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The four fossil fuel stockpiles that could toast the world

by neogrom Posted on April 14, 2014

Burn Baby Burn

The four fossil fuel stockpiles that could toast the world

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By now it’s old news that the U.S. is in the midst of an oil and gas boom. In fact, with 30.5 billion barrels of untapped crude, our proven oil reserves are higher than they have been since the 1970s. But if that oil doesn’t stay in the ground, along with most U.S. gas and coal reserves, then the planet and all of its inhabitants are in trouble.

A new report from the Sierra Club takes a look at what will happen to the climate if we burn through four of our biggest fossil fuel reserves — and it ain’t pretty. The four stockpiles are Powder River Basin coal in Wyoming and Montana; Green River shale in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah; oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska; and frackable oil and gas across the U.S. Together these deposits could release 140.5 billion tons of CO2, the report says, enough to get the world a quarter of the way toward a global 2-degree Celsius rise, aka climatological catastrophe.

While the Sierra Club also reports that, for the first time in 20 years, domestic CO2 emissions are actually decreasing (and the U.S. has lost its place as No. 1 CO2 emitter to China), exploiting our oil, gas, and coal reserves will make it hard to maintain that trend. And, if we’re exporting the fuel, domestic trends don’t tell the whole story. Extracting even a fraction of these fossil fuel deposits would outweigh all of the positive climate steps the Obama administration is taking.

As Dan Chu, an author of the report, told Grist, “We have more [fossil fuels] than we can afford to burn. Our argument is … unless we are proactively keeping some of those proven reserves in the ground, we will assuredly go over that tipping point.”

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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The four fossil fuel stockpiles that could toast the world

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The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

by ImogeneSchafer Posted on April 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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When the Supreme Court recently demolished yet another chunk of the nation’s campaign finance laws, Dan Backer arguably cheered louder than anyone. It was Backer, a Washington, DC-area attorney active in conservative politics, who had convinced an Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon to challenge the government’s limit on the number of candidates, party committees, and political action committees an individual can contribute to in a single election cycle. (The basic limits on how much money that donor can give to each candidate, party, or PAC remain intact.) Backer, who represented McCutcheon, responded to the news of the Supreme Court’s decision by tweeting (in apparent reference to William Wallace in Braveheart): “FREEEEDOMMMMM!!!!”

Backer’s victory is shining some light on another high-profile cause of his: Convincing Sarah Palin to run for US Senate.

In an email headlined “Palin for Senate” recently blasted out by a PAC called the Tea Party Leadership Fund, Backer writes, “Sarah’s the proven leader we need.” He goes on, “She has a better grasp on world politics, and she knows what it means to cherish and protect our American freedoms far better than THE MAN WHO IS SUPPOSED TO BE LEADING THE FREE WORLD.” Backer slams incumbent Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) for spending “too much time in Washington, DC, begging the Obama administration for favors rather than representing the good people of Alaska.” Palin supporters need to act quick, Backer warns: The window for her to get into the race “has almost closed.” And so Backer asks recipients to sign a petition and gather enough signatures to “to push Sarah Palin over the top in a critical run for Alaska’s Senate seat in 2014.”

In an interview, Backer said almost 100,000 people had signed the Palin for Senate petition. If Palin did enter the race,he said the Tea Party Leadership PAC would bolster her candidacy with direct mail and radio ads. “Nobody’s going to be a greater agent for change than Sarah Palin from Alaska,” Backer told me. “She will bring something to the race and she will disrupt the Senate. And disruption is good.”

Read the email:

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Backer’s plea isn’t entirely out of left field. Palin has made noises about running for Senate in Alaska. Last summer, she said on Sean Hannity’s radio show that she was considering a run. “I’ve considered it because people have requested me considering it,” she said. “But I’m still waiting to see what the lineup will be and hoping that…there will be some new blood, new energy, not just kind of picking from the same old politicians in the state.” But this email comes when it’s getting late for a possible Palin campaign. (The filing deadline is six weeks away.) Right now, the much-watched Alaska Senate race pits Begich against Republican Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell. Most polling shows Begich in the lead, but the seat is considered a toss-up Senate race that could determine which party ends up controlling the upper chamber.

Backer’s email asks for more than just a signature; it includes a plea to donate $5 or more to the Tea Party Leadership Fund PAC. (Backer is the PAC’s treasurer.) A cynical political observer might wonder if this “Palin for Senate” effort could be more of a fundraising ploy than a realistic attempt to get Palin into the race. Campaign records show that the Tea Party Leadership Fund has so far raked in $3.8 million in the 2013-14 election cycle, and most of that money—almost $9 of every $10—has gone to fundraising, legal fees (to Backer’s own firm), consulting, and other related expenses.

But Backer says the Tea Party Leadership PAC has spent so much non-electoral money because it was building its donor lists during 2013, an off year. This year, he says, the PAC plans to be a counterweight to the outside money from corporations and trade associations backing establishment Republican candidates. “We knew this was going to be a tough cycle and a tough year,” he said. “You need resources you can put on the ground when you need them.”

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The Lawyer Behind the Supreme Court’s Latest Campaign Finance Decision Has a New Cause: Sarah Palin for Senate

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Victims of The First Fort Hood Attack Asked The President for a Meeting. Here’s The Response.

by Kathari4402 Posted on April 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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During last week’s memorial service for victims of April 2 Fort Hood shooting, President Barack Obama spoke about the lingering hurt from the previous attack on the base in 2009. “Part of what makes this so painful is that we’ve been here before,” Obama said. “This tragedy tears at wounds still raw from five years ago. Once more soldiers who survived foreign war zones were struck down here at home, where they’re supposed to be safe.” Yet, when victims of the first Fort Hood shooting invited the president to see those wounds up close, he refused, without explaining why.

The morning of the memorial, retired Staff Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times during the 2009 Fort Hood rampage, requested that the Obama meet briefly with victims and their families while he was on base. Lunsford’s letter, which was addressed to the president’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, also described survivors’ disappointment with how they had been treated:

As you may know, the President and high-ranking members of the military promised me, my family and the other Fort Hood terror attack survivors that the federal government would “make them whole.” After more than four and one-half years, however, the government has yet to make good on this promise.

We believe that if the President could hear, first-hand, our plight and our mistreatment at the hands of his bureaucracy, that he would take the steps needed to set things right. Therefore, we ask for ten minutes of his time.

In the years since Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire in a crowded Fort Hood medical center, killing 13 people and wounding another 32, victims have struggled to get medical care and financial benefits. This is largely because of how the incident has been labeled. Although Hasan is an avowed jihadist with ties to Al Qaeda, the Pentagon considers the attack to be workplace violence rather than terrorism or combat. Thus victims aren’t eligible for many benefits and honors available to soldiers wounded or killed in action. (For more on this topic, see How the Obama Administration Failed the Victims of the First Fort Hood Attack.)

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Victims of The First Fort Hood Attack Asked The President for a Meeting. Here’s The Response.

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Obamacare and the Hack Gap: A Case Study

by d2wk58 Posted on April 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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“Watch the right search desperately for bad news on Obamacare,” says the headline to Michael Hiltzik’s piece a couple of days ago about the right, um, desperately searching for bad news on Obamacare. And it’s true. Obamacare is a great example of the famous hack gap.

Don’t get me wrong. We lefties generally try to portray Obamacare as a success. You won’t find Diogenes on either side. But I read lots of lefties who write about health care, and they’ve generally been willing to acknowledge Obamacare’s problems. The federal website rollout was a disaster. The insurance pools so far seem to have fewer of the young and healthy than we’d hoped. Narrow networks are a significant problem, especially in some states. We don’t know yet how many Obamacare enrollees were previously uninsured—and in any case, the number appears to be less than CBO projected earlier this year. Etc.

But unless I’m reading the wrong conservatives, you simply see nothing of this sort on the right. Their coverage of Obamacare is simply an endless search for increasingly strained ways to deny that anything even slightly positive has happened. The Obama administration is lying about its numbers. If they’re not lying, the figures are meaningless anyway until they’ve been unskewed. Premiums are skyrocketing. People are being tossed off their plans and thrown in the street. The budget projections are a joke. Cancer patients are dying for lack of doctors to see them. Hours are being cut back and part-time workers are being fired. Fewer people have coverage now than before Obamacare started up.

I could go on. And on. And on. This is the hack gap in all its glory. There’s simply no willingness on the right to acknowledge any success at all. And even when they’re forced to concede that maybe there are a few people benefiting from Obamacare, it’s just an opportunity to rail about Democrats handing out bennies to inner-city moochers like a modern-day Boss Tweed. Welcome to America, ladies and gentlemen.

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Obamacare and the Hack Gap: A Case Study

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An American Just Disappeared From a Prison in Yemen, and No One Will Say What Happened

by Emily Collins Posted on April 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sharif Mobley—an American accused by the US government of wanting to join Al Qaeda, and by the Yemeni government of shooting a prison guard—has disappeared from the Sana’a prison where he was being held, his lawyer, Cori Crider of the British charity Reprieve, said Monday. Crider believes the Yemeni secret police are holding Mobley in an undisclosed location, and has written to the US Embassy requesting the government’s help. “We have not had any news of Mobley for 39 days, despite strenuous attempts to locate him,” she wrote.

Mobley’s is one of the forgotten stories of the war on terror. In early 2010, the New Jersey-born Muslim was living in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. He says he had moved there to study Arabic; US officials have told reporters that he planned to join Al Qaeda. Mobley was running errands one morning, he says, when he was kidnapped by Yemeni secret police, shot in the leg, and held incommunicado, tortured, and interrogated for weeks.

During this time, FBI agents visited and questioned Mobley, leading him to believe that the Yemeni government had arrested him and tortured him on behalf of the US government. (Documents Crider obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2012 proved that the US government was aware of Mobley’s detention even as US officials were telling his wife they did not know where he was.) Eventually, Mobley tried to escape, and US and Yemeni officials say he shot and killed a guard in the process. He’s been held in the Sana’a central prison ever since. His supporters believe that he was a victim of proxy detention—civil libertarians’ term for the US government’s practice of having allied countries detain suspects the United States doesn’t want to arrest and detain itself.

More MoJo reporting on proxy detention


Locked Up Abroadâ&#128;&#148;for the FBI


Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)


Document Shows US Government Knew About American Locked Up in Yemen


American Muslim Alleges FBI Had a Hand in His Torture (Updated with Video)


US Charges Yonas Fikre, American Who Claimed Torture, With Conspiracy


READ: Letter to Justice Department About Alleged Proxy Detainee Yonas Fikre


Obama Administration Sued Over “Proxy Detention”

Mobley disappeared sometime between February 27, when Crider’s colleagues saw him there last, and March 22, when they visited the prison and discovered he was nowhere to be found. The timing is noteworthy for a couple reasons. The same week Mobley turned up missing, Kel McClanahan, an American lawyer who helped with Crider’s FOIA, filed suit in federal court in Washington alleging that the FBI had hacked his emails after he obtained classified documents relating to the case.

Moreover, just before Mobley disappeared, Crider and her team were about to publicize a bevy of US government documents they obtained through FOIA. “I am certainly concerned that this is about someone trying to discourage embarrassing evidence from coming to light,” she wrote in an email. “Why move him now? There have been security incidents in the centre of town, but that has been the case before. So all is very odd.”

The big question now is whether the US had any connection to Mobley’s latest disappearance. It’s not so far-fetched. Consider the case of Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a Yemeni journalist who had been accused of associating with Al Qaeda because he had interviewed Anwar al-Awlaki, the now-dead American Al Qaeda propagandist. In February 2011, Yemen was set to release Shaye. But, as Jeremy Scahill reported in The Nation, President Barack Obama intervened personally to prevent Shaye’s release. The journalist was held for another two years.

The State Department said it was aware of “reports” that Mobley had been moved but couldn’t comment further out of concern for his privacy. A spokesman for the Yemeni embassy said he didn’t know where Mobley was, but he’d check.

Here’s the letter Crider sent to the US Embassy:

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Sharif Mobley Is Missing, His Lawyer Says (PDF)

Sharif Mobley Is Missing, His Lawyer Says (Text)

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An American Just Disappeared From a Prison in Yemen, and No One Will Say What Happened

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Ohio cracks down on methane pollution from fracking

by TangelaCso Posted on April 7, 2014

Ohio cracks down on methane pollution from fracking

By

Bill Baker

This guy probably understands that Ohio’s new rules don’t go far enough.

Drillers in the heavily fracked Buckeye State will now have to do more to find and fix leaks in their systems, part of the latest initiative to crack down on climate-changing methane pollution. The Akron Beacon Journal reports:

Ohio on Friday tightened its rules on air emissions from natural gas-oil drilling at horizontal wells. …

Drilling companies now are required to perform regular inspections to pinpoint any equipment leaks and seal them quickly.

Such leaks can contribute to air pollution with unhealthy ozone, add to global warming and represent lost or wasted energy. Fugitive emissions can account for 1 to 8 percent of methane from an individual well, according to some studies. …

The revised rules — in development for more than a year — were released by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and go into effect immediately, officials said.

Environmentalists cheered the new rules, which closely followed a crackdown on fugitive methane emissions in Colorado, and a similar proposal from the Obama administration. And Wyoming recently introduced methane pollution rules for new or expanded fracking and other natural gas-related operations.

“It’s essential we maintain an unblinking vigilance in driving down harmful emissions,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, which has drawn criticism from other environmental groups in recent years for partnering with fracking companies to study and attempt to address harms associated with the drilling practice.

“There are parts of the policy we would have written differently,” said EDF’s Matt Watson, “but this unquestionably puts Ohio among the national leaders in tackling fugitive emissions.”


Source
Ohio becomes third state to impose rules to curtail ‘fugitive emissions’ from drilling operations, Akron Beacon Journal

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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This GOP House Candidate Proposed Eliminating the Weekend

by AdelePlatz Posted on April 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wisconites tired of relaxing on weekends and staying home on federal holidays are in luck: On Thursday, GOP state Sen. Glenn Grothman announced his challenge to 13-term moderate Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis.). In a conservative district that went to Mitt Romney by seven points in 2012, Grothman hopes to channel dissatisfaction with Republicans in Congress whom he believes haven’t done enough to slow down the Obama administration’s policy agenda. But he comes with some baggage of his own.

In January, Grothman introduced legislation to eliminate a state requirement that workers get at least one day off per week. “Right now in Wisconsin, you’re not supposed to work seven days in a row, which is a little ridiculous because all sorts of people want to work seven days a week,” he told the Huffington Post. Eliminating days off is a long-running campaign from Grothman. Three years earlier, he argued that public employees should have to work on Martin Luther King Day. “Let’s be honest, giving government employees off has nothing to do with honoring Martin Luther King Day and it’s just about giving state employees another day off,” he told the Wisconsin State Journal. It would be one thing if people were using their day off to do something productive, but Grothman said he would be “shocked if you can find anybody doing service.”

MLK Day and “Saturday” aren’t the only holidays Grothman opposes. At a town hall in 2013, he took on Kwanzaa, which he said “almost no black people today care about” and was being propped up by “white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans.”

When he’s not advocating for people to spend more time working, Grothman has gotten in trouble for advocating that (some) people be paid less. “You could argue that money is more important for men,” he told the Daily Beast’s Michelle Goldberg, after pushing through a repeal of the state’s equal pay bill. And he has pushed to pare back a program that provided free birth control, while floating a bill that would have labeled single parenthood, “a contributing factor to child abuse and neglect.” Grothman justified the bill by contending that women choose to become single mothers and call their pregnancies “unplanned” only because it’s what people want to hear. “I think people are trained to say that ‘this is a surprise to me,’ because there’s still enough of a stigma that they’re supposed to say this,” he said in 2012.

Enjoy the weekend.

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This GOP House Candidate Proposed Eliminating the Weekend

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No, Our Oil and Gas Production Did Not Give Us an Advantage During the Crimea Crisis

by TeddyAraujo Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Of all the preposterous, irresponsible headlines that have appeared on the front page of the New York Timesin recent years, few have exceeded the inanity of this one from early March: “US Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin.” The article by normally reliable reporters Coral Davenport and Steven Erlanger suggested that, by sending our surplus natural gas to Europe and Ukraine in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the United States could help reduce the region’s heavy reliance on Russian gas and thereby stiffen its resistance to Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior.

Forget that the United States currently lacks a capacity to export LNG to Europe, and will not be able to do so on a significant scale until the 2020s. Forget that Ukraine lacks any LNG receiving facilities and is unlikely to acquire any, as its only coastline is on the Black Sea, in areas dominated by Russian speakers with loyalties to Moscow. Forget as well that any future US exports will be funneled into the international marketplace, and so will favorsales to Asia where gas prices are 50% higher than in Europe. Just focus on the article’s central reportorial flaw: it fails to identify a single reason why future American LNG exports (which could wind up anywhere) would have any influence whatsoever on the Russian president’s behavior.

The only way to understand the strangeness of this is to assume that the editors of the Times, like senior politicians in both parties, have become so intoxicated by the idea of an American surge in oil and gas production that they have lost their senses.

As domestic output of oil and gas has increased in recent years—largely through the use of fracking to exploit hitherto impenetrable shale deposits—many policymakers have concluded that the United States is better positioned to throw its weight around in the world. “Increasing US energy supplies,” said then-presidential security adviser Tom Donilon in April 2013, “affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.” Leaders in Congress on both sides of the aisle have voiced similar views.

The impression one gets from all this balderdash is that increased oil and gas output—like an extra dose of testosterone—will somehow bolster the will and confidence of American officials when confronting their foreign counterparts. One former White House official cited by Davenport and Erlanger caught the mood of the moment perfectly: “We’re engaging from a different position with respect to Russia because we’re a much larger energy producer.”

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No, Our Oil and Gas Production Did Not Give Us an Advantage During the Crimea Crisis

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Republican’s bill calls for weather forecasting, not climate forecasting

by qiuyz4ye Posted on April 1, 2014

Republican’s bill calls for weather forecasting, not climate forecasting

By

Scott Gentzen

If Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) were a squirrel, he’d have starved over the winter.

Like a maladapted rodent that’s too short-sighted to save any nuts for the lean season ahead, the climate denier is sponsoring legislation that would force NOAA to focus on short-term weather forecasting at the expense of long-term climate modeling. The Hill reports that the bill, which now has 13 Republican and seven Democratic cosponsors, could get its first real hearing this week.

Bridenstine introduced the bill after 48 Oklahomans were killed by a brutal string of tornadoes last spring. “My state has seen all too many times the destructive power of tornadoes and severe weather,” Bridenstine said at the time. Then he staged a bizarre tirade on the House floor in which he demanded that President Barack Obama apologize for spending “30 times as much money on global warming research as he does on weather forecasting and warning.”

That would be quite the funding imbalance, were it true. But it’s not. The figure is just plain wrong.

Scientists have not concluded whether there is a link between climate change and tornadoes, but Stanford University researchers reported last year that climate change could cause the meteorological conditions that would lead to tornadoes and thunderstorms occurring more often.

More research into the potential climate-tornado link could help Bridenstine’s state properly prepare for extreme weather of the future. But the lawmaker seems more interested in squirreling around in the politics of the absurd than in finding out what hazards the future might hold in store for Oklahoma.


Source
GOP: Predict storms, not climate change, The Hill

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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Obama Orders Up More Money for Nukes, Less to Keep Them in Safe Hands

by DrusillJnb Posted on April 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last week, President Barack Obama claimed to be less worried about security threats from Russia than “the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan.” If that’s the case, however, it isn’t reflected in his latest military budget, which would boost funding for maintaining and developing atomic weapons while cutting back programs that help keep bomb-making materials out of the hands of terrorists.

“It’s troubling that for the third year in a row, the President’s budget proposal funds nuclear weapons programs at the expense of virtually every nonproliferation effort,” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), who sits on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement provided by his aides. “Maintaining our existing nuclear weapons stockpile is already unsustainable, and it makes little sense to increase investments in weapons that matter less and less for our national security.”

The administration’s proposed 2015 budget reduces the National Nuclear Security Administration’s $790 million in spending on nuclear nonproliferation programs by 20 percent, or $152 million. The cuts apply to NNSA programs that secure buildings containing fissile material, prevent the smuggling of radioactive material across borders, and convert nuclear reactors to use low-enriched uranium, which, unlike highly enriched uranium, cannot be used in nuclear warheads.

At the same time, the Obama budget increases the NNSA’s spending on nuclear weapons systems by nearly 6 percent, or $445 million. This includes a $100 million increase for the “life extension” of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, a Cold War-era weapon stationed mostly around Europe that many arms experts call outdated and unnecessary.

“It’s misplaced priorities across the board,” says James Lewis, communications director for the Center For Arms Control And Non-Proliferation. The nation’s nuclear weapons complex “is just such a massive behemoth that there really isn’t money for anything else.”

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has defended the cuts, albeit without much enthusiasm. “Nuclear nonproliferation programs, I’m afraid, is not such a great story,” he told the Albuquerque Journal News last month. “It’s frankly disappointing that we have such a substantial reduction this year. However, I do want to emphasize that this will continue to be a very robust program.”

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Obama Orders Up More Money for Nukes, Less to Keep Them in Safe Hands

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