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Animal Rights Groups Challenge Utah’s Ag Gag Law

by 2lgax8lh Posted on July 25, 2013

Mother Jones

Animal rights activists filed a civil lawsuit on Monday contesting the constitutionality of a Utah law that bans recording at an agricultural facility without the owner’s consent. The suit, which asks the court to strike down a law that Gov. Gary Herbert (R) signed in March 2012, is the first challenge to this type of “ag gag” law.

The plaintiffs in the suit include PETA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), environmental journalist Will Potter, and animal rights activist Amy Meyer. Meyer was charged with violating Utah’s law in February after she filmed a tractor carrying away a downed cow outside a meatpacking facility. She was the first person to face prosecution under an ag gag law in the US. The charges against her were later dropped because she was standing on public property while filming, but Meyer wants to prevent future charges against her and other activists.

“Utah should be ashamed of itself for passing a law to keep animal abuse a secret,” Jeff Kerr, general counsel for PETA, told Mother Jones. “The Utah legislature should be passing laws to put cameras in slaughterhouses and factory farms to expose and end abuse, as opposed to keeping it secret to protect their profits.”


Gagged by Big Ag


You Won’t Believe What Pork Producers Do to Pregnant Pigs


Has Your State Outlawed Blowing the Whistle on Factory Farm Abuses?


Timeline: Big Ag’s Campaign to Shut Up Its Critics


The Cruelest Show on Earth

Utah was one of four states to pass laws criminalizing whistleblowing on agricultural facilities in 2012. In a recent feature for Mother Jones, Ted Genoways investigated the spread of so-called “ag gag” laws, which have been introduced in 12 more states in 2013. A total of eight states have now passed this type of legislation.

In Iowa, the law prohibits people from obtaining employment under false pretenses, like providing a false name or lying about employment history, in order to film animal abuse. But Utah’s law is even stricter, making it illegal to seek employment at an agricultural facility with the intention of creating a recording inside the facility, even if the prospective employee does not provide false information on the job application. Justin Marceau, a lawyer for ALDF, said the groups decided to challenge Utah’s law first because the charges brought against Meyer earlier this year show that “police and prosecutors are serious about enforcing it” in the state.

The complaint, which names Utah Attorney General John Swallow and Gov. Herbert as defendants, alleges that the law’s primary purpose is to “stifle political debate about modern animal agriculture by criminalizing the creation of videos or photos from within the industry made without the express consent of the industry.” The law also prevents the public and government officials from “learning about violations of laws and regulations designed to ensure a safe food supply and to minimize animal cruelty,” the complaint argues.

The plaintiffs say the law violates the Constitution. “The statute takes a content- or viewpoint-based discrimination, singling out certain types of speech or messages for less protection,” said Marceau, who is also a constitutional law professor at the University of Denver.

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Animal Rights Groups Challenge Utah’s Ag Gag Law

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Reuters’ Climate Coverage Slashed Under “Skeptic” Editor

by qdyedut Posted on July 24, 2013

Mother Jones

Last week, former Reuters reporter David Fogarty published a scathing letter online accusing his former employer of abandoning coverage of climate change.

Fogarty, who had been covering climate change in Asia, said he’d been told climate change was no longer a top-priority issue for the wire service. Fogarty described one high-level editor, Paul Ingrassia, as a climate skeptic and said that it became increasingly difficult to publish stories on global warming under his leadership:

In April last year, Paul Ingrassia (then deputy editor-in-chief) and I met and had a chat at a company function. He told me he was a climate change sceptic. Not a rabid sceptic, just someone who wanted to see more evidence mankind was changing the global climate.
Progressively, getting any climate change-themed story published got harder. It was a lottery. Some desk editors happily subbed and pushed the button. Others agonised and asked a million questions. Debate on some story ideas generated endless bureaucracy by editors frightened to take a decision, reflecting a different type of climate within Reuters – the climate of fear.
By mid-October, I was informed that climate change just wasn’t a big story for the present, but that it would be if there was a significant shift in global policy, such as the US introducing an emissions cap-and-trade system.
Very soon after that conversation I was told my climate change role was abolished.

On Tuesday, Media Matters published an analysis of Reuters’ climate coverage before and during Ingrassia’s tenure that seems to back up Fogarty’s claims. Their analysis found a 48-percent drop in the number of climate stories after the editor started:

Media Matters

Reuters responded previously to Fogarty’s allegations by saying that “there has been no change in our editorial policy” and the wire service “is committed to providing fair and independent coverage of climate change.”

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Reuters’ Climate Coverage Slashed Under “Skeptic” Editor

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Climate Scientist Prevails in First Round of Defamation Suit Against Conservative Bloggers

by BakenKesselring341 Posted on July 24, 2013

Mother Jones

A judge in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia is allowing a defamation suit that climate scientist Michael Mann filed against conservative commentators to move forward.

Last year, Mann sued the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute over blog posts accusing him of lying about climate science. The NRO post called his research “fraudulent,” and the CEI post accused him of “scientific misconduct.” NRO also twice quoted another blogger who referred to Mann as “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” comparing him to the Pennsylvania State University football coach convicted of child molestation last year.

Blue Marble readers have certainly heard Mann’s story before. The Penn State climate scientist has been the subject of a relentless assault from climate skeptics over the years, largely tracing back to a chart of global temperature records that he coauthored that showed a sharp uptick in the industrial era.

The judge issued two decisions on July 19 allowing Mann’s suits to go forward. The plaintiffs had each filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that the First Amendment protects their right to say that sort of stuff online. But the judge didn’t agree. Here’s a key part of the decision on the CEI suit (via Climate Science Watch) in which the judge asserts that the blogger was not just stating opinions, but that he was making factual claims about Mann’s work that could be proven false:

Defendants argue that the accusation that Plaintiff’s work is fraudulent may not necessarily be taken as based in fact because the writers for the publication are tasked with and posed to view work critically and interpose (brutally) honest commentary. In this case, however, the evidence before the Court, at this stage, demonstrates something more and different than honest or even brutally honest commentary.

The judge continued:

Plaintiff has been investigated several times and his work has been found to be accurate. In fact, some of these investigations have been due to the accusations made by the CEI Defendants. It follows that if anyone should be aware of the accuracy (or findings that the work of Plaintiff is sound), it would be the CEI Defendants. Thus, it is fair to say that the CEI Defendants continue to criticize Plaintiff due to a reckless disregard for truth. Criticism of Plaintiff’s work may be fair and he and his work may be put to the test. Where, however the CEI Defendants consistently claim that Plaintiff’s work is inaccurate (despite being proven as accurate) then there is a strong probability that the CEI Defendants disregarded the falsity of their statements and did so with reckless disregard.

The full National Review ruling is here and the CEI ruling here. The parties are scheduled to be back in court on September 27.

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Climate Scientist Prevails in First Round of Defamation Suit Against Conservative Bloggers

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The Alberta Oil Sands Have Been Leaking for 9 Weeks

by h0rt67bx11 Posted on July 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nine weeks ago, an oil leak started at a tar sands extraction operation in Cold Lake, Alberta, and it’s showing no signs of stopping.

On Friday, the Toronto Star reported that an anonymous government scientist who had been to the spill site—which is operated by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.—warned that the leak wasn’t going away. “Everybody at the company and in government is freaking out about this,” the scientist told the Star. “We don’t understand what happened. Nobody really understands how to stop it from leaking, or if they do they haven’t put the measures into place.” The Star reported that 26,000 barrels of watery tar have been removed from the site.

The impacted area spans some 30 acres of swampy forest, said Bob Curran, a spokesperson for the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), which oversees these sites. According to the Star, pictures and the documents provided by the scientist show that dozens of animals, including loons and beavers, have been killed, and some 60,000 pounds of contaminated vegetation have been removed. (You can see the pictures at the Star‘s website.)

Curran confirmed to Mother Jones that the leak was ongoing as of Tuesday afternoon and said AER was working with the company on a plan to contain the damage. He added that he couldn’t make a firm assessment of what caused the leak until after AER had completed its investigation. “We don’t get into probable causes,” he explained. But he did say that AER was concerned, adding that the leak was “very uncommon—which is why we’ve responded the way we have.”

In response to specific questions about the spill, the company sent Mother Jones a previously prepared statement: “The areas have been secured and the emulsion is being managed with clean up, recovery and reclamation activities well underway. The presence of emulsion on the surface does not pose a health or human safety risk. The sites are located in a remote area which has restricted access to the public. The emulsion is being effectively cleaned up with manageable environmental impact. Canadian Natural has existing groundwater monitoring in place and we are undertaking aquatic and sediment sampling to monitor and mitigate any potential impacts. As part of our wildlife mitigation program, wildlife deterrents have been deployed in the area to protect wildlife…We are investigating the likely cause of the occurrence, which we believe to be mechanical.”

The Primrose bitumen emulsion site, where the leak occurred, sits about halfway up Alberta’s eastern border and pulls about 100,000 barrels of bitumen—a thick, heavy tar that can be refined into petroleum—out of the ground every day. But unlike the tar sand mines that have scarred the landscape of northern Alberta and added fuel to the Keystone XL controversy, the Primrose site injects millions of gallons of pressurized steam hundreds of feet into the ground to heat and loosen the heavy, viscous tar, and then pumps it out, using a process called cyclic steam stimulation (CSS). Eighty percent of the bitumen that can currently be extracted is only accessible through steam extraction. (CSS is one of a few methods of steam extraction.) Although steam extraction has been touted as more environmentally friendly, it has also been shown to release more CO2 than its savage-looking cousin.

There have been accidents before with steam injection mining. At another kind of steam injection site, the high pressure at which the steam is injected exceeded what the terrain could bear and blasted wild-looking craters, hundreds of feet wide, into the landscape.

Curran said that although the current leak is extremely unusual, a similar—but smaller—incident occurred at Primrose back in 2009. In that case, tar started bubbling out of “thin fissures” in the ground near the wellhead. According to a report from the Energy Resources Conservation Board—an oversight agency that was folded into AER last year—new limits on steam pressure were imposed, and extraction was allowed to resume.

But on May 21, something new went wrong at the Primrose site. According to Curran, springs of watery bitumen started popping up, seeping out of the earth. When the first three appeared, AER shut down nearby steam injection. When a fourth appeared in a body of water close by, AER shut down all injection within a kilometer of the leaks, and curtailed adjacent steaming operations. “The first three are just leaking right there at the surface,” Curran says. “Small cracks in the ground, just kind of bubbling out.”

It’s unclear what long-term consequences might result from the spill. “They don’t know where this emulsion has gone, whether it has impacted groundwater,” says Chris Severson-Baker, managing director of the Pembina Institute, a nonprofit group that studies the impacts of tar sand mining. According to Severson-Baker, the question is what will happen if the geology at Primrose is to blame. “If the problem is inherent to the project itself, are they going to remove the permits for the project?” Even so, he claims the damage might already be done. “At this point, what can actually be done to prevent the impact from continuing to occur? I don’t think there is anything that can be done.”

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The Alberta Oil Sands Have Been Leaking for 9 Weeks

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Income Inequality and the Fracking Boom

by Justin Thomas Posted on July 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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The New York Times had a big feature on Monday looking at how where you live can affect your upward mobility in the US. Researchers from Harvard University and UC Berkeley found stark geographical differences in the likelihood that children will earn more than their parents did, which my colleague Erika Eichelberger covered yesterday.

The researchers looked at millions of tax records and compared the 2011 earnings of people born in 1980 and 1981 to that of their parents. They found that a variety of factors influence social mobility—things like how segregated a town is, the quality of the public school system, and the affordability of local colleges. But one thing that stuck out to me was the high social mobility in places like North Dakota and eastern Montana, which don’t really seem to have many advantages on those fronts. (More than two-thirds of North Dakota public schools failed to meet federal standards this year, for example.) But they do happen to be places with heavy oil development right now, which the NYT article doesn’t really talk about at all.

You can see here that the blue regions of high income mobility fall almost right on top of the Bakken Formation, which has seen a boom in employment and earnings in the past six years:

New York Times

Energy Information Administration

The area around Williston, ND, has the highest chance that a child raised on the bottom fifth of the income scale had made it to the top fifth—33.1 percent—of anywhere in the country. This gibes with the previous news stories about local economies now flooded with cash thanks to the oil boom, which started around 2008 with the advent of new fracking technology.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry also noticed this trend. His piece ends with the declaration that the Bakken Formation “is bringing wealth, prosperity, jobs and upward income mobility to America’s ‘economic miracle state.'”

I would classify it more cautiously. The study looks at a particular year—2011—when the boom near its peak. But a boom is just that—it doesn’t last forever. Nor can every other part of the US rely on tapping into massive oil reserves beneath it as the way to solve income inequality.

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Income Inequality and the Fracking Boom

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US Won’t Fund a Massive Coal Plant in Vietnam

by jp19gkx Posted on July 19, 2013

Mother Jones

On Thursday, the board of the US Export-Import Bank voted against backing a new coal-fired power plant in Vietnam. The 1,200 megawatt Thai Binh Two plant was the first test of one of the policy changes President Barack Obama laid out in his big climate speech last month.

Reuters reports that Ex-Im said the decision came after “careful environmental review.” In his speech, Obama called for an end to public funding for new coal plants “unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there’s no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity.”

As I’ve reported here before, the US has loaned millions of dollars to energy projects abroad through Ex-Im, like the $805 million it loaned to a massive coal plant in South Africa in 2011. Despite a stated commitment to evaluating the greenhouse gas emissions from each project, Ex-Im loaned $9.6 billion to fossil-fuel projects in 2012, which was almost twice as much as it gave in 2011, according to data that the environmental group Pacific Environment compiled.

Earlier this week, five environmental groups wrote to President Obama, the head of Ex-Im, and its board members asking the bank to turn down the request for Thai Binh Two. “This dirty coal plan will emit unacceptable air pollution that will worsen climate disruption and poison local communities,” they wrote. The decision, they said, would be “the first crucial test case” for Obama’s climate plan.

Thus, turning down the Vietnam plant is a pretty big deal. “It has significance far beyond this project because it sends a message to the international community that financing dirty coal is no longer acceptable practice,” said Doug Norlen, policy director at Pacific Environment. “The impact will spread.”

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US Won’t Fund a Massive Coal Plant in Vietnam

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Climate-Related Power Outages Aren’t Just a Coastal Problem

by Adan Baird Posted on July 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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

Eerie images of flooded, pitch-black lower Manhattan following Superstorm Sandy made it clear just how stark an effect climate change and extreme weather can have on our everyday access to electricity.

A report from the US Department of Energy released on last week shows that New York City and other coastal regions aren’t the only ones at risk. And it’s not just a question of the future. No American region, it turns out, has been exempt from the possibility of mass power outages. The report focuses on three major causes: rising temperatures; wider-spread, more severe droughts; and more devastating flooding, storms, and sea level rises.

DOE also created a map of energy and power-related disruptions over the past decade that experts have attributed to large-scale, long-term disruptions in climate and weather patterns (for the full, interactive map, click here).

Department of Energy

Several memorable mass power failures make the list, including Sandy, 2004’s Hurricane Jeanne, and this February’s major New England blizzard. The map also includes less-publicized and less obviously catastrophic events in which climate change had an impact on the US power grid. For example, drought conditions and low water levels on the Mississippi River last summer made it difficult for barges to transport resources like coal and petroleum. On the other end of the spectrum, flooding of the Yellowstone River in Montana ripped open an oil pipeline in July 2011, causing $135 million in property damages.

Droughts and extreme heat have made it more difficult for power plants to do their job. Storms and rising sea levels put the physical power grid, including power plants and individual power lines, at risk in places ranging from coastal communities to Tornado Alley. And, to make it all worse, rising temperatures will continue to put an ever-increasing strain on electricity resources.

As part of the climate change initiative launched in June by President Obama, the report offers several recommendations to help mitigate these trends. Long-term suggestions include new technologies to make power plants more efficient, increased emergency back-up systems for local power grids, and strategies to reduce the amount of energy consumers need.

In the meantime, it’s clear that inland communities have as much to worry about in terms of climate change as the coasts.

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Climate-Related Power Outages Aren’t Just a Coastal Problem

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Map: Oysters, Reefs, and Swamps Protect Billions’ Worth of Real Estate—for Free

by donkorleone842 Posted on July 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Among the hundreds of recommendations listed in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $20 billion plan to protect New York from climate change is a call to stock up on oysters. Not the kind you’d want to knock back with a nice pilsner on a Friday afternoon: The idea is to build large underwater oyster reefs around the harbor that could prevent coastal erosion and absorb storm surges. “Soft” infrastructure like this—reefs, wetlands, dunes, and other “natural” systems—is gaining in popularity over “hard” levees and sea walls as an effective way to insulate cities from sea level rise.

Turns out, some of the best of these defenses might already be in place: Yesterday the journal Nature published the first-ever nationwide maps that reveal just how much existing coastal habitats are going to save our butts from rising seas and wild storms. Remove reefs, coastal forests, marshes, kelp beds, and other coastal habitats, the study finds, and twice as much coastline and 1.4 million more people will be highly exposed to climate risks.

Stanford marine ecologist Katie Arkema and her colleagues pulled a vast trove of data—Census Bureau population stats; property values from real estate site Zillow; wave and wind exposure data from NOAA; published climate models; and maps of coastal ecosystems from the scientific literature—and mixed them together to visualize where these natural systems offer the most, or least, protection.

The map below shows where the greatest risk from sea level rise and storm surge will be in 2100, based on models from the 2013 National Climate Assessment. Red areas represent not just places where sea levels are projected to rise the most, but also factor in the presence of protective offshore habitats; the type of shoreline (beach, cliff, etc.); and the spot’s exposure to wind, waves, and other weather. Coastal southern Florida, for example, which is generally expected to get inundated by sea level rise, actually appears yellow, because of its abundant ocean-absorbing wetlands. Except Miami, that is: That city, the little red dot at the bottom right corner of the state, is still screwed. But things could be worse. The inset bar graph shows how many more people would be in high-risk red areas if those natural barriers were removed; in Florida, roughly an additional 300,000 people would be exposed, in New York another 300,000.

Courtesy Nature

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Map: Oysters, Reefs, and Swamps Protect Billions’ Worth of Real Estate—for Free

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Conservative Climate Hawks to GOP: Wake the Hell Up

by Abe Smith Posted on July 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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Eli Lehrer wants conservatives to take global warming seriously. He’s the president of the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank whose board includes former South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis—a celebrated conservative apostate on climate change—and another freethinking conservative, David Frum.

Recently, Lehrer took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to make the conservative case for a carbon tax (while also criticizing President Obama’s recent climate proposals). “Rather than pretend climate change isn’t a problem, there are ample opportunities for Republicans to point out the obvious flaws in the left’s plans to deal with it and offer alternatives of their own,” writes Lehrer. He adds that the scientific debate over whether humans are causing climate change is pretty much over:

Nobody seriously involved in the policy debate over climate change—not even those the left unfairly labels as “deniers”—actually denies that humans influence global climate. There’s also no dispute that the Earth is warmer than it was before the Industrial Revolution or that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases can trap heat energy.

Unfortunately, however, it looks like many other influential voices on the right are still trying to find “scientific” reasons to discount or minimize global warming.

Lately, a favored argument is to suggest that global warming may have stopped after the year 1998. Versions of this claim were articulated by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, and numerous others in response to Obama’s recent climate speech. Or as Krauthammer put it: “Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years—a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.”

This is very misleading. First, if you’re simply looking at record temperature years, then 2010 and 2005 both beat 1998 for the highest global average temperature, according to NASA. The World Meteorological Organization agrees that 2010 is the hottest year on record, “followed closely by 2005.” The WMO also notes that the 2000s were the hottest decade on record (see graphic above).

A more sophisticated version of this latest “skeptic” argument is to note that the rate of global warming in the last 15 years has been slower, or has been “leveling off.” But as the blog Skeptical Science points out, that’s only true for atmospheric temperatures—which, in turn, only reflect a small part of the overall global warming picture. Warming of other parts of the planet, and especially the oceans, proceeds apace.

“Conservatives should care about global warming,” writes Lehrer at the end of his Weekly Standard article. Alas, many still seem to be looking for a reason not to.

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Conservative Climate Hawks to GOP: Wake the Hell Up

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The Coal Industry Knows That Enviros Are Winning

by Sheeritwern Posted on July 5, 2013

Mother Jones

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The coal industry is worried about environmental threats. Not threats like climate change, superstorms, or wildfires. Threats posed by environmentalists.

In May, the American Coal Council—an industry group whose membership includes the biggest coal producers and consumers in the US—hosted a webinar called “What Environmental Activists Are Planning for Coal in 2013.” As the invitation put it, “Using social media and community organization tactics, these groups are savvy, motivated and may be off your radar.” The industry has begun to refer to this kind of strategy as a “war on coal” that aims to stop pollution from coal-fired power plants.

Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, a New York-based marketing firm that works with businesses like Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola, and Bank of America, put together the presentation on the “environmental threats” posed by groups like 350.org, Sierra Club, and Organizing for America (the activist group spun off from Obama’s election campaign). Mother Jones obtained a copy of their slideshow. Using newspaper headlines and promotional materials from environmental groups, MXM’s presentation points out all the ways environmental activists have found success in taking on coal.

One slide points out the “strength in the environmental narrative” and lists headlines from stories on the decline of coal and the rise of renewables.

The next slide notes enviros’ “ability to drive national attention.” Another slide notes that recent efforts to get universities to divest from fossil fuels are “a potent form of publicity.”

Ross Parman, who put the presentation together, told Mother Jones by email that MXM doesn’t do work for ACC; he just put this presentation together for the council. “I was asked to pull together this really top-level overview of some of the messaging and specific campaigns that have targeted the coal industry,” said Parman. “The presentation wasn’t intended to focus on environmental activists or messaging about climate change, just the campaigns and messages from 10,000 feet.”

What’s interesting about this is that it shows that anti-coal activists are winning—and that the coal industry is worried. The industry has used the allegation that government regulators and environmentalists are waging a “war on coal” to fight off any and all attempts to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants. But it’s not working.

Luke Popovich, the vice president for communications at the National Mining Association, penned an op-ed in the industry magazine Coal Age on a recent court decision upholding the EPA’s regulatory authority on Clean Water Act permits that noted as much. “Anyway, ‘war on coal’ never resonated with much conviction among ordinary Americans,” he wrote. “For them, the EPA keeps the air and water clean, their kids safe.”

But Popovich’s piece, as Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette pointed out last month, goes on to call for a doubling down on the rhetorical strategy.

And then, when President Obama announced his climate plan last week, the industry and its allies in Congress, launched into the “war on coal” cries once again. I guess some people never learn.

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The Coal Industry Knows That Enviros Are Winning

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