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Posted 18 July 2013 in
From Domestic Fuel:
This week the American Petroleum Institute (API) kicked off an new anti-ethanol and anti-biofuels TV and print campaign and in a commercial being aired in South Dakota, criticized the increased use of ethanol and E15 as a motor fuel. The 30-second commercials mention Triple A (AAA) and the organization has come out publicly and said the ads misrepresent their position on E15 and is calling for API to have the ads taken down.
“This commercial is the latest in a series of communications on social media and elsewhere which portray AAA as being “anti-ethanol.” This is not the case,” according to AAA’s statement. “AAA South Dakota remains a strong supporter of image002-2the development and use of alternative fuels such as ethanol. The auto club believes ethanol fuels provide motorists with a choice at the pump that promotes U.S. energy independence, supports American and South Dakotan jobs and can save the consumer money.”
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Don’t let the oil industry fool you: AAA doesn’t want to repeal the RFS
Over the weekend, two very different media outlets ran two very different takes on green jobs.
David Leonhardt, writing for The New York Times, begins with a common critique: Green jobs produce more expensive energy, so they’re a net loss for the economy.
Green jobs have long had a whiff of exaggeration to them. The alternative-energy sector may ultimately employ millions of people. But raising the cost of the energy that households and businesses use every day — a necessary effect of helping the climate — is not exactly a recipe for an economic boom.
Not when framed like that, certainly. Leonhardt doesn’t address the built-in economic advantages fossil fuels enjoy, nor the recent examples of price parity between fossils and solar, for example. He’s trying to make a broader point: The climate should be fixed for its own sake, because the economic cost of climate change over the long run will be enormous. The goal is preventing disaster, not worrying about jobs.
This is an easy argument for the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times to make. Contrast Leonhardt with Aaron Alton, as profiled in a thoughtful piece by Brentlin Mock at Gawker.
After an intense six-week training program, the only thing that stands between Aaron Alton and a $90,000 fracking job is a commercial driver’s license. It’s August of 2012. The job, at a natural gas drilling company, is Aaron’s ticket out of Harrisburg, PA.
Waiting at the PennDOT, the state’s motor-vehicle office, Aaron thinks he’s all set until they run his information. They tell him that his driving privileges are suspended. …
A suspended regular license means no commercial license, which means no fracking job. Aaron thinks about his current job at the city’s notorious alternative school for kids labeled delinquent, where he’s overworked and underpaid. He thinks about the teens he counseled there. They are 15-year-olds. Much of their drive is already dissolved. He’s seen many of them buried or hauled off to prison.
Standing at the PennDOT counter, Aaron thinks of his own friends in and out of prison and the few free ones who he’d told that he had finally found an escape hatch in fracking.
Mock portrays another side of the push for green jobs — an effort to break the long-standing link between dirty jobs and workers with no other decent choices. Heavy industry and fossil fuel-burning power plants go where the land is less valuable, often meaning poorer neighborhoods. Not only do those neighborhoods have less political power; they’re eager for high-paying jobs.
“Aaron understood the climate change crisis,” Mock writes. “But it didn’t matter. In places like Harrisburg, people were suffocating, and in the fracking industry — no matter how dirty or dangerous it was — Aaron saw hope.” The inability of green jobs to grow to scale, in part because the pressures and biases that Leonhardt skips over, means that Alton must seize opportunity where it’s presented.
Green jobs projects … were mostly pilot programs in random cities — nothing long-term or widespread like the jobs offered by the fossil fuel industries. In Pennsylvania, coal, the dirtiest of all fuels, was still king. As king, the coal companies did [their] mightiest to keep green jobs in the pilot phase. Together with oil and gas companies, the coal industry did a PR blitz, even trying to convince Americans that they could burn “clean coal.” They also filled Republican candidates’ coffers with millions of dollars to fight clean energy policies. Their goal was to obstruct and delay renewable energy, and block wind and solar from any license to operate.
Environmentalists and most Democrats lined up with the green energy companies, while anti-regulation capitalists and Republicans lined up with the fossil-fuel empires.
While they duked it out, natural gas slowly seeped to the top. And my friend, Aaron Alton, needed a better job and a way out.
In the Times, Leonhardt summarizes his argument: “[T]he strongest economic argument for an aggressive response to climate change is not the much trumpeted windfall of green jobs.” But why not an aggressive response to joblessness leveraging the landfall of climate change? Leonhardt’s economic argument is clearly much different than Alton’s.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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A new, green future awaits the concrete drainage ditch that we know as the Los Angeles River. But it may have to wait for quite a while.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which originally poured all that concrete about 80 years ago (thanks for nothing, dudes), is teaming up with city engineers on a $10 million study of the potential for restoring the river’s ecosystem, creating wetlands for animals and hang-outs for people. From The Wall Street Journal:
The study examines an 11-mile stretch of the river on the city’s east side, where some resilient plants have survived in a narrow, muddy strip of so-called soft bottom at the center of the channel.
Efforts to manipulate the river’s concrete form without losing its flood-control function will be a “delicate balancing act,” said Josephine Axt, the Corps’ local planning chief who is leading the study, known as Alternative with Restoration Benefits and Opportunities for Revitalization, or Arbor.
It’s like “setting the table,” said Omar Brownson, executive director of the L.A. River Revitalization Corp., which coordinates economic-development projects along the river. “We’re creating a more attractive destination for investment.”
Yes, well, what’s a revitalized habitat without the business it attracts? I guess?
The Corps is expected to present the results of the study to the public in June. But that public might not take so kindly to the Corps and their master plans by then. Just last month, the Corps razed dozens of acres of the river’s wildlife habitat along the Sepulveda Basin, seriously pissed off the local water agency, violated the Clean Water Act, and potentially also violated endangered species protections.
State Sen. Kevin de León, one of several local officials who has demanded an explanation from the Corps, said the Sepulveda project “doesn’t bode well” for the future of efforts to revitalize the Los Angeles River’s natural landscape.
The Journal plays down the “Sepulveda incident” with this weird statement: “The federal interest, the public’s desires and a noticeable change in recent years in the way Los Angelenos view the river have cushioned the blow of the Sepulveda Basin shearing.”
If anything, the wetlands razing may just motivate the public to push the Army Corps harder to get this one right.
But even if the Corps cleans up its act, Los Angeles has a long way to go to clean up its river, which watchdog groups have found is periodically contaminated by mercury, arsenic, cyanide, lead, and fecal bacteria.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that L.A. area governments were not responsible for the polluted water that flows through storm drains and into the Los Angeles and nearby San Gabriel Rivers. But, fearing further litigation and fines (lead! fecal bacteria!), the county is looking at less painful ways to fund the clean-up. It is now considering an “ambitious” property tax to pay for pollution remediation, at about $54 per house, and up to $11,000 per big box store, per year. Not surprisingly, it is not terribly popular with the locals.
Without the cash to pay for the infrastructure to filter the water, these are going to be some dirty, dirty wetlands indeed.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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