Author Archives: london

Offshore fracking in California: What could go wrong?

by london Posted on August 5, 2013

Offshore fracking in California: What could go wrong?

By Claire Thompson

Exciting new update in the chronicles of America’s domestic oil-and-gas boom: Not only is offshore fracking a thing, but it’s been happening off the coast of California for a good 15 years now, in the same sensitive marine environments where new oil leases have been banned since a disastrous 1969 spill.

Berardo62

Drillin’ U.S.A.

If that’s news to you, you’re not alone — the California Coastal Commission was unaware, until recently, that the seafloor was being fracked. Because these drilling operations happen more than three miles off the coast, they’re under federal jurisdiction, but the state has the power to reject federal permits if water quality is endangered.

The Associated Press has the story:

Federal regulators thus far have exempted the chemical fluids used in offshore fracking from the nation’s clean water laws, allowing companies to release fracking fluid into the sea without filing a separate environmental impact report or statement looking at the possible effects. That exemption was affirmed this year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to the internal emails reviewed by the AP. …

The EPA and the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement or BSEE, conduct some routine inspections during fracking projects, but any spills or leaks are largely left to the oil companies to report.

Although new drilling leases in the Santa Barbara Channel’s undersea oil fields are banned, drilling rights at 23 existing platforms were grandfathered in. Offshore fracking — pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals into the sea floor — can stimulate these old wells into production again.

Companies don’t have to disclose the exact combination of chemicals in their fracking fluids — that information is protected as a trade secret — and none of the experts AP interviewed knew of any study on the fluids’ underwater effects. But some of the chemicals known to be used in fracking are toxic to bottom dwellers like fish larvae and crustaceans, and research has shown that fluids used in traditional offshore drilling can mess with some marine animals’ reproductive systems.

The AP describes one major offshore fracking operation:

In January 2010, oil and gas company Venoco Inc. set out to improve the production of one of its old wells with what federal drilling records show was the largest offshore fracking operation attempted in federal waters off California’s coast. The target: the Monterey Shale, a vast formation that extends from California’s Central Valley farmlands to offshore and could ultimately comprise two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves.

Six different fracks were completed during the project, during which engineers funneled a mix of about 300,000 pounds of fracking fluids, sand and seawater 4,500 feet beneath the seabed, according to BSEE documents.

Venoco’s attempt only mildly increased production, according to the documents. Venoco declined to comment.

Other companies’ offshore fracking explorations have yielded similarly lukewarm results. Chevron’s one effort failed, and only one of Nuevo Energy’s nine attempts was considered successful.

Now that the Coastal Commission has wised up, it plans to ask operators proposing new offshore drilling projects whether they’ll be fracking, and may look into requiring a separate permit and stricter review process for such operations.

At least one BSEE employee appeared skeptical of the environmental safety of offshore fracking, according to internal agency emails obtained by AP. Pacific regional environmental officer Kenneth Seeley wrote this in an email to colleagues in February:

We have an operator proposing to use “hydraulic stimulation” (which has not been done very often here) and I’m trying to run through the list of potential concerns. The operator says their produced water is Superclean! but the way they responded to my questions kind of made me think this was worth following up on.

Still, that application, from privately held oil-and-gas company DCOR LLC, ended up being approved.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Offshore fracking in California: What could go wrong?

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It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

by london Posted on July 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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You know the old saying, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Well, Kelly Shue of the University of Chicago has found an intriguing way to test this. At Harvard Business School, students are randomly assigned to sections, where they presumably build strong friendships. (Stronger than the average friendship from just being at Harvard, anyway.) So what effect does this have on success later in life?

I test whether executive and firm outcomes are more similar among section peers than among class peers. I find evidence of significant peer effects in firm investment, leverage, interest coverage, and firm size, with the strongest effects in executive compensation and acquisition activity. Section peers are 10% more similar than class peers in terms of compensation and acquisitions.

In other words, if you get randomly assigned to a section with successful peers, you’re more likely to go along for the ride. I don’t have access to the article itself, and there are several possible explanations for this effect, but the most likely one is that friends help friends, and it’s nice to have friends who are successful. I hope there’s some followup research along these lines. It has some pretty obvious implications for diversity in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces.

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It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know. Seriously.

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Green Gear for Your Camping Trip

by london Posted on July 11, 2013

Taking a camping trip with the family this summer is a great way to spend some quality time outdoors. A little pre-planning can help you tread lightly on the planet while you’re exploring your surroundings, so before heading out, think about making eco-friendly choices for your trip.

We’ve selected a handful of green gear and gadgets for your camping trip that will make your adventure easier for both you and the planet.

Photo: BioLite

BioLite CampStove

The BioLite camp stove is a unique alternative to gasoline-burning stoves. BioLite’s stove uses twigs as fuel, so you won’t need to carry any extra fuel with you. By burning a renewable resource instead of petroleum, the stove also reduces your carbon footprint.

In addition to burning cleanly, BioLite’s stove can charge your gadgets while you’re cooking. The stove can convert heat from the fire into usable electricity, allowing you to charge your phone and other electronics.

Price: $129.95

BUY IT HERE

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Green Gear for Your Camping Trip

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Most Americans Still OK With NSA Spying Programs

by london Posted on June 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest polling on the NSA surveillance program:

Most Americans in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll support telephone and internet surveillance by the National Security Administration, but two-thirds also favor congressional hearings on the subject — indicating broad interest in more information about these activities.

The public by 58-39 percent supports the NSA collecting “extensive records of phone calls, as well as internet data related to specific investigations, to try to identify possible terrorist threats.” Support for the program is far higher among Democrats and liberals than among Republicans and strong conservatives, reversing Bush-era political divisions on issues of privacy vs. security.

It’s now been two weeks since the original Guardian story, and several recent polls have produced similar results. For now, then, I think we can say that we have a pretty good idea of what the public thinks. They favor surveillance by about a 2:1 margin, and now that Obama is president that margin is much higher among Democrats than Republicans.

On interesting tidbit about this: on most issues these days, opinion among independents is closer to Democrats than to Republicans. On this one, just the opposite is true: Independents are aligned almost perfectly with the newly Foxified and skeptical Republicans. Politically speaking, this should be unsettling news for Democrats.

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Most Americans Still OK With NSA Spying Programs

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Privacy Activists Worried About Immigration Bill

by london Posted on June 11, 2013

Mother Jones

For years, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation have kept tabs on potential privacy problems arising from immigration reform efforts. Now that a big immigration reform bill has made it out of committee and reached the Senate floor, privacy advocates are focused on three big concerns.

1) Drone surveillance: US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) already uses Predator drones to patrol parts of the northern and southern borders, but the Senate immigration bill calls for surveillance “24 hours per day and for 7 days per week,” in the southwest and southern border regions. The bill would also fund additional border enforcement and surveillance, including more drones, to the tune of $4.5 billion.

A federal statute from the 1950s allows border patrol agents to stop and search people at checkpoints located in the US up to 100 miles from any international border; the Senate immigration bill would allow the surveillance drones to fly over the same areas in most states. But by law, border agents can only enter private lands within 25 miles of the border without a warrant to track down immigrants who have unlawfully crossed the border.

Although the Senate immigration bill would require border drones to be unarmed, they would still possess the same high-tech surveillance capabilities designed for Predator drones used by the US military in Afghanistan. That, privacy advocates say, blurs the line that limits border patrol surveillance of private lands to 25 miles within the border. Beyond that, drone use raises the question of what other data the feds are sweeping up in the process of watching the border. In a recent New York Times Magazine story, a reporter witnesses an Air Force training exercise where drones track civilian vehicles on the highway. Regulations prevent the Air Force from targeting specific people, but it’s okay for it to hand data collected “incidentally” in the course of a separate operation, such as training or observing illegal activity, to federal agencies. That same logic could apply to border surveillance, which could conceivably give the feds wide latitude on data collection because of the Mexican drug war.

In short, the bill “offers little protections or guidance on drones’ use and on the grave privacy implications they create,” explains Mark Jaycox, an EFF policy analyst.

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Privacy Activists Worried About Immigration Bill

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Immiserating the Poor for the Benefit of the Rich

by london Posted on June 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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Mark Bittman is appalled at the farm bill currently wending its way through Congress:

The current versions of the Farm Bill [] could hardly be more frustrating. The House is proposing $20 billion in cuts to SNAP — equivalent, says Beckmann, to “almost half of all the charitable food assistance that food banks and food charities provide to people in need.”

Deficit reduction is the sacred excuse for such cruelty, but the first could be achieved without the second. Two of the most expensive programs are food stamps, the cost of which has justifiably soared since the beginning of the Great Recession, and direct subsidy payments.

This pits the ability of poor people to eat — not well, but sort of enough — against the production of agricultural commodities. That would be a difficult choice if the subsidies were going to farmers who could be crushed by failure, but in reality most direct payments go to those who need them least.

I’m starting to lose my ability to write rationally about this stuff. I just don’t know any longer what I’m supposed to think about a political movement whose primary raison d’être, one they no longer even bother to conceal, is an almost gleeful immiseration of the poor for the benefit of the rich. How is it that the wealthiest country on earth has come to this?

This would all be cruel enough even if the economy were good and you thought that folks on food stamps needed some motivation to get themselves off assistance and into jobs. Cruel but—arguably, anyway—perhaps best in the long run. But now? When the current level of SNAP spending is entirely due to the swollen ranks of the unemployed and underemployed, which makes it all but impossible for most recipients to entertain even a faint hope of either finding work or, for those lucky enough to have jobs, increase their incomes enough to escape poverty? Is there even a pretense of a reason for these cuts, aside from a desire not to reduce subsidies to agribusiness and not to raise taxes on the best off? Help me out. What is it?

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Immiserating the Poor for the Benefit of the Rich

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4 Ways Apple CEO Tim Cook Spins Tax Avoidance

by london Posted on May 21, 2013

Mother Jones

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“I’ve never seen anything like this and we don’t know anybody who has ever seen anything like this,” Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said yesterday of Apple’s baroque tax avoidance strategies. Apple CEO Tim Cook, who will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations today, is aggressively spinning the company’s tax strategies as patriotic, commonsensical, and no big deal. Here are the most remarkable talking points from his pre-released Senate testimony:

1. Apple’s taxes are straightforward
Spin: “Apple does not use tax gimmicks.”
Reality: Yet somehow, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice, Apple has paid almost no income taxes to any country on its $102 billion in offshore holdings. Between 2009 and 2012, Apple avoided paying US taxes on some $74 billion in income, an amount equal to the entire budget of Florida.

2. Paying American salaries through a subsidiary based in Ireland saves American jobs
Spin: Apple and its Irish subsidiaries are engaged in a “cost sharing agreement” whereby the subsidiaries “partially fund R&D costs incurred by Apple Inc.” The agreements “play an important role in encouraging companies like Apple to keep R&D efforts—and the high-paying, income tax generating jobs associated with them—in the US.”
Reality: This is how Apple brings back money from overseas without having to pay federal taxes on it.

3. Apple is awesome because it runs huge data centers right here in the United States
Spin: “In 2010, Apple built one of the country’s largest data centers in North Carolina, and it is in the process of constructing two additional data centers in Oregon and Nevada.”
Reality: Apple only agreed to build the North Carolina data center after getting a $46-million state tax break, its local property taxes halved, and local taxes on its assets slashed by 85 percent—all for creating 50 jobs. To build its data center in deficit-plagued Nevada, it extracted an $88 million state tax break, the largest in state history. And Apple chose to build a data center in Prineville, Oregon because Oregon has no sales tax and Prineville is in a “rural enterprise zone” that offers a 15-year property tax exemption.

4. “Apple supports comprehensive corporate tax reform.”
Spin: “Apple recognizes that these and other improvements in the US corporate tax system may increase the company’s taxes.”
Reality: Cook wants to reduce the tax that corporations pay when they repatriate profits, which could save Apple a lot of money considering that 61 percent of its profits are earned overseas. But lowering the repatriation tax probably wouldn’t benefit most Americans. After Congress enacted a one-time repatriation holiday in 2004, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks, or executive bonuses.

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4 Ways Apple CEO Tim Cook Spins Tax Avoidance

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It’s a Monday, So Unemployment Checks Are Being Slashed Somewhere

by london Posted on April 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, Congress took quick and decisive action to restore funding to the Federal Aviation Administration that had been cut as part of sequestration. The move, which is expected to be signed into law by President Obama, comes as welcome news to America’s frequent fliers. The long-term unemployed, on the other hand, are still totally screwed.

On Monday, New Hampshire residents receiving new emergency unemployment benefits—designed to assist people who have been without work for more than 26 weeks—will see their checks shrink by about 17 percent due to sequestration cuts. (Per the Associated Press, between 150 and 180 New Hampshire residents apply for emergency unemployment benefits every week.) Also laying down the sequestration hammer on the long-term unemployed on Monday: Utah, which will cut its benefits by 12.8 percent. The move is expected to impact roughly 4,000 citizens, according to the Deseret News. Alabama’s 12.8-percent cuts (affecting about 16,500 people) and Rhode Island’s 12.2-percent cut (affecting about 8,000 people) both go into effect this week as well.

As tough as these cuts are, they only get steeper the longer states wait. States that wait to make cuts will have a shorter period of time in which to enact them. As the National Journal explains, “If California waits until June 30 to reduce the checks, for instance, it will have to cut benefits by 22.2 percent between then and Sept. 30 in order to meet the sequester’s requirements.”

This could be averted if Congress restored full funding for the emergency unemployment benefits program. But don’t expect Congress to act fast this time—people on emergency unemployment assistance generally don’t fly business class.

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It’s a Monday, So Unemployment Checks Are Being Slashed Somewhere

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After MoJo Story, Treasury Department Clarifies Its Stance on Financial Reform Bills

by london Posted on April 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Mother Jones ran a story on how newly-minted Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is reluctant to take a stand against a series of Wall Street deregulation bills now being considered by the House Financial Services Committee. After the story pubbed, a spokeswoman for Treasury got in touch with Mother Jones to clarify its position.

Last year, Geithner slammed a series of seven bills that would have deregulated Wall Street banks. Those bills never made it to the Senate before the last Congress ended, but a spate of nearly identical bills are being considered again. When asked by Mother Jones whether Lew would echo Geithner’s opposition to them, Lew’s office had no comment, but pointed to recent testimony by another Treasury official warning against messing with the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, the sweeping 2010 law aimed at preventing another 2008-style financial crisis.

Once the story started making the rounds, a spokeswoman for Lew called Mother Jones. “Of course the Treasury secretary would oppose any effort to weaken Wall Street reform,” she said. She pointed to Lew’s recent comments on Bloomberg television. “The purpose of Dodd-Frank was to make sure the American taxpayer would never again be in the position where they had to step in when banks failed,” he told the news channel. “We are committed to that purpose.”

Lew’s spokeswoman also pointed out that Geithner made his statement condemning the bills last year after several of the them had already moved out of committee, and some had passed the House. “We didn’t send the letter until after committee mark up, not while the bills were still in committee,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it won’t happen.” Reformers complain that silence—or stalling, as it may be—on Lew’s part corresponds with Obama administration’s general reluctance to protect Dodd-Frank from attacks on all sides, whether that be in the courts, or regulatory agencies, or in Congress.

The seven deregulatory bills have been presented as technical fixes to Dodd-Frank, but most of them aren’t. One bill would allow certain derivatives that are traded among a corporation’s various affiliates to be exempt from almost all new Dodd-Frank regulations. Another measure would expand the types of trading risks that banks can take on. A third bill would allow big multinational US banks to escape US regulations by operating through international arms.

Financial reform advocates say it’s way too early to alter Dodd-Frank, because even though it is technically the law of the land, regulatory agencies have yet to finish crafting it into rules that can be enforced. Whatever Lew’s reasons for waiting to denounce lawmakers’ efforts to gut Wall Street reform, reform advocates are hoping he’ll stick to a recent promise his spokeswoman pointed to: “We have to finish implementing Dodd-Frank,” he said on CNBC. “I’m committed to using the authority that I have to drive that process forward.”

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After MoJo Story, Treasury Department Clarifies Its Stance on Financial Reform Bills

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The Immigration Bill’s Security Poison Pill

by london Posted on April 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Naming its long-awaited comprehensive immigration bill the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 wasn’t just an alphabetical flourish by the bipartisan Senate Gang of Eight: Securing the border always was going to be its No. 1 stated goal.

So it’s no surprise that the bill calls for the Department of Homeland Security to present Congress with plans for security and fencing strategies for the southern border before any of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants can become “Registered Provisional Immigrants,” allowing them to legally live and work in the United States. And before RPIs can apply for green cards, a border enforcement plan must be “substantially operational,” “maintaining effective control in all high-risk border sectors” in the Southwest.

Too bad, though, that there’s still no way to know how the bill’s benchmark border security stats will be determined.

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The Immigration Bill’s Security Poison Pill

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