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TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

by xf0ks040u Posted on November 3, 2015

TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

By on 3 Nov 2015 6:40 amcommentsShare

President Obama has reportedly been gearing up to reject the Keystone XL pipeline project, so pipeline company TransCanada is trying a last-ditch effort to get the decision punted to Obama’s successor.

The latest twists and turns in the long-running Keystone saga kicked off on Monday afternoon, when White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest responded to a question from a reporter by saying that President Obama will make a decision on the pipeline before he leaves office. It’s been rumored for months that his decision will be “no.” As The Washington Post reports, “The administration is preparing to reject a cross-border permit for the project aimed at transporting hundreds of thousands of barrels of heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands region to Gulf Coast refineries, according to several individuals who have been briefed but spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House’s decision has not been announced.”

A few hours after Earnest’s comments, TransCanada sent a formal letter to Secretary of State John Kerry asking the State Department to “pause” its review of the Keystone proposal. His department has been tasked with determining whether the project would be in the “national interest” and then reporting its determination to the White House. TransCanada is arguing that because the pipeline’s planned route through Nebraska is in contention, the federal review should be put on hold until the route is finalized.

That’s pretty cheeky: After years of complaining that the administration has been delaying its Keystone decision, TransCanada is now asking the administration to further delay it.

Climate campaigners and anti-Keystone activists see TransCanada’s move as a desperate ploy that has exactly nothing to do with the pipeline route. “The route in Nebraska has been uncertain for years,” activist Jane Kleeb of the group Bold Nebraska told the Omaha World-Herald. “The only difference is they know they are losing now.”

Activists are loudly calling on Obama to reject TransCanada’s request for a delay and then reject the pipeline altogether. Said 350.org founder (and Grist board member) Bill McKibben, “No matter what route TransCanada comes back with, the ultimate problem all along with Keystone XL has been that it’s a climate disaster.”

If TransCanada’s request for a delay is granted, the final Keystone decision would likely fall to the next president. TransCanada is obviously hoping that president will be a Republican, as all of the Republican candidates support Keystone, while the top three Democratic candidates oppose it. Hillary Clinton had refused to take a position on the pipeline for years, but in September she finally came out against it. “This is nothing more than another desperate and cynical attempt by TransCanada to build their dirty pipeline someday if they get a climate denier in the White House in 2017,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Conservation Voters.

If Obama sticks to his plan and denies TransCanada the permit it needs, the move could help build his legacy as a leader in the climate fight. Says McKibben, “If President Obama rejects this pipeline once and for all, he’ll go to Paris with boosted credibility — the world leader who was willing to shut down a big project on climate grounds.” A major round of U.N. climate negotiations will start in Paris on Nov. 30, and Obama has been working to get other big countries to make significant pledges of climate action ahead of that meeting.

A pipeline rejection from Obama might mean that TransCanada is screwed even if a Republican moves into the White House in 2017. “The company would either have to restart the difficult and costly application entirely from scratch — or, more likely, abandon the pipeline altogether,” writes Brad Plumer of Vox.

So where does all this leave us now? Exactly where we were two days ago: waiting to see what Obama will do.

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TransCanada tries desperate move to save Keystone XL pipeline

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Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

by PhoebeKmk753134 Posted on August 28, 2015

Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

By on 28 Aug 2015commentsShare

It’s a safe bet that most kids who make excuses for bad grades are just totally full of it. Couldn’t upload your homework because the internet was down? Nice try. The latest video in your YouTube series went viral, and you just had to spend all night responding to comments? You’re not that important. Dog ate your homework? Stop it. But if a kid says her GPA is a touch low because her home is shrouded in toxic air pollution, maybe listen to her.

In a recent study published in the journal Population and Environment, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso reported that kids living in highly polluted areas tended to have lower GPAs than their peers — and that’s after the researchers accounted for the child’s age, race, and sex, their family’s household income, and the mother’s education level, age during pregnancy, and English proficiency.

Previous studies have shown correlations between students’ academic performance and air pollution levels around schools, but this is the first to look at home environments, where students likely spend most of their time. The researchers conducted the study using data from the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment and the academic records of 1,895 fourth and fifth graders around El Paso. The overall differences in GPA were small, the researchers reported, but the association with home toxicity was strong, and that’s cause for concern:

Effects appear to be insidious, since they are mild, unlikely to be perceived, and, hence, unlikely to be addressed in any way. It would be important to note that seemingly trivial effects on children’s development may translate into substantial impacts throughout the life course, in terms of physical and mental health and personal success (e.g., lifetime earnings).

How exactly these pollutants influence a child’s academic performance is a bit murky. Sara E. Grineski, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at UTEP and one of the study’s coauthors, said in the press release that there could be a few things going on here:

“Some evidence suggests that this association might exist because of illnesses, such as respiratory infections or asthma. Air pollution makes children sick, which leads to absenteeism and poor performance in school. The other hypothesis is that chronic exposure to air toxics can negatively affect children’s neurological and brain development.”

The primary sources of the harmful pollution came from what the researchers called “non-mobile road sources” — things like trains, construction vehicles, and airplanes. That the researchers separated out these various sources of pollution is another reason that this study is unique compared to previous research that just looked at pollution in aggregate:

While point (e.g., factories) and on-road mobile (e.g., freeways) sources of air pollution have received the most attention in the policy and academic arenas, the contribution to non-road mobile sources to the overall pollution burden is increasingly being recognized nationwide. For example, new evidence suggests that the particle pollution generated from the Los Angeles International airport extends over 10 km and is of the same general magnitude as the entire freeway system in Los Angeles, California, USA (Hudda et al. 2014).

Since low-income and minority neighborhoods tend to be the most popular dumping grounds for air pollution compared to their more affluent counterparts, this is clearly a job for — oh, sorry. It’s just that environmental justice gets violated so often these days that it seems like it should have its own superhero by now — a Superman to its Metropolis, a Batman to its Gotham. Do you think we could get Captain Planet to spearhead an Environmental Justice League?

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Study Links Air Pollution to Children’s Low GPAs

, UTEP News.

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A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15


That 15-foot-long tiger shark need wrestling? Leave it to the prosYou probably aren’t going to tango with a tiger shark anytime soon — but David Shiffman does it on a weekly basis, for science.


These first-time fishermen know all the best (and worst) parts of fishingAndrew and Sophie never planned to be commercial fishermen — but they tried it for a summer. Here’s what they learned.


How to feed the world, with a little kelp from our friends (the oceans)Paul Dobbins’ farm needs no pesticides, fertilizer, land, or water — we just have to learn to love seaweed.


This surfer is committed to saving sharks — even though he lost his leg to one of themMike Coots lost his leg in a shark attack. Then he joined the group Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation, and started fighting to save SHARKS from US.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

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Obama’s Big Climate Plan Is Now Final—and It’s Even Stronger Than Expected

by Myrna Posted on August 3, 2015

But there’s still much more to do. Drop of Light/Shutterstock t’s finally here, the biggest climate action of Obama’s presidency: On Monday morning, the EPA will issue a final Clean Power Plan rule that will, for the first time, govern carbon emissions from power plants. And it’s stronger in several ways than the draft plan that was released in June 2014. The White House began bragging about its accomplishment on Sunday. First it released a feel-good video. Then there was a press call with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. On Monday, President Obama himself will speak about the plan. Even before any of that, the accolades from environmental and public health groups started rolling in. Carol Browner, former EPA administrator and now chair of the League of Conservation Voters, was typical in calling it “a visionary policy that sets our nation on the path to cleaner, renewable energy for the future.” Here’s why: The Clean Power Plan, assuming it survives legal challenges, is set to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. It’s the biggest component of Obama’s Climate Action Plan, and the centerpiece of any realistic program to meet our emission-reduction pledges from the 2009 Copenhagen Accord and the intended targets we have outlined ahead of the Paris climate talks that will take place later this year. Read the rest at Grist. Visit site:  Obama’s Big Climate Plan Is Now Final—and It’s Even Stronger Than Expected ; ; ;

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Obama’s Big Climate Plan Is Now Final—and It’s Even Stronger Than Expected

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Hillary Clinton Refuses to Take a Position on the Keystone Pipeline

by Stephanj0r Posted on July 27, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton took a strong stance on clean energy Monday, telling a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, that her efforts to tackle climate change would parallel President John F. Kennedy’s call to action during the space race in the 1960s.

“I want to get the country back to setting big ambitious goals,” Clinton said. “I want us to get back into the future business, and one of the best ways we can do that is to be absolutely ready to address the challenge of climate change and make it work to our advantage economically.”

Her remarks tracked closely with an ambitious plan her campaign released Sunday night, which set a target of producing enough renewable energy to power all the nation’s homes and businesses by 2027.

“America’s ability to lead the world on this issue hinges on our ability to act ourselves,” she said. “I refuse to turn my back on what is one of the greatest threats and greatest opportunities America faces.”

Still, the Democractic front-runner refused—as she has several times before—to say whether or not she supports construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That project, which would carry crude oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries and ports in the United States, is seen by many environmentalists as a blemish on President Barack Obama’s climate record. It has been stalled for years in a lengthy State Department review that began when Clinton was still Secretary of State. The Obama administration has resisted several recent attempts by Congress to force Keystone’s approval, but it has yet to make a final decision on the project—although one is expected sometime this year.

“I will refrain from commenting on Keystone XL, because I had a leading role in getting that process started, and we have to let it run its course,” Clinton said, in response to a question from an audience member.

Her non-position on Keystone earned derision from environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose organization 350.org has been at the forefront of opposition to the pipeline.

“I think it’s bogus,” he said in an email. “Look, the notion that she can’t talk about it because the State Dept. is still working on it makes no sense. By that test, she shouldn’t be talking about Benghazi or Iran or anything else either. The more she tries to duck the question, the more the whole thing smells.”

Clinton also punted on an audience request to reveal further details of how exactly she would finance the renewable energy targets she announced yesterday, which aim even higher than those already put in place by Obama. She reiterated that one key step would be to ensure the extension of federal tax credits for wind and solar energy that have expired or are set to expire over the next few years. And she said that she would continue Obama’s practice of pursuing aggressive climate policies from within the White House, saying that “we still have a lot we can do” without waiting for a recalcitrant Congress to act.

Clinton acknowledged that the clean energy boom would come at a cost for the US coal industry, which is already in steep decline. She said she would “guarantee that coal miners and their families get the benefits they’ve earned,” but didn’t elaborate on what she meant or how specifically she would achieve that.

Environmental groups offered a generally positive reaction to Clinton’s policy announcement Sunday. In a statement, League of Conservation Voters vice president Tiernan Sittenfield commended her for “calling out climate change deniers and effectively illustrating the urgent need to act on a defining issue of our time.” She also earned praise from billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who has set a high bar on climate action for any candidate who wants to tap his millions.

“I refuse to let those who are deniers to rip away all the progress we’ve made and leave our country exposed to climate change,” Clinton said.

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Hillary Clinton Refuses to Take a Position on the Keystone Pipeline

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Don’t Forget: Sepp Blatter’s Odds-On Replacement Is Also Pretty Terrible

by Nathanmlm Posted on June 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michel Platini, the legendary former French midfielder who now runs Europe’s soccer governing body, is already the oddsmaker’s favorite to become the next head of FIFA.

He also kind of sucks.

Blatter unexpectedly resigned on Tuesday, just days after winning a fifth term as FIFA president. His resignation was prompted by the arrest of FIFA officials last week as part of a Justice Department investigation into corruption and bribery at the organization. Though Blatter professed shock and said he had no intention of leaving FIFA, the widening scope of the investigations—along with huge global media coverage and schadenfreude—finally drove Blatter out of office.

“FIFA needs a profound overhaul,” he said at the announcement.

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Don’t Forget: Sepp Blatter’s Odds-On Replacement Is Also Pretty Terrible

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CNN Plans to Feature Peanut Gallery Debate as Warmup for Main Event

by CecilaCardell Posted on May 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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CNN will be hosting the second Republican debate, and they’ve come up with a….unique way of dealing with the fact that there are just too damn many candidates. To handle the crowd, they’re going to have two separate debates:

“The first 10 candidates — ranked from highest to lowest in polling order from an average of all qualifying polls released between July 16 and September 10 who satisfy the criteria requirements … will be invited to participate in ‘Segment B’ of the September 16, 2015 Republican Presidential Primary Debate,” the network states in its candidate criteria. “Candidates who satisfy the criteria and achieve an average of at least 1 percent in three national polls, but are not ranked in the top 10 of polling order will be invited to participate in ‘Segment A’ of the September 16, 2015 Republican Presidential Primary Debate.”

Did you get that? All the yokels—Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, etc.—will go on first. They’ll be sort of the warm-up act. Then they’ll get shuffled off the stage and the big guns will have prime time all to themselves. This is pretty humiliating for the also-rans, but presumably if they play by the rules they’ll have a chance to move up, just like in English Premier League soccer. Perhaps Rick Perry will stumble and get relegated to the minor leagues for the next debate, while Jindal will knock everyone’s socks off and get promoted to the show. I don’t know if I’d quite call this “fun,” but it would certainly make for some interesting office pools.

The first debate, which is hosted by Fox, will feature none of this nonsense. The top ten candidates will be invited to the debate, and that’s that. If you’re outside the top ten, you can watch the debate on your big-screen TV at home. Or, if Fox is feeling generous, perhaps the sad sacks polling at the 1% level will be allowed to while away their time in the spin room, where they can try to buttonhole reporters and explain why they really should have been up on the stage. Perhaps the saddest story will win a prize.

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CNN Plans to Feature Peanut Gallery Debate as Warmup for Main Event

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

by Charity1825 Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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The National Football League paid its commissioner, Roger Goodell, a staggering $44.1 million in 2012. The year before, he took home $29 million. The year before that, $11 million. That’s corner-office-at-Goldman-Sachs-level money—to run what for decades has been a tax-exempt organization.

Soon, however, the public won’t have a clue what Goodell or anyone else in the NFL league office earns. On Tuesday, Goodell announced that the NFL will give up its tax-exempt status, claiming that it has turned into a “distraction” that “has been mischaracterized repeatedly.” Here’s what that means: For the first time in more than 70 years, pro football’s league headquarters will pony up its share of federal taxes. But it also means the NFL won’t have to file the tax forms that require it to be transparent about salaries, revenue, spending, and more.

Congress granted the NFL tax-exempt status way back in 1942, long before it was the global juggernaut that it is today, with estimated revenues of $9.5 billion a year. (Goodell wants to grow that to $25 billion by 2027.) For years, budget hawks in Congress and good-government groups have called for stripping the league of its nonprofit status and forcing it to join Major League Baseball’s front office in operating like a normal taxable business. Former Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who never saw a piece of pork he didn’t want to trim, waged a lonely war to revoke the NFL’s 501(c)(6) status with a piece of legislation called the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports Act (PRO Sports Act). (The bill specifically targeted the NFL, even though the National Hockey League and Professional Golf Association are also nonprofits.) And in December 2013, I wrote about an anti-corruption group’s campaign to gin up public support for eliminating the NFL’s tax break.

Goodell’s announcement will no doubt be cheered as a victory by the league’s critics. So what I’m about to say will make me few friends, but here goes: The commish has a point. And the NFL giving up its tax-exempt status is bad news.

Goodell frames this decision not as a financial one but as a way to move past what he sees as the misguided controversy and anger over the league’s tax status. As he’s quick to point out, the league’s 32 teams pay taxes on all that revenue. The Pats, the Colts, my beloved Detroit Lions: None is tax-exempt. It’s the NFL front office—which reported $326,882,787 in 2013 revenue—that doesn’t pay taxes. Sure, $327 million is a lot of money, but it’s a pittance compared to $9.5 billion. How much do we lose in tax revenue from this? The Joint Committee on Taxation crunched the numbers and found that the 10-year cost for giving the NFL and NHL tax-exempt status is roughly $109 million—a relatively paltry sum.

Nonetheless, critics like Coburn and government watchdog groups argue that eliminating the NFL’s subsidy is the right thing to do. Any waste, they say, is bad waste. Okay, sure. But at what cost?

There’s a wealth of information in each of the NFL’s annual tax forms—detailed breakdowns of where the league’s money comes from, front-office compensation packages, which law firms the league retains, the amounts and recipients of league grants. Goodell doesn’t mention this in his announcement, but it’s hard to imagine the league not relishing the opportunity to pull some of that information out of the spotlight.

Perhaps the silver lining is this: By taking the tax-exempt issue off the table, activists can instead focus their work on more-meaningful reforms. Take, for example, the grand scam of taxpayer financing for stadiums. A 2012 Bloomberg analysis calculated that federal taxpayers lost $4 billion in the last 25 years’ worth of stadium construction deals. It’s one of the great boondoggles in sports today, an issue where the fleecing is very real.

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The NFL Is About to Pay Taxes for the First Time in More Than 70 Years

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Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment

by CyrilLackvyfr Posted on March 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Scott Walker is killing it with Republicans. The Wisconsin governor is one of his party’s rising stars—thanks to his ongoing and largely successful war against his state’s labor unions, a fight that culminated Monday with the signing of a controversial “right-to-work” bill.

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Now (for the moment, anyway), he’s a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple weeks ago, he polled a close second to three-time winner Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by a significant margin.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that none of the prospective GOP presidential candidates are exactly champions of the environment. Probably the least bad is New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who at least acknowledges that climate change is real and caused by human activity. Walker just might be the worst. He hasn’t said much about the science of global warming. (In the video above, you can watch him tell a little kid that his solution to the problem will center on keeping campsites clean, or something.) But his track record of actively undermining pro-environment programs and policies while supporting the fossil fuel industry is arguably lengthier and more substantive than that of his likely rivals.

“He really has gone after every single piece of environmental protection: Land, air, water—he’s left no stone unturned,” said Kerry Schumann, executive director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters. “It’s hard to imagine anyone has done worse.”

Here’s a rundown of Walker’s inglorious history of anti-environmentalism.

Attacking Obama’s climate agenda: Walker is a key figure in the GOP’s battle against President Barack Obama’s flagship climate policy—the proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules that are designed to reduce the carbon footprint of the nation’s electricity sector 30 percent by 2030. The rules will likely require states to retrofit or shutter some of their coal-fired power plants. That could be a big deal in Wisconsin, which gets 62 percent of its power from coal.

In a letter to the EPA in December, Walker said the plan would be “a blow to Wisconsin residents and business owners.” He cited an analysis from his state’s Public Service Commission that predicted household electric bills would skyrocket. They won’t, necessarily, since the state has a lot of options—including boosting renewables and energy efficiency—that it could use to meet its EPA carbon target without jeopardizing the power grid. But rather than preparing for the new rules, Walker seems bent on stonewalling them. In January he announced that his new attorney general was already preparing a lawsuit against the EPA, a move that was lauded by the Wisconsin director of the Koch Brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity. Walker has also signed a pledge, devised by Americans for Prosperity, that he will oppose any legislation relating to climate change—presumably a cap-and-trade plan or a carbon tax—that would result in a “net increase in government revenue.”

Indeed, Walker has close ties to Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who made a fortune in fossil fuels and who for years poured money into groups that cast doubt on the science of climate change. They own paper factories and a network of gasoline supply terminals in Wisconsin, and they have an interest in the state’s trove of “frac sand” (more on that below). Koch Industries gave $43,000 to Walker’s 2010 election campaign, and just after he took office, the Kochs doubled their lobbying force in Madison. In 2011 and 2012, David Koch and Americans for Prosperity spent $11 million backing Walker’s agenda and his successful effort to avoid being recalled.

Turning off clean energy: As much as he apparently supports fossil fuel development, Walker has taken steps to put the brakes on clean energy. Last month, he released a budget proposal that would drain $8.1 million from a leading renewable energy research center in the state. That same budget, however, would pump $250,000 into a study on the potential health impacts of wind turbines. (Wind energy opponents have long suggested that inaudible sound waves from turbines can cause insomnia, anxiety, and other disorders, although independent research has repeatedly found these claims are more connected to NIMBYism than legitimate medical concerns.) Walker’s budget would also cut $4 million in state subsidies for municipal recycling programs. That, at least, is an improvement over his first budget as governor, which proposed to eliminate recycling subsidies altogether.

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Scott Walker Is the Worst Candidate for the Environment

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This Is Why Under-Inflated Footballs Could Have Given Tom Brady An Advantage

by IXYEmeryebk Posted on January 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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To those of us for whom the nuances of professional football tactics are a bit of a mystery, there was one question looming over New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady’s surreal Ballghazi press conference yesterday that went unanswered: What’s so great, in theory, about a deflated football? Seems like, if anything, an under-inflated ball would be less aerodynamic?

Turns out, the potential benefit is all about grippiness. From Fox Sports:

John Eric Goff, professor of physics at Lynchburg College in Virginia and author of “Gold Medal Physics: The Science of Sports,” told FoxNews.com that the league-mandated PSI range is ideal for playing football. “If, however, there’s rain or snow or something else happening, that would make the ball a bit slicker, so having a bit less pressure in the ball makes it easier to squeeze and the grip improves,” he added.

Interesting!

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This Is Why Under-Inflated Footballs Could Have Given Tom Brady An Advantage

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You Can Go Watch "The Interview" On Christmas After All

by MelodeeLum Posted on December 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Update, 12/23/2014: Sony has confirmed the Christmas Day release of “The Interview.”

It looks like “The Interview” may actually be released on Christmas Day!

Independent theaters in Texas and Atlanta are saying that they’ve received the go-ahead to show the film Thursday.

The Dallas Morning News has more: “Sources familiar with this morning’s conference call say Sony is also going to make the movie available to theaters at a reduced rental rate, as well as put it on a streaming service (not yet named) and video on demand by no later than Christmas.”

This is fantastic news for America and for freedom of expression and blah blah blah blah. However, on the downside, it does mean we may actually have to see this stupid movie now. Still, overall, fantastic news!

God bless America. God bless George Washington. God bless all the Founding Fathers. God bless Thomas Edison for inventing the movie camera. God bless Seth Rogen and James Franco. God bless Kim Jong Un…wait, don’t God bless Kim Jong Un.

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You Can Go Watch "The Interview" On Christmas After All

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