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Dennis Hastert May Have Chosen the Absolute Worst Way to Buy Someone’s Silence

by SelinaDaugherty Posted on June 8, 2015

Mother Jones

Former House speaker Dennis Hastert is now under indictment for lying to the FBI and embroiled in a major sex abuse scandal. The allegations of Hastert’s sexual misconduct—and his alleged efforts to cover up his misdeeds by paying off the victim—are shocking on their own. But what’s also so remarkable about the case is that Hastert, who spent 20 years in Congress, got caught in the first place, given how many easy, creative, and legal methods exist for buying someone’s silence without leaving a paper trail.

According to the indictment, Hastert aroused suspicion by making a series of $50,000 cash withdrawals from his bank, which was required to report any cash transaction over $10,000 to the Treasury Department. After the bank questioned Hastert about those withdrawals, he began taking out unusual amounts of cash that were just shy of the $10,000 reporting threshold—a red flag to bankers, who reported him to the feds. The cash was allegedly part of $3.5 million in hush money that Hastert, a onetime high school wrestling coach, had agreed to pay a former student to keep quiet about allegations of sexual abuse. Paying off Individual A—as the recipient of Hastert’s payments was identified in the indictment—would have been perfectly legal had Hastert not violated banking regulations by structuring his withdrawals to conceal their purpose. He then compounded his offense by lying to FBI agents who questioned him about the withdrawals. (The New York Times reported on Saturday that shortly before Hastert allegedly began paying Individual A, he inquired about setting up an annuity that would “generate a substantial” annual payout.)

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Dennis Hastert May Have Chosen the Absolute Worst Way to Buy Someone’s Silence

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Guess which two words can make your nonpartisan education reforms a hot potato?

by FrancesBolling Posted on July 15, 2014

Guess which two words can make your nonpartisan education reforms a hot potato?

By

Podoc

Depending on who you’re talking to, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)– the first major national recommendations for teaching science to be made since 1996 — either painfully water down the presentation of climate-change information or attempt to brainwash our nation’s youth into believing climate change is real.

The backlash to the NGSS began last year, but now, we also have the backlash to the backlash — an effort by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others, to frame science education as a civil rights issue and mobilize a grassroots movement around the idea of a Climate Students Bill of Rights. The idea is to ensure that the new standards actually wind up getting taught.

If you’re the kind of person who likes geeking out over curricula, you’ll find the NGSS’s website fascinating. How do we teach climate change? It’s such an awkward thing to explain to children, who have not caused the problem and have yet to have a chance to help make it better. Or worse, for that matter.

The standards spell it out, grade by grade. Kindergartners  will learn that “Things that people do to live comfortably can affect the world around them. But they can make choices that reduce their impacts on the land, water, air, and other living things.” High schoolers will learn that “All forms of energy production and other resource extraction have associated economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical costs and risks as well as benefits. New technologies and social regulations can change the balance of these factors. “

It’s up to the states to adopt new educational standards like this. When the feds want to get new educational standards approved, they can pressure states into signing by attaching federal funds to the deal. Because the NGSS standards were developed by a smorgasbord of scientific organizations and the states themselves — or 26 of them, anyway — that financial incentive doesn’t exist. Instead, there’s the motivation that comes from so many states having participated in the process, as well as fears of America’s waning scientific standing.

Attempts to block the NGSS have taken several forms. In Wyoming, state legislators added a last-minute footnote to its state budget that banned the use of any public funds to adopt the new science standards, which effectively removed them from the public school system. In Oklahoma, a group of lawmakers tried to repeal its NGSS-based science standards, but were blocked by the state’s education department, which managed to get the governor to sign off on them.  The NGSS have been adopted by 11 states so far, including California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Rhode Island, Vermont, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington, plus the District of Columbia, though Kansas promptly got sued over it.

I grew up in Michigan, in a suburban community outside of Detroit that was a melting pot of religions, all of which seemed to have objections to scientific education. In general, teachers steered clear of anything more controversial than photosynthesis. Outside of school, I took every chance I could get to (a) read about dinosaurs/space shuttles/stalactites and (b) wish I was a dinosaur/space shuttle/stalactite.

For all that I loved science, it took me years to learn the really important stuff: how to wade through what people want to believe — and what you want to believe — to figure out what can be empirically proven. Here’s hoping that these new standards will help students get to the same place.

Heather Smith (on Twitter, @strangerworks) is interested in the various ways that humans try to save the environment: past, present, and future.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Guess which two words can make your nonpartisan education reforms a hot potato?

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Millions of dolphins could be hurt as oil industry blasts along East Coast

by BillieMcmichael Posted on February 28, 2014

Millions of dolphins could be hurt as oil industry blasts along East Coast

By

Simon du Vintage

The Obama administration tentatively gave its environmental blessing to oil industry plans to look for new deposits in the Atlantic Ocean off the East Coast. Recommendations outlined Thursday in a long-awaited environmental report by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management came as music to the ears of drilling companies.

But the air guns that the industry plans to use in its hunt for underwater oil fields won’t sound so sweet to the staggering numbers of dolphins and whales that could end up being maimed.

The oil industry wants to drill along the East Coast, but the last surveys of oil deposits in coastal Atlantic areas were conducted in the 1970s and 1980s using technology that’s now obsolete. So now industry wants to survey with more modern techniques, which McClatchy news service describes this way: “The seismic tests involve vessels towing an array of air guns that blast compressed air underwater, sending intense sound waves to the bottom of the ocean. The booms are repeated every 10 seconds or so for days or weeks.”

Thirty-four marine mammal species, which use sound to navigate, could be harmed by the seismic testing, and some of the animals could be killed. “By failing to consider relevant science, the Obama administration’s decision could be a death sentence for many marine mammals, needlessly turning the Atlantic Ocean into a blast zone,” said Jacqueline Savitz with the nonprofit Oceana. “In its rush to finalize this proposal, the Obama administration is failing to consider the cumulative impacts that these repeated dynamite-like blasts will have on vital behaviors like mating, feeding, breathing, communicating and navigating.”

The government’s new environmental assessment warns that more than a million bottlenose dolphins could be hurt every year by the acoustic blasts, which would extend from the shoreline to as far as 400 miles offshore, from Delaware down to Florida. More than 600,000 short-beaked common dolphins and more than 500,000 Atlantic spotted dolphins could also be affected, along with humpback whales, baleen whales, and other endangered species.

Estimating the damage that could be caused by the air guns is a difficult task, and the report states that its figures are “based on acoustic and impact models that are by their very nature conservative and complex.” The report also includes estimates that would see far fewer whales and dolphins harmed. And some outside experts say threats are not that dire: “There’s no argument that some of these sounds can harm animals, but it’s blown out of proportion,” Arthur N. Popper, head of the University of Maryland’s laboratory of aquatic bioacoustics, told The New York Times.

The report is part of a long administrative process required to move forward with surveys and the easing of a long ban on drilling the Atlantic seafloor. The New York Times explains what’s next:

Actual drilling of test wells could not begin until a White House ban on production in the Atlantic expires in 2017, and even then, only after the government agrees to lease ocean tracts to oil companies, an issue officials have barely begun to study.

The petroleum industry has sunk 51 wells off the East Coast — none of them successful enough to begin production — in decades past. But the Interior Department said in 2011 that 3.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 312 trillion cubic feet of natural gas could lie in the exploration area, and nine companies have already applied for permits to begin surveys.

Much of the controversy around Thursday’s report has focused on largely invisible impacts on charismatic sea life, but the report warns of another obvious risk associated with an exploration and drilling spree: oil spills.

Those can have bad impacts on sea life too. Just ask fishermen along the Gulf of Mexico.


Source
Feds Sentence East Coast to Dynamite-Like Blasts for Big Oil, Oceana
U.S. Moves Toward Atlantic Oil Exploration, Stirring Debate Over Sea Life, The New York Times
Feds support air gun blasts to find Atlantic oil, gas, McClatchy

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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Millions of dolphins could be hurt as oil industry blasts along East Coast

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How to Stop Talking About the Weather—and Start Understanding It

by NoemiStrahan Posted on January 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Talking about the weather used to be a euphemism for not talking about anything at all.

No matter how many times scientists tell us that weather isn’t climate, the day-to-day weather sure does remind us of the long-term trends that together form the climate.

Is the unseasonably warm, dry weather we’re having in California a pleasant occasion for pleasantries or an impending sign of planetary doom? Maybe both.

The same goes for hurricanes and polar vortices and any other anomaly. We talk about our strange local weather, but we are also talking about our planet’s future.

And what that means is: Talking about the weather no longer simply requires looking outside or checking the temperature on an app. We need context, long-term trend lines, analysis, and—because why not—also data and maps and webcams and pictures from space.

Here’s how to elevate your weather-talking game with help from @burritojustice, the best Twitter feed for eclectic, unexpected links (especially about the weather and historical mapping).

There are three general types of resources here. First, there are people and institutions that analyze the weather and tell us about them. The second category is unfiltered public weather data and imagery. And the last tranche of resources deliver forecasts or computer models on which forecasts are based.


People and Institutions

The first stop for budding weather nerds is Jeff Masters’ Wunderground blog. This is meteorology, raw and uncut. Masters breaks down newsy weather phenomena better than anyone.

On Twitter, friends swear by @EricHolthaus, a meteorologist who recently joined Slate. Others love Anthony Sagliana, who writes for Accuweather. There are many meteorologists with prominent online presences, like Cliff Mass for the Pacific Northwest/West, the Capital Weather Gang for the DC region, and @phillywx for the Delaware Valley. Check out, for example, Mass’ look at Western snowpack as seen in satellite imagery from 2013 and 2014.

It’s also worth following the regional Twitter accounts that interest you. For example, if you’re interested in tornadoes, the NWS’s Norman, Oklahoma, regional office is a must follow. Or if you follow space launches out of Johnson Space Center, there’s a feed just for you.

During a weather event, these Twitter feeds often present the most interesting Weather Service information in a way that’s easy to access.

If you’re not a Twitter user, they have a variety of ways to receive important alerts. Specific types of weather events tend to have their own web outposts, too. For hurricanes, for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains the National Hurricane Center.

There are also several tools and apps that provide a lot of data all in one place for your local weather. The standard is probably Weather Underground, but there are many sites. Check out, for example, Weatherspark for a detail-rich interface.

But sometimes all that data can be overwhelming. In that case, there are cheeky feeds like @OneWordSFWthr, which provides the San Francisco forecast in one word. Today? Muddled.

And in between these two extremes, there are a variety of apps that try to simplify and beautify the weather experience. Probably the best known is Dark Sky, which has the killer feature of telling you when it’s going to rain just about right where you are.


Weather Data and Imagery

The core resource in this category is, of course, the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA. You can find all kinds of stuff:

Radar maps
River and lake gauge data (to assess flooding)
Precipitation data
Air quality readings including ozone, smoke, and dust
Satellite imagery in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum

That’s just the beginning, too. Of particular interest, I think, is the Climate Prediction Center, which does longer term analyses. For example, let’s say you wanted to know how anomalous a given temperature was relative to the long-term average of a place. There’s a microsite for temperature anomaly maps.

And there are also:

Long-term precipitation charts for cities
Long-term temperature plots for cities
Long-term trend plots for the country

Among non-governmental websites, the company Unisys posts a variety of weather data. Here’s just a sampling:

Weather front position maps

Wind chill maps

Heat index maps
Wind streamline maps
Sea surface temperature maps
Sea surface temperature anomaly maps
Individual weather station time-series plots

And there’s a whole set of data about the upper air including temperatures at given atmospheric pressures and heights of certain temperatures. It’s wild. There’s so much.

The data keeps going. NOAA can give you surface temperatures from 9,000 weather stations, some of which have data stretching back to the beginning of the 1900s. In certain local areas, like San Francisco, people have made this history easier to access. Perhaps the coolest of these projects is @datapointed’s look at rainfall patterns in the Bay before and after Valentine’s Day.

Or if you prefer a more visual interface, Forecast.io brings you Quicksilver:

The metapoint with these last several links is that because weather data is so widely available, there are a lot of people doing interesting things with it.


Forecasts and Models

Weather forecasting has come a long way, in part due to the increasing availability of data and the sophistication of the simulations that forecasters can run. In the section above, we saw data sources, current and historical. In this section, we look at the models and the forecasts they generate.

The National Weather Service creates the Global Forecast System Model, the only one for which all data is available over the Internet. For that reason, most of the weather products you see out there (or in the App Store) are based on NWS data. But just for medium-range global forecasting, there are four other global models. (This is to say nothing of other types of models.)

Each model has been trained with certain types of data and makes certain assumptions. Global models lose some resolution, but they provide ways to understand how various weather patterns interact around earth. More regional models might be able to incorporate more local data, but they might miss out on effects from more planetary forces. Even between global weather models, they might weight some factors more heavily than others.

For that reason, forecasters might look at more than one model to understand a given weather phenomenon. Meteorologists can also look at “ensemble” forecasts that combine the output from many different models. The NWS produces the Global Ensemble Forecast System, which is fascinating to look at because one can see the variation that the model runs show between each other. Here’s one run of the model, showing the contour lines for atmospheric pressure at 500mb over North America. Note how in this forecast, which is for Saturday, the lines representing the various models have begun to diverge.

There’s even a probability tool that lets you probe the differences between the models in the GEFS for individual stations!

Now, this is a dense and technical world. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this post or my expertise to lead you through how to effectively test weather predictions with the models that exist.

But, there are three tools for probing models that you should be aware of:

NOAA’s Model Guidance (With this index)
Weather Underground‘s simplified model prediction mapping tool
Unisys’s model exploration tools

All three let you explore the models discussed here as well as the North American Mesoscale Model, Rapid Refresh Model, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model.

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How to Stop Talking About the Weather—and Start Understanding It

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Why are there pesticides and GMOs in our national wildlife refuges?

by pofg23dsacv Posted on September 4, 2013

Why are there pesticides and GMOs in our national wildlife refuges?

By

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – Midwest Region

A bald eagle nesting in Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in Illinois.

You might think that national wildlife refuges would be places where wildlife could take refuge from the environmental insanity of modern American agriculture.

But you’d be wrong.

Birds, insects, and other wildlife are sharing refuges with genetically engineered crops and being exposed to poisonous pesticides.

A lawsuit [PDF] filed by environmental groups last week argues that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Midwestern division is violating federal law by allowing the use of pesticides and the planting of GMOs at wildlife refuges in four states without conducting thorough site-by-site environmental reviews.

This is just the latest battle in a long-running war between environmentalists and the federal government over agricultural practices used at refuges across the country. From Environmental News Service:

This is the fifth lawsuit filed by Center for Food Safety and [Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility] challenging genetically engineered crops on wildlife refuges in their drive to ban these plantings from all refuges across the country.

A series of lawsuits has succeeded in rolling back approvals for genetically engineered crops on 75 national wildlife refuges across 30 states.

Previously, the two groups successfully challenged approval of genetically engineered plantings on two wildlife refuges in Delaware, which forced the Fish and Wildlife Service to end such plantings in its 12-state Northeastern region.

Another suit from the same groups halted cultivation of genetically engineered [crops] on 25 refuges across eight states in the Southeast in November 2012.

“These chemical companies and their products have no role in maintaining our wildlife refuges,” said Kathryn Douglass of PEER. “The Fish and Wildlife Service needs to look before it leaps to embrace industrial agricultural techniques on what are supposed to be havens for wildlife.”

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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Solar plane completes cross-country trip despite torn wing

by Beatriz Kasser Posted on July 8, 2013

Solar plane completes cross-country trip despite torn wing

By John Upton

Solar Impulse

Solar Impulse approaches John F. Kennedy Airport.

You know a plane is hot when wing damage actually hastens its arrival.

That happened Saturday night, when the solar-powered Solar Impulse completed a historic stop-and-start transcontinental voyage across America that began May 3 in San Francisco.

Total flying time: 105 hours and 41 minutes
Distance flown: 3,511 miles
Average speed: 33 miles per hour
Gasoline consumed: 0 drops

From Reuters:

The Solar Impulse, its four propellers driven by energy collected from 12,000 solar cells in its wings to charge batteries for night use, landed at John F. Kennedy Airport at 11:09 p.m. EDT, organizers said.

The experimental aircraft had left Dulles International Airport outside Washington for its last leg more than 18 hours earlier, on a route that took it north over Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey.

The spindly aircraft had been expected to land in the early hours of Sunday, but the project team decided to shorten the flight after an 8-foot (2.5 meter) tear appeared on the underside of the left wing.

The wing damage forced organizers to cancel a planned Statue of Liberty flyover, but it wasn’t enough to prevent them from achieving their dream of coast-to-coast solar-powered flight.

Between San Francisco and New York, the plane stopped over at Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Washington D.C., holding public events and meeting public officials.

Solar Impulse

Solar Impulse’s pilots, Andre Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, celebrate after reaching New York.

“Flying coast-to-coast has always been a mythical milestone full of challenges for aviation pioneers,” Solar Impulse copilot and chairman Bertrand Piccard said. “During this journey, we had to find solutions for a lot of unforeseen situations, which obliged us to develop new skills and strategies. In doing so, we also pushed the boundaries of clean technologies and renewable energies to unprecedented levels.”

Read more about the Solar Impulse: Solar plane crosses U.S., injects sexiness into the green conversation

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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Electric vehicles could stabilize grid, make money as batteries

by Jonathan Cawley Posted on April 30, 2013

Electric vehicles could stabilize grid, make money as batteries

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Makin’ money.

Electric vehicles aren’t just cars that are cleaner to operate than internal combustion dinosaurs. They’re also powerful batteries on wheels. Andthat quality could spur EV owners to buy electricity at night, or operate their own solar panels or wind turbines, and store the excess energy in their cars. Then they could sell that electricity onto the grid from their parked vehicles during the day, when energy prices are highest.

The University of Delaware began working with NRG Energy in late 2011 to try to realize and commercialize that concept. Last week, the project hit a landmark: It has begun selling power from parked EVs into an energy market being developed by wholesale electricity dealer PJM.

From the New York Times:

A line of Mini Coopers, each attached to the regional power grid by a thick cable plugged in where a gasoline filler pipe used to be, no longer just draws energy. The power now flows two ways between the cars and the electric grid, as the cars inject and suck power in tiny jolts, and get paid for it. …

The possibilities of using electric cars for other purposes are being realized around the globe. Electric cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid Volt are generally not sold in the United States with two-way chargers that could feed back into the grid. But Nissan is offering a similar device in Japan that allows consumers to power their houses when the electric grid is down.

In the Delaware project, each car is equipped with some additional circuitry and a battery charger that operates in two directions. When the cars work with the grid, they earn about $5 a day, which comes to about $1,800 a year, according to Willett M. Kempton, a professor of electrical engineering and computing. He hopes that provides an incentive to make electric cars more attractive to consumers, and estimates that the added gadgetry would add about $400 to the cost of a car.

According to a press release, the Delaware project became “an official participant in the PJM’s frequency regulation market” on Feb. 27. “Since then, the project has been selling power services from a fleet of EVs to PJM, whose territory has 60 million people in the 13 mid-Atlantic states.”

The option to sell electricity to the grid from parked cars could be particularly attractive for fleet operators. But the idea would also be expected to spread to personal garages and parking spaces, providing some extra spark for EV marketing efforts.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie 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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Honda partners with SolarCity to subsidize solar panels for customers

by kastijoo8753 Posted on February 20, 2013

Honda partners with SolarCity to subsidize solar panels for customers

By Philip Bump

Among the options that will soon be available to Honda customers in certain markets: cruise control, automatic transmission, solar panels for your house. Which is admittedly odd.

The New York Times explains the car company’s new offer:

Through a partnership with SolarCity, a residential and commercial installer, Honda and Acura will offer their customers home solar systems at little or no upfront cost, the companies said on Tuesday. The automaker will also offer its dealers preferential terms to lease or buy systems from SolarCity on a case-by-case basis, executives said.

The deal, in which Honda will provide financing for $65 million worth of installations, will help the automaker promote its environmental aims and earn a modest return, executives said. …

And SolarCity, one of the few clean-tech start-ups to find a market for an initial public offering of its stock last year, will potentially gain access to tens of millions of new customers through Honda’s vast lists of current and previous owners.

United States Marine Corps

Another satisfied Honda customer, in the future, maybe.

It’s an interesting strategy by Honda, a reinforcement of the company’s ongoing efforts to sell itself as environmentally friendly. And it’s not only buyers of efficient Hondas who stand to benefit from the offer; you can buy a giant gas-guzzler from another car company and still take Honda up on its deal.

Honda approached SolarCity more than a year ago when it was looking for a partner to provide solar installation services for its hybrid and electric vehicle customers, said Ryan Harty, American Honda’s assistant manager for environmental business development. The company then decided to expand to all its customers — a group it is defining “very, very broadly,” Mr. Harty said, to include not just car owners but also those who have explored its Web sites. The offer will be available in 14 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, and the District of Columbia.

For SolarCity, of course, the benefits are obvious. This is not the first time it has worked with a car company; in 2009, it announced a partnership to provide panels for Tesla’s solar charging stations. (Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk is also chair of SolarCity.)

We are still looking into reports that Chevron is offering an authentic polar bear rug with the purchase of 20 gallons of gasoline. We’ll update you as we learn more.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Test drive of Tesla sedan leaves New York Times stranded

by graptorm Posted on February 12, 2013

Test drive of Tesla sedan leaves New York Times stranded

By Philip Bump

Tesla is Silicon Valley’s car. The company’s head of product design, Elon Musk, went from rethinking online payments as a cofounder of PayPal to rethinking automobiles. Tesla’s first vehicle was an electricity-and-testosterone-powered roadster; recently, it added a sedan (electricity only).

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a review of the sedan by John Broder. His test drive, a haul from the outskirts of D.C. to Boston, could have gone better. From “Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway”:

The Model S has won multiple car-of-the-year awards and is, many reviews would have you believe, the coolest car on the planet.

What fun, no? Well, no.

The problem was power. The electric car, like a regular car, needs to be refilled. But unlike a regular car, you can’t refuel every few miles. Broder’s trip was meant to highlight two new charging stations between the cities, spaced within the range of a full charge of the car. Ideally. As Broder discovered, that wasn’t his experience — something for which the cold weather may have been partly to blame.

As I crossed into New Jersey …, I noticed that the estimated range was falling faster than miles were accumulating. At 68 miles since recharging, the range had dropped by 85 miles, and a little mental math told me that reaching Milford would be a stretch.

I began following Tesla’s range-maximization guidelines, which meant dispensing with such battery-draining amenities as warming the cabin and keeping up with traffic. I turned the climate control to low — the temperature was still in the 30s — and planted myself in the far right lane with the cruise control set at 54 miles per hour (the speed limit is 65). Buicks and 18-wheelers flew past, their drivers staring at the nail-polish-red wondercar with California dealer plates.

Broder’s trip ended on the back of a flatbed truck in Connecticut. But the story didn’t.

After the review ran, Musk jumped on Twitter to criticize it and the reviewer.

The “Top Gear BS” is a reference to a similar problem experienced by the TV show Top Gear when it was reviewing the Tesla Roadster. The show noted that the car ran out of juice well before it should have. Musk and Tesla filed a libel lawsuit, which was eventually thrown out.

Musk’s promised blog post hasn’t yet materialized, but that didn’t stop the Times from rising to the defense of the review. The paper told the Atlantic Wire:

The Times’s Feb. 10 article recounting a reporter’s test drive in a Tesla Model S was completely factual, describing the trip in detail exactly as it occurred. Any suggestion that the account was “fake” is, of course, flatly untrue. Our reporter followed the instructions he was given in multiple conversations with Tesla personnel.

As the San Francisco Chronicle notes, the review did some damage to Tesla. By the time markets closed last night, the stock had dropped 2 percent.

That might be a bit unfair. Tesla got out ahead of its skis a little in suggesting that the car was ready to have a road-trip review even though there are so few charging stations. Limited infrastructure is still a key inhibitor to electric-car adoption. But Musk’s response may have been a worse decision. By attacking the review, he both provides a disincentive to future reviewers and builds the affair into a much bigger deal than it needed to be — though his response did help the stock price rebound a bit. His later tweet indicating that more charging stations are imminent may have made an important longer-term point.

As a Silicon Valley veteran, Musk should know that things go wrong, and it’s the responsibility of the tech company to foresee and handle those problems. And, look, it could have been worse. At least Broder didn’t experience a crash.

Update: Broder posted his own response to Musk. It’s detailed. For example:

Mr. Musk has referred to a “long detour” on my trip. He is apparently referring to a brief stop in Manhattan on my way to Connecticut that, according to Google Maps, added precisely two miles to the overall distance traveled from the Delaware Supercharger to Milford (202 miles with the stop versus 200 miles had I taken the George Washington Bridge instead of the Lincoln Tunnel). At that point, I was already experiencing anxiety about range and had called a Tesla employee from the New Jersey Turnpike to ask how to stretch the battery. She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage.

Broder ends his response where we would have thought: It’s worth trying the test drive again once there is more infrastructure.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Test drive of Tesla sedan leaves New York Times stranded

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Seven states, led by New York, sue EPA over methane from oil and gas drilling

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 13, 2012

Seven states, led by New York, sue EPA over methane from oil and gas drilling

By Philip Bump

One of the benefits of being an elected official in a bright blue state, a state so blue that it casts a pale blue glow over its neighbors, is that you can be pretty aggressively liberal. New York state has a proud tradition of such politicians (as well as some less aggressive ones) — particularly those politicians ensconced as state attorney general.

Ten years ago, the state’s attorney general was a gentleman named Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer basically created the role of the crusading AG, running hard against Wall Street, prostitution (ahem), and pollution. When he wasn’t at the office, he was at home with his wife Silda, because he is a family man. Spitzer was succeeded in his role by Andrew Cuomo, who went after student loans and violations of privacy by police. In January 2011, when Cuomo became governor, the AG position was assumed by Eric Schneiderman — who has taken up the activist tradition with gusto.

citizenactionny

Schneiderman, during his campaign for attorney general.

Last May, Schneiderman filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to force an environmental review of fracking. That lawsuit was tossed out. So today, Schneiderman is trying a different route. From his website:

Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, leading a coalition of seven states, today notified the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of his intent to sue the Agency for violating the Clean Air Act by failing to address methane emissions from the oil and natural gas industry. …

Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Pound for pound, it warms the climate about 25 times more than carbon dioxide. EPA has found that the impacts of climate change caused by methane include “increased air and ocean temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, melting and thawing of global glaciers and ice, increasingly severe weather events — such as hurricanes of greater intensity — and sea level rise.” In 2009, EPA determined that methane and other greenhouse gases endanger the public’s health and welfare.

The EPA’s decision not to directly address the emissions of methane from oil and natural gas operations — including hydrofracking — leaves almost 95% of these emissions uncontrolled.

In August, the EPA finalized new pollution standards for the oil and natural gas industry which limited the amount of volatile organic compounds and other toxics that could be emitted at new extraction sites. But the rule doesn’t explicitly cover methane, though some of the methane that might otherwise escape would be captured or flared under the newly mandated systems. How much methane escapes during extraction — particularly during fracking — is hotly debated.

The EPA is no stranger to taking action in response to a legal dictate; in fact, lawsuits are one of the agency’s primary motivators. 2011′s proposed standard on mercury and air toxics from coal-burning power plants only happened because a court insisted that the EPA develop stricter pollution standards. Lawsuits from states and environmental organizations can reduce the political pressure faced by the EPA — and its supervising administration — when tightening rules that will result in higher costs for industry.

Industry reacted to today’s news as you’d expect, with a representative of the American Petroleum Institute telling the Associated Press that the lawsuit “makes no sense.” Of course, any regulation or imposition on the oil industry makes no sense to the API, because it means having polluters bear the costs of their pollution, and who would want that?

There are two reasons this lawsuit is smart for Schneiderman. The first is that it falls in the sweet spot of two controversial issues: climate change and fracking. New Yorkers are newly sensitive to the former topic, and a battle over the latter has been going on for months. Schneiderman is staking a bold, popular position in both cases.

Which leads to the second reason that this lawsuit is smart. Both of the last two elected governors of New York came directly from the office Schneiderman now holds. There’s basically a footpath worn from the attorney general’s office to the governor’s, with inspirational posters hung along the way saying things like “Bring truth to power!” and “Everyone hates polluters!” As that Associated Press article notes, the seven states that are party to Schneiderman’s suit — New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont — are not big oil and gas producers. But they’re all bathed in that blue light; the attorney general in each can feel confident that taking on greenhouse gas polluters is a politically safe fight to pursue.

For Schneiderman, it’s a push for higher office. But if it results in stronger curbs on methane pollution, who are we to argue?

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Seven states, led by New York, sue EPA over methane from oil and gas drilling

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