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Obama admin punts on oil train safety — and another bomb train explodes

by CeliaLoper Posted on March 6, 2015

Obama admin punts on oil train safety — and another bomb train explodes

By on 6 Mar 2015 2:12 pmcommentsShare

An oil train derailed and exploded in rural Illinois on Thursday afternoon — the third one in North America in three weeks. As of midday Friday, the fire was still burning, though fortunately no one has been injured.

Which makes it all the more galling that the Obama administration passed up a key opportunity to try to make oil trains safer, as Reuters is reporting.

For awhile, the administration was considering taking some action to regulate explosive gas in the growing number of trains carrying crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale drilling boom throughout North America. But the administration backed off, leaving the job up to North Dakota’s government instead.

From Reuters’ Patrick Rucker:

Last summer, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx took his concerns about Bakken fuel to the White House and sought advice on what to do about the danger of [explosive gas], according to sources familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. …

The Transportation Department was warning that Bakken fuel was uncommonly volatile and explosion-prone. Foxx’s agency conceived an oil train safety plan in July with an array of measures that aimed to make sure oil train cargo moved safely on the tracks.

Tankers would have toughened shells. Oil train deliveries would slow down. Advanced braking systems would be adopted.

But the rule would do nothing to limit volatile gas.

Foxx brought his concerns about the unresolved issue of dangerous gas, commonly measured as vapor pressure, and his agency’s limited power to curtail the problem to President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough. The administration decided to just let the existing oil train safety plan take root.

The problem with relying on North Dakota to regulate the oil trains is that the explosion issue is a national, and even international, one. The tanker cars travel along routes that criss-cross the U.S. and Canada, often passing through populated urban centers. “These trains are going all across the country so it absolutely has to be the feds who are in charge,” said Karen Darch, mayor of Barrington, Ill., a town through which a number of oil and gas trains pass each week.

North Dakota produces more than 1.2 million barrels of crude oil daily, and 60 percent of that moves to refineries and ports by rail. The number of oil trains on the rails has increased by more than 40 fold in the past five years to over 400,000 cars in 2013, according to data from the nonprofit group ForestEthics and similar numbers from the Association of American Railroads. ForestEthics estimated last year that around 25 million Americans live in a potential blast zone.

The plan proposed by the Department of Transportation — to slow trains down and require sturdier, thicker tank cars — won’t go far enough to prevent explosions. Yesterday’s accident in Illinois and last month’s in West Virginia both involved newer, supposedly tougher rail cars, but they obviously didn’t prevent the blowups.

North Dakota’s new regulations, set to go into effect next month, aren’t expected to solve the problems either. They will set a limit for the vapor pressure of oil in tank cars, but the limit isn’t very tight. The crude oil on the train that exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in 2013, was below that limit, which means North Dakota’s regs wouldn’t have prevented the 47 deaths that resulted from that accident.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) of New York — a state through which hundreds of cars full of Bakken crude pass each day — is calling on Foxx and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz to work together to come up with regulations with more of a bite. But if the Obama administration has already opted to take a pass, as the Reuters report indicates, his push might not amount to much.

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Obama admin punts on oil train safety — and another bomb train explodes

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These Photos of World Lawmakers Pummeling Each Other Almost Make You Appreciate Congress

by JamePintogz Posted on February 26, 2015

Mother Jones

Twice last week, brawls broke out in Turkey’s parliament over a controversial bill that would give the police more power to crack down on protestors. Punches were thrown, kicks landed, a chair launched. One MP fell down a flight of stairs. It was like the golden early days of cage fighting when rules were laughed out of the arena and MMA fighters’ posses joined in the mayhem. But at least no shots were fired, unlike the time in 2013 that a Jordanian MP tried to come after a colleague with an AK-47. (No one was harmed.)

While American members of Congress haven’t had a serious dust-up in decades, full-contact debate is more common in other deliberative bodies. Here are some memorable recent bouts of parliamentary fisticuffs. (And for many more examples, check out parliamentfights.)

Turkish lawmakers throw punches over a security bill in February 2015.

AP

A presidential decree to call up military reserves leads to a fight in Ukraine’s parliament in July 2014.

Sergii Kharchenko/NurPhoto/ZUMA Wire

Armed police force out South African opposition MPs after they challenged President Zuma over corruption allegations in February 2015.

Rodger Bosch, Pool/AP

Opposition politicians hurl chairs and attack the speaker during a Constituent Assembly meeting in Kathmandu, Nepal, in January 2015.

Bikram Rai/AP

In September 2013, a Jordanian MP fired a shot from his Kalashnikov outside the parliamentary chamber. No one was hurt.

ODN/YouTube

Venezuelan MPs duke it out over an election dispute in May 2013.

A mass brawl erupts Taiwan’s legislature in July 2010, after the speaker rejects a proposal to a debate a trade pact with China.

Wally Santana/AP

In November 2011, South Korean Rep. Kim Seon-dong explodes a tear gas canister in an attempti to block the ratification of a free trade agreement with the United States.

Yonhap/AP

Bonus: Then-Toronto mayor Rob Ford knocks down Councillor Pam McConnell as he runs toward hecklers in November 2013.

The Canadian Press, Paola Loriggio/AP

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These Photos of World Lawmakers Pummeling Each Other Almost Make You Appreciate Congress

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Here’s What Boston’s Record-Setting Snowfall Looks Like

by LolitaMcKinley Posted on February 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the past two weeks, Boston has been hit by three separate snowstorms that have dumped a combined total of more than 70 inches of snow on the city. The storms have shattered Boston’s previous record—set back in 1978—for most snowfall in a 30-day period.

The historic snowfall has virtually paralyzed the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the oldest transit system in the country, forcing the agency to declare a state of emergency. Roof collapses have been reported throughout the area and the city’s public school system has been closed for eight days, as of Tuesday.

The relentless snowfall is showing no signs letting up either, with another storm forecasted for the area this Thursday.

Steven Senne/AP

Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/AP

While city plows have been working round-the-clock to clear the snow—more than 130,000 combine hours according to the Department of Public Works—the city is still struggling with what to do with the excess. On Monday, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh indicated that the snow might be dumped into Boston’s harbor, a move that some experts warned could have environmental consequences.

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Here’s What Boston’s Record-Setting Snowfall Looks Like

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Here’s How Much You Should Tip Your Delivery Guy During A Blizzard

by PedroVerdon Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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As you may have heard, a blizzard is about to destroy life as we know it on the Eastern seaboard. Your children, your children’s children, their children’s children will all learn of this snowfall in stories. If a normal snowstorm is, as the wise men used to say, “God shedding a bit of dandruff,” then what we are about to experience can only be described as, well, God shedding…a lot of dandruff? An avalanche of dandruff? One or two revelations of dandruff? We’re going to be knee-deep in God’s dandruff, is what I’m saying.

If, like mine, your fridge is bare of everything but the essentials (Tabasco, old Bloody Mary mix, a few jars of pickles) then you’re probably hoping to make it through this thing via one of two ancient ways: 1) master-cleanse or, 2) Seamless. Assuming you take the second door, the question becomes: What do you tip a delivery man during a blizzard? What is morally acceptable?

Let’s first dispense with the question of whether or not it is ever acceptable—regardless of gratuity—to order delivery during a blizzard. Leave that to the poets and the ethicists. It doesn’t matter in the real world. People order delivery more during bad weather. Them’s the facts. You are going to order delivery in bad weather.

During really bad weather like blizzards and apocalypses, a lot of restaurants nix their delivery offerings altogether—and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has banned all non-emergency vehicles, including delivery bikes, after 11pm Monday night. But the ones that manage to stay open—and in this case are willing to deliver on foot well into the night—reap the benefits of constrained supply. If this were Uber, it would result in surge pricing to get more restaurants delivering. But since GrubHub and its parent company Seamless don’t do that—and they shouldn’t unless there is some way of ensuring that the increase goes to the delivery person and isn’t pocketed by the owner—we’re thrown into this sort of state of moral worry. You know in your bones that the guy who brings you pizza in sub-zero weather should get more than the guy who brings you pizza when it’s 68 degrees and sunny. But how much more?

GrubHub Seamless crunched the numbers on tips during last year’s polar vortex and found that residents in some zip codes increased their tips by as much as 24 percent, but on the whole, New Yorkers raised their normal tipping amount by a meager 5 percent. In the Midwest, however, where the temps dipped especially low, gratuities rose higher, to 14 percent in Chicago and 15 percent in Detroit and Minneapolis. Maybe the stereotypes are true and Midwesterners really are the nicest people in the country.

So, more. Tip more. How much should you tip a delivery man in a blizzard? More. More than you usually tip. Whatever you usually tip, tip better. Are you a good tipper normally? Become a great tipper. Are you an awful tipper? Become a just-bad tipper. (Also, you’re a very bad person, and no one likes you very much.)

Want a strict system? Don’t trust your heart to lead you to the right amount? New York magazine can help. Last year they spoke to Adam Eric Greenberg, a UC San Diego Ph.D. who co-authored an empirical analysis on the relationship between weather and tipping. Here’s what he told them:

When the weather is bad, be a bit more generous by tipping 20 to 22 percent. If it’s raining outside, tip 22 to 25 percent. If there’s any snow accumulation, add a dollar or two on top of what you’d tip if it were raining. Having to work as a delivery guy during a blizzard is similar to getting stuck with a party of 20 as a restaurant server, so if you hear weather forecasters promising a “polar vortex, ” a 30 percent tip is not outrageous.

So, there you have it: 30 percent. Anything under 25 percent and you go to Hell.

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Here’s How Much You Should Tip Your Delivery Guy During A Blizzard

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Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

by HildredCouncil Posted on January 9, 2015

Foam party

Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

By on 9 Jan 2015 3:56 pmcommentsShare

This week, New York officially became the largest city in the U.S. to ban that squeaky ecological scourge: plastic foam, usually (incorrectly) known as Styrofoam. The everlasting stuff is finally getting less ubiquitous now that it’s been kicked out of at least 70 cities across the country. (OK, yeah, they’re mostly located in California).

Groundswell

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg originally proposed the ban during a February 2013 State of the City address, but Mayor Bill de Blasio is seeing it through: If all goes as planned, it should roll out on July 1, preventing foam cups and containers and even packing peanuts from being sold in the Big Apple. (You’re still allowed to mail a package to New York full of foam peanuts, though.) Officials say it could eventually remove 30,000 tons of the stuff from streets and landfills and waterways.

Of course, the lobbying group Restaurant Action Alliance issued a statement in protest, saying that it’ll impose too significant of a financial hardship on small businesses and that New York should work on recycling the stuff instead. But guess what? It tried, and it can’t.

Plus, since New York is so huge, Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has a good point: “Removing polystyrene from our waste stream is not only good for a greener, more sustainable New York,” she said, “but also for the communities who are home to landfills receiving the City’s trash.”

Right. Including that one really, really big community next door … you know, the ocean.

Source:
New York City to Ban Use of Plastic Foam Containers

, Huffington Post.

MAP: Which Cities Have Banned Plastic Foam?

, Groundswell.

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Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

by JacquesBroome Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

I’m going to keep things simple this year: Mother Jones is great! You already know that if you subscribe to the magazine (which you should) or if you read this blog. But no single source of funding can support what we do, so we rely on multiple sources. And you guessed it: one of them is reader donations.

So if you want to support our great journalism….

Or you just want to support this blog….

Or, hell, if you just want to say thank you to MoJo for providing me with much-needed health insurance this year….

Then how about making a year-end contribution? Small amounts are fine. Large amounts are even better! You can use PayPal or a credit card. Every little bit helps. So thanks for another year of reading my rants and raves, and thanks in advance for whatever donation you can afford. Here are the details:

Click here to pay via credit card.

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Click here if you want to get someone a gift subscription.

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Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

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Someone Needs to Invent a Great Non-Opioid Painkiller

by JulianaWillifor Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Austin Frakt writes about the stunningly widespread use and abuse of narcotic painkillers in the US:

Opioids now cause more deaths than any other drug, more than 16,000 in 2010. That year, the combination of hydrocodone and acetaminophen became the most prescribed medication in the United States. Patients here consumed 99 percent of the world’s hydrocodone, the opioid in Vicodin. They also consumed 80 percent of the world’s oxycodone, present in Percocet and OxyContin, and 65 percent of the world’s hydromorphone, the key ingredient in Dilaudid, in 2010. (Some opioids are also used to treat coughs, but that use doesn’t seem to be a major factor in the current wave of problems.)

When I got out of the hospital a couple of months ago, I was in considerable pain. The answer was morphine. For about two weeks, I took a couple of low-dose morphine tablets each day. Then the pain eased and I stopped.

I resisted the morphine at first, and my doctor had to argue me into using it regularly. “You broke a bone in your back,” she told me. “Your pain is legitimate. We have a lot of experience treating pain with morphine, and you’ll be all right.”

I finally listened, and the morphine did indeed work as advertised. But it somehow got me thinking. Morphine? That’s the best we can do? This stuff was invented 200 years ago. And while there are newer painkillers around, they’re all opioids of one kind or another with all the usual horrible side effects1. How is it that in over a century of research, we still know so little about pain that we haven’t been able to create a powerful, non-opioid painkiller?

I’m not really going anywhere with this. I’m just curious. Are there any good books, or even long magazine articles, about this? Why is that even after gazillions of dollars of effort, we’re still relying on variants of the opium poppy for serious pain relief? It’s the 21st century. How come we can’t do better?

1Addiction, nausea, wooziness, constipation, etc.

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Someone Needs to Invent a Great Non-Opioid Painkiller

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There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

by MabelBugnion Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

Is there a higher-education bubble? Will technology produce cheaper, better alternatives in the near future? Are kids and parents finally figuring out that if Bill Gates can drop out of Harvard and become the richest man in the world, maybe an Ivy League degree isn’t actually worth 50 grand a year? Dan Drezner thinks the whole idea is ridiculous, and he’s willing to put his money where his mouth is:

If, in fact, there really is a higher ed bubble, it should pop before 2020. And if it does pop, then tuition prices for college should plummet as demand slackens. After all, that’s how a bubble works — when it deflates, the price of the asset should plummet in value, like housing in 2008. So who wants to bet me that an average of the 2020 tuition rates at Stanford University, Williams College, Texas A&M and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell will be lower than today?

I’m open to changing the particular schools, but those four are a nice distribution of private and public schools, elite and not-quite-as-elite colleges, with some geographic spread. Surely, true believers in a higher ed bubble would expect tuition rates at those schools to fall.

I really don’t think that will be the case. So anyone who believes in a higher ed bubble should be happy to take the other side of that bet.

Not me. I’d be willing to bet that eventually artificial intelligence will basically wipe out the demand for higher education completely. But “eventually” means something like 30 years minimum, probably more like 40 or 50. Maybe even more if AI continues to be as intractable as some people think it will be.

In the meantime, Drezner is right: the vast, vast majority of college students don’t want to strike out on their own and try to become millionaire entrepreneurs. They just want ordinary jobs. And that’s a good thing, since if everyone wanted to run their own companies, entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to find anyone to do all the non-CEO scutwork for their brilliant new social media startups.

So if something like 98 percent of college grads are aiming for traditional jobs in which they work for somebody else, guess what? All those somebody elses—which probably includes most of the people who think there’s a higher-ed bubble—are going to want to hire college grads. They sure don’t want to hire a bunch of losers who were too dim to drop out and become millionaires and couldn’t even manage the gumption to accrue 120 units at State U, do they?

Look: the rising cost of higher education has multiple causes, but it’s mostly driven by two simple things. At public schools, it’s driven by declining state funding, which transfers an increasing share of the cost of higher ed onto students. Unfortunately, I see no reason to think this trend won’t continue. At private schools, it’s driven by the perception of how much a private degree is worth—and right now, all the evidence suggests that even with fairly astronomical tuitions at elite and semi-elite universities, the lifetime value of a degree is still worth more than students pay for it. Universities understand this, and since these days they mostly think of themselves not as public trusts, but as businesses who simply charge whatever the traffic will bear, they know they still have plenty of headroom to increase tuition. So this trend is likely to continue as well.

If I had to guess, I’d say that there’s a class of 2nd or 3rd tier liberal arts colleges that might be in trouble. They have high tuitions, but the value of their degree isn’t really superior to that of a state university. They might be in trouble, and if Drezner added one of these places to his list it might make his bet more interesting.

But he’d still win. He might lose by 2040, but he’s safe as long as he sticks to 2020.

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There Is No Higher Ed Bubble. Yet.

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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For

by FinleyBernier Posted on December 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Via Atrios, here is America’s-mayor-for-life Rudy Giuliani commenting on the killing of two New York City police officers yesterday by a deranged gunman:

“We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged. The protests, even the ones that don’t lead to violence, a lot of them lead to violence, all of them lead to a conclusion. The police are bad, the police are racist. That is completely wrong.”

….The former mayor also criticized President Barack Obama, Holder, and Al Sharpton for addressing the underlining racial tensions behind the failure to indict the white police officers who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island and Mike Brown in Ferguson. “They have created an atmosphere of severe, strong, anti-police hatred in certain communities. For that, they should be ashamed of themselves,” he said.

Fair enough. But I assume this means we can blame Bill O’Reilly for his 28 episodes of invective against “Tiller the Baby Killer” that eventually ended in the murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder. We can blame conservative talk radio for fueling the anti-government hysteria that led Timothy McVeigh to bomb a federal building in Oklahoma City. We can blame the relentless xenophobia of Fox News for the bombing of an Islamic Center in Joplin or the massacre of Sikh worshippers by a white supremacist in Wisconsin. We can blame the NRA for the mass shootings in Newtown and Aurora. We can blame Republicans for stoking the anti-IRS paranoia that prompted Andrew Joseph Stack to crash a private plane into an IRS building in Austin, killing two people. We can blame the Christian Right for the anti-gay paranoia that led the Westboro Baptist Church to picket the funeral of Matthew Snyder, a US Marine killed in Iraq, with signs that carried their signature “God Hates Fags” slogan. We can blame Sean Hannity for his repeated support of Cliven Bundy’s “range war” against the BLM, which eventually motivated Jerad and Amanda Miller to kill five people in Las Vegas after participating in the Bundy standoff and declaring, “If they’re going to come bring violence to us, well, if that’s the language they want to speak, we’ll learn it.” And, of course, we can blame Rudy Giuliani and the entire conservative movement for their virtually unanimous indifference to the state-sanctioned police killings of black suspects over minor offenses in Ferguson and Staten Island, which apparently motivated the murder of the New York police officers on Saturday.

Or wait. Maybe we can’t do any of those things. Maybe lots of people support lots of things, and we can’t twist that generalized support into blame for maniacs who decide to take up arms for their own demented reasons. Maybe that’s a better idea after all.

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Let’s Blame Conservatives For All the Killings They’re Responsible For

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Here’s How the Sony Hack Is Like 9/11

by CristinLambrick Posted on December 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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I doubt that I’m the first to say this, but has anyone noticed a striking a similarity between 9/11 and the Sony hack? Not in terms of scope or malevolence, of course, but in terms of—what’s the best word here? Creativity? Bang for the buck?

Here’s what I mean. The 9/11 attack wasn’t especially sophisticated. In fact, it was famously crude and butt cheap. All it took was a few guys who learned rudimentary piloting skills and then carried some box cutters on board four airplanes1. The reason it worked is that it was brilliant. Nobody had ever considered that hijackers could take control of a plane without so much as a single cheap handgun, and even if they could, no one had really figured that they could do anything much worse than fly the plane somewhere and maybe engineer a hostage crisis. But al-Qaeda thought different. They understood that (a) box cutters would be good enough to hold pilots and passengers at bay for an hour or two, and (b) this was long enough to fly their airplanes into a pair of iconic skyscrapers, killing thousands in an extraordinarily gruesome way. They took a crude, simplistic weapon and figured out a way to cause damage that was both tangibly enormous and emotionally outsized.

The Sony hack is a far smaller thing, but it shows a lot of the same hallmarks. Despite what press reports say, it wasn’t really all that sophisticated. It was, to be sure, a step up from box cutters, but it’s not like North Korea tried to hack into a nuclear power plant or the Pentagon. They picked a soft target. In fact, based on press reports, it sounds like even in the vast sea of crappy IT security that we call America, Sony Pictures was unusually lax. Hacking into their network was something that probably dozens of groups around the world could have done if they had thought about it. And like al-Qaeda before them, North Korea thought about it. And they realized that a Sony Pictures hack, done right, could have an outsized emotional impact. Like 9/11, it was a brilliant example of using a relatively crude tool to produce a gigantic payoff.

So what happens next? The 9/11 attack was huge, but even for its size it provoked a mammoth overreaction that continues to this day. Will the Sony hack do the same? After the dozens of credit card hacks of the past couple of years corporations are finally getting the news that they need to secure their networks better, and the Sony hack might prompt even more companies to finally get serious about IT security. That would be good. On the other hand, it could also provoke an overreaction that ends up locking down corporate infrastructure so tightly that workplaces turn into digital gulags. That would be dumb.

So then. Better corporate IT security: good. Massive overreaction: bad. Let’s get things right this time.

1It also required recruiting 19 guys willing to die for a cause. This is definitely uncommon. But it doesn’t really change the basic nature of how al-Qaeda managed to pull off such a massive attack.

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Here’s How the Sony Hack Is Like 9/11

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