Category Archives: Vernal

Carbon offsets for urban trees are on the horizon

by DelilaGreenup05 Posted on August 31, 2018

This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The evidence is in: Urban trees improve air and water quality, reduce energy costs, and improve human health, even as they offer the benefit of storing carbon. And in cities across the country, they are disappearing.

A recent paper by two U.S. Forest Service scientists reported that metropolitan areas in the U.S. are losing about 36 million trees each year. The paper, by David Nowak and Eric Greenfield, was an expansion of the same researchers’ 2012 study that found significant tree loss in 17 out of the 20 U.S. cities studied.

This arboreal decline is happening even in some areas that promote “million-tree” campaigns, Arbor Day plantings, and street-tree giveaways. Cash-strapped municipalities just can’t find enough green to maintain the green. Additionally, many cities are adjusting to population booms, and to temperature increases and drought due to climate change — both conditions that can be hard on trees (while increasing their value as sources of cooling and cleaner air). There’s also a growing recognition of the inequity of tree-canopy distribution in many cities, with lush cover in wealthy neighborhoods and far fewer trees in disadvantaged areas.

To find more funding for urban trees, some local governments, including Austin, Texas, and King County, Washington (where Seattle is located), are running pilot projects with a Seattle-based nonprofit called City Forest Credits (CFC). The nonprofit is developing a new approach: generating funding for city tree canopies from private companies (and individuals) that wish to offset their carbon emissions by buying credits for tree planting or preservation.

The vast majority of forest carbon credits worldwide have been issued for trees in tropical rainforests and other forests far from urban areas. A study released last year of the forest offsets in California’s cap-and-trade program found that they are effective at reducing emissions.

The new credits aim to quantify not only the carbon benefits of urban trees, but also rainfall interception, energy savings from cooling and heating effects, and air-quality benefits. CFC has no role in marketing or selling credits for specific projects, but maintains the standards (protocols) and credentialing for other organizations that sell them. A third-party firm, Ecofor, verifies compliance for tree-preservation projects. Tree-planting projects are either third-party verified, or, for smaller projects that cannot afford that, verified by CFC with peer review, using Google Earth and geocoded photos.

To be eligible for the credits, city tree projects must follow protocols created specifically for urban forests — rules governing such specifics as the location and duration of a project and how the carbon will be quantified.

The new credits “are specifically catered to the urban environment and the unique challenges and possibilities there, so they differ from traditional carbon credits,” said Ian Leahy, director of urban forestry programs at the nonprofit conservation group American Forests, and a member of the CFC protocol board.

“I think the work is innovative and potentially game-changing,” said Zach Baumer, climate program manager for the City of Austin. (Baumer also serves on the protocol board for CFC.) “To harness the market to create environmental benefits in cities is a great thing.”

Austin

The City of Austin aims to be carbon neutral in government operations by 2020. To get there, it has been reducing emissions through energy efficiency, renewable energy, alternative fuels, and hybrid and electric vehicles. But the city will still need offsets to claim neutrality.

If governments and businesses choose to purchase these credits, they could help fill that gap, and they can keep their dollars local. Austin is running two pilot projects this year with CFC: a riparian reforestation project near a creek and a tree-planting project on school-district land. The City of Austin is purchasing the credits for both projects from the nonprofit TreeFolks, via CFC.

The fact that credits can cover both stream-side plantings and trees on school property illustrates the complex task of developing a city credit — the protocols and quantification methods must work for the disparate tree species and stewardship strategies of an urban forest, in contrast to the more controlled setting of an industrial plantation.

CFC is eager to road-test the protocols in Austin, said its founder and executive director, Mark McPherson, a Seattle lawyer and businessperson who has dedicated pro bono hours throughout his career to city tree issues. “Even though you have a national drafting group that put the protocols together, that brings together lots of expertise, they’re still cooked in the lab, if you will,” he said. “They have to be tested in the real world.” The effort is being helped by McPherson’s older brother, E. Greg McPherson, a prominent scientist in the field of urban forestry who helped develop the protocols.

King County

Another piece of the puzzle is a pilot project in King County, where a new land conservation initiative (LCI) targets protection of 65,000 acres, spanning urban areas to farmland. “We really want to maintain this intact landscape — what I’d call our natural infrastructure — that is the foundation of the quality of life we have here,” said Charlie Governali, the land conservation projects manager at King County’s Department of Natural Resources & Parks.

King County has been working with CFC over the last year, piloting a carbon program to help protect about 1,500 acres of currently unprotected and threatened tree canopy in and around urban communities. The county will consider expansion to a full-blown program by the end of 2018. Governali said there are already businesses interested in buying credits.

One of the first commitments made through CFC is a planting project on a rare parcel of open space in the City of Shoreline, just north of Seattle, funded by Bank of America through American Forests.

According to a study by the nonprofit Forest Trends, in 2016, $662 million globally went toward the purchase of carbon offsets for the protection or restoration of forests and other natural landscapes. The usual model is that for-profit carbon project developers work with landowners to qualify large forests for credits. Doubters have questioned whether city trees offer enough scale to be worthwhile, McPherson noted. “Carbon developers are thinking they want to lock up 10,000 acres of forest land, so they don’t see the scale or the volume in what we’re doing.”

But Governali said that for King County, the carbon protocol offers something different — a way to protect a lot of urban green space cumulatively by selling credits over time, and for many small green spaces.

Urban credits will be expensive — many times what a commodity credit for carbon might cost. Urban land is not cheap, and urban trees are costly to plant and maintain compared to those on forest land.

However, urban trees offer more public benefits. “Compared to one additional tree left standing in a far-off industrial forest, each additional urban tree we protect has an outsized human impact,” argued Governali, because these trees bring cooling on hot days, better air quality, and even improved mental health. Finally, he noted, the sale of carbon credits from urban trees can help a municipality buy the underlying land and make it a public park, “a place for families to gather, relieve stress, get some exercise, relax, and for children to play and learn.”

At the outset, the work adds to already full urban-forest workloads and stretches budgets, at least until credit revenue from buyers can support the programs. “We’re good at planting trees, but documenting the work to create an official carbon credit is new for us,” said Austin’s Baumer. However, generating credits is one more way to stall or reverse tree loss at a time when people are just starting to understand how critical trees — whether elms, oaks, Douglas firs, or cedars — are to a city’s health and economy.

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Carbon offsets for urban trees are on the horizon

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She Was Desperate. She Tried to End Her Own Pregnancy. She Was Thrown in Jail

by BrandenBwp Posted on May 8, 2017

Mother Jones

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Gracia Lam

One night in May 2009, Jocelyn packed a backpack and left the ramshackle house in Naples, Utah, where she lived with her mom and two of her five siblings. She was six months pregnant—a condition that had caused the 17-year-old to drop out of high school and become alienated from her Mormon family. That night she’d broken up with her new boyfriend, who, though not the father, was her biggest source of support.

She planned to hitchhike 2,000 miles to Florida, where her dad lived, even though they hadn’t spoken in years. She only made it to a gas station a block away before she stopped, in tears. Aaron Harrison, a “Goth” 21-year-old, approached Jocelyn and asked if he could help. “I was a mess, I was crying, I didn’t know what to do,” she remembers. “I told him everything. I even told him about thinking of ending the pregnancy.” He asked if she wanted to go to his place nearby and talk.

Jocelyn (which is not her real name), a petite woman with wavy brown hair and a soft twang, told Harrison that her boyfriend had suggested an abortion could be caused by a punch in the stomach, and that they had even discussed resolving her pregnancy problem this way. So Harrison struck a deal with her. If he beat her up so she would miscarry, Jocelyn would give him the $150 she’d brought for her trip. If anyone asked, she’d say she had been sexually assaulted.

He was more than cooperative. Once inside his house, he punched her in the stomach, slapped her face, and bit her neck. Jocelyn says they also had sex, thinking it would help their cover story.

But things quickly got out of hand—”he hit me really hard”—and Jocelyn ran out of the house, shocked, bruised, and appalled by what they’d done. “I felt so sad for my baby,” she tells me. “I felt awful that I’d just agreed to any of it. But I also felt like a victim.” She called her mom and told her she’d been sexually assaulted. Jocelyn’s mom took her to the police station, where she was questioned by a detective. Jocelyn stuck with her story at first, but the cop kept questioning her, she says, well into the middle of the night. After she finally confessed, the police took her to the hospital. Her unborn baby was alive.

The next day, Jocelyn was arrested. “The county attorney said, ‘Take her straight to detention,'” she says. “‘This is insane, this is unacceptable, this is attempted murder.'” Jocelyn was moved to Split Mountain, a juvenile center, and charged with solicitation of murder, which would have been a felony if she were an adult. Harrison was also arrested and charged with attempted murder.

“That was the worst moment of my life,” Jocelyn, now 25, tells me from her home in Vernal, Utah, with two young children cooing behind her.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said women who end their pregnancies ought to face “some form of punishment.” He was met with an onslaught of criticism, even from anti-abortion groups, which characterized his position as “completely out of touch with the pro-life movement.” Before efforts to decriminalize abortion began in the late 1960s, women were rarely prosecuted for attempting to access the procedure. Anti-abortion advocates argued then, as most do now, that women, like their fetuses, were victims. After Trump’s comments, March for Life issued a press release with the headline “No Pro-Life American Advocates Punishment for Abortion.” Jeanne Mancini, the organization’s president, went further, saying, “Being pro-life means wanting what is best for the mother and the baby. We invite a woman who has gone down this route to consider paths to healing, not punishment.”

Trump quickly walked back his statement; doctors, he said, not women, should be punished. But his remarks exposed a tension at the heart of the pro-life legal movement: How can abortion become illegal without punishing the women who seek them? The question has come into greater relief over the last several decades, as state and federal laws have evolved to regard fetal deaths as potential homicides. With Republicans now in control of federal judicial nominations and most statehouses, growing gaps in the abortion rights landscape seem likely to drive more women to self-abort, just as several high-profile cases have shown prosecutors willing to bring charges against those who take desperate measures to end their pregnancies.

Mother Jones has identified at least two dozen cases since Roe v. Wade in which women faced investigation or prosecution for a self-induced abortion, according to a review of news reports, scholarly articles, and court documents. But Jill E. Adams, who leads the Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team at the University of California-Berkeley, says the real number is unknown. In the eight years following Jocelyn’s arrest, eight women, almost all in the Midwestern or Southern United States, have been investigated, charged, or prosecuted for trying to end pregnancies, or for being suspected of doing so. About half the women charged since Roe, including Jocelyn, were accused of homicide, manslaughter, or a related crime—charges enabled by “fetal homicide laws,” which are on the books in 38 states and make killing a fetus a crime.

Fetal homicide laws are the result of a two-pronged strategy that anti-abortion groups adopted after their 1973 Supreme Court defeat in Roe: They pushed state laws that made abortions harder to get and expanded the legal rights of fetuses so that the public, and eventually the courts, would begin to regard the unborn—no matter what stage of development—as children. Advocates started by working to define life as beginning at conception in nonabortion contexts—property or contract law, for instance.

But criminal prosecutions of anyone who killed a fetus soon followed. In one of the earliest such cases, attorneys for Americans United for Life, the nation’s most influential pro-life legal group, fought to get an Illinois man prosecuted for murder after he shot a pregnant woman, allegedly killing her unborn child. (He was found not guilty; a judge was not convinced his bullet had killed the fetus.)

In 1984, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state’s vehicular homicide statute should apply to a driver who crashed into a pedestrian and killed her eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus. In 1986, a year after the Minnesota Supreme Court held that the state’s vehicular homicide law shouldn’t apply to fetuses, the Legislature stepped in to pass a fetal homicide law starting from the moment of conception.

These rulings and laws represented the first cracks in the so-called “born alive” rule, which required a child to be alive and out of the womb before it could be considered the victim of a homicide; the standard had been used by virtually every jurisdiction in the United States for more than a century. In 1987, Clarke Forsythe, a new Americans United for Life lawyer, released a paper (paywall) with model fetal homicide legislation aimed at further unraveling the born-alive standard. He led a team of young pro-life lawyers and advocates who argued that in an era with technology that is capable of determining the precise status of a fetus in utero and even, in rare occasions, the cause of death, the born-alive standard was arcane and immoral. “Modern medicine made that rule obsolete,” Forsythe told me.

By 1994, 17 states had fetal homicide laws on the books. Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and author of the book After Roe, says the particular genius of fetal homicide laws was “you could convince lawmakers to pass them even if they were uneasy with the pro-life movement. They were personhood laws, but they didn’t apply to abortion.”

Mountain ranges and hills surround Uintah County, where Jocelyn grew up. Giant dinosaur statues are scattered throughout the area, an homage to nearby paleontology digs. For decades, many of Uintah’s 38,000 mostly Mormon residents worked extracting oil and shale gas. Jocelyn and her five siblings grew up in Jensen, with a population of fewer than 500, in the northern part of the county. Her mother waitressed and her father worked as a carpenter until a back injury forced him to stop. When Jocelyn was 10, he left without a goodbye. Jocelyn’s mom struggled with addiction, and eventually she moved her family into a small condemned home, with no running water or electricity, on her parents’ property in nearby Naples.

By the time she was in 11th grade, Jocelyn, fed up with her mother’s problems and the family’s living situation, moved into a small apartment in Naples, a town lined with fly-fishing shops, industrial facilities, and motels. She was working toward a welding certificate in high school and had started dating a senior she met in class. Then she found out she was pregnant. She knew her ex was the father and her new boyfriend wouldn’t raise someone else’s kid.

“I kind of spiraled,” Jocelyn remembers. “I started to show, and then I was embarrassed to go to school, so I dropped out.” She moved back in with her mother and brothers. Lights and space heaters were powered by extension cords running from her grandparents’ house. If Jocelyn had to go to the bathroom after the doors were locked for the night, she’d have to pee outside.

She struggled with what she should do, weighing the pressure she felt from her new boyfriend to have an abortion. “I didn’t think abortion was wrong or right or indifferent. I was just a 16-year-old with a boyfriend who was the closest person to me at that time.” Utah’s nearest abortion clinic was about 170 miles away in Salt Lake City, and Jocelyn convinced her mom to drive her the three-plus hours across mountains and snow and pay several hundred dollars to end her pregnancy. According to court records, clinicians told her an abortion would be impossible because she was too far along. At the time, state law banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy; Jocelyn does not recall being so far along. (Later that year, the Legislature moved the limit to viability, usually considered 24 weeks.)

On the ride home, Jocelyn remembered the ultrasound and hearing the tiny heartbeat; she worried that abortion wasn’t for her. Adoption was one option, but she couldn’t imagine giving the baby to an anonymous couple. After being turned away from the clinic, Jocelyn swallowed a handful of pills in a failed suicide attempt. “I tried to just get rid of us both. And when I did survive, there was even more disappointment,” she says. “There were no other options. There was nothing else.”

Following success in the states—26 had passed fetal homicide laws by the end of the ’90s—then-Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and other congressional Republicans introduced a bill in September 1999 that would make it illegal to injure or kill a fetus in the commission of a federal crime. Their proposal, called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, mirrored state laws, with one key difference: Most state laws only protected fetuses starting from some point after the first trimester, but the federal bill sought to cover fetuses from conception. Democrats argued that the measure encroached on abortion rights, and President Bill Clinton threatened to veto it. As a countermeasure, Democrats, led by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), introduced a “single victim” bill that increased federal punishment for harm done to a pregnant woman, without mentioning her fetus. Neither House bill made it over to the Senate, and the same battle played out for the next three and a half years.

Then, on Christmas Eve in 2002, Laci Peterson—supposedly on a fishing trip with her husband, Scott—went missing. She was eight and a half months pregnant with a son she’d named Conner. Scott’s odd behavior quickly made him the focus of the investigation. When a mistress came forward, three months of tabloid coverage ensued before Laci Peterson’s body washed up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. Scott Peterson was eventually convicted of murder. At his sentencing, Laci’s mother read a statement to the court, written in Conner’s voice. “Daddy,” Sharon Rocha read, “why are you killing Mommy and me?” Scott was sentenced to death.

Congressional Republicans had found their rallying cry. In 2003, while the Peterson case was ongoing, Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and Rep. Melissa Hart (R-Pa.) introduced the Unborn Victims of Violence Act yet again, now dubbing it Laci and Conner’s Law. Rocha wrote to the bill’s sponsors to thank them, adding that she hoped for a future where “no surviving mother, grandmother, or other family member is ever again told, ‘We’re sorry, but in the eyes of the law, there is no dead baby.'” On March 25, 2004, the Senate passed the bill in a 61-38 vote.

At the signing ceremony a week later, President George W. Bush praised Laci and Conner’s Law: “Any time an expectant mother is a victim of violence, two lives are in the balance, each deserving protection, and each deserving justice.”

With the federal law in place, fetal homicide legislation gained new momentum. In several states, legislators enlisted a survivor whose pregnancy had ended after an attack, or a deceased woman’s family, to become the public face of their campaign—Alexa’s Law in Kansas, for instance, or Ethan’s Law in North Carolina. Americans United for Life and other pro-life organizations pointed out that domestic violence can spike during pregnancy and argued that fetal homicide laws could deter abusive fathers. With the federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act as a model, the newest state fetal homicide laws protected fetuses from the moment of conception; several states with laws that previously only applied after viability amended them to start earlier in pregnancy.

Unsurprisingly, abortion rights advocates argued the measures were part of a broader push to roll back Roe, this time by pitting women against the fetuses they’re carrying. “There is no way the state can protect embryos and fetuses separate from the woman without subtracting the pregnant woman,” says Lynn Paltrow, the founder of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, warning that if people come to see fetuses as human beings who can be murdered by an angry boyfriend, they will extend that idea to abortions sought or performed by the woman herself.

But pro-life groups dismissed such criticisms, noting that most fetal homicide laws have exceptions for abortion or other actions (intentional or otherwise) a woman might take to end a pregnancy. “Pro-life legislators and pro-life leaders do not support the prosecution of women and will not push for such a policy,” Forsythe, now the acting president of Americans United for Life, wrote in 2010.

In June 2009, a month after her arrest, Jocelyn skipped trial and was advised by her public defender not to challenge the charge of solicitation of murder. She was sentenced to detention until age 21 and transferred to a juvenile secure facility south of Salt Lake City.

After nearly three months behind bars, she went into labor in August and was transported to a hospital in handcuffs and leg shackles. After giving birth, she was allowed to hold and breastfeed her new daughter while locked to the bed. Leaving her baby at the hospital “was the hardest part,” Jocelyn remembers. “Once they start moving and you watch them come out of you, you love them—they are you. And you can’t even fathom life without them. And then they’re gone. And you’re alone again. And people looked at me and told me I deserved it.” Her daughter, born with a clean bill of health, was adopted by Jocelyn’s aunt, who lives two hours from Naples.

Meanwhile, Jocelyn and her mom found a new lawyer, Richard King, who petitioned the juvenile court to reverse her plea deal, arguing that she had broken no law and that her previous lawyer, who had also represented her ex-boyfriend after he was charged with producing pornographic pictures of her, had a conflict of interest. In October 2009, a juvenile court judge, Larry A. Steele, agreed to reverse the deal.

The judge may have rescinded Jocelyn’s plea deal, but she still had to face the state’s charges in a new trial. King’s defense focused on the text of Utah’s 2009 fetal homicide law, which defined homicide as a person causing the death of another person, “including an unborn child”—except when that death is the result of an abortion. He argued that Jocelyn’s actions had been part of an abortion attempt and demanded the charges be dismissed. Steele agreed: “No one should interpret this ruling to mean this court thinks the minor’s conduct was justifiable. What the minor did was terribly wrong. However, only the legislature can determine whether such conduct as set forth here should be criminal.” The state appealed the decision, but Jocelyn was free.

Days after her release, Carl Wimmer, an ex-cop who was then a prominent Mormon state representative, told reporters that he was going to close the “loophole” that Jocelyn’s lawyer successfully used in her defense: “Abortion and right to life is the top issue for me, and it is something I feel very passionate about.” A month later he introduced a new fetal homicide bill that redefined abortion as a medical procedure performed in the care of a physician. “Jocelyn revealed an extreme weakness in the law, that a pregnant woman could do anything she wanted to do—it did not matter how grotesque or brutal—all the way up until the date of birth to kill her unborn child,” Wimmer told The Nation. He boasted that his bill would make Utah the only state to “hold a woman accountable for killing her unborn child” in cases other than a medical abortion. In March 2010, less than a year after Jocelyn’s arrest, Wimmer’s bill became law.

While Aaron Harrison pleaded guilty in 2009 to attempted murder, Jocelyn’s case climbed to the state’s highest court. In December 2011, the Utah Supreme Court sided with the state, reversing the juvenile court’s decision to dismiss the charges. She was once again at square one, this time under the shadow of the new and more punitive law. Though the law wouldn’t apply to her, a draining and very public trial still loomed. She wanted out. Jocelyn pleaded guilty to solicitation of a crime, a second-degree felony. The charge was reduced to a misdemeanor after she completed 60 hours of community service.

Thus far, Utah is the only state that has strengthened a fetal homicide law in direct response to a self-induced abortion. But several recent cases have shown there are prosecutors ready to use the laws to punish women who perform their own abortions. The methods can be desperately brutal. Women have been targeted for shooting themselves, stabbing their bellies, and drinking toxic levels of herbal tea. In 2015, a Tennessee woman named Anna Yocca was charged with attempted first-degree murder after allegedly using a coat hanger to try to end her pregnancy. She took a plea deal this January after spending a year and a half in jail. In 2009, Indiana amended its 1998 fetal homicide law after a robber shot a pregnant bank teller in the abdomen. In 2013, prosecutors used the law against Purvi Patel, who went to the emergency room after taking pills she bought online to end her pregnancy and experiencing heavy bleeding. A pro-life doctor turned her in to the police. After three years behind bars, Patel was convicted of feticide and neglect of a dependent. She was sentenced to 20 years before the state’s appeals court overturned the feticide conviction last September, accusing prosecutors of “unsettling” overreach.

“I don’t think any of us have any sense of how common home abortion is right now,” says Adams. But surveys sampling the approximately 900,000 women who get clinical abortions each year help give a rough sketch. A national study found that about 2.6 percent of patients reported taking drugs, herbs, or vitamins before seeking an abortion. A 2014 study in abortion-hostile Texas found that 7 percent of patients surveyed in 2012 said they’d done something in the hopes of having a miscarriage before coming in. In 2011, after nearly 100 new state-level abortion restrictions had been enacted, a New York Times analysis found that Google searches for “how to have a miscarriage” or “how to do a coat hanger abortion” had jumped 40 percent compared with the year before. The state with the highest rate of searches, Mississippi, has just two abortion providers. The Times noted that a few hundred searches occurred nationwide for information on inducing abortion by being punched in the stomach.

Having an abortion at home, without the supervision of a physician, is not necessarily unsafe. Misoprostol, a prescription drug in America that is given over the counter in other countries, effectively ends upward of 88 percent of pregnancies within the first 12 weeks. When taken with mifepristone, a prescription-only drug usually dispensed under supervision of a doctor, the effectiveness jumps to over 95 percent. But if the Trump years bring further restrictions to choice, the number of women looking to end a pregnancy outside of clinical care seems certain to increase. Even safe drugs—whether purchased from online dark markets or provided by abortion activists—can be misused or abused or fail, sending women to the emergency room to face not only life-threatening complications, but prosecutors backed by fetal homicide laws. “In the new political reality of 2017,” Adams says, “we could foresee an emboldened anti-choice movement that places women who end their own pregnancies in the bull’s-eye.”

Jocelyn never left the Uintah Basin. When I visit, she takes me on a drive up to Split Mountain, the namesake of the detention center she once called home. A massive cliff face that hulks over the Green River, it’s been a place of solace and reflection for Jocelyn over the last eight years. After being released, she searched for structure and found the Jehovah’s Witness faith and a husband who shares it. Her religious convictions have changed her views on abortion: No longer ambivalent, Jocelyn now believes it is wrong. She’s not in touch with the daughter she birthed while incarcerated. In her community, she can’t talk about her own abortion attempt for fear of judgment. For her husband, an auto mechanic in Naples, the decisions Jocelyn made as a teenager are referred to just as “her past.”

With the youngest of their two daughters, not yet a year old, in tow, we walk to the base of Split Mountain, where our figures are dwarfed. Though her views on abortion have changed, Jocelyn remarks that women who end their own pregnancies aren’t “heartless.” She wishes she’d made a different choice that night. But she understands why she didn’t. “It was the fact that I was left up to my own options, which were…nothing,” she says. But she doesn’t judge other young women. “I know being put in that situation, how desperate women can be.”

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She Was Desperate. She Tried to End Her Own Pregnancy. She Was Thrown in Jail

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How Obama Became the Oil President

by NoreenN58l Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Considering all the talk about global warming, peak oil, carbon divestment, and renewable energy, you’d think that oil consumption in the United States would be on a downward path. By now, we should certainly be witnessing real progress toward a post-petroleum economy. As it happens, the opposite is occurring. US oil consumption is on an upward trajectory, climbing by 400,000 barrels per day in 2013 alone—and, if current trends persist, it should rise again both this year and next.

In other words, oil is back. Big time. Signs of its resurgence abound. Despite what you may think, Americans, on average, are driving more miles every day, not fewer, filling ever more fuel tanks with ever more gasoline, and evidently feeling ever less bad about it. The stigma of buying new gas-guzzling SUVs, for instance, seems to have vanished; according to CNN Money, nearly one out of three vehicles sold today is an SUV. As a result of all this, America’s demand for oil grew more than China’s in 2013, the first time that’s happened since 1999.

Bill Mckibben: How Methane Wrecked Obama’s Fracking Gambit

Accompanying all this is a little noticed but crucial shift in White House rhetoric. While President Obama once spoke of the necessity of eliminating our reliance on petroleum as a major source of energy, he now brags about rising US oil output and touts his efforts to further boost production.

Just five years ago, few would have foreseen such a dramatic oil rebound. Many energy experts were then predicting an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline in output. With supplies constantly shrinking, it was said, oil prices would skyrocket and consumers would turn to hybrid vehicles, electric cars, biofuels, and various transportation alternatives. New government policies would be devised to facilitate this shift, providing tax breaks and other incentives for making the switch to renewables.

At that time, a growing concern over climate change and the prospect of further warming due to increased emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels seemed to dim the long-term prospects for petroleum. After all, oil combustion is this country’s single largest source of carbon emissions. This, in turn, clearly meant that any significant attempt to reduce emissions—whether through a carbon tax, a carbon cap-and-trade program, or other such measures—would naturally have to incorporate significant impediments to oil use. President Obama entered the White House promising to enact such a measure, and the House of Representatives passed a modified cap-and-trade bill in 2009. (It failed in the Senate and so never became law.)

The 2008 financial crisis and global economic meltdown only put oil’s future in further doubt. Suddenly cash-conscious Americans began trading in their gas-guzzlers for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, with the Obama administration adding its encouragement. When agreeing to the bailout of General Motors, for instance, the White House insisted that the reorganized company focus on the production of such vehicles. In a similar spirit, the administration’s $787 billion stimulus package favored investment in electric cars, biofuels, high-speed rail, and other petroleum alternatives.

The president’s comments at the time clearly reflected a belief that oil was an “old” form of energy facing inevitable decline. “The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more expensive to extract from the ground,” he declared in 2011. “We can’t afford it when the costs to our economy, our country, and our planet are so high.” Not only did the country need to lessen its dangerous reliance on imported oil, he insisted, but on oil altogether. “The only way for America’s energy supply to be truly secure is by permanently reducing our dependence on oil.”

Obama’s Turnaround on Oil

That was then and this is now, and Obama ain’t talking that way no more. Instead, he regularly boasts of America’s soaring oil output and points to all he’s done and is still doing to further increase domestic production. Thanks to the sort of heightened investment in domestic output his administration has sponsored, he told a cheering Congress in January, “more oil was produced at home than we buy from the rest of the world—the first time that’s happened in nearly twenty years.” Although still offering his usual bow to the dangers of climate change, Obama did not hesitate to promise to facilitate further gains in domestic output.

In accord with his wishes, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced on July 18th that it would reopen a large portion of the waters off the Eastern seaboard, an area stretching all the way from Florida to Delaware, to new oil and natural gas exploration. Under the BOEM plan, energy companies will be allowed to employ advanced seismic technology to locate promising reserves beneath the seabed in preparation for a round of offshore licensing scheduled for 2018. At that point, the companies can bid for and acquire actual drilling leases. Environmental organizations have condemned the plan, claiming the seismic tests often involve the use of sonic blasts that could prove harmful to endangered sea animals, including whales. The truth is, however, that those seismic tests, by opening future fossil fuel deposits to development and exploitation, are likely, in the long run, to hurt human beings at least as much.

Here are some of the other measures recently taken by the administration to boost domestic oil production, according to a recent White House factsheet:

* An increase in the sales of leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. In 2013, the Bureau of Land Management held 30 such sales—the most in a decade—offering 5.7 million acres for lease by industry.

* An increase in the speed with which permits are being issued for actual drilling on federal lands. What’s called “processing time” has, the White House boasts, been cut from 228 days in 2012 to 194 days in 2013.

* The opening up of an additional 59 million acres for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a disastrous BP oil spill in April 2010.

In other words, global warming be damned!

In a turnaround that has gotten next to no attention and remarkably little criticism, President Obama is now making a legacy record for himself that will put the “permanent reduction of our dependence on oil” in its grave. His administration is instead on a drill-baby-drill course to increase production in every way imaginable on US territory, including offshore areas that were long closed to drilling due to environmental concerns.

What explains this dramatic turnaround?

The Rekindled Allure of Oil

The most significant factor behind the renewed popularity of oil has been a revolution in drilling technology. In particular, this involves the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract oil and natural gas from previously inaccessible shale formations. These techniques include the use of drills that can turn sideways after penetrating thin underground shale layers, along with high-pressure water cannons to fracture the surrounding rock and liberate pockets of oil and gas. Until the introduction of these techniques, the hydrocarbons trapped in the shale were prohibitively expensive to produce and so ignored both by industry and the many experts predicting that “peak oil” was in sight.

Most domestic shale “plays” (as they are called in the industry) contain both oil and natural gas. They were first exploited for their gas content because of the greater ease in extracting commercial volumes of that fossil fuel. But when the price of gas collapsed—in part because of a glut of shale gas—many drillers found that they could make more money by redeploying their rigs in oil-rich shales like the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Eagle Ford in West Texas. The result has been a sudden torrent of domestic crude that has brought gasoline prices down (with a resulting increase in gasoline consumption) and created boom-like conditions in several parts of the country.

Prior to the utilization of horizontal drilling and fracking technology, US crude production was indeed facing long-term decline. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the Department of Energy, domestic crude output fell from a peak of 9.6 million barrels per day in 1970 to a low of 5 million barrels in 2008. With the introduction of fracking, however, the numbers started to soar. Total US crude output jumped from 5.7 million barrels per day in 2011 to 7.5 million in 2013. Output in 2014 is projected to be 8.5 million barrels per day, which would represent a remarkable increase of 2.8 million barrels per day in just three years.

The increase is, by the way, the largest posted by any of the world’s oil producers from 2011-2013 and has generated multiple economic benefits for the country, along with significant environmental consequences. For one thing, it has kept gas prices relatively low. They are now averaging about $3.50 per gallon—a lot more than Americans were paying in the 1990s, but a lot less than most experts assumed would be the case in a post-peak-oil economy. This has, of course, spurred both those SUV sales and an increase in recreational driving. (“We were able to take a day-cation because of the lower gas prices,” said Beth Hughes, of a four-hour roundtrip drive with her husband to San Antonio, to visit the Alamo and do some shopping.)

The increased availability of relatively affordable oil has also spurred investment in ancillary industries like petrochemicals and plastics. Petroleum is the basic raw material, or “feedstock,” for a wide variety of subsidiary materials, including ethylene, propylene, and benzene, which in turn are used to make polyesters, plastics, and numerous consumer products. Many chemical firms have built new facilities to convert shale oil and shale gas into these commodities, a spur both to new jobs and greater tax revenues. In addition, with crude oil selling at around $100 per barrel, those extra 2.8 million barrels produced daily will add about $100 billion to the US economy in 2014, a substantial contribution to an otherwise tepid recovery.

Of course, the environmental downside to all this, already significant, could be staggering for the future. The use of hydro-fracking to release all that shale oil has resulted in the diversion of vast quantities of water to energy production, in the process regularly posing a threat to local water supplies. In some drought-affected areas, oil drilling is now competing with farming for access to ever-diminishing supplies of fresh water. The growing use of railroads to carry shale oil—an especially volatile hydrocarbon substance—has also led to several lethal explosions, triggered by accidents involving old and inadequately reinforced tank cars.

Of course, the greatest environmental fallout from the domestic oil boom will be a continuing deluge of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, further bolstering the greenhouse effect and ensuring higher world temperatures for years to come. While emissions from domestic coal use are likely to decline in the years ahead, in part due to new rules being formulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, the expected rise in emissions from oil and natural gas use will wipe out these gains, and so total US emissions are expected to be higher in 2040 than they are today, according to the EIA. As a result, we can expect little progress in international efforts to slow the advance of climate change and a steady increase in the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, fires, droughts, and heat waves.

As seen from Washington, however, the domestic oil rebound is largely a feel-good story and an essential part of an otherwise anemic economic recovery. Putting people back to work, Obama declared in May, “starts with helping businesses create more good jobs. One of the biggest factors in bringing jobs back to America has been our commitment to American energy over the last five years. When I took office, we set out to break our dependence on foreign oil. Today, America is closer to energy independence than we have been in decades.”

“A Stronger Hand”

For the president and many other politicians, increased oil output, however important as a source of economic vitality and job creation, is far more than that. It is also a source of power and prestige, guaranteed to give the United States greater leverage in international affairs.

As Tom Donilon, then the president’s senior adviser on national security, explained in April 2013, “America’s new energy posture allows us to engage from a position of greater strength. Increasing US energy supplies act as a cushion that helps reduce our vulnerability to global supply disruptions and price shocks. It also affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.”

One area where American energy prowess has given us “a stronger hand,” he suggested, was in negotiations with Tehran over the Iranian nuclear program. Because the US is importing less oil, there is a larger pool of foreign oil on which our allies can draw for their needs, which has made it easier to impose tough sanctions on Iran’s petroleum exports—and so wring concessions from Iran’s leadership circle.

Another area where many Washington pundits and politicians believe increased oil and gas production has strengthened the president’s hand lies in the administration’s efforts to impose multilateral sanctions on Russia’s energy companies as a punishment for the Kremlin’s covert backing of anti-government rebels in eastern Ukraine. Although still dependent on Russia for a large share of their energy intake, America’s European allies are feeling somewhat less deferential to Moscow because of the growth in global supplies.

In other words, the striking spurt in domestic oil production has added a patriotic dimension to its already powerful allure.

Collective Schizophrenia

As polls show, most Americans acknowledge the reality of climate change and support efforts to reduce carbon emissions in order avert future climate-induced disasters. California and other states have even taken significant steps to reduce energy-related emissions and the Obama administration has, among other things, announced plans to improve the fuel efficiency of American cars and trucks.

In addition, the president and many in his administration clearly grasp the dangers of climate change—the increasing heat, drought, fiercer storms, rising sea levels, and other perils that, without serious curbs on the combustion of fossil fuels, will make the present look like a utopian moment in human history. Nevertheless, the numbers—from production to consumption—are anything but promising. According to the latest EIA projections, US carbon dioxide emissions from petroleum use will increase by eight million metric tons between 2013 and 2015; such emissions are then expected to level off, at about 2.2 billion tons per year, despite substantial increases in average vehicle fuel efficiency.

With emissions from natural gas expected to rise—the inevitable result of the shale gas boom—and coal emissions experiencing only a modest decline (some of which is offset by rising US exports of coal to be burned elsewhere), total domestic carbon emissions from energy use in 2040 are still predicted to be a devastating 6% higher than they are today. Can there be any question at this point of how this will help ensure the sorts of predicted global temperature increases, with all the ensuing side effects, that every expert knows will be devastating to the planet?

At a national level, such a situation—knowing one thing and doing something else—can only be described as some form of mass delusion or a collective version of schizophrenia. In one part of our collective brain, we are aware that petroleum use must decline sharply to prevent the sorts of global catastrophes that we are only used to seeing in science fiction movies; in another, we retain our affection for driving and gasoline use without giving much thought to the consequences. We have a global warming president presiding over a massive expansion of fossil fuel production. Think of this as a form of collective mental compartmentalization that should frighten us all—and yet from the president on down, it’s remarkable how few seem disturbed by it.

Obviously, this is an unsustainable condition. Eventually, excessive petroleum use will produce such frequent and severe climate effects that no president or energy executive would dare boast of increased petroleum output and none of us would even dream of filling up the gas tank to take a “day-cation” at a distant tourist site. Until we identify and begin treating this state of national schizophrenia, however, we will ensure that a time of mutual pain and hardship is ever more likely.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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How Obama Became the Oil President

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