Politics Seen to Limit E.P.A. as It Sets Rules for Natural Gas
By IAN URBINA
The New York Times
When Congress considered whether to regulate more closely the handling of wastes from oil and gas drilling in the 1980s, it turned to the Environmental Protection Agency to research the matter. E.P.A. researchers concluded that some of the drillers’ waste was hazardous and should be tightly controlled.
But that is not what Congress heard. Some of the recommendations concerning oil and gas waste were eliminated in the final report handed to lawmakers in 1987.
“It was like the science didn’t matter,” Carla Greathouse, the author of the study, said in a recent interview. “The industry was going to get what it wanted, and we were not supposed to stand in the way.”
E.P.A. officials told her, she said, that her findings were altered because of pressure from the Office of Legal Counsel of the White House under Ronald Reagan. A spokesman for the E.P.A. declined to comment.
Ms. Greathouse’s experience was not an isolated case. More than a quarter century of efforts by some lawmakers and regulators to force the federal government to police the industry better have been thwarted, as E.P.A. studies have been repeatedly narrowed in scope, and important findings have been removed.
For example, the agency had planned to call last year for a moratorium on the gas-drilling technique known as hydrofracking in the New York City watershed, according to internal documents, but the advice was removed from the publicly released letter sent to New York.
Now some scientists and lawyers at the E.P.A. are wondering whether history is about to repeat itself, as the agency undertakes a broad new study of natural gas drilling and its potential risks, with preliminary results scheduled to be delivered next year.
The documents show that the agency dropped some plans to model radioactivity in drilling wastewater being discharged by treatment plants into rivers upstream from drinking water intake plants. And in Congress, members from drilling states like Oklahoma have pressured the agency to keep the focus of the new study narrow.
They have been helped in their lobbying efforts by a compelling storyline: Cutting red tape helps these energy companies reduce the nation’s dependence on other countries for fuel. Natural gas is also a cleaner-burning alternative to coal and plentiful within United States borders, so it can create jobs.
But interviews with E.P.A. scientists, and confidential documents obtained by The New York Times, show long and deep divisions within the agency over whether and how to increase regulation of oil and gas drillers, and over the enforcement of existing laws that some agency officials say are clearly being violated.
Agency lawyers are in a heated debate over whether to intervene in Pennsylvania, where drilling for gas has increased sharply, to stop what some of those lawyers say is a clear violation of federal pollution laws: drilling waste discharged into rivers and streams with minimal treatment. The outcome of that dispute has the potential to halt the breakneck growth of drilling in Pennsylvania.
The E.P.A. has taken strong stands in some places, like Texas, where in December it overrode state regulators and intervened after a local driller was suspected of water contamination. Elsewhere, the agency has pulled its punches, as in New York.
Asked why the letter about hydrofracking in the New York City watershed had been revised, an agency scientist who was involved in writing it offered a one-word explanation: “politics.”
Natural gas drilling companies have major exemptions from parts of at least seven of the 15 sweeping federal environmental laws that regulate most other heavy industries and that were written to protect air and drinking water from radioactive and hazardous chemicals.
Coal mine operators that want to inject toxic wastewater into the ground must get permission from the federal authorities. But when natural gas companies want to inject chemical-laced water and sand into the ground during hydrofracking, they do not have to follow the same rules.
The air pollution from a sprawling steel plant with different buildings is added together when regulators decide whether certain strict rules will apply. At a natural gas site, the toxic fumes from various parts of it — a compressor station and a storage tank, for example — are counted separately rather than cumulatively, so many overall gas well operations are subject to looser caps on their emissions.
An Earlier Reversal
The E.P.A. also studied hydrofracking in 2004, when Congress considered whether the process should be fully regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act.
An early draft of the study discussed potentially dangerous levels of contamination in hydrofracking fluids and mentioned “possible evidence” of contamination of an aquifer. The final version of the report excluded these points, concluding instead that hydrofracking “poses little or no threat to drinking water.”
Shortly after the study was released, an E.P.A. whistleblower said the agency had been strongly influenced by industry and political pressure. Agency leaders at the time stood by the study’s findings.
“It was shameful,” Weston Wilson, the E.P.A. whistleblower, said in a recent interview about the study. He explained that five of the seven members of that study’s peer review panel were current or former employees of the oil and gas industry.
“The study ended up being the basis for this industry getting yet another exemption from federal law when it should have resulted in greater regulation of this industry,” Mr. Wilson added.
Some E.P.A. scientists say this pattern may be playing out again in the national study of hydrofracking that Congress will consider as it decides whether drillers will have to operate under stricter rules.
Internal documents from early meetings, obtained through public-records requests filed by The Times and provided by E.P.A. officials who are frustrated with how research is being handled, show agency field scientists demanding that certain topics be included in the study. And earlier versions of the research plan indicate that many of those topics were to be included.
For example, the study was to consider the dangers of toxic fumes released during drilling, the impact of drilling waste on the food chain and the risks of this radioactive waste to workers.
But many of these concerns, cited by field scientists in earlier documents as high priorities, were cut from the current study plan, according to a version of it made public on Feb. 8.
Earlier planning documents also called for a study of the risks of contaminated runoff from landfills where drilling waste is disposed and included detailed plans to model whether rivers can sufficiently dilute hazardous gas-well wastewater discharged from treatment plants.
These topics were cut from the current study plan, even though E.P.A. officials have acknowledged that sewage treatment plants are not able to treat drilling waste fully before it is discharged into rivers, sometimes just miles upstream from drinking water intake plants. While the current study plan clearly indicates that the agency plans to research various types of radioactivity concerns related to natural gas drilling, this river modeling, which E.P.A. scientists say is important, has been removed.
In interviews, several agency scientists and consultants, who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, said the study was narrowed because of pressure from industry and its allies in Congress, as well as budget and time constraints.
Brendan Gilfillan, an agency spokesman, said that the plan remained broad and that the agency had taken additional steps to investigate the impacts of drilling, including recently issuing a subpoena against the energy services company Halliburton to force the company to provide fuller disclosure about its drilling operations.
To Read the Rest of the Article
Showing posts with label Pollution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pollution. Show all posts
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Silas House: My Polluted Kentucky Home
My Polluted Kentucky Home
By SILAS HOUSE
The New York Times
Berea, Ky.
LAST weekend I joined 19 other Kentuckians in a sit-in at the office of Gov. Steve Beshear. We were there to protest his support of mountaintop removal, a technique used by coal-mining companies that, as its name implies, involves blasting away the tops of mountains and hills to get at the coal seams beneath them.
Since it was first used in 1970, mountaintop removal has destroyed some 500 mountains and poisoned at least 1,200 miles of rivers and streams across the Appalachian coal-mining region. Yet Governor Beshear is so committed to the practice that he recently allied with the Kentucky Coal Association in a suit against the Environmental Protection Agency to block more stringent regulations of it. In court his administration’s lawyers referred to public opposition as simply “an unwarranted burden.”
The news media and the rest of the country typically think of mountaintop removal as an environmental problem. But it’s a human crisis as well, scraping away not just coal but also the freedoms of Appalachian residents, people who have always been told they are of less value than the resources they live above.
Over the past six years I’ve visited dozens of people who live at the edge of mountaintop removal sites. They bathe their children in water that has arsenic levels as high as 130 times what the E.P.A. deems safe to drink.
Their roads are routinely destroyed by overloaded trucks; their air is clouded with pollutants. Their schools sit below ponds holding billions of gallons of sludge. Their children lose sleep worrying that the sludge dams will break, releasing the sludge down upon them. It happened 40 years ago at Buffalo Creek, W.Va., killing 125 people, and it could happen again today.
It’s a horrible way to live. And yet, as it does in many other impoverished quarters of America, the news too often avoids covering Appalachia as if it were a no man’s land.
When a 3-year-old Virginia boy was crushed to death in his crib after a half-ton boulder was accidentally (and illegally) dislodged by a mining company, it barely made the national news. Many people around here believe the omission reflected that the child lived in a trailer home in the heart of coal country.
In 2000, 306 million gallons of sludge — 30 times more than the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez — buried parts of Martin County, Ky., as deep as 5 feet. Yet hardly anyone outside the region remembers the disaster, if they ever heard about it.
More recently, my friend Judy’s grandson was playing in a creek when he was suddenly surrounded by dozens of dead fish. Tests later proved that a coal company was releasing polyacrylamide — a cancer-causing agent used to prepare coal for burning — into the creek. When Judy complained to the state, no one replied. She recently died of brain cancer.
I’ve heard dozens of stories like these, but they rarely make it beyond the mountains. Is it any wonder then that Appalachian residents feel invisible?
In fact, invisible is how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves since coal was first discovered here. When I was little, teachers would stand over my desk and tell me that I had to change my accent if I wanted to get ahead in the world. Never mind that I had nearly perfect grammar and spelling.
We were also told the success of the mines mattered above all else, that if we complained about the dust, noise and disrespect pumped out by the mine in our community, people would lose jobs.
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
By SILAS HOUSE
The New York Times
Berea, Ky.
LAST weekend I joined 19 other Kentuckians in a sit-in at the office of Gov. Steve Beshear. We were there to protest his support of mountaintop removal, a technique used by coal-mining companies that, as its name implies, involves blasting away the tops of mountains and hills to get at the coal seams beneath them.
Since it was first used in 1970, mountaintop removal has destroyed some 500 mountains and poisoned at least 1,200 miles of rivers and streams across the Appalachian coal-mining region. Yet Governor Beshear is so committed to the practice that he recently allied with the Kentucky Coal Association in a suit against the Environmental Protection Agency to block more stringent regulations of it. In court his administration’s lawyers referred to public opposition as simply “an unwarranted burden.”
The news media and the rest of the country typically think of mountaintop removal as an environmental problem. But it’s a human crisis as well, scraping away not just coal but also the freedoms of Appalachian residents, people who have always been told they are of less value than the resources they live above.
Over the past six years I’ve visited dozens of people who live at the edge of mountaintop removal sites. They bathe their children in water that has arsenic levels as high as 130 times what the E.P.A. deems safe to drink.
Their roads are routinely destroyed by overloaded trucks; their air is clouded with pollutants. Their schools sit below ponds holding billions of gallons of sludge. Their children lose sleep worrying that the sludge dams will break, releasing the sludge down upon them. It happened 40 years ago at Buffalo Creek, W.Va., killing 125 people, and it could happen again today.
It’s a horrible way to live. And yet, as it does in many other impoverished quarters of America, the news too often avoids covering Appalachia as if it were a no man’s land.
When a 3-year-old Virginia boy was crushed to death in his crib after a half-ton boulder was accidentally (and illegally) dislodged by a mining company, it barely made the national news. Many people around here believe the omission reflected that the child lived in a trailer home in the heart of coal country.
In 2000, 306 million gallons of sludge — 30 times more than the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez — buried parts of Martin County, Ky., as deep as 5 feet. Yet hardly anyone outside the region remembers the disaster, if they ever heard about it.
More recently, my friend Judy’s grandson was playing in a creek when he was suddenly surrounded by dozens of dead fish. Tests later proved that a coal company was releasing polyacrylamide — a cancer-causing agent used to prepare coal for burning — into the creek. When Judy complained to the state, no one replied. She recently died of brain cancer.
I’ve heard dozens of stories like these, but they rarely make it beyond the mountains. Is it any wonder then that Appalachian residents feel invisible?
In fact, invisible is how we’ve been taught to think of ourselves since coal was first discovered here. When I was little, teachers would stand over my desk and tell me that I had to change my accent if I wanted to get ahead in the world. Never mind that I had nearly perfect grammar and spelling.
We were also told the success of the mines mattered above all else, that if we complained about the dust, noise and disrespect pumped out by the mine in our community, people would lose jobs.
To Read the Rest of the Commentary
Friday, January 28, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen on the state of energy and climate politics in DC; Lucia Green-Weiskel on Cancún and Chinese energy and climate politi
Behind the News with Doug Henwood (KPFA: Berkeley, CA)
Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen on the state of energy and climate politics in DC • Lucia Green-Weiskel, author of "Climate Clash in Cancun", on Cancún and Chinese energy and climate politics
To Listen to the Episode and Access More Resources
Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen on the state of energy and climate politics in DC • Lucia Green-Weiskel, author of "Climate Clash in Cancun", on Cancún and Chinese energy and climate politics
To Listen to the Episode and Access More Resources
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Oscar Reyes and Tamra Gilbertson: Carbon Trading -- How It Works and Why It Fails
Carbon Trading: How it Works and Why it Fails
by Oscar Reyes and Tamra Gilbertson
New Left Project
Emissions trading is the EU’s flagship measure for tackling climate change, and it is failing badly. While in theory it provides a cheap and efficient means to limit greenhouse gas reductions within an ever-tightening cap, in practice it has rewarded major polluters with windfall profits, whilst undermining efforts to reduce pollution and achieve a more equitable and sustainable economy. This article briefly examines the theory of carbon trading, then looks at the empirical record of the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN Clean Development Mechanism - the world’s largest carbon trading schemes. It then briefly surveys the many alternative and equitable ways to tackle climate change.
Proponents of carbon trading argue that it offers a way for companies to `internalise’ the economic costs of climate change. It enables them to put a price on climate change impacts, which traditional economists would describe as an `externality’ - something that remains off the balance sheet and is therefore not taken into account when decisions are made. Putting a price on carbon is seen as allowing this `externality’ to be included in a company’s balance sheet. This is achieved either through taxation or trading (though the latter is claimed to be more flexible and corporate-friendly). The hidden hand of the market then guides finance towards the cheapest options for tackling climate change.
But there are some fundamental problems with this conception. Firstly, the claim that markets offer the cheapest solutions for tackling climate change begs the question: cheapest for whom and over what timescale? In fact carbon markets have tended to pursue short-term `fixes’, whilst displacing the responsibility for tackling climate change onto the global South. In this respect, such markets are promoting climate injustice.
Secondly, the adoption of carbon pricing through carbon trading entails a reframing of the climate change debate. It presumes that global warming can be addressed by the relatively simple translation of `unpriced’ pollution into a tradable, ownable commodity. This reduces the politics of climate change to a simple economic calculation about how to incentivise shifts in private sector investment. In so doing, it closes down the space for asking the very questions that are crucial if we are to make the structural changes that might tackle climate change: what changes do we need for escaping from our dependence on fossil fuels? What `development paradigms’ are being pursued? What environmental regulations are appropriate and just? What public investment programmes are needed, and how can community control of these finances be ensured? Is constant economic growth compatible with greenhouse gas emissions reductions?
More generally - and partly because of this reframing - the idea that the trading of `carbon’ as a commodity will address climate change implies that there is no need to ask key questions about where and when changes should be made. Even if the theory worked out as planned - which is far from the case - it would end up chasing the cheapest short-term cuts, incentivising quick fixes to patch up outmoded power stations and factories, rather than pursuing more fundamental changes. Moreover, what is cheap in the short term does not translate to an environmentally effective or socially just solution over the long term.
Cap and trade
There are two main forms that carbon trading takes: `cap and trade’ and offsetting. Under cap and trade schemes, governments or intergovernmental bodies set an overall legal limit on emissions in a certain time period (`a cap’) and then grant industries a certain number of licenses to pollute (`carbon permits’ or `emissions allowances’). Companies that do not meet their cap can buy permits from others that have a surplus (`a trade’). The idea is that a scarcity of permits to pollute should encourage their price to rise; and the resulting additional cost to industry and power producers should then encourage them to pollute less. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that the incentives created by the scheme work very differently - awarding profits to polluters and encouraging continued investment in fossil fuel-based technologies, while disadvantaging industry that is focused on transition away from fossil fuels. This is not an arbitrary product of misapplied rules; it is a product of the way these markets reinforce existing power relations, thereby contributing to unjust economic decision-making.
The world’s largest cap and trade scheme is the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). It has created a trade in European Union Allowances (EUAs), which are allocated according to National Allocation Plans, which are in turn subject to European Commission approval. The EU ETS covers approximately 11,500 power stations, factories and refineries in 30 countries - the 27 EU member states, plus Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein. These account for almost half of the EU’s CO2 emissions, and include most of the largest single, static emissions sources, including power and heat generation, oil refineries, iron and steel, pulp and paper, cement, lime and glass production.
In the first phase of the scheme, from 2005 to 2008, however, far too many emissions permits were handed out to these industries - largely as a result of intensive corporate lobbying. When the first emissions data was released in April 2006, it showed that 4 per cent more permits were handed out than the actual level of emissions within the EU. In other words, the `cap’ did not cap anything. Nor was it just the first year of the scheme that was over-allocated. By the end of phase 1, emitters had been given permits to emit 130 million tonnes more CO2 than they actually did, a surplus of 2.1 per cent. As a result the price of carbon permits collapsed and never recovered. From a peak of around 30, the price slid below 10 in April 2006, and below 1 in the spring of 2007.
A further major criticism levelled at the first phase of the EU ETS is that it generated huge `windfall profits’ for power producers, helping them to make large unearned financial gains as a result of flaws in the rules rather than any proactive measures taken to reduce emissions through structural changes. An inquiry by the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee found that `it is widely accepted that UK power generators are likely to make substantial windfall profits from the EU ETS amounting to £500 million a year or more’. At first glance, this seems contradictory. How can polluters profit when the value of the credits in the scheme fell to almost nothing? The answer lies in the way energy companies account for the costs of the EU ETS. The costs that are indirectly passed on to consumers through an increase in wholesale energy prices do not reflect what carbon credits actually cost, but rather what the companies assume they may cost. This leaves considerable scope for over-estimates. First, by assuming a larger than necessary need to buy permits or credits; second, by assuming that there will be a high carbon price; and third, by assuming the costs of replacing EU Allowances, irrespective of their actual use of offset credits, which in any case have consistently commanded lower prices. When these assumptions have turned out to be over-generous, the surplus is more often pocketed as profit than returned.
The same problems of over-allocated permits and windfall profits for polluters are occurring in the second phase of the EU scheme, which runs from 2008 to 2012. Research by market analysts Point Carbon, for example, has calculated that the likely windfall profits made by power companies in phase 2 could be between 23 billion and 71 billion (and between 6 and 15 billion for UK power producers alone). Given that the majority of permits are still allocated for free, the EU ETS is effectively providing a subsidy stream for highly polluting industry. The example of ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker and the holder of the greatest surplus of EU ETS permits, is instructive. It has routinely been awarded a surplus of permits of around 25 to 35 per cent above its actual level of emissions, and this has allowed the company to gain a subsidy of up to 2 billion since 2005. A recent Carbon Rich List survey, meanwhile, concluded that the 10 industries (mostly steel and cement companies) with the largest surplus of permits stand to gain over 3.5 billion in subsidies between 2008 and 2012.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Oscar Reyes and Tamra Gilbertson
New Left Project
Emissions trading is the EU’s flagship measure for tackling climate change, and it is failing badly. While in theory it provides a cheap and efficient means to limit greenhouse gas reductions within an ever-tightening cap, in practice it has rewarded major polluters with windfall profits, whilst undermining efforts to reduce pollution and achieve a more equitable and sustainable economy. This article briefly examines the theory of carbon trading, then looks at the empirical record of the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN Clean Development Mechanism - the world’s largest carbon trading schemes. It then briefly surveys the many alternative and equitable ways to tackle climate change.
Proponents of carbon trading argue that it offers a way for companies to `internalise’ the economic costs of climate change. It enables them to put a price on climate change impacts, which traditional economists would describe as an `externality’ - something that remains off the balance sheet and is therefore not taken into account when decisions are made. Putting a price on carbon is seen as allowing this `externality’ to be included in a company’s balance sheet. This is achieved either through taxation or trading (though the latter is claimed to be more flexible and corporate-friendly). The hidden hand of the market then guides finance towards the cheapest options for tackling climate change.
But there are some fundamental problems with this conception. Firstly, the claim that markets offer the cheapest solutions for tackling climate change begs the question: cheapest for whom and over what timescale? In fact carbon markets have tended to pursue short-term `fixes’, whilst displacing the responsibility for tackling climate change onto the global South. In this respect, such markets are promoting climate injustice.
Secondly, the adoption of carbon pricing through carbon trading entails a reframing of the climate change debate. It presumes that global warming can be addressed by the relatively simple translation of `unpriced’ pollution into a tradable, ownable commodity. This reduces the politics of climate change to a simple economic calculation about how to incentivise shifts in private sector investment. In so doing, it closes down the space for asking the very questions that are crucial if we are to make the structural changes that might tackle climate change: what changes do we need for escaping from our dependence on fossil fuels? What `development paradigms’ are being pursued? What environmental regulations are appropriate and just? What public investment programmes are needed, and how can community control of these finances be ensured? Is constant economic growth compatible with greenhouse gas emissions reductions?
More generally - and partly because of this reframing - the idea that the trading of `carbon’ as a commodity will address climate change implies that there is no need to ask key questions about where and when changes should be made. Even if the theory worked out as planned - which is far from the case - it would end up chasing the cheapest short-term cuts, incentivising quick fixes to patch up outmoded power stations and factories, rather than pursuing more fundamental changes. Moreover, what is cheap in the short term does not translate to an environmentally effective or socially just solution over the long term.
Cap and trade
There are two main forms that carbon trading takes: `cap and trade’ and offsetting. Under cap and trade schemes, governments or intergovernmental bodies set an overall legal limit on emissions in a certain time period (`a cap’) and then grant industries a certain number of licenses to pollute (`carbon permits’ or `emissions allowances’). Companies that do not meet their cap can buy permits from others that have a surplus (`a trade’). The idea is that a scarcity of permits to pollute should encourage their price to rise; and the resulting additional cost to industry and power producers should then encourage them to pollute less. The empirical evidence, however, suggests that the incentives created by the scheme work very differently - awarding profits to polluters and encouraging continued investment in fossil fuel-based technologies, while disadvantaging industry that is focused on transition away from fossil fuels. This is not an arbitrary product of misapplied rules; it is a product of the way these markets reinforce existing power relations, thereby contributing to unjust economic decision-making.
The world’s largest cap and trade scheme is the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). It has created a trade in European Union Allowances (EUAs), which are allocated according to National Allocation Plans, which are in turn subject to European Commission approval. The EU ETS covers approximately 11,500 power stations, factories and refineries in 30 countries - the 27 EU member states, plus Norway, Iceland and Lichtenstein. These account for almost half of the EU’s CO2 emissions, and include most of the largest single, static emissions sources, including power and heat generation, oil refineries, iron and steel, pulp and paper, cement, lime and glass production.
In the first phase of the scheme, from 2005 to 2008, however, far too many emissions permits were handed out to these industries - largely as a result of intensive corporate lobbying. When the first emissions data was released in April 2006, it showed that 4 per cent more permits were handed out than the actual level of emissions within the EU. In other words, the `cap’ did not cap anything. Nor was it just the first year of the scheme that was over-allocated. By the end of phase 1, emitters had been given permits to emit 130 million tonnes more CO2 than they actually did, a surplus of 2.1 per cent. As a result the price of carbon permits collapsed and never recovered. From a peak of around 30, the price slid below 10 in April 2006, and below 1 in the spring of 2007.
A further major criticism levelled at the first phase of the EU ETS is that it generated huge `windfall profits’ for power producers, helping them to make large unearned financial gains as a result of flaws in the rules rather than any proactive measures taken to reduce emissions through structural changes. An inquiry by the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee found that `it is widely accepted that UK power generators are likely to make substantial windfall profits from the EU ETS amounting to £500 million a year or more’. At first glance, this seems contradictory. How can polluters profit when the value of the credits in the scheme fell to almost nothing? The answer lies in the way energy companies account for the costs of the EU ETS. The costs that are indirectly passed on to consumers through an increase in wholesale energy prices do not reflect what carbon credits actually cost, but rather what the companies assume they may cost. This leaves considerable scope for over-estimates. First, by assuming a larger than necessary need to buy permits or credits; second, by assuming that there will be a high carbon price; and third, by assuming the costs of replacing EU Allowances, irrespective of their actual use of offset credits, which in any case have consistently commanded lower prices. When these assumptions have turned out to be over-generous, the surplus is more often pocketed as profit than returned.
The same problems of over-allocated permits and windfall profits for polluters are occurring in the second phase of the EU scheme, which runs from 2008 to 2012. Research by market analysts Point Carbon, for example, has calculated that the likely windfall profits made by power companies in phase 2 could be between 23 billion and 71 billion (and between 6 and 15 billion for UK power producers alone). Given that the majority of permits are still allocated for free, the EU ETS is effectively providing a subsidy stream for highly polluting industry. The example of ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker and the holder of the greatest surplus of EU ETS permits, is instructive. It has routinely been awarded a surplus of permits of around 25 to 35 per cent above its actual level of emissions, and this has allowed the company to gain a subsidy of up to 2 billion since 2005. A recent Carbon Rich List survey, meanwhile, concluded that the 10 industries (mostly steel and cement companies) with the largest surplus of permits stand to gain over 3.5 billion in subsidies between 2008 and 2012.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Monday, June 21, 2010
Avi Lewis: In Deep Water
In Deep Water
by Avi lewis
Al Jazeera
In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, millions of litres of oil have gushed out of BP's well into the water each day, slowly encroaching on the coastline.
A menace to the fragile marshlands, the drilling disaster is also threatening a whole way of life for fishing communities in Louisiana - still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina five years ago.
But this is not all new: Big Oil has a long history in this part of the world.
Fault Lines' Avi Lewis travels to the drill zone, and learns about the erosion in the wetlands from industry canals and pipelines, the health problems blamed on contaminated air and water from petrochemical refineries.
On the Gulf Coast, it has long been widely accepted that the fishing and oil industries can co-exist. In the wake of the Deepwater disaster, the more destructive (and more lucrative) industry may be the last one standing.
To Watch the Documentary
by Avi lewis
Al Jazeera
In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, millions of litres of oil have gushed out of BP's well into the water each day, slowly encroaching on the coastline.
A menace to the fragile marshlands, the drilling disaster is also threatening a whole way of life for fishing communities in Louisiana - still struggling to recover from Hurricane Katrina five years ago.
But this is not all new: Big Oil has a long history in this part of the world.
Fault Lines' Avi Lewis travels to the drill zone, and learns about the erosion in the wetlands from industry canals and pipelines, the health problems blamed on contaminated air and water from petrochemical refineries.
On the Gulf Coast, it has long been widely accepted that the fishing and oil industries can co-exist. In the wake of the Deepwater disaster, the more destructive (and more lucrative) industry may be the last one standing.
To Watch the Documentary
Friday, April 30, 2010
BBC News: US military joins Gulf of Mexico oil spill effort
US military joins Gulf of Mexico oil spill effort
BBC News
The US military has joined efforts to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico as fears rise about its scale.
Five times as much oil as previously thought could be leaking from the well beneath where a rig exploded and sank last week, the US Coast Guard says.
Rear Admiral Mary Landry said 5,000 barrels a day were thought to be gushing into the sea off Louisiana.
The Department of Homeland Security has designated the spill as one of "national significance".
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is to go to Louisiana to oversee operations, told reporters in Washington that this designation would allow resources to be ordered in from other areas of the US.
At the same briefing, a coastguard official said the oil slick was expected to wash ashore on the Gulf Coast on Friday.
And Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior David Hayes said the US government had ordered inspections of all deep-water oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico to see if anti-spill regulations were being followed.
To Read the Rest of the Report and Access Video
BBC News
The US military has joined efforts to stop an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico as fears rise about its scale.
Five times as much oil as previously thought could be leaking from the well beneath where a rig exploded and sank last week, the US Coast Guard says.
Rear Admiral Mary Landry said 5,000 barrels a day were thought to be gushing into the sea off Louisiana.
The Department of Homeland Security has designated the spill as one of "national significance".
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who is to go to Louisiana to oversee operations, told reporters in Washington that this designation would allow resources to be ordered in from other areas of the US.
At the same briefing, a coastguard official said the oil slick was expected to wash ashore on the Gulf Coast on Friday.
And Deputy Secretary of the Department of the Interior David Hayes said the US government had ordered inspections of all deep-water oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico to see if anti-spill regulations were being followed.
To Read the Rest of the Report and Access Video
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
"Snapped as the DW Horizon offshore drilling rig collapsed into the gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and pumping 42k barrels of oil a day into gulf"
via Patrick Bigger: "Snapped as the DW Horizon offshore drilling rig collapsed into the gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and pumping 42k barrels of oil a day into the gulf."
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Democracy Now: The Real Climategate -- Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters
The Real Climategate: Conservation Groups Align with World’s Worst Polluters
Democracy Now
Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.”
Guests:
Johann Hari, columnist for the London Independent. His article for The Nation is called ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’
Christine MacDonald, journalist who used to work for Conservation International, or CI. She is the author of Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.
To Watch/Listen/Read
Democracy Now
Major environmental groups are coming under criticism from within their own ranks for taking positions that some say are antithetical to their stated missions of saving the planet. In the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the British journalist Johann Hari writes, “As we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters—and burying science-based environmentalism in return…In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate.”
Guests:
Johann Hari, columnist for the London Independent. His article for The Nation is called ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’
Christine MacDonald, journalist who used to work for Conservation International, or CI. She is the author of Green, Inc.: An Environmental Insider Reveals How a Good Cause Has Gone Bad.
To Watch/Listen/Read
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