Author Archives: Obediah Ousley

Some Fracking Companies Illegally Use Diesel Fuel, In Violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act

by Obediah Ousley Posted on August 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

A new report charges that several oil and gas companies have been illegally using diesel fuel in their hydraulic fracturing operations, and then doctoring records to hide violations of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

The report, published this week by the Environmental Integrity Project, found that between 2010 and July 2014 at least 351 wells were fracked by 33 different companies using diesel fuels without a permit. The Integrity Project, an environmental organization based in Washington, DC, said it used the industry-backed database, FracFocus, to identify violations and to determine the records had been retroactively amended by the companies to erase the evidence.

The Safe Drinking Water Act requires drilling companies to obtain permits when they intend to use diesel fuel in their fracking operations. As well, the companies are obligated to notify nearby landowners of their activity, report the chemical and physical characteristics of the fluids used, conduct water quality tests before and after drilling, and test the integrity of well structures to ensure they can withstand high injection pressures. Diesel fuel contains a high concentration of carcinogenic chemicals including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, and they disperse easily in groundwater.

FracFocus is an online registry that allows companies to list the chemicals they use during fracking. At least 10 states, including Texas, Colorado and Pennsylvania, mandate the use of the website for such disclosures.

The report asserts that the industry data shows that the companies admitted using diesel without the proper permits. The Integrity Project’s analysis, the report said, then showed that in some 30 percent of those cases, the companies later removed the information about their diesel use from the database.

“What’s problematic is that this is an industry that is self-reporting and self-policing,” said Mary Greene, senior managing attorney for the environmental organization. “There’s no federal or state oversight of filings with FracFocus.”

The FracFocus website currently has no way to track changes to disclosures. The Integrity Project noticed the changes when it compared newer disclosures to those in older FracFocus data purchased from PIVOT Upstream Group, a consulting firm in Houston.

Energy In Depth, the communications and research arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, published a lengthy response to the Integrity Project’s report and criticized it for including diesel use that occurred prior to a 2014 Environmental Protection Agency rule clarifying the types of chemicals considered “diesel fuels.”

Energy In Depth said the Integrity Project was “retroactively changing the definition of diesel fuel in order to malign more operations for engaging in an activity (a “diesel frack”) that did not occur.”

The EPA first listed kerosene as a type of diesel fuel in May 2012 when it released a draft version of the rule finalized this year. Kerosene is also listed as a type of diesel fuel in the definition of the Toxic Substance Control Act, which controls the production, use and disposal of chemicals.

In its response, Energy In Depth also pointed out that in some cases companies may have provided incorrect data to the FracFocus website and were seeking to correct it, not skirt the law.

“We no longer use the contract completions crews that used very small trace amounts of kerosene and a hydrocarbon distillate on five wells more than three years ago,” said John Christiansen, director of external communications at Anadarko Petroleum Corp., one of the companies listed in the report. “Since 2011, there has been no re-occurrence, and we remain in compliance with EPA regulations,” he said in an email to ProPublica.

The report found that six companies had changed disclosures for wells; Pioneer Natural Resources accounted for 62 of the changes. Tadd Owens, vice president of governmental affairs at Pioneer said most of these changes were made because of “coding errors” while submitting data to FracFocus.

“We did use trace amounts of kerosene in 2011 prior to when the EPA issued guidance. The rest of the wells on the list are coding errors and we have an ongoing internal quality control process to identify them,” he said.

For many years fracking industry groups insisted their member companies never used diesel fuels in their operations. Then, in 2011, a congressional investigation found that in fact between 2005 and 2009, 12 companies had injected 32 million gallons of diesel fuel or fracking fluids containing diesel fuel in wells in 19 states.

The industry groups then shifted their argument, declaring that they could not be in violation of federal regulations in their use of diesel fuels because the EPA had never adequately spelled out exactly what exact kinds of fuels were barred.

Indeed, in a 2011 email to ProPublica, Halliburton, a company listed in the congressional investigation as having used 7.2 million gallons of diesel fuel, said it had not violated any laws “because there are currently no requirements in the federal environmental regulations that require a company to obtain a federal permit prior to undertaking a hydraulic fracturing project using diesel.”

The EPA then acted to make its enforcement authority explicit, and earlier this year finalized more detailed regulations governing the use of diesel fuels in fracking operations.

In February 2014, after the EPA released its rule, Lee Fuller, the vice president of government affairs at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, stated that the rule was “a solution in search of a problem.”

“Based on actual industry practices, diesel fuel use has already been effectively phased out of hydraulic fracturing operations,” Fuller said.

Yet energy companies have continued to produce fracking fluids containing diesel fuels. The Environmental Integrity Project’s report identified 14 well fracturing products—commercially called emulsifiers, dispersants, additives and solvents—sold by Halliburton that contain diesel fuels. Halliburton’s own safety data sheets for these products list diesel as a chemical in these products.

“Halliburton is working with state regulators and customers to be sure all FracFocus reports are accurate,” said Emily Mir, a spokeswoman for the company. Mir would not comment on whether Halliburton informs drillers that purchase its products that they are required to obtain a permit before diesel fuel can be used for fracking.

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Some Fracking Companies Illegally Use Diesel Fuel, In Violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act

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Friday Cat Blogging – 30 May 2014

by Obediah Ousley Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today is snoozing day. Much like every other day, in fact. I recommend that if you’re having trouble falling asleep, take this picture to bed with you and stare at it until you fall serenely into a zenlike feline state. Let Domino be your sleep guru.

Original article – 

Friday Cat Blogging – 30 May 2014

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Bid adieu to South Carolina’s drowning shorelines

by Obediah Ousley Posted on November 26, 2013

Bid adieu to South Carolina’s drowning shorelines

By

Frank Kehren

About 1,200 acres of land have disappeared from Bulls Island and three nearby islands along the South Carolina coast since the 1990s — lost to rising seas and the eroding effects of powerful storms.

The erosion problems at the barrier islands, which are part of Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge, are so severe that U.S. Interior Department secretary Sally Jewell visited them last week.

The State reports that the land’s vanishing act is harming wildlife populations:

Islands in the 66,000-acre Cape Romain refuge provide important nesting habitat for loggerhead sea turtles, federally protected reptiles that deposit their eggs in sand dunes for protection. But many of the dunes are washing away. …

Raye Nilius, a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and Cape Romain project leader, said some birds that nest on Cape Romain’s islands also face threats from the encroaching ocean. As islands dwindle in size, birds that lay nests on top of the beach have fewer places for their young to hatch.

Least terns, black skimmers, and eastern brown pelicans are some of the birds of particular concern because of nesting habitat loss, Nilius said.

“We used to have huge numbers of eastern pelicans on some of those islands,” Nilius said, noting that at one spot, “They’re all gone now. Their habitat has been diminished in size.”

It’s not just chunks of land that are disappearing: Entire features of the landscape — like the spit known as Sandy Point — are entirely vanishing. A sign used to warn visitors not to bring their pets onto Sandy Point; now it juts ominously out of the water.


Source
Wildlife could be biggest losers as SC islands wash away, The State

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Bid adieu to South Carolina’s drowning shorelines

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Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?

by Obediah Ousley Posted on October 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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“That social norm is just something that has evolved over time” is how Mark Zuckerberg justified hijacking your privacy in 2010, after Facebook imperiously reset everyone’s default settings to “public.” “People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds.” Riiight. Little did we know that by that time, Facebook (along with Google, Microsoft, etc.) was already collaborating with the National Security Agency’s PRISM program that swept up personal data on vast numbers of internet users.


Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?


Privacy Is Dead, Long Live Transparency!


Timeline: How We Got From 9/11 to Massive NSA Spying on Americans


Meet the Data Brokers Who Help Corporations Sell Your Digital Life


Six Ways to Keep the Government Out of Your Files

In light of what we know now, Zuckerberg’s high-hat act has a bit of a creepy feel, like that guy who told you he was a documentary photographer, but turned out to be a Peeping Tom. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: At the core of Facebook’s business model is the notion that our personal information is not, well, ours. And much like the NSA, no matter how often it’s told to stop using data in ways we didn’t authorize, it just won’t quit. Not long after Zuckerberg’s “evolving norm” dodge, Facebook had to promise the feds it would stop doing things like putting your picture in ads targeted at your “friends”; that promise lasted only until this past summer, when it suddenly “clarified” its right to do with your (and your kids’) photos whatever it sees fit. And just this week, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin told the Wall Street Journal that the company is experimenting with new ways to suck up your data, such as “how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone.”

There will be a lot of talk in coming months about the government surveillance golem assembled in the shadows of the internet. Good. But what about the pervasive claim the private sector has staked to our digital lives, from where we (and our phones) spend the night to how often we text our spouse or swipe our Visa at the liquor store? It’s not a stretch to say that there’s a corporate spy operation equal to the NSA—indeed, sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Yes, Silicon Valley libertarians, we know there is a difference: When we hand over information to Facebook, Google, Amazon, and PayPal, we click “I Agree.” We don’t clear our cookies. We recycle the opt-out notice. And let’s face it, that’s exactly what internet companies are trying to get us to do: hand over data without thinking of the transaction as a commercial one. It’s all so casual, cheery, intimate—like, like?

But beyond all the Friends and Hangouts and Favorites, there’s cold, hard cash, and, as they say on Sand Hill Road, when the product is free, you are the product. It’s your data that makes Facebook worth $100 billion and Google $300 billion. It’s your data that info-mining companies like Acxiom and Datalogix package, repackage, sift, and sell. And it’s your data that, as we’ve now learned, tech giants also pass along to the government. Let’s review: Companies have given the NSA access to the records of every phone call made in the United States. Companies have inserted NSA-designed “back doors” in security software, giving the government (and, potentially, hackers—or other governments) access to everything from bank records to medical data. And oh, yeah, companies also flat-out sell your data to the NSA and other agencies.

To be sure, no one should expect a bunch of engineers and their lawyers to turn into privacy warriors. What we could have done without was the industry’s pearl-clutching when the eavesdropping was finally revealed: the insistence (with eerily similar wording) that “we have never heard of PRISM”; the Captain Renault-like shock—shock!—to discover that data mining was going on here. Only after it became undeniably clear that they had known and had cooperated did they duly hurl indignation at the NSA and the FISA court that approved the data demands. Heartfelt? Maybe. But it also served a branding purpose: Wait! Don’t unfriend us! Kittens!

O hai, check out Mark Zuckerberg at this year’s TechCrunch conference: The NSA really “blew it,” he said, by insisting that its spying was mostly directed at foreigners. “Like, oh, wonderful, that’s really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies. I thought that was really bad.” Shorter: What matters is how quickly Facebook can achieve total world domination.

Maybe the biggest upside to l’affaire Snowden is that Americans are starting to wise up. “Advertisers” rank barely behind “hackers or criminals” on the list of entities that internet users say they don’t want to be tracked by (followed by “people from your past”). A solid majority say it’s very important to control access to their email, downloads, and location data. Perhaps that’s why, outside the more sycophantic crevices of the tech press, the new iPhone’s biometric capability was not greeted with the unadulterated exultation of the pre-PRISM era.

The truth is, for too long we’ve been content to play with our gadgets and let the geekpreneurs figure out the rest. But that’s not their job; change-the-world blather notwithstanding, their job is to make money. That leaves the hard stuff—like how much privacy we’ll trade for either convenience or security—in someone else’s hands: ours. It’s our responsibility to take charge of our online behavior (posting Carlos Dangerrific selfies? So long as you want your boss, and your high school nemesis, to see ’em), and, more urgently, it’s our job to prod our elected representatives to take on the intelligence agencies and their private-sector pals.

The NSA was able to do what it did because, post-9/11, “with us or against us” absolutism cowed any critics of its expanding dragnet. Facebook does what it does because, unlike Europe—where both privacy and the ability to know what companies have on you are codified as fundamental rights—we haven’t been conditioned to see Orwellian overreach in every algorithm. That is now changing, and both the NSA and Mark Zuckerberg will have to accept it. The social norm is evolving.

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Where Does Facebook Stop and the NSA Begin?

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How Smart Are American Kids?

by Obediah Ousley Posted on October 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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For the past couple of weeks, Bob Somerby has been reviewing Amanda Ripley’s new book, The Smartest Kids in the World. I haven’t linked to any of Somerby’s increasingly acerbic posts about Ripley because I haven’t read the book and can’t vouch for how fair they are. But one point he makes is simple enough: for her international comparisons, Ripley relies entirely on a single test, the PISA, on which American students do relatively poorly. She ignores others with longer pedigrees, like the TIMSS, on which Americans do fairly well.

Ripley apparently has some arguments about why PISA is a better test, and I can’t really offer an assessment of that—though, like Somerby, it’s hard not to suspect that part of the motivation is a desire to tell an alarming story about how poorly American kids are doing. However, it turns out that, in fact, Ripley doesn’t always rely solely on PISA. On at least one occasion, when she’s praising the improvement that Minnesota has made in math scores, she merely refers to a “major international test”:

Ripley never names the international tests to which she refers in this passage, not even in her endnotes, which run 35 pages….Here’s the rest of the story:

In each case, Ripley is referring to Minnesota’s performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (the TIMSS). In 1995 and in 2007, Minnesota participated in the TIMSS as a stand-alone entity….Minnesota’s fourth graders did score quite well on that TIMSS math test in 2007. Minnesota’s eighth graders did a bit less well, but they outscored most foreign nations too.

Having said that, please note a key point:

In this passage, Ripley accepts Minnesota’s performance on the TIMSS as a marker of the state’s elite status in math. And yet, all through the rest of her book, she completely ignores the TIMSS.

That’s odd, all right. It’s almost as if Ripley has a story she wants to tell, and cherry picks whatever statistics help her tell it. For the record, TIMSS (despite its name) also tests reading these days, and it turns out that American kids in general—not just Minnesotans—did pretty well in the latest round of testing: 9th out of 56 in math, 10th out of 56 in science, and 6th out of 53 in reading. For some reason, though, you never hear about that. After all, everyone, both liberals and conservatives, has their own educational hobbyhorses, and it’s a lot easier to promote them if you tell an alarming story of educational decline. But the truth is different. If you look at all the evidence—TIMSS, PIRLS, PISA, NAEP, and other metrics—the story is rather more mixed and nuanced. America continues to do a poor job of educating its low-income kids and its black and Hispanic kids, something that’s especially inexcusable given the increasing evidence that these children are far behind their peers even before they get to kindergarten. On the other hand, American kids more broadly are (a) doing better over time and (b) doing fairly well compared to kids in other countries. Like it or not, that’s the story.

If you’re interested, the latest TIMSS results are below. I originally posted these in December, but it might be worth seeing them again.

UPDATE: Mike the Mad Biologist has some more technical critiques of PISA here. Among other things, it turns out there was a sampling error in the U.S. administration of PISA that overrepresented low-income children.

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How Smart Are American Kids?

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NASA Found Propene, the Chemical Used to Make Your Tupperware, on One of Saturn’s Moons

by Obediah Ousley Posted on October 2, 2013

Photo: NASA

Titan, Saturn’s massive, planet-like moon, is known for its seasonal weather patterns, sand dunes akin to those found in Africa’s Namib desert and hydrocarbon lakes. Now, the second-largest moon in the Solar System has gotten even more Earth-like: it contains propylene, an ingredient used in household plastics such as Tupperware and car bumpers.

This is the first time the common Earth chemical has been found anywhere other than on our planet, NASA reports. The chemical, found in Titan’s lower atmosphere, was detected with a composite infrared spectrometer by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Titan’s atmosphere is mostly composted of nitrogen, followed by methane. Hydrocarbons like ethane and propane are also present. This new discovery fills in a gap in that chemical line-up, though experts suspect that many more molecular surprises await. The BBC reports, citing curious “colossal hydrocarbons” that have been detected:

When the effects of ultraviolet light are combined with the bombardment from particles driven in Saturn’s magnetic field, it becomes possible to cook up some very exotic chemistry.

Cassini’s plasma spectrometer has seen evidence for hydrocarbons with an atomic mass thousands of times heavier than a single hydrogen atom.

As for the propylene, the NASA project managers believe that ”this new piece of the puzzle will provide an additional test of how well we understand the chemical zoo that makes up Titan’s atmosphere.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Titan Missile Museum
The Birth of Saturn’s Moonlets

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NASA Found Propene, the Chemical Used to Make Your Tupperware, on One of Saturn’s Moons

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A Simple Insecticide Without Any Chemicals

by Obediah Ousley Posted on June 29, 2013

Deb E.

on

4 Home Remedies For Restless Legs

5 minutes ago

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A Simple Insecticide Without Any Chemicals

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Could Massachusetts become the first state to impose a carbon tax?

by Obediah Ousley Posted on June 25, 2013

Could Massachusetts become the first state to impose a carbon tax?

By John Upton

Shutterstock

How ’bout paying a little bit more for that gas?

If a group of climate activists gets its way, Bay Staters will vote next year on whether to establish a statewide carbon tax.

From The Boston Globe:

A group of environmentalists plans to ask voters to make Massachusetts the first state in the nation to adopt a so-called carbon tax by imposing new levies on gasoline, heating oil, and other fossil fuels based on the amount of carbon dioxide they produce.

The group, which has registered with the state as a political committee, is launching a campaign to place the issue on the ballot for the 2014 state elections. If approved, such a tax would add several cents to the price per gallon of gas and could generate as much as $2.5 billion in revenue a year, according to an economic analysis that was done for the group, the Committee for a Green Economy. …

“There is grass-roots support for taking this kind of action,” said Gary Rucinski, of Newton, a cofounder and chairman of the group.

This quest to impose a carbon tax will not be easy. First activists will have to gather tens of thousands of signatures to place the proposal on the ballot. Then they will need to overcome opposition from conservatives and fossil fuel industries. Again from The Globe:

[T]he effort will almost certainly attract opposition from antitax groups and businesses not eager to contend with higher taxes and energy costs. Some note that Massachusetts already participates in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a program among Northeastern states to cut carbon dioxide emissions by requiring power plants to pay an allowance for every ton they produce. …

Skeptics say a carbon tax would make it harder for Massachusetts businesses to compete with companies in other states where no such tax exists. Even some environmentalists, preferring federal to state-by-state approaches, wonder if it would have much impact on lowering overall greenhouse gas levels.

“We are strongly in favor of having a price on carbon and having a market signal that greenhouse gases need to come down over time,” said Peter Rothstein, president of the New England Clean Energy Council, but “is doing a carbon tax at a single state level going to be most beneficial to the state and to dealing with climate change?”

If the campaigners succeed, they will do so where like-minded lawmakers have so far failed. State Rep. Thomas Conroy (D) and state Sen. Michael Barrett (D) introduced carbon-tax legislation in January, but the bill has not yet received a committee hearing.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The Best Ways To Pick The Most Effective Solar Panel Company

by Obediah Ousley Posted on June 25, 2013

Solar energy energy is becoming a growing number of well-liked due its potential to generate electrical power to your house without any regular monthly cost. Purposefully positioned on your residential property, a photovoltaic panel firm will make certain that the panel takes in the radiations from the sun and gives electricity 24 hrs a day.

The generation of photovoltaic panel power can be meant prices related to your electric costs. If your panel produces 75 % of the electrical power needed, your monthly cost for your electrical power will certainly be similarly lessened.

On a long-term basis, your solar panel will create added worth to your house as a fixed asset. If you choose to offer your residence, your investment in a photovoltaic panel must gather a good-looking return.

When looking for a solar residential professional, seek somebody that has considerable experience with solar panel installment and make certain they are certified and covered. It additionally never injures to ask if they are BBB approved.

The longer someone has beened around, the additional experience they have and the a lot more suggestions and tricks they understand. It’s additionally usually a reflection of doing good business since bad businesses do not stay about for long! They have possibly also experienced additional troubles than somebody that has been in business for a much shorter amount of time so they will have the know-how to assist you stay away from those problems.

Don’t think twice to ask inquiries or ask for references. A great contractor will certainly smile to offer whatever you need and will take their time in explaining every one of the specifics and seeing to it you fit. Inquire about funding options and ask if they can show you an estimation of your electricity cost savings over time. A trustworthy and competent solar domestic professional will supply funding options that feature leasing with absolutely no down so that you could understand the expense savings of electricity quickly.

There are rewards from state and federal government methods that you can make the most of to aid finance the cost of your solar panel. Ask exactly what type of motivations are offered in your area, a proficient contractor will be updated on this info.

Ask about warranties and ask about the very best manufacturers – not all photovoltaic panels are produced alike and neither are suppliers. You want to guarantee you’re protecting your financial investment by using a top manufacturer and get a service warranty on not only the panels yet also on the installation and craftsmanship.

how to build your own solar panels

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