Tag Archives: society

Notorious Astroturf Pioneer Rick Berman Is Behind Business Group’s Anti-Labor-Board Campaign

by BurtonMount Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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In January, viewers catching the morning shows on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC met Heidi Ganahl, the bubbly founder and CEO of a national doggy day care chain called Camp Bow Wow.

“I’ve worked hard and played by the rules to make my franchise business a success,” Ganahl said in an ad that ran on all three networks, as video showed her fawning over a golden retriever. “Now, unelected bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board want to change the rules. As Americans, we deserve better. Tell Washington, ‘No.'”

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Notorious Astroturf Pioneer Rick Berman Is Behind Business Group’s Anti-Labor-Board Campaign

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We Lock Up Tons of Innocent People—and Charge Them for the Privilege

by BernadiD30 Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

The United States has a prison problem. We have just 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. Even though our imprisonment rate has grown more than 400 percent since 1970, locking people up has not proved to be a deterrent.

The prison problem also extends to jails, which hold defendants awaiting trial and prisoners sentenced for minor offenses. A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on justice policy, reports that America’s local jails, which hold roughly 731,000 people on any given day, are holding more people even though the crime rate is going down. Jails disproportionately detain people of color longer and for lesser crimes. The report also finds that jails are less likely to give inmates the rehabilitation and mental-health support that could keep them out of prison.

Inside the Wild, Shadowy, and Highly Lucrative Bail Industry

“I observe injustice routinely. Nonetheless even I—as this report came together—was jolted by the extent to which unconvicted people in this country are held in jail simply because they are too poor to pay what it costs to get out,” writes Vera president and director Nicholas Turner. He described poor detention practices in which the mentally ill, homeless, and substance abusers are routinely jailed for bad behavior and described the practice as “destructive to individuals, their families, and entire communities.”

The 46-page report paints a devastating portrait of American jails. Here are a few quick takeaways:

1. The number of people going to jail is going up while crime rates are falling: In 1983, roughly 6 million people were admitted to a local jail. That number grew to roughly 11.7 million in 2013. Meanwhile, crime rates have been dropping. See Vera’s chart:

Jail admissions rates include people who’ve gone to jail more than once—recidivism is a separate, but related issue—but even factoring that in, more people are going to jail. The report speculates that this is tied to arrests for drug crimes: In 1983, drug defendants and inmates made up less than 10 percent of local jail populations but by 2002 they accounted for 25 percent.

2. Jail time is getting longer: Once people land in jail, their average stay has increased nearly 65 percent, from 14 days to 23. This statistic doesn’t distinguish between pretrial detention and those serving actual jail terms, but, as the report notes, “the proportion of jail inmates that are being held pretrial has grown substantially in the last thirty years—from about 40 to 62 percent—it is highly likely that the increase in the average length of stay is largely driven by longer stays in jails by people who are unconvicted of any crime.”

3. People who go to jail often work less and earn less after getting out: Spending any time in jail can, and usually does, significantly alter someone’s ability to lead a normal life upon release. Plus, many jail inmates have to pay fees for laundry service, room and board, and even booking fees. Even if they’re later found innocent, they still must pay those bills, leaving many former defendants indebted to the system.

Consider Kevin Thompson, a Georgia man who had been jailed once and was jailed again for not paying $838 in traffic fines, court fees, and probation fees to a private probation company.

4. Lack of money is the main reason defendants sit in jail: The report comes to a depressing, if not surprising, conclusion: “Money, or the lack thereof, is now the most important factor in determining whether someone is held in jail pretrail. Almost everyone is offered monetary bail, but the majority of defendants cannot raise the money quickly or, in some cases, at all.” This leads to situations where people are stuck in jail for minor offenses. A 2010 Human Rights Watch report found that in about 19,000 criminal cases in New York City, many people couldn’t afford bail set at $1,000 or less. In some cases, the accused pled guilty early to get out of jail, even if they were innocent.

5. Society’s race problems are amplified by the local jail dynamic: The Vera report notes that about 38 percent of felony defendants will spend their entire pretrial periods in jail, but only one in 10 were denied bail in the first place. The rest, many of whom are African American men, simply can’t afford to post bail: “Black men appear to be caught in a cycle of disadvantage: incarcerated at higher rates and, therefore, more likely to be unemployed and/or in debt, they have more trouble posting bail.”

Continued – 

We Lock Up Tons of Innocent People—and Charge Them for the Privilege

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Fracking is definitely causing earthquakes, another study confirms

by DaciaPamphlett Posted on January 7, 2015

Fracking is definitely causing earthquakes, another study confirms

By on 7 Jan 2015commentsShare

Yet another study has found a link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes. This one examined 77 minor quakes near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

The sequence of seismic events, including a rare “felt” quake of a magnitude 3.0 on the Richter scale, was caused by active “fracking” on two nearby Hilcorp Energy Co. well pads, according to the research published online [Tuesday] in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

The study found that although it is rare for fracking associated with shale gas extraction to cause earthquakes large enough to be felt on the surface by humans, seismic monitoring advances have found the number of “felt and unfelt” earthquakes associated with fracking have increased over the past 10 years.

Studies have found that it’s not just the actual drilling and extraction that causes the earthquakes; more often, the routine practice of injecting fracking wastewater into deep disposal wells is to blame. Once the toxic mix of water, sand, and chemicals is underground, it can travel for miles, changing the pressure on fault lines and sometimes triggering earthquakes.

The practice has caused a surge in earthquakes in many areas where fracking is common. Oklahoma in particular has been hard-hit. Once a state where tremors were few and far between, Oklahoma in 2014 had 564 quakes that were at least of magnitude 3 — the most in the contiguous U.S.  From 1975 until 2008, the state had, on average, only three such quakes per year. From E&E EnergyWire:

The Sooner State was shaken by 564 quakes of magnitude 3 and larger, compared with only 100 in 2013, according to an EnergyWire analysis of federal earthquake data. California, which is twice the size of Oklahoma, had fewer than half as many quakes. …

“Who’d have ever thought we’d start having so many earthquakes out here in the middle of the country?” asked Max Hess, a county commissioner in Grant County, which had 135 quakes last year. He also thinks the quakes are related to oil and gas, which has been an economic boon for the rural county northwest of Oklahoma City.

“It’s been good,” Hess said of the drilling, “but it’s got its drawbacks.”

EnergyWire reports that many in Oklahoma’s oil and gas regions are cautiously tolerant of the earthquakes because of the money that comes with the drilling boom. But scientists in the state’s geological survey are concerned about the trend. “If my research takes me to the point where we determine the safest thing to do is to shut down injection — and consequently production — in large portions of the state, then that’s what we have to do,” seismologist Austin Holland told Bloomberg this summer.

Source:
Study: Fracking caused earthquakes in existing faults in Ohio

, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Shaken more than 560 times, Okla. is top state for quakes in 2014

, E&E EnergyWire.

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Fracking is definitely causing earthquakes, another study confirms

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Has Obama Gone Too Far? Five Key Questions Answered About the Legality of His Immigration Plan.

by RenaGroves Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’ve been paying only moderate attention to the whole issue of President Obama’s executive order on immigration, and it’s only over the past few days that I’ve started trying to learn more about the legal issues involved. And I confess that I’ve been a little surprised by what I’ve discovered. As near as I can tell, both liberal and conservative legal scholars—as opposed to TV talking heads and other professional rabble-rousers—agree that Obama has the authority to reshape immigration enforcement in nearly any way he wants to. Here are answers to five key questions about the legality of the immigration plan Obama announced tonight:

  1. The linchpin of Obama’s executive action is the president’s inherent authority to engage in prosecutorial discretion, and just about everyone agrees that this authority is nearly unconditional. Speaking to a meeting of the conservative Federalist Society, Christopher Schroeder said: “I think the roots of prosecutorial discretion are extremely deep. The practice is long and robust. The case law is robust.” Erwin Chemerinsky and Samuel Kleiner agree: “It has always been within the president’s discretion to decide whether to have the Department of Justice enforce a particular law. As the Supreme Court declared in United States v. Nixon, ‘the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.'”
  2. OK, but exempting entire categories of people from prosecution? It turns out that current immigration law explicitly recognizes this. Margaret Stock, a Republican immigration lawyer and a Federalist Society member, says: “The Immigration and Nationality Act and other laws are chock-full of huge grants of statutory authority to the president. Congress gave the president all these powers, and now they are upset because he wants to use them. Other presidents have used the same authority in the past without an outcry.”
  3. But are those grants really broad enough? Apparently so. In fact, immigration law provides the president an unusually broad scope for executive action. Eric Posner writes: “The president’s authority over this arena is even greater than his authority over other areas of the law….In 2012, the Supreme Court recognized the vast discretion of the president over immigration policy. In the case Arizona v. United States, the court struck down several Arizona laws that ordered state officials to enforce federal immigration laws, on pain of state penalty….As Adam Cox puts it, in a recent academic article, the court’s reasoning “gives executive branch officials near complete control over the content of immigration law.'”
  4. Still, even if this is true in theory, is it really true in practice? As it turns out, yes, there’s plenty of prior precedent for exactly this kind of thing. As the LA Times reports, “Obama would not be the first president to push through immigration reform by working outside of Congress.” In fact, presidents from FDR through Bill Clinton have issued executive orders that deferred deportation for various categories of undocumented immigrants. And while it’s true that Obama’s action will likely affect more people than any of the previous ones, that’s a political issue, not a legal one. From a strictly legal viewpoint, Obama is doing something that has plenty of past precedent.
  5. Finally, what about work permits? Even if Obama can legally defer prosecution—a right conferred by both constitutional authority and statutory language—does that also give him the right to issue work permits to immigrants affected by his order? Surprisingly, perhaps, that has a long pedigree too—one that goes back not just to DACA (Obama’s 2012 mini-DREAM executive order), but well before that. David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, explains: “The federal regulations governing employment under immigration law existed well before DACA. Under those regulations, any undocumented immigrant granted deferred action — under programs that preceded DACA or coincide with it — had already been able to apply for employment authorization….The president’s authority to grant work status long precedes DACA, and while it does apply to DACA and would apply to its expansion, it is not a direct outgrowth or creation of either.”

It’s an open question whether Obama’s actions are politically wise. It might force Republicans into an uncomfortable corner as they compete loudly to denounce Obama’s actions, further damaging their chances of appealing to Hispanics in future elections. Alternatively, it might poison any possibility of working constructively with congressional Republicans over the next couple of years, which might further degrade Democratic approval ratings. There’s also, I think, a legitimate question about whether liberals should be cheering an expansion of presidential power, whether it’s legal or not.

That said, Obama’s actions really do appear to be not just legal, but fairly uncontroversially so among people who know both the law and past precedent. Republicans may not like what Obama is doing, and they certainly have every right to fight it. But they should stop spouting nonsense about lawlessness and tyranny. That’s just playground silliness.

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Has Obama Gone Too Far? Five Key Questions Answered About the Legality of His Immigration Plan.

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California Voters Helped Kick Off the Prison Boom. They Just Took a Huge Step Toward Ending It.

by JacobRaphael Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Voters in the birthplace of mass incarceration just gave it a major blow. With California’s passage of Proposition 47, which reclassifies nonviolent crimes previously considered felonies—think simple drug possession or petty theft—as misdemeanors, some 40,000 fewer people will be convicted of felonies each year. Thousands of prisoners could be set free. People with certain kinds of felonies on their records can now apply to have them removed.

The state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the reforms will save California hundreds of millions of dollars annually, money that will be reinvested in school truancy and dropout prevention, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and victim services.

The proposition’s passage represents a pendulum swing: Just two decades ago, California overwhelmingly passed a three-strikes ballot initiative that would go on to send people to prison for life for stealing tube socks and other minor offenses. Last night, the state’s voters turned back the dial.

The new law requires the savings from reducing prison rolls to be reinvested into other areas that could, in the long-term, further reduce the prison population. Take dropout prevention: Half of the nation’s dropouts are jobless, and according to a 2006 study by the Gates Foundation, and they are more than eight times as likely to get locked up.

The same goes for increased funding to aid the mentally ill. In California, the number of mentally ill prisoners has doubled over the last 14 years. Mentally ill inmates in state prisons serve an average of 15 months longer. Lockups have become our country’s go-to provider of mental health care: the nation’s three largest mental health providers are jails. There are ten times as many mentally ill people behind bars as in state hospitals. Sixteen percent of inmates have a severe mental illness like schizophrenia, which is two and a half times the rate in the early 1980s. Prop 47 will provide more money for mental health programs that have been proven to drop incarceration rates. For example, when Nevada County, California started an Assisted Outpatient Treatment program, average jail times for the mentally ill dropped from 521 days to just 17.

Keeping drug users out of prison and putting more money into drug treatment is probably the most commonsense change that will come out of the measure. Sixteen percent of state prisoners and half of federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offenses. Yet there is growing evidence that incarceration does not reduce drug addiction. And while 65 percent of US inmates are drug addicts, only 11 percent receive treatment in prison. Alternatives exist: a pilot project in Hawaii suggested that drug offenders given probation over being sent to prison were half as likely to be arrested for a new crime and 70 percent less likely to use drugs.

California’s vote comes at a time when it seems more and more Americans are questioning how often—and for how long—our justice system incarcerates criminals. Last year, a poll of, yes, Texas Republicans showed that 81% favored treatment over prison for drug offenders. The passage of Prop 47 is yet another example that prison reform is no longer a partisan issue. The largest single backer of the ballot measure was Bradley Wayne Hughes Jr., a conservative multimillionaire who has been a major financial supporter of Republicans and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads. His donation of $1.3 million was second only to contributions from George Soros’s Open Society Policy Center.

The passage of Prop 47 might inspire campaigners to put prison on the ballot in other states. It might also push lawmakers to realize they can ease the penal code on their own without voters skewering them for letting nonviolent people out of prison—and keeping them out.

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California Voters Helped Kick Off the Prison Boom. They Just Took a Huge Step Toward Ending It.

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10 Terrifying Facts From the UN’s New Climate Report

by ITAVinceyt Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The latest IPCC report is out, and the news is not happy.

The chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called today’s report the “strongest, most robust and most comprehensive” to come out of the IPCC, which has been tracking climate change since 1988. It is “yet another wake-up call to the global community that we must act together swiftly and aggressively,” the White House said in a statement.

The report’s language is stronger than in years past: Warming is “unequivocal,” and the changes we’re seeing are pervasive, it states clearly. We must take action quickly to cut our dependence on fossil fuels, it warns. If we don’t, we’ll face “further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.”

As we explained last week, you may be experiencing déjà vu—that’s because there have been three IPCC reports released since September 2013. Today’s is the final installment in this cycle of reports; called the synthesis report, it’s intended to summarize and clarify the three that came before. All the parts together form the complete Fifth Assessment Report, or AR5, a comprehensive look at climate change of the sort that hasn’t been released since 2007.

Everyone involved hopes the research summarized within will guide political leaders and UN negotiators as they try, over the next year, to cut an emissions-reducing deal and save us all.

Though this report is breezy by IPCC standards, coming in at a mere 116 pages with a 40-page summary for policymakers, we boiled it down a bit more. Here, with some charts, are 10 key things to take away—many of them familiar from the IPCC installments that have come out over the past 13 months.

1. We humans really, truly are responsible for climate change, and ignoring that fact doesn’t make it less true. “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history,” the report states. The atmospheric concentration of key greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—is “unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years,” the report warns, and our fossil-fuel driven economies and ever-increasing population are to blame.

IPCC

2. Climate change is already happening. Each of the past three decades has been warmer than the last, and warmer than any decade since we started keeping records. Sea levels are rising. Arctic ice cover is shrinking. Crop yields are changing—more often than not, getting smaller. It has been getting wetter, and storms and heat waves are getting more intense.

IPCC

3. …and it is going to get far worse: “Heat waves will occur more often and last longer…extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise,” the report states. If we stick to our current path, we could see 3.7 to 4.8 degrees Celsius of warming—or even more—by the end of the century.

These graphs show projected changes in sea-level rise and surface temperature given different emissions scenarios:

IPCC

4. Much of recent warming has been in the ocean. About 90 percent of the energy that has gone into the climate system since 1971 went into the ocean. That means a warmer, expanding ocean, which fuels stronger storms. It also means rising sea levels and eroding coastlines.

5. The ocean is also becoming more acidic. By taking in so much of the carbon dioxide that humans have been spitting out since the industrial revolution, the ocean has become 26 percent more acidic and its pH level is falling. Scientists think this could have widespread and severe effects on marine life—increasingly, ocean acidification is being referred to as the “other CO2 problem.”

6. Climate change will hit developing nations particularly hard, but we are all vulnerable. Climate change will make food systems more volatile, exacerbate health problems, displace people, weaken countries’ infrastructures, and fuel conflict. It will touch every area of life. Economic growth will slow as temperatures warm, new poverty traps will be created, and we’ll find that poverty cannot be eliminated without first tackling climate change.

7. Plants and animals are even more vulnerable than we are. As climates shift, entire ecosystems will be forced to move, colliding with one another. Many plants and small animals won’t be able to move quickly enough to keep up, if global warming marches forward unabated, and will go extinct.

8. We must switch mostly to renewables by 2050, and phase out fossil fuels by 2100. To avoid the most damaging and potentially irreversible impacts of climate change (e.g., from the report: “substantial species extinction, global and regional food insecurity, consequential constraints on common human activities, and limited potential for adaptation”), we’ll need to make sure our greenhouse gas emissions are cut severely by the middle of this century. We should aim for “near zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived GHGs by the end of the century.”

This graph shows how much our emissions could go up or down under different emissions scenarios:

IPCC

9. We already have the answers we need to tackle climate change. We have the necessary technologies available, and economic growth will not be strongly affected if we take action, the report argues. As the cliché goes, all it takes is the will to act. But we must act in unison, the report states: “Effective mitigation will not be achieved if individual agents advance their own interests independently. Cooperative responses, including international cooperation, are therefore required to effectively mitigate GHG emissions and address other climate change issues.”

10. This dire report is decidedly conservative. The effects of climate change could be much worse than what this report presents. As Chris Mooney explains, many scientific experts say the panel errs on the side of caution. He writes:

…a new study just out in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society …charges that the IPCC is focused on avoiding what are called “type 1” errors—claiming something is happening when it really is not (a “false positive”)—rather than on avoiding “type 2” errors—not claiming something is happening when it really is (a “false negative”).

So the actual effects of climate change could be even more severe, and even stranger, than what the IPCC describes.

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10 Terrifying Facts From the UN’s New Climate Report

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The Chinese people care more about the environment than Americans do

by KurtisBoag Posted on October 17, 2014

The Chinese people care more about the environment than Americans do

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17 Oct 2014 2:21 PM

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Those who oppose action on climate change in America are fond of complaining about how futile our own efforts to cut greenhouse gases are when China doesn’t give a hoot about its own emissions. But a new poll finds that the Chinese people do want action to cut pollution — even more than we do in America.

The Pew Research Center asked people around the world to rank five global threats. A full third of respondents in China think that issues related to “pollution and the environment” present the greatest danger to the world. Compare that to 15 percent of Americans. (We Americans, according to Pew, are most concerned about inequality — which, incidentally, is a related issue because inequality both makes climate change harder to tackle, and will be made greatly worse as poor communities and nations face the brunt of a climate run amok.)

And increasingly, the Chinese people are making their voices heard. This summer, Stephen Vines reported for Al Jazeera on the growing number of environmental protests in China:

The latest official State of the Environment report recorded 712 cases of “abrupt environmental incidents” in 2013, up 31 percent from the previous year. Many of these “incidents” are in fact protests, and the level of protest in the current year is, if anything, on the up. Yang Chaofei, the vice-chairman of the Chinese Society for Environmental Sciences, told members of the powerful Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress that environmental protests have been growing 29 percent annually from 1966 to 2011.

Maybe the folks running the country with the world’s highest greenhouse gas emissions and some of the filthiest air are starting to listen to their people. This June, just a day after the U.S. announced its own plans to cut power plant emissions, a Chinese government advisor stated that, for the first time, his country would limit its emissions. And China’s Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli outlined the country’s plans at the U.N. summit in New York last month. Mashable’s Andrew Freedman writes:

China has a goal to reduce its carbon intensity, which is a way of measuring the carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product, by up to 45% by 2020. Zhang said that China will reveal its goals for reducing emissions post-2020 during the first quarter of 2015, as the United States also intends to do.

Zhang said that in 2013, carbon intensity dropped by nearly 29% from the 2005 level, and that installed renewable energy capacity increased significantly as well.

“Responding to climate change is what China needs to do to attain sustainable development at home,” Zhang told the throngs of dignitaries, corporate titans and representatives of civil society groups at the U.N.

So not only have the Chinese beaten us in emitting, they’ve beaten us in being concerned about what those emissions do. Will they now beat us in doing something about it?

Source:
Global Attitudes Project

, Pew Research Center.

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The Race to Reclaim Louisiana’s Vanished Land Back From the Sea

by ClaritaPBNK Posted on October 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The GPS showed David Morgan still on dry land—but the waves bumping beneath his boat revealed the reality of this lost Louisiana landscape. Rising seas have obliterated 30 points on the map in the last three years at Plaquemines Parish where Morgan lives.

Sugarcane fields, citrus groves, backwoods—all gone. “This was all land here when I was a kid. There was no water anywhere,” said Morgan, 57, slowing the boat to pass oyster beds. “I used to hunt rabbits there with my dog,” he said.

Louisiana is losing land to the sea faster than anywhere else in the world.

But the authorities say they have a plan to turn back the seas—and get BP to pay a substantial share of the $50 billion cost out of criminal penalties from the blowout of its well in the Gulf of Mexico.

The plan includes proposals for more than 100 engineering projects along the coastline, diverting the Mississippi, dumping fresh sand on barrier islands, and re-planting degraded wetlands to reinforce the coast. The state’s computer forecast shows that, if all the projects come in on time, by 2060 Louisiana could start regaining land.

The big question is: will it work?

Dead mangrove at Cat Island and Bay Jimmy in Plaquemines Parish Gerald Herbert/AP

Officials say the ambitious plan is the best hope yet for saving the coast. Louisiana has lost nearly 1,900 square miles of land over the past 80 years—a disappearing act that claims on average a football field an hour.

In Plaquemines Parish, the remaining land looks moth-eaten, chewed up by oil industry canals and the incoming waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Left unchecked, the state is projected to lose an additional 1,750 square miles in the next 50 years.

The land began vanishing from southern Louisiana about 80 years ago when the authorities began penning in the Mississippi after catastrophic floods.

The system of levees cut off the river from the delta, choking off the sediment needed to shore up the coast.

A decade later, oil drilling took off in coastal areas of Louisiana. Industry canals tore up the coastal wetlands.

Rising seas under climate change accelerated the land loss, exposing New Orleans and the valuable oil, shipping and seafood industries on the coast to hurricanes and storm surge.

Sea level rise is now the leading cause of land loss, said Virginia Burkett, chief scientist for climate and land use change at the US Geological Survey, leading a recent tour of the restoration projects organized by the Society of Environmental Journalists.

“If sea level rise doubles as we expect over the next century, can you imagine what is going to happen to this landscape?” she asked. “Without the barrier islands and marshes to attenuate the storm surge, the people of New Orleans are basically surrounded by an earthen levee.”

Even the state’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, who publicly downplays the dangers of climate change, has committed to the plan to hold back the seas.

The Mississippi-Atchafalaya river plumes are visible here as they empty into the Gulf of Mexico, on 17 April 2009

Local politicians have also signed on. “This is how we are going to save Louisiana. It is doable,” said Billy Nungesser, president of Plaquemines Parish. “I think we can realistically put back what we had 25 or 30 years ago.”

However, the engineering projects are prohibitively expensive. Congress has refused to fund the $50 billion and private estimates for the engineering works range up to $94 billion—which is where BP comes in.

The Louisiana authorities are banking heavily on BP paying a large share of the costs. Under a law passed by Congress, 80 percent of the penalties obtained from BP following the 2010 blowout of its oil well in the Gulf of Mexico are designated for coastal restoration. The oil company has already made a downpayment of about $1 billion for coastal restoration.

After a judge in New Orleans last month found BP had exercised “gross negligence” in the run-up to the disaster, the oil company could now be on the hook for as much as $18 billion in penalties under the Clean Water Act. The judge will begin court proceedings on penalties in January.

A separate lawsuit is trying to get oil and gas companies to pay for restoration, because of the damage done by the canals.

Burkett said the plan was different from earlier—failed—restoration efforts because it aims to mimic the way sediment, debris and even trees were carried along by the Mississippi and deposited on the delta, extending land into the Gulf of Mexico. “What we have learned through time is restoring the natural process is more effective than building concrete dams and dykes,” she said.

flooded homes and citrus orchards in the aftermath of 2012 Hurricane Isaac in Plaquemines Parish Gerald Herbert/AP

This time around, engineers are importing sand to rebuild barrier islands scoured by hurricanes. At Pelican Island, a 2.5 mile strip in the Barataria Bay, crews used 2.5m cubic yards of sand and silt mined from the Gulf of Mexico to build dunes and marshes, and rolled out protective fences around newly planted grasses.

But it has cost $77 million so far to restore Pelican Island, and the coastal restoration authority admits that, even after all this effort, Pelican Island has a limited life-span, just 20 years, before it too is devoured by the sea.

Given the rate of land loss, it’s hard to keep pace. “Even though a couple of billion dollars sounds like a lot of money we have found it woefully inadequate to do a lot of good here on the coast that we’re looking at,” said Brad Inman, a senior project manager on the restoration project from the Army Corps of Engineers.

It’s also unclear whether re-engineering the coast can ever work—no matter how massive the scale. In research published earlier this year, Richard Condrey, a retired coastal ecologist from Louisiana State University, said this approach to restoring the coast was bound to fail.

It was time to start again—before it’s too late.

“The data doesn’t support that putting sand on a barrier island has impacted the rate of loss,” Condrey said. “We need to recognize that what we are doing is not working. We are not protecting the citizens of Louisiana. We are not protecting the coasts and barrier islands. … We need to stop fooling ourselves.”

Taken from – 

The Race to Reclaim Louisiana’s Vanished Land Back From the Sea

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BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

by IssacTenreajbyw Posted on September 4, 2014

BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

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4 Sep 2014 3:46 PM

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Today, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier of the New Orleans federal court issued a ruling finding BP guilty of gross negligence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. Halliburton and Transocean, companies also involved in operating the rig, received lesser smackdowns in the same ruling. BP, of course, will be appealing the decision, because why not drag these legal proceedings out for a few more years!

The ruling has coincidentally come about at the same time as the Society of Environmental Journalists conference — also taking place in New Orleans — where Geoff Morrell, BP’s vice president of U.S. communications, had a lot of crybaby-ish things to say about the media’s handling of BP’s behavior in the aftermath of the crisis.

In that regard, we imagine* that the handing down of this decision may have gone a little like this:

Judge Carl Barbier: So listen … four years ago, y’all fucked up. Big time. You know this!

BP: PROVE IT.

CB: What — ? That’s really not my job. Do you know how the U.S. judicial system works? I’m the judge, you morons — I don’t have to prove shit. But just to review: your Deepwater Horizon rig spilled over 200 million gallons of oil, contaminated 650 miles of coastline and 87,000 square miles of the Gulf, and killed 11 people. Not to mention, you impacted the livelihoods of 20 million people in the United States alone.

Halliburton and Transocean, in unison: Okay, fair, but really not our fault.

CB: I’ll get to you bozos in a minute. Anyway, BP, I’m aware this isn’t your first federal court rodeo. You’ve already pleaded guilty to no fewer than 14 federal charges, including 11 for manslaughter, and also one for deliberately lying about the size of the oil spill. And now we’ve spent the past few months hearing — in detail — how your enormous screw-up­ has been detrimental to the environment, food system, and economy of the Gulf region. Do you have anything to say for yourself?

BP: Thank you for asking. We’ve set aside $46 billion to cover all of the cleanup, legal fees, and penalties that we may or may not be responsible for. That’s a lot of money! It should be more than enough.

CB: It will definitely not be even close to enough, but that’s on you. On that note, I find you guilty of reckless conduct and gross negligence in setting off the Deepwater Horizon disaster, for which you are hereby levied a penalty of $18 billion.

BP: Wow. WOW.

HB: DO YOU WANT SOME ICE FOR THAT BUUUURRRRRNNNNNN??!!

TO: HEY BP CAN YOU LOAN ME A COUPLE BIL?? OH WAIT JUST KIDDING YOU BROKE AS F –

CB: Seriously, you two — I’ll get to you in a minute.

BP: Are you kidding me with that number? I am prepared to offer you exactly $3.5 billion.

CB: Does this look like a goddamn Moroccan marketplace to you, BP? Are you seriously haggling with me right now?

HB and TO: Take that penalty and take a seat!

BP: You both need to shut up.

CB: I’m going to have to break character and agree with BP on this one. Transocean and Halliburton, I find you each guilty of negligent conduct.

BP: HA!

CB: … and you don’t have to pay anything. God damn it.

BP: WHAT.

HB: Already took care of it. (High-fives TO.)

CB: I really do just hate all of you, for the record.

*In case you couldn’t tell (!), this exchange is fictional.

Source:
BP Found Grossly Negligent in 2010 Spill; Fines May Rise

, Bloomberg.

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BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, KTP, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BP convicted of gross negligence in Deepwater Horizon spill, really salty about it

BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists

by ChristoSprouse Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

News of this morning’s federal court decision against BP broke as I was aboard a 40-foot oyster boat in the Louisiana delta, just off the coast of Empire, a suburb of New Orleans.

The reaction: stunned silence. Then a bit of optimism.

“This is huge,” said John Tesvich, chair of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, his industry’s main lobby group in the state. “They are going to have to pay a lot more.” Standing on his boat, the “Croatian Pride,” en route to survey oyster farms, he added: “We want to see justice. We hope that this money goes to helping cure some of the environmental issues in this state.”

On Thursday, a federal judge in New Orleans found that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster—in which the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 people and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf—was caused by BP’s “willful misconduct” and “gross negligence.”

Tesvich says he’s seen a drastic decline in his company’s oyster production since then—company profits down 15 to 20 percent and oyster yields slashed by 30 percent. He says he’s suspicious that this new decision will force the kind of action from local politicians needed to clean up the Gulf once-and-for-all. The politicians in Louisiana, he says, “haven’t been the best environmental stewards.”

BP’s own reaction to the news has been fast and pointed. “BP strongly disagrees with the decisionâ&#128;&#139;,” the company said in a statement on Thursday, published to its website. “BP believes that an impartial view of the record does not support the erroneous conclusion reached by the District Court.”

The company said it would immediately appeal the decision.

With the fourth anniversary of the busted well’s final sealing coming up in a couple weeks, BP has been pushing back aggressively against the company’s critics. On Wednesday night—just hours before the court’s ruling—Geoff Morrell, the company’s vice president of US communications, spoke in New Orleans at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, and blamed the media and activists for BP’s rough ride.

The company’s efforts to clean up the spill have been obscured, he said, by the ill-intentioned efforts of “opportunistic” environmentalists, shoddy science, and the sloppy work of environmental journalists (much to the chagrin of his audience, hundreds of environmental journalists).

“It’s clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come to pass,” he said. “The environmental impacts of the spill were not as far-reaching or long-lasting as many predicted.”

Back in 2010, BP’s then-CEO Tony Hayward lamented—a month after the explosion—that he wanted his “life back.” He didn’t find much sympathy at the time. Within a couple months, he resigned out of the spotlight (with a $930,000 petroleum parachute). But his flub didn’t retire so easily, and it became emblematic of BP’s astonishing capacity for tone-deafness, something Morrell seemed intent on continuing Wednesday.

Morrell said that while “impolitic” remarks had been made by BP officials in the past, the spill’s aftermath has been “tough on all of us.”

I can only imagine.

I can faithfully report that no rotten tomatoes were hurled during Morrell’s talk, and grumbles and cynical chuckles were kept to a polite murmur. But the response on Twitter was more free-flowing:

Yup, that last one is true.

Original article: 

BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists

Posted in Anchor, Dolphin, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists