Author Archives: xf0ks040u

Canadian tar-sands exec: ‘We do need Keystone’

by xf0ks040u Posted on May 6, 2013

Canadian tar-sands exec: ‘We do need Keystone’

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Christopher KolaczanTar-sands developments such as this one, in northern Alberta, could be expanded if Keystone XL is approved.

The U.S. State Department has curiously asserted that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t significantly affect the development of tar-sands fields in Alberta, Canada. But that assertion is being contradicted by a big player in the Canadian tar-sands industry.

Steve Laut, president of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., told the Toronto Globe and Mail that “we do need Keystone” to be built if the industry is to increase its oil extraction in Alberta. Here’s the quote in the context of the article:

New refinery capacity and pipeline projects coming on line will help demand and prices for Canadian bitumen in the next two years but Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. president Steve Laut says the proposed Keystone XL pipeline will eventually be essential for growth in the oil sands industry.

“Long-term, we do need Keystone to be able to grow the volumes in Canada,” Mr. Laut said in an interview following the release of his company’s first-quarter results on Friday.

Mr. Laut’s emphasis on the importance of Keystone stands in contrast to what others in the industry, as well as the U.S. State Department, have said regarding the project.

Are you listening, State Department?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Canadian tar-sands exec: ‘We do need Keystone’

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Will Monsanto Ties Influence Nutritionists’ Stance on GMOs?

by xf0ks040u Posted on April 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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The GMO seed giant Monsanto recently flexed its muscles in Congress, working with a senator to sneak a friendly rider into an unrelated funding bill. Now it appears to be having its way with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. As the New York Times reports, a dietician who’d been working on crafting the group’s GMO policy claims she was pushed aside for pointing out her colleagues’ links to Monsanto.

The controversy started during last fall’s highly contested battle over a ballot initiative that would have required labeling genetically modified food in California. The prestigious dieticians’ group was incorrectly listed by the official state voters’ guide as one of the scientific organizations that had “concluded biotech foods are safe.” Actually, the AND had taken no position on the issue, but it promised to come out with a position paper on it. (The ballot initiative ultimately failed.)

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Will Monsanto Ties Influence Nutritionists’ Stance on GMOs?

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Barrett Brown and the FBI

by xf0ks040u Posted on March 21, 2013

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Glenn Greenwald tells us the story today of Barrett Brown, a young journalist who relentlessly followed up on documents leaked by Anonymous, was targeted for this by the FBI, and who was eventually harassed enough that he cracked and recorded a ranting YouTube video promising to “destroy” one of his tormentors. He now faces multiple felony charges that could put him in prison for decades:

So here we have the US government targeting someone they clearly loathe because of the work he is doing against their actions. Then — using the most dubious legal theories, exploiting vague and broad criminal statutes, and driving him to ill-advised behavior with deliberately vindictive harassment (including aimed at his mother) — they transform what is at worst very trivial offenses into a multi-count felony indictment that has already resulted in his imprisonment for six months and threatens to imprison him for many years more

….Brown may not be as cuddly as Aaron Swartz, and certainly does not have the same roster of influential friends. Nor can it be categorically argued that Brown did nothing wrong (just as many of Swartz’s most ardent defenders acknowledged about him): that YouTube video, made when he was admittedly struggling with impaired judgment, was certainly ill-advised.

But none of that should matter. The claim with prosecutorial abuse is never that the person targeted is a perfect being or even that he never did anything wrong. The issue with prosecutorial abuse is that the punishments being meted out are wildly disproportionate to the alleged acts when the trivial harms of the acts are considered and/or that the prosecution is being pursued for improper purposes.

This is the first I’ve read about this, and I can’t pretend to know that Glenn’s account is fair on all counts. But read the whole thing anyway. More here.

Mother Jones
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Barrett Brown and the FBI

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Big Sugar could get a big government bailout

by xf0ks040u Posted on March 14, 2013

Big Sugar could get a big government bailout

By Susie Cagle

Trigger warning, healthy eaters. The USDA is considering a big sugar bailout. Here’s how that would work: The agency would buy 400,000 tons of sugar from surprisingly productive sugar companies in order to give those sugar companies enough cash to pay back the the $862 million they borrowed from the USDA last October. And then you would riot in the streets because what the hell is going on, USDA?!

The Wall Street Journal reports on the part before the rioting:

The USDA makes loans to sugar processors annually as part of a program that is rooted in the 1934 Sugar Act. The loans are secured with some 4.1 billion pounds, or 2.05 million tons, of sugar that companies expect to produce from the current harvest. That comes to almost a quarter of total U.S. output that the USDA forecasts for this year.

If domestic sugar prices bounce back before a final decision [on the bailout] is made, the USDA would back away from plans to intervene in the market, [said USDA economist Barbara Fecso]. A final decision could come as early as April 1. …

The loan program was designed to operate at no cost to taxpayers. A June 2000 study by the Government Accountability Office, then called the General Accounting Office, estimated the program’s cost to the U.S. economy at $700 million in 1996 and $900 million in 1998.

The bailout would help bolster the price of sugar, therefore driving up the cost of sweetened goods. But even if you hate sugar and all the terrible things it does to our bodies, you’re still paying for it.

Is that enough, though, to ally carrot and cupcake lovers in what New York Magazine wishes were a militant social movement?

Big Sugar has spent decades paying its way into politicians’ hearts, demanding price controls and tariffs that boost profits and artificially inflate sugar prices, and using its political clout to establish a permanent life-support mechanism for an industry whose major product is causing many Americans to die.

Why wait? Let’s Occupy Sugar, and Occupy it now.

Speaking of unholy alliances, New York points to a 2012 report by the Heritage Foundation. Free-market-loving Heritage hates Big Sugar. The foundation points to big political spending by sugar companies, just the kind of sweet stumping that killed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban.

Heritage Foundation

Not feeling riled yet? Maybe have an angry-making Coke first.

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James Fallows on Threat Inflation

by xf0ks040u Posted on March 2, 2013

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James Fallows has some things to say about the Iraq War as we near the tenth anniversay of the invasion. Go read. This was the most resonant bit for me:

As I think about it this war and others the U.S. has contemplated or entered during my conscious life, I realize how strong is the recurrent pattern of threat inflation. Exactly once in the post-WW II era has the real threat been more ominous than officially portrayed. That was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the world really came within moments of nuclear destruction.

Otherwise: the “missile gap.” The Gulf of Tonkin. The overall scale of the Soviet menace. Iraq. In each case, the public soberly received official warnings about the imminent threat. In cold retrospect, those warnings were wrong — or contrived, or overblown, or misperceived. Official claims about the evils of these systems were many times justified. Claims about imminent threats were most of the times hyped.

We’re all going to use the anniversary as a reason to cast blame and demand accountability from everyone who was wrong ten years ago. That’s fine. But it’s more important, I think, to try to learn some actual lessons, and this is the key one. The lesson isn’t that threats are never real. The lesson is that, nine times out of ten, the official account of the threat is overblown by at least half.

So keep that in mind for the next war. If you listen to the war supporters, and their case still sounds reasonable even after you discount everything they say by 50 percent or more, then maybe you should support military action. But that ought to be your standard. Your default assumption should be that they’re overstating the threat by at least that much.

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James Fallows on Threat Inflation

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