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Step right up, Big Coal, for America’s Big Coal Giveaway

by WalkerMcIntyre Posted on February 5, 2014

Step right up, Big Coal, for America’s Big Coal Giveaway

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It’s bad enough that the federal government leases out public lands to private companies to be torn up and mined for coal. Even worse is that the feds are ripping off taxpayers in the process, leasing the coal tracts at way-below-market prices, through a totally inept program, according to a new federal study.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has leased 107 coal-laden tracts of land to mining companies since 1990, recently generating about $1 billion a year for federal coffers. Coal mining on federal land accounts for two-fifths of the 1 billion tons of coal mined every year in the U.S. Less coal is being burned in the U.S. these days, but it still produces about 40 percent of the nation’s electricity. Meanwhile, coal exports are growing.

Auctions for the coal-tract leases attract few bidders, and a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office is the latest reminder that the feds are selling the public short by accepting lowball offers.

Of the 107 coal-tract leases, 96 were sold to the only bidder — often to a company that was already mining for coal nearby:

GAO

The government is under no obligation to accept the lowball bids, but it appears to be doing so anyway because of systemic failures within BLM to properly estimate fair market value. The GAO found that some bureau offices failed to follow procedures, seek independent advice, or consider future market conditions when estimating market value. And when the bureau sold America’s assets at fire-sale prices, it “did not consistently document the rationale for accepting bids that were initially below the fair market value,” according to the report.

“Taxpayers are likely losing out so that coal companies can reap a windfall,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who asked the GAO to conduct the study. Markey’s office estimates that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars may have been lost to coal companies through these bargain leases.

Following publication of the GAO report on Tuesday, Markey and environmentalists called on the federal government to suspend new coal leases until it can be sure it will get fair prices for them.

Of course, it would be even better for the U.S. to stop coal mining on federal land entirely — something that President Obama might consider were he to take his own rhetoric about climate change seriously.

On that note, here’s how Rolling Stone describes the administration’s muddled coal policy in a must-read article titled “How the U.S. Exports Global Warming”:

With the freefall in domestic [coal] demand, industry giants like Peabody are desperate to turn American coal into a global export — targeting booming Asian economies that are powering their growth with dirty fuel. China now consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and its demand is projected to grow by nearly 40 percent by the end of the decade. “China’s demand,” according to William Durbin, head of global markets for the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, “will almost single-handedly propel the growth of coal.”

Since Obama took office, American coal exports are up more than 50 percent. … [T]he administration opened up more than 300 million tons of coal in the Powder River Basin to bidding by the coal companies last year. The coal is on government land; it belongs to the public. Yet the leasing practices of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are so flawed that one independent study estimates that taxpayers have been fleeced of $30 billion over the past three decades. In the past, that stealth subsidy to Big Coal at least helped create cheap power for American homes and businesses. Today, the administration has put American taxpayers in the position of subsidizing coal destined to fuel the growth of our nation’s fiercest, and carbon-filthiest, economic rival.

In an era of climatic craziness and growing clean energy capacity, the last thing Americans should be subsidizing is coal mining.


Source
BLM Could Enhance Appraisal Process, More Explicitly Consider Coal Exports, and Provide More Public Information, GAO
How the U.S. Exports Global Warming, Rolling Stone

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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Step right up, Big Coal, for America’s Big Coal Giveaway

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

by BenitoStingley Posted on February 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Federal coffers are missing out on what could be billions of dollars in lost revenue due to shoddy accounting work by the office that handles leases for coal mines on public land, according to a report made public today by the investigative arm of Congress.

The Government Accountability Office was asked by Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a stalwart climate hawk, to look into whether the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management routinely sells leases to coal mining companies for far less than their market value. Investigators found that BLM agents in Wyoming (by far the country’s largest coal producer) set prices based on coal’s historic value, but, in contradiction of the department’s own rules, fail to take into account how much it will likely be worth in the future. Similar problems were found in other coal-producing states. As a result, the GAO report claims, many leases were sold far beneath their true market value, depriving taxpayers of additional royalties (which, as it stands, come to about $1 billion per year) that are normally skimmed from the mines’ profits.

“As a net result, the public is getting screwed,” said Tom Kenworthy, an energy analyst at the Center for American Progress who has kept tabs on Interior’s longstanding problems with coal lease valuation.

That the leases are selling for less than they’re worth seems clear; what’s less obvious is exactly how much money is at stake, since the values were never properly set in the first place (the GAO report doesn’t specify a number). A 2012 analysis of federal lease records by former New York State Deputy Comptroller Tom Sanzillo for the independent Institute for Energy Economics found that undervalued coal leases cost the Treasury $28.9 billion in lost revenue since 1983, or almost $1 billion every year. Meanwhile, analysis by Senator Markey’s office put the figure at $200 million, although a spokesperson would not specify the time period to which that applied, as the underlying data are considered proprietary to the Interior Department, he said.

Since 1990, the federal government has leased 107 parcels of public land for coal mining; these parcels typically account for 25-40 percent of the roughly one billion tons of coal produced annually nationwide. That adds up to a massive carbon footprint: Fossil fuels produced on public land create roughly a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas pollution every year, about as much as 285 coal plants.

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How the Feds Are Ripping You Off To Benefit Big Coal

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Only Obama Can Block the Keystone Pipeline Now

by BrentonHoutz Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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The decision on whether or not to allow construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico, has always been President Obama’s to make. But the environmental stakes are so high—leading climate scientist James Hansen is fond of referring to the pipeline as “game over for the climate” because it would promote the extraction of one of the dirtiest kinds of oil—that a decision has been delayed for the last few years as the State Department carries out a review of the project’s likely environmental impact.

That wait ended today, as State released its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement. The report says the annual carbon emissions from producing, refining, and burning the oil the pipeline would move (830,000 barrels per day) would add up to 147-168 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. (By contrast, the typical coal-fired power plant produces 3.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually.) That sounds like a lot, but the report comes with an important caveat:

Approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, is unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands or the demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States.

In other words, according to the report, those emissions are likely to happen whether the president approves Keystone XL or not. That’s an important distinction, given that President Obama has already said that in order to gain approval, the pipeline must not increase carbon emissions. But there are other ways to move oil: For example, the report mentions that “rail will likely be able to accommodate new production if pipelines are delayed or not constructed.” Rail transit is already underway; yesterday an ExxonMobil exec said the company had begun to use trains to pack oil out of the tar sands (despite their pretty awful safety record). But if the oil is going to be extracted (and the emissions emitted) one way or another, the case for blocking the pipeline per se becomes less clear.

There’s still one more important document yet to be released by State: an investigation by the department’s internal Inspector General into a potential conflict of interest by a contractor who helped produce the report, Environmental Resources Management. As Mother Jones first reported, State Department officials took steps to conceal that some ERM employees had ties to companies that would profit from the pipeline’s construction. Last December, Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz) led a coalition of House members who asked the president to delay release of the environmental impact statement until after the Inspector General’s report is released, which is not expected for several more weeks.

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Only Obama Can Block the Keystone Pipeline Now

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Freedom Industries kept West Virginia spill details secret

by EsmeraldaYarnol Posted on January 27, 2014

Freedom Industries kept West Virginia spill details secret

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If you had been among Freedom Industries’ dozens of employees, you would have known more than your neighbors about the contents of a toxic spill that left hundreds of thousands of West Virginians without safe tap water recently.

After state officials discovered on Jan. 9 that chemicals had gushed out of a storage drum and into Elk River, the company told them that the drum contained something called 4-Methylcyclohexane methanol. The poison is used by the state’s coal miners. Little is known about the precise hazards that it poses, but it has sickened hundreds of people.

What the company didn’t tell the government until last week was that the drum also contained something that they call stripped PPH. The company did, however, tell its own workers about that second chemical in an email immediately after the spill. So, lucky them.

Stripped PPH was mixed in with the other chemicals in the drum at a concentration of about 6 percent. A material safety data sheet (MSDS) provided to state officials says stripped PPH contains a complex mixture of polyglycol ethers. “The specific chemical identity is being withheld as ‘trade secret,’” the company wrote in the safety document, which was dated Oct. 15, 2013.

According to the MSDS, stripped PPH causes skin irritation and “serious” eye irritation. Workers are warned to wear protective gloves, goggles, and face protection whenever they work with it. And in case of a chemical spill? “Persons not wearing protective equipment should be excluded from the area of the spill until cleanup has been completed.”

So nice of them to let us know. Here’s more from the AP:

The company at the center of the West Virginia water crisis immediately knew a second chemical leaked from its plant into the Elk River, and told its workers in an email, according to a state environmental official.

However, Freedom Industries did not let state government officials know about the second chemical until days after the spill. And state environmental department official Mike Dorsey said most company employees did not skim far enough into the email to see that information. …

“The explanation I was given was that they had the information on the very first day,” said Dorsey, chief of the state environmental agency’s homeland security and emergency response division.

After learning of the presence of the second chemical, state officials tested for it, but found no traces of it.

Meanwhile, more than 500 people have now been hospitalized with ailments linked to the spill. And the company is enjoying newfound bankruptcy protection from lawsuits.


Source
W.Va. official: Spill company knew of 2nd chemical, AP
PPH, stripped, Freedom Industries via West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management

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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McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

by AntoineRuggles Posted on January 7, 2014

McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

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We aren’t suggesting that you try this, but should you venture into a McDonald’s a few years from now and order a hamburger, some of the beef you end up eating may have come from a sustainably raised cow.

The fast-food giant’s first planned purchases of frozen beef patties from “verified sustainable sources” will begin in 2016, the company announced today. That’s an important step because McDonald’s is a huge international dealer in beef — it sells more than $5 billion a year worth of Big Macs and less iconically branded hamburgers. Here’s more from Joel Makower at GreenBiz:

“Our vision is to buy verifiable, sustainable beef in the future for all of our beef,” said Bob Langert, McDonald’s vice president, global sustainability. “We have achieved internal alignment and energy around that aspirational goal, which is a big task,” he told me during a November visit to the company’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill.

Langert says McDonald’s isn’t yet ready to commit to a specific quantity it will purchase in 2016, or when it might achieve its “aspirational goal” of buying 100 percent of its beef from “verified sustainable sources.” (The company will only say that, “We will focus on increasing the annual amount each year.”) Realistically, it could take a decade or more to achieve the 100-percent goal.

But what is sustainable beef, exactly? (Is it ground off the hide of an ever-suffering but immortal cow, perhaps?) There is no clear definition, so McDonalds is working with other food giants and the World Wildlife Fund to try to figure that out. They’re collaborating through a group known as the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Again from GreenBiz:

The group developed six draft principles that the membership is currently considering, along with multiple criteria within each of those principles. The principles cover people (human rights, safe and healthy work environment), community (culture, heritage, employment, land rights, health), animal health and welfare, food safety and quality, natural resources (ecosystem health) and efficiency and innovation (reducing waste, optimizing production, economic vitality).

This is part of a bigger push by McDonald’s to be more green and socially responsible:

Beef isn’t the only sustainability issue the company is looking at. For years, the company has been addressing the environmental and social impacts of its supply chain, one ingredient at a time. The company’s Sustainable Land Management Commitment, unveiled in 2011, requires suppliers to gradually source food and materials from sustainably managed land, although there are no specific timelines, and it is initially focusing on beef, poultry, fish, coffee, palm oil and packaging. Notably missing for now are pork, potatoes and other produce.

There’s plenty more that is notably missing, including a willingness to pay workers a living wage.

Still, the beef shift should bring some real environmental and climate benefits. Watch for more on that from GreenBiz later this week, in parts 2 and 3 of its series on McDonald’s and beef.


Source
Exclusive: Inside McDonald’s quest for sustainable beef, GreenBiz

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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McDonald’s will shift (very slowly) to sustainable beef

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Elizabeth Warren Introduces Bill to Prevent Employers From Discriminating Against Poor People

by Junepps1b Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and six of her colleagues in the Senate introduced a bill that would prevent employers from using credit checks in the hiring process, a practice that disproportionately hurts poor people.

Over the past few decades, credit reporting bureaus have begun selling their services not just to lenders, but to a wide range of employers. Forty-seven percent of employers check applicants’ credit history as an indicator of their employability, according to a 2012 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. But research shows that a person’s credit score has nothing to do with her likelihood of succeeding in the workplace. The Equal Employment for All Act—co-sponsored by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)—would prohibit the judging of applicants by this metric.

“A bad credit rating is far more often the result of unexpected medical costs, unemployment, economic downturns, or other bad breaks than it is a reflection on an individual’s character or abilities,” Warren said. “Families have not fully recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, and too many Americans are still searching for jobs. This is about basic fairness—let people compete on the merits, not on whether they already have enough money to pay all their bills.”

The bill, which is backed by over 40 community, financial reform, labor and civil rights organizations, would be a boon for low-wage workers, minority communities, and women. Credit checks used in the hiring process disproportionately disqualify people of color. Divorce tends to hit women’s finances harder than men’s, and women are also more likely to receive subprime loans than men.

Chi Chi Wu, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center in Boston, told the New York Times in May that most of the people who contacted her group complaining that they’d been denied a job because of poor credit were low-wage workers applying to big retail chains. “Someone loses their job,” she said, “so they can’t pay their bills—and now they can’t get a job because they couldn’t pay their bills because they lost a job? It’s this Catch-22 that makes no sense.”

There is ample support for the senators’ bill. In 2011, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) introduced a similar bill in the House. Nine states have adopted legislation that curbs the use of credit reports to in the hiring process.

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Elizabeth Warren Introduces Bill to Prevent Employers From Discriminating Against Poor People

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Bay Area commits to 80 percent greenhouse gas reduction

by paczaizmon Posted on November 7, 2013

Bay Area commits to 80 percent greenhouse gas reduction

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Air-quality officials in the oil-refinery-dotted and highway-laced San Francisco Bay Area committed Wednesday to substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the famously progressive region.

Bay Area Air Quality Management District leaders directed agency staff [PDF] to begin the work needed to reduce emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The unanimous vote by the air district’s directors was celebrated by environmentalists, including 350.org and the Sierra Club, which described it as “historic.”

“This is a little more significant than most climate action plans, in that the air district has real regulatory teeth,” 350.org Bay Area spokesperson Rand Wrobel told Grist. “This resolution will mean that the five refineries in the Bay Area could basically not function, as they produce some 40 percent of the stationary source emissions.”

The heavily polluting refineries could be forced to cut output or vastly improve their environmental performance at a time when they are preparing to begin processing dirty tar-sands oil from Canada.

In 2005, California’s then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the state to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050 compared with 1990 levels. Which is nice, but actually meeting that requirement requires a helluva lot of planning, legislation, and subsequent enforcement at the state, regional, and local levels. Now the Bay Area is stepping up to that challenge.

A new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory shows that California is on track to meet the goal of reducing emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020 — but the 2050 goal will be more elusive. California is reducing its emissions through a variety of aggressive steps, including a carbon-trading system and a requirement that utilities generate some of their electricity from renewables (which has led to the development of some of the world’s biggest solar farms in the state’s deserts). But the researchers found that bold new technologies and policies are needed to meet the ambitious 2050 goal, especially because the state is projected to experience significant population growth over the next four decades.

The resolution adopted by the air district’s board on Wednesday lays out a 10-point plan for how the Bay Area will meet that goal. It includes expanding pollution enforcement, improving emissions monitoring and forecasting, and conducting new studies into the Bay Area’s energy future. Most importantly, it requires agency staff to develop a regional climate action strategy and accelerate the development of planned air-pollution rules.

Here’s hoping these kinds of ambitions spread far and wide — like a plume of pollution from a Chevron refinery smokestack.

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: Business & Technology

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Bay Area commits to 80 percent greenhouse gas reduction

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Environment Groups Set for New Fight Over Drilling on U.S.-Managed Utah Land

by Myrna Posted on September 18, 2013

The Bureau of Land Management plans to open some of the San Rafael Swell in central Utah to oil and gas drilling. Continue reading –  Environment Groups Set for New Fight Over Drilling on U.S.-Managed Utah Land ; ;Related ArticlesNational Briefing | West: California Court Upholds Emissions CurbsWorld Briefing | Europe: Russia: Greenpeace Members Held at Arctic Oil RigAs Adirondack Reserve Grows, Asking How Wild It Should Stay ;

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Environment Groups Set for New Fight Over Drilling on U.S.-Managed Utah Land

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Keystone study contractor under scrutiny by State Dept. watchdog

by Aaron Small Posted on August 5, 2013

Keystone study contractor under scrutiny by State Dept. watchdog

By Grist staff

Does the consulting firm studying the environmental effects of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have a conflict of interest?

For months, climate activists have been raising the alarm about Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the main firm contracted by the State Department to write the official environmental impact statement for Keystone.

Now State’s Inspector General is looking into allegations of improper ties and incomplete disclosures.

From The Hill:

The State Department’s internal watchdog has “initiated an inquiry” into whether the contractor Foggy Bottom used for a draft environmental analysis on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline had a conflict of interest.

The move is a response to allegations from several outside groups, Doug Welty, a spokesman with the State Department Office of Inspector General, told The Hill on Friday.

The development raises the possibility of another redo of the analysis assessing Keystone’s environmental impact.

Bloomberg Businessweek explains some of the allegations of improper behavior:

[Friends of the Earth] engaged in opposition research, as it is called during election campaigns, to turn up the evidence that ERM had worked with TransCanada on projects that it had failed to disclose to the U.S. State Department. …

Here, (PDF), for example, is a 2010 document, cached online, in which ERM lists TransCanada as a client. Does this prove that ERM has been biased toward TransCanada in its Keystone assessment? No. But unless this document is a forgery, ERM appears not to have disclosed all it should have to the U.S. government. (ERM declined to comment.)

Meanwhile, there’s another hiccup for Keystone, this one in Nebraska. From The Washington Post:

[A] little-noticed trial scheduled for next month in Nebraska could spell problems for [Keystone].

Despite two attempts by Nebraska’s attorney general to have the case thrown out, Lancaster County District Court Judge Stephanie Stacy has set a Sept. 27 trial date for arguments in a lawsuit that contends the state legislature unconstitutionally gave Gov. Dave Heineman (R) authority to approve the pipeline route.

A win for the plaintiffs — three Nebraska landowners who oppose the pipeline — would force TransCanada, the company that wants to build the 1,179-mile northern leg of the project, to go through the entire siting process again. Even supporters do not believe that would permanently block the project, but it could add years to the timeline.

No wonder TransCanada is now looking to build a big tar-sands oil pipeline that doesn’t cross the U.S. border.

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Aerated Micro-Bin Compost and Manure Management System

by Myrna Posted on August 4, 2013

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