Tag Archives: oil and gas

Trump’s $200 billion infrastructure plan takes aim at the environment

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Trump’s $200 billion infrastructure plan takes aim at the environment

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This major coal company is done with climate denial.

Donald Trump’s White House is using some alarming tactics to keep people quiet about climate change and other scientific matters. Over the past few days, investigations have brought some of them to light:

No more climate tweets: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke summoned Joshua Tree National Park’s superintendent to his office last month to reprimand him for tweeting about climate change, The Hill reported on Friday. Zinke made it clear that it was no longer OK for any national park to share climate change facts on official social media accounts.

Joshua Tree’s Twitter account had sent out a thread devoted to climate change:

“Science-based” gets banned: Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has forbidden health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and other federal agencies from using words such as “fetus,” “transgender,” and “science-based” in official documents for next year’s budget.

EPA employees targeted: A lawyer with the Republican campaign group America Rising (which helps find damaging info on political opponents) submitted requests for emails written by EPA staffers who had criticized the agency, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The request calls for emails that mention EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt or President Trump, along with any email correspondence with congressional Democrats who had criticized the EPA.

America Rising is affiliated with Definers Public Affairs, a communications company founded by two influential Republicans that promises to help its clients “influence media narratives” and “move public opinion.” The EPA recently signed a $120,000 contract with Definers for media monitoring.

Things are getting pretty Orwellian in here.

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This major coal company is done with climate denial.

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After a threatening call from Trump admin, Lisa Murkowski’s got backup.

The Eternal City’s water utility, Acea, had proposed cutting off water to 1.5 million residents for eight hours a day starting on Monday. The city avoided that fate on Friday when the central government allowed the city to keep drawing from a drought-ravaged lake.

The summer heat is partly to blame for the water shortage. Much of Western Europe has been sweltering, with heatwaves stoking fires in Portugal and setting record temperatures in France. Italy is suffering through one of its hottest, driest, wildfiriest times in history. Several regions have declared a state of emergency or asked for relief from the climate change–fueled drought, which has already taken a $2.3 billion toll on the country’s farming industry.

Rome’s other problems are making things worse. The city’s aqueducts are chronically leaking. Diminished snowpack on nearby mountains means less meltwater to replenish its aquifers. Rome had planned to stop drawing from one of its big sources of fresh water, Lake Bracciano, which has sunk nearly six feet in the last two years.

City officials have switched off iconic fountains and lowered water pressure, causing residents to lug buckets up the stairs to their apartments. Nearby small towns have already resorted to rationing, the New York Times reports.

Minus a drought in the Dark Ages, clean drinking water has been constantly flowing through Rome for millennia. Now, it looks like things are changing (the climate certainly is).

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After a threatening call from Trump admin, Lisa Murkowski’s got backup.

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Trump administration’s energy plans just faced another loss.

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Trump administration’s energy plans just faced another loss.

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A judge rules that rushing approval for the Dakota Access Pipeline violated the law.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg issued a ruling Wednesday that deemed the previous environmental review process inadequate. His decision comes in response to a legal challenge filed by Standing Rock Sioux in February, after President Trump greenlit the pipeline shortly after his inauguration.

Specifically, the judge said the Army Corps of Engineers, which must approve pipelines that cross water, “did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline’s effects are likely to be highly controversial.” According to Jan Hasselman, the Earthjustice attorney representing the tribe, the ruling represents possibly the first time that a federal judge has dinged the Army Corps for not considering environmental justice concerns.

The Army Corps must now do additional review. Hasselman is unsure what form that will take. “Do they just try to paper this over with a supplemental or revised environmental assessment, which is likely to lead to more litigation?” he says. “Or do they go back to the environmental impact statement process?”

The tribe has argued for months that the pipeline would endanger their drinking water and ancestral lands. Since oil began flowing in March, the pipeline has already leaked several times. Oil will continue flowing for now, but Standing Rock Sioux Chair Dave Archambault II said the tribe “will ask the Court to shut down the pipeline operations immediately” while it undergoes further environmental review. A ruling could come on that demand in as soon as six weeks.

Related: Read Grist’s investigation of the paramilitary tactics used to track and target pipeline opponents.

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A judge rules that rushing approval for the Dakota Access Pipeline violated the law.

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Obama is making another move to block offshore drilling.

In the piece, which appeared in Science on Monday, the president outlines four reasons that “the trend toward clean energy is irreversible”:

1. Economic growth and cutting carbon emissions go hand in hand. Any economic strategy that doesn’t take climate change into account will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth in the long term.

2. Businesses know that reducing emissions can boost bottom lines and make shareholders happy. And efficiency boosts employment too: About 2.2 million Americans now have jobs related to energy efficiency, compared to about 1.1 million with fossil fuel jobs.

3. The market is already moving toward cleaner electricity. Natural gas is replacing coal, and renewable energy costs are falling dramatically — trends that will continue (even with a coal-loving president).

4. There’s global momentum for climate action. In 2015 in Paris, nearly 200 nations agreed to bring down carbon emissions.

“Despite the policy uncertainty that we face, I remain convinced that no country is better suited to confront the climate challenge and reap the economic benefits of a low-carbon future than the United States and that continued participation in the Paris process will yield great benefit for the American people, as well as the international community,” Obama concludes — optimistically.

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Obama is making another move to block offshore drilling.

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Colorado voters just made it a lot harder to pass fracking bans.

It’s no surprise, really, as passing such a policy was always going to be an uphill climb, and in this case even climate activists were not unified behind it. Big business was against it too, of course.

I-732 was designed to be revenue-neutral: It would have taxed fossil fuels consumed in the state and returned the revenue to people and businesses by cutting Washington’s regressive sales tax, giving tax rebates to low-income working households, and cutting a tax for manufacturers. A grassroots group of volunteers got it onto the ballot and earned support from big names like climate scientist James Hansen and actor/activist Leonardo DiCaprio.

But other environmentalists and social justice activists in the state didn’t like this approach, and they got backing from their own big names: Naomi Klein and Van Jones. They want revenue from any carbon fee to be invested in clean energy, green jobs, and disadvantaged communities.

“There is great enthusiasm for climate action that invests in communities on the frontlines of climate change, but I-732 did not offer what’s really needed,” said Rich Stolz of OneAmerica, a civil rights group in the state. “This election made it clear that engaging voters of color is a necessity to win both nationally and here in Washington state.”

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Colorado voters just made it a lot harder to pass fracking bans.

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How are you celebrating Oilfield Prayer Day?

Ravaging crops, drowning goats, and wrecking fishing boats, the Category 4 storm devastated the financial mainstays of an already impoverished people, the Miami Herald reports.

While experts struggle to calculate Matthew’s long-term economic toll, Haitian farmers can see their losses in front of them, in fields littered with rotting fruit and fallen palms. Half the livestock and almost all crops in the nation’s fertile Grand-Anse region were destroyed. Although vegetables can be replanted, it will take years for new trees to bear fruit again. “This was our livelihood,” Marie-Lucienne Duvert told the Herald, of her coconut and breadfuit plantation. “Now it’s all gone, destroyed.”

The farmers, who have yet to receive any relief, are facing threats from famine and contaminated water. Matthew has already caused at least 200 cases of cholera, which could mark the beginning of an outbreak like the one following 2010’s crippling earthquake that claimed 316,000 lives and left 1.5 million homeless.

The death toll from the storm is over 1,000 in the Caribbean, a number that will likely continue to rise as Haitians struggle to find food.

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How are you celebrating Oilfield Prayer Day?

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We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

By on 24 Apr 2015commentsShare

Humans have gotten very good at causing earthquakes. Humans who work for the oil and gas industry, that is. They’ve gotten so good, in fact, that the U.S. Geological Survey has decided that it needs to start forecasting human-caused earthquakes in addition to the natural ones that it’s been forecasting for decades.

Between 1973 and 2008, the average number of earthquakes of magnitude 3 or more in the central and eastern U.S. was 21. Between 2009 and 2013, that number was 99. And last year alone, there were 659.

Cumulative number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or larger in the central and eastern United States, 1973-2014. The rate of earthquakes began to increase starting around 2009 and accelerated in 2013-2014.USGS

Scientists attribute this rise to “induced” earthquakes caused when we inject wastewater from gas and oil extraction sites into disposal wells.

“These earthquakes are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby. The USGS is developing methods that overcome the challenges in assessing seismic hazards in these regions in order to support decisions that help keep communities safe from ground shaking,” Mark Peterson, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project, said yesterday in a press release.

Traditionally, the USGS has put out a map every six years showing which parts of the country are most likely to experience earthquakes within 50 years, but those maps have never included induced earthquakes. Here’s the latest, which came out in 2014:

2014 USGS National Seismic Hazard Map, displaying intensity of potential ground shaking from an earthquake in 50 years (which is the typical lifetime of a building).USGS

Last November, the USGS and the Oklahoma Geological Survey gathered more than 100 academics, industry representatives, and government officials to discuss the growing prevalence of induced earthquakes and how best to incorporate them into the USGS forecasting models.

Representatives from the meeting released a report yesterday, detailing the group’s initial findings. They found, for example, that certain parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas are now particularly susceptible to induced earthquakes:

Research has identified 17 areas in the central and eastern United States with increased rates of induced seismicity. Since 2000, several of these areas have experienced high levels of seismicity, with substantial increases since 2009 that continue today.USGS

The group also concluded that induced earthquake forecasts would likely have to be issued once per year (if not more frequently) in order to account for changes in industrial activity.

According to the USGS website, most induced earthquakes are either magnitude 3 or 4, and they’ve never reached 6, meaning they’re often strong enough for people to feel but not usually strong enough to cause damage. Two induced quakes did cause some damage and injuries in 2011, though — a 5.3 in Colorado and a 5.6 in Oklahoma.

But don’t underestimate the oil and gas industry — they’re endlessly inventive and might soon figure out how to cause bigger earthquakes more often.

Source:
New Insight on Ground Shaking from Man-Made Earthquakes

, USGS.

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We are so good at causing earthquakes that the government is starting to forecast them

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