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A Big Oil foe runs for Congress — as a Republican

A Big Oil foe runs for Congress — as a Republican

@IowansForShaw

At first blush, Monte Shaw, a newly announced GOP candidate for Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, sounds like any other conservative. He denounces talk of new taxes, pledges to defend the Constitution, and speaks reverently of his “hero” Ronald Reagan. “Conservatives must hold this seat if we’re to have any hope at all of stopping the leftward plunge of our federal government,” Shaw said this week in announcing that he would run to replace Rep. Tom Latham (R), who is not seeking reelection.

Yeah, yeah, yada yada. But get this: “Big Oil,” as Shaw calls the industry that controls so many House Republicans (and some Democrats), is his professional enemy. Supporting renewables is currently his full-time job. He’s the executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association.

A Big Oil opponent running on a Republican ticket? Whaaa?

The catch is that Shaw’s association doesn’t champion solar panels or wind turbines. It promotes biofuels derived from the region’s cornfields.

The biofuel and oil industries are locking horns over how much ethanol the federal government should require to be blended into gasoline under its Renewable Fuel Standard program. Here’s what Shaw had to say about the issue in an op-ed published in The Hill last year:

Big Oil is back to its old tricks, this time trying to convince Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency that the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) cannot work and should be eliminated.

To combat Big Oil’s monopoly on transportation fuels, the RFS requires refiners to gradually increase the amount of renewable fuels available to consumers over time. However, refiners now say it cannot be done. Once again, they are wrong.

We call this the Big Oil Bluff.

While it’s refreshing to hear a GOP candidate calling out “Big Oil” on its bullshit, it’s not so refreshing that he’s pimping for the ethanol industry — which has been wrecking havoc on the environment and the climate as corn fields expand into natural areas to help satisfy our thirst for gasoline.

But it could still be fun to watch a Republican run against the oil industry.


Source
Monte Shaw kicks off bid for Congress, says conservatives must hold seat, The Des Moines Register

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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A Big Oil foe runs for Congress — as a Republican

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How the West Virginia Spill Exposes Our Lax Chemical Laws

Mother Jones

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The West Virginia chemical spill that left some 300,000 people without access to water has exposed a gaping hole in the country’s chemical regulatory system, according to environmental experts.

Much the state remains under a drinking-water advisory after the spill last week into the Elk River near a water treatment facility. As much as 7,500 gallons of the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, which is used in the washing of coal, leaked from a tank owned by a company called Freedom Industries.

A rush on bottled water ensued, leading to empty store shelves and emergency water delivery operations. According to news reports, 10 people were hospitalized following the leak, but none in serious condition.

The spill and ensuing drinking water shortage have drawn attention to a very lax system governing the use of chemicals, according to Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund who specializes in chemical regulation. “Here we have a situation where we suddenly have a spill of a chemical, and little or no information is available on that chemical,” says Denison.

An empty West Virginia store shelf Foo Conner/Flickr

The problem is not necessarily that 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, is highly toxic. Rather, Denison says, the problem is that not a great deal about its toxicity is known. Denison has managed to track down a description of one 1990 study, conducted by manufacturer Eastman Chemical, which identified a highly lethal dose, in rats, of 825 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. But how that applies to humans at much lower doses in water isn’t necessarily clear.

In response to the crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency have determined that a level of 1 part per million in water is safe. The drinking water advisory is now slowly being lifted on an area-by-area basis.

So why do we know so little? All of this traces back to the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, the law under which the Environmental Protection Agency regulates the production of chemicals. According to EPA spokeswoman Alisha Johnson, MCHM is one of a large group of chemicals that were already in use when the law was passed, and so were “grandfathered” under it. This situation “provided EPA with very limited ability to require testing on those existing chemicals to determine if they are safe,” she says.

There are more than 60,000 such grandfathered chemicals, according to Johnson. A leak involving any of them into water could trigger to a similar situation of uncertainty—meaning that this spill has served to underscore a major gap in how we regulate chemicals.

“What we have now is a situation where because our system, our policies, and regulations don’t require this information be developed, we’re left scrambling when something like this happens,” says Denison.

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How the West Virginia Spill Exposes Our Lax Chemical Laws

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Will Tyson Finally Ditch Cruel Crates for Pregnant Pigs?

Mother Jones

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In November, the animal-welfare group Mercy For Animals released a video, captured by an undercover investigator, documenting alarming conditions on a hog farm contracted to meat giant Tyson Foods. Some of the actions caught on tape were truly awful: men kicking sows and pounding them with sheets of wood. But it was just as devastating to watch how those pregnant sows lived day-to-day: crammed individually into spaces so tight, they can’t turn around.

On Thursday, Tyson announced it had begun “urging” its hog contractors to “improve housing for pregnant sows…urging all future sow barn construction or remodeling to allow for pregnant sows of all sizes to stand, lie down, stretch their legs and turn around.” Granted, it’s a statement without teeth: It requests, not requires, action, and gives no timeline. But even Mercy For Animals acknowledged in an emailed statement that it “signals an important new era and direction for the company,” which had before resisted considerable pressure to take a stand on the practice.

Gestation crates really, really need to be phased out. As Ted Genoways showed so forcefully in his 2013 Mother Jones feature “Gagged by Big Ag,” the techniques not only essentially tortures the sows, but it also puts the workers who handle them in danger—and leads them in turn to heap yet more abuse on the sows. Get this, from Genoways’ account of an interview with a Hormel worker who had been caught on tape in the act:

As we sat recently in the tiny, tumbledown house he grew up in and now shares with his wife and two kids, Lyons acknowledged—as he did to the sheriff’s deputy back then—that he had prodded sows with clothespins, hit them with broad, wooden herding boards, and pulled them by their ears, but only in an effort, he said, to get pregnant sows that had spent the last 114 days immobilized in gestation crates up and moving to the farrowing crates where they would give birth. Lyons said he never intended to hurt the hogs, that he was just “scared to death” of the angry sows “who had spent their lives in a little pen”—and this was how he had been trained to deal with them. Lyons had watery blue eyes that seemed always on the verge of tears and spoke in a skittish mutter that would sometimes disappear all the way into silence as he rubbed his thin beard. “You do feel sorry for them, because they don’t have much room to move around,” he said, but if they get spooked coming out of their crates, “you’re in for a fight.”

Did the revelations in the latest video inspire Tyson’s baby steps toward change? In its statement, Tyson attributed the announcement to its “ongoing animal well-being program,” “input we’ve received from our Animal Well-Being Advisory Panel, customers, farmers and industry experts,” and “our continuing efforts to balance the expectations of consumers with the realities of today’s hog farming business.”

But it’s becoming clear that videos like the Mercy For Animals one are increasingly shaping those consumer expectations. Tyson’s rival Smithfield found religion on hog crates after being burned by a particularly grotesque video in 2010. Unlike Tyson, which buys the great bulk of the pigs it slaughters from contract farmers, Smithfield is a massive hog producer in its own right, raising about 60 percent of its own sows. In 2010, it vowed to phase out the gestation crates in its company hog-production facilities by 2017. And just this week, Smithfield announced it would pressure its contract farmers, suppliers of the other 40 percent, to phase out crates by 2022.

The lesson from this trend is clear: When people see what goes on in factory farms, they don’t like it, and they force change (granted, at a slow and halting pace). And that is why, as Genoways’ Mother Jones piece demonstrates, the meat industry is fighting so hard to criminalize the act of secretly documenting conditions within these massive facilities.

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Will Tyson Finally Ditch Cruel Crates for Pregnant Pigs?

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