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Obama’s offshore drilling plan mostly a win for environmentalists, with a caveat

by DwightMyers Posted on March 15, 2016

Obama’s offshore drilling plan mostly a win for environmentalists, with a caveat

By on 15 Mar 2016commentsShare

President Obama has shown little interest in gambling his environmental legacy in his final year of office. Rather than slow down after the Paris climate change conference in December, he has pushed forward on policies climate activists say are necessary to keep fossil fuels in the ground — first, his administration announced a moratorium on new coal leases, and now, it has taken the Atlantic Coast off the table for drillers.

The administration released a new version of its five-year plan for offshore drilling on Tuesday, and the most significant change is its reversal on its plan from a year ago to open the mid-Atlantic to offshore development. The Arctic, meanwhile, is still open for business: The new proposal solicits comments on whether to drop Arctic leases entirely or whether to limit them in some areas. But it also still has an option that includes leases in the Chuckhi Sea, Beaufort Sea, and Cook Inlet — much criticized by environmentalists who say a spill anywhere in the Arctic will have devastating effects for the rest of the region. The Gulf will be open for 10 leases.

The Interior Department’s plan for offshore drilling essentially sets the course for oil and gas development long after Obama leaves office. Technically it covers a period from 2017 to 2022, but oil and gas exploration offshore can take years to get off the ground, even decades before paying off the cost. Any delay is promising: While presidential candidates could promise to reverse course, in practice, they are unlikely to do so, explained Natural Resources Defense Council’s Beyond Oil Director Franz Matzner. “This administration sets the five-year plan for the next administration,” Matzner said in an email. “The next administration could, in theory, try to undo that, but we have not seen that precedent in the past. Far and away the most secure route for the Obama administration would be to permanently withdraw the Arctic and Atlantic from all future leasing, using his executive authority under [the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act].”

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If the proposed version is finalized after the 90 days of public comment, it will be a significant achievement for environmentalists and local communities that organized against offshore drilling. With one caveat, of course: the Arctic.

“They won’t get it right every time, but it gives us a new hook to hold them and the next president to account,” 350.org spokesperson Jamie Henn said in an email. “The new test of climate leadership is if you’re keeping fossil fuels in the ground.”

“Less than a week after committing to protect the Arctic with Prime Minister Trudeau, President Obama has left the door open for Shell and the rest of the oil industry to drill in the region,” Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard said in an email. “This decision doesn’t balance conservation and energy — it fuels climate chaos. President Obama must place the whole Arctic off limits. This program isn’t yet final, the president must use the time he has to take all new offshore drilling out of circulation.”

The Interior didn’t highlight climate change as part of its calculus on Tuesday, only citing “significant potential conflicts with other ocean uses such as the Department of Defense and commercial interests; current market dynamics; limited infrastructure; and opposition from many coastal communities.” But there was intense pressure from cities and businesses that rely on $4 billion in tourism and fishing on the coasts to remove the Atlantic from the plan. In recent weeks, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have highlighted their opposition against drilling off the East Coast and the Arctic.

This is the second time the administration has tried to open the East Coast for drilling, only to reverse course. Just before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster by BP, the administration proposed auctioning up to 104 million acres of the mid- and south-Atlantic and 10 leases in the Arctic. Then last January, Interior again put the Atlantic on the table, which set off protests from environmental groups and local businesses and residents.

The oil and gas industry, which eyed the Atlantic for its 3.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 31.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, will be furious. But public opinion on oil drilling is more complicated than political divides. Public support for offshore drilling plummets when there are spills, as it did after the BP disaster in 2010, but tends to rise again with passing time.

In his final year of office, Obama faces limits in what more he can do for the environment and climate. He’s already pushed his executive power on climate change more than any other president; the offshore drilling plan is one of the few opportunities he has left. Protecting the coasts by limiting oil and gas development offshore would be a fitting ending for a president who once called the BP spill the “worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.”

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Obama’s offshore drilling plan mostly a win for environmentalists, with a caveat

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The Pentagon Is Preparing to Go to War With ISIS…on Twitter

by ErnestineHeighwa Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) complained at last week’s GOP presidential debate debate that the United States isn’t doing enough to beat ISIS in the online propaganda battle. “Every war we have ever been involved in has had a propaganda informational aspect to it,” he said. “ISIS is winning the propaganda war.”

That’s probably true: Not only is ISIS skilled at recruiting people online, but the group’s huge, sophisticated video operation and its products are now a hallmark of its brand of terror. The US government’s efforts to counter that machine, led by the State Department, have mostly been a laughingstock. Now the diplomats are getting reinforcements from the Pentagon, which recently got approval to conduct its own online propaganda efforts against terrorist groups and their sympathizers.

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The Pentagon Is Preparing to Go to War With ISIS…on Twitter

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Obama’s Climate Plan Just Won Another Key Victory in Court

by AntoniaDavison Posted on September 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last year, President Barack Obama released an early version of his plan to crack down on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants—the cornerstone of his climate change agenda. Right away, a dozen coal-reliant states and coal companies fired back with a pair of lawsuits aimed at blocking the plan from going into effect. The challenges failed: A federal court in DC ruled that they would have to wait until the rules were finalized.

They tried again last month, when the final details were announced. But this afternoon, they got smacked down again because the rules, while now final, still haven’t been published in the federal register (that process typically takes months). Here’s the ruling:

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width: 630,
height: 400,
sidebar: false,
text: false,
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container: “#DV-viewer-2392311-obamas-clean-power-plan-just-won-an-important”
);

Once again, the complaining parties were just too eager to chomp at the bit, said David Doniger, director of climate policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Counting this challenge, the previous one, and several prior attempts to squelch Obama’s climate plan, he said, “they’re batting 0-8 in premature challenges.”

“It’s not a great track record. You don’t want to bring a succession of losing cases, because you get a bad reputation before the court.”

The battle isn’t over yet: You can count on the same cast of characters trying the same shenanigans when the rule is finally published sometime in October.

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Obama’s Climate Plan Just Won Another Key Victory in Court

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

by Pilar2325h Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley made an astute observation about ISIS in an interview with Bloomberg.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria, the rise of ISIS, was the effect of climate change and the mega-drought that affected that region, wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, created a humanitarian crisis that created the…conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” said the former Maryland governor.

Republicans were quick to seize on the comment as an indication of O’Malley’s weak grasp of foreign policy. Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the suggestion of a link between ISIS’s rise to power and climate change was “absurd” and a sign that “no one in the Democratic Party has the foreign policy vision to keep America safe.”

Here’s the thing, though: O’Malley is totally right. As we’ve reported here many times, Syria’s civil war is the best-understood and least ambiguous example of a case where an impact of climate change—in this case, an unprecedented drought that devastated rural farmers—directly contributed to violent conflict and political upheaval. There is no shortage of high-quality, peer-reviewed research explicating this link. As O’Malley said, the drought made it more difficult for rural families to survive off of farming. So they moved to cities in huge numbers, where they were confronted with urban poverty and an intransigent, autocratic government. Those elements clearly existed regardless of the drought. But the drought was the final straw, the factor that brought all the others to a boiling point.

Does this mean that America’s greenhouse gas emissions are solely responsible for ISIS’s rise to power? Obviously not. But it does mean that, without accounting for climate change, you have an incomplete picture of the current military situation in the Middle East. And without that understanding, it will be very difficult for a prospective commander-in-chief to predict where terrorist threats might emerge in the future.

The link between climate and security isn’t particularly controversial in the defense community. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama called climate change an “urgent and growing threat” to national security. A recent review by the Defense Department concluded that climate change is a “threat multiplier” that exacerbates other precursors to war, while the Center for Naval Analysis found that climate change-induced drought is already leading to conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

In other words, O’Malley’s comment is completely on-point. If Priebus and his party are serious about defeating ISIS and preventing future terrorist uprisings, they can’t continue to dismiss the role of climate change.

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Republicans Are Still Totally Wrong About ISIS

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School Lunches Just Got Way Better in These Six Cities (and It’s Not the Food)

by LesliPlunkett Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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School lunches may be healthier than when you were a kid, but the wasteful and polluting materials that cafeterias serve them on have actually gotten worse. In an effort to save on labor and equipment costs, many schools switched from washable trays to disposable foam ones over the past couple of decades. But this trend is now beginning to change.

The school districts of six major cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, and Orlando— announced today that they will stop using polystyrene foam trays, and begin serving lunch on compostable plates.

The Urban School Food Alliance, which counts the country’s largest school districts among its members, coordinated the change after developing an affordable compostable plate made from recycled newspaper that costs just a penny more than its foam counterpart.

“Shifting from polystyrene trays to compostable plates will allow these cities to dramatically slash waste sent to landfills, reduce plastics pollution in our communities and oceans, and create valuable compost that can be re-used on our farms,” said Mark Izeman, a senior attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, which partners with the Alliance.

This shift to compostable plates by more than 4,000 schools will save an estimated 225 million petroleum-based plastic trays from going into landfill each year.

What’s next? The Alliance hopes to introduce compostable cutlery by next school year.

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School Lunches Just Got Way Better in These Six Cities (and It’s Not the Food)

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Pentagon and Other Agencies Slammed for Police Militarization at Senate Hearing

by CharlinFreycine Posted on September 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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In a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Tuesday, Democratic and Republican lawmakers slammed officials from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice for their handling of federal programs that help provide military grade vehicles, equipment, and weapons to local police departments across the country. The hearing was called in response to the events that took place in Ferguson, Missouri, after an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a white police officer, and peaceful protests were met by a heavily militarized police force. “Aggressive police actions were being used under the umbrella of ‘crowd control,'” noted Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

The panel grilled Alan Estevez, a Department of Defense agent dealing with logistics and acquisition of military equipment; Brian Kamoie, a federal grant regulator at the Department of Homeland Security; and Karol Mason, an attorney from the Department of Justice.

Senators questioned why certain military equipment was on the Pentagon’s list of acceptable items for local police departments. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) declared that police militarization gives him “real heartburn” and wondered “how did we get to the point where we think states needs MRAPS”—that is, mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles, which have been acquired by a large number of small police departments across the country. In Texas, McCaskill noted, police departments have more than 70 MRAPS, while the state National Guard has just six.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) questioned what police departments could possibly do with the 1,200 bayonets that have been issued in recent years. The Pentagon’s Alan Estevez replied that he was unsure. Throughout the hearing, members of the panel underscored the point that police officers are often not adequately trained in how (and when) to use the military-grade equipment their departments acquire. The Pentagon doesn’t require police departments to undergo any training before supplying them MRAPS and other military equipment.

Estevez testified that the Pentagon would reevaluate its list of acceptable equipment for police departments. But Brian Kamoie, the Homeland Security official, and the Justice Department’s Karol Mason, both acknowledged that their agencies don’t do much to regulate how police departments use the grant money they dole out to local law enforcement.

McCaskill condemned the Department of Defense and the other agencies for their lack of oversight over the use of military equipment by local police. “None of them know how it’s being utilized,” McCaskill said. She pointed out that a police department in Lake Angelus, Michigan, which employs only one police officer, has received 13 military grade assault weapons since 2011. “I think we need to get to the bottom of that,” McCaskill said.

Watch the hearing here:

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Fungi Perfecti Host Defense My Community , 120 Vegetarian Capsules

by 07ld5ksl Posted on August 2, 2014

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First Indochina War Ended 60 Years Ago Photo

by AishaIVBkehxlvh Posted on August 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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A wounded Vietminh prisoner is given first aid by Franco Vietnamese medicals after hot fire fight near Hung Yen, south of Hanoi, 1954. US Department of Defense

On this date in 1954 the first Indochina War officially ended. After a long war in Viet Nam, culminating in the nearly four month battle of Dien Bien Phu, the French withdrew under the the Geneva Acccords. That agreement also also divided Viet Nam along the 17th parallel under the condition that a unification election would be held two years later. When elections didn’t happen as planned, the communist Viet Minh fought to reclaim the South, which eventually drew the United States deeper into the fight between the Communists and Western-backed South Vietnamese government.

A French Foreign Legionnaire goes to war along the dry rib of a rice paddy, during a recent sweep through communist-held areas in the Red River Delta, between Haiphong and Hanoi. Behind the Legionnaire is a U.S. gifted tank, 1954. US Department of Defense

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First Indochina War Ended 60 Years Ago Photo

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The US Government Really Isn’t Worried About “Transcendence” Happening in Real Life

by PhyllisRamsden Posted on April 18, 2014

Mother Jones

This post contains spoilers, but the movie is bad so I don’t think you’ll care.

Transcendence is an awful movie—two hours of squandered potential. (You can read my colleague Ben Dreyfuss’ review here.) The film stars Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, and Kate Mara. It was executive-produced by Christopher Nolan, and marks the directorial debut of cinematographer Wally Pfister (the guy who made Christopher Nolan movies look like Christopher Nolan movies). The plot goes something like this: Depp plays a renowned artificial-intelligence researcher named Will Caster. He gets assassinated by a terrorist group that fears super-intelligent, sentient machines will one day rule the world. Will’s wife Evelyn (played by Hall) has the bright idea to upload his consciousness to a big computer thing, hoping he’ll live on in cyberspace or something. It works, and this achieves technological singularity (when A.I. becomes greater than the human mind), which Will calls “transcendence.”

Things get really creepy and it starts to look like Johnny Depp The Omniscient Computer really is trying to take over the world. The US government begins to wage a secret war on him/it, and gets into bed with some shady, gun-toting characters in doing so.

Anyway, that may sound like a cool premise, but the movie is really, very boring—but it did get me and my buddy thinking: What would our government do if this happened in real life? Does the government have a contingency plan if (as some believe is possible) sentient machines began outdoing mankind? What if the machines went to war against us? What would Barack Obama do???

Okay, this is stupid. But if America once drew up legit plans to invade Canada, maybe there’s a chance we have a plan for this. I called up the Department of Defense, and was transferred to spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart. I asked him these questions, and if anyone working in cyber warfare had anything to say about this. His response:

I’m gonna be frank with you. There is nobody here who is going to talk about that…There are currently no plans for this. It’s just a completely unrealistic scenario. We have a lot of people working on this team on serious stuff, but this just isn’t a real threat.

“Well,” he concluded, “at least not for now.”

For now.

Obama’s America.

Here’s the trailer for the Johnny Depp movie:

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The US Government Really Isn’t Worried About “Transcendence” Happening in Real Life

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The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War

by Bart Jameson Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers like the New York Times and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting process.

Yet a careful look at budget figures for the US military—a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57 percent of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40 percent of all military spending on this planet—shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.

This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action—and the “news” that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.

The Pentagon Cries Wolf, Round One

As sequestration first approached, the Pentagon issued deafening cries of despair. Looming cuts would “inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country,” said Secretary Hagel in December 2012.

Sequestration went into effect in March 2013 and was slated to slice $54.6 billion from the Pentagon’s $550 billion larger-than-the-economy-of-Sweden budget. But Congress didn’t have the stomach for it, so lawmakers knocked the cuts down to $37 billion. (Domestic programs like Head Start and cancer research received no such special dispensation.)

By law, the cuts were to be applied across the board. But that, too, didn’t go as planned. The Pentagon was able to do something hardly recognizable as a cut at all. Having the luxury of unspent funds from previous budgets—known obscurely as “prior year unobligated balances”—officials reallocated some of the cuts to those funds instead.

In the end, the Pentagon shaved about 5.7 percent, or $31 billion, from its 2013 budget. And just how painful did that turn out to be? Frank Kendall, who serves as the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has acknowledged that the Pentagon “cried wolf.” Those cuts caused no substantial damage, he admitted.

And that’s not where the story ends—it’s where it begins.

Sequestration, the Phony Budget War, Round Two

A $54.6 billion slice was supposed to come out of the Pentagon budget in 2014. If that had actually happened, it would have amounted to around 10 percent of its budget. But after the hubbub over the supposedly devastating cuts of 2013, lawmakers set about softening the blow.

And this time they did a much better job.

In December 2013, a budget deal was brokered by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray. In it they agreed to reduce sequestration. Cuts for the Pentagon soon shrank to $34 billion for 2014.

And that was just a start.

All the cuts discussed so far pertain to what’s called the Pentagon’s “base” budget—its regular peacetime budget. That, however, doesn’t represent all of its funding. It gets a whole different budget for making war, and for the 13th year, the US is making war in Afghanistan. For that part of the budget, which falls into the Washington category of “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO), the Pentagon is getting an additional $85 billion in 2014.

And this is where something funny happens.

That war funding isn’t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all. So imagine for a moment that you’re an official at the Pentagon—or the White House—and you’re committed to sparing the military from downsizing. Your budget has two parts: one that’s subject to caps and cuts, and one that isn’t. What do you do? When you hit a ceiling in the former, you stuff extra cash into the latter.

It takes a fine-toothed comb to discover how this is done. Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, found that the Pentagon was stashing an estimated extra $20 billion worth of non-war funding in the “operation and maintenance” accounts of its proposed 2014 war budget. And since all federal agencies work in concert with the White House to craft their budget proposals, it’s safe to say that the Obama administration was in on the game.

Add the December budget deal to this $20 billion switcheroo and the sequester cuts for 2014 were now down to $14 billion, hardly a devastating sum given the roughly $550 billion in previously projected funding.

And the story’s still not over.

When it was time to write the Pentagon budget into law, appropriators in Congress wanted in on the fun. As Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight discovered, lawmakers added a $10.8 billion slush fund to the war budget.

All told, that leaves $3.4 billion—a cut of less than 1 percent from Pentagon funding this year. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the sprawling bureaucracy of the Defense Department will even notice. Nonetheless, last week Secretary Hagel insisted that “sequestration requires cuts so deep, so abrupt, so quickly that…the only way to implement them is to sharply reduce spending on our readiness and modernization, which would almost certainly result in a hollow force.”

Yet this less than 1 percent cut comes from a budget that, at last count, was the size of the next 10 largest military budgets on the planet combined. If you can find a threat to our national security in this story, your sleuthing powers are greater than mine. Meanwhile, in the non-military part of the budget, sequestration has brought cuts that actually matter to everything from public education to the justice system.

Cashing in on the “Cuts,” Round Three and Beyond

After two years of uproar over mostly phantom cuts, 2015 isn’t likely to bring austerity to the Pentagon either. Last December’s budget deal already reduced the cuts projected for 2015, and President Obama is now asking for something he’s calling the “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.” It would deliver an extra $26 billion to the Pentagon next year. And that still leaves the war budget for officials to use as a cash cow.

And the president is proposing significant growth in military spending further down the road. In his 2015 budget plan, he’s asking Congress to approve an additional $115 billion in extra Pentagon funds for the years 2016-2019.

My guess is he’ll claim that our national security requires it after the years of austerity.

Mattea Kramer is a TomDispatch regular and Research Director at National Priorities Project, which is a 2014 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is also the lead author of the book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War

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