Author Archives: Theodot7v8

When It Comes to Process, We Are All Hypocrites

by Theodot7v8 Posted on January 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Just before lunch I wrote a post suggesting that if conservatives win their fight against Obama’s recess appointments, they’re probably just shooting themselves in the feet since the most likely victims will be fellow conservatives. Over at The Corner, Charles C. W. Cooke takes exception:

As a matter of practical politics, this may be true. Nevertheless, the “nice work, conservatives” line only makes sense if one presumes that all that matters in a system of government is raw political power, and that the role of the citizenry is to try to bend the rules for the short-term favor of their chosen party. I can only speak for myself and for the many conservatives who, like me, have kicked up a fuss over this, but I can assure you that the checks and balances contained within the Constitution really do matter to us.

….Republicans and Democrats alike ignore the Constitution when it suits them. Indeed, that politicians are self-interested and that they will subjugate principle to personal political profit is precisely why we have a codified charter of power. This notwithstanding, there is no reason for unaffiliated writers to look at these questions with such a cynical, will-to-power eye — especially when they write for an outlet that sees itself as continuing the traditions of a woman whose raison d’être was, she said, to “abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

Let’s stipulate that I’m pretty cynical when it comes to this kind of stuff. But am I wrong? My take is that liberals and conservatives tend to be tolerably consistent and principled on matters of policy. Working politicians obviously tailor their messages depending on when, where, and to whom they’re speaking, but generally speaking, liberals aren’t going to suddenly oppose national healthcare just because Obamacare is having some growing pains and conservatives aren’t going to suddenly favor high capital gains rates just because bankers have become a wee bit unpopular.

However, when it comes to matters of process, neither liberals nor conservatives tend to be very principled. Both sides have switched their view on filibuster reform based on who happens to be in power, for example. Likewise, they’ve traded places on their tolerance for broad claims of executive power between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Both sides will claim that there are subtle differences that justify these switches. Spare me. It happens too often to be anything other than picking whichever rule happens to favor your side. So here’s my question:

How many examples can we come up with in which either liberals or conservatives have consistently supported a matter of process that works against their own interests?

I’m not interested in individuals here. I’m not interested in policy issues. I’m not interested in positions that are being taken right this moment. I’m looking for things in which a significant majority of one side or the other has consistently supported a procedural matter that works against their own policy interests. Help me out here.

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When It Comes to Process, We Are All Hypocrites

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A National Park for Maine Proves a Hard Gift to Give

by Theodot7v8 Posted on January 9, 2014

green4us

The Art of Raising a Puppy (Revised Edition) – Monks of New Skete

For more than thirty years the Monks of New Skete have been among America’s most trusted authorities on dog training, canine behavior, and the animal/human bond. In their two now-classic bestsellers, How to be Your Dog’s Best Friend and The Art of Raising a Puppy, the Monks draw on their experience as long-time breeders of German shepherds and as t […]

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Codex: Tyranids (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop

From the cold darkness of the intergalactic void comes a race of ravenous aliens known as the Tyranids, a numberless horde of super-predators governed only by the instincts to hunt, kill and feed. Each Tyranid is a living weapon, perfectly adapted to its designated function, but each creature is no more than a single cell in a vast gestalt entity controlled […]

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Cat Sense – John Bradshaw

Cats have been popular household pets for thousands of years, and their numbers only continue to rise. Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. In Cat Sense , renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using […]

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Projects for Kids – Authors and Editors of Instructables

21 Projects Guaranteed to Keep Your Kids Occupied This Weekend give you full step-by-step instructions for 21 amazing kids activities that your family will love. Learn how to entertain your kids with the DoodleBot360, LED Throwies, Grow Your Own Magic Crystal Tree, the Marshmallow Shooter and other projects that are sure to hold your child’s atten […]

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Decoding Your Dog – American College of Veterinary Behaviorists

More than ninety percent of dog owners consider their pets to be members of their family. But often, despite our best intentions, we are letting our dogs down by not giving them the guidance and direction they need. Unwanted behavior is the number-one reason dogs are relinquished to shelters and rescue groups. The key to training dog […]

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Marley & Me – John Grogan

The heartwarming and unforgettable story of a family and the wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in life. Now with photos and new material

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Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop

Not all battles in the 41st Millennium are massed engagements between lumbering armies and towering war machines. In the shadows of these epic conflicts, squads of elite soldiers clash – their missions no less vital, their foes no less deadly. Designated as Kill Teams by the Imperium, or by a myriad of different names for their alien and daemonic counterpart […]

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Inside of a Dog – Alexandra Horowitz

The bestselling book that asks what dogs know and how they think, now in paperback. The answers will surprise and delight you as Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist, explains how dogs perceive their daily worlds, each other, and that other quirky animal, the human. Horowitz introduces the reader to dogs’ perceptual and cognitive abilities and then draw […]

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What the Dog Did – Emily Yoffe

Dave Barry meets The Secret Lives of Dogs in Emily Yoffe’s funny and insightful look at all things canine. Filled with adventures of heroic dogs, lovable and lazy dogs, malodorous dogs, phlegmatic and incontinent dogs, What the Dog Did delivers some of the most outlandish and certainly the funniest dog stories on record.

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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier

From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]

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A National Park for Maine Proves a Hard Gift to Give

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Yes, Muslims Are Denouncing The Nairobi Terrorist Attack

by Theodot7v8 Posted on September 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, the popular Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, was the target of a horrific terrorist attack. Al-Shabaab, an Al Qaeda-affiliated Somali group, claimed responsibility for the assault, which reportedly left over 60 people dead. It is Kenya’s worst terrorist attack since 1998. And Fox News personalities don’t feel as though Muslims, both foreign and domestic, have done enough to condemn the killing.

“They are not the religion of peace…You moderate Muslims out there…the time has come for you to stand up and say something!” Bob Beckel, one of the network’s leading center-left stereotypes, howled on Monday. “And I will repeat what I said before: No Muslim students coming here with visas, no more mosques being built here until you stand up and denounce what’s happened in the name of your prophet…The time has come for Muslims in this country, and for other people around the world, to stand up…and if you can’t, you’re cowards!”

Fox host Bill O’Reilly—a man who has successfully drawn the link between same-sex marriage and dudes marrying small turtles—was similarly annoyed. “What is the Muslim world doing about it? Nothing!” he declared, before talking about Muslims and violence in Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, and elsewhere.

Okay.

First off, it’s bizarre to present the global Muslim community as monolithic, and then shout at Muslims for not doing something. There are a lot of different branches and schools of Islam in a lot of different parts of the world. Angrily asking one kind of “moderate Muslim” in one far corner of the world to stand up to an act of terror in Nairobi is a lot like asking him or her to stand up to the epidemic of gun violence in Chicago. But let’s forget that for a moment, and assume for the sake of argument that you can and should scream at the “Muslim world” about their supposed lack of courage.

The “why won’t Muslims denounce the terrorist attack?” argument is still somewhat undermined by numerous Muslims denouncing the terrorist attack. Here are some particularly prominent instances of Muslims condemning the jihadist violence in Kenya:

CAIR: On Sunday, the Council on American–Islamic Relations—a controversial DC-based Muslim advocacy group that is frequently the target of conservative ire—condemned the Nairobi mall attack. “We strongly condemn this cowardly attack by al-Shabab and offer condolences to the loved ones of those killed or injured,” CAIR announced in a statement. “Our nation should offer whatever assistance we can to Kenyan authorities as they seek to free the hostages and bring to justice all those responsible for this heinous crime.”

Muslim leaders in Kenya: From the Standard, one of Kenya’s biggest newspapers:

Muslim leaders have strongly condemned the terror attack by the Al-Shabaab, terming them barbaric terrorists who do not represent the religion or its faithful.

Leaders of major Muslim organisations said the Somali-based militia was trying to spark sectarian conflict between Kenyans of different faiths by claiming they are acting on behalf of Muslims and Islam.

Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims Adan Wachu said the wanton and indiscrimate killings of innocent men, women and children goes against all Islamic teachings and tenets…Al Amin Kimathi, convenor of the National Muslim Human Rights Forum, said the government should pursue the terrorists robustly, terming their actions indefensible and reprehensible.

The article includes a list of several other Muslim leaders who came out to condemn the attack.

The president of Somalia. On Monday, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud delivered a speech at Ohio State University, where he stressed his government’s commitment to waging war on al-Shabaab. “Today, there are clear evidences that al-Shabaab is not a threat to Somalia and Somali people only—they are a threat to the continent of Africa, and the world at large,” he said. (Also, Mohamud allows America to violently drone his country in the hunt for Muslim extremists, so it’s possible that that could be considered the “Muslim world” doing something “about it.”)

A bunch of Somali-Americans. Via NBC News:

In Minnesota—which has the largest concentration of Somalis in the United States—community leaders held a press conference at the Abubakar As-saddique Islamic center in Minneapolis to publicly denounce al Shabaab as Muslims.

“Al Shabaab—they are nothing but criminals,” said imam Ibrahim Baraki. “They are not Muslims. They have deviated from the teaching of Islam. Their main goal is to destabilize and create chaos in the world.”

This website in particular is absolutely loaded with examples of Muslims denouncing and working against Islamic terrorism and extremism. The examples are extraordinarily easy to find.

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Yes, Muslims Are Denouncing The Nairobi Terrorist Attack

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Climate scientists are 95 percent sure that humans are causing global warming

by Theodot7v8 Posted on August 19, 2013

Climate scientists are 95 percent sure that humans are causing global warming

By Lisa Hymas

Shutterstock

When it comes to climate science, the writing is on the wall.

Climate hawks are buzzing over leaks from the fifth big climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, due to be officially released in September. Spoiler: Scientists are pretty damn confident that we’re screwing up the climate.

An earlier draft was leaked in December by climate deniers trying to undermine the case for anthropogenic climate change. News of more recent leaked drafts comes to us from Reuters, which has no such agenda. Reuters sums up the report this way:

Climate scientists are surer than ever that human activity is causing global warming, according to leaked drafts of a major U.N. report, but they are finding it harder than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in coming decades. …

Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities — chiefly the burning of fossil fuels — are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.

That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame. …

Experts say that the big advance in the report, due for a final edit by governments and scientists in Stockholm from Sept. 23-26, is simply greater confidence about the science of global warming, rather than revolutionary new findings.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress reminds us that the IPCC reports are generally conservative:

[The forthcoming report] is just a (partial) review of the scientific literature … [L]ike every IPCC report, it is an instantly out-of-date snapshot that lowballs future warming because it continues to ignore large parts of the recent literature and omit what it can’t model. For instance, we have known for years that perhaps the single most important carbon-cycle feedback is the thawing of the northern permafrost. The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment climate models completely ignore it, thereby lowballing likely warming this century.

Here’s reaction from climate scientist Michael Mann, via Climate Progress:

The report is simply an exclamation mark on what we already knew: Climate change is real and it continues unabated, the primary cause is fossil fuel burning, and if we don’t do something to reduce carbon emissions we can expect far more dangerous and potentially irreversible impacts on us and our environment in the decades to come.

And, for entertainment value, here’s reaction from denier-ville, via the Hockey Schtick blog:

[A]ll of these fatuous figures [about likelihood of human causation] are pulled out of the air to support the IPCC ideologies and not based upon any statistical analysis or science.

Back in reality-ville, John Abraham at The Guardian thanks all the climate scientists who have donated time to produce the IPCC report and wonders whether we need them to keep spending their time this way:

[T]he IPCC has done its job. For this fifth report, they have synthesized the science and provided enough evidence that action is warranted. How many more reports of this type do we need? Will a sixth report that confirms what we already know make much of a difference? Will a seventh? …

Whatever the future holds for the IPCC, the history books will tell us we were warned. Time and time again, the world’s best scientists have sent us clear messages.

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.

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The Southwest’s Forests May Never Recover From Megafires

by Theodot7v8 Posted on July 8, 2013

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on The Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you doubt that climate change is transforming the American landscape, go to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sweltering temperatures there have broken records this summer, and a seemingly permanent orange haze of smoke hangs in the air from multiple wildfires.

Take a ride into the mountains and you’ll see one blackened ridge after another where burns in the past few years have ravaged the national forest. Again, this year, fires in New Mexico and neighboring states of Colorado and Arizona are destroying wilderness areas.

Fire danger is expected to remain abnormally high for the rest of the summer throughout much of the Intermountain West. But “abnormal” fire risks have become the new normal.

The tragic death of 19 firefighters in the Yarnell fire near Prescott, Arizona last Sunday shows just how dangerous these highly unpredictable wind-driven wildfires can be.

The last 10 years have seen more than 60 mega-fires over 100,000 acres in size in the West. When they get that big, firefighters often let them burn themselves out, over a period of weeks, or even months. These fires typically leave a scorched earth behind that researchers are beginning to fear may never come back as forest again.

Fires, of course, are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, clearing out old stands and making way for vigorous new growth out of the carbon-rich ashes. What is not natural is the frequency and destructiveness of the wildfires in the past decade—fires which move faster, burn hotter, and are proving harder to manage than ever before. These wildfires are not exactly natural, because scientists believe that some of the causes, at least, are human-created.

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The Southwest’s Forests May Never Recover From Megafires

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Leaks and the First Amendment

by Theodot7v8 Posted on May 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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I hate to say this, but the media is losing me. I’m mostly on their side when it comes to subpoenaing journalists’ phone records, but the level of outrage and special pleading has gotten so palpable that I’m starting to waver. Aren’t they supposed to at least feign objectivity, even when the subject is something that affects the press?

It’s worse in some places than others. Roger Ailes, for example, released a histrionic statement yesterday about “the administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News.” Sure, Roger. Other places it’s only slightly more subtle. This morning’s LA Times, for example, greeted me with the headline on the right. If the subject were, say, wiretaps on organized crime rings, would the Times have written a headline about “spying on mafia dons”? I don’t think so.

I’m not sure what precisely has caused the big increase in leak investigations during the Obama administration. Maybe it’s because electronic communication makes it easier to investigate them. Maybe it’s because electronic communication makes it easier to leak in the first place, so there are more leaks. And certainly some cases are more troubling than others. The harassment of Thomas Drake, for example, is hard to defend. Conversely, the prosecution (though not always the treatment) of Bradley Manning is entirely justified.

The two cases that have everyone exercised at the moment mostly seem to be justified. As Cheryl Rofer points out, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim basically acted like an idiot, apparently leaking information to James Rosen without even quite realizing how damaging it was. There’s no government in the world that would tolerate that kind of behavior from someone in a sensitive position who knew the rules. We know less about the AP case, but it certainly seems to have involved the release of information (the existence of an Al Qaeda mole) that the government had a legitimate reason for keeping secret.

Does this mean the government should be able to pursue these cases by getting warrants for reporters’ phone records? I think the bar should be very, very high for that. Should the government be able to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information? I’d say the bar should be almost insurmountable for that. Even making the suggestion in a warrant application, as they did in the case of Rosen, is going too far for my taste.

Nevertheless, the government has an obvious interest in trying to keep its intelligence operations secret. The existence of an Al Qaeda mole and the existence of high-level sources within North Korea are both classic cases of this. There’s no whistleblowing or government misconduct here. When those kinds of secrets are blown, the feds legitimately want to know which nitwit is doing it. Sometimes that may justify getting a warrant to look at journalists’ phone records. The rules for this ought to be more stringent than they are, but the First Amendment isn’t a magic pass here.

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Leaks and the First Amendment

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WTO kills Ontario’s green jobs initiative

by Theodot7v8 Posted on May 8, 2013

WTO kills Ontario’s green jobs initiative

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Wind turbines in Ontario, where a Canuck conspiracy to discriminate against Japanese and Europeans was foiled by the WTO.

It’s great to go green and it’s laudable to go local. But don’t you dare try to do both at once.

That’s the message the World Trade Organization sent this week went it ruled — again — that Ontario’s Green Energy Act illegally discriminated against international renewable energy companies. Similar green jobs programs in other countries might also have to be disbanded following the ruling.

The Green Energy Act aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while encouraging energy conservation and fostering a jobs-rich renewable energy sector. Under the controversial elements of the act, electricity suppliers could charge premium prices for clean energy, but only if they produced that electricity using a certain amount of locally manufactured equipment like solar panels.

The European Union and Japan protested to the international trade body, claiming that the program illegally discriminated against their manufacturers. The WTO sided with the E.U. and Japan in a November ruling. Ontario appealed against that ruling, and on Monday the WTO rejected the appeal [PDF] while making some minor tweaks to its earlier ruling. From the Toronto Star:

The province will have to bring its rules into line with WTO rules or risk a claim for trade sanctions against Canada.

Ontario energy minister Bob Chiarelli said the province will talk to the federal government before deciding what to do.

“The big question is, to what extent will it impact on job creation? We’re assessing that,” Chiarelli told reporters, saying that 31,000 jobs have been created through the Green Energy Act. Many of those were short-term construction jobs, but others are in plants that make renewable energy equipment. The Liberal government promised the green legislation would create 50,000 jobs.

The implications of the ruling could be sweeping. Governments all around the world have coupled green energy efforts with incentives to strengthen local cleantech industries, and those programs could now be vulnerable to similar challenges. Even programs that aim to strengthen local economies but have nothing to do with renewable energy could be affected. From Reuters:

Canada’s defeat may spur more WTO disputes by countries which are desperate for economic growth and suspect their firms are being illegally locked out of infrastructure projects abroad.

The United States has already charged India with illegally favouring local producers in its solar sector and China has hit the EU with a claim that Greece and Italy favoured solar power firms that bought local components.

Other potential disputes are simmering, with Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia, Ukraine and the United States all under scrutiny in sectors such as energy, mining, carmaking and telecoms.

So much for think globally and act locally.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

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WTO kills Ontario’s green jobs initiative

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European leaders let cap-and-trade flounder

by Theodot7v8 Posted on April 17, 2013

European leaders let cap-and-trade flounder

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Europe: Not so into that carbon-trading thing anymore.

The world’s foremost carbon cap-and-trade system is floundering, and members of the European Parliament on Tuesday voted to keep it that way.

About 12,000 power plants and factories operating across the 27 countries that make up the European Union must purchase allowances to release greenhouse gases. The eight-year-old cap-and-trade program, designed to rein in carbon emissions and slow down climate change, is the world’s biggest and oldest international carbon-trading scheme.

But there’s a problem. Greenhouse gas–producing industrial activity has been slowed down by sour economies across Europe, which has left the market awash with a glut of carbon allowances. The price to buy the right to release a tonne of carbon on the E.U. Emissions Trading Scheme has dropped below $6.50 — well down from highs of more than $39 in 2006.

That means the system has stopped working. At least, it’s not working as planned: The price of carbon is now so low that it provides very little disincentive to release greenhouse gases, which means that it’s doing very little to combat climate change. Naturally, some of the businesses that must buy the allowances disagree with that logic, saying the price reflects the true price of carbon emissions in a stagnant European economy.

In a bid to revive the system and reduce Europe’s carbon emissions to lower levels than previously planned, the European Commission proposed cutting back on the number of allowances sold into the open market during the next couple of years. If the supply of allowances is pushed down, the commission reckons that economic forces would push prices up.

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. It’s a bureaucracy that represents the region as a whole — it’s not meant to be distracted by any parochial concerns of the 27 nations that are members of the E.U. It produces recommendations that are voted on by politicians in the European Parliament.

The European Parliament is made up of hundreds of elected officials from the E.U.’s member states. Europe’s parliament doesn’t always agree with the commission: National interests and domestic election campaigns can color the outcomes of its votes. And so it was this week when the parliament voted down the commission’s proposal to withhold around 900 million allowances over two years. From the BBC:

Despite political backing from the UK, France and Italy, [members of the European Parliament] voted against the proposal by 334 votes to 315 with more than 60 abstentions. It will now go back to the Parliament’s environment committee for further consideration.

Poland’s minster for the environment, Marcin Korolec, welcomed the move in a tweet.

“The vote of reason,” he wrote.

From Reuters:

Traders took the lack of political support as a signal to sell, driving the market down to its lowest yet. Immediately after the vote, carbon prices dropped by around 40 percent to [$3.43] a tonne. They were trading at [$4.10], down 34 percent, by [3:41 p.m.] GMT.

“The carbon market is now in a coma, until a clear intervention takes place,” an emissions trader said.

Bummer. And the bummer moments kept coming Tuesday for those who want to force polluting industries to rein in their carbon emissions through trading schemes.

The European Parliament voted Tuesday to continue to exempt international flights from the carbon-trading scheme for a year. That was a victory for political leaders and airlines from the U.S. and other non-European countries, which argued that subjecting businesses outside the E.U. to the carbon-trading scheme would violate international law.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie 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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Inside California’s Color-Coded, Race-Based Prisons

by Theodot7v8 Posted on April 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

In several men’s prisons across California, colored signs hang above cell doors: blue for black inmates, white for white, red, green or pink for Hispanic, yellow for everyone else.

Though it’s not an official policy, at least five California state prisons have a color-coding system.

On any given day, the color of a sign could mean the difference between an inmate exercising in the prison yard or being confined to their cell. When prisoners attack guards or other inmates, California allows its corrections officers to restrict all prisoners of that same race or ethnicity to prevent further violence.

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Inside California’s Color-Coded, Race-Based Prisons

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Good news, Arkansas: Tar-sands oil isn’t oil-oil

by Theodot7v8 Posted on April 3, 2013

Good news, Arkansas: Tar-sands oil isn’t oil-oil

By Susie Cagle

So far, the thousands of barrels of tar-sands oil that spilled into a middle-class neighborhood in central Arkansas on Friday have driven 22 families from their homes and killed and injured a grip of local wildlife. So far, the oil hasn’t contaminated the local lake or drinking water supply, according to ExxonMobil. It’s a “major spill,” according to the EPA, and the cause is so far still under investigation.

But since it’s not oil-oil, ExxonMobil hasn’t paid into the government clean-up fund that would help bankroll the epic scrub-down necessary to rid poor unsuspecting Mayflower, Ark., of all that bitumen.

“A 1980 law ensures that diluted bitumen is not classified as oil, and companies transporting it in pipelines do not have to pay into the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund,” writes Ryan Koronowski at Climate Progress. “Other conventional crude producers pay 8 cents a barrel to ensure the fund has resources to help clean up some of the 54,000 barrels of pipeline oil that spilled 364 times last year.”

Here, this helpful infographic might clear things up for you:

Naturally, ExxonMobil is feeling defensive about the whole “incident,” i.e. “release,” i.e. motherfucking oil spill. Today’s corporate headquarters update makes no mention of how many barrels of tar-sands oil actually hit the ground in Mayflower, but includes lots of numbers on vacuum trucks, storage tanks, responders, and claims (140 as of today). “A few thousand barrels of oil were observed in the area; a response for 10,000 barrels has been undertaken to ensure adequate resources are in place.”

DeSmogBlog ain’t buying it: After a look through ExxonMobil’s spill history, they found the company has a record of paying for immediate clean-up efforts but not for damages. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see if Exxon spontaneously grows a conscience this time — and hope all those other pipelines hold.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Good news, Arkansas: Tar-sands oil isn’t oil-oil

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