Author Archives: Olesiatd1

Seeing the Debt Ceiling Fight From the Other Side

by Olesiatd1 Posted on October 16, 2013

Mother Jones

As the debt ceiling fight drags on, we’re seeing more and more reporting about just what it is that motivates tea partiers to be so frenzied on the subjects of Obamacare, the national debt, and government spending in general. Roughly speaking, the conclusion of these pieces of ethnography is that tea partiers have an almost panicky belief in several things:

The growth of the welfare state is sapping the strength of the country as more and more people are allowed to live off the taxes of others.
Obamacare is the tipping point: if it’s allowed to stand, the fight against welfare entitlements is lost.
Likewise, the United States has reached the breaking point on its national debt. If it’s allowed to keep growing, the country is doomed.
Refusing to raise the debt ceiling may be tough medicine, but it needs to done in order to rein in spending right now.

If you believe these things, then you wouldn’t care about polls or charges of hostage taking or any of that. You’d feel like you were literally fighting a war for the future of your country, and anything is worth the cost. Shut down the government. Breach the debt ceiling. Do anything. Just make sure to stop the spending, rein in welfare programs, and stop Obamacare. The fate of the United States literally depends on it.

But there’s more to it. A lot of tea partiers just flatly don’t believe that breaching the debt ceiling is the big deal that liberals are making it out to be. Not only does spending need to be cut anyway, but it’s not even that hard. This is how you get interviews like this one, from Brett LoGiurato of Business Insider. He’s talking to David Biddle, a GOP state committeeman who lives in Rep. Ted Yoho’s Florida district:

“There’s a scare tactic out there that if we breach the debt ceiling and default, there’s just no more money coming in, and that’s just not the case,” Biddle said. “There’s money to be allocated different ways. And maybe you have to make some cuts somewhere that might not make everybody happy, but at some point, you have to say, enough is enough.”

So what can we cut? Social Security? Medicare? Those are the big, long-term problems on our docket.

“No one’s going to cut Social Security or Medicare. That’s another scare tactic,” Biddle said.

So what can we cut now?

“You can start with foreign aid. Cut that out. You can cut, you know, federal arts …” Biddle said.

“There are a lot of grants,” adds Bob Clemons, a director of finance for the local school board.

“Grants. There’s a lot of grants,” Biddle confirms.

There’s a pause for about 10 seconds.

“It’s a big problem,” Clemons said.

“It is. It is,” Biddle said.

Like a lot of people, Biddle simply doesn’t accept that refusing to raise the debt ceiling is a big deal. He thinks there’s plenty of spending that can be cut if we have to. He doesn’t know what, and apparently he doesn’t want to start talking about welfare in front of a reporter from New York, but he knows it’s there. Given all that, what’s wrong with using the debt ceiling as a hostage to force spending cuts or the end of Obamacare? It’s just ordinary leverage, not a threat of financial Armageddon.

For more, read the whole piece. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.

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Seeing the Debt Ceiling Fight From the Other Side

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Fracking study downgrades methane worries, escalates enviro infighting

by Olesiatd1 Posted on September 17, 2013

Fracking study downgrades methane worries, escalates enviro infighting

By

No pies have been thrown yet, but we wouldn’t rule it out.

The latest research on methane emissions at fracking sites is dividing environmentalists.

A study of 190 natural gas fracking sites, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that methane leaks at the sites were notably lower than fracking critics have warned.

The New York Times reports that the study is “the most comprehensive look to date” at the issue of methane leakage during natural gas drilling and production:

The study, conducted by the University of Texas and sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund and nine petroleum companies, … concluded that while the total amount of escaped methane from shale-gas operations was substantial — more than one million tons annually — it was probably less than the Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2011.

From the AP:

The findings bolster a big selling point for natural gas, that it’s not as bad for global warming as coal. And they undercut a major environmental argument against fracking, a process that breaks apart deep rock to recover more gas. The study … doesn’t address other fracking concerns about potential air and water pollution.

There’s controversy not only about the study’s findings but about its backers. Alongside oil companies, the Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based environmental group, was a funder. The group was already being treated as a pariah by some greens for striking an agreement with frackers in March, agreeing on voluntary environmental standards for fracking (instead of pushing for a ban) and jointly establishing the Center for Sustainable Shale Development. With the release of Monday’s paper, howls of anger only grew louder.

Greenpeace USA Executive Director Phil Radford slammed the new study in an opinion piece published by EcoWatch:

[T]he Center for Energy and Environmental Resources released a study funded by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and the natural gas industry that stated two things: that the sample size it looked at is “not sufficient” to fully understand the methane pollution from fracking, and that the rates of methane pollution from this sample size are nonetheless 10 to 20 times lower than those calculated from more complete measurements in other peer reviewed studies. This discrepancy may be attributable to the fact that industry chose the locations and times of the wells that were studied.

At best this study will be considered an interesting outlier that calls for further research. At worst, it will be used as PR by the natural gas industry to promote their pollution. …

There’s been even more controversy on the people behind this study. Among others, Steve Horn at De-Smog Blog has long been skeptical of EDF’s position in the industry studies, and he has a studious critique of this study’s funding.

There will be more controversy to come. This study is just the beginning of EDF’s research on the topic. From NPR:

Steve Hamburg, chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, says his organization is funding 16 studies to look at the entire natural gas system in the United States. The PNAS study, focusing only on production, is just one part of that.

“Regrettably, we need another year, and then we’ll have all of these pieces together and we really can get a much clearer picture of what’s going on,” Hamburg says.

At stake isn’t simply gas production in the United States. Natural gas is taking off globally. So Hamburg says these measurements offer producers and regulators an opportunity to fix what’s wrong in the U.S. and to spread those best practices around the world.

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Fracking study downgrades methane worries, escalates enviro infighting

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The NSA Makes 600,000-Plus Database Queries Every Single Day

by Olesiatd1 Posted on August 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, after reading that the NSA violated its surveillance rules 865 times in the first quarter of 2013, I wondered how big a percentage that was. On Friday, they provided an answer:

The official, John DeLong, the N.S.A. director of compliance, said that the number of mistakes by the agency was extremely low compared with its overall activities. The report showed about 100 errors by analysts in making queries of databases of already-collected communications data; by comparison, he said, the agency performs about 20 million such queries each month.

Holy crap. They perform 20 million surveillance queries per month? On the bright side, if you assume that their internal auditing really does catch every “incident,” it means they have a violation rate of about 0.001 percent. On the less bright side, they perform 20 million surveillance queries per month.

That’s genuinely hard to fathom. Is some of that automated? Or is that truly 600,000-plus human queries each and every day? The mind boggles.

This article:

The NSA Makes 600,000-Plus Database Queries Every Single Day

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