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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

by bileteaviononline Posted on July 26, 2016

Suckers

Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

By on Jul 26, 2016Share

The coolest new innovation in offshore wind energy right now is, essentially, a giant toilet plunger. Put enough of these plungers together and they could help power Detroit, Chicago, and the other metropolises of the Midwest.

Lake Erie Energy Development and Fred Olsen Renewables, a European energy company, plan on building a wind installation with the help of these toilet plungers, aiming for six 50-foot high turbines in Lake Erie, seven miles off the coast of Cleveland.

Putting wind turbines in the Great Lakes instead of on Midwestern farmland makes plenty of sense. Compared to farmland, underwater land is cheap. There’s also more wind on the water, because there are no inconvenient trees or buildings in the way. The Great Lakes are freshwater, so mechanical parts won’t wear down as fast as they would in the ocean’s saltwater. And big cities surround the Great Lakes, which makes it easy to connect a new installation to a pre-existing power plant.

The toilet plunger method (more formally known as the “Mono Bucket”) is an example of how a technological game-changer can often be incredibly low tech. Imagine a bunch of giant plungers in a lake. When the plungers descend, the water trapped in the bottom is pushed out, creating a vacuum. The vacuum pulls the plunger down to the lake bed and anchors it. This provides a solid base for a wind turbine and takes much less time than the standard method of using pile drivers to push concrete-filled steel pipes into the ground. It’s also less environmentally destructive.

This “Icebreaker” project  — a nod to the ice floes that dot Lake Erie in the winter — is expected to generate 20 megawatts by the fall of 2018. But the potential for expanding this project is enormous. The Great Lakes have one-fifth of the country’s impressive but unused offshore wind energy, a mind-boggling 700 gigawatts, enough to power as many as 525 million households, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. That’s nearly four times as much energy as U.S. households currently use.

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Are giant suction cups the key to cheap wind power?

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Cleveland Police Are Gearing up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention

by edwinputilin54 Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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With the Republican National Convention imminent, the Cleveland Police Department is finalizing its security plan for what is expected to be a volatile few days. The city announced last Friday that it was updating its plan following last week’s mass shooting of police officers in Dallas, and though it shared scant detail, the Cleveland PD is set to be outfitted with plenty of heavy gear.

The RNC is designated as a National Special Security Event by the US Department of Homeland Security, which entitled Cleveland to a $50 million federal grant toward its security plan. According to bids the city has posted to its website and reports from local news outlets, so far Cleveland has spent the money on:

2,000 sets of riot gear
2,000 steel batons
325 sets of tactical armor
300 patrol bicycles, with accompanying riot gear
25 rifle scopes
10,000 flexible handcuffs

Other supplies include bulletproof helmets, pepper spray, two-point slings (used to carry rifles) and inmate mattresses. The Cleveland PD also asked the Chicago Police Department to loan them three bearcats, and Taser International is loaning the department 300 body cameras that can be attached to riot suits. The city also put out a bid for tear gas, according to the Washington Post, and recently upped its protest insurance coverage from $9.5 million to $50 million.

This approach by the city isn’t unusual per se; Tampa bought similar kinds of equipment (though less of it) ahead of the RNC there in 2012. But Cleveland is the first city to host a political convention with its police department under a consent decree with the federal government. The Cleveland PD has been under the oversight of a federal monitoring team charged with enforcing the decree since October 2015, due to a history of excessive force and other abuses. Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department lawyer who supervised the agency’s Cleveland PD investigation, told the Marshall Project, “You would want a department to provide security that has systems that are in place where there is better accountability and better supervision.” In a report issued in June, the team monitoring the Cleveland PD under the decree characterzied the police department’s ability to investigate officer misconduct as “dire.” Cleveland’s consent decree calls for changes to the department’s use of force policy and internal review protocol, but those changes are still in progress.

Joycelyn Rosnick, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild’s Cleveland office, told Mother Jones the group has concerns about the equipment and tactics that the Cleveland PD plans to deploy. The police department’s purchase of 10,000 flexible handcuffs, she said, indicates “they are preparing for mass arrests.” She also cautions about potential escalation: Earlier this year, a coalition of international civil liberties groups released a report on the health impacts of crowd-control weapons commonly used by law enforcement. The report focused on how projectile weapons such as rubber bullets or bean bags can cause severe injuries, including ruptured organs and even death. The report also found that chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray can cause permanent disabilities such as blindness and respiratory problems.

Rosnick also notes that wearing riot gear is a display of force that could chill people’s First Amendment right to protest. (Cleveland officials have said that officers will only wear riot gear if it becomes necessary.) And she wonders whether the Cleveland PD has sufficient training or will show adequate restraint. “The police department that was found to use excessive force a couple months ago,” she said, “is still the department we have today.”

Jane Castor, who was chief of the Tampa Police Department when that city hosted the RNC in 2012, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the Tampa PD’s approach to security—which included officers working in standard uniforms, passing out food and water to protesters, and arresting people only as a last resort—resulted in just two convention-related arrests and zero lawsuits from protesters after the convention. Cleveland is expected to see many more protesters than Tampa did, however.

Militarization of police departments has returned to the spotlight since the country erupted with protests last week following two high-profile fatal shootings by cops. Baton Rouge police officers used tear gas, pepper spray, and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) to disperse protesters during demonstrations over the police shooting death of Alton Sterling. And officers in St. Paul, MN, used smoke bombs to disperse a crowd that had blocked a highway.

Watchdogs are working to prepare protesters for what may come. Matthew Barge, the attorney appointed to lead the federal oversight effort, told the Marshall Project that the public could report instances of police abuse at the RNC on the monitoring team’s website. “We are not going to be bashful about reviewing what happens at the RNC,” he said.

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Cleveland Police Are Gearing up for Mayhem at the GOP Convention

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Why Is It So Hard for Inmates to Sue Prisons?

by KFMWilbert Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

It began with a complaint about salad.

Since he started serving time in the ’70s, Melvin Leroy Tyler has filed dozens of lawsuits advocating better conditions in Missouri prisons, earning himself the nickname King of the Writs. One newspaper dubbed him one of the “finest jailhouse lawyers this state has ever produced.” In 1994, Tyler filed a case a case about dangerous conditions at Farmington Correctional Center, including allegations of overcrowding and food contamination. But his complaints would become infamous for a passing mention that the prison cafeteria’s salad bar was only available to guards.

Read more: Reporter Shane Bauer’s four months as a private prison guard

Tyler’s salad bar protest was held up as exhibit A in the campaign to stem the supposed flood of frivolous prison lawsuits clogging up the nation’s courts. Jay Nixon, then Missouri’s attorney general (and now its governor), singled out Tyler and sneered that “these recreational litigators can be very creative when it comes to constitutional rights.” Other examples of outrageous cases cited by Nixon and 23 of his fellow AGs included an inmate’s $1 million suit “because his ice cream had melted,” and a demand for LA Gear or Reebok sneakers instead of prison-issued Converse.

Shutting down these lawsuits became a pillar of the tough-on-crime agenda then sweeping Capitol Hill. Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in 1996, prisoners who seek to file federal civil rights cases must first jump through several hoops, like exhausting all internal grievance procedures and paying $350 to file a case.

Yet much of the evidence cited in support of the law was thin. As the bill was making its way through Congress, Jon O. Newman, a federal appeals judge, found that tales of ridiculous lawsuits “were at best highly misleading and, sometimes, simply false.” Tyler’s complaint had been ripped without context from a case that, Newman wrote, “concerned dangerously unhealthy prison conditions, not the lack of a salad bar.”

The law’s backers claimed it would protect inmates with legitimate complaints. Instead, it established a labyrinth of red tape. Between 1995 and 2012, as prison populations swelled 40 percent, the number of federal civil rights cases filed by prisoners dropped by more than 70 percent. About one-tenth of those cases resulted in an outcome favoring inmates, a slight decrease from the 1990s. If the PLRA was meant to filter out flimsy lawsuits, we should see more prisoners winning their cases, notes University of Michigan law professor Margo Schlanger. But now, she says, “each success is harder fought.”

Human Rights Watch has found that the law is often invoked to throw out cases on technicalities, even suits involving sexual assault, juveniles, or prisoners who are illiterate, deaf, or mentally ill. “This is a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse,” says David Fathi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “What we have done is dismantle the only oversight system that we had for prisons, which was litigation,” adds Schlanger.

Most inmates have little recourse but to represent themselves. The law further discourages lawyers from taking their suits by capping damages and recoverable costs. “There were never a whole lot of lawyers doing this in the first place,” says David Rudovsky, a civil rights attorney in Philadelphia. Suing prisons, he says, “is even more difficult than suing police officers.”

Now 73, Melvin Tyler lives in Missouri’s Jefferson City Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison located on No More Victims Road, where he is serving a 185-year sentence for rape, assault, and robbery. (He says he was wrongfully convicted; in 2009, the Innocence Project took up his case.) “I picked up a lot of enemies” due to the salad bar case, he tells me. “But if I hadn’t intervened, there would have been hundreds of people that would have died.”

The Prison Litigation Reform Act, Tyler explains, “destroys the ability of prisoners to seek and pursue legitimate claims.” The most unforgiving part of the law, he says, is its filing fee requirement. Sometimes the only way to fund a new lawsuit is to round up a bunch of guys to pool their money. Even though the Supreme Court unanimously shot down a prisoner’s challenge to part of the PRLA earlier this year, Tyler is working on a class-action suit questioning the constitutionality of the filing fee—one of more than 45 cases currently on his plate.

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Why Is It So Hard for Inmates to Sue Prisons?

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2015 Saw a Record Number of Attacks on US Mosques

by Grace98Vohrpzxo Posted on June 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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The past three years have been difficult for Muslim-Americans, according to a new report tracking increasing Islamophobia issued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the UC-Berkeley Center for Race and Gender. Among the most eye-catching findings: the researchers recorded 78 attacks on mosques last year, the highest since CAIR began monitoring such incidents in 2009.

The report highlights the growth of many other forms of discrimination. Self-declared “Muslim-free” businesses have cropped up across the country, and bullying of Muslim students, even by teachers, is on the rise. One piece of good news is a decrease in law enforcement anti-terrorism trainings led by purported experts who spread fear and misinformation about Muslims.

The report suggests that anti-Muslim incidents spike in the wake of terrorist events, noting an uptick in violent anti-Muslim rhetoric that took place after Islamic State militants beheaded two Americans in Syria in August 2014. Additional armed anti-Islam demonstrations sprouted up in the wake of an attempted terror attack on a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas last year, where illustrators had been invited to submit caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. And after November’s Paris attacks, there was a marked increase in attacks on American mosques.

The study comes after a Republican primary season that repeatedly featured anti-Muslim rhetoric. Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim migration to the United States. Sen. Ted Cruz spoke at summits hosted by the Center for Security Policy, a group which has been declared an extremist anti-Muslim group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Ben Carson told Meet the Press that he believed Islam was inconsistent with the Constitution and said he wouldn’t vote for a Muslim to be president. Two-thirds of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire favored banning Muslims from entering the United States, and last September, a survey of Republican voters in Iowa found that almost a third think Islam should be illegal.

Here are some key developments highlighted in the report:

Mosque Attacks

Last year saw a spike in attacks on Muslim places of worship.

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Thirty-four mosques were targeted in just the final two months of 2015—more incidents than typically occur across an entire year. Only two of November’s attacks took place before the Paris terror attacks.

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September 2015: Three young men burned three crosses on a New York’s mosque’s lawn.
November 2015: Vandals targeted a Texas mosque, covering the door in feces and throwing torn Korans on the ground.
December 2015: A severed pig’s head was left outside a Philadelphia mosque.
December 2015: A mosque in California was firebombed shortly before a prayer service.
December 2015: Raw bacon was wrapped around the door handles of a Las Vegas mosque.

Anti-Sharia movement

Since 2010, many state legislatures have seen bills introduced to prevent the influence of Sharia law on US courts, an effort which critics say has no purpose other than to vilify Muslims. As even a writer in the conservative National Review noted, “this ‘creeping Sharia’ phenomenon supposedly going on in American courts is not even happening.” Nonetheless, anti-Sharia and anti-foreign law bills have been popular among Republican state lawmakers.

Anti-foreign law bills have been enacted in ten states.
Over 80 similar bills and amendments were introduced between 2013-2015â&#128;¨. All but one were solely sponsored by Republicans.
To date, none of these laws have been invoked in legal proceedings.

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The Islamophobia network

The report identified 33 groups whose “primary purpose” is to spread fear and hatred of Islam. Financial information collected by CAIR suggests that the following organizations had the highest average annual revenue between 2008 and 2013.

  1. David Horowitz Freedom Center
  2. Middle East Media and Research Institute
  3. Clarion Project
  4. Middle East Forum
  5. Center for Security Policy
  6. Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
  7. Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation
  8. Christian Action Network
  9. Abstraction Fund
  10. ACT for America

Textbooks

After a firestorm of complaints that school textbooks were too pro-Islam, Florida and Tennessee passed laws giving parents more power to reject certain course materials.

Muslim-free businesses

Since 2014, businesses in Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire have publicly declared themselves “Muslim-free.”

Media Bias

A 2014 study of national TV news published in the Journal of Communication found that “among those described as domestic terrorists in the news reports, 81 percent were identifiable as Muslims. Yet in FBI reports from those years, only 6 percent of domestic terror suspects were Muslim.”

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2015 Saw a Record Number of Attacks on US Mosques

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This Company Turns Recycled Plastic Bags into Something Pretty

by WallyFair135676 Posted on June 17, 2016

Plastic shopping bags, as useful as they are for the 12 minutes when they’re in use, are a curse on our planet. While it can be simple enough to avoid them by bringing our own reusable shopping bags with us, the fact that millions of them are made each day, to be used only briefly and to then spend years afterward contaminating our shared resources, is enough to make even the staunchest treehugger throw their hands up in defeat.

Of course, we’re not all so easily swayed into giving up on finding alternatives and solutions for this plastic menace, and some innovative designers are coming up with ways to upcycle plastic bags into products that not only make us feel good about them, but that also look good as well.

One such initiative comes from Reform Studio, which has developed a rather ingenious solution to our plastic bag epidemic, in which the bags become the feedstock for a traditional, yet disappearing, industry in Egypt – handweaving.

Reform Studio is the brainchild of two designers, Mariam Hazem and Hend Riad, who came up with the original concept as their project for the Faculty of Applied Arts at the German University in Cairo two years ago, in which they followed their belief that “design can solve stubborn problems.”

“It all started with a plastic bag. We believe that design can solve stubborn problems and thus we started from a major issue in Egypt: waste. One experiment after another, and after many design proposals, we came up with our first product Plastex. Plastex is a new eco-friendly material made by weaving discarded plastic bags.” – Reform Studio

Plastexstarts with used plastic bags collected by friends, family, and the public, as well as with flawed bags that can’t be sold or used as-is, which are then converted into long plastic strips. These strips, or ‘threads’ are strung on a handloom and manually woven into a fabric that retains the original colors of the threads, which adds to the unique look of the upcycled material. The company claims that the material has proven to be “durable, strong, washable and tolerant to sand and dust.”

By turning what was once waste into a valuable resource, this process can help reduce the negative impacts of single-use plastic bags, as the material is not only a colorful and useful material, but one that can also spur further conversations about waste and plastic and reuse.

Reform Studio

“Plastex is designed to raise awareness about how we define waste and the possibilities behind reusing what was once destined to become trash.”

Currently, Reform Studio offers two types of chairs, theAhwa(coffee) collection, and the Grammys collection(named after grandma, not the music award), both upholstered with Plastex, along with a variety of other goods made with the material, at six stores in Cairo and one in London.

According toFuturePerfect, Reform Studio employs mostly women (70%) in its upcycling workshop, and the company offers job opportunities for untrained workers, either at the facility or working from home, through referrals from charitable organizations.

Find out more atReform Studio’s website.

Written by Derek Markham. Reposted with permission from TreeHugger.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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This Company Turns Recycled Plastic Bags into Something Pretty

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

by AnnetteGalindo Posted on May 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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The United States leads the world in the number of electric vehicles on the road, but the count is still tiny: about 350,000. That’s less than 1 percent of all passenger cars and trucks in the country. Recent market research suggests that number will climb steadily over the next several decades. But will it climb fast enough? When it comes to fighting climate change, that could turn out to be one of the most important questions of the next few years.

On April 22, world leaders gathered in New York City to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, in which they vowed to keep global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a limit the world is already more than halfway toward exceeding. Meanwhile, energy experts have begun to map out the fine-grain details of what meeting that goal would actually require. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that electric vehicles have a indispensable role to play.

It turns out that one of the most immediate societal changes for average Americans in a climate-savvy future would likely be the electrification of just about everything. In other words, the hope of the planet could like in a force—electricity—we’ve known about for hundreds of years.

That might sound strange, given that electricity production is the number-one source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. Coal- and gas-burning power plants are still our main sources of electricity, and in some parts of the country the power grid is so dirty that electric vehicles might actually cause more pollution than traditional gas-guzzlers.

But thanks to the explosive growth of solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies, electricity is getting cleaner all the time. Over the last decade, the share of total US electricity production from renewables (including hydroelectric dams) rose from about 9.5 percent to more than 14 percent, with year-to-year growth getting faster all the time. So there’s a good case to be made for phasing out the other types of fossil fuel use in our daily lives—particularly gasoline for cars and oil and gas for heating buildings. We should be using electricity instead—even if that means using more electricity overall.

That’s a key finding of the Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project, an international consortium of energy researchers that produced a detailed technical study of how to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent compared to 1990 levels by 2050—the change necessary if Americans hope to do their part to stay within the two-degree limit. The report found that it’s technically possible for the US to meet that target, at an annual cost of about 1 percent of GDP, without sacrificing any “energy services.” That is, the report assumes we’ll still drive and have houses and operate factories the same as we do today. But to do so will require a major boost in electrification—which will in turn require that the US produce about twice as much electricity as it currently does—while reducing the carbon emissions per unit of energy down to just 3 to 10 percent of their current levels. In other words, at the same time we’re electrifying everything, we need to continue to clean up the electric grid and double down on energy efficiency, especially in buildings.

“You can’t get to a level of emissions that’s compatible with 2C or less unless you do all three of those things,” said Jim Williams, one of the report’s lead authors and chief scientist at the private research firm Energy and Environmental Economics.

We get energy from fossil fuels in two basic ways: Either burning it in a power plant to create electricity that gets used elsewhere, or by burning it directly where it’s needed—i.e., your car’s internal combustion engine or a gas-fueled stove. Williams’ basic idea—which has also been advanced by other leading energy economists, particularly Stanford’s Mark Jacobson—is to axe that second category as much as possible, while simultaneously “decarbonizing” the electric grid by replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and other renewables.

Williams’ model doesn’t assume that all fossil fuel consumption goes completely to zero. A small portion of electricity could still come from natural gas plants; some oil and gas could still be used for manufacturing and industrial purposes; and airplanes, freight trains, and ocean liners may still rely mainly on petroleum. But by the middle of the century, the total “budget” for fossil fuels will become so small that they need to be limited only to uses that are absolutely unavoidable. Everything that can run on electricity needs to do so. Cars and buildings are low-hanging fruit. And despite gradual fuel efficiency improvements in cars over the last few decades, Williams said, there’s ultimately no way to make an oil-burning internal combustion car engine efficient enough to fit in the tiny fossil fuel “budget.”

“At some point you can’t continue to do direct combustion of fossil fuels, even if it’s efficient,” he said. “There is a point where you have to get out of direct fossil fuel combustion to the maximum extent.”

Ending direct combustion of fossil fuels would take a massive bite out of greenhouse gas emissions: Put together, buildings, transportation, and industrial uses account for more than half of the country’s carbon footprint.

In practical terms, the most important element of that transition would be bringing electric vehicles off the sidelines and into the mainstream. The charts below, from the report, illustrate what that transformation would look like. It’s important to note that these charts are not a projection of what the authors think will happen, but rather a prescription for what they think should happen. In the left chart, you can see that starting in the mid-2020s, sales of gas-powered cars (blue) fall off dramatically in favor of hybrids (red) and fully electric vehicles (gold). On the right, you see that by the mid-2030s, there are more electric cars and hybrids on the road than gas-powered cars:

DDPP

At the same time as this transformation is happening on the road, your gas stove will be swapped for an electric one; ditto the gas furnace in your basement. Gas stations will close and be replaced by charging stations. Machinery in factories that uses oil and gas will be largely replaced with electric equipment. Your propane or charcoal grill could be replaced by a George Foreman…you get the idea.

These are big shifts, but Williams said they probably won’t actually be very noticeable to most people. How much do you really know about what’s under your hood? Would you really notice if your basement held an electric heat pump instead of a gas furnace?

“The carbon aspect is in the guts of it that people don’t really look at,” he said. “The good news is that even if we continue to live like we’re living, we have the technology, we have what it takes to quit emitting so much CO2 to the atmosphere.”

Still, we’re not yet on pace to meet the goals laid out in the DDPP report. In a recent market forecast from Bloomberg New Energy Finance of global electric vehicle sales—a realistic picture of what the future actually holds, given current policies—global sales of electric and hybrid vehicles in 2040 are still only 35 percent of total car sales, instead of close to 100 percent in Williams’ model.

How do we get on track? Williams argues that policymakers need to start spending less energy worrying about fuel efficiency for oil-powered cars and focus instead on speeding up the transition to electric vehicles. That’s something the Obama administration has only scratched the surface of, so it could be an area of focus for the next president. Power grid operators, too, need to start planning for a future in which there could be major demand for electricity in sectors (i.e., electric cars, home heating, etc.) that are small now.

“We’re not used to having a whole lot of our electricity being used by sectors that currently don’t exist,” Williams said. “We need to already be thinking about that. If we don’t start planning now, we’ll run into dead ends.”

Have more questions about electricity? We’ve got your answers in this special podcast episode with our engagement editor Ben Dreyfuss:

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Science Says This Centuries-Old Discovery Will Save the Planet

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

by BLMWaylon7619 Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 61 drug offenders on Wednesday, as part of his push to ramp up clemencies and reform sentencing laws. That brings his total commutations to 248 since taking office, more than the past six presidents combined.

More than a third of the 61 inmates were serving life sentences on charges related to possession and distribution of drugs including cocaine, methamphetamines, and marijuana. Unlike recent rounds of commutations, however, none of them were serving life sentences for marijuana-only crimes. As Mother Jones has reported in the past, scores of so-called pot lifers remain behind bars.

“Sadly none of my guys are on this list,” says Cheri Sicard, founder of the Marijuana Lifer Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that aims to reverse the life sentences of people charged with marijuana crimes. “That will be a huge disappointment to all of them, especially 81-year-old Antonio Bascaro,” she says, referring to the longest-serving marijuana prisoner in the United States. “He does not have much time left.”

Neil Eggleston, the White House counsel, wrote in a blog post that Obama will continue his relatively aggressive pace of commutations during the remainder of his presidency. But his administration is still far from the goal it announced as part of a clemency initiative in 2011, when former Attorney General Eric Holder said that some 10,000 prisoners “were potentially going to be released.”

More than 10,000 inmates have since applied for relief, but there’s mounting evidence that the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA)—which is responsible for vetting and recommending clemency petitions to the White House—has been hampered by a bureaucratic culture and broken process in which the cases of qualifying applicants often go unheard or are regularly rejected against the OPA’s recommendations.

In January, former Pardon Attorney Deborah Leff resigned from her post after less than two years on the job. Her resignation letter, obtained by USA Today under a Freedom of Information Act request, offers a rare glimpse into a department that is shrouded in secrecy. “Given that the Department has not fulfilled its commitment to provide the resources necessary for my office to make timely and thoughtful recommendations on clemency to the President, given your statement that the needed staff will not be forthcoming, and given that I have been instructed to set aside thousands of petitions for pardon and traditional commutation, I cannot fulfill my responsibilities as Pardon Attorney,” Leff wrote to Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, who is responsible for forwarding the OPA’s recommendations to the White House.

Leff criticized Yates for overruling her recommendations and said the president was often not informed of the differences in opinion. “I believe that prior to making the serious and complex decisions underlying clemency, it is important for the President to have a full set of views,” she wrote.

Leff’s letter placed the blame for much dysfunction on the OPA’s supervisors. But in the past, Samuel Morison, a former OPA staff attorney turned whistleblower, has accused the OPA itself of routinely denying petitions “without any real consideration.” Morison noted that once cases do reach the White House, the president often takes the OPA’s advice. “The number of times the president doesn’t do what the pardon attorney suggests is extremely low,” he told me last August.

Under Leff’s leadership, Obama’s clemency numbers slowly rose. Her predecessor, Ronald L. Rodgers, a former military judge and a major prosecutor of drug crimes, was removed from office in April 2014 after failing to accurately share key information with the president in a high-profile clemency case, and during his tenure Obama granted fewer clemencies than any other modern president.

America’s federal prisons hold nearly 200,000 people; some 95,000 of them are incarcerated on nonviolent drug charges. Sicard of the Marijuana Lifer Project believes the marijuana lifers offer low-hanging fruit for an administration that has vowed to reverse “unduly harsh sentences” for drug crimes. Of Wednesday’s commutations, Amy Povah, president of the CAN-DO Foundation, which advocates on behalf of individuals charged with nonviolent drug crimes, says that while she is “thrilled that President Obama has chosen to end the suffering of these deserving applicants,” she remains concerned about others whose long-standing petitions for clemency have not yet been granted. These include Michael Pelletier, who has been in a wheelchair since he was 11 years old and is serving a life sentence for marijuana charges. The way Povah sees it, “we have a long way to go before Obama leaves office.”

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Obama Has Granted More Commutations Than the Past 6 Presidents Combined

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The Feds Just Issued an Earthshaking Report About Fracking

by KiraMaitland Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Oklahomans have always had to deal with tornadoes, wildfires, and ice storms. But now residents of the Sooner State are facing a new threat: damaging earthquakes.

For the first time, the US Geological Survey has included “human-induced” earthquakes in its seismic hazard forecast. These man-made tremors are most often attributed to the injection wells in which oil and gas companies dispose of wastewater from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The USGS seismologists estimate that some 7 million people in the central and eastern United States now live in areas at risk of a damaging earthquake.

More Mother Jones coverage of fracking


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Why Coal Is (Still) Worse Than Fracking and Cow Burps


Clinton and Sanders Want to Restrict Fracking. Will That Make Global Warming Worse?


Deep Inside the Wild World of China’s Fracking Boom

“By including human-induced events, our assessment of earthquake hazards has significantly increased in parts of the US,” said Mark Petersen, who leads the agency’s National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project, in a statement.

The risk is most acute in parts of central Oklahoma and southern Kansas, the epicenter of a fracking boom. According to the new report, the chances of a damaging earthquake (defined as level 6 or greater on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale) in these areas now range from 5 percent to 12 percent in the next year. Level 6 is considered the threshold at which earthquakes become more than a matter of a few smashed dishes and jolted nerves, causing structural damage in the form of cracked walls and chipped plaster.

However, the researchers say damaging tremors linked to injection wells are unlikely to pack the punch of the strongest earthquakes on the West Coast. The largest earthquake ever in Oklahoma was a magnitude 5.6 on the Richter scale in 2011 centered near the town of Prague, about 40 miles east of Oklahoma City. (A level six MMI corresponds to roughly 5.0 on the Richter scale.) Located near several active injection wells, the trembler injured two people and destroyed more than a dozen homes.

The 2016 seismic risk assessment focused on human-induced and natural earthquakes in the eastern and central United States. The risk of natural quakes in the West is given for comparison. USGS

Other hubs of human-induced seismicity identified in the USGS report include the Dallas area, which has seen more than 180 earthquakes since 2008; central Arkansas; and the Raton Basin along the New Mexico-Colorado border. An additional area of natural earthquake activity visible on the map lies along the New Madrid fault west of Nashville.

Typically, the USGS releases hazard forecasts with a 50-year outlook. They are used as guidance for local building codes and engineering design strategies in quake-prone areas. But the new report looks just one year ahead, a decision the researchers say is due to the highly variable risk of human-induced earthquakes from year to year.

In the past six years, that danger has spiked. From 1973 to 2008, the central United States saw an average of 24 earthquakes each year with a magnitude of 3.0 or greater (earthquakes weaker than that are not typically felt). The rate increased steadily between 2009 and 2015, averaging 318 earthquakes per year and reaching 1,010 in 2015. The tremors haven’t abated this year, the USGS says; through mid-March, there have been 226 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or larger in the central United States.

Still, it’s possible the earthquake risk could diminish with similar speed, the researchers note, given that unlike tectonic plates, industrial practices can be regulated. In an interview with the Oklahoman, Tom Robins, the state’s deputy energy secretary, noted that recent efforts to rein in wastewater injection are not yet reflected in the USGS data. That includes a call from regulators earlier this month for a 40 percent reduction in wastewater injection volume.

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The Feds Just Issued an Earthshaking Report About Fracking

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Huge wind project moves forward despite states’ objections

by gildabanner5225 Posted on March 28, 2016

Huge wind project moves forward despite states’ objections

By on 28 Mar 2016commentsShare

The Department of Energy announced Friday it will permit a major expansion of the nation’s wind energy lines.

The power line project, which will move 4,000 megawatts of power from Texas and Oklahoma through Arkansas and into the Southeast, has faced opposition from landowners and state leaders, but the DOE used a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to bypass state approval of the project. It is projected to cost $2.5 billion and bring power to 1.5 million homes.

While clean energy advocates may be celebrating, not everyone is as pleased.

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“Basically this decision says that Washington, D.C., knows more than the people of Arkansas do about whether to build across the state giant, unsightly transmission towers to carry a comparatively expensive, unreliable source of electricity to the Southeast where utilities may not need the electricity,” said Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander. “This is the first time federal law has been used to override a state’s objections to using eminent domain for sitting electric transmission lines. It is absolutely the wrong policy.” The Republican senator has received a 20 percent lifetime score on his environmental voting record by the League of Conservation Voters, which is admittedly better than most of his peers.

The DOE, however, says the project will do much to modernize the nation’s energy grid, as well as help address climate change from carbon emissions.

“Moving remote and plentiful power to areas where electricity is in high demand is essential for building the grid of the future,” said Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz in a statement. “Building modern transmission that delivers renewable energy to more homes and businesses will create jobs, cut carbon emissions, and enhance the reliability of our grid.”

The effort to modernize the grid has largely stalled since the ’80s, as the New York Times reports, despite increasing urgency from the threat of climate change. While the company building the line, Clean Line Energy Partners, will be required to acquire the land the lines are built across, the developers will be able to use eminent domain if negotiations fail by invoking the Energy Policy Act.

Construction is projected to begin in 2017.

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Huge wind project moves forward despite states’ objections

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A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

by TiaZABcztkkghe Posted on March 5, 2016

Mud flats sit where water used to be next to the Great Salt Lake Marina. REUTERS/George Frey

A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

By on 5 Mar 2016 7:00 amcommentsShare

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

The Great Salt Lake is drying up, thanks to 150 years of human diversions from the rivers that feed it. That’s the takeaway of a white paper released by a team of Utah biologists and engineers. And if those diversions continue ramping up, as a bill working its way through the Utah legislature proposes, the waterbody may face a withering fate similar to other dried-up salt lakes around the world.

The namesake of Utah’s capital city, the Great Salt Lake is the the state’s defining geographic feature and one of its economic anchors. A 2012 report by the Great Salt Lake Council estimated that the total economic output of the waterbody at $1.32 billion, between mineral extraction from the lake, brine shrimp egg production (used in aquaculture all over the world), and recreation that takes place in and around it. It also serves as an essential migration flyway for millions of birds each year.

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But the lake, which approached record-low water levels last year, is under threat. According to the Utah researchers’ calculations, since the mid-19th century, consistent reductions from the rivers that feed the lake have caused the lake’s elevation to drop by 11 feet, lose roughly half its volume, increase the lake’s salinity, and expose approximately 50 percent of the lake bed.

Those numbers are unrelated to natural fluctuations over wet and dry periods, including the current drought. Since the lake is a closed basin, the only way water leaves it is through evaporation. That makes it fairly simple to calculate just how much water has been lost to agriculture and urban growth.

Utah State University

Currently, the Utah Senate is debating a bill that would fund a number of water infrastructure projects, including the controversial Bear River Development Project, which would dam and divert more water from one of the Great Salt Lake’s main feeds. Supporters of the project say it’s designed to support the state’s growing population and water consumption needs. But the researchers estimate that the project would lead to an additional 8.5 inch drop in the Great Salt Lake’s elevation, and another 30 square miles of exposed lake bed.

Not only does that spell trouble for the lake’s economic and ecological importance, a dried-up lake would ramp up dust storms in the Salt Lake City area, which already suffers some of the worst air pollution in the country. It doesn’t take much searching to find an example of how damaging such withered lakes are for the people around them. In nearby California, the researchers write:

Diversions from the Owens River for the city of Los Angeles desiccated Owens Lake by 1926, causing it to become one of the largest sources of particulate matter (PM10) pollution in the country. This dust affects about 40,000 permanent residents in the region, causing asthma and other health problems.

Lake Urmia in Iran and the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are other examples of how massive water diversions from closed basins for human uses can create environmental health disasters.

To meet the needs of a growing population, and to protect their future health, the researchers stress that Utah policymakers should focus on taking less water, not more, from the Great Salt Lake — especially when it comes to agriculture, which consumes the majority of all that diverted water. Like so many states throughout the arid American West, Utah has to weigh its future against a history of overdrawn resources.

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A drying Great Salt Lake spells trouble for Utah

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