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BP’s newly upgraded refinery just spilled oil into Chicago’s water source

BP’s newly upgraded refinery just spilled oil into Chicago’s water source

Parker Wood / Coast Guard

Cleaning up after BP. Again.

Deepwater Horizawhatnow?

Less than a year after BP upgraded its Whiting refinery in northwestern Indiana to allow it to handle heavy Canadian tar-sands oil, causing petroleum coke to begin piling up in nearby Chicago, an industrial accident at the refinery has spewed some of that oil into Lake Michigan. The Chicago Tribune reports that it’s not known how long the refinery was leaking or how much oil was spilled. The leak was reported at 4:30 p.m. and plugged by 9 p.m., when an EPA official arrived at the scene. More from the Tribune:

Mike Beslow, the EPA’s emergency response coordinator, said there appeared to be no negative effects on Lake Michigan, the source of drinking water for 7 million people in Chicago and the suburbs. The 68th Street water intake crib is about eight miles northwest of the spill site, but there were no signs of oil drifting in that direction.

Initial reports suggest that strong winds pushed most of the oil toward a sandy cove on BP’s property between the refinery and an Arcelor Mittal steel mill. A flyover Tuesday afternoon revealed no visible oil beyond booms laid on the water to prevent the oil from spreading, Beslow said.

The spill came at an ominous time, catching the attention of both of Illinois’s U.S. senators. “[T]hree weeks ago, BP announced a plan to nearly double its processing of heavy crude oil at its BP Whiting Refinery,” Mark Kirk (R) and Dick Durbin (R) said in a joint statement on Tuesday.

“Given today’s events and BP’s decision to increase production, we are extremely concerned about the possibility of a future spill that may not be so easily contained. We plan to hold BP accountable for this spill and will ask for a thorough report about the cause of this spill, the impact of the Whiting Refinery’s production increase on Lake Michigan, and what steps are being taken to prevent any future spill,” the senators said.

The spill is the latest in a string of similar accidents that have coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster.

A 34,000-gallon oil spill is being slowly cleaned up in North Dakota, where it escaped from a pipeline a week ago just 75 miles from a similar accident in a wheat field last year. Officials have discovered that 20,000 gallons of crude recently leaked out of a pipeline and into an Ohio nature preserve — which is double initial estimates. And several dozen dead and oiled birds have been discovered as crews work clean up as much as 168,000 gallons of oil that spewed into the Houston Ship Channel on Saturday following an oil barge crash. Meanwhile, Denver-based Zavanna LLC is facing fines after up to 1,400 gallons of oil spilled from one of its wells near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers during recent North Dakota flooding.


Source
BP confirms oil spill into Lake Michigan from Whiting refinery, Chicago Tribune
Kirk, Durbin Statement on BP Whiting Refinery Oil Spill Into Lake Michigan, U.S. Senators Mark Kirk’s office
North Dakota regulator: oil company could be fined, AP
Dead, oiled birds sighted 3 days into Texas oil spill cleanup, CNN
Ohio Pipeline Spill Twice As Large As Original Estimate, ThinkProgress
North Dakota Oil Spills Highlight Gaps in Regulation and Oversight, India Country Today Media Network

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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BP’s newly upgraded refinery just spilled oil into Chicago’s water source

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Michigan’s Gay Marriage Ban Struck Down Pending Appeal: See How Fast The Movement Is Spreading

Mother Jones

Update, Saturday, March 22, 2014, 5:05pm ET: A federal appeals court has issued a temporary stay of Judge Friedman’s ruling until the 26th. That means that the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Michigan is suspended until at least Wednesday.

Same-sex couples may soon be able to wed in Michigan, following a ruling by US District Judge Bernard Friedman finding the state’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has asked the courts to freeze Friedman’s ruling while the state pursues an appeal. Since December 2013, courts have also ruled against gay-marriage bans in Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

The animated map below shows how marriage equality is spreading across the country. Read more about that here.

Molly Redden and Matt Connolly

Here’s the full text of Judge Friedman’s ruling:

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Michigan Marriage Equality Ruling (PDF)

Michigan Marriage Equality Ruling (Text)

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Michigan’s Gay Marriage Ban Struck Down Pending Appeal: See How Fast The Movement Is Spreading

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Is it a good idea to pay farmers to store carbon in soil?

Is it a good idea to pay farmers to store carbon in soil?

Haydyn Bromley

Climate protection is getting down and dirty Down Under.

Soil serves as a great reservoir for carbon, yet it’s often overlooked in climate protection efforts. That’s changing in Australia, where farmers will soon be able to earn cash for projects that store carbon in the soil — such as tree plantings, dung beetle releases, and composting. Aussie farmers are already eligible to make money by reducing greenhouse gas pollution from livestock, manure, and rice fields.

Australia’s environment minister announced Tuesday that farmers could start applying for payments for soil carbon storage in July.

The government considers the replenishment of carbon in soil to be one of the cheapest and best ways of reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions — although federal scientists recently concluded that it could only provide “low levels of greenhouse gas abatement.”

The money for payments to farmers will come from the country’s Emissions Reduction Fund — which is climate-denying Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s planned replacement for a nascent carbon tax. Having the government pay for projects that reduce CO2 might be a nice idea, but not when it comes at the expense of having polluters pay for their emissions. And the plan to make soil-storage payments to farmers been criticized by experts as a potentially ineffective corporate handout.


Source
Graziers now able to tap carbon farming, Reuters
Soil carbon storage incentive, The Land

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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Is it a good idea to pay farmers to store carbon in soil?

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Billions of pounds of sea life die every year to feed our seafood appetite

Billions of pounds of sea life die every year to feed our seafood appetite

NOAA

A ring seal entangled in fishing equipment — aka bycatch.

For every pound of sashimi, barbecued shrimp, or grilled sea bass that you stuff into your mouth, you’re basically spitting four ounces of marine life onto the floor.

The nonprofit Oceana published a detailed report on Thursday cataloguing the egregious problem of bycatch in U.S. fisheries. Bycatch is a word that refers to the sharks, turtles, whales, non-edible fish, and other critters that are inadvertently hauled into fishing boats or caught up in the gear of fishing fleets that are pursuing more palatable and lucrative species.

Such gratuitous killing wreaks havoc with marine food chains that are needed to support sustainable fisheries. From Oceana’s new report:

Bycatch is one of the biggest threats to the oceans and has contributed to overfishing and the dramatic decline of fish populations around the world. Commercial fisheries bring in approximately 160 billion pounds of marine catch around the world each year, which means almost 400 million pounds are caught every day. Recent estimates indicate as much as 40 percent of global catch is discarded overboard.

Based in part on U.S. government studies, Oceana estimates that 17 to 22 percent of animal life captured by the American fishing industry is discarded back into the sea — “likely already dead or dying.” If that’s accurate, some 2 billion pounds of marine wildlife is inadvertently being maimed or killed by the U.S. fishing sector every year.

The problem is not well measured globally or in the U.S.:

OceanaClick to embiggen.

Of those American fisheries where bycatch is measured, nine fisheries cause a lionfish’s share of the problem — they’re responsible for half of the country’s reported bycatch but they bring in just 7 percent of its landings.

OceanaClick to embiggen.

Oceana is calling for new regulations, the closing of loopholes in existing regulations, vigorous enforcement of rules already on the books, and better monitoring of bycatch. “Bycatch is not inevitable,” the report states. “There are ways to minimize unintended injury and waste by using cleaner gear, avoiding areas where vulnerable species are known to be present and enforcing bycatch limits each season.”


Source
Wasted Catch: Unsolved Problems in U.S. Fisheries, Oceana

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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Billions of pounds of sea life die every year to feed our seafood appetite

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Scientists to Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

Scientists to Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

Shutterstock

One of the world’s largest and most influential science organizations is launching a new campaign to cut through the noise of climate denialism and help the public understand the threat of climate change.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science kicked things off on Monday by publishing a 20-page report entitled What We Know. The gist: We know that global warming is real, risky, and demands a serious response — “the three Rs of climate change.”

“We’re trying to provide a voice for the scientific community on this issue so that we can help the country, help the world move this issue forward,” AAAS CEO Alan Leshner said during a call with reporters on Tuesday morning. “If we don’t move now we are at tremendous risk for some very high impact consequences, many of which are laid out in the report.”

The AAAS has also assembled a panel of a 13 leading scientists who will make public presentations and try to spread climate smarts far and wide.

Here’s an explanation of those three climate Rs from the initiative’s website:

The first is Reality — 97% of climate experts have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening.

The second is Risk — that the reality of climate change means that there are climate change impacts we can expect, but we also must consider what might happen, especially the small, but real, chance that we may face abrupt changes with massively disruptive impacts.

The third R is Response — that there is much we can do and that the sooner we respond, the better off we will be.

The report is not all gloom and doom. The call to action is premised on hope:

By making informed choices now, we can reduce risks for future generations and ourselves, and help communities adapt to climate change. People have responded successfully to other major environmental challenges such as acid rain and the ozone hole with benefits greater than costs, and scientists working with economists believe there are ways to manage the risks of climate change while balancing current and future economic prosperity.

As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do or must believe about the rising threat of climate change. But we consider it to be our responsibility as professionals to ensure, to the best of our ability, that people understand what we know: human-caused climate change is happening, we face risks of abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes, and responding now will lower the risk and cost of taking action.

Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann – a member at large of AAAS’s atmospheric sciences division but not a member of the new climate panel — lauded the initiative. “AAAS is the largest non-governmental scientific membership body in the world, so them taking such an affirmative role in the societal debate over climate change, and what to do about it, is significant,” Mann told Grist.

“The crux of the matter is that, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists that, (a) climate change is real, (b) it is caused by us, and (c) it poses a grave threat to society if we do nothing about it, the public still thinks that there is a ‘debate’ on each of those elements,” Mann said.


Source
What We Knew: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change, AAAS

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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Scientists to Americans: This climate change thing really is a big deal

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Chart of the Day: China’s Debt Bubble Continues to Swell

Mother Jones

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Via Paul Krugman, Atif Mian and Amir Sufi give us the chart below today to chew over. It shows China’s declining trade surplus over the past decade, which authorities have effectively offset by a dramatic increase in private credit in order to boost domestic demand. The authors explain how this happened:

China got a break starting 2003….The rest of the world — and in particular the United States — was willing to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every year to purchase Chinese goods (among other things)….The result was reduced pressure on domestic debt creation, and domestic debt went down from 125% of GDP in 2003 to almost 100% of GDP in 2008.

….The continued borrowing by western countries was not sustainable and by 2008 global demand for Chinese goods collapsed….How could China create new demand for its productive capacity? The answer once again came in the form of a rapid rise in domestic private debt. The Chinese state-owned banks with explicit prodding from the government opened their spigots. The country has seen an explosive growth in domestic private debt since 2008.

Is this sustainable? Probably not. It’s yet another reason to be concerned about the continued fragility of the global economy. We’re probably not strong enough to withstand a major shock from China.

Link:

Chart of the Day: China’s Debt Bubble Continues to Swell

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Americans respond to climate change by yawning at it, poll finds

Americans respond to climate change by yawning at it, poll finds

Shutterstock

An outbreak of climate-related yawns appears to be afflicting the country that’s done more than any other to warm the planet.

The results of a Gallup survey reveal just how little climate change raises Americans’ anxiety levels. The research firm called 513 Americans last week and asked them how much they worry about 15 problems facing the nation. When it came to climate change, half said “a little” or “not at all.”

Only a quarter said they worried about climate change “a great deal,” which puts the issue second from the bottom in the list of Americans’ concerns, above only race relations. Even drug use has Americans more worried than climate change.

The following chart shows the percentage of survey respondents who worry a great deal, a fair amount, and a little or not at all about the national problems they were asked about:

Gallup

Click to embiggen.

And when you break it down by political party, just 10 percent of Republicans said they worry a great deal about climate change, making it the very lowest priority on their list. Compare that with the 74 percent of Republicans who worry a great deal about federal spending and the budget deficit.

That’s obviously lame. But is it lamer that just 36 percent of Democrats said they worry a great deal about climate change?

Gallup

Click to embiggen.


Source
Climate Change Not a Top Worry in U.S., Gallup

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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Americans respond to climate change by yawning at it, poll finds

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Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always

Mother Jones

Greg Sargent points us to the latest CNN poll on Obamacare today, one of the few polls that accurately judges public attitudes on the subject. Instead of just asking whether people support or oppose the law, CNN asks if their opposition is because the law is too liberal or not liberal enough. The latter aren’t tea partiers who hate Obamacare, they’re lefties and Democrats who mostly support the concept of Obamacare but want it to go further. Counting them as opponents of Obamacare has always been seriously misleading.

I went ahead and charted CNN’s poll results over time, and they’ve been remarkably stable. Ever since the law passed, about 40 percent of the country has opposed it, while more than 50 percent have either supported it or said they want it to go even further. This goes a long way toward explaining the supposedly mysterious result that lots of people oppose Obamacare but few want to repeal it. The truth is that actual opposition has always been a minority view. Polls routinely show that only about 40 percent of Americans want to repeal Obamacare, and there’s nothing mysterious about that once you understand that this is also the level of actual opposition to the law.

Sargent has more here, including some interesting internals and crosstabs.

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Opposition to Obamacare Remains Under 40 Percent, the Same as Always

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Your Rap Lyrics Can Be Held Against You in a Court of Law

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Next month, the Supreme Court of New Jersey will hear arguments about whether rap lyrics written by a defendant are fair game in criminal proceedings—in a case that advocates say could have major First Amendment implications.

In 2008, a New Jersey jury convicted Vonte Skinner of the attempted murder of his associate Lamont Peterson, who was left partially paralyzed after being shot multiple times at close range. During the trial, the prosecutor was permitted to read 13 pages of violent rap lyrics written by Skinner. These lyrics were found in the backseat of his girlfriend’s car at the time of his arrest, and they were written between two months and four years before the crime. None of his raps relate to the particular shooting for which he was convicted, and there was no indication that any of the acts described in the lyrics ever occurred. Prosecutors argued that the lyrics, which depict gun violence in gory detail, showed motive and intent. An appellate court overturned the conviction in 2012, noting that there was no justification for using the lyrics in the case and that there was “significant doubt” that Skinner would have been convicted otherwise. Now it’s up to the state’s highest court to decide.

“We’re arguing to the New Jersey Supreme Court that it needs to provide guidance to the courts in New Jersey that this is artistic and political expression and you need to do a more searching review when you’re seeking to use this kind of expression against someone,” says Jeanne LoCicero, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU of New Jersey (ACLU-NJ), which filed an amicus brief in support of the defendant. She says there must be a direct link between the artistic expression and the crime (as opposed to a description of violent acts with no relation to the crime) for such material to be cited during a trial and that rap lyrics should be treated with the same protections as other artistic expressions and social and political commentary.

“That a rap artist wrote lyrics seemingly embracing the world of violence is no more reason to ascribe to him a motive and intent to commit violent acts than to saddle Dostoevsky with Raskolnikov’s motives or to indict Johnny Cash for having ‘shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,'” ACLU-NJ attorneys wrote in the brief. (The Burlington County prosecutors office, which is arguing for the state, declined to comment.)

The introduction of rap lyrics in Skinner’s case is not unique. Experts say that it’s common for prosecutors to use wannabe rappers’ lyrics against them in criminal proceedings, leaving the songs up to interpretation by people with little knowledge or understanding of the art form.

An ACLU-NJ study completed last year found 18 cases around the country in which prosecutors tried to cite rap lyrics as evidence. Prosecutors won the argument most of the time. In 14 of the cases ACLU-NJ examined, defendants’ rap lyrics were admitted into evidence. But the use of rap lyrics in criminal proceedings isn’t limited to the 14 examples ACLU-NJ dug up, says Erik Nielson, a professor at the University of Richmond who studies rap lyrics and criminal proceedings and who has served as an expert witness for defendants in these cases. “We know they’re also being used in less formal ways,” he explains. “Perhaps a prosecutor may be using rap lyrics as leverage to compel somebody to take a plea agreement or something like that. It’s really difficult to get a sense of it. My guess is that we’re looking in the hundreds.”

Defense attorneys fight like crazy to keep their defendants’ lyrics out of court because they know that rap lyrics can be “devastating” to a defense, Nielson says. But defense attorneys usually lose the argument. “The problem is that prosecutors are able to capitalize on the ignorance and perhaps even preconceived notions of judges,” he says. “They’re able to convince them that unlike any other fictional form out there, this can be presented as legitimate evidence either of confession or of somebody’s motive or intent.”

In his memoir Decoded, hip-hop star Jay-Z wrote, “The art of rap is deceptive. It seems so straightforward and personal and real that people read it completely literally, as raw testimony or autobiography.” As Nielson and his research partner Charis Kubrin note in their paper, “Rap on Trial,” “If rap lyrics are treated as mere diaries or journals, no special skill or training is necessary to analyze them, and consequently juries may hear false or misleading testimony about rap from witnesses…who lack the basic qualifications to offer it.”

Judges and juries across the country are unable to see these amateur rap lyrics as the young men writing them see them, says Nielson—as fictional work imbued with social and political commentary, and a possible pathway into an industry with a number of legitimate job opportunities. Instead, the often-reprehensible lyrics serve only to affirm stereotypes about the pathology of young black or Latino defendants.

“When you put the lyrics in front of the jury or even worse when you play a video for the jury, you present the jury with an image of some sort of remorseless vicious thug,” he says, noting that it’s common for young men of color to write rhymes and aspire to become rappers. “What you don’t see is that same kid in glasses sitting at his desk with crumpled paper all around, who has just spent hours trying to write just one of the lyrics that’s in one of the dozens of notebooks that he has.”

Some First Amendment advocates contend that using rap lyrics in court is a slippery slope to eroding the overall protections given to all types of artistic work and social commentary. Nielson doesn’t buy that. He points to a 1996 study by researcher Carrie Fried, who took violent song lyrics and told one group they were from a country song, one group they were from a folk song, and one group they were from a rap song. The group that thought they were looking at rap lyrics found the song to be more offensive and a greater threat to society than the folk and country groups. The study is old, but the stereotypes remain. “I’m just not convinced that using traditionally white forms, for example country music, or using novels against white authors would work,” Nielson says. “There is something about rap music that gives it this special treatment. It’s been negated as an art form.”

It’s obvious to Nielson that rap gets this special treatment because it’s part of a larger problem. “It’s hard to divorce these conversations from the fact that the justice system has proven itself to be incredibly good at finding ways to lock up young men of color,” he says. “It’s not just about society’s antipathy toward hip hop. It’s about society’s antipathy toward young black and brown men.”

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Your Rap Lyrics Can Be Held Against You in a Court of Law

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Here Is A Truly Wonderful Video of the US Military’s "First Drag Show"

Mother Jones

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Happy Monday! Here is something wonderful.

On Saturday, six US servicemen put on what may have been, according to Stars & Stripes, the first drag show ever on a US military base.

The event was held on at the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan to raise money for OutServe-SLDN, a non-profit that supports the military’s LGBT community. Organizers initially only expected to sell 75 tickets, but according to Navy Lt Marissa Greene, ended up selling 400.

The video of US troops lip syncing in drag to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” as the crowd goes wild is amazing.

Once upon a time, gay and lesbian Americans who wanted to serve their country had to live in the closet thanks to a stupid policy called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” In the more than two years since DADT’s repeal, the US military has somehow not fallen into chaos and disrepair.

Tech. Sgt. Kristen Baker put it best to Stars & Stripes: “Everything is just accepted. It makes me really proud to watch it. We are all brothers and sisters no matter what.”

Watch:

(via Jezebel)

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Here Is A Truly Wonderful Video of the US Military’s "First Drag Show"

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