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You can thank Warren Buffett for many of those exploding oil trains

by kowalski099 Posted on March 5, 2014

You can thank Warren Buffett for many of those exploding oil trains

By

Asa Mathat / Fortune MPW

We’ve written a lot about the dangers of shipping extra–flammable oil in flimsy rail cars that are prone to puncture and explode. Turns out you can blame a fair bit of the problem on billionaire investor Warren Buffett. As the Sightline Institute’s blog reports, “Arguably, he is the single most important person in the world of oil-by-rail.” More from the post:

Most people don’t realize it, but the tank cars that carry crude oil are not owned by the railroads that run them and are only rarely owned by the shippers who use them. In fact, roughly 80 percent of all the tank cars registered in North America are owned by companies that lease the tank cars to shippers. … These lessors … are the ones ultimately responsible for the fact that that the vast majority of oil trains today are largely composed of older models so riddled with obvious flaws that federal safety investigators have for years urged the entire fleet be retrofitted. …

Not only have they avoided pulling the hazardous DOT-111 tank cars out of service to retrofit them, but they have opposed and delayed meaningful federal regulation at every turn.

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway investment group is the biggest player in the tank car leasing business with around 40 percent of the market … The next biggest player, GATX Corp, is scarcely more than half the size. …

Buffett is also a major player in the railroad side of oil-by-rail. Berkshire Hathaway has full ownership of BNSF Railway Company, and BNSF is the biggest railroad player in the Bakken oil region … And BNSF isn’t some side line business for Berkshire Hathaway; it’s a major part of the firm, making up 13 percent of revenues in 2012.

To protect that business, Buffett’s companies and the industry groups they belong to do a lot of lobbying against regulations — very effective lobbying. Sightline points out that other modes of transportation would never get away with such an abysmal safety record:

It doesn’t take much scrutiny to see that oil trains get special treatment. After all, if a jet plane has a battery fire problem, regulators immediately pull it from service and will ground the entire fleet until the manufacturer makes modifications to reduce the risk of fire. If an auto regularly bursts into flame upon impact, the feds issue a recall and mandate retrofits for all the cars with the defect. Yet despite explosion after deadly explosion — and safety report after federal safety report — government regulators, at the urging of the industry groups that represent Buffett’s holdings, have allowed unsafe DOT-111s tank cars to haul crude oil and ethanol.

Buffett admitted this week that “it’s more dangerous to move certain types of crude, certainly, than we thought previously,” but there’s no sign that he’s going to take action to make it any less dangerous.

You might think a man who is making so much money shipping oil by rail would oppose Keystone XL, but Buffett isn’t worried about the pipeline cutting into his business. From The Washington Post:

Buffett … said during a CNBC interview Monday he thought the controversial project was a “good idea for the country.”

Buffett, whose company has a major stake in the railroad company BNSF, said he did not see the pipeline’s construction as a major problem for rail firms. “It’s not that big a competitor,” he said.

Thanks to the epic oil boom, there’s plenty of crude to go around.


Source
The Man Behind the Exploding Trains, Sightline Daily
Buffett and Shultz, allies of Obama and Steyer, endorse Keystone pipeline, The Washington Post

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

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You can thank Warren Buffett for many of those exploding oil trains

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Great Barrier Reef will be smothered with silt, because coal

by GudrunHVOfytumz Posted on January 31, 2014

Great Barrier Reef will be smothered with silt, because coal

By

Shutterstock

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park — a supposedly protected natural area containing thousands of reefs, which together are visible from space and attract nearly $6 billion a year in tourism — is a pretty terrible place to dump loads of silt. But it’s happening: The federal agency that governs the reef approved plans to dump up to 3 million cubic meters of silt that will be dredged from the marine park to help carve a superhighway for tankers ferrying coal to Asia.

It’s the final piece in Australian Prime Minister (and known climate denier) Tony Abbott’s already-approved master plan to dredge the shipping lane, expand an existing coal terminal, and extensively mine the northeastern state of Queensland for coal.

Reuters reports that backers of the coal export project, including two Indian firms and the heiress to an Australian mining empire, hope to deliver an estimated $28 billion of coal to Asian markets once it’s complete.

Dredging a new shipping lane through the reef to deliver all that coal will generate as much as 3 million cubic meters of silt. That’s an abstract number, but, if you can imagine 150,000 dump trucks all dropping loads of sand into the sea, then you have a sense for the volume.

The silt will be dumped 15 miles out to sea from the expanded port at Abbott Point. “It’s important to note the seafloor of the approved disposal area consists of sand, silt, and clay and does not contain coral reefs or seagrass beds,” the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s chair said in a statement Friday.

Scientists and conservationists say that doesn’t matter: Ocean currents are always moving sand around on the sea floor. “The best available science makes it very clear that expansion of the port at Abbot Point will have detrimental effects on the Great Barrier Reef,” 233 of them wrote in a letter to the federal government. “Sediment from dredging can smother corals and seagrasses and expose them to poisons and elevated nutrients.”

It’s worth noting that the U.S. is complicit in Australia’s fossil-fuel export blitz. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a lending body, is providing about $5 billion in financing to international energy companies to help them build a pipeline from the Queensland mainland to the hitherto pristine Curtis Island, which is inside the marine park, and to construct coal-seam gas processing facilities there. These projects will also involve dredging.

It all sounds like an environmental nightmare, but Australia’s über-conservative government wants you to know that the conditions it’s imposing on all these projects “will result in an improvement in water quality.” Awesome. And if you’re willing to believe that, the prime minister has some even better news for you: Everything you have ever heard about climate change is “absolute crap.” Fantastic!


Source
Strict conditions placed on approval for Abbot Point permit, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority approves plan to dump Abbot Point spoil, Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australia permits dredge dumping near Great Barrier Reef for major coal port, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Great Barrier Reef will be smothered with silt, because coal

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The Obama Administration Wants to End Racial Discrimination by Car Dealers. Why Are 35 Dems Getting in the Way?

by Jana9324cuf Posted on January 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Dozens of Democrats are pushing back against an Obama administration effort to curb racial discrimination by car dealerships.

In late March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—the consumer watchdog agency dreamt up by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—issued new, voluntary guidelines aimed at ensuring car dealerships are not illegally ripping off minorities. Since then, 13 Senate Democrats, including Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.); and 22 House Dems, including Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Florida) and Terri Sewell (D-Ala.), have joined 19 House and Senate Republicans in signing letters to the agency objecting to the anti-discrimination measure. Consumer advocates and congressional aides say the lawmakers’ backlash against the anti-discrimination rules is unjustified, and that Dems have backtracked on civil rights in this instance because of the colossal power of the car dealership lobby, which has spent millions lobbying Congress in the months since the CFPB issued these new guidelines.

Auto dealers “wield enormous amounts of power,” one Democratic aide explains. “There’s one in every district. They give a lot of money to charity. They’re on a bunch of boards. They sponsor Little Leagues.”

When a dealership makes a car loan, it often sells the loan to a bank or credit union, which, in return, allows the dealership to mark up the interest rate. Here’s the problem: Some dealerships have been accused of charging higher rates to black and Hispanic customers, potentially costing consumers millions of dollars in overcharges. The CFPB’s anti-discrimination guidance reminds lenders that they are liable under federal law if car dealerships they work with charge higher interest rates to minority borrowers. The guidance suggests that lenders help prevent discrimination by educating dealers, increasing oversight, and either capping dealership interest rates or requiring dealers to charge a flat fee.

Auto dealers are up in arms. If lenders follow the CFPB’s advice, dealership profits could fall by hundreds of dollars per car sold, according to the Department of Justice. Car dealer trade groups claim that the CFPB has not adequately proved that discrimination is a problem in the industry. Dealerships have spent millions lobbying Congress over the past year, including on this very issue. Many Democrats have the auto dealers’ back. In their letters to the CFPB, Dems claim that they appreciate the CFPB’s goal of curbing discrimination by car dealerships. But they echo the dealers’ arguments, and demand that the CFPB provide the detailed methodology it uses to determine that some dealers may be discriminating.

The CFPB maintains that the way it detects discrimination in the auto industry should be no mystery to Congress. These methods, which are similar to those used by the DOJ and other federal banking regulators, have been used in voting rights cases, discrimination cases, and jury selection cases for decades, a CFPB spokeswoman notes. Here’s how it works: Because customer race and ethnicity data is not available for auto loans, the CFPB uses proxies, including geography and surname, to see if lenders are allowing dealerships to charge higher interest rates to minorities. The CFPB has responded to lawmakers’ requests for this methodology in letters, at a public forum on the issue, and on its website.

If lawmakers don’t trust the feds’ definition of discrimination, they can also look to the courts. In December, the DOJ and the CFPB reached a $98 million settlement with Ally Financial and Ally Bank over claims that Ally’s markup policies resulted in illegal discrimination against over 235,000 minority borrowers. At least seven class-action lawsuits have been filed over the past 14 years that allege auto-dealers unfairly overcharged minorities. And “nothing has really changed in the marketplace” to force auto lenders and dealerships to change their practices, says Chris Kukla, the senior counsel for government affairs at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit consumer rights group.

Car dealers have also complained that regulating the interest rates dealerships can charge will increase costs for consumers. Consumer advocates disagree: “I don’t believe…dealers’ ability to mark up prices…in any way benefits consumers,” says Stuart Rossman, director of litigation the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group. Jeff Sovern, a law professor and expert in consumer law at St. John’s University in New York, adds that the low prices some customers have been paying may have been subsidized by the higher prices paid by minorities. “It’s not usually considered a defense that the beneficiaries of racism should keep the lower prices that other groups pay for,” he says.

So why the outcry amongst Democrats? Congressional aides and consumer advocates say that the auto dealer industry’s lobbying efforts are intense. “Dealers are a powerful lobby,” Kukla says. “These people sell things for a living. They’re good at advocating.”

“I’m not surprised that any politician” would cave to the dealerships, Rossman adds. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), an industry trade group, has spent $3.1 million on lobbying in 2013, according to lobbying disclosure forms. “The dealerships made a very concerted push to get members of Congress to sign those letters” criticizing the guidance, Kukla says.

None of the 35 Democrats responded to requests for comment for this story, nor did the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers, another industry trade group. NADA declined to comment.

The oddest aspect of Democrats’ push back on the CFPB anti-discrimination measures, advocates say, is that in issuing the guidance, the CFPB didn’t actually create any new regulation or law. “The funny thing is that… the CFPB is getting hit…because someone is actually enforcing rules already on the books,” says the Dem aide.

“It’s not that controversial,” Rossman adds.

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The Obama Administration Wants to End Racial Discrimination by Car Dealers. Why Are 35 Dems Getting in the Way?

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Safety rules to prevent oil-train explosions delayed

by DeannaDeal Posted on January 17, 2014

Safety rules to prevent oil-train explosions delayed

By

U.S. Department of Transportation

Sounds like we might need to get used to oil-hauling trains exploding. New rules that would require railways to use stronger cars for transporting crude will not be ready until next year, the federal government announced this week.

There are a few reasons why we’re seeing more oil-train explosions these days. The main one is the huge rise in the amount of oil being extracted in the U.S. and then transported by rail to refiners. Also, fracked crude from the Bakken formation in North Dakota is particularly explosive thanks to its higher levels of light hydrocarbons and, possibly, the presence of flammable fracking chemicals. And DOT-111 tanker rail cars, which make up 70 percent of the nation’s tanker fleet, puncture easily. 

Here’s Fuel Fix with an update on forthcoming railcar safety rules:

New regulations that could force older tank cars to be upgraded or phased out are under development, but will not be proposed until Nov. 12 and will be subject to a public comment period until Jan. 12, 2015, according to the Department of Transportation.

However, that initial timeline could shift as the process continues, said Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration spokesman Gordon Delacambre.

If the timeline shifts, expect the rules to be even later.

This is a big disappointment to some lawmakers and others who had hoped that the rules would be drafted in the coming months weeks. From the Twin Cities Pioneer Press:

[North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven (R)] and other federal lawmakers turned up the pressure in the wake of the Dec. 30 crash in Casselton, where 18 DOT-111 cars hauling crude oil ruptured after the train collided with a derailed soybean train, sparking explosions and sending thick plumes of black smoke over the small town.

“It’s disappointing,” Hoeven said Wednesday after the DOT released its schedule. “They need to get going on this.” …

Hoeven said a quicker rollout of regulations is necessary to put the public at ease and let shipping companies know what rules they’ll be working under. …

More than 300,000 DOT-111s are on the rails — 94,000 of which haul hazardous fluids such as crude oil and ethanol, according to the Railway Supply Institute.

There is a bit of good news. Railroad and oil companies agreed on Thursday to take some voluntary steps to make oil trains safer. From The Wall Street Journal:

Any steps the industries take voluntarily would occur much faster than changes imposed by regulators. …

Anthony Foxx, secretary of the Transportation Department, said the railroads agreed to take steps to avoid derailments and reroute trains around high-risk areas. …

The railroads also agreed to “work on a speed reduction plan” for high-risk areas, Mr. Foxx said.

The energy and rail industries also agreed to come up with new recommendations for tank-car fleets in the next 30 days, he said.

For now, if you live near train tracks, keep your fingers crossed and hope for the best.


Source
New regulations for oil on rail cars to come in 2015, Fuel Fix
After North Dakota crash, new crude oil tank car rules not coming until 2015, Pioneer Press
Rail, Oil Industries to Make Safety Changes for Transporting Crude, The Wall Street Journal

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Safety rules to prevent oil-train explosions delayed

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Why Have Investors Given Up on the Real World?

by BettyWhitefoord Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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How should we respond to sustained economic weakness? Brad DeLong has a lengthy post today comparing two approaches. To oversimplify, we have Larry Summers on one side, who believes the answer is higher government spending on infrastructure. On the other side is Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist, who thinks the answer is higher inflation.

In a nutshell, the argument for higher inflation is simple. Right now, with interest rates at slightly above zero and inflation running a little less than 2 percent, real interest rates are about -1 percent. But that’s too high. Given the weakness of the economy, the market-clearing real interest rate is probably around -3 percent. If inflation were running at 4-5 percent, that’s what we’d have, and the economy would recover more quickly.

There are two arguments opposed to this. The first is that central banks have demonstrated that 2 percent inflation is sustainable. But what about 5 percent? Maybe not. If central banks are willing to let inflation get that high, markets might conclude that they’ll respond with even higher inflation if political considerations demand it. Inflationary expectations will go up, the central bank will respond, and soon we’ll be in an inflationary spiral, just like the 1970s.

The second argument is the one Summers makes: sustained low interest rates are almost certain to lead to asset bubbles. So even if higher inflation works in the short run, it’s a recipe for disaster in the long run.

DeLong draws several conclusions from this. He agrees that higher government spending is a good idea—and so do I. The drop in government spending since 2010 has been unprecedented in recent history (see chart below). He’s ambivalent about a higher inflation target, since he agrees that at some level it risks turning into a spiral. (But he’s not sure what that level is.) And finally, he thinks the real demand-side problem is in residential construction, which has plummeted since the housing bubble burst. This could be addressed with policy changes at the FHFA, which might be a better alternative than higher inflation anyway. I have two observations about all this:

Central bankers seem to think that over the past 30 years they’ve demonstrated credibility in restraining inflation, something they’re loath to give up. That’s why they hate the idea of raising their inflation targets above 2 percent. But it strikes me that they may be wrong: what they’ve really done is demonstrate credibility in following the Taylor Rule, which provides a formula-based target for short-term interest rates. But right now, the Taylor Rule suggests that interest rates should be below zero.1 A higher inflation target that’s in service of rigorously following the Taylor Rule might increase the monetary credibility of central banks, not decrease it. (Or, possibly, have no effect at all on their credibility.)
The Summers view that sustained low interest rates lead to bubbles may be correct. But this is only true if there just flatly aren’t enough good real-world investment opportunities available, which would leave investors with no place to put their money except in risky asset plays. DeLong seems to agree with this. When Ryan Avent asks, “Are we really arguing that there aren’t enough good private investment opportunities in America?” DeLong answers, “Yes. We are.”

DeLong has much more to say about all this, and I’m dangerously oversimplifying here. But I’m doing it to make a point. First, I think central banks have a lot of leeway to pursue higher inflation as long as they’re clear about what they’re doing and can credibly say that they’re merely following the same monetary rules they’ve been following for the past three decades. Second, it’s surprising that we haven’t paid more attention to the suggestion that asset bubbles are the result of a (permanent?) condition in which there simply aren’t enough good private investment opportunities. This deserves way more discussion, not just a footnote in a broader essay. If it’s true, surely this is the economic challenge of our day. No matter what else we do, we’re in big trouble if markets simply don’t believe there are enough factories to expand or new companies to invest in. If investors have essentially given up on the real economy, no amount of fiscal or monetary policy will save us.

So why isn’t this getting more discussion?

1Actually, this depends on which version of the Taylor Rule you use. But let’s leave that for another day. For now, it’s enough to say that there’s a conventional version of the Taylor Rule which says real interest rates should be well below zero.

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Why Have Investors Given Up on the Real World?

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How a Local "Ganjapreneur" Bummed Oakland’s High and Cheated the City out of Thousands

by surfikdon Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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Derek Peterson and Dhar Mann (pictured at right)

In 2011, a Lamborghini-driving 26-year-old named Dhar Mann became a national media sensation when he partnered with a Morgan Stanley investment banker in an audacious plan to create weGrow, a vertically integrated marijuana conglomerate better known as the “Walmart of Weed.” Shortly after I wrote the first detailed profile of Mann, however, he split with Morgan Stanley’s Derek Peterson amid mutual accusations of unpaid debts and financial shenanigans. Peterson charged Mann with running “a fucking hydroponzi scheme.”

Now it looks like he wasn’t exaggerating by much. Yesterday, Mann pleaded “no contest” to five felony counts of defrauding the City of Oakland, the Oakland Tribune reports. The scion of a wealthy taxi monopolist and a major local political donor, Mann was accused of pocketing some $44,000 in city redevelopment funds that he was supposed to use to fix up several of his properties. According to court documents, Mann submitted checks to the city that he’d supposedly written to contractors but that were in fact redeposited into his own bank account.

Mann won’t face jail time, but still must resolve an Oakland civil suit seeking $345,000 in civil penalties and damages.

Though weGrow got a lot of media attention, it was never very popular among the Bay Area’s pot cognoscenti, who saw the company’s materialistic and confrontational image as a liability to their wider goal of a truce in the drug war. But now it looks like it was Mann himself, not anti-drug crusaders in the federal government, who planted the seeds of his demise.

Link: 

How a Local "Ganjapreneur" Bummed Oakland’s High and Cheated the City out of Thousands

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Obamacare Has a Few Months Left to Start Working, And It Probably Won’t Get an Extension

by PiperASZcygvte Posted on November 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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I’ve been avoiding speculation about the Obamacare website for the past week or two because, really, there hasn’t been much concrete information to base anything on. The whole exercise feels like the ultimate in bloggish wankery. There’s no real news out there, and spending time either defending Obama or ripping him apart is kind of pointless. Why not just wait and see how things turn out?

Because we’re all humans, that’s why. We don’t need to speculate endlessly about the big Denver-KC showdown on Sunday night either. We could just wait and see who actually wins. But speculation is fun.

That said, concrete information is finally starting to trickle out, and it’s grim. Healthcare.gov has signed up only about 40,000 people so far, compared to early estimates of several hundred thousand.1 That’s pretty effing bad. Still, we all know the website is a horror show, so this isn’t a huge surprise. It just confirms that the website is, indeed, a horror show.

Today, though, we learn that, contrary to President Obama’s promise a couple of weeks ago, the horror show isn’t likely to get fixed by the end of November:

Software problems with the federal online health insurance marketplace, especially in handling high volumes, are proving so stubborn that the system is unlikely to work fully by the end of the month as the White House has promised, according to an official with knowledge of the project.

The insurance exchange is balking when more than 20,000 to 30,000 people attempt to use it at the same time — about half its intended capacity, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal information. And CGI Federal, the main contractor that built the site, has succeeded in repairing only about six of every 10 of the defects it has addressed so far.

….This inside view of the halting nature of HealthCare.gov repairs is emerging as the insurance industry is working behind the scenes on contingency plans, in case the site continues to have problems….The need for what the official called a “divide-and-conquer strategy” for enrollment puts more emphasis on alternative methods for buying health plans. These methods include federal call centers and insurance companies that sell policies directly to customers — paths that are hobbled for now by some of the same technical problems affecting the federal Web site.

And this is all coming on top of screaming from middle-class individual insurance buyers—the kind of people Congress actually cares about—that their rates are going up considerably thanks to Obamacare. Senate Democrats might be able to stand fast against this pressure if the program was actually working smoothly, but the combination of voter anger and technical disaster is wearing them down. At this point, they might very well acquiesce to some kind of Republican “fix” that, we can be sure, will be very precisely calculated to do maximum damage to the goals of Obamacare. That would add disaster on top of disaster.

Sabotage works. But it works a lot better when the bridge is teetering in the first place. I still don’t know that I can think of anything very insightful to say about any of this, but it’s certainly a low point for Obama’s presidency—and the polls are finally catching up to that. I know it’s melodramatic to say this, but his presidency really does depend on the next few months. I sure hope everyone in the administration is taking this as seriously as they should.

1This sentence originally said the early estimate was 500,000 signups, but that was for both state and federal exchanges. There was no separate estimate just for the federal exchange. However, since the federal exchange covers more than half the population, it’s reasonable to figure that early hopes were for something on the order of 300,000 signups.

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Obamacare Has a Few Months Left to Start Working, And It Probably Won’t Get an Extension

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Bill de Blasio’s Biggest Challenge: Climate Change

by Damian7899 Posted on November 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Bill de Blasio, New York City’s new mayor-elect, didn’t spend much time during the campaign talking about climate change, but he’ll likely spend a lot of his time at City Hall dealing with it.

New York finds itself these days with an unusual conundrum: Its biggest problems are largely the byproduct of its biggest successes. Just 20 years ago, New York was, like American cities generally, blighted by rampant crime and less populated than at its mid-century heyday.

Today, New York City’s central challenge is one that virtually any other city would love to have: Too many rich people want to live there. But Wall Street bankers, trust funders, and wealthy foreigners looking for a pied-à-terre have driven up the price of housing to levels that threaten to eject the creative classes that have powered New York’s renaissance. The high cost of housing is also the main reason New York’s homeless population is at an all-time high.

The massive gap between rich and poor, the loss of diversity in the most centrally located neighborhoods, and the lack of affordable housing were the problems identified by de Blasio in his “tale of two cities” campaign spiel. De Blasio won in a landslide Tuesday on a promise to increase the supply of affordable housing, raise taxes on the very wealthy, and expand educational opportunities for those left behind by New York’s current boom. Meanwhile, crime has been so successfully tamed—the murder rate is one-fifth of its 1991 peak—that de Blasio has proposed to reduce the use of aggressive policing tactics such as stop-and-frisk.

But other serious challenges loom in New York’s future, even though they were hardly mentioned in this year’s mayoral campaign. Indeed, they are arguably already here: extreme weather events caused by climate change, and felt especially hard in coastal areas developed during the city’s boom years.

New York is built on a collection of islands, with 520 miles of coastline and entire neighborhoods constructed on landfill. One year ago, Hurricane Sandy flooded New York’s low-lying neighborhoods, from Lower Manhattan to the Rockaways in southeastern Queens, leaving elderly, impoverished New Yorkers stranded in high-rise housing projects without power for weeks. Some families are still displaced, living seven to a hotel room.

Global warming leads to melting polar ice caps, which lead to higher sea levels. Global warming is also raising surface water temperatures, leading to larger, more frequent storms. The former could permanently submerge miles of New York’s currently inhabited land, while the latter threatens to periodically topple buildings, destroy power stations, and knock trees onto cars.

New York Harbor is where the Hudson River meets the Atlantic Ocean, and what we call the East and lower Hudson Rivers are actually tidal estuaries. Much of New York’s recent economic and real estate development has been in the very same waterfront areas that are most at risk from climate change. Tribeca, DUMBO, and Red Hook have seen former waterfront warehouses filled first with artists and then well-heeled professionals. A year ago, they saw neck-high water flowing through their streets.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg, aware of the urgent need for housing, has encouraged the development of New York’s waterfront neighborhoods. After Sandy, the Bloomberg administration created the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, which produced a massive report, released in June. The report found that the next hurricane could be even worse: “With greater winds and more rain, Sandy could have had an even more serious impact on the areas of Staten Island, Southern Brooklyn, and South Queens that experienced the most devastation during the storm. And while Sandy brought the full force of its impact at high tide for these southernmost areas of the city, it hit the area around western Long Island Sound almost exactly at low tide. As a consequence, parts of the Bronx, Northern Queens, and East Harlem were not as affected as they could have been.”

But Sandy was plenty bad and its effects will last for years to come. On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Metropolitan Transit Authority will be forced to continue cutting back service and spending billions of dollars for years to come to deal with the damage Sandy wrought. While the MTA got the subways running again within days, it has recently had to shut down stretches of the R and G lines to repair tunnels that were flooded. There will be an estimated $3 billion worth of repair work for each of the next two years, about double what would otherwise have been needed.

New York cannot afford to be unprepared for climate change. As Bloomberg’s report lays out, the city must invest in a wide array of both hard and soft anti-flooding infrastructure improvements. Buildings must be elevated, shorelines must be regraded, beachfront boardwalks must be rebuilt with gradual rises in elevation. Buildings must move their power supplies upward, while neighborhoods must move their power lines downward, wrapping them in water-resistant materials. Sidewalks will have to be made permeable, to wick floodwater back out to sea. Meanwhile, the city must continue its efforts to be a global leader in reducing its own carbon footprint.

Though he vaguely promised to adhere to Bloomberg’s climate change agenda, de Blasio didn’t make climate preparedness an issue in his campaign. But it will likely be the central challenge of his mayoralty, and his successor’s as well.

De Blasio said in his victory address that “the city has chosen a progressive path” in electing him. If he really wants to help all New Yorkers thrive, he’ll get as serious about climate change as he is about economic inequality. Reducing the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and preparing its neighborhoods for storms and rising seas is a moral obligation for a self-described progressive, no less so than housing the city’s homeless, enhancing its social mobility, or welcoming its undocumented immigrants. And climate adaptation is a pragmatic imperative too. It will be expensive, but as Sandy demonstrated, failure to invest on the front end will cost even more later on.

Source:  

Bill de Blasio’s Biggest Challenge: Climate Change

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Ballot effort to ban tar-sands oil from Maine city appears to have failed

by MoniqueFQI Posted on November 6, 2013

Ballot effort to ban tar-sands oil from Maine city appears to have failed

By

Voters in South Portland, Maine, split like a tar-sands pipeline on Tuesday over whether to allow tar-sands oil to be funneled through their city and loaded onto ships.

But it appears that a ballot initiative that would have prevented dockworkers from handling the Canadian crude failed by a small margin. The Waterfront Protection Ordinance [PDF] was supported by 4,261 voters and opposed by 4,453. Backers might request a recount.

The Bangor Daily News reports:

The ordinance sought to prevent the expansion of petroleum-related activities on the South Portland waterfront and, as a result, the potential transportation of tar sands through a 236-mile pipeline, owned by the Portland Pipe Line Corp., that runs from Montreal, through New Hampshire and into western Maine, where it passes Sebago Lake on its way to South Portland’s waterfront. …

The Portland Pipe Line Corp. has not officially proposed any such project, but [the company’s CEO] in the past has expressed interest in reversing the flow of its pipeline to carry tar sands from Montreal to South Portland harbor, where it would be loaded onto refinery-bound ships. Currently, Portland Pipe Line pumps crude oil from tankers that arrive in South Portland to refineries in the Montreal area, as it has done since 1941. …

Proponents of the waterfront protection ordinance argued that bringing tar sands into Maine, via a path that would take it past Sebago Lake, would be an environmental hazard. In addition, those in the pro-ordinance camp cited the potential increase of air pollution caused by the need to burn off toxic chemicals at the pier before the tar sands could be pumped onto the tankers.

Best of luck with that recount, folks.


Source
South Portland narrowly rejects attempt to ban ‘tar sands oil’ from waterfront, Bangor Daily News

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Ballot effort to ban tar-sands oil from Maine city appears to have failed

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Oil and gas train runs off tracks, explodes in Canada — again

by 0dyqe2k7 Posted on October 21, 2013

Oil and gas train runs off tracks, explodes in Canada — again

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Another train loaded with fossil fuels derailed in Canada over the weekend, triggering explosions and fueling a big fire.

Reuters

Firefighters did not bother battling the flames at the accident near Edmonton in Alberta. Instead, they allowed the propane that was leaking from ruptured rail cars to burn itself out. Nobody was hurt, but a nearby town was evacuated. From a weekend Globe and Mail report:

The train belongs to Canadian National Railway Co. It derailed in Gainford, a village about 90 kilometres west of Alberta’s capital, at around 1 a.m. MT Saturday. The train was en route to Vancouver from Edmonton.

Thirteen tanker cars went off the track, according to Louis-Antoine Paquin, a spokesman for CN. Nine of those are pressurized tank cars filled with liquefied petroleum gas in the form of propane, and three of them are on fire.

Four of the derailed tank cars are loaded with oil and have “no indications of any leaks,” he said. Mr. Paquin would not say to whom the shipment belonged.

The accident comes just a few months after a train derailment and explosion in Quebec killed dozens of people and leveled a town. As the North American energy industry booms, more oil and gas are being transported by rail — and that’s leading to more accidents. From Bloomberg:

The [rail] industry is drawing heightened attention after a train carrying oil jumped the tracks and exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in July, killing 47.

Railroads are facing new rules that may raise costs as energy companies move more oil on trains amid delays in building new pipelines such as TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL. Across the continent, trains are forecast to move as much as 2 million barrels a day by the end of 2014, according to Calgary-based pipeline operator TransCanada.

Canadian National Railway Chief Operating Officer Jim Vena told reporters that his company operates a safe railroad. “But we do have incidents,” he added. And those incidents can be explosive when shipments of fossil fuels are involved.


Source
CN Rail Cars Burning After Yesterday’s Alberta Derailment, Bloomberg
Train derailment, explosions force evacuation of Alberta community, The Globe and Mail

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Oil and gas train runs off tracks, explodes in Canada — again

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