Despite a looming government shutdown, Republicans are still using the budget bill process to impose right-wing policies on all Americans by inserting policy riders that have no place in a budget bill. These policy riders have included riders to defund healthcare reform, defund NPR, defund PBS, cut spending for Planned Parenthood, and cut spending to the Environmental Protection Agency, thereby attacking healthcare reform, women’s health, clean air, and clean water. Furthermore, these policy riders attack domestic discretionary spending that has nothing to do with avoiding a government shutdown or reducing the national deficit or the national debt and could actually result in more debt and put Americans at risk. Republican shenanigans to force a government shutdown could also hurt economic recovery. Undoubtedly, the spending cuts are more ideological in nature and have nothing to do with passing a budget or keeping the U.S. government running. Most recently, Tea Party members actually cheered for a government shutdown (and it appears that a majority of Republicans actually favor a government shutdown over a budget compromise), but a government shutdown would actually cost taxpayers money. According to U.S. Senator Jack Reed, “The Gingrich-led government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 lasted 26 days and cost taxpayers over $1.4 billion.”
The American Lung Association is working to protect the public health from air pollution. We are defending the Clean Air Act to ensure that all Americans can have air that is safe and healthy to breathe. The Clean Air Act has provided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the authority and the responsibility to protect and clean up the nation’s air since 1970. Thanks to that law and later amendments that strengthened it, people throughout the nation breathe cleaner, healthier air.
But, the work is not done; millions of Americans continue to breathe unhealthy air. Polluters and some members of Congress want to interfere with EPA’s ability to protect public health. Most Americans believe that the Clean Air Act needs protecting. We are fighting hard to prevent anyone from weakening or undermining the law or the protective standards the law provides. We are fighting to ensure EPA has the legal authority and necessary funding to continue to protect public health.
The Administrator has considered how elevated concentrations of the well-mixed greenhouse gases and associated climate change affect public health by evaluating the risks associated with changes in air quality, increases in temperatures, changes in extreme weather events, increases in food- and water-borne pathogens, and changes in aeroallergens. The evidence concerning adverse air quality impacts provides strong and clear support for an endangerment finding. Increases in ambient ozone are expected to occur over broad areas of the country, and they are expected to increase serious adverse health effects in large population areas that are and may continue to be in nonattainment. The evaluation of the potential risks associated with increases in ozone in attainment areas also supports such a finding.
. . .
There is some evidence that elevated carbon dioxide concentrations and climate changes can lead to changes in aeroallergens that could increase the potential for allergenic illnesses. The evidence on pathogen borne disease vectors provides directional support for an endangerment finding. The Administrator acknowledges the many uncertainties in these areas. Although these adverse effects provide some support for an endangerment finding, the Administrator is not placing primary weight on these factors.
Finally, the Administrator places weight on the fact that certain groups, including children, the elderly, and the poor, are most vulnerable to these climate-related health effects.
The Administrator has considered how elevated concentrations of the well-mixed greenhouse gases and associated climate change affect public welfare by evaluating numerous and far-ranging risks to food production and agriculture, forestry, water resources, sea level rise and coastal areas, energy, infrastructure, and settlements, and ecosystems and wildlife. For each of these sectors, the evidence provides support for a finding of endangerment to public welfare. The evidence concerning adverse impacts in the areas of water resources and sea level rise and coastal areas provides the clearest and strongest support for an endangerment finding, both for current and future generations. Strong support is also found in the evidence concerning infrastructure and settlements, as well ecosystems and wildlife. Across the sectors, the potential serious adverse impacts of extreme events, such as wildfires, flooding, drought, and extreme weather conditions, provide strong support for such a finding. Water resources across large area
Gasland, a documentary that tackles the environmental side effects associated with drilling for natural gas, is up for an Oscar for the best documentary feature at the Academy Awards ceremony tomorrow. Not surprisingly, the fossil-fuel industry attacked the claims that are made in the documentary. However, given the history of environmental litigation that’s associated with fossil-fuel companies and their wrongdoings, the efforts of fossil-fuel companies to circumvent and stifle environmental regulations, and the known environmental crimes that have been committed against the human environment by the fossil-fuel industry, I believe that claims made by the fossil-fuel industry should be taken with a grain of salt. Here is a review of Gasland via Scientific American (a comprehensive review of claims made in Gasland can be found at Greenwire):
Scientific American got its hands on a pre-release copy of the film months before it aired on HBO, and the movie convinced me to write a feature article investigating the claims of fracking critics and promoters. After doing my own research and interviews, it became apparent that, like most documentaries, Gasland revealed surprising facts, amplified a few, and chose to gloss over a couple others. What writer and producer Josh Fox did achieve, regardless, was to blow the lid off the secrecy that kept most local residents, not to mention scientists and regulators, in the dark about the chemicals used in fracking and their possible effects. And he certainly put me on the reporting trail.
[Josh Fox] spends a lot of time on three Colorado households who can all set their water on fire. All three cases were investigated by Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, and while one was indeed traced to fracking, the other two apparently have nothing to do with it. One homeowner had inadvertently drilled his well through four coal beds, which contained natural gas.
Regardless of the arguments, will Gasland take home the Oscar? It seems unlikely that arguments about its accuracy will sway the Academy much. But for the record, my money’s on Banksy.
“Gasland” is up for best documentary at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony. Director Josh Fox’s dark portrayal of greedy energy companies, sickened homeowners and oblivious regulators has stirred heated debate among the various stakeholders in a natural gas boom that is sweeping parts of the U.S. The film has galvanized anti-drilling activists while drawing complaints about its accuracy and objectivity.
In a letter to the academy, Lee Fuller, the executive director of an industry-sponsored group named Energy In Depth, called “Gasland” an “expression of stylized fiction” with “errors, inconsistencies and outright falsehoods.”
He asked the academy to consider “remedial actions” against the film.
Davis, the executive director, wrote to Fuller that if the academy were to act on every complaint made about a nominated film, “it would not be possible even to have a documentary category.” He said the academy must “trust the intelligence of our members” to sort out fact from fiction.
. . .
Fox said the industry’s campaign against “Gasland” has backfired.
“What they’re doing is calling more attention to the film, so I think it works against them,” the director said from Los Angeles. “But I think it shows how aggressive they are, how bullying they are, and how willing they are to lie to promote the falsehood that it’s OK to live in a gas drilling area.”
The documentary category is no stranger to controversy. Michael Moore films like “Bowling for Columbine” and “Sicko,” as well as Al Gore’s 2006 global-warming tale, “An Inconvenient Truth,” have likewise been attacked as biased and inaccurate.
When the article was published on Friday night, it was the first time an industry spokesperson deployed a shift in strategy from the industry’s standard denials and repeated assertions that fracking is safe, despite the numerous reports of problems, such as flammable water, contamination of drinking water, trucks leaking toxic and radioactive waste-water on public highways, the pollution of streams, as well as fires, and explosions in which people have been injured.
“We have to stop blaming documentaries and take a look in the mirror,” Matt Pitzarella, a spokesman for gas producer Range Resources Corp., was quoted as saying in WSJ.
However, if you go to the article, you won’t find Pitzarella’s statement because within the hour the quote disappeared, say citizen journalists, who screen captured it and posted it on Twitter. Gasland director Fox, in Los Angeles, awaiting Sunday night’s Oscar ceremony, has the screen shot of the original version. He also has questions:
“Why did this key quote disappear from the article? Why did the WSJ censor its own piece ? Does the Gas industry get to edit the Wall Street Journal?” Fox wondered. “Who pulled the quote?”
It’s more innocuous replacement from Tom Price, a Chesapeake Vice-President reads, “We need to be able to respond objectively and accurately.”
. . .
Although it’s unknown who ordered the yanking of the quote published in the Wall Street Journal, the appearance of censorship, whatever its source, does little to restore public confidence in either the industry reported on, or the media outlet doing the reporting.
Meanwhile citizens are rooting for Gasland to win the Oscar Sunday night at nationwide Gasland parties, and by writing letters to President Obama, asking for a nation-wide moratorium on fracking and safety studies. To learn more and participate, go here.
Given the large amount of water that must be used and transported during the hydrofracking process (“fracing a typical Chesapeake horizontal deep shale gas well requires an average of 4.5 million gallons per well“), the large amounts of chemicals that must be produced and used in hydrofracking, and the large amount of diesel fuel that is used in hydrofracking, I’m interested in seeing data that compares the energy input that’s required to extract natural gas during the hydrofracking process against the actual energy that’s extracted from the ground in the form of natural gas. Considering the likely high costs to the human environment and to human health, it seems to me, that if the energy return is slight or even in the negative, then why do politicians allow natural-gas drilling in such an extreme and gross negligent manner without reasonable precautions to protect the environment. Of course, the answer is money in the form of profits and subsidies. However, the price paid to land owners and the price paid for natural gas by consumers vastly undervalues and ignores the human and environmental impacts that occur during and after the drilling process.
Another problem with hydrofracking is wastewater treatment. Wastewater contains carcinogens and radioactive elements, and since “radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways,” it appears that wastewater from hydrofracking is a threat to drinking water supplies and to public health. Via the New York Times (emphasis added):
With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.
While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.
The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.
Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.
The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.
But the E.P.A. has not intervened. In fact, federal and state regulators are allowing most sewage treatment plants that accept drilling waste not to test for radioactivity. And most drinking-water intake plants downstream from those sewage treatment plants in Pennsylvania, with the blessing of regulators, have not tested for radioactivity since before 2006, even though the drilling boom began in 2008.
In other words, there is no way of guaranteeing that the drinking water taken in by all these plants is safe.
That has experts worried.
“We’re burning the furniture to heat the house,” said John H. Quigley, who left last month as secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “In shifting away from coal and toward natural gas, we’re trying for cleaner air, but we’re producing massive amounts of toxic wastewater with salts and naturally occurring radioactive materials, and it’s not clear we have a plan for properly handling this waste.”
Justice Clarence Thomas claims that he didn’t disclose his wife’s past employment with the Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank — or other employers, because he misunderstood the filing instructions on the disclosure forms. Considering he’s a Supreme Court justice, his excuse is both laughable and troubling. Via the New York Times:
Justice Thomas said that in his annual financial disclosure statements over the last six years, the employment of his wife, Virginia Thomas, was “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.”
To rectify that situation, Justice Thomas filed seven pages of amended disclosures listing Mrs. Thomas’s employment in that time with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group, and Hillsdale College in Michigan, for which she ran a constitutional law center in Washington.
. . .
Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, said he found Justice Thomas’s explanation about the omission to be “implausible.”
As a Supreme Court justice who regularly hears complex legal cases, “it is hard to see how he could have misunderstood the simple directions of a federal disclosure form.”
The Tea Party epitomizes the kind of organization no justice should speak to — left, right or center — in the kind of seminar that has been described in the press. It has a well-known and extreme point of view about the Constitution and about cases and issues that will be decided by the Supreme Court.
By meeting behind closed doors, as is planned, and by presiding over a seminar, implying give and take, the justice would give the impression that he was joining the throng — confirming his new moniker as the “Justice from the Tea Party.” The ideological nature of the group and the seminar would eclipse the justice’s independence and leave him looking rash and biased.
There is nothing like the Tea Party on the left, but if there were and one of the more liberal justices accepted a similar invitation from it, that would be just as bad. This is not about who appointed the justice or which way the justice votes. Independence and the perception of being independent are essential for every justice.
[T]here’s a difference between justices appearing before a truly bipartisan group and one that has such a clear partisan agenda, and that the lack of transparency raises concerns.
“I think it’s outrageous that a Supreme Court justice would openly go to a political party meeting, particularly given all the issues around Citizens United [the 2009 decision about corporate political contributions] and all the issues that have come and will be coming before the Supreme Court,” says Bob Edgar, a former congressman and the president and CEO of Common Cause, a nonpartisan watchdog group.
Mr. Edgar says that he is concerned with a growing pattern, particularly in the cases of Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas – both of whom attended retreats sponsored by Koch Industries, which stood to benefit from the Citizens United decision – of some justices not carefully avoiding even the appearance of impartiality. “There are only nine justices, and the nine justices are supposed to be serving on behalf of all the people of the United States, not just the tea party, not just the radical right, not just the liberal left,” says Edgar.
Despite a looming government shutdown, Republicans are still using the budget bill process to impose right-wing policies on all Americans by inserting policy riders that have no place in a budget bill. These policy riders have included riders to defund healthcare reform, defund NPR, defund PBS, cut spending for Planned Parenthood, and cut spending to the Environmental Protection Agency, thereby attacking healthcare reform, women’s health, clean air, and clean water. Furthermore, these policy riders attack domestic discretionary spending that has nothing to do with avoiding a government shutdown or reducing the national deficit or the national debt and could actually result in more debt and put Americans at risk. Republican shenanigans to force a government shutdown could also hurt economic recovery. Undoubtedly, the spending cuts are more ideological in nature and have nothing to do with passing a budget or keeping the U.S. government running. Most recently, Tea Party members actually cheered for a government shutdown (and it appears that a majority of Republicans actually favor a government shutdown over a budget compromise), but a government shutdown would actually cost taxpayers money. According to U.S. Senator Jack Reed, “The Gingrich-led government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 lasted 26 days and cost taxpayers over $1.4 billion.”
