Getting Warmer

I have never claimed to understand climate change or really take a strong position on it, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that something is going on when you read about things like this:

Daily record highs have been set in Des Moines, Iowa (65 degrees), Rapid City, S.D. (73 degrees), International Falls, Minn. (46 degrees), St. Louis, Mo. (66 degrees) and Fargo, N.D. (55 degrees), to name a few locations. Although the record warmth subsides on Friday for the Plains, the mild air mass will bully its way eastward. We’re talking temperatures in cities such as Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit and Cincinnati enjoying highs on the order of 10-to-20 degrees above average. High temperatures around 5-to-15 degrees above average will make it all the way to the East Coast including New York City, Washington, D.C. and Charlotte, N.C.

It's easy to focus on cold climates dealing with warmer temperatures, but here in Phoenix, we had 100 degree temperatures well into October last year. And 2012 isn't off to a great start either with the first week of January notching temperatures in the 80s. 

Or perhaps this is just another platform from which I can gripe more about the shitty weather in Arizona. 

Thanks Captain Hindsight!

South Park:

Coon 2: Hindsight
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PARKEric Cartman,more...

The Washington Post:

A 16-month federal investigation has concluded that BP’s efforts to limit costs on its mile-deep Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to the blowout last year that killed 11 workers, sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and created the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
The long-awaited report by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement catalogues dozens of mistakes, misapprehensions, risky decisions and failures of communication that led to the blowout and the 87-day spill that spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Right. I understand a formal investigation was necessary, but it wasn't like these things weren't blatantly obvious on the first day after the spill.

Reducing Unemployment Through Increasing Pollution

This is a neat trick, albeit one that we have seen before:

House Republicans are planning votes for almost every week this fall in an effort to repeal environmental and labor requirements on business that they say have hampered job growth.With everyone from President Obama to his Republican challengers in the 2012 campaign focusing on ways to spur economic growth, House Republicans will roll out plans Monday to fight regulations from the National Labor Relations Board, pollution rules handed down by the Environmental Protection Agency and regulations that affect health plans for small businesses. In addition, the lawmakers plan to urge a 20 percent tax deduction for small businesses.“It is essential that the House continue our focus on the jobs crisis,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) wrote in a memo to be sent to GOP lawmakers Monday. 

[...] 

The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”The result of these votes is likely to mirror failed efforts this year to repeal landmark legislation that was approved during Obama’s first two years in office — his health-care law and the Dodd-Frank consumer protection bill — but it will provide a framework for Republicans to highlight a jobs agenda. Also, leaders have pushed several of their freshman lawmakers to advance the anti-regulation bills, providing the newcomers with a chance to tout proposals that could resonate with voters in their districts.

I am seeing a formula here - pick a policy or boogieman completely unrelated to current economic conditions but that resonates with your failed ideology and mouth breathing base, relentlessly hammer at this policy in the House even though it has zero chance of ever passing the Senate and even less of a chance of making it past the President's veto pen, all the while taking to Fox News and the Sunday shows and spew lies, misinformation, and propaganda about how the Democrats are killing the nation with their support of the boogieman and how it's their fault that we're in the mess that we are, and oh if they would just compromise a little bit on this very reasonable and "pro-growth" GOP position, we would all be rolling in the Benjamins. 

We saw it the last two years with the deficit as a political cudgel. The deficit has absolutely nothing to do with unemployment or flagging GDP - not a fucking thing. But that was the Republican meme. And the Democrats went along like the bunch of groupthink fraught morons that they are. But I have a feeling that the GOP has gone a bit far on this one and I don't think they will get very far with a "screw labor unions/pollute more" agenda for jobs. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that anything the President reveals in his speech next week will be much more palatable to the American public, but I could also be placing far too much faith in our incredibly stupid and uninformed electorate. 

Finally, this latest stunt from the GOP circus is just further proof that they don't care fuck all for the country or the economy. Focusing on labor unions and environmental regulations at a time of 9.1% unemployment and GDP growth nearing recession is laughable and stupid. It's just an attempt to enact an extreme, ideological agenda under the cloak of jobs. After all, two pillars of the modern Republican party is gutting worker rights and polluting as much as possible because pollution creates jobs and climate change is a farce and only Jebus can harm or end this world. But they are Very Serious People because they hold elected office, and their buddies in the media will treat them as such with kid gloves. Expect this to get a similar treatment to Paul Ryan's 'courageous' abolition of Medicare. The media won't care that the GOP is a bunch of clowns and these policies are cynical and ideologically driven and will do nothing to improve the economy or create jobs. What matters is that they're trying! They're putting something on the table!

Freedom to Poison Yourself on the Water of the Free Market

John Cole offers the following on the GOP's increasingly strange hatred of EPA:

As chance would have it, today in my post office box (another government service that I absolutely cherish) there was a piece of mail from the local public service department, where I get my water. It was an annual EPA required report, detailing in clear English, where my water comes from. Half of it is treated surface water from the Ohio River, the rest is from deep wells along the banks of the river. The report outlined backup plans should the Ohio become contaminated (more and more likely as Pennsylvania allows drillers to simply dump whatever the fuck they want in the water), and then went on and provided the annual data on the level of contaminants in my drinking water.

I like this. I think it is valuable for a number of reasons, beyond simply keeping me informed. It also verifies that the folks who provide me my water are keeping an eye on things, and providing a safe, clean product that I and my neighbors can consume. It’s the very model of good government. This is why we band together to form government- to do things that would be impossible to do otherwise.

To Republicans, though, this is an evil thing. And this is why I get so livid at the assholes in the media who cover the Republicans and give us the he said/she said version of things. If Republicans had their way, you and your kids would likely be drinking contaminated water and no one would be around to tell you about it. That’s the facts in the case, not “Bachmann claims the EPA kills jobs, while Democrats disagree.” This is why our media is failing us. When Republicans want to end the EPA, it’s not some esoteric debate about big government Democrats and small government conservatives. It’s not he said/she said. It’s “they don’t want you to know about all the shit GE dumped in the Hudson, and furthermore, they don’t want GE to clean it up, either, and as a matter of fact, GE should not be regulated in any way shape or form and should be free to dump shit in your water” versus “we need some sensible regulations to limit the harm corporations do to the environment so we can protect the population and make sure we have clean drinking water.”

I honestly don't understand this either, or how the Republican base has become so unhinged from reality that they actually go along with this shit. It's really not a partisan issue that we ought to have some basic form of government accountability that ensures, at a minimum, that the water we drink and the air we breathe is, you know, conducive to sustaining human life.

Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event

It never happened, you know, because mutant microbes ate all the oil.

Carcinogenic Water - It's a Gas

Natural gas, frequently hailed as a cleaner, safer alternative to our dependence on oil, is not without its own litany of issues:

Millions of gallons of potentially hazardous chemicals and known carcinogens were injected into wells by leading oil and gas service companies from 2005-2009, a report by three House Democrats said Saturday.

The report said 29 of the chemicals injected were known-or-suspected human carcinogens. They either were regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act as risks to human health or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Methanol was the most widely used chemical. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And this is by far my favorite part about the chemicals used in this process:

The report said many chemical components were listed as "proprietary" or "trade secret."

We have Bush/Cheney to thank for that btw. So we have known carcinogens being introduced into sources of drinking water, and energy companies deem these same chemical mixtures to be proprietary. A trade secret can be defined as information which, if released to the general public or obtained by a competitor, could cause the owner of that information significant, adverse economic harm. In other words, energy companies derive economic benefits and  profits from their continued ability to inject enormous volumes of carcinogenic and otherwise unknown fluids and chemicals into our water tables.

The New York Times had a good story on fracking a few months back, which revealed that the effects on groundwater are not limited to carcinogens, but also radioactivity. That and  public wastewater treatment plants are ill-equipped to properly process these substances, so massive amounts of toxins are being poured into our lakes and rivers:

In Pennsylvania, these treatment plants discharged waste into some of the state’s major river basins. Greater amounts of the wastewater went to the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in the western part of the state, including Pittsburgh, and to the Susquehanna River, which feeds into Chesapeake Bay and provides drinking water to more than six million people, including some in Harrisburg and Baltimore.

Lower amounts have been discharged into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is really the epicenter for all of this, and its new wingnut governor is making sure that the industry is regulated only by the invisible hand:

Gas producers are generally left to police themselves when it comes to spills. In Pennsylvania, regulators do not perform unannounced inspections to check for signs of spills. Gas producers report their own spills, write their own spill response plans and lead their own cleanup efforts.

A review of response plans for drilling projects at four Pennsylvania sites where there have been accidents in the past year found that these state-approved plans often appear to be in violation of the law.

At one well site where several spills occurred within a week, including one that flowed into a creek, the well’s operator filed a revised spill plan saying there was little chance that waste would ever enter a waterway.

Sound familiar?

BP PLC's 582-page regional spill plan for the Gulf, and its 52-page, site-specific plan for the Deepwater Horizon rig are riddled with omissions and glaring errors, according to an Associated Press analysis that details how BP officials have pretty much been making it up as they go along. The lengthy plans approved by the federal government last year before BP drilled its ill-fated well vastly understate the dangers posed by an uncontrolled leak and vastly overstate the company's preparedness to deal with one.

In the spill scenarios detailed in the documents, fish, marine mammals and birds escape serious harm; beaches remain pristine; water quality is only a temporary problem. And those are the projections for a leak about 10 times worse than what has been calculated for the ongoing disaster.

There are other wildly false assumptions in the documents. BP's proposed method to calculate spill volume judging by the darkness of the oil sheen is way off. The internationally accepted formula would produce estimates 100 times higher.

More specifically, Gov. Corbett's early decisions have ensured that there will essentially be no regulation of the natural gas industry whatsoever:

Gov. Tom Corbett wants to hand authority over some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions to C. Alan Walker, a Pennsylvania energy executive with his own track record of running up against the state’s environmental regulations.

Walker, who has contributed $184,000 to Corbett’s campaign efforts since 2004, is CEO and owner of Bradford Energy Company and Bradford Coal, which was once among Pennsylvania’s largest coal mining companies. He also owns or has an interest in 12 other companies, including a trucking business and a central Pennsylvania oil and gas company.

Walker was Corbett’s first appointee—he chose him to lead the Department of Community and Economic Development in December, before taking office. Now, as Corbett stakes much of the state’s economy on Marcellus Shale gas drilling, a paragraph tucked into the 1,184-page budget gives Walker unprecedented authority to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” That includes, presumably, coal, oil, gas and trucking.

And regulators must now obtain approval from Corbett political appointees before they are actually permitted to do their jobs:

Oil and gas inspectors policing Marcellus Shale development in Pennsylvania will no longer be able to issue violations to the drilling companies they regulate without first getting the approval of top officials.

That’s according to a directive laid out in a series of emails received by the Department of Environmental Protection staff last week and leaked to ProPublica. The emails say the new edict applies only to enforcement actions related to Marcellus Shale drilling and that failure to seek prior approval “will not be acceptable.”

The memos require that each of the hundreds of enforcement actions taken routinely against oil and gas operators in Pennsylvania each month now be approved by the department’s executive deputy secretary, John Hines. The memos are raising concerns that the state’s environmental inspectors can no longer act independently and that regulations could be overridden by the political whims of the state’s new governor, Tom Corbett.

When I read about stories like these, it makes me hopeful that people will eventually realize and remember what colossal assholes Republicans are once they're in power. Certainly voters in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida are starting to get that memo. There's literally no depths to which they won't sink. With the modern Republican party, we are no longer talking about an opposition movement that seeks a more "common sense" version of Democratic policies, no matter how hard they try to market their ideals as such. This current group has moved the party so far to the extreme right that many of their policies have the effect of dismantling swaths of society. They want to codify pervasive income inequality as a central tenet of American society, kick the poor and elderly off of Medicaid and Medicare, prohibit your right to unionize, deny the existence of and do nothing about climate change, dictate to women what they can and can not do with their bodies, substitute religion for science, and turn a blind eye to private enterprise and allow them to do whatever they want because the resultant free market trickle down will always outweigh the societal or environmental cost, even if it means poisoning your water and destroying our oceans. And they are one of our two national political parties.

Realizing this is the start. Remembering it at the ballot box is what really matters, but I am hopeful that the current bunch of teatards and wingnut governors and state legislatures will actually prove to be a Democratic net benefit going into 2012.

We're Sooooooorry

Soooooooooorry!

BP Plc's (BP.L) (BP.N) Chief Executive Robert Dudley issued an industry-wide apology for the worst offshore spill in U.S. history at a high-profile energy conference on Tuesday.

"This is the first chance I have had to address such a large gathering of industry colleagues and the first thing I want to say is that I am sorry for what happened last year," Dudley told the CERAWeek conference in a speech titled "New Era, New Responsibilities."

Well that should clean up some of the totally-not-there-anymore-oil from the spill. Good to know the new CEO is as contrite as the former:

Coon 2: Hindsight
Tags: SOUTH
PARKEric Cartman,more...

And this makes me laugh:

Dudley said BP was working to earn back the trust of the industry, state and federal leaders and Gulf Coast residents, in part by upping efforts to improve safety. That includes shutdowns of two offshore oil and gas production platforms to repair faulty equipment, and shutting down a producing field to enable pipeline integrity work.

The BP Oil Company: earning back the trust of industry, state and federal leaders, and Gulf Coast residents by now doing shit that we should have fucking been doing all along.

No Conflict of Interest Here

Remember that whole BP oil spill thing? Something happened last summer. Anyway, I forget, cuz you never hear about it anymore, and magical fairies cleaned up the entire Gulf of Mexico and there is no more oil anywhere to be found. Hooray!

But even though there's no more oil, whatsoever, and it was all eaten up by microbes and Jesus, there still remains the $20 billion fund set aside to compensate victims of the now-completely-cleaned-up-and-non-existant-nothing-to-see-here-spill. Ken Feinberg was selected to oversee that fund, and you will be glad to know he is taking this shit on pro bono:

Feinberg, a Washington lawyer who previously administered the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, and his law firm negotiated a contract with BP to be paid $850,000 a month for overseeing the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, which doles out compensation to victims of the oil spill. That salary comes up for review every three months, Vitter said. . . . He also said the $850,000 a month salary “seems staggering, particularly in that it’s not tied in any way to any certain number of hours worked by any certain number of people.”

I am sure he'll be completely impartial and empathetic to the victims when he's a paid contractor of BP making $10 million a year. 

As American as a Preventable Heart Attack

Our new objectively pro-pollution Republican controlled House:

The Southern California lawmaker will endorse a draft bill to stymie climate rules from Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) “due to her long-standing concerns regarding the role of the EPA and the overly burdensome California standards,” her office told Politico. Upton and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) on Wednesday unveiled the draft bill, which would repeal the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and hamstring California’s authority to issue stricter vehicle emission standards than the federal government.

Latest studies (h/t Yglesias):

Air pollution triggers more heart attacks than using cocaine and poses as high a risk of sparking a heart attack as alcohol, coffee and physical exertion, scientists said on Thursday. Sex, anger, marijuana use and chest or respiratory infections and can also trigger heart attacks to different extents, the researchers said, but air pollution, particularly in heavy traffic, is the major culprit. The findings, published in The Lancet journal, suggest population-wide factors like polluted air should be taken more seriously when looking at heart risks, and should be put into context beside higher but relatively rarer risks like drug use. Tim Nawrot of Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the study, said he hoped his findings would also encourage doctors to think more often about population level risks.

But man does not create pollution, only Jesus can do that, there is unrest in the Middle East and oil prices are rising, so we need to abolish the EPA and expand offshore drilling and double down on fossil fuels. And on a related note, DougJ:

You know the drill: global warming isn’t happening, if it is happening then it’s not caused by human behavior, if it is caused by human behavior then we can’t do anything about it, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it, then that something is too expensive, if it is caused by human behavior and we can do something about it that is not too expensive, then that something is not what Democrats are proposing. And Al Gore is fat, he flies too much, look at his electricity bill, and sometimes when he goes somewhere it snows there, which is very ironic.

And I will also add that Amurikans should have the freedom to have heart attacks from ingesting excessive if they so choose. We don't need the federal gubmint gettin' in our way and tellin' us what ta' breathe and what not ter breathe, dadgummit.