It was a relief to hear more than a passing reference to climate change in President Obama’s State of the Union Speech, including promises of more support for wind and solar power. But the oil industry heard nothing to even cause even a smidgen of concern.
Asking Congress to “get together to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change” should have been marked in the transcript as a laugh line. And the presidential promise to “keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits” was an emergency alert for communities under siege from natural gas fracking and states–particularly California–whose dwindling supply of clean water is being sucked away by both oil companies and climate change.
While the president pledged support for “research and technology that helps natural gas burn even cleaner and protects our air and our water,” technology is only as good as the corporations willing to pay for it as well as put safety above profit. What citizens want is information and a say in the process. Right now they have precious little of either.
So the citizen’s challenge to President Obama and Congress has to be this:
We want knowledge and the oil industry demands secrecy about its drilling, its safety procedures, the toxic chemicals it injects into wells and the effects of drilling on land, water and air.
We want responsibility and the oil industry wants deniability about chemical and methane seepage (to protect it from liability for the damage it causes, from poisoning our water to killing farm stock after leaks from wastewater ponds like the one pictured above).
We want advance information about new drilling and the industry wants no discussion with communities before the drill bits hit the soil; dangerous fracking gets far less advance scrutiny than solar and wind projects.
We want the environmental and quality of life effects of drilling measured and balanced before deep new fracking and injection wells go up next door; the industry calls such requests “job killers.”
President Obama rightly praised the growth of cleaner cars and called for more conservation and greener buildings. He left no wiggle room in his speech for climate-change deniers, not with American coastal communities being submerged by rising seas and ever-more-frequent giant storms like Sandy. Yet that firmness doesn’t track with his praise for clean-burning natural gas. Any clean-air benefit in combustion has to be balanced against the high volumes of methane–which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide–in the gas fracking process.
He praised growing North American energy independence–yet such “independence,” in a global market like oil, will do exactly nothing to reduce U.S. gasoline prices. And the worse cost is the acceptance of filthy tar sands oil from Canada, which pollutes at every stage from extraction to refining.
Everything in politics is a tradeoff, and President Obama has at least put energy conservation and climate change back on the national radar. What we need to see now is a commitment to saving our air, land and water for generations to come, rather than accepting the false “job killer” mantra of industry and its empty promises to put safety over profit.
Posted by Judy Dugan, former research director for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to providing an effective voice for taxpayers and consumers in an era when special interests dominate public discourse, government and politics. Visit us on Facebook and Twitter.
It’s an issue that cannot be covered enough, especially since we’re seeing the environmental impact on our very shores and the external costs around the globe in disasters.
The external costs are those not added to the true cost, the cost we pay at the pump and those who usually pay that cost are the poor, the least of us who live on the outskirts of our society, either in our own Country or Globally in less developed Countries.
But as the Gulf nightmare has shown, the costs will become more apparent at home.
And so the efforts of organizations like the National Resource Defense Council and anyone who is willing to talk about the issue should be applauded.
They currently have an amazing piece up by Ryan Reynolds (MY new hero, because he is also producing a documentary about a very wonderful Orca named Luna, who’s story is as tragic as it is beautiful), The True Cost of a Gallon of Gas.
The conclusion is the most important part, the true cost of gas is impossible to calculate because to try to measure the worth of biodiversity, the health of our children affected by pollution, the loss of habitat, I think it’s beyond our grasp to try to put it into small numbers before a dollar sign. But it’s what we seem to live and die by.
It’s easy to vilify Big Oil after a tragedy like this, but there are still hard working people in that industry who need to put a roof over their heads. I firmly believe we can pass clean energy and climate legislation and by doing so, put millions of Americans to work.
But we have to ask for it. We have to petition the government to move this kind of legislation forward. The Senate failed to do it this summer, but we should call on them to do it this fall.
If the voices are loud enough, lawmakers will start to listen and (if only in the interests of self preservation) begin to move the country in a new direction.
I think our approach to energy is going to change one way or another. Eventually the Earth will make us change. It would be great if we could get in front of that — and better still, be here to enjoy it.
It is easy to point fingers at big oil, what it comes down to is putting more and more Americans back to work and attempting to put big oil down at the same time. It’s a hard sell. They have a lot of money backing them, money to burn.
Not only does OPEC like the idea of cheap oil to keep alternatives outpriced and out of the market. But you’ve got big players like Koch spending money to crank up the anti-global warming rhetoric. Greenpeace traced their dirty money and all the players they fund to keep talking up the free market deniers on our airwaves to muddy the waters and keep people in denial. It works too. I wrote about it here.
Funding Cape Wind Protests Bill Koch has a nearly five-year history of opposing one of largest renewable energy initiatives in America. Cape Wind, a project to develop the country’s first offshore wind farm, has received a significant amount of media attention, not only for its prominence as the first major proposal of it’s kind, but also for the manufactured opposition from wealthy individuals like Bill Koch.
According to the project’s developer Jim Gordon and his company Energy Management Inc., Cape Wind calls for the construction of 130 wind turbines off of Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound.34 While the project is expected to produce 420 megawatts of energy, providing Cape Cod and the surrounding islands with three fourths of the area’s total electricity needs, Koch has been vehemently against Cape Wind. Koch has a home overlooking the Sound in Osterville, Massachusetts, and has been quoted in a variety of publications stating that Cape Wind would ruin the beauty and hinder his sailing in the area. “Who would want to sail in a forest of windmills?” said Koch, in a 2006 Forbes article.35 “I don’t want this in my backyard.”
According to capewind.org, the turbines will be visible 440 feet above the water. Point Gammon is the closest land area to the development, at a distance of 5.2 miles and Nantucket is the furthest away at 13.8 miles. The Web site also adds however that Cape Wind is “farther away from
the nearest home than any other electricity generation facility in Massachusetts.”36
Koch’s opposition to Cape Wind surpasses his verbal protest and manifests in his role as chairman for a front group that he also supports financially. He has been one of the largest donors to The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, one of the most recognized adversaries of Cape Wind. Formed in 2001, the group collects donations in efforts to lobby against the building of the wind turbines, and in 2006 had raised $11 million, 90 percent of which has been donated by Koch and
other wealthy opponents of the project.37 Koch, who serves as the group’s co-chairman, has given at least $1.5 million to support the cause.38 Other donations have come from extremely wealthy individuals like Paul Fireman of Reebok, who gave $250,000 and Michael Egan, son to the founder of EMC Corp., who gave $150,000.39
Evidence shows that the Alliance is particularly strategic in how they solicit such donations. In 2006, the Boston Globe reported that an internal fundraising guide from the Alliance shows that the organization has specific steps for wooing a donor. The 35-page guide teaches fund-raisers how to meet a donor, court them at home and engage them with a follow-up call. According to the Globe, the guide makes statements such as, “Don’t be afraid if there is silence, allow them to think about their response,” and “Highlight fund-raising successes to date, but our success will depend on major donors at the six-figure level.” The guide explains that small donations, such as $5,000, are frowned upon and viewed as “token gifts.”40
Oxbow Lobbyists Against Cape Wind
In addition to being the largest identified funder of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Bill Koch has also funneled $1 Million dollars to lobbyists to fight Cape Wind through his company, Oxbow Energy.41 By using his company as the conduit for these lobbying payments from 2005 to
2007, Koch helped the Alliance not exceed their limits for lobbying expenditures as a tax-deductable not-for-profit charitable organization. 42
Koch’s use of Oxbow to funnel money to lobbyists against Cape Wind started surreptitiously, with payments from Oxbow to the lobbying firm U.S. Strategies. That firm then paid other lobbyists to work against Cape Wind, including Kessler & Associates.43 This lobbying activity coincided with a
widely criticized move by members of the Alaskan delegation in Congress working with opponents to Cape Wind. The delegation attempted to attach language to a Coast Guard Reauthorization Act in Conference Committee that would have singled out Cape Wind and prohibited it from being permitted.
It was a lobbyist being funded through Koch’s company Oxbow that set up the first meeting between Alaskan Congressman Don Young and the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. Young inserted anti-Cape Wind language into the conference bill shortly thereafter.44 Due to a strong bipartisan outcry, the anti-Cape Wind provision was later significantly modified so that Cape Wind could continue forward in its permitting process.
Koch’s role in lobbying efforts against Cape Wind were revealed again in a 2008 Boston Globe article that described a lobbying disclosure form showing Oxbow along with the Alliance as the funders of yet another lobbying firm, BKSH & Associates, against Cape Wind.45 This was the
first time that Oxbow Energy and the Alliance were listed on the same lobbying disclosure form for anti-Cape Wind lobbying which the Alliance and Oxbow would later claim was a ‘mistake.’
The efforts of Koch and the Alliance were defeated this past April when U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the project, making it America’s first offshore wind facility.
It’s not just money behind the scenes, we know that, it’s lobbyist money, it’s money given to think tanks to put pundits on the TV to try to convince Americans that climate change is not real and, as we learned this week, Fox News, the mouthpiece for the Republican party is not staying on the sidelines either when it comes to the money game, 1 million dollar donations are not “fair and balanced” (Not that I had an delusions otherwise).
This is about buying public opinion and continued complacency so that we will continue down the same path that keeps a very few people and corporations rich while many pay the price for our dirty energy dependent society.
Corporations can buy candidates, the Supreme court said so. But we can vote. We can lobby for better legislation, we can talk to our neighbors and tell them that what we see before us, the world that is changing around us, this is not an illusion, it is reality.
We cannot afford to pay for cheap gas anymore in the lives lost, in the cost to our environment, to the cost to our oceans, air and our future. These costs are far too high and the stakes are so much more than any of us could imagine.
I am extremely disappointed by the Senate’s failure to address the governmental and corporate failures that led to the BP oil disaster. The inability to respond to a great environmental catastrophe, coming on the heels of the failure to deal with climate change, is astonishing. By doing nothing the Senate has failed to create American jobs, increase our security and protect the environment.
The BP blowout has disrupted the lives of millions on our Gulf Coast. The well may finally be plugged, but we are still left to wonder about the long-term effects of millions of gallons of oil and a million-plus gallons of chemical dispersant on our health and the environment. It will be a long time before we fully understand the consequences.
But we already know the costs of inaction on clean energy and climate legislation. Every day since the Senate failed to act:
— America falls another $210 million behind in clean energy investments;
— we miss the opportunity to create nearly two million good-paying clean energy jobs; and
— we import another 491 million gallons of oil, raising the price of oil, which gives Iran — a recognized sponsor of terrorism — another $173 million dollars in oil profits.
And while the Senate fails to act, temperatures keep rising. In fact, since 1985, every single month has seen global average temperatures higher than the average for all of the 20th century. As a result, more than one third of U.S. counties face higher risks of water shortages in the coming years.
You still have an opportunity to invest in our workers at home, to stop sending billions of dollars overseas, to slow the rate of climate change. But this will require your active leadership in making sure the Senate takes action now. There is still time to get the right legislation enacted, a bill that responds to the Gulf spill, limits carbon pollution, ends our oil dependence and creates new, clean-energy jobs throughout the country.
Brian mentioned this in the open thread, but it really deserves its own post, it’s such a ridiculous column. George Skelton today made a full-throated but deeply flawed argument for offshore drilling that as far as I can tell boils down to “well we did it in the past, and it’s not going to help in the future…so why not?!” and winds up arguing that we should sacrifice the future for hardly anything in return. The column doesn’t start off on a promising note:
On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes — and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.
Calling it “crud” is deliberately misleading readers about what actually happened in 1969. From UCSB:
Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel -their main route south.
The oil took its toll on the seabird population. Shorebirds like plovers, godwits and willets which feed on sand creatures fled the area. But diving birds which must get their nourishment from the waters themselves became soaked with tar….
Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not difficult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, medicated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumonia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had managed to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used to disperse the oil slick. The chemicals robbed feathers of the natural waterproofing used to keep seabirds afloat.
In all 3686 birds were estimated to have died because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had previously drawn 4000 to 7000.
Skelton’s blithe dismissal of the ecological consequences of drilling is appalling. It’s not as if our oceans are healthy – oceans face crippling ecological crises and they’re in no position to withstand drilling.
Skelton goes on to turn “Big Oil” into a nostalgia piece (I’m guessing someone didn’t see There Will Be Blood):
Oh, another thing: My dad was an oil field roustabout, or driller or whatever job he could fill on a given shift. So were his dad, brother and cousins. They left their Tennessee farms and followed the migration to California for the 1920s oil boom.
My first summer job out of high school was in a Ventura oil field, an experience guaranteed to prod a kid into college if nothing else would. (But the oil job paid better than newspaper work, I soon discovered.)
So “Big Oil” never has been a big bugaboo for me. It was the producer of a vital commodity and provider of working-class jobs. Although oil derricks annoy many people as unsightly, I’ve always marveled at how they work, especially all lighted up at night.
Nostalgic memories do not count as a sound basis for public policy – unless of course he thinks we should go back to the days before OSHA, dump our toxic waste into the drinking water supply, and drive without seatbelts.
Worse is the conflation of Big Oil with working-class prosperity. Perhaps at some moment in the past this was true, but Skelton here merely reveals that he, like all the High Broderists, does not live in the 21st century, instead assuming that the conditions of the 1970s remain true today. They don’t.
Here in the 21st century Big Oil sucks precious income away form working-class families while returning hardly any in the form of jobs, taxes, or anything else resembling prosperity. And as anyone living near the Torrance refinery knows, they tend to actually have rather debilitating effect on working-class communities.
More below…
Skelton’s main thrust of the article is some weird attempt to argue that offshore drilling will actually produce self-sufficiency – since California uses so much gas, shouldn’t we drill offshore for more?
This argument has numerous flaws. First, Californians are reducing their gas consumption which has been relatively flat over the last 8 or 9 years. Conservation, not wasteful and useless drilling, is what brought prices back from the brink of $5 earlier this summer, and it alone is what will produce long-term savings.
Skelton tries to dismiss the correct argument that drilling now won’t produce usable oil for at least ten years:
Offshore exploration opponents point out that if the federal drilling ban were lifted today, there’d be no immediate effect on gasoline prices. It could take 10 years to get any crude to the gas pump. Fine. Most people driving today still will be 10 years from now.
This is a statement deeply ignorant of how oil works today. He is assuming that the supply of oil and the demand for oil will remain static so that in 10 years, the oil we drill off our coast will make it to the pump and reduce prices.
He is wrong.
The fact is that the demand for oil is soaring around the world, and it is becoming difficult if not impossible to increase production to match it. That is the phenomenon of peak oil at work and that is why gas prices have climbed by 30% every year since 2002. Supply can’t match ever-rising demand. The oil off American shores is so small an amount as to not be able to dent oil prices that, ten years from now, are very likely to be much higher than they are today. As demand rises around the world, oil companies will sell the oil we drill off our coast on a global market. The chances it will bring down the price of gas here in CA is next to none.
The only thing offshore drilling will accomplish is fouling our already suffering oceans and wildlife while lining the pockets of oil companies that sell the oil to China and India. How is that useful again?
Skelton does deal with the argument that lifting the drilling ban detracts us from the necessary long-term investment in alternatives – by dismissing it almost entirely:
Alan Salzman, founder of VantagePoint Venture Partners…adds, “The car industry is going to switch over to electric, and that’s a certainty. Hundreds of thousands of electric cars will be on the road in 2011.”
Let me know when one is affordable, practical and in the showroom.
People didn’t give up their horse and buggy until Henry Ford began making affordable cars. We’re anxiously awaiting our next transportation mode. Meanwhile, we’ll need to keep pumping gas — some of it from the Santa Barbara Channel.
Skelton needs to get out of the LA Times offices and take a look at the city around him. He might be surprised at what he finds. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Angelenos have found alternatives to driving. That’s what enabled them to reduce their gas consumption and in turn bring down prices, albeit slightly. They bike. They walk.
His own paper reported on Metro Rail’s soaring ridership and again on Metrolink’s soaring ridership. Nowhere in Skelton’s drilling article is the MTA sales tax discussed, which would have the Subway to the Sea open by the time the first oil from the Santa Barbara Channel reaches Chinese gas pumps. Nor is high speed rail discussed, or clean bus technology, or greater urban density, or any other alternative to oil that is ready to go, right now, stalled merely for lack of political will that is currently being wasted on drilling.
Al Gore said it best at the TED Conference here in Monterey last March: drilling is “like a junkie looking for veins in his toes so he can get one last fix.” Drilling distracts us from the real problems our state faces, and for absolutely nothing in return.
Skelton doesn’t have to live in a future where the oil runs out and Californians, instead of building alternatives when we had the time and money to do so, are left with no viable alternative to oil. Unfortunately the rest of us do.
His plan for more drilling isn’t letting go of the past, it’s clinging desperately to the past in a blind refusal to accept the need to change in order to produce a better future. Just as California has failed its offspring by kicking the tax and deficit issues into the future, so too will it fail the future by drilling instead of developing alternatives.
If Skelton wants to live in the past, he’s welcome to do so. But he should not condemn the rest of us to do as well. California must change if we are to have a prosperous future.
Fabian Nunez and Bill Lockyer have proposed AB 457, a bill that introduces a price cap:
Frustrated by soaring gasoline prices, two of California’s top elected officials proposed legislation Thursday designed to crack down on consumer gouging by allowing a temporary price cap in times of “abnormal market disruption.”
Attorney General Bill Lockyer and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez jointly proposed the measure, Assembly Bill 457, in response to pump prices that have jumped by more than $1 per gallon since January.
“We need to make sure that California is not the victim of any type of market manipulation or Enron-type scheme to artificially inflate the price of gasoline at the pump,” Núñez said.
***
“It’s a publicity stunt,” said Assemblyman Russ Bogh, R-Cherry Valley. “It will do nothing to solve the gas problem, because they’re not addressing the real issues.”
Rather than demonize oil companies, lawmakers ought to be pushing to fast-track refineries and increase oil supply, Bogh said.(SacBee 6/9/06)
Personally, I don’t think that the way to deal with this is to extend temporary price caps and interfere with the market. The market has a way (Adam Smith’s invisible hand) of making sure that gas gets to the people who value it most highly.
However, Bogh has it even more wrong than the bill. The way to solve the problems is not to increase refinery capacity for many reasonsts. Of course, the most glaring reason is that nobody really wants to build any more refinery capacity. The other major reason is that there just isn’t the oil to keep building refineries and expect the oil just to keep rolling in.
So, the obvious suggestions would be to increase public transport capacity and alternative fuel production. But, those don’t sound as immediate as gas caps, so gas caps it is I suppose.
President Obama rightly praised the growth of cleaner cars and called for more conservation and greener buildings. He left no wiggle room in his speech for climate-change deniers, not with American coastal communities being submerged by rising seas and ever-more-frequent giant storms like Sandy. Yet that firmness doesn’t track with his praise for clean-burning natural gas. Any clean-air benefit in combustion has to be balanced against the high volumes of methane–which is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide–in the gas fracking process.