22-Foot Gash in Pegasus Pipeline Puts Gaping Hole in Safety Claims

Here's your answer: Kill the fucking Keystone XL Pipeline. Big Oil can't be trusted to keep it from harming the areas through which they feed that pipeline.


Thursday, April 11, 2013 by Common Dreams
Heavy rains move into Mayflower, Arkansas as cleanup of ExxonMobil pipeline proves ever more difficult
- Jon Queally, staff writer

Dustin McDaniel, the Arkansas Attorney General announced on Wednesday evening that a '22 foot long and 2 inch wide' gash along the Pegasus pipeline allowed crude oil to flood the town of Mayflower with thousands of gallons of tar sands oil on March 29.

"The pipeline rupture is substantially larger than many of us initially thought." Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel speaks in Little Rock, Ark., Wednesday, April 10, 2013, about last month's oil pipeline leak in Mayflower, Ark. McDaniel says an ExxonMobil pipeline that burst last month, leaking oil into a neighborhood at Mayflower, has a hole in it that is 22 feet long and 2 inches wide.

 "The pipeline rupture is substantially larger than many of us initially thought," McDaniel said at the press conference.

Though he said the state does not yet have an official estimate of how much oil is estimated to have leaked through the hole, the Associated Press, citing filings from ExxonMobil and local officials, reports that "crews have recovered about 28,200 barrels of oily water and about 2,000 cubic yards of oiled soil and debris."

ExxonMobil also delivered more than 12,500 pages of documents to the AG's office, following a subpoena request by the state, though their contents remained unclear.

"More documents will be received and requested from Exxon in coming days," McDaniel said. "But now everyone's priority continues to be the cleanup efforts in Mayflower."

McDaniels said his immediate concern was about heavy thunderstorms heading for the area that could disperse the oil into run-offs and make ongoing cleanup harder.

Later on Wednesday, as the storm hit Mayflower, activist-journalists from TarSandsBlockade, documented the shifting weather and the impact on the spill area. As Treehugger reports:

A manmade disaster was made even worse by nature Wednesday night, as a severe thunderstorm hit Mayflower, Arkansas spreading the Exxon Mobil oil spill to the yards of homes along the cove and the main body of Lake Conway. For nearly two weeks, Exxon has maintained that oil has not reached Lake Conway, despite clear evidence both from aerial video and on-the-ground guerrilla reporting that showed oil had spread throughout a cove and wetlands, which are connected through ground water and drainage culverts to the main body of the lake. Images captured Wednesday night should put any doubt to rest that the main body of Lake Conway is now contaminated with oil.

Citizen journalists, Jak and Lauren, reporting for Tar Sands Blockade, braved the severe weather Wednesday, which included hail, lighting and chance of tornados, to report on what was happening to the site of the oil spill.

Watch their footage here.

It remains unclear what could have caused such a rupture, but experts have repeatedly warned that diluted bitumen—which is run at higher temperatures and contains more corrosive solvents and chemicals—puts added pressure on traditional pipelines.

As DeSmogBlog's Steve Horn reports:

In February, the Tar Sands Blockade group revealed photographs that appear to indicate that TransCanada - which is now building the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline in Texas - may be laying poorly-welded pipe there.

Could it be a faulty or corroded weld that led to the gash in the 65-year-old Pegasus pipeline? Did it corrode due to its age or as a result of error on Exxon's part?

The 12,587 pages of documents will hopefully have some answers.

The Koch Bros., ALEC and the Power of the State

"We Don't Have the Power to Coerce Anybody"...That's Why They Need Government
by KEVIN CARSON


Were there an awards show for unintentional howlers, Charles Koch’s statement in a Forbes interview last December (“Inside the Koch Empire: How the Brothers Plan to Reshape America,” December 5, 2012) would surely be a nominee. “Most power is power to coerce somebody,” he said. “We don’t have the power to coerce anybody.”

No, but the government sure does. Maybe that’s why the Koch Brothers put so much money into lobbying groups and think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation whose main purpose is to influence government policy.

“Oh,” but you say. “They’re not looking to make money through increased government coercion. Far from it! They’re just lobbying government to get out of the economy so they can take their chances competing on their merits in an unfettered market economy.”

Well … not quite.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.

The legislative agenda pursued by groups like ALEC, Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute isn’t exactly libertarian. At least not if, by “libertarian,” you mean anything more principled than “whatever big business wants from government to make it profitable.”

As an example, consider so-called “Ag-Gag” bills – written by ALEC — that prohibit undercover journalists from exposing animal abuse within corporate agribusiness. This past year such bills were introduced in nine states and signed into law in three.

The Koch Brothers are also enthusiastic advocates (to say the least) of the Keystone XL pipeline, standing to make billions from the project if it’s completed. Needless to say, Keystone’s route depends heavily on the use of eminent domain to steal land from family farmers, and Keystone’s government backers have run roughshod over Indian lands (including sacred burial grounds) guaranteed by treaty. Last I heard, eminent domain is only possible through coercion — you know, that thing David Koch said he lacks the ability to do.

The Keystone project is also heavily dependent on regulatory state preemption of ordinary common law standards of civil liability for the air and groundwater pollution and health damage fracking causes to surrounding communities. And the Koch brothers are also prominent cheerleaders for “tort reform” — i.e., making it more difficult to hold corporations liable for their wrongdoing and make them pay for the harm they’ve caused.

So the actual pattern we see is the Koch brothers and their pet think tanks actively encouraging a near-totalitarian level of state intervention to suppress all the mechanisms of civil society — investigative journalism by a free and independent press, a vigorous system of civil liability, etc. — that would help keep business honest and hold it accountable. Hardly surprising, when you consider Koch Industries got its start building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. Say, now — he had the power to coerce, didn’t he?

While we’re at it, ALEC has actively lobbied for the draconian drug laws and for detention of “illegal aliens” [sic] that are so profitable to its sponsors like CCOA, Wackenhut and other private prison corporations. That doesn’t sound too libertarian, does it?

And how about David Addington’s new No. 3 role at Heritage? Addington was Dick Cheney’s go-to guy for writing legal memos on stuff like indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance. You can see why a guy like that would be a perfect fit for a think tank that’s all about “limited government” and “restoring the Constitution.” All sarcasm aside, I think you can see that people like this have a very, um, skewed idea of what “freedom” means.

The role of people like Charles and David Koch, and of think tanks like ALEC, AEI and Heritage, in the larger free market libertarian movement is a lot like that of the Pharisees in the Judaism of Jesus’s time. “Whited sepulchres” and “generation of vipers” are some of the terms he used, I think.

The Pharisees, Jesus said, would cavil and split hairs for years on the finer points of the law, while utterly disregarding its spirit; they would tithe their very herbs, while putting their money into their day’s equivalent of tax-free nonprofit foundations to avoid taking care of their aged parents.

The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of world off their land.

It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple.

Canadian and US Pipelines - A Map of them

Obama’s Biggest Environmental ‘Victory’ Was A Huge Win for Frackers

He's a Big Gas Man

by Joshua Frank

 

Greenhouse gas emissions are hot news these days — especially in the lead up to an election when candidates, at least those who claim to believe in climate science, vow to do something about the biggest environmental crisis facing our little blue planet: climate change.

In early March of this year, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Obama vowed to end $4 billion in Big Oil and Gas subsidies. “You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people,” Obama said to an applauding audience. “You can keep subsidizing a fossil fuel that’s been getting taxpayer dollars for a century, or you can place your bets on a clean-energy future.”

That sounds dandy, but ending subsidies to polluters is only half the battle, and Obama’s idea of a “clean-energy future” is tenuous at best. In an attempt to round up the green vote, which he successfully accomplished, President Obama trumpeted his half-hearted attempt to put the breaks on climate change by tapping energy sources here at home and regulating the industry that’s doing most of the damage. Only days after the president announced he was looking to fast-track the southern portion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, his administration released the first-ever federal standards to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants.

In what’s now become typical Obama fashion, the move was meant to appease environmental critics while at the same time ensure the fossil fuel industry that the so-called New Source Performance Standard would not actually hurt its bottom lines.

Here’s why: the EPA rule would only impact new coal-fired power plants, but only those that break ground in later next year. In all, 15 proposed coal plants in 10 states could be potentially impacted by the rule, even though most are already hung up in court battles. As such, no coal-fired power plants in the United States have broke ground over the past three years and tenacious environmentalists have seen far more victories than defeats when it comes to battling King Coal.

The new greenhouse rule will require fossil fuel-fired electricity generating units to restrict their emissions to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) per megawatt-hour of electricity produced; a strict standard to be sure, but one that doesn’t come without caveats. All old power plants, some well over 50 years in age, will be exempt entirely from Obama’s greenhouse rule when it comes into effect, despite the fact that these archaic facilities alone account for over 40 percent of carbon emissions in the country. In a nutshell, the biggest coal polluters are being let off the hook altogether.

Five years ago a staggering 151 new coal plants were slated for construction, but with one of the greatest environmental achievements in our history, grassroots activists across the country stopped their development.

Obama is still riding on the coat-tails of these victories, but what’s underlying the greenhouse gas rule is a bit more sinister. As concerns about the impacts of fracking continue to grow, the power plants that burn natural gas extracted through this process of pumping a mix of water, chemicals and sand deep into the earth’s crust, won’t be covered by the rule. Generally, natural gas plants produce less than 900 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. Indeed the limit set by the EPA was not arbitrary; it directly aids and abets the natural gas industry. Obama knows quite well that natural gas is poised to be the fossil fuel of the future and his administration and the EPA are not going to stand in the way of the big boom.

This isn’t to say the effect of natural gas on climate change is benign — far from it. While still producing a large amount of carbon emissions (albeit less than coal), natural gas also spews a whole bunch of methane (natural gas is methane), which is far more potent than CO2 when it comes to the immediate warming of our planet. In fact, it is estimated that methane gas has a global warming potential 25 times that of CO2 (averaged over 100 years). So, in absolute terms, natural gas does contribute substantially to greenhouse gas emissions, and with more production in the works, this contribution is going to grow a lot more in the years to come.

The EPA certainly understands methane is a big contributor to global warming. In an analysis released last year the agency doubled its earlier estimate for the amount of methane that leaks from natural gas wells and pipelines. This leaking is so extensive that it is equal to the annual emissions from over 35 million automobiles. In addition, the EPA reported that the levels of methane release during the fracking of shale gas were actually 9,000 times higher than previously thought.

Methane, unfortunately, is not covered by Obama’s proposed greenhouse gas rule. Perhaps that’s because Obama supports the expansion of natural gas exploration as well as the notion of “safe” fracking — an oxymoron akin to “clean” coal.

“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy,” said President Obama in his last State of the Union address. “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy … it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock.”

The process Obama is touting is the fracking of natural gas and oil from underground geological formations, like the Marcellus Shale on the East Coast. The procedure has been documented in a draft report by the EPA as causing groundwater pollution in Wyoming, yet fracking remains exempt from the Clean Water Act.

As coal becomes a relic of the past in the U.S., natural gas, with fracking as its main source of extraction, is being set up as the fossil fuel of the future, thanks in large part to Obama’s embrace and the EPA’s blind eye. In 2008 the Obama campaign amassed $884,000 from the oil and gas industry. In 2012 that number topped $2 million.

Often seen as a “bridge fuel” from coal toward renewables, natural gas has not come under the same scrutiny as other fossil fuels. Instead natural gas has been seen as a safer, cleaner burning fuel — an improvement over dirty coal. Hence why the EPA continues to punt on proposing regulations on the industry, as it did for a second at the beginning of last April when it delayed the release of rules for the oil and gas industry. If the EPA caves to the natural gas industry, as it will likely continue to do, the majority of existing fracking wells will be exempt from regulation.

Yet, even if fracking wells begin to receive the regulatory oversight they so gravely deserve, the burning of natural gas is not about to come under intensified scrutiny any time soon. On the contrary, as long as the EPA’s attention remains on curbing coal’s carbon footprint, the natural gas industry is sure to benefit and more methane is sure to seep from the depths of Earth. A recent study by tech billionaire Nathan Myhrvold and climate scientist Ken Caldeira argues that shifting to natural gas “cannot substantially reduce the climate risk in the next 100 years.”

Those fighting the frackers ought to expand their focus from fracking’s immediate dangers, which are very real, to natural gas’ long-term impacts on climate change. Even if fracking were to one day be outlawed, as long as natural gas continues to be burned the planet will continue to heat up. In short, natural gas is not a bridge to renewable energy; it’s a bridge to an even more toxic planet.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein arrested in Texas

She just became my hero...

Published: 31 October, 2012
Edited: 01 November, 2012
RT
Video

(36.9Mb) embed video

Jill Stein, a presidential candidate from the Green Party, has been arrested in Texas while attempting to resupply protesters camping out in trees to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline, according to anti-pipeline activists.

The Tar Sands Blockade activists said she was released soon after being taken to the Wood County jail in Quitman, TX.

“Dr. Jill Stein has been released from Wood County Jail on a Class B Misdemeanor Criminal Trespass charge,” the group’s website stated.

Tar Sands has been protesting against the costruction of the Keystone XL pipeline for the last month. However,  a spokesperson for TransCanada, the company in charge of the pipeline project, confirmed they are preparing to build around the existing blockade.

Jill Stein and two other women came to resupply the tree-sitters in Winnsboro, Texas. Stein and a freelance journalist were subsequently detained by TransCanada security, and handed over to the police.

On her website, www.jillstein.org, the third-party candidate explains she went to the blockade to adress a very important national issue: climate change.

“Everyone needs to step up resistance to climate-killing emissions. Romney and Obama are only talking about the symptoms of climate change in terms of destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy; the blockaders are addressing the cause.” 

The Green Party's media coordinator, Scott McLarty, explained to RT that Jill Stein was focusing on the issue as both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have ignored climate change during the presidential debates that took place earlier in October at Hofstra University.

“We find it reckless and irresponsible that both the Democratic and the Republican  candidates for president never once mentioned climate change at all during this debates.”

Earlier this month, police arrested Dr Stein and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, after they tried to enter the site of the second presidential debate at Hofstra University.

The two were protesting against the exclusion of all but the two major political parties from taking part in the debate.

RT has been broadcasting all third-party debates live and will host the third and final debate, which will take place on November 5, from its DC studios. Jill Stein is slated to participate, alongside Gary Johnson.

Obama Set to Speed Up Approval of Tar Sands Pipeline

Wednesday, March 21, 2012 by Common Dreams
Cushing, Oklahoma, to Port Arthur, Texas, section likely to be quickly approved

Although President Obama denied a permit for the main Keystone XL pipeline from Canada's tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico in January, it is expected that he will announce on Thursday on a visit to Cushing, Oklahoma, a plan to speed up the permit for the southern section of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands crude from Cushing to Port Arthur, Texas.

Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity said today, “Keystone XL may be a boon to Big Oil companies in the exporting business but those profits will come at a stiff price for our land, water, wildlife and climate.” “Building Keystone XL in pieces doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”

* * *

CNN: Obama to fast track southern half of Keystone XL Pipeline

President Barack Obama plans to announce in Cushing, Oklahoma Thursday that his administration will expedite the permit for the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, a source familiar with the president's announcement tells CNN.

* * *

The Texas Tribune: Obama to talk about Keystone XL pipeline in Oklahoma this week

A White House official confirmed Tuesday that the president on Thursday will "reiterate his administration's commitment to expediting the construction of a pipeline from Cushing, Okla., to the Gulf of Mexico, relieving a bottleneck of oil and bringing domestic resources to market."

* * *

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian/UK:
On two-day energy tour, US president is expected to hasten building of southern section of tar sands line out of Canada

Barack Obama is expected to speed up approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline on Thursday after taking to the road with what the White House is billing as an "all of the above" energy tour. 

Obama's planned visit to the oil hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, on day two of the energy tour has raised expectations he will speed up approval of the southern US-only segment of the pipeline, running from the town to Port Arthur, Texas. 

The approval, which would infuriate environmental groups, could allow construction on that portion to begin before November's presidential elections instead of next year. 

Obama's tour starts with a visit to the country's biggest operating solar farm in Boulder City, Nevada. The White House said in a statement: "The president will highlight his administration's focus on diversifying our energy portfolio, including expanding renewable energy from sources like wind and solar, which thanks in part to investments made by this administration is set to double in the president's first term." 

But the visit seemed a detour on a trip apparently solidly focused on fossil fuels and the price of gas at the pump. 

Obama has been under nonstop attack from Republicans for rising petrol prices, which now stand at well over $4 (£2.50) for a US gallon in some parts of the country, and for his decision in January to halt the pipeline because of a section running through an ecologically sensitive part of Nebraska. 

On the campaign trail, Newt Gingrich has said he would cut gas prices to $2.50 if he is elected president, and Mitt Romney has taken to demanding Obama sack his energy secretary, Steven Chu, the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lisa Jackson. Gingrich calls the three the "gas hike trio". 

But Obama's forthcoming speech at a pipe yard owned by TransCanada, the Canadian company behind the project to pump crude from the tar sands of Alberta, was seen as a strong signal that the pipeline – at least, the portion running from Cushing to Port Arthur, Texas – is back on track. 

The White House said last month it would allow the southern portion, which requires no State Department approval, to go ahead. It was not immediately clear how Obama would push the process along further. 

TransCanada has said it will go ahead with the Cushing-Port Arthur segment of the pipeline as soon it gets the go-ahead from the army corps of engineers. 

The White House said in a statement Obama's visiting Cushing was intended to show his commitment to "improving and supporting the infrastructure that helps us leverage our domestic resources, while also ensuring these projects are developed in a safe and responsible way". 

It continued: "This includes a pipeline that will transport oil from Cushing to the Gulf of Mexico, which will help address the bottleneck of oil that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production in the midwest." 

Fast-tracking a portion of the pipeline would be a huge disappointment for a broad coalition of activists who have campaigned against the project, framing it as a test of Obama's green credentials.

* * *

Bill McKibben: Mr. Obama Goes to Cushing, OK

Amidst the many environmental disappointments of the Obama administration -- the fizzled Copenhagen conference, the opening of vast swathes of the Arctic to drilling and huge stretches of federal land across the northern Plains to coal-mining, the failure to work for climate legislation in the Senate, the shameful blocking of regulations to control ozone -- the president has done one somewhat brave thing. He responded to the largest outpouring of environmental enthusiasm so far this millennium and denied a permit for the main Keystone XL pipe from Canada's tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico. 

Cynics said he did so just to avoid disappointing young people before the election, and pointed out that he invited pipeline proponent Transcanada to reapply for the permit. It's hard not to wonder if those cynics might be right, now that he's going to Oklahoma to laud the southern half of the project just as Transcanada executives have requested. 

True, the most critical part of the pipeline still can't be built -- thanks to Obama and 42 Democratic Senators, the connection to Canada remains blocked, and hence that remains a great victory for the people who rallied so fiercely all fall. But the sense grows that Obama may be setting us up for a bitter disappointment -- that his real allegiance is to the carbon barons.

* * *

Center for Biological Diversity: Obama Trumpets Dirty Fuel Pipeline That Will Allow Global Export of Tar Sands Oil, Worsen Climate Crisis

“The Gulf Coast leg would add to the fossil fuel infrastructure at a time when we critically need to transition away from fossil fuels in order to avoid climate catastrophe,” said Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Just like Keystone I, the Gulf Coast leg of Keystone XL will spill, polluting land and water and ruining important habitat for endangered species like the whooping crane, piping plover, American burying beetle, interior least tern, and Arkansas River shiner.” 

“The president’s support for this pipeline is troubling,” said Greenwald. “Keystone XL may be a boon to Big Oil companies in the exporting business but those profits will come at a stiff price for our land, water, wildlife and climate.” 

“The American people have spoken clearly against this project,” said Greenwald. “Building Keystone XL in pieces doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”

“Social Security is Broke”—and Other Corporate Scare Tactics

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 by YES! MagazineFor years, corporations have been peddling myths to rally us behind their interests. Here are three things everyone “knows,” and why they're wrong.
by Lisa Graves
Winston Churchill reportedly said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.” 

That was before corporations had perfected the art of public relations, investing millions of dollars in PR campaigns to advance their commercial and political interests.The fact is, there are a number of things most people know are true—except they’re not. That’s the result of well-planned, well-funded, long-term propaganda campaigns designed to make people believe things that are against their own best interests.

One relatively new example is the climate denial industry, which is funded by some of the richest corporations and CEOs on the planet to protect their profits from regulations that would address climate change. Although it’s one of the biggest threats we have ever faced, an increasing number of Americans believe there is widespread disagreement in the scientific community about climate change.

But that’s not true—there is actually widespread scientific agreement on climate, and a few dissenters, most paid in some way by the oil industry. Millions of dollars have been spent to create the appearance of disagreement, including deployment of so-called experts and even TV meteorologists to repeat talking points favored by big oil.

In the past year, the Internet and social media have brought together social movements across the globe, and there are signs that, in this new information age, people are breaking through the fog of corporate disinformation. But some of the “facts” have been repeated for so many years that a lot of people still think they are true.


“Social Security is Broke”
—The Cass City Chronicle (Jan. 22, 1976)

For more than 30 years, opponents of Social Security have peddled this lie.

The roots of the efforts to attack Social Security run deep in the far right. They include CEOs such as Fred Koch, who promoted the John Birch Society’s red-scare-era smears that such New Deal reforms were “socialist” or “communist.” In the 1970s, Fred’s sons, Charles and David, inherited his billions—and his ideas. Charles began funding think tanks to develop arguments for dismantling Social Security.
David ran for vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket with a platform that included privatizing Social Security. Since then he’s spent millions on groups to push disinformation about Social Security and promote an array of sophisticated corporate propaganda. The donations of Koch Industries and others to groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that promote claims that Social Security is going broke have paid off. Also, as detailed in SourceWatch, billionaire Peter Peterson has pledged a billion dollars to attacking Social Security. And, guess what? Almost all the current crop of GOP presidential candidates have called Social Security a scam.

The truth is that Social Security wasn’t broke in 1976, and it’s not broke today. According to trusted actuaries, in about 25 years Social Security could face a shortfall—a gap that would allow it to pay most but not all of the earned benefits—unless it’s fixed.

One easy solution is to apply Social Security taxes to all earned income. Under the current system, any wages over the first $106,800 are exempt from Social Security withholding. If we close this loophole soon, the potential shortfall would be solved. Only about 6 percent of Americans earn that much, and removing this exemption would help ensure that the other 94 percent have the protection of this basic social safety net for decades to come.



Tort Reform “Creates Jobs” 
—Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, ALEC alum

The first controversial bill Gov. Walker signed into law last year wasn’t his union-busting effort but a “tort reform” package he claimed would “create jobs.” This omnibus bill, which included numerous items that echo “model” bills from the ALEC bill factory, was rushed through so fast most folks barely had time to read it. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce immediately applauded the bill and so did ALEC. Such legislation is on the wish list of the global corporations funding these groups and many politicians.

Tort reform is a made-up phrase that really means changing the rules for Americans killed or injured by corporations or other defendants. It’s been making its way through states across the country based on claims that it will create jobs, protect access to medical care, and bring down insurance rates.

But legal changes like those in Wisconsin make it harder for Americans to hold a company or careless physician responsible for all the damages caused by their negligence. Such changes make it harder for juries to punish companies to help deter egregious and deadly corporate acts.

Such bills are often pushed based on claims that corporations fear getting “unfairly” sued. But changes like those in Wisconsin have nothing to do with frivolous lawsuits. Caps on damages, for example, apply only after a jury of American citizens has heard the facts and found the company was responsible for the harm.

Plus, there is no conclusive evidence that these changes to the law create jobs. In Wisconsin, for example, Walker claimed his tort reforms and other changes would create 250,000 new private-sector jobs, but the state ended last year with five months in a row of job losses.

The reality is that surveys of local businesses about what would lead them to hire more people reveal that the answer is more sales, not less litigation. In Wisconsin, for example, in a survey of state businesses about what would improve business, tort reform was dead last.

Tort reform is just more of the race to the bottom, pitting state against state to protect their citizens the least. The reality is that ALEC and the U.S. Chamber are bankrolled by global corporations trying to pay American workers the least, provide workers the fewest rights and benefits, and compensate as little as possible for consumers who are injured.

Lives and livelihoods are the real costs of tort reform, which is being sold through calculated corporate disinformation.


We Need the Keystone XL Pipeline for Our “Jobs and National Security”—Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute

The richest industry on the planet is putting money behind claims that controversial energy projects, from natural gas fracking to the Keystone XL pipeline, are essential to our national security. Americans are vulnerable to such claims as gas prices rise in response to another round of saber-rattling in the Middle East.

People have been bombarded with corporate-backed claims that national security demands immediate approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline connecting the Alberta, Canada, tar sands to the Gulf Coast in Texas. But the claims are misleading.

First, the crude oil from the dirty tar sands extraction process comes from Canada, not the United States, so the oil does not belong to the American people. The oil is not Canada’s either. Rights to it have been sold to multinational companies whose interest is the highest price.

Second, take a look at the map of the proposed pipeline. Its target is the refinery world of Port Arthur, Texas, which is focused on exporting oil via the Gulf of Mexico. Refiners in Texas on board to process tar sands crude include Royal Dutch Shell, the Saudi government, and the French oil company Total. A Texas company, Valero, which operates in a “Foreign Trade Zone” in Port Arthur, which limits customs duties, has pitched investors on exporting the diesel from tar sands crude while importing gas to America.

Don’t believe the corporate propaganda on jobs either. In an earlier phase of the pipeline in South Dakota, almost 90 percent of the 2,500 jobs were filled by workers not from that state, and most of the jobs were low-wage and temporary, according to testimony from TransCanada, the pipeline’s developer.


To Tell the Truth …
These are just a few examples. If you want to find out more on these issues and corporate PR techniques, check out our research and resources at PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, and ALECexposed.org.

Despite the gloomy picture of the success of some of these propaganda campaigns, there is hope. The Keystone XL pipeline looked like a done deal. But demonstrations at the White House led by 350.org that resulted in 1,253 arrests, combined with citizen outcry in the heartland states the pipeline would cross, resulted in denial of the permit to build. The day after the Obama administration announced that decision, a group of politicians held a press conference. You guessed it: They said that stopping the pipeline threatened jobs and national security.

And, as economist Dean Baker points out, for all the hostile rhetoric over the years, Social Security is undamaged so far, although this guaranteed pension is difficult to live on alone, since it has not been fully funded by including all wages in withholding over the years.

We’re up against big, rich opponents. But at least if you know the truth, the next time you hear someone say, “Social Security is broke,” you can say, “No it’s not.” And even explain why.

Fracks in the Foundation

Fracking, Keystone XL, Mountaintop Removal and More

by STEPHANIE PENN SPEAR

 

On Jan. 10 at 1 p.m. on the west lawn of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio, concerned citizens from all over the state will gather to ask Gov. Kasich to impose an indefinite moratorium on Ohio’s oil and gas wastewater injection well sites and the natural gas extraction process that has become well-known as fracking, until further research and proper regulations are put in place to protect human health and the environment.

This protest is in response to the 11 earthquakes that have hit the Youngstown, Ohio area since March 2011. The most recent earthquake, with a 4.0 magnitude that was felt nearly 200 miles away, shook the community on New Year’s Eve. Won-Young Kim, a research professor of seismology geology at Columbia University who is advising the state of Ohio on the Dec. 31 earthquake, said that circumstantial evidence suggests a link between the earthquake and high-pressure well activity. Kim believes that the recent earthquake did not occur naturally and may have been caused by high-pressure liquid injection related to oil and gas exploration and production.

Fracking is a method of gas extraction that involves injecting a brew of toxic, heavy metal lubricants, chemicals and sand deep underground to fracture rock formations that release oil and gas. Hydraulic fracturing uses enormous quantities of fresh water, which gas companies take from nearby streams, ponds and rivers, or truck in if there is no immediate water source. Every time a gas well is fracked, four to nine million gallons of water are injected into the ground with a secret brew of chemicals. A single well can be fracked up to 12 times, totaling more than 100 million gallons of freshwater used in the lifetime of a well.

Some of the fracking fluid used in the process of breaking apart the shale remains underground, but a large majority of it comes back to the surface mixed with hazardous chemicals, volatile organic compounds, and even radioactive material that was trapped underground and released in the process. This wastewater is then trucked to a disposal well and pumped back underground. With millions of gallons of hazardous liquid created during this process, a major challenge for the natural gas industry and regulators, has been the disposal of this toxic byproduct of fracking.

It is this toxic wastewater that is being high-pressure injected into many of Ohio’s deep wells, as far down as 9,000 feet, and blamed for the recent Youngstown earthquakes. Thanks to Ohio’s geology and the Kasich administration, along with other elected officials, Ohio now receives about 1,000 truckloads of frackwater everyday at disposal wells around Ohio. Ohio is home to 177 oil and gas wastewater injection well sites, 10 times more than surrounding states. More than half of the fracking wastewater coming into Ohio is from out of state, including New York and Pennsylvania.

Concerns on how to dispose of fracking wastewater are only one of the problems associated with natural gas extraction. Fracking has been linked to more than 1,000 incidents of groundwater contamination across the U.S., including cases where people can actually ignite their tap water. There is no doubt that proper regulations on the state and federal levels are lacking.

In New York state, opponents of fracking are asking lawmakers to extend the moratorium that was put into place in 2010, due to concerns that hydraulic fracturing, without proper regulation, could pollute groundwater.

Concerns over the extraction of natural gas are experienced worldwide and impact rural, suburban and urban communities. The number of anti-fracking groups is growing every day. Frustrations are running high as the U.S. continues to lack a sustainable energy policy that puts a cap on carbon and supports investment in renewable energy generation and manufacturing instead of supporting extreme fossil fuel extraction.

On the federal level and in Ohio and many other states, incentives for renewable energy projects and manufacturing need to be put back in place. Three years ago we were making some progress in moving toward a sustainable energy supply. But over the last couple years, states and the federal government have stripped away the incentives that were a first step in leveling the playing field between renewable and nonrenewable energy. Since the fossil fuel industry is so highly subsidized and externalizes much of its costs, the renewable energy industry cannot compete without the help of incentives.

In Ohio, we passed SB 221 in July 2008. It mandates that 25 percent of Ohio’s electricity generation come from advanced energy sources by 2025 with 12.5 percent from renewable sources including hydro. Half of the renewable energy generation has to come from within the state. It even contains a .5 percent solar carve out that has increased the value of solar renewable energy credits in the state. Coupled with this legislation was the Ohio Advanced Energy Fund grant program that provided a financial incentive to invest in renewable energy projects. However, the legislature failed to renew this grant program in 2010 and the number of projects in our state has greatly declined.

Creating jobs at the expense of human health and the environment is not sustainable. 

Energy generation is not a job vs. the environment issue. It’s a need for a cleaner environment creating jobs—green jobs that will transition our country to relying on cleaner, renewable sources of energy. Investment in renewable energy will create jobs, revitalize our strong manufacturing base and provide long-term solutions to our energy needs without contaminating our drinking water, polluting our air, displacing communities and making people sick.

I know there’s no perfect solution or silver bullet that will generate all the word’s energy needs, but it is clear that supporting extreme fossil fuel extraction—like fracking, mountaintop removal coal mining, tar sands mining or building pipelines like the proposed Keystone XL that would take the most toxic and corrosive oil from Alberta, Canada and pipe it through the breadbasket of America to ship it overseas—is not the answer. Energy efficiency, investment in distributed generation and grid-feeding renewable energy projects, rebuilding the electric grid, and investment in battery storage and innovative energy technologies is the direction our country needs to take.

The next several months are going to be interesting. As of right now, according to the House Energy & Commerce Committee clock, Obama has 43 days to decide on the Keystone XL pipeline as stated in the tax-cut bill passed at the end of last year. Gov. Cuomo will decide on the fate of New York’s moratorium on fracking as early as this week. Ohioans will speak out on Tuesday concerning their fears of continued natural gas extraction and disposal of toxic wastewater in their state. Public comments are being accepted on Obama’s proposal to allow drilling in the pristine Arctic Ocean and increased drilling in the Gulf of Mexico before adequate safety standards are in effect. Regulations aimed at limiting harmful power plant pollution that crosses state lines, including sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which would prevent 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 heart attacks and 400,000 cases of asthma have been put on hold by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington. Unfortunately, the list goes on.

I’ve been working in the grassroots environmental movement for more than 23 years.  I’ve never seen so many people so worried about the health of the planet and concerned for future generations as we continue to consume resources at an unprecedented rate, and allow corporations to run our government and privatize our natural resources. I’ve also never seen such incredible grassroots leadership and collaboration among environmental organizations as we have today. Like I said, the next several months are going to be really interesting. Be sure to stay-tuned to EcoWatch.org as we keep you up-to-date on all the issues.

Buying Congress in 2012

Thursday, January 5, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
Time to Stop Being Cynical About Corporate Money in Politics and Start Being Angry 
by Bill McKibben

 

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve -- dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery. 

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including 350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

And what do you know? We won a small victory in November, when President Obama agreed that, before he could give the project a thumbs-up or -down, it needed another year of careful review.  (The previous version of that review, as overseen by the State Department, had been little short of a crony capitalist farce.)  Given that James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, had said that tapping Canada’s tar sands for that pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate,” that seemed an eminently reasonable course to follow, even if it was also eminently political.

A few weeks later, however, Congress decided it wanted to take up the question. In the process, the issue went from out in the open to behind closed doors in money-filled rooms.  Within days, and after only a couple of hours of hearings that barely mentioned the key scientific questions or the dangers involved, the House of Representatives voted 234-194 to force a quicker review of the pipeline.  Later, the House attached its demand to the must-pass payroll tax cut.

That was an obvious pre-election year attempt to put the president on the spot. Environmentalists are at least hopeful that the White House will now reject the permit.  After all, its communications director said that the rider, by hurrying the decision, “virtually guarantees that the pipeline will not be approved.”

As important as the vote total in the House, however, was another number: within minutes of the vote, Oil Change International had calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted aye had received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry; the 193 nays, $8 million.

Buying Congress
I know that cynics -- call them realists, if you prefer -- will be completely unsurprised by that. Which is precisely the problem.

We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core. So, just for a moment, be naïve and consider what really happened in that vote: the people’s representatives who happen to have taken the bulk of the money from those energy companies promptly voted on behalf of their interests.

They weren’t weighing science or the national interest; they weren’t balancing present benefits against future costs.  Instead of doing the work of legislators, that is, they were acting like employees. Forget the idea that they’re public servants; the truth is that, in every way that matters, they work for Exxon and its kin. They should, by rights, wear logos on their lapels like NASCAR drivers.

If you find this too harsh, think about how obligated you feel when someone gives you something. Did you get a Christmas present last month from someone you hadn’t remembered to buy one for? Are you going to send them an extra-special one next year?

And that’s for a pair of socks. Speaker of the House John Boehner, who insisted that the Keystone approval decision be speeded up, has gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.

If someone had helped your career to the tune of a million dollars, wouldn’t you feel in their debt? I would. I get somewhat less than that from my employer, Middlebury College, and yet I bleed Panther blue.  Don’t ask me to compare my school with, say, Dartmouth unless you want a biased answer, because that’s what you’ll get.  Which is fine -- I am an employee.

But you’d be a fool to let me referee the homecoming football game. In fact, in any other walk of life we wouldn’t think twice before concluding that paying off the referees is wrong. If the Patriots make the Super Bowl, everyone in America would be outraged to see owner Robert Kraft trot out to midfield before the game and hand a $1,000 bill to each of the linesmen and field judges.

If he did it secretly, the newspaper reporter who uncovered the scandal would win a Pulitzer. But a political reporter who bothered to point out Boehner’s and McConnell’s payoffs would be upbraided by her editor for simpleminded journalism.  That’s how the game is played and we’ve all bought into it, even if only to sputter in hopeless outrage.

Far from showing any shame, the big players boast about it: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, front outfit for a consortium of corporations, has bragged on its website about outspending everyone in Washington, which is easy to do when Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and News Corp are writing you seven-figure checks.

This really matters.  The Chamber of Commerce spent more money on the 2010 elections than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined, and 94% of those dollars went to climate-change deniers.  That helps explain why the House voted last year to say that global warming isn’t real.

It also explains why “our” representatives vote, year in and year out, for billions of dollars worth of subsidies for fossil-fuel companies. If there was ever an industry that didn’t need subsidies, it would be this one: they make more money each year than any enterprise in the history of money. Not only that, but we’ve known how to burn coal for 300 years and oil for 200.

Those subsidies are simply payoffs. Companies give small gifts to legislators, and in return get large ones back, and we’re the ones who are actually paying.

Whose Money?  Whose Washington?
I don’t want to be hopelessly naïve. I want to be hopefully naïve. It would be relatively easy to change this: you could provide public financing for campaigns instead of letting corporations pay. It’s the equivalent of having the National Football League hire referees instead of asking the teams to provide them.

Public financing of campaigns would cost a little money, but endlessly less than paying for the presents these guys give their masters. And it would let you watch what was happening in Washington without feeling as disgusted.  Even legislators, once they got the hang of it, might enjoy neither raising money nor having to pretend it doesn’t affect them.

To make this happen, however, we may have to change the Constitution, as we’ve done 27 times before.

This time, we’d need to specify that corporations aren’t people, that money isn’t speech, and that it doesn’t abridge the First Amendment to tell people they can’t spend whatever they want getting elected. Winning a change like that would require hard political organizing, since big banks and big oil companies and big drug-makers will surely rally to protect their privilege.

Still, there’s a chance.  The Occupy movement opened the door to this sort of change by reminding us all that the system is rigged, that its outcomes are unfair, that there’s reason to think people from across the political spectrum are tired of what we’ve got, and that getting angry and acting on that anger in the political arena is what being a citizen is all about.

It’s fertile ground for action.  After all, Congress’s approval rating is now at 9%, which is another way of saying that everyone who’s not a lobbyist hates them and what they’re doing. The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

A good time to take an initial stand comes later this month, when rallies outside every federal courthouse will mark the second anniversary of the Citizens United decision. That’s the one where the Supreme Court ruled that corporations had the right to spend whatever they wanted on campaigns.

To me, that decision was, in essence, corporate America saying, “We’re not going to bother pretending any more. This country belongs to us.”

We need to say, loud and clear: “Sorry. Time to give it back.”

The Keystone Victory

Friday, November 18, 2011 by The Nation

by Mark Hertsgaard

 

Victories against climate change have been rare, so it’s vital to recognize them when they happen. The Obama administration’s decision to delay the Keystone XL pipeline is one such victory—arguably the most important achievement in the climate fight in North America in years.

True, the administration’s November 10 statements did not outright kill the 1,700-mile pipeline, which the TransCanada company wants to build to transport highly polluting tar sands from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas coast. Yes, President Obama or his successor could try to greenlight the project in 2013, when the State Department’s new review of the project is due. But that’s unlikely, as TransCanada’s CEO, Russ Girling, has acknowledged. The project’s contracts require the pipeline to be completed by 2013, or refineries will be free to look elsewhere for supply, which Girling expects they will.

In any case, such caveats mean only that the Keystone victory is not absolute. But when a $7 billion project involving the number-one US trading partner and oil supplier, a project that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton only a year ago said she was “inclined” to approve, is very publicly postponed—even as the inspector general of the State Department launches an investigation into cronyism involving a former top aide to Clinton—good luck putting that Humpty Dumpty together again.

The climax of the Keystone campaign came November 6, when some 12,000 activists surrounded the White House (evidently a first) to urge Obama to honor his 2008 campaign pledge to fight climate change. “We want jobs but not as gravediggers for the planet,” Roger Toussaint, head of Local 100 of the Transport Workers of America, told the crowd in one of the strongest green declarations by a US labor leader. (Unfortunately, other elements of organized labor did not play against stereotype; the Building Trades Unions went so far as to team up with the oil industry to launch a “Jobs for the 99” campaign, co-opting Occupy rhetoric for their pro-pipeline propaganda.)

The breadth of the anti-pipeline coalition—indigenous people, progressive labor unions, youth, faith, farmer, community and environmental activists—was just one way this crusade contrasted with previous environmental campaigns. Other key differences: demands were more concrete and more radical. Strategy was set more by grassroots activists than by Beltway insiders. Tactics stressed people power—putting feet on the street, going to jail—over policy papers. The message was comprehensible to ordinary people rather than off-putting. And thanks to the Occupy movement, journalists were primed to pay attention to street protests.

All these factors combined not only to deliver the immediate victory over Keystone but to reanimate a movement that had been reeling after the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009 and the defeat of climate legislation on Capitol Hill in 2010. “You need victories to build a movement, and how you win can be as important as what you win,” explained Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International, an NGO that punctured the “energy independence” rationale for Keystone by revealing that the oil it transported to Texas would be sold on the world market, not reserved for American gas tanks. Kretzmann added, “For once a big battle coming out of the environmental community was not about an obscure policy proposal, like cap and trade. [The pipeline] was made into a moral issue about what we want the future of our country to be and what we’re willing to do about it. At the White House, I had one seasoned activist tell me, ‘I feel like I finally can crawl out of the fetal position I’ve been in since Copenhagen.’”

As with the Occupiers, establishment voices quickly registered their disapproval—and their political tone-deafness. Some, like Council on Foreign Relations fellow Michael Levi, even suggested that the delay would hurt the climate fight, because Bill McKibben and other climate organizers had muddied their message by taking advantage of the “not in my backyard” sentiments of Midwestern farmers who—oh the horror!—are Republicans. Such NIMBYism, Levi sniffed, could be used to undercut future deployment of wind farms and other clean energy sources.

The truth, as McKibben has said many times, is that he and his colleagues came to the Keystone party fairly late. “The indigenous peoples in Canada have been fighting this from the start, and then folks along the route” got active, McKibben told The Nation. “I joined in this spring, when [NASA scientist James] Hansen made clear the size of the [tar sands] carbon pool. Our role was to take a regional fight and make it national and international, which I think we managed to do.”

And not a moment too soon. One day before Obama’s announcement, the International Energy Agency released its annual report on the “World Energy Outlook.” The IEA is no den of subversives; it’s run by many of the world’s largest oil-consuming nations. Its report warns that without radical changes in the world’s energy infrastructure in the next five years, humans will make climate change irreversible. In this context the defeat of Keystone is exactly the kind of radical change, in infrastructure and activism, that’s needed.

What Is the Keystone XL Pipeline — and Why Is It So Controversial?

by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, Oct. 14, 2011

By the end of this year, the State Department will decide whether to give a Canadian company permission to construct a 1,700-mile, $7 billion pipeline that would transport crude oil from Canada to refineries in Texas.

The project has sparked major environmental concerns, particularly in Nebraska, where the pipeline would pass over an aquifer that provides drinking water and irrigation to much of the Midwest. It has also drawn scrutiny because of the company's political connections and conflicts of interest. A key lobbyist for TransCanada, which would build the pipeline, also worked for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her presidential campaign. And the company that conducted the project's environmental impact report had financial ties to TransCanada.

The debate over the pipeline is both complicated and fierce, and it crosses party lines, with much sparring over the potential environmental and economic impacts of the project. More than 1,000 arrests were made during protests of the pipeline last summer in Washington, D.C.

Here's our breakdown of the controversy, including the benefits and risks of the project, and the concerns about the State Department's role.

Potential benefits — energy security and jobs for Americans — and how they're disputed

Proponents of the project point to two main benefits for Americans. First, it would improve America's energy security, because it would bring in more oil from friendly Canada and reduce our dependence on volatile countries in South America and the Middle East. Secondly, the pipeline would create well-paying construction jobs and provide a broader economic boost to the American economy. Labor unions have supported the project.

TransCanada estimates that the project would directly create 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs for Americans. A study paid for by TransCanada also estimated the economic impact over the life of the pipeline at about $20 billion in total spending.

But a report by Cornell University's Global Labor Institute questioned those numbers, noting that the project would "create no more than 2,500-4,650 temporary direct construction jobs for two years, according to TransCanada's own data supplied to the State Department."

Critics of the project have also questioned whether the pipeline's oil, once processed in American refineries on the Gulf Coast, would actually be sold to Americans rather than being exported for sale elsewhere. As a New York Times editorial opposing the pipeline noted, five of the six companies that have already contracted for much of the pipeline's oil are foreign companies — and the sixth focuses on exporting oil.

The Washington Post, which editorialized in favor of the pipeline, said this should not be a major objection. "The bottom line remains: The more American refineries source their low-grade crude via pipeline from Canada and not from tankers out of the Middle East or Venezuela, the better, even if not every refined barrel stays in the country," the Post editorial stated.

Cozy relationships with the State Department — and a compromised environmental report

Because the project crosses the U.S. border, it requires a permit from the State Department. As part of that process, the State Department did an environmental impact report. The study concluded that, if operated correctly, the pipeline would have "limited adverse environmental impacts." But a New York Times investigation found that the company that the government hired to conduct the study had significant financial ties to TransCanada — and that this conflict of interest "flouted the intent of a federal law" requiring federal agencies to select contractors that have no potential interest in the outcome of the project being evaluated. (Update: The Los Angeles Times first reported the financial connection between TransCanada and Cardno Entrix, which helped conduct the environmental studies, this July.)

Environmental groups have also scrutinized the relationship between State Department officials and TransCanada's representative in Washington. Paul Elliott, who worked on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was actively lobbying the State Department and Congress about the project for a year and a half before he officially registered as a lobbyist, according to State Department email messages made public by the environmental group Friends of the Earth. Elliott did not comment on the emails, but a TransCanada spokesperson said he was simply doing his job as a lobbyist.

The emails showed a friendly relationship between Elliott and his State Department contact, who wrote "Go Paul!" when Elliott secured the support of a key congressman for the Keystone project.

The State Department has said that it will consider the merits of the pipeline proposal impartially.

As the news organization Mother Jones pointed out, the emails also revealed "an apparent understanding between the State Department and TransCanada that the company would later seek to raise the pressure used to pump oil through the pipeline — even though the company said publicly it would do the opposite."

TransCanada had originally sought permission to use a higher-than-usual pressure in its pipeline but publicly backed away from the request in response to the concerns of citizens and politicians that higher pressure might increase the risk of leaks and environmental damage.

A WikiLeaks cable also revealed that a different U.S. diplomat had given PR tips to Canadian officials about the project. As the Los Angeles Times noted, the diplomat "had instructed them in improving 'oil sands messaging,' including 'increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories.'"

Concerns about water contamination across the Great Plains

The proposed route of the pipeline passes over the Sandhills wetland of Nebraska — and over the most important aquifer in the nation, the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water and irrigation to a large swathe of Midwestern states.

This has prompted opposition from Nebraska politicians. The state's Republican governor wrote a letter to President Obama asking him not to approve the project, and state legislators are considering legislation limiting where the pipeline can be located.

"Clearly, the contamination of groundwater is the top concern," State Sen. Mike Flood told reporters.

Opposition to the pipeline is so broad in Nebraska that a TransCanada-sponsored video that was perceived as supporting the pipeline was booed at a University of Nebraska football game, which resulted in the Cornhuskers athletic department ending a TransCanada sponsorship deal.

But at least one scientist with significant experience with the Ogallala Aquifer said fears about contamination from the pipeline are overblown.

James Goeke, a hydrogeologist and professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska, wrote on The New York Times' website that the geography of the aquifer — there'd be clay between the pipeline and the water, and much of the aquifer is uphill from the pipeline's proposed location — means that a leak in the pipeline "would pose a minimal risk to the aquifer as a whole." He suggested the government "require TransCanada to post a bond for any cleanup in the event of a spill," and noted that in particularly vulnerable areas, TransCanada has promised to encase the pipeline in cement.

Leaks and spills

The Keystone XL pipeline would carry a diluted form of tar sands, a type of natural petroleum deposit. Environmentalists argue that the tar sands, or "dilbit," mixture that the pipeline would transport is more corrosive than typical crude oil, and thus might cause more leaks in the pipeline.

These fears were heightened by an oil spill in Michigan that leaked roughly 800,000 gallons of tar sands into Michigan's Kalamazoo River in July 2010. The spill came within 80 miles of Lake Michigan, and a year later, the Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Enbridge, the energy company responsible for the spill, to conduct further cleanup, citing pockets of submerged oil covering about 200 acres of the river's path.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good, brief summary of spills on TransCanada's existing U.S. pipeline, and notes that according to the State Department estimate, "the maximum the Keystone XL could potentially spill would be 2.8 million gallons along an area of 1.7 miles."

Concerns about eminent domain

Some property owners whose land the pipeline would cross have spoken out against the company's approach, particularly the fact that a Canadian company is able to use eminent domain to acquire the use of private land.

The issue has struck a nerve across the political spectrum and has helped bring together Tea Party and environmental activists in Texas to oppose the project.

TransCanada says it is compensating landowners fairly, and notes that, "Our permit does allow us to use eminent domain to acquire an easement and provide compensation for the landowner. Keystone XL always prefers to avoid the use of eminent domain, and if we cannot reach an agreement, then we turn to the independent processes/hearings that are established in Texas and other U.S. states."

Broader environmental concerns

Environmentalists also object not just to the pipeline itself but to the start-to-finish process of refining tar sands, which has a heavy impact on the environment, including global warming. As a Stanford University professor wrote on The New York Times' website:

Available evidence suggests that oil sands, on a "well-to-wheels" basis, have 15 to 20 percent higher greenhouse emissions than conventional oil. This is because of increased energy demand during extraction and the use of high-carbon fuels like petroleum coke. Also, water pollution concerns plague mining-based projects that produce large volumes of tailings (a contaminated, watery waste product).

Critics of the project argue that approving Keystone XL could have a "chilling effect" on efforts to create green jobs, and that it would demonstrate that the U.S. is not serious about its climate change leadership — and that Canada is not serious about trying to reach its Kyoto targets.

But as many have noted, denying approval to Keystone XL wouldn't stop tar sands production. As the Heritage Foundation's David Kreutzer argued: "Block the XL pipeline if you think the environment will be better served by shipping Canadian oil an extra 6,000 miles across the Pacific in oil-consuming super tankers and then refining it in less-regulated Chinese refineries."

Goodbye Obama

So Long Labor and Greens!

by GEORGE OCHENSKI

 

It’s getting harder and harder to figure out how President Obama is going to win re-election when his administration continues to abandon its base in favor of traditional Republican supporters. Nothing illustrates this better than two recent incidents.

OnThursday, Aug. 25, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters labor is planning to scale back involvement in the Democratic Party. Then the State Department, headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave a green light to construction of 1,700-mile Keystone XL Pipeline that will carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands across Montana, to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. Ironically, the latter decision comes as hundreds of America’s top environmentalists are being arrested for protesting to stop that pipeline.

The reasons for the two actions are different, but the effect—losing long-time allies–is the same.

As Politico’s Byron Tau reported, Trumka made his comments during a breakfast speech sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. They must have Obama’s campaign staff sweating bullets. “We’re going to use a lot of our money to build structures that work for working people,” Trumka told reporters. “You’re going to see us give less money to build structures for others, and more of our money will be used to build our own structure.”

What Trumka was referring to is the union’s plan to launch a so-called Super PAC, now authorized by the Supreme Court’s decision that allows entities such as corporations and unions, among others, to spend unlimited funds on campaigns. The reason, he said, is that “the day after Election Day,” in 2008, “we were no stronger than we were the day before.” Trumka said some of the member unions intended to skip the 2012 Democratic Party convention altogether.

Big Labor’s gripes with Obama primarily focus on free-trade agreements that ship jobs overseas to cheap labor while America’s workers are abandoned. Trumka told reporters that Obama “started playing on the Republican ground,” adding: “As we approach this Labor Day, our working-class people are looking for three things: jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Yet, even as the AFL-CIO filled the air with ominous threats to Democrats and Obama, Obama’s administration deemed it prudent to not just abandon environmentalists, but to do so with a slap in the face.

So far, more than 300 people have been arrested in front of the White House in what is easily the longest and largest environmental protest in recent times. Among those were a number of Montanans, including Livingston’s Margot Kidder, who is best known for playing Lois Lane in the Superman movies and who in real life is a super advocate for women and the environment.

The concerns of the pipeline protestors are not theoretical. The State Department’s conclusion in its final Environmental Impact Statement is that the pipeline would have “no significant impact on the environment.” Both the Environmental Protection Agency and some of the nation’s leading environmental scientists disagree.

The EPA estimates that extraction of oil from Alberta’s tar sands creates 80 percent more carbon emissions that extracting and refining oil from more traditional sources. Add to that the destruction of Alberta’s boreal forests, the ongoing pollution of major rivers like the Athabasca and the enormous toxic storage ponds, and giving the Keystone XL pipeline the green light to enable and enhance tar sands extraction is anything but environmentally benign.

NASA’s lead climatologist, speaking to the National Press Club recently, laid it out rather bluntly: “We have a planetary emergency,” Dr. James Hansen said, stressing that if we continued to burn oil at our current rate, we would lose 20 to 40 percent of all species on the planet within the century, see an increase in disastrous weather events and “ruin the future for our children.” Following his remarks, Hansen accompanied 60 religious leader to protest in front of the White House and joined the ranks of 140 more people arrested Aug. 29 for trying to stop the pipeline.

Adding insult to injury, Paul Elliot, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager for her presidential bid, is now a lobbyist for the Keystone XL pipeline. And, according to emails released by WikiLeaks, the State Department’s former energy envoy, David Goldwyn, “alleviated” the concerns of Canadians about getting approval for the pipeline and went further by coaching them to improve their “oil sands messaging” by “increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories” on the issue. In a disgusting demonstration of the inbred corruption that plagues D.C.–and which Obama pledged to stop—Goldwyn left the State Department and went to work for a Washington lobbying firm, recently testifying in favor of the pipeline before a Congressional committee.

One might wonder how the State Department could claim to be objective in its review of the pipeline, given the ongoing political manipulation to push the project through.

The Koch Brothers, who already import a quarter million barrels of tar sands oil per day, and have funded endless efforts to deny global warming, are pushing approval of the pipeline—which only makes the actions of the Obama administration more puzzling. A New Yorker investigative report last year said the Koch Brothers were “waging war on Obama.” They stand to profit immensely should the pipeline be built.

While telling Americans he would change the way business is done in the White House, Obama has continued the oil-baron, big-corporate policies of the last President Bush. If it’s goodbye to labor and goodbye to greens, come the 2012 elections, it’ll be goodbye to Obama.