “Audacity of Hope”.

There is a difference between dealing with people who merely disagree with you, and dealing with evil ratf%$#s who will destroy everything for a few pennies.

BP’s upper management is clearly the latter, and dealing with them as the former just makes things worse.

*H/T JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the title and the first line.

More Like The Bush Administration Every Day

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Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

Case in point, punishing scientists who speak the truth even when big oil wants lies:

It was seen as one of the most distressing effects of climate change ever recorded: polar bears dying of exhaustion after being stranded between melting patches of Arctic sea ice.

But now the government scientist who first warned of the threat to polar bears in a warming Arctic has been suspended and his work put under official investigation for possible scientific misconduct.

Charles Monnett, a wildlife biologist, oversaw much of the scientific work for the government agency that has been examining drilling in the Arctic. He managed about $50m (£30.5m) in research projects.

Some question why Monnett, employed by the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been suspended at this moment. The Obama administration has been accused of hounding the scientist so it can open up the fragile region to drilling by Shell and other big oil companies.

“You have to wonder: this is the guy in charge of all the science in the Arctic and he is being suspended just now as an arm of the interior department is getting ready to make its decision on offshore drilling in the Arctic seas,” said Jeff Ruch, president of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “This is a cautionary tale with a deeply chilling message for any federal scientist who dares to publish groundbreaking research on conditions in the Arctic.”

There could be some completely innocent explanation for this, and I could be the rightful heir to the house of Saud.

I think that both are equally likely.