Author Archives: donnajansen

BP can bid on new Gulf drilling leases, but will it be allowed to drill?

by donnajansen Posted on March 18, 2013

BP can bid on new Gulf drilling leases, but will it be allowed to drill?

By John Upton

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The sun setting on BP’s time in the doghouse?

A glimmer of good news for BP and its shareholders: After being forced to sit out a single auction of Gulf of Mexico drilling leases as punishment for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the company will be allowed to bid on new leases this week.

That’s not only good news for BP, which already has more Gulf drilling leases than any other company. It’s a victory for Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and other lawmakers who said they were fed up with persecution of BP by the Obama administration.

There is, however, a major catch. The company’s suspension from bidding on new leases has been lifted, but it remains suspended from actually leasing any of the new drilling areas. From Fuel Fix:

[The Interior Department] said in a notice Thursday that if the British oil giant is the highest bidder and remains under suspension at the time of the lease award, which is given following a 90-day post-sale evaluation period, it will be disqualified.

“Concurrently, the previous second highest bidder will assume the position of the highest responsible qualified bidder,” the notice says.

For now, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will accept and process BP bids following standard procedures.

How forward thinking of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

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At CPAC, Sarah Palin Has Not Gotten Any Smarter Since Her Disastrous Political Career Ended

by donnajansen Posted on March 16, 2013

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Sarah Palin rocked a packed ballroom here at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday afternoon. The applause was roaring. The hollers many. The atmosphere crackling. In other words: Dog bites man.

Palin’s speech, if you can call it that, was Palin at her most Palinesque: heavy on one-liners and folksy charm; light on, you know, anything resembling substance and solutions. Here, a sampling of Palin’s many zingers:

“They talk about rebuilding the party. How about rebuilding the middle class?”

“They talk about rebuilding the GOP? How about restoring the trust of the people?”

“Let’s be clear about one thing: We’re not here to rebrand a party. We’re here to rebuild a country.”

“Barack Obama promised the most transparent administration ever. Barack Obama, you lie!”

“Mr. President, we admit it: You won! Now accept it and step away from the teleprompter and do your job.”

“Remember no-drama Obama? Now it’s all-drama Obama.”

“More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President. Shoulda started with yours.”

“Obama is considered a good politician—which is like saying Bernie Madoff was a good salesman.”

“We’re not here to put a fresh coat of rhetorical paint on our party.”

“If you don’t have a lobbyist in DC, you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

“Never before have our challenges been so big, and our leaders so small.”

“My only advice to College Republicans is: You gotta be thinking Sam Adams, not drinking Sam Adams.”

Imagine that for 30-plus minutes and you get the idea. I hesitate to call the above quotes “punchlines.” Punchlines follow a wind-up of some kind, an anecdote or an argument. Palin’s speech didn’t have any of these. The one-liners were the speech.

The closest she came to making a point about the future direction of the fractured Republican Party was to say that “it’s time to stop preaching to the choir,” a piece of advice offered, as Jon Ward sagely tweeted, to the choir. The closest she came to tackling an issue of importance was to note that the median household income has declined by thousands of dollars since 2007 “even as we work longer and longer hours.”

That’s right! Also: Data! Economics! Here at Mother Jones, we, too, are concerned about this phenomenon of working longer while earning less. We call it “the Great Speedup.” So go on, Sarah, tell us what we should do about the Great Speedup!

Instead, a few moments later, she told a joke having something to do with her “rack.” Then she did this:

Dorsey Shaw/Buzzfeed

Yes, that’s a Big Gulp. Palin was making a jab at New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s proposed ban on big sugary sodas, which was struck down in court this week. “Bloomberg’s not around,” Palin said. “Don’t worry.” And the crowd went wild.

Oh, Sarah. Don’t ever change.

Mother Jones
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At CPAC, Sarah Palin Has Not Gotten Any Smarter Since Her Disastrous Political Career Ended

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Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

by donnajansen Posted on February 25, 2013

Organic tomatoes are healthier for you, researchers find

By Susie Cagle

They may be smaller but they’re also mightier. Organic tomatoes pack in more cancer-fighting phenols and vitamin C than conventionally grown tomatoes, according to research published in the journal PLOS One. But the organic tomatoes do tend to be about 40 percent tinier, so make sure your next tomato fight features the conventional kind.

waltarrrrr

From Mother Jones:

The authors hypothesize that the additional stress experienced by organic plants — having to fend off pests, scrounge harder for nutrients like nitrogen in soil, etc. — “resulted in oxidative stress and the accumulation of higher concentrations of soluble solids as sugars and other compounds contributing to fruit nutritional quality such as vitamin C and phenolic compounds.” In other words, when the plants suffer a bit, they generate more of these vital nutrients. And the same could be true for other phenol-rich fruits and vegetables.

If you’re excited about this news, that’s great! But don’t get too excited. Tomato season is summer and early fall, so even though our globalized industrial food system brings organic tomatoes to stores year-round, they won’t taste really good until several months from now, when they’re also more likely to be locally grown.

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There Are Always New and Inventive Ways to Deny Health Coverage to Risky Prospects

by donnajansen Posted on February 22, 2013

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Brad DeLong links today to his wife, Ann Marie Marciarille, who in turn links to a New York Times article from a few days ago about small companies who choose to self-insure for health coverage. Here’s the basic drill:

  1. Regulations are looser for companies that self-insure, so more small companies are doing it.
  2. Obamacare is (probably) accelerating this process.
  3. But small companies that self-insure need “stop loss” coverage, just in case one employee has a gigantic health disaster that could bankrupt them.
  4. Stop loss insurers are loosely regulated too, which means they can choose to insure only companies with young, healthy workforces.
  5. And they do.

The Times explains what happens next:

As a result, companies with less healthy work forces may find self-insuring more difficult….Insurance regulators worry that commercial insurers — and the insurance exchanges being set up in every state to offer a range of plan options to consumers — will be left with disproportionate numbers of older, sicker people who are more expensive to insure.

That, in turn, could drive up premiums for uninsured people seeking coverage in the exchanges. Since the federal government will subsidize that coverage, it, too, could face higher costs, as would some employees and employers in the traditional insurance market.

And Marciarille picks up the story from there:

The moral of the story? Wherever and whenever we have competing insurance products whose profitability is determined by calculating every health care payout as a loss, the insurance markets will respond accordingly — ever inventing more methods, even if once or twice removed, to screen those who need health insurance out of the health insurance marketplace.

This is the problem with private insurers: they only have three basic ways of making more money: (a) charging higher premiums, (b) operating more efficiently, or (c) reducing payouts. Option A is limited by competition. Option B is nice to think about, but pretty hard to implement consistently. And Option C….

Well, Option C means either denying coverage to iffy customers in the first place, or else denying treatment to sick people who you have the misfortune to cover despite your best efforts. In a free market the incentives to do these things are very strong, which means the only way to stop them from spiraling out of control is with heavy-handed regulation, of the kind they have in Switzerland. But Obamacare doesn’t quite have regulations that heavy-handed, and that’s going to cause some growing pains. Eventually we’ll get there.

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There Are Always New and Inventive Ways to Deny Health Coverage to Risky Prospects

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The Politics of Tech is Usually Pretty Simple

by donnajansen Posted on February 14, 2013

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Whenever you read about some kind of political dispute over a tech issue, you should be aware that it’s almost certainly really a fight among two or more of the following four groups:

Telcos
Cable companies
Hollywood
Silicon Valley

Everything else is just fluff. There are occasional exceptions, but these four are usually all that matter.

This is apropos of nothing in particular. I just felt like passing it along. You may now go about your regular business.

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The Politics of Tech is Usually Pretty Simple

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5 Ways to Love the Earth on Valentine’s Day

by donnajansen Posted on February 11, 2013

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Oil companies aren’t happy that the government is making them fix defective offshore rig parts

by donnajansen Posted on February 7, 2013

Oil companies aren’t happy that the government is making them fix defective offshore rig parts

By Philip Bump

The U.S. government has asked Chevron, Shell, and our old friends at Transocean to halt drilling on wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Why? Because the systems connecting the rigs to the ocean floor contain defective parts.

From Bloomberg:

[The companies] have been directed by U.S. regulators to suspend work aboard rigs that employ General Electric Co. devices connecting drilling tubes to safety gear and the seafloor. The equipment must be retrieved so defective bolts can be replaced, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said in an alert issued on Jan. 29. …

The defect was discovered last month after a leak of drilling fluid was linked to bolts that failed because of stress corrosion, according to the Jan. 29 alert. The regulator didn’t identify the owner of the rig or which oil company was leasing it. GE declined to identify the manufacturer of the bolts.

Thanks for your help, GE.

How big a deal is this for the companies?

Installing new bolts and resuming drilling may take as long as three weeks for each rig, Credit Suisse Group AG said. For oil companies paying upwards of $600,000 a day to rent the most-sophisticated deep-water vessels and another $500,000 a day to staff and supply each of them, the delays may be significant, said Craig Pirrong, director of the University of Houston’s Global Energy Management Institute.

“This certainly will be costly for the industry,” Pirrong said in a telephone interview yesterday. “This is a result of increasing government scrutiny of deep-water activities. The question is, will the increased costs be so onerous that they discourage some companies” from searching the deep oceans for crude.

1. You know what’s more expensive than spending $1.1 million a day to replace faulty bolts? Massive oil spills.

2. If a company is going to be discouraged from drilling offshore because it might have to fix defective, leaky parts, it’s probably for the best.

Source

U.S. Halts Drilling on Gulf Wells With Flawed Bolts, Bloomberg

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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WATCH: The Permanent Campaign Fiore Cartoon

by donnajansen Posted on January 31, 2013

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: The Permanent Campaign Fiore Cartoon

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Obama Lays Out His Pitch for Immigration Reform

by donnajansen Posted on January 29, 2013

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Speaking to an audience in Las Vegas, President Barack Obama made his case for immigration reform Tuesday, invoking the idea of America as a nation of immigrants and saying he believed Republicans were truly committed to getting reform done.

“It’s easy for the discussion to take on a feeling of ‘us’ versus ‘them,'” Obama said. “A lot of folks forget that most of ‘us’ used to be ‘them.'”

Obama’s proposal resembles, to a large degree, the one put forth by the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” Monday. It proposes adding more resources for immigration enforcement and border security, a mandatory employment verification system, and a path to citizenship—what critics will call “amnesty,” but that the White House has referred to as “earned citizenship.” Like the Senate bill, undocumented immigrants on temporary legal status while they are “going to the back of the line” to apply for citizenship would not be eligible for federal benefits.

On these broad principles, the Senate and the White House are in agreement; but of course, the details matter, and there are key differences:

No Security requirement for the path to citizenship: While the Senate plan describes border security requirements that may have to be met before undocumented immigrants already in the US can complete the legalization process, the White House plan has no such requirement. The dispute over what, if any, border security requirements must be met could endanger the passage of any bill. (To be eligible for legal status or citizenship under both plans, undocumented immigrants still have to pay fines and pass background checks).

Nothing resembling a guest worker program: While the Senate proposal calls for a “humane and effective system” for “immigrant workers to enter the country and find employment without seeking the aid of human traffickers or drug cartels,” the White House fact sheet provided to reporters does not address this issue. That’s a problem, because some kind of system for foreign workers is necessary to deter illegal immigration in the future.

Families headed by same-sex couples are treated as other families: The White House’s proposal “treats same-sex families as families by giving U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents the ability to seek a visa on the basis of a permanent relationship with a same-sex partner.” Republicans on the Gang of Eight have treated this issue as unimportant. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said same-sex couples are “not of paramount importance,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked sarcastically, “Why don’t we just put legalized abortion in there and round it all out?”

DREAMers get an expedited citizenship process, agricultural workers do not: The Senate proposal exempted not just “DREAM Act” undocumented immigrants, who were brought here as children and are poised to go to college or join the military, but agricultural workers “because of the role they play in ensuring that Americans have safe and secure agricultural products to sell and consume.” The White House plan only expedites “earned citizenship” for DREAM Act-eligible undocumented immigrants, presumably because they’re slightly less fond of Big Ag than the upper chamber of Congress.

The two variables that are likeliest to cause friction between the White House and Congress are security requirements on the path to citizenship and the length of the path to citizenship itself. This afternoon on the Senate floor, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the Republican members of the “Gang of Eight,” warned Obama: “If this endeavor becomes a bidding war to see who can come up with the easiest, quickest, and cheapest pathway to a green card possible, this thing is not going to go well.” The clear implication is that despite bipartisan agreement on a path to citizenship, Rubio— and by extension, other Republicans currently supporting a reform push—could easily withdraw their support, based on how that path is paved.

Obama made it clear that if the Senate bill fails, he won’t simply be giving up. “If Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion,” Obama said. “I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away.”

Here’s the speech:

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Obama Lays Out His Pitch for Immigration Reform

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EPA drops methane inquiry to keep oil company happy

by donnajansen Posted on January 17, 2013

EPA drops methane inquiry to keep oil company happy

By Philip Bump

EPA headquarters.

When Fort Worth resident Steve Lipsky discovered that his tap water was bubbling, the EPA sprang into action. Lipsky lived near natural gas wells being drilled by Range Resources, the likely source of the methane flowing into his water supply. From the Associated Press:

The EPA began investigating complaints about the methane in December 2010, because it said the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees oil and gas drilling, had not responded quickly enough to the reports of bubbling water.

Government scientists believed two families, including the Lipskys, were in danger from methane and cancer-causing benzene and ordered Range Resources to take steps to clean their water wells and provide affected homeowners with safe water.

The agency issued a 2010 emergency order in an effort to address the problem. And then, without the problem being fixed, it pulled that order. Why?

Believing the case was headed for a lengthy legal battle, the EPA asked an independent scientist named Geoffrey Thyne to analyze water samples taken from 32 water wells. In the report obtained by the AP, Thyne concluded from chemical testing that the gas in the drinking water could have originated from Range Resources’ nearby drilling operation.

Meanwhile, the EPA was seeking industry leaders to participate in a national study into hydraulic fracturing. Range Resources told EPA officials in Washington that so long as the agency continued to pursue a “scientifically baseless” action against the company in Weatherford, it would not take part in the study and would not allow government scientists onto its drilling sites, said company attorney David Poole.

In March 2012, the EPA retracted its emergency order, halted the court battle and set aside Thyne’s report showing that the gas in Lipsky’s water was nearly identical to the gases the Plano, Texas-based company was producing.

The EPA’s efforts to study and possibly regulate fracking have been fraught from the outset. The massive production boom that’s reshaping entire states is lucrative for fossil fuel companies and a boon for politicians. That the U.S. is seeing recent highs in extraction — and recent lows in oil imports — is largely a function of increased hydraulic fracturing. There’s a huge disincentive for those in power to derail that train.

There’s even dissension within the government. The EPA and the Department of the Interior disagree on possible water pollution from fracking in Wyoming. Interior is developing its own fracking rules that will apply on federal land, due out later this year.

In this case, the EPA’s move is disconcerting and, on its surface, inappropriate. It’s another example of how an agency designed to be highly independent of political forces increasingly finds itself held hostage to them. Over the long term, everyone who might be affected by incomplete research into fracking suffers. Over the short term, people like Steve Lipsky do.

Lipsky, who is still tied up in a legal battle with Range Resources, now pays about $1,000 a month to haul water to his home. He, his wife and three children become unnerved when their methane detectors go off. Sometime soon, he said, the family will have to decide whether to stay in the large stone house or move.

“This has been total hell,” Lipsky said. “It’s been taking a huge toll on my family and on our life.”

Range Resources’ David Poole disagrees.

“[EPA] said that they would look into it, which I believe is exactly what they did,” Poole said. “I’m proud of them. As an American, I think that’s exactly what they should have done.”

Source

EPA changed course after oil company protested, Associated Press

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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