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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

by SarahMarquardt Posted on April 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Democratic primary basically over, I want to step back a bit and explain the big-picture reason that I never warmed up to Bernie Sanders. It’s not so much that he’s all that far to my left, nor that he’s been pretty skimpy on details about all the programs he proposes. That’s hardly uncommon in presidential campaigns. Rather, it’s the fact that I think he’s basically running a con, and one with the potential to cause distinct damage to the progressive cause.

I mean this as a provocation—but I also mean it. So if you’re provoked, mission accomplished! Here’s my argument.

Bernie’s explanation for everything he wants to do—his theory of change, or theory of governing, take your pick—is that we need a revolution in this country. The rich own everything. Income inequality is skyrocketing. The middle class is stagnating. The finance industry is out of control. Washington DC is paralyzed.

But as Bill Scher points out, the revolution that Bernie called for didn’t show up. In fact, it’s worse than that: we were never going to get a revolution, and Bernie knew it all along. Think about it: has there ever been an economic revolution in the United States? Stretching things a bit, I can think of two:

The destruction of the Southern slave economy following the Civil War.
The New Deal.

The first of these was 50+ years in the making and, in the end, required a bloody, four-year war to bring to a conclusion. The second happened only after an utter collapse of the economy, with banks closing, businesses failing, wages plummeting, and unemployment at 25 percent. That’s what it takes to bring about a revolution, or even something close to it.

We’re light years away from that right now. Unemployment? Yes, two or three percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They’ve been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.

Like it or not, you don’t build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.

Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that’s never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?

I don’t know, but my fear is that some of them will do the latter. And that’s a damn shame. They’ve been conned by a guy who should know better, the same way dieters get conned by late-night miracle diets. When it doesn’t work, they throw in the towel.

Most likely Bernie will have no lasting effect, and his followers will scatter in the usual way, with some doubling down on practical politics and others leaving for different callings. But there’s a decent chance that Bernie’s failure will result in a net increase of cynicism about politics, and that’s the last thing we need. I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie’s spiel and then got discouraged when it didn’t pan out.

I’ll grant that my pitch—and Hillary’s and Barack Obama’s—isn’t very inspiring. Work your fingers to the bone for 30 years and you might get one or two significant pieces of legislation passed. Obviously you need inspiration too. But if you don’t want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable. By offering a chimera instead, Bernie has done the progressive movement no favors.

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Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders

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Trump’s foreign policy plan has one giant, baffling hole

by ClydeBrigstocke Posted on April 28, 2016

Trump’s foreign policy plan has one giant, baffling hole

By on Apr 28, 2016 12:55 pmShare

Likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had a gaping hole in his speech that laid out his foreign policy platform on Wednesday. While covering topics ranging from ISIS, North Korea, and China, Trump’s discussion of climate change was light. The only time he addressed it was to mock it.

“Our military is depleted, and we’re asking our generals and military leaders to worry about –” Trump said, pausing before delivering the punch line, “global warming.”

Trump failed to touch on the landmark 196-nation Paris agreement, in which nations pledged emissions cuts and finance to act on “an urgent and potentially irreversible threat.” What we do know about Trump’s opinion of the agreement is from December, when Trump called Obama’s Paris remarks “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, or perhaps most naive.” The candidate is known for conflating weather and climate, stating that global warming was “created by and for the Chinese,” and flat-out denying the scientific consensus about climate change.

Trump could formally pull the U.S. out of the agreement, or simply fail to deliver on Obama’s pledges; it’s tough to ever guess what he’s going to do next.

Let’s put aside Trump’s views on climate science for a minute and focus on the pure politics of this. Climate change may be just one issue on a long list of diplomatic conflicts that Trump would have upon entering the White House, but pulling from the Paris deal alone would be huge: Trump is prepared to take the United States in the opposite direction of every single one of our allies. And he hasn’t told us yet how he will engage in trade talks and tackle migration crises while the rest of the world recognizes these issues are linked to climate change.

By ignoring climate change, Trump is ignoring the advice of America’s military experts. The Pentagon itself, with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the helm, warned in 2014 that climate change would directly contribute to security risks for U.S. relations abroad. Last year, a study commissioned by the G7 countries found that climate change, which poses a threat to both global and economic security, has become “the ultimate threat multiplier” for regions that are already facing another type of threat.

Trump just isn’t listening.

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Trump’s foreign policy plan has one giant, baffling hole

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This Bill Could Make More Kids Obese—and No One Is Talking About It

by DarrenLashbrook Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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You probably haven’t heard much about it with the presidential election sucking up all the oxygen, but US lawmakers are mulling one of the nation’s most important and influential pieces of food legislation: a once-every-five-years bill that sets the budget and rules for school meals. And it hasn’t been a very appetizing process.

In a recent episode of Bite—the new podcast I host with colleagues Kiera Butler and Maddie Oatman—the excellent school lunch analyst and blogger Bettina Elias Siegel lamented that there’s no push to increase our miserly annual outlay on the lunch program, which serves about 30.5 million kids each school day. Currently, we spend about $13 billion in federal dollars on it each year—equal to about 2 percent of annual defense spending. That leaves cafeteria administrators with a bit more than a dollar per meal to spend on ingredients, leading to generally dismal-quality food, often served reheated from a box.

Instead of pushing for more resources, advocates are having to play defense, fighting to preserve reforms made in the previous Child Nutrition Reauthorization (as the bill is known). That act, passed in 2010, included a tiny per-meal budget increase but also required cafeterias to serve more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and to cut back on sugar, fat, and salt. It also limited the amount of junk food that can be served in a la carte lines—restricting a practice that has been linked to higher obesity rates. And it adopted a program to allow schools in high-poverty areas to automatically offer all students free lunches—a provision widely praised in anti-hunger circles.

The 2010 reforms have largely proven a success, Steven Czinn, the chair of the department of pediatrics at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, recently showed in a Washington Post op-ed. While the new rules got off to a rough start in some districts, things have improved, and tales of rejected lunches and fresh fruit piling up in cafeteria trash cans are overblown, he wrote.

Even so, those healthier food provisions provoked a furious backlash from tea-party-associated Republicans. In a notorious 2014 rant on the House floor, US Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) thundered against what he called “nanny-state lunches.” Then there’s the School Nutrition Association, a group that represents cafeteria administrators but gets about half its $10 million budget from the food industry. As Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported in 2014, the group initially fought for the changes, but suddenly, in 2014, it began “standing shoulder to shoulder with House Republicans” in an effort to gut them.

In January, the Senate Agriculture Committee cobbled together a bill that preserved the 2010 reforms. But now its counterpart in the House, the Education and Workforce Committee, is pushing a bill that would ease restrictions of sales of junk like chips and cookies in cafeterias. “Children as young as five could go from having cookies or fries with their lunches once in a while to buying and eating them every day,” writes Jessica Donze Black, who directs the the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project for the Pew Charitable Trusts.

More egregiously, the proposed House bill would undermine universal free-lunch programs for many high-poverty schools. Under the 2010 bill, when at least 40 percent of students in a school qualify for free lunches, the school can claim “community eligibility”—meaning all students automatically have access to free lunches. The program eases the administrative burden for these financially strapped schools, allowing them to “shift resources from paperwork to higher-quality meals or other educational priorities,” writes Zoë Neuberger of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. It also eliminates the “stigma that sometimes accompanies free meals” and increased meal participation, which, in turn, “improves student achievement, diets, and behavior,” she adds.

The House bill would raise the threshold from 40 to 60 percent. If it becomes law, Neuberger writes, more than 7,000 schools—with nearly 3.4 million students—”would have to reinstate applications and return to monitoring eligibility in the lunch line within two years.”

Happily, none of these rollbacks are likely anytime soon, said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a veteran of the school food wars. That’s because first lady Michelle Obama pushed hard for the 2010 reforms, and her husband will veto any school lunch reauthorization bill that attempts to roll them back. Until a new bill passes, the 2010 reforms hold sway, she said. “For once, the status quo is on the side” of people pushing to widen access to free lunch and remove junk food from the cafeteria, she added.

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This Bill Could Make More Kids Obese—and No One Is Talking About It

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The Mystery of the Churchill Bust Is Finally Explained

by yonggarling1379 Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over the years, conservatives have invented a spectacular set of grievances against President Obama—teleprompters, whitey tapes, Bill Ayers, birth certificates, etc.—but in the category of just plain strange, none of them surpass the tale of the missing Churchill bust. Early in his presidency, someone noticed that a bust of Churchill that had adorned the Oval Office during W’s presidency was gone, and this became a cause célèbre, one that continues to this day. Why does Obama hate Churchill? Is it because of his Kenyan background? Because he hates anyone who showed toughness during a time of war? Because he wanted to snub the British?

The correct answer is, “Who cares?” Still, it’s true that the White House offered up something of a whirligig of responses when this first hit the fan, and that’s a little odd too. Why were they so sensitive about it?

That’s still a mystery. However, a few days ago Boris Johnson—basically the Donald Trump of London—brought up the Churchill bust yet again, and this time Obama decided to explain personally what happened:

It was, Mr. Obama said, his decision to return that Churchill to his native land, because he wanted to replace it with a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“There are only so many tables where you can put busts. Otherwise, it starts looking a little cluttered,” the president explained. “And I thought it was appropriate, and I suspect most people here in the United Kingdom might agree, that as the first African-American president, it might be appropriate to have a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King in my office.”

He added that the choice of Dr. King was “to remind me of all the hard work of a lot of people who would somehow allow me to have the privilege of holding this office.”

Bizarrely enough, then, it appears that conservatives were basically right (Obama actively chose to return the bust) and the White House pretty much lied about the whole thing. So score one for the conspiracy theorists.

What a weird affair. Why was the White House so hypersensitive about this? Did Obama really feel that he couldn’t afford to be seen favoring King over Churchill? I didn’t care much about this idiocy before, but now I kind of do. What was behind all the doubletalk?

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The Mystery of the Churchill Bust Is Finally Explained

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A top climate negotiator isn’t stressing out over the future of the Paris agreement

by GregoryLavater8 Posted on April 21, 2016

U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern. REUTERS/Mandel Ngan/Pool

A top climate negotiator isn’t stressing out over the future of the Paris agreement

By on Apr 21, 2016commentsShare

Before the Paris climate agreement enters its next stage – getting signed by 155 countries at the United Nations headquarters on Friday – I caught up with the United States’ outgoing special envoy for climate change on the phone. Todd Stern, who has stepped down to pursue teaching and other projects, was digging himself out of seven years of paperwork in his State Department office.

Stern’s departure comes after he helped the Obama administration accomplish its goals at the Paris conference (COP 21) in December, laying the groundwork for the first global climate agreement to cover the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions.

The future of the Paris agreement is far from secure; 55 countries representing 55 percent of world emissions need to ratify it and its effectiveness relies on countries delivering on (and exceeding) their national pledges. And of course, the U.S. government’s position remains tenuous until the next president takes office.

Stern’s career in international climate politics dates back to the ill-fated Kyoto conference of 1997. His experience putting together deals at Kyoto and Copenhagen, and watching them unravel, could explain why Stern insists the Paris agreement will succeed despite all the challenges. In our recent interview, Stern said he doesn’t wring his hands and wonder, “Oh, my God, what if” the whole thing unravels, because he doesn’t see it happening. “Call me crazy, but I don’t think so.” After all these years of working in painstakingly incremental climate negotiations, Stern remains an optimist.

This interview is edited for clarity and length.

Q. How does it feel to be packing up?

A. I ended up staying, probably a lot longer than I originally intended when I started in 2009. At some level, we were officially working on this particular negotiation for four years [since the end of 2011] but were really working on the whole thing for seven. I wanted to stay and see it through to the end, and it worked better than anybody had hoped. So this is a good time for me to go.

Q. Do you have any regrets from how you approached the Paris talks and any regrets about the outcome?

A. With respect to Paris, I don’t think that I would say we had real regrets. Obviously, there’s a lot more to do. We made a start, and there’s a tremendous amount of follow-up to do, so it’s not like I’m saying Paris is the be-all and end-all, because that’s certainly not true, but in terms of what’s achievable in Paris, I think we did pretty well.

Q. Paris still left a lot of issues unclear. What needs to happen at the next United Nations climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco?

A. There are a set of different follow-up actions that are called for by the Paris agreement or the accompanying decision itself. You need guidelines for transparency; there are issues on accounting and finance.

All of those follow-up measures that are called for need to be negotiated and worked out over the course of the next few years. There are a small handful of things called for in Marrakech itself, but mostly, we’re talking about beyond Marrakech.

Q. What do future conferences need to accomplish to resolve outstanding issues?

A. In 2018, there’s going to be the first five-year global stock take of how countries are doing on the global emissions goals. Then, two years after each global stock take, there will be a review, with the first one happening in 2020.

Some countries have five-year targets, some countries have 10-year targets. Countries with five-year targets will be putting in a new target. Countries with 10-year targets might be putting in a new target in 2020; their target might still be running for an additional number of years, but they are required to take another look at it in light of science and technology development and make a determination as to whether they should increase it. They have to submit something in writing about whether they’re going to stay where they are or increase it. That’s the kind of ratcheting processes that are going to happen every five years.

Apart from the specifics of what happens in the COP [United Nations climate conference] process, the most important thing is what countries do nationally to drive the emission reductions, drive the transformation from high to low carbon that is required to solve the problem. A lot of it is going to happen at the national levels, even sub-national levels.

Q. What did you learn from your experience at other climate conferences that helped the U.S. position in Paris?

A. Going all the way back to the Kyoto and Buenos Aires conferences in ’97 and ’98 — my first exposure to this issue — one thing I took away was that it was going to be very important, diplomatically, to create a forum where the major players, both developed and developing, get together on a regular basis at a high level and have a civilized, calm, reflective, candid conversation about whatever the hard issues were at the moment.

Coming to the Obama administration, we took President Bush’s Major Economies Forum and we gave it a mission to advance the negotiations with high-level administrators coming together three or four times a year.

I think my sense of needing to do that came out of experiencing the kind of circus and cacophony of my first two U.N. climate conferences.

I always have tried to think both forward and backward. Whatever year you’re in, think about where you want to land, and then try to walk backward to how you’re going to get there. That’s an evolving process. What you think in March is not going to be the same thing that you think in May.

Somebody famous said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” This is a slightly more diplomatic version of that. I’ve always tried to be very direct and candid with people, and I think that’s not a diplomatic lesson I’ve learned, I think that’s just my nature that I brought to the job.

When negotiating, I always wanted to have in mind, “We could go this far and we couldn’t go further.” You’re trying to find where the common ground is, where the landing zone is.

Q. How much does it affect negotiations when you have candidates for president who are actively undermining your message?

A. As the noise from the campaign gets louder and louder in this election year, obviously people are paying attention to what the candidates are saying, and I’ve been asked plenty of times about that. I mean, I’m still at the State Department, so I’m not gonna get political here. But I don’t believe any president is going to pull us out of Paris, because I think quite apart from climate change, the diplomatic fallout would be so serious.

Q. I saw you said that President George W. Bush took “lots and lots of diplomatic flak,” for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, but despite the fallout, we still didn’t see any progress on global climate action. While there would be fallout for pulling the U.S. from the Paris agreement, how does that ensure the next president might not do it anyway?

A.That’s a fair question, but I think it’s a different situation, really. You know, Kyoto was a good try, but Kyoto covered really a fairly [limited] number of nations around the world. It was a good effort, but it was also flawed.

I think what you have now is, first of all, a much broader understanding and realization of what this issue is about and what the risks are by countries all over the world. And you have a structure here which is designed to be long-lasting, designed to be inclusive. It would just be seen as a huge step backward for the United States to do this.

Even with respect to Kyoto, the United States took a really big diplomatic hit for doing that, and I think the diplomatic hit here would be just an order of magnitude larger than was true for Kyoto.

Q. Have you ever thought about what it would feel like to watch this unravel after years of effort?

A. No, I don’t think it’s going to. I honestly don’t think it’s going to. I think it’s enormously important that we charge faster forward, because if you look at what’s happening in the natural world, we don’t actually have that much time. But I don’t think about what’s going to happen if it unravels because I don’t think it’s going to unravel.

Q. OK, well, I don’t want to end on such a pessimistic note on my part.

A. I mean, honestly, I don’t, though, Rebecca. You asked me a straight-up question. I don’t go around wringing my hands about, “Oh, my God, what if” because I actually don’t think that that’s going to happen. Call me crazy, but I don’t think so.

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A top climate negotiator isn’t stressing out over the future of the Paris agreement

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Senate Republicans use Palestine as an excuse not to fund climate agency

by BrookeM145 Posted on April 20, 2016

Senate Republicans use Palestine as an excuse not to fund climate agency

By and on Apr 20, 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

More than two dozen Republican senators this week asked Secretary of State John Kerry not to provide any funding for the United States’ involvement in the United Nations effort to address climate change, saying they object to the U.N. treating Palestine as a state.

The Palestinians joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the international treaty that governs action on climate change, in March. On Monday, the group of 28 senators, led by Wyoming Republican John Barrasso, argued in a letter to Kerry that — because of a 1994 law barring federal funds from being distributed to any U.N. program that grants membership to a state or organization that lacks “internationally recognized attributes of statehood” — the UNFCCC should not receive U.S. funding.

It may not be entirely a coincidence that this letter comes from a group of senators who, by and large, don’t really believe climate change is an issue the U.S. should be addressing at all.

Among the letter’s signatories: Republican Sens. Roy Blunt (Mo.), John Boozman (Ark.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Bill Cassidy (La.), Dan Coats (Ind.), John Cornyn (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.), Ted Cruz (Texas), Steve Daines (Mont.), Mike Enzi (Wyo.), Deb Fischer (Neb.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Jim Inhofe (Okla.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), James Lankford (Okla.), Mike Lee (Utah), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Pat Roberts (Kan.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Dan Sullivan (Alaska), John Thune (S.D.), Thom Tillis (N.C.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), David Vitter (La.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.).

They’re not all climate change deniers, per se. But Barrasso has said that the climate “is constantly changing” and that “the role human activity plays is not known.” Inhofe, who is chair of the Senate Committee on Environment And Public Works, wrote a whole book about how climate change is “the greatest hoax.” Rubio has spouted every type of climate denial possible. Cornyn has said he believes humans can influence the environment, but he doesn’t want the feds “in charge of trying to micromanage” the issue.

“The U.S. government does not recognize the ‘State of Palestine,’ which is not a sovereign state and does not possess the ‘internationally recognized attributes of statehood,’” the letter reads. “Therefore, the UNFCCC, as an affiliated organization of the U.N., granted full membership to the Palestinians, an organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood. As a result, current law prohibits distribution of U.S. taxpayer funds to the UNFCCC and its related entities.”

The lawmakers have some precedent for this argument. In 2011, the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization lost U.S. funding — which made up about 22 percent of its budget — after allowing the Palestinians full membership. The U.S. later lost its voting rights to the UNESCO general assembly as a result. Kerry said last year that he planned to work with Congress to restore U.S. funding to the organization.

State Department spokesperson John Kirby said on Tuesday that he was aware of the lawmakers’ letter but declined to comment further.

The Palestinians have endeavored to gradually join U.N. organizations and treaties as a way of gaining international recognition after several rounds of failed bilateral negotiations with the Israelis. The Palestinians gained non-member observer status at the U.N. in 2012, and the Palestinian flag was flown at the U.N. headquarters in New York for the first time last year during the annual general assembly, but they still lack full member status.

The Obama administration opposes Palestinian efforts to gain statehood through U.N. recognition, but the senators’ letter criticizes the administration for failing to block the Palestinians from gaining recognition within the UNFCCC.

“We urge the administration to clarify, both publicly and privately, that the United States does not consider the ‘State of Palestine’ to be a sovereign state, and to work diligently to prevent the Palestinians from being recognized as a sovereign state for purposes of joining U.N. affiliated organizations, treaties, conventions, and agreements,” the lawmakers wrote.

The United States has pledged to give $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which was created so that industrialized countries can help developing nations address climate change. It’s seen as a pivotal part of the deal reached at the U.N. summit last December, which nations will begin officially signing this week.

The UNFCCC was created in 1992 to provide a mechanism for international coordination on addressing climate change. The United States provides funding to support the UNFCCC secretariat and other activities, as do the 196 other parties to the convention.

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The Supreme Court Justices Are in a Jam on Immigration

by EzraWhitmore Posted on April 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a critical case, the justices often provide hints in their questions about how they might rule. But after Monday’s arguments in United States v. Texas, a challenge by 26 states to President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration, the only thing that seemed clear was that the court was in a massive bind, having been asked to settle a contentious political question that it was not keen to address.

There were few, if any, hints—and this probably doesn’t bode well for the president’s attempt to bring 4 million immigrants out of the shadows and allow them a foothold into the legal employment market. The questions from the justices showed a marked lack of consensus on all the key issues at play. And if the court ends up deadlocked with a 4-4 vote, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling against the administration will stand, and Obama’s immigration action will be eviscerated.

The case stems from a lawsuit filed in December 2014, a month after the Obama administration ordered immigration officials to defer the deportation of millions of law-abiding immigrants who had come to the country illegally but had children who were US citizens or legal permanent residents. The action, which was blocked by the lower court before it could be implemented, wouldn’t grant any immigrants legal status, but it would permit many of them to apply for legal work authorizations and the ability to participate in the Social Security system.

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The Supreme Court Justices Are in a Jam on Immigration

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Republicans in Congress try to paperwork the EPA to death

by RoyalOShaughness Posted on April 15, 2016

Republicans in Congress try to paperwork the EPA to death

By on 15 Apr 2016commentsShare

In news that should surprise absolutely no one, an investigation shows the Republican-controlled Congress has it out for the Environmental Protection Agency. Its method: Annoying it to death.

Bloomberg BNA analyzed documents requests sent to the EPA and found that in just 2015, Congress sent the agency 884 letters requiring a response, 60 document requests, and one subpoena. In response, the EPA’s staff had to provide Congress with over 276,000 pages of documents.

All this paperwork impedes the EPA’s ability to do its job, according to Jeffrey Lubbers, a professor of administrative law at American University. Lubbers told Bloomberg BNA that the “EPA is probably one of the few agencies that gets this many. Because agencies have to take these requests very seriously, they have to spend a lot of time on them.”

The irony here is that after Congress flooded the EPA with requests, it criticized the agency for acting slowly. This isn’t entirely surprising from a Senate led by Mitch McConnell, who is currently urging states to refuse to work with the EPA on complying with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. McConnell is hardly alone in his disregard for the EPA. “If [the EPA] actually acted in a responsible way, they wouldn’t get all these letters,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) told Bloomberg BNA. “These letters are all generated by their irresponsible actions.”

As to what these “irresponsible actions” are, Barrasso didn’t say. Maybe he’ll request more documents to get to the bottom of it.

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6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

by graptorm Posted on April 14, 2016

6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

By on 14 Apr 2016commentsShare

Next Wednesday marks the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the BP gusher that killed 11 workers and released at least 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. On Thursday, the Obama administration finalized a set of regulations that will help ensure we never have to witness this kind of disaster again — or so the administration claims. But environmental experts have real concerns about the rule’s rigor and implementation.

The new rule — the result of years of investigations by the Department of Interior, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Academy of Engineering — will tighten standards for blowout preventers (the type of device that failed spectacularly in 2010). It will also strengthen the design of other offshore well elements, including wellheads and the steel casings used in construction.

Speaking to press on Thursday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell cited the complexity of oil drilling technology as one of the reasons why the regulations took six years to compose. And learning from the blowout was a part of taking time “to do this right,” she said.

“As offshore oil and gas production continue to grow every year and our dependence on foreign oil continues to decline, we owe it to the American people to ensure we are developing these resources responsibly and safely,” said Jewell, who was once a petroleum engineer in Oklahoma.

Asked point blank on a press call if the blowout preventers will be fail-safe, Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, said he couldn’t give a conclusive answer. “We do believe this is a significant increase in the level of safety,” he said.

The new regulations incorporate several existing industry standards, produced by the likes of the American Petroleum Institute. API’s reaction to the announcement has been relatively calm.

But environmentalists have found much more to criticize.

A major concern is how rigorous the rule is around severing capability, the ability of blowout preventers to seal a pipe or wellbore by cutting through the pipe or casing in the event of a leak.

Liz Birnbaum, former director of the Minerals Management Service and an expert in offshore energy development, also pointed to the long phase-in periods that appear in the proposed regulations. “The rule says that they have three more years to set up real-time monitoring [of oil-well safety by onshore personnel],” Birnbaum told Grist. “Which is just insane.” She pointed to the fact that BP was able to set up real-time monitoring in less time than that after the Deepwater Horizon spill. “It doesn’t take three years.”

Environmental groups worry about providing too much flexibility for industry players, too. The only solution, Director of Environment America’s Stop Drilling Program Rachel Richardson said, “is to transition away from dirty fuels altogether.”

With respect to blowout preventers, Birnbaum argues that industry is being given too much temporal wiggle room to update their technology. In drilling operations, companies aren’t currently required to install parts that center the drill pipe during severing operations — which was exactly the problem during the Deepwater Horizon spill. The regulations would require them to do so, but not for another seven years.

Before the seven years are up, the Gulf of Mexico may be open for another 10 offshore leases, based on Obama’s proposed five-year offshore drilling plan. According to Birnbaum, “Another seven years is seven years too long.”

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6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

Saudi Arabia Killed Nearly 100 Civilians In Yemen With American-Made Bombs

by YoungT08gxixm Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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A Saudi airstrike hit a crowded marketplace in Mastaba, Yemen, on March 15, killing at least 97 civilians, including 25 children. “We saw people shredded to pieces. Some with no head, no hands…Unrecognizable,” one survivor told Human Rights Watch when a researcher from the organization investigated the site two weeks later.

It was one of the deadliest strikes in 12-month-old civil war, highlighting the devastating use of weapons supplied by the United States and other Western countries in attacks that human rights organizations call potential war crimes.

In Mastaba, Human Rights Watch came across what it says are remnants of an American-made MK-84 bomb paired with a “smart bomb” guidance kit. The group also reviewed images of remnants of another bomb found by British journalists and determined it to be the same kind. These 2,000-pound general purpose bombs are the largest of their class and are capable of inflicting massive damage on their targets.

The Saudi-led coalition has been criticized for carrying out indiscriminate bombings in the civil war, which began last year after rebel forces seized control of the government. The air campaign is responsible for the vast majority of the conflict’s civilian deaths, according to the United Nations. An airstrike in February that resulted in at least 32 civilian deaths led UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon to call for an investigation.

Remnant of an American-made satellite-guided bomb found at the scene of the Mastaba market airstrike. Human Rights Watch

Western governments have also come under fire for their roles in the conflict. In December, a group of lawyers wrote a legal opinion stating that the United Kingdom is breaking domestic, European, and international law by supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia. A lawsuit filed in March seeks to overturn a $15 billion Canadian arms deal with Saudi Arabia. An international movement to seek an arms embargo on Saudi Arabia is growing.

Despite providing weapons, intelligence, drones, and other assistance to the Saudis, the United States has so far been subjected to less scrutiny. In the past year, the Obama administration has inked arms deals with Riyadh worth more than $20 billion.

Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the first MK-84 bomb struck near the entrance of the Mastaba market at around noon, and five minutes later, the second bomb hit, killing and wounding both those who were trying to escape and others helping the victims. The day after the strike, a team of UN investigators visited the site and compiled the names of the 97 civilian victims. And they found another 10 bodies “burned beyond recognition,” bringing the death toll to 107.

“Even after dozens of airstrikes on markets, schools, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians, the coalition refuses to provide redress or change its practices,” Priyanka Motaparthy, emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “The US and others should pull the plug on arms to the Saudis or further share responsibility for civilian lives lost.”

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Saudi Arabia Killed Nearly 100 Civilians In Yemen With American-Made Bombs

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