text:
Achieving a low-carbon economy is dependent rather on new, well-designed energy law that shifts private incentives towards efficient use of renewable energy to "game-changing" technology such as Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) motor vehicles.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 26th, 2016
Those interested in how a near 0 economy could be achieved using existing technology may find this chapter, available at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?a…
Integrating Vehicles and the Electricity Grid to Store and Use Renewable Energy by David Hodas :
The world could be powered by renewable energy: more energy from the sun hits the earth in one hour than all of the energy consumed on our planet in an entire year.
In Delivering Energy Policy in the EU and US: A Multi-Disciplinary Reader, (Heffron and Little, eds.) (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
Widener University Delaware Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 16-13
V2G vehicles integrate separate energy conversion systems: the electricity grid and light vehicle transportation fleet by storing electricity from the grid when it is not needed and returning it to the grid when it is needed.
The total U.S. light vehicle fleet power capacity is about 39 times the power generation capacity of the U.S. electrical generation system.
The grid could use power stored in idle V2G batteries whenever needed, yet each vehicle would be tapped only within the constraints of its drivers' specific schedule and driving needs. 20,000,000 V2G cars (just 10% of the U.S. fleet) with an average peak power rating of only 50 Kw, would have the combined power capacity equivalent to the entire U.S. Electric grid. This fleet would be the backup system for a fully renewable (e.g., solar and wind) energy generation system.
David R. Hodas
4601 Concord Pike
302 477 2186 (tel)
Well, NINE US SENATORS WHO ARE DEMOCRATS SIDED WITH THE AMERICAN OIL BARRONS – REMEMBER THAT WHEN THE US GOES TO THE POLLS !
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 30th, 2015
Instead of discussing (again) what a dreadful idea the pipeline is, let's mention the nine (!) Democratic senators who voted to submarine the White House in favor of this catastrophe waiting to happen.
OK, Heidi Heitkamp is about one head-scarf short of being an oil sheikh at this point, and Joe Manchin is hopeless on any issue involving the extraction industries because of coal. But what the hell is up with Tom Carper? What's Delaware's dog in this fight? Shipping, I guess, and the same thing could be said for Bob Casey, Jr., who is following the family tradition of bailing on his party when it suits him. (The residents of Pennsylvania, with their land fracked half to death and their water capable of being used as lighter fluid, should be alerted to the fact that their junior senator voted with the industries that have done the damage.) Donnelly of Indiana voted for it so nobody would call him a tree-hugger on the radio, and I suspect Mark Warner wanted to burnish his "centrist" credentials as well. These are all very lame excuses, but Claire McCaskill has none. Of the nine poltroons, her state is closest to the proposed route of the death funnel, and it will be most affected by whatever happens when the pipeline breaks, because it will, because it is a pipeline and they break. That doesn't mean she hasn't tried to cobble one together.
"It's going to be either moved by train, or it's going to be moved by barge, or it's going to be moved by pipeline. The safest way for it to be moved is by pipeline. It also has the benefit of more jobs," said McCaskill when asked about her vote for a pipeline bill offered by Senate Democrats within weeks of losing their majority in last November's mid-term elections.
Let it be moved in all those ways, but let Canadian oil be moved through Canada, which is a harder sell, because they take their environmental regulations — and their treaties with their indigenous peoples — a lot more serious than we do. So we serve as North America's Louisiana, with our own Cancer Corridor. Which reminds me:
The vote is a big win for Louisiana lawmakers. Before December's Senate runoff in that state, the two candidates, incumbent Democratic senator Mary Landrieu and her challenger, GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy, both pushed bills to approve the pipeline. The House approved Cassidy's bill, but the Senate defeated Landrieu's and he went on to take her Senate seat in the election.
+32 # fredboy 2015-01-30 15:46
For some time now, here in Colorado, I've been passing on my logo for a Dem. governor, Hickenlooper:
And now, since his vote in the egregious and gonna be so damaging and health destroying Keystone Pipeline, I've got a similar logo for Dem. Sen. Michael Bennet:
Yep, a political war it now is – bi-partisan effort to impeach this POTUS, Obama, should he not veto, as he said he would, this Keystone Pipeline, and a Dem. vote out of any and all obviously bought off Dem. Senators who are listed above, and who are very likely to vote to overcome a veto, should Pres. Obama keep his word and veto, as he's said he would, the deadly Keystone Pipeline.
+32 # Luckyenough 2015-01-30 15:57
+30 # Blackjack 2015-01-30 16:05
+3 # BillW72 2015-01-30 16:14
+15 # Carol R 2015-01-30 16:16
BP Oil in NW Indiana (Whiting, IN) is already processing Tar Sands oil. Our air was 16th most polluted in the US, according to the American Lung Association. BP Oil puts 2 million tons of pet coke into our air every year.
Just who was Donnelly voting to help? Hoosiers or BP Oil?
AND # skylinefirepest 2015-01-30 16:39
AND +25 # Blackjack 2015-01-30 17:05
-45 # brycenuc 2015-01-30 17:08
Of all the stupid things to blame for global warming pipelines are at the top of the list.
+19 # X Dane 2015-01-30 17:19
We are producing plenty of oil in our own country, we do not need Canada's filthy crap. YOU need to inform yourself before you try to lecture us. You probably do not understand that it is also the most expensive to refine.
+16 # Cassandra2012 2015-01-30 17:49
Filthy dangerous tar sands oil is NO answer to our energy needs. Time to actually develop green solutions as IS BEING DONE IN PLACES LIKE ICELAND and Scotland. We are rapidly becoming a third world country as we succumb to the machinations of the Koch/ALEC oligarchs.
+19 # Barbara K 2015-01-30 17:46
+6 # Laird999 2015-01-30 18:22
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 17th, 2014
Tax Breaks That Are Killing the Planet
The comments show how deep is the Republican brainwashing of the population. You have here pundits for whom loss of life is nothing when compared to what they think is the right of corporations to make a profit.
What is even worse, nobody asked whose oil and coal is it anyway? If Natural Resources are the property of the Whole Nation, then why should a company get depletion subsidies for their appropriating to themselves the natural National treasures? The whole system of paying royalties is inadequate – but the payment to them for the deletion of the resources is ridiculous. Getting a bonus for gains from misappropriated resources is much more like rewarding the CEOs for being great thieves! Just give it some more rational thinking and use the babble of the comments as your guideline. ST.info editor)
Rex Tillerson, CWO of ExxonMobil wants court protection from ExxonMobil like every other Joe – Amazing! Fracking Infrastructure – Not in My Backyard!
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 24th, 2014
Fracking Infrastructure? Not in My Backyard, Says Exxon CEO
23 February 14
oe is Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil.
Public utility Cross Timbers Water Supply Corp. has had the nerve to plan a water tower in Bartonville, Texas – right next to Tillerson's own personal horse ranch! Not only is the tower a blight on Tillerson's very own piece of Texas forever, but it's also going to bring all kinds of noise, traffic, and plebeians to his driveway. Oh, and one more thing – it's also going to supply the energy companies that are quickly growing their fracking operations in the area. Included among these companies is XTO Energy, which ExxonMobil acquired in 2009.
Tillerson and his wife have brought suit against Cross Timbers to block the proposed water tower, and they're not alone. Former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R) and his wife are the lead plaintiffs in the suit. Armey's impressive track record includes a stint as chairman of Tea Party-affiliated FreedomWorks, a D.C.-based nonprofit committed to "helping activists fight for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom."
The Cross Timbers case has been going on since 2012, and was recently sent back to the district court after a ruling reversal by an appellate judge, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Tillersons, Armeys, and their co-plaintiffs argue that they were promised that utility construction would not come near their homes. Cross Timbers' position has been that, as a public utility, they can build wherever they goddamn please.
Tillerson's primary concern seems to lie in damage to the aesthetics and privacy of the property in which, as he repeatedly reminded the audience at a Bartonville town meeting in November, he's invested millions of hard-fracked dollars. We might focus more on the danger of water contamination that tends to accompany fracking infrastructure, for which XTO Energy currently faces criminal charges in Pennsylvania. But, hey – you do you, Rex!
UPDATE: Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) has released a statement kindly inviting Tillerson to an exciting new club:
Read the rest of Polis' statement here.
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A West Virginia Killer-Coal Story. The Poor Heroes That Pay For Our Excesses. UPDATED – A US STATE TO LIVE ON BOTTLED WATER? IS THAT WHAT WEST VIRGINIA DEMOCRAT GOVERNMENT WANTS FOR THE SAKE OF JOBS?
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 13th, 2014
A U.S. attorney has opened an investigation looking into the release of a potentially dangerous chemical into parts of West Virginia's water supply.
Nearly 200,000 residents in nine counties have been told not to drink the water and avoid cooking with it, brushing their teeth or even taking a shower.
The spill of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol was found coming from a 48,000-gallon tank at a chemical storage facility about a mile upriver from the West Virginia American Water plant. The chemical is used to wash coal before it goes to market.
THE NEW UPDATE – January 13, 2014:
Restaurants reopen with bottled water after West Virginia spill
Date: 13-Jan-14
Author: ANN MOORE of Reuters' Planet Ark
(Reuters) – Restaurants and shops began reopening on Sunday in parts of West Virginia where the water supply was poisoned by a chemical spill, although up to 300,000 people spent a fourth day unable to use tap water for anything besides flushing toilets.
State government officials, the utility company West Virginia American Water and the National Guard continued to test the water supply after as much as 7,500 gallons (28,000 liters) of an industrial chemical leaked into the Elk River on Thursday.
It could still be several days before people in nine counties and Charleston, the state capital and largest city, can once again use the water from their faucets for drinking, cooking and bathing.
Earl Ray Tomblin, the governor of West Virginia, and other officials said at a press conference on Sunday that efforts to flush the chemical from the water supply were showing signs of progress, and that most water samples were found to be within safety limits for a second day.
But they did not specify when the drinking water ban might be lifted, instead saying they were working to create a website where residents will be able to check to see when the restriction is lifted in their area.
"Our team has been diligently testing samples from throughout the affected area, and the numbers look good," Tomblin said. "I believe we're at a point where we see light at the end of the tunnel."
A dozen restaurants in Charleston had been allowed to reopen by Sunday afternoon by the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department after assuring officials that they have secured a source of potable water.
"It feels very expensive," said Keeley Steele, who bought hundreds of bottles of water in order to reopen her comfort-food restaurant, the Bluegrass Kitchen, in Charleston on Sunday. "This is all coming at such a huge cost."
Hotels were allowed to continue operating as long as they steer clear of using tap water, although several hotel owners said they were only honoring existing reservations to reduce the expense of shipping out linens for cleaning.
Officials have so far declined to estimate the economic cost of the spill.
Frustrations, however, continue to mount, with West Virginians lamenting the toll the outage has taken on their health and personal hygiene.
"It feels like we've all been living on junk food these past couple days," Josephine Ritter, a 40-year-old hairstylist, said outside a recently reopened 7-Eleven convenience store in Charleston. "You can't cook or clean or anything. It's just bottled water and potato chips every day."
The emergency began last week after a spillage from a tank belonging to Freedom Industries, a Charleston company that makes chemicals for the mining, steel and cement industries, authorities said.
The spill happened about a mile upriver from a West Virginia American Water treatment plant. President Barack Obama declared it an emergency, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent dozens of tractor trailers loaded with clean water.
Water tainted by the spilled 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or Crude MCHM, smells faintly of licorice. Contact with the water can cause nausea, vomiting, dizziness, diarrhea, rashes and reddened skin. Around 70 people had visited emergency rooms with these symptoms by Sunday, said Karen Bowling, Cabinet Secretary of the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
Some 1,045 people have called the West Virginia Poison Center since the spill to say they or someone in their household had been exposed, she said.
The "vast majority" of those people reported symptoms of some kind, said Elizabeth Scharman, the poison center's director. While there is little data on the chemical's effect on humans, she said most symptoms were easily treated and that rashes and feelings of nausea would soon fade.
"It's not a highly toxic chemical, it's an irritant chemical," she said, adding that less than 10 people had had to be admitted to a hospital. More than 60 people had also called to say their livestock or pets had been exposed.
Meanwhile, some West Virginians are anticipating a disheveled start to the new work week.
"I'm not looking forward to going back to work on Monday without a shave or shower," said Clark Mills, a 51-year-old contractor in Charleston. He has sent his family to stay with relatives in an unaffected part of the state while he waits out the problem.
"I have a 6-month-old baby," he said. "We can't live like this."
(Reporting by Ann Moore and Jonathan Kaminsky; Writing by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Eric Walsh)
Calls for Oversight in West Virginia Went Unheeded
Is the New Jersey Governor's punishment of the people of Fort Lee connected to a Koch Brothers underground (there is no fossil fuels induced climate change) hold of Republican politics in effort to strangle the Nation? Was the punishment intended against Fort Lee State Senator Loretta Weinberg?
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 11th, 2014
THERE WAS A SECRET KOCH BROTHERS" POLITICAL GATHERING IN 2011 IN COLORADO WHERE CHRISTIE WAS A SECRET MAIN SPEAKER AND HE LEFT IN SECRET NEW JERSEY WHEN HE WENT THERE. A DEMOCRATIC STATE SENATOR FROM FORT LEE – Loretta Weinberg – LEADER OF THE DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY IN NEW JERSEY SENATE – ASKED THEN THAT THE GOVERNOR BE COMPELLED IN THE FUTURE TO OBEY TO A RULING THAT HE IS NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE STATE IN SECRET MISSIONS. IS THE CURRENT MESS RELATED TO THESE EVENTS?
ome very good investigative broadcast journalism from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday night.
On Thursday morning, New Jersey governor and, until now, Republican presidential favorite Chris Christie gave a two-hour press conference (full transcript here) in which he expressed being "stunned" and "blindsided" Wednesday morning by the blockbuster revelations published that day by Shawn Boburg of the Bergen Record.
The paper's report included email and text messages [PDF] between Christie's deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly and a number of other top appointees conspiring to shut down lanes of the George Washington Bridge leading out of Fort Lee, N.J., on the first day of school last September. The messages reveal the staffers appearing to enjoying the pain the shutdown was causing the town, joking about the inconvenience to the local children of voters of Christie's gubernatorial opponent in last November's election, and otherwise agreeing not to respond to queries from town officials about the closures.
Rachel Maddow: There Was Another Target of Bridge-Gate.
10 January 14
Maddow, noticing that Kelly's "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee" email was sent to Christie's Port Authority appointee David Wildstein on Aug. 13, 7:34 a.m., wondered what else happened around that time in N.J. that might have spurred Kelly to order the lane closures on the world's busiest bridge first thing in the morning that day?
Here's Maddow's report, finding that the evening before, Christie had unloaded on Democrats in a particularly angry press conference concerning the renomination battle of a N.J. Supreme Court judge, a battle that had been several years in the making. The woman who headed the state Senate committee causing embarrassment for Christie at the time was N.J.'s state Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg (D), who happens to represent … you guessed it … Fort Lee …
The points raised by Maddow are certain to raise many more questions about this entire fine mess, as if there aren't enough already. But, for now, we'll leave those for another day.
After offering her alternative theory, explained above, Maddow interviewed Weinberg about them. Here's that interview …
I don't claim to be an expert on the man. But, to be frank – having spent a fair amount of time studying Christie in advance of my 2011 exclusive revealing the secret audiotapes of the secret Koch brothers' summit where Christie was the super-secret keynote speaker – while he can certainly be thuggish, a blowhard, and somewhat of a bully when he likes, retribution against a Democratic mayor for declining to endorse him in a landslide election seems a bit overboard, even for Christie.
On the other hand, retaliating against the state's Democratic Senate Majority Leader, who he likely saw as causing him no small amount of embarrassment in the NJ Supreme Court matter, does seem more in keeping with his style. Even if he didn't know about it (which is seeming less likely by the hour), his staff surely shared the same frustrations with Senate Democrats that Christie would have (even as he often expertly played Democrats in the state legislature like a fiddle.)
Weinberg, for that matter, led the charge in the state Senate after the Secret Koch Tapes story, to pass legislation that would keep Christie from secretly leaving the state again in the future, as he had when he appeared at the Koch Summit in Colorado.
Maddow's alternative theory is smart, good reporting, might make more "sense" out of this entire matter, and is certainly worthy of further inquiry.
Is Climate Change Disinformation Campaign tantamount to Crime Against Humanity? This is not just an academic question.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 3rd, 2013
How to Classify the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign. Ethical Distinctions Between Skepticism and Disinformation.
Skepticism in science is a good thing that should be encouraged. The philosopher Diderot said that skepticism in all things is the first step on the road to truth. Yet the phenomenon that a growing sociological literature calls the "climate change disinformation campaign" is arguably some new kind of assault on humanity It has been at least partially responsible for a 25 year delay in the United States for taking action on climate change. Two new papers seriously examine how to classify the climate change disinformation campaign while distinguishing this phenomenon from responsible skepticism. The papers are:
The Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: What Kind Of Crime Against Humanity, Tort, Human Rights Violation, Malfeasance, Transgression, Villainy, Or Wrongdoing Is It?
Part One: Is The Disinformation Campaign a Crime Against Humanity or A Civil Tort?
Part Two: Is The Disinformation Campaign a Human Rights Violation Or A Special Kind of Malfeasance, Transgression, Villainy, Or Wrongdoing ?
In Pennsylvania I've seen fracking up close writes us Yoko Ono. People there buy now bottled water for all their needs.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 28th, 2013
Dear Pincas,
After being invited to visit Pennsylvania by residents who have experienced the impacts of fracking, my son Sean and I decided to go see the harms of fracking up close. Our friend Susan Sarandon came with us, and we had the incredible honor of being joined by Mahatma Ghandi's grandson, Arun Ghandi, as well.
Driving into the quaint town of Montrose, PA, I could hardly have anticipated how upsetting the next stops on our tour would be: a gas pad of four drills and a hissing pressure release, a giant compressor station under construction, large trucks full of sand and toxic chemicals rumbling down narrow dirt roads, and a drilling rig reaching to the sky.
To see such a beautiful landscape ruined was disturbing enough, but not nearly as bad as the heartbreak of meeting those whose health, homes and lives have been forever changed because of fracking: Vera Scroggins, Craig Stevens, Rebecca Roter, Frank Finan, Ray Kemble and the Manning family. They welcomed us into their homes with complete hospitality, and Tammy Manning even baked us delicious muffins.
They cannot move to a healthier place to raise their families because the value of their houses plummeted when the water went bad — and they cannot afford to relocate. They have to open their windows when they run the water to prevent methane gas from building up and risk explosion. It is a terrible fate, and there is no way to reverse what has happened to them. And it is outrageous that the gas companies accuse these honorable, defenseless people of lying — we saw the brown smelly water ourselves in homes right next to fracking sites. The fact that the water was nasty brown around their houses really scared me.
After that tour, I have never felt more compelled to prevent others from facing the harm I saw in Pennsylvania last week. And after being followed around all day by industry representatives who yelled threats at us, I have also come to realize how much is at stake. We cannot allow people, clean water, and the health of our climate and planet to be sacrificed for the gas industry.
Will you join me in telling Governor Cuomo that he cannot open New York to fracking? We have until February 13 to let him know we will not allow the natural gas industry to destroy our communities with their devastating drilling.
The bipartisan coalition of Northeast and mid-Atlantic governors to reduce pollution from electric power plants, known as R.G.G.I., is under renewed pressure from the Koch Brothers oil-Billionaires.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 26th, 2013
Republicans, including even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, allow themselves be led by the Pied Pipers for the upper 1% – of the so fake Americans for Prosperity – the Koch Brothers fighting any notion of American progress, that are even more extreme then the Romney vision was, will dismantle whatever already got initiated on the front of Climate Change. Even this can be viewed as a political fight.
Op-Ed Contributors
Northeast Faces Stark Choice on Climate Pollution.
By PETER SHATTUCK and DANIEL L. SOSLAND
Published The New York Times on-line: January 24, 2013
EIGHT years ago, a bipartisan coalition of Northeast and mid-Atlantic governors joined forces to reduce pollution from electric power plants. They agreed to cap overall emissions of carbon dioxide, the major pollutant driving global warming, and require the more than 200 power plants in the region to buy permits to emit the greenhouse gas.
The governors reasoned that plant operators would have an incentive to clean up their emissions if they had to pay for the carbon dioxide they discharged. Over the first three years of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, average annual emissions were indeed 23 percent less than in the previous three years, and auctions of allowances — or permits to pollute — raised $952 million, much of which has been invested in clean energy programs.
But the future effectiveness of this market-based cap-and-trade system, the first but not the only one of its kind in the nation, is now in question. The nine states in the initiative are preparing to reset the emissions cap — or the total amount of carbon dioxide that power plants can emit — and some of the proposals would allow power plants to increase the amount of carbon dioxide they dump into the atmosphere.
Cap-and-trade programs are designed to lower emissions gradually by reducing the cap and the allowances that are available. Polluters get flexibility in cutting emissions by being able to trade allowances among themselves. The idea is to achieve the reductions at the lowest cost through market forces rather than through direct regulation.
But of the four cap-adjustment proposals under consideration, three would reset the cap above current emissions and allow pollution to rise through 2020. Only a fourth option would continue to drive down pollution by resetting the cap at 91 million tons, the current emissions level, and then reducing it by another 2.5 percent a year through 2020.
Opponents of the initiative, known as R.G.G.I., argue that lower-cost natural gas has eliminated the need for the program by reducing the use of dirtier coal and oil. Growing investments in energy efficiency and renewable electricity have also helped to reduce emissions by cutting demand for electricity from power plants that burn fossil fuels.
But those developments don't argue against R.G.G.I., which determines what electricity generators may not do — namely, discharge unlimited quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If market forces deliver emissions reductions cheaper and faster than anticipated, then states should lock in that progress with a binding cap to ensure that emissions don't rise and that incentives for reducing pollution remain.
The proposals that would allow emissions to increase reflect the success of opponents of efforts to slow climate change, who have fought against initiatives like R.G.G.I.
Americans for Prosperity, an organization backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, has been at the forefront of this effort. The group sought unsuccessfully to repeal R.G.G.I. in Maine and New Hampshire, and A.F.P. members sued but failed to extricate New York from the initiative. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey did pull his state out of the initiative last year, arguing that low-cost natural gas made the program unnecessary.
R.G.G.I.'s economic performance tells a different story. Auctions of allowances pay for energy efficiency programs that curb power plant emissions, bring down energy prices and save consumers money. These savings flow back into the economy, increasing growth and employment in the region. An independent report published in 2011 by the Analysis Group, a consulting firm, said that electric customers would save $1.1 billion on their bills over 10 years from energy efficiency measures paid for by the sale of allowances. These savings would generate an additional $1.6 billion in economic growth, as money that otherwise would be spent on electricity generated with imported fossil fuels is instead spent in the local economy.
This initiative carries broad significance. President Obama's reaffirmed commitment to address climate change will move forward in part through regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, and R.G.G.I. could serve as a template for other states seeking to comply with new federal requirements.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York recently committed to ensuring the program's continuing effectiveness, and we encourage all of the participating states to make the program as strong as possible and put the public good over interests vested in the dangerous status quo of unchecked pollution.
Peter Shattuck is director of market initiatives and Daniel L. Sosland is president at ENE an environmental research and advocacy group focused on the Northeast.
An Exclusive from Hofstra University – last night, Sunday, October 14, 2912 the Libertarians had a full room (250 people?) at the Cultural Center. The speaker was John Stossel, Host od "Stossel" on Fox Business Network. He will vote for Gary Johnson.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 15th, 2012
With members of the media busy setting up for the Tuesday Presidential debate, I was the only media present at the students event though it was announced in the Campus Activities section of the Commission on Presidential Debates official booklet that all media received. We must say right here that with the elections being as close as they seem to be at this point, Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, has the potential of being this year's Ralph Nader of the Republicans – the candidate that might siphon off enough votes to sink the Republicans in critical States, and hand thus a clear electoral victory to President Obama. Media ought thus to pay attention to the Libertarian Party activities and note the way they feel about these elections as expressed in the statement that the debate is still one between Coke and Pepsi and not basic enough to their liking when it comes to economic matters and questions of Liberty of the individual.
The Libertarians at Hofstra meet every every Wednesday in room 141 in the Students' Center, this week the obvious exception, and are listed as a club – "HOFSTRA STUDENTS FOR LIBERTY."
The group was started by three students last year, and now, in its second year, filled the Cultural Center Theater at the Axinn Library for the John Stossel lecture and large Q&A session – listed topic: "Debt, War, Recession, The Growth of the American Government," in which the elections as such were not mentioned but the students were presented with arguments about the self-serving growing government that interferes with the well-being of the individual who left to his own crativity would have been doing much better. The implication thus that both parties did not act in the real interest of the individual.
Lavishly, free literature was distributed. It included:
the 280 page John A. Alison, President and CEO of the Cato Institute, Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries backed publication – , "The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure – why Pure Capitalism is the World's Only Hope" that explains how Destructive Banking Reform Is Killing the Economy;
"After the Welfare State" Students for Liberty volume edited by Tom G. Palmer and stating that Politicians stole your future – you can get it back" and from the same source – "The Morality of Capitalism – What Your Professors Won't Tell You;"
The excellent Specially Abridged pocket book size "The Road to Serfdom" by Nobel Prize Winner Friedrich A. Hayek with an introduction by Edwin J. Feulner, President of The Heritage Foundation;
The United States Constitution and The Declaration of Independence with Foreward by Congressman Ron Pauk;
and to top it – a pocket version of The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.
The questions were all about economic issues like what do you think of a recovery? What about monopolies? And the answers were logical accepted helpful government but rejecting restricting legislation. The belief is in self correcting actions by the economy and a rejection of the dictum attributed to Tom Daschle who supposedly said – "What you can not professionalize – Federalize."
As no mention was made directly of the debate and as one of the student organizers told me that the meeting was held in order to enlarge the some of the discussion on campus, I asked Mr. Stossel What he thinks of the debate – that is when he told me that he will vote for Gary Johnson but it is not important in new York State. Then he refused to speak any more substance to me because he wants to speak to the students – obvious voters and potential opinion builders as – do not forget – the debate this coming Tuesday will be in a Town Hall format and questions that were already vetted by moderator Candy Crowley, will come from the Nassau community including these students.
Further, at midnight – Sunday to Monday – Mr. Stossel was on Fox Business TV – in Manhattan this is Channel 44 – talking about the elections and how the form takes the place of substance. The program was impartial to the two parties in the running but critical of the system – so let's say favorable to outsiders.
Coincidentally – This morning New York Times picked up the subject of the Libertarians – though obviously without having been at last nights meeting – Excerpts from this morning New York Times:
Mr. Gary Johnson said he had no problem being labeled a potential spoiler in an election that he views as "a debate between Coke and Pepsi."
"Take the issue of Medicare," he said. "Both parties are arguing over who is going to spend more money on Medicare when we should be having a raging debate in this country over how we're going to cut Medicare."
He admits he has only limited finances. The Federal Election Commission had denied his request for general election matching funds, ruling that he did not meet its requirements for third-party candidates. And his campaign filings show he had roughly $50,000 in the bank at the end of August, having burned through much of the more than $350,000 or so he raised in small donations that month.
He said that his campaign had found it hard to keep up with the offers of volunteer help, and that when it came to campaigning, "I think we're going to stick with what we've been doing — stay flexible and take the most advantage out of media appearances."
Democrats say Mr. Johnson could have the biggest effect on Mr. Romney in Nevada, where a Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Marist poll in September showed Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney effectively tied.
Mr. Roger Stone, a former long time Republican operative who has Nixon tatooed on his back, said the campaign believed it had the potential to cut into support for Mr. Romney in three of his must-win states, Florida, Ohio and Virginia — where Republican challenges to the Libertarian candidate quickly failed — as well as in North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
There is very little polling on Mr. Johnson to bear all of this out, which his campaign points to as evidence that he is being unfairly ignored by the news media. However, The Miami Herald and The Tampa Bay Times have measured his support at about 1 percent — far more than the 537-vote margin that was ultimately deemed to have separated Mr. Bush from Mr. Gore in 2000.
"As we all learned in Florida, when something's close enough, even small numbers can make a difference," said Charlie Cook, the publisher of The Cook Political Report, which monitors electoral trends.
That appeared to be the thinking when Pennsylvania Republicans sought to go after Mr. Johnson's petitions, which Mr. Gleason, the party chairman, suspected had been collected with help from Democrats. He noted that many of the signatures came from Democratic precincts of Philadelphia.
One petition gatherer, Tracey Norton of Germantown, said in an interview that she was a Democratic committeewoman, though she said she did not act in a partisan manner when being paid to collect petitions.
In court, the Republicans presented evidence that some petitions had been collected without the proper signatures. But some of that evidence was collected by the private detective, Reynold Selvaggio who, some of the petition workers said in interviews and testimony, flashed his F.B.I. badge "like he was law enforcement," as one worker, Reynaldo Duncan, said in an interview.
In testimony, Mr. Selvaggio denied Libertarian lawyers' suggestions that it was an intimidation tactic, saying his badge stated clearly that he was retired and that he said so in his interviews. The judge hearing the case, James Gardner Colins, a former president judge of the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, seemed displeased.
"I have a badge that says I'm president judge," he said, "but I don't flash it to anyone, because I'm not president judge."
His ruling in favor of the Libertarians came down on Wednesday.
FRACKING – who do you think they'll hand the bill to for the clean up of that mess? Who will be asked to provide water for cooking, cleaning and drinking for all of those affected?
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 18th, 2012
The Truth About Fracking.
By Alec Baldwin, Reader Supported News.
17 August 2012
In a recent post here, I described an event that I produced in Syracuse, New York, which brought together disparate anti-fracking groups for a screening of Josh Fox's documentary film Gasland. As one would expect, among the readers who posted here there was a strong level of both support for the event (and any anti-fracking advocacy) and critiques of our effort, typically from gas industry functionaries or labor that supports hydraulic fracturing on behalf of jobs.
Many pro-fracking people posted attacks on Fox and his film, going so far as to state, in no uncertain terms, that his film has been widely and undeniably dismissed for lacking in accurate facts, science and history. I contacted Fox, by email, and asked him to provide me with more information to address the "deniers" who have debunked his assertions.
Josh Fox forwarded to me a detailed response that included the following links:
1- This 2009 piece from ProPublica that refers to a Garfield County, Colorado, study that contradicts certain gas industry assertions about methane in drinking water.
2- This 2011 report from Scientific American that describes significant aquifer contamination from fracking fluids in Wyoming.
3- A 2011 New York Times article that refers to the potential "first crack in the armor" of Rex Tillerson's claims about fracking-related contamination.
4- This article from Food and Water Watch in April of 2012.
5- And this article from a March, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
I've got more if you want it.
I am quite certain that not many minds will be changed here. There are those who believe natural gas is abundant and readily accessible through fracking, that it will create lots of good paying jobs and will contribute to America's energy independence.
Then there are those who believe that fracking is actually the energy industry's most recent opportunity to do to Americans what these companies have been doing to other, economically impoverished and less politically sophisticated peoples all over the globe: to promise them some economic benefit, deliver a pittance in actual compensation, desecrate their environment and then split and leave them the bill.
Unfortunately, in this case, it's not like Shell in Nigeria or Chevron in Ecuador. It's here. In New York State and Pennsylvania and many other areas. And when the gas companies are done blasting and pumping and contaminating, after they've put the gas on the open market and sold it and the workers head home to Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, who do you think they'll hand the bill to for the clean up of that mess? Who will be asked to provide water for cooking, cleaning and drinking for all of those affected?
Gas companies, like LNG, will make huge profits. And what will you get?
# Street Level 2012-08-17 21:00
Well said. The energy industry and idiots will always deny anything said about conservation and/or contamination. Our consumption based economy punishes us for using less with higher prices.
Our local water company is wanting a huge rate increase because consumption has gone down. I can only hope that they don't end up selling it to the energy companies for fracking, causing a shortage and forcing farmers to compete for water like they've had to do in some parts of the country.
# objectiveobserver1 2012-08-17 14:28
Thank you Mr. Baldwin. Isn't is so much better to not hold political office so that you can be free to speak the Truth?! What I want to know is why does an ad for an oil and natural gas company that operates in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, keep showing up on my google page advertising Tax Free Investment in oil and gas wells? Why is that investment tax free? It's called BreitlingOiland Gas.com. It seems so funny (in that I get a perverse pleasure in black humor) that they boast of "experience in the field since 2004" as if 8 years experience adds up to much. Then I read an article (which disappears after 1 day) on Yahoo about the massive sink hole that just appeared suddenly in Louisiana. Their rightwing Gov. Jindal and cohorts want to blame it on the nearby abandoned salt mine and compel the salt mine company to drill a hole to investigate. Like it really makes sense to build a hole right near a massive hole. Meanwhile I learn from reading through the thousands of comments underneath that the region is "pocked with pumpers" (small exploratory wells) and I read various speculations about the likelihood that the sinkhole is related to fracking. Now finally, I am reading something logical that might resemble the Truth. If we wring the earth dry like a sponge, the earth will collapse in on itself. Fracking just helps us race ever faster to our own destruction.
350.org takes on Governor Andrew Cuomo on Fracking New York State. Whatever the merits – his putting in charge a Climate Denier did not endear him on New York Progressives.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 15th, 2012
Gov. Cuomo: Don't Frack New York.
Governor Andrew Cuomo is on the brink of introducing high volume hydrofracking, a dangerous new gas drilling technique, into New York State.
The Governor promised to be 'guided by science' when it came to fracking. He has not kept his promises.
Instead, he put a climate denier in charge of overseeing the environmental review process for fracking, and that kind of recklessness shows — the leaked version of his fracking plan would classify toxic fracking waste as 'medical waste', with no added staff to provide oversight of the industry (and no new taxes to pay for that oversight in the future).
350.org Action Fund is joining an action called Don't Frack New York in Albany on August 25th-27th to stop fracking in New York. Our goal is to show Gov. Cuomo just how many New Yorkers stand for a frack-free future, and to pledge to him that we will begin resistance to fracking should it move forward.
Click here to sign up for Don't Frack New York in Albany – www.dontfrackny.org
Here are the details for the action and training:
WHAT: Don't Frack New York – Pledge to resist fracking
Trainings will begin Saturday the 25th at Noon at the Albany YMCA, 616 North Pearl Street, and continue through Sunday night.
50 grassroots organizations from every corner of New York are coming together to pledge to resist fracking in our state.
If Governor Cuomo permits high-volume, horizontal hydraulic fracturing in any part of New York State, we are pledging to engage in non-violent acts of protest aimed at protecting our communities and showing the folly of more drilling on a warming planet.
We're expecting hundreds of people to take a stand together later this month – can you be there?
Click here to join Don't Frack NY.
Governor Cuomo has a choice: either allow fracking to split our communities and threaten our climate or create a clean energy economy that renews New York State.
With all of the creativity and energy we can muster, hopefully we can encourage him to make the right decision for our state. But we'll need you.
"Is DEC's top regulator too close to Big Energy for comfort? Spotlight on Brad Field, head of Mineral Resources for NY" Shale Gas Review, Tuesday, July 17, 2012
"Shale Gas Exclusve: Cuomo's fracking plan takes shape" Shale Gas Review, Wednesday, August 8, 2012
This email was paid for by the 350.org Action Fund, which works to empower a dynamic activist movement to fight for the solutions to the climate crisis that science and justice demand. We must use all tools at our disposal for these purposes, including efforts to influence policy and policymakers through bold and creative campaigning. Therefore, the work of the350.org Action Fund is necessary to complement the work of our affiliated organization 350.org, which works to build a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis.
There are numerous marine black shales in the US with potential to produce gas – potential for hundreds or thousands of TCF
New YorkUS Shale Gas
• From less than 1% of US production in 2000,
shale gas now accounts for 30% of US
natural gas production.
• Marcellus first produced in 2006, today the
Marcellus produces 4BCF/D or 6% of US
total .
• Some projections have Marcellus producing
25% of US total in 2020
• GHG emissions in US declining, at least in
part because old coal plants are being
replaced by new gas plants.
rganic-Rich Marine Black Shale
are the source of most
of the oil and gas produced in
the United States and are now
considered potential
reservoirs themselves.
• The organic matter in marine
black shales is mainly algae,
plankton, diatoms and spores
that are preserved during
• When organic-rich shales are
buried and heated some of the
organic matter turns into oil
and some turns into gas.
Conventional Petroleum System shows oil and gas migrating from
source rock to reservoir – shales typically source rocks and seals on more porous reservoirs. In this case the seal is the reservoir.
What May Be The Second Biggest Gas Field in the World is in
the Marcellus Shale and the Production Comes From Rocks that
Look Just Like These
Above link is to a NY State NSERDA study that clearly and easily can blind developers who see the gains and refuse to allow themselves be thwarted by environmental dangers. Will the US allow itself to be exploited as if it were a Third World Colony?
Donald A. Brown from the Wiedener University School of Law, Pennsylvania, says: Climate Change posses Ethical Problems that are not dealt with by relying on science and economics alone.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 30th, 2012
Why Climate Change Must Be Seen Essentially An Ethical Problem and What Practical Differences Follow From This.
The great importance and urgency of examining the ethical dimensions of climate change becomes obvious upon the realization that: (a) human-induced warming creates many civilization challenging ethical questions, (b) this understanding has enormous practical significance for climate change policy options including the fact that no nation or entity may justify its response to climate change on the basis of self-interest alone, (c) a thirty-year debate about climate change policies that began in the early 1980s has been framed almost exclusively by scientific and economic arguments that have largely ignored the ethical questions, (d) an urgently needed global solution to climate change to climate change is not likely to arise and be accepted unless it is just, and (e) millions of the world's poorest people are most likely to experience the harshest climate change impacts, and (f) there is a growing consensus among most mainstream scientists that the world is running out of time to prevent very dangerous climate change.
It should be obvious upon initial reflection that climate change is a civilization challenging ethical problem because: (a) it is some high emitting nations and individuals in some parts of the world who are putting other often very poor people in other parts of the world at great risk, (b) the potential harms to the most vulnerable are not mere inconveniences but catastrophic threats to life and natural resources on which life depends, and (c) because of the global scope of the problem, the victims cannot petition their governments to protect them-their best hope is that high emitters of greenhouse gases will respond to their ethical responsibilities to greatly reduce their emissions.
Although is should be obvious that climate change is a civilization ethical problem, it has not been debated as such. In a new book to published in October, this author reviews a thirty-year climate change debate in the United States. (Brown, 2012) This historical analysis reveals that, for the most part, the three decade old US climate debate has been exclusively about scientific and economic issues that have both ignored and hidden important ethical questions. The press and even some of the NGOs participating in the debate that have supported action on climate have completely ignored the ethical issues that should have been seen by the nature of the issues being debated and if acknowledged would have transformed how the debate was structured.
The deeper the understanding of the scientific issues raised by climate change such as what amount of warming will likely trigger catastrophic climate changes, the more obvious it becomes that climate change is a moral issue. In other words, scientific sophistication about climate change deepens one's understanding of the ethical dimensions of climate change.
A new article by Bill McKibben is a must read in this regard for US citizens who are working to turn up the volume on the ethical dimensions of climate change. It is: Global Warming's Terrifying New Math: Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe – and that make clear who the real enemy is
This article will greatly enhance both any reader's sense of the urgency of the need to respond to climate change and their understanding of why global warming must be understood essentially as an ethical problem. This article also points to a deeper ethical condemnation of the forces opposing climate change policies, a matter recently discussed in several prior posts on EthicsandClimate.org under the category of "climate change disinformation" and "crime against humanity."
Brown, D. (2012) Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm, Climate Ethics, forthcoming October 2012, Routledge, EarthScan.
Donald A. Brown,
Scholar In Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law, Widener University School of Law.
New Book Describes Ways To Accelerate US Transition To Sustainability-Including A Greater Emphasis On Ethics.
As the world gathered in Rio de Janeiro in June in an attempt to make global course corrections needed to move the world to sustainable future, a new book was published that rigorously examines what has happened and failed to happen on sustainability in the United States. In Acting As If Tomorrow Matters: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability, Professor John Dernbach, with the input from 51 contributing authors, including this author, after looking closely at US sustainability successes and failures, deduces from this experience a strategy to rapidly improve US sustainability performance. (Dernbach et al, 2012)
The idea of sustainable development was placed on the front burner internationally at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. As most educated citizens know, this concept called for the integration of economic, environmental, and social justice goals in policy formation and human practices at international, national, regional, and local scales around the world. The idea of sustainable development was a positive step forward in human history because humans frequently have pursued either economic, environmental, or social goals individually in isolation from each other. That is, for instance, governments at all scales have frequently pursued economic development without regard to how new economic activity might affect the environment or social justice. The great wisdom of the concept of sustainable development is this insight that pursuit of economic, environmental, or social justice goals in isolation from each other will likely have adverse impacts on the goals not considered.
Acting As If Tomorrow Matters rigorously describes what has happened or failed to happen in the United States in the 20 years since the idea of sustainability got widespread international attention at Rio. To seriously examine what needs to be done to move the world on a sustainability path there is no shortcut to a thorough, ambitious, and rigorous analysis of what has happened and failed to happen. This is particularly true of a concept like sustainable development that creates immense policy challenges because of the ambitiousness of this idea's scope. And so, if one wants to know what has happened on sustainability, there is no escaping the need to go deep on matters that are both wide ranging and complex and that have been unfolding for 20 years.
Because of the sheer complexity of the idea of sustainable development any serious analysis of progress must rely on experts and analysis beyond the disciplinary kens of most individual human beings. One of the most significant contributions of this new book is to make even veteran sustainability watchers aware of sustainability developments in areas that they have not been following. No one person can be an expert on even the major developments in environmental protection, economic development, and human flourishing. There is simply too much to follow. And so, another virtue of this book is that Professor Dernbach has obtained the cooperation of 51 renowned experts to compile the synthesis of US sustainability successes and failures.
This new book examines progress in such diverse policy subjects as: (a) links between environmental protection and public health outcomes, (b) relationships between consumption and population, (c) connections between poverty and unemployment, (d) links between the built environment and sustainability outcomes, (e) national, regional, and local governments successes on sustainability, and (f) achievements in sustainability education, just to name a few.
Even sustainability experts, including myself, who have been deeply been immersed in sustainable development issues since the Earth Summit in 1992 will learn from this book about sustainability progress and failures of which they were unaware . Therefore, perhaps the greatest contribution of this new book is to make those working to make sustainability a reality aware for the first time of achievements, failures, and case studies relevant to sustainability's future progress. I, for instance was unaware of many sustainability developments discussed in this book such as: (a) the fact that some US states now require that climate change impacts be described in any environmental impact study, (b) the impressive number of programs or projects on sustainability at the local government level in the United States, (c) that 1000 US mayors have joined a mayors' climate change prevention program, and (d) that the city of Chicago has over 400 green roofs. And so even the most experienced sustainability expert will get ideas from this book about how to improve the US sustainability performance.
Acting As If Tomorrow Matters not only describes progress on sustainability, it makes it clear that US performance on many sustainability issues has been a dismal failure on some matters. In fact, another virtue of this book is that in describing obstacles to sustainability it does not pull punches. The book makes clear that despite modest success on some sustainability issues, the US has failed to adequately implement the concept because of some persistent obstacles that have been blocking US progress. In this regard, the book discusses the following barriers to US progress: habits, lack of urgency, confusion about sustainability options, unsupportive law and governance, and perhaps most importantly strong political opposition to sustainability policy proposals.
The book also makes recommendations on how to overcome these obstacles including developing better sustainability choices, improving law for sustainability, and perhaps most importantly, the need for a new sustainability social movement.
Woven throughout the book are implicit and express claims that sustainable development must be understood essentially as an ethical and moral matter because what is at stake is the very future of the quality of life on earth. Sprinkled throughout the book are references to morality and ethics including discussions of religious and moral leaders who have been provoking wider public discussion of the ethical dimensions of sustainability. This inclusion of ethics in what is otherwise a policy book makes it unique among serious analyses of sustainability achievements and failures.
The importance of seeing sustainability problems as ethical matters becomes apparent when one considers the comments of some observers that have criticized the very idea of sustainable development because there is no precise definition of the idea that would allow for its unambiguous implementation when there are conflicts between environmental, economic, and social goals. Yet this is where ethics and morality become so very important.
In this regard, one minor suggestion for improvement of the conclusions in this excellent book is to call for even greater acknowledgement of the need to stress the importance of the ethical dimensions of sustainability. This is so because the implementation of the concept of sustainable development needs to look to other ethical principles to resolve conflicts among environmental, economic and social goals. For instance:
And so, in some controversial sustainability matters, ethical considerations have been the key missing element in policy disputes. For this reason, applied ethical analyses should be at the tip of the spear of the new sustainability social movement called for in this book. Any sustainability social movement should follow actual concrete sustainability issues to identify the ethical issues that need to be considered to move forward on the sustainability path.
And so Acting As If Tomorrow Matters makes a significant contribution to moving the United States forward on the path toward sustainable development. Following perhaps the key recommendation in this book, interested sustainability advocates should work together to create a new social movement on sustainability armed with what we can learn from the sustainability successes and failures discussed in this book.
Those interested in the book can find more information at the book's website:www.actingasiftomorrowmatters.com/
Dernbach, J. (2012) Acting As If Tomorrow Matters: Accelerating the Transition to Sustainability, Environmental Law Institute Press, Washington, D.C.
Donald A. Brown,
Scholar in Residence, Sustainability Ethics and Law
Widener University School of Law
Some States in the USA came up with laws to scare-away certain groups from going to the ballot box. Democrats from New York will travel to Philadelphia Saturday July 28th to explain to the locals how to fight back locally passed laws by Republicans.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 23rd, 2012
The death of the Coal Industry in the US – or a safer and cleaner future for all of us – those are points of view that are irreconcilable.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on May 30th, 2012
THE NEW YORK TIMES QUOTATION OF THE DAY – May 30, 2012 – The Traditional Memorial Day.
"You cannot wave the white flag and let the environmentalists and regulators declare victory here in the heart of coal country."
ROCKY ADKINS, state representative from Kentucky, in response to a plan for one of the state's largest power plants to switch from coal to natural gas.
Even in Coal Country, the Fight for an Industry
By ERIC LIPTON
With the coal industry under siege across the country, an announcement that the operator of the Big Sandy power plant near Louisa, Ky., planned to switch to natural gas prompted an uproar.
Chatham University School of Sustainability and the Environment, Eden Hall Campus north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, offers a MASTER IN SUSTAINABILITY in a first Zero Net Energy Campus.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 29th, 2012
What does sustainability mean to you? Protecting natural resources? Moving beyond fossil fuels? Green jobs? Running a successful business using ethical and socially responsible practices for your customers, employees and shareholders?
Sustainability has increasingly become the driving force for thousands of new jobs. In fact, you can read almost daily what executive recruiters, business think tanks and industry chiefs are saying about the exciting growth in this discipline. The people who secure these jobs have made smart decisions by expanding their education and experience. They have become the leaders of tomorrow. Now, you can too.
With Chatham University's Master of Sustainability through our School of Sustainability and the Environment, you'll learn to identify and find solutions to real-world sustainability challenges.
UPDATED: Austria has a problem, its called Poysdorf – at the tri-Nation corner of Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Its oil company OEMV talks of having found lots of SHALE-GAS.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 9th, 2012
Der Standard of Austria of April 4, 2012, continues a stream of information about Shale-Gas development North of Vienna – in the Wein-gardens of Poysdorf.
WEINVIERTEL – Kein Ende im Schiefergas-Krieg.
by ROSA WINKLER-HERMADEN, 04. April 2012
Geheime Bohrungen, gefährliches Fracking und ein Landeschef im Vorwahlkampf: Warum die Bürger dem Frieden mit der OMV nicht trauen.
please see the full April 4, 2012 article at –
The original article was of December 17, 2011, and we posted it following a meeting of Eurosolar Austria.
vergrößern (means enlarge the map)
Bedeutung der "Bruderschaft" nimmt ab.
Like all the rest of Europe, Austria switched from oil to natural gas. This is a less polluting energy carrier and emits less CO2, but then – where do you buy the gas?
From the Netherlands – that is OK, or what about North Africa, Russia, Central Asia, and that means dependence on sources that may be friendly today but may use political pressure tomorrow? The import of the gas via pipelines or huge boats of liquefied gas, means also serious outflow of Euro, dollars, or whatever National currency you have – not very good at times of budding recession.
Further – bringing the gas in by ship requires the building of high pressure unloading stations that people do not consider safe in their backyards; pipelines depend very much on the countries in transit, and a dispute relations of the Ukraine and the Russian Federation had serious impact on the gas supplied to the European Union. The Austrian OEMV got involved in plans for the Nabucco pipeline from Central Asia via Turkey to Austria, and found that Russia will retaliate by directing the planned South Stream pipeline not to touch Austrian land. The recent announcement by OEMV of huge finds of Shale-gas, just North North-East of Vienna, must be viewed in above context.
A small, integrated oil-shale operation has been conducted at Puertollano since about 1922 by a French company, Sociedad Mimora y Metalurgica de Penarroya, hereinafter referred to as "Penarroya", but only during WWII have the potentialities of the Spanish oil-shale deposits been recognized.
Empresa Nacional "Calvo Sotelo" do Combustibles y Lubricantes, hereinafter designated as "Calvo Sotelo," which was created in 1942 by the National Industrial Institute of Spain to produce liquid fuels from oil shales, has made marked progress in the design and construction of a complete oil-shale plant at Puertollano. Penarroya is mainly a coal-mining company, and the oil-shale operations were on a small scale of approximately 220 tons a day in October 1947. It is an integrated operation comprising oil-shale mining and retorting and shale-oil refining. Motor gasoline, Diesel fuel oil, light burner fuel oil, lubricants, paraffin wax, cresols, and ammonium sulfate were manufactured.
The problem is in the nature of the finding. Shale is a stone – it contains hydrocarbons in a polymeric form called Kerogen. When heated in a retort the kerogen breaks down and yields oil and gas. In 1959 I watched this being done in above-ground retorts at the Puertollano plant, the Ciudad Real region of Spain. The governmental Calvo Sotelo company was doing this with lubricants as the prized product. The plant was planned still during WWII by the Franco government, and became a reality only after the war with the help of French engineering companies. The original idea was to produce liquid fuels as a substitute for the petroleum that was hard to obtain during the war years. The Puertollano plant was dismantled, and sold for scrap metal in 1968, as by then Petroleum was cheap and plentiful on the global market. With the first energy constraint of 1972-1973 there was general interest in oil-shales but the Spanish experience was history by that time. Brazil picked up with a company called Petrosix, and in the US The Oil Shale Corporation was formed, with competition from Paraho, The Occidental Company, and Exxon.
The Petrosix 11 metres (36 ft) vertical shaft retort is the world's largest operational surface oil shale pyrolysis reactor. It was designed by Cameron Engineers of the US. The retort has the upper pyrolysis section and lower shale coke cooling section. The retort capacity is 6,200 tons of oil shale per day, and it yields a nominal daily output of 3,870 barrels of shale oil (i.e., 550 tons of oil, approximately 1 ton of oil per 11 tons of shale), as well as 132 tons of oil shale gas, 50 tons of liquefied oil shale gas, and 82 tons of sulfur.
Petrosix – as per Qian, Jialin, Wang Jianqiu (2006-11-07) – he said at the "World oil shale retorting technologies" (PDF) – International Oil Shale Conference. Amman, Jordan by Jordanian Natural Resources Authority – it is one of five technologies of shale oil extraction, which is currently in commercial use.
It is an above-ground retorting technology, which uses externally generated hot gas for the oil shale pyrolysis (decomposition by heat). After mining, the shale is transported by trucks to a crusher and screens, where it is reduced to particles (lump shale). These particles are between 12 millimetres (0.5 in) and 75 millimetres (3.0 in) and have an approximately parallelepipedic shape. These particles are transported on a belt to a vertical cylindrical vessel, where the shale is heated up to about 500 °C (932 °F) for pyrolysis. Oil shale enters through the top of the retort while hot gases are injected into the middle of the retort. The oil shale is heated by the gases as it moves down. As a result, the kerogen in the shale decomposes to yield oil vapor and more gas. Cold gas is injected into the bottom of the retort to cool and recover heat from the spent shale.
Cooled spent shale is discharged through a water seal with drag conveyor below the retort. Oil mist and cooled gases are removed through the top of the retort and enter a wet electrostatic precipitator where the oil droplets are coalesced and collected. The gas from the precipitator is compressed and split into three parts.
One part of the compressed retort gas is heated in a furnace to 600 °C (1,112 °F) and recirculated back to the middle of the retort for heating and pyrolyzing the oil shale, and another part is circulated cold into the bottom of the retort, where it cools down the spent shale, heats up itself, and ascends into the pyrolysis section as a supplementary heat source for heating the oil shale. The third part undergoes further cooling for light oil (naphtha) and water removal and then sent to the gas treatment unit, where fuel gas and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) are produced and sulfur recovered. Above tells us that this above ground retorting of the shale is done so that oil is the outcome and the by-product gasses are used to provide the energy for the process. One major problem is what to do with the heavy metals rich spent shale that cannot be discarded without damaging neighboring undergound water or rivers.
One further drawback of this process is that the potential heat from the combustion of the char contained in the shale is not utilized. Also, oil shale particles smaller than 12 millimetres (0.5 in) can not be processed in the Petrosix retort. These fines may account for 10 to 30 per cent of the crushed feed. The above process was similar to the process used by the Spanish Calvo Sotelo company at Puertollano, and the Oil Shale Corporation method used in Colorado. A TOSCO II system, the reworked US Oil Shale Corporation technology, used a rotating drum and Alumina balls in the retort and the spent shale is transferred to a furnace where residue-carbon is burned off to provide reheating of the balls.
As a result of the 1972-1973 energy crisis, the United States got interested in oil shales as a strategic fuel and I found myself involved first with TOSCO, then with the Hudson Institute in formulating what became the only Energy Policy the US ever had – that was the government funded "THE SYNFUELS CORPORATION" which allowed private companies to try to develop commercial technologies. Needles to say – the money was spent by the oil companies but no tangible results were returned to the government.
{My last involvement with oil shale technology was when I was contracted to write the issue paper on the use of shales for the 1981 UN Conference on NEW and RENEWABLE SOURCES OF ENERGY at Nairobi. Oil Shales, coal liquids and gases were the "NEW" sources of Energy at the UN – The Canadian tar sands and Venezuela's heavy crudes were not part of the conference discussions.}
Wikipedia posted: "The Synthetic Fuels Corporation was a U.S. government-funded corporation established in 1980 by the Synthetic Fuels Corporation Act to create a financial bridge for the development and construction of commercial synthetic fuel manufacturing plants (such as coal gasification) that would produce alternatives to imported fossil fuels. The Great Plains coal gasification plant in Beulah, ND, still producing natural gas and sequestering carbon in 2009 , was built with the support of the Department of Energy and applied for further support by this corporation, partly as a result of efforts by Reagan's Energy Secretary James B. Edwards. The corporation was abolished in 1985.
Oil Shales were part of these sponsored corporations as promoted during the Gerald Ford Presidency 1974-1977. The 1980 – "the Synthetic Fuels Corporation Act" was then passed under President Carter and eventually killed under President Reagan. Whatever the policy – it was still a pro-petroleum policy.
The Colony Shale Oil Project was an oil shale development project at the Piceance Basin near Parachute Creek, Colorado. The project consisted of an oil shale mine and pilot-scale shale oil plant, which used the TOSCO II retorting technology, developed by Tosco Corporation. Over time the project was developed by a consortium of different companies until it was terminated by Exxon on 2 May 1982 a day which is known amongst locals as "Black Sunday".
Shale Oil History at Parachute Creek, Colorado:
The project started in 1964 when Tosco, Standard Oil of Ohio, and Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company formed the Colony Development joint venture.[4] The aim of the newly formed joint venture was to develop the Colony Oil Shale Project and to commercialize the TOSCO II technology. Starting in 1965 the consortium operated a shale oil pilot plant and in 1968 the Colony Development started preparatons to build a commercial-scale plant.[5]
In 1969 Atlantic Richfield Company joined the project acquiring part of Tosco's stake.[5][6] However the commercial project was delayed by economic uncertainties and then resurrected in the 1970s after the Arab oil embargo. In 1972 the consortium stopped the pilot plant and the development of the commercial plant was suspended in November 1974 when more detailed economic studies indicated a more than three times higher cost than previously anticipated.[4][5][7][8]
In 1974 Ashland Oil and Shell Oil Company joined the project.[7][9] In the late 1970s Standard Oil of Ohio, Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company, Shell and Ashaland Oil sold their shares to Atlantic Richfield Company.[7][10][11] As a result of these transactions Tosco owned 40% of shares and Atlantic Richfield Company owned 60% of shares in the project.
In 1980 Atlantic Richfield Company sold its share to Exxon for $300 million.[6] In 1981 the Colony Development started a construction of the commercial scale shale oil plant.[3] On 2 May 1982 Exxon announced the termination of the project because of low oil-prices and increased expenses laying off more than 2,000 workers resulting in the date becoming known among locals as "Black Sunday".[1][2][3] According to the shareholders agreement in a case of project termination Exxon had an obligation to buy out Tosco's shares. It paid $380 million worth of compensation.[6]
During its existence the project produced 270 thousand barrels (43×103 m3) of shale oil.[4]
I felt obliged to talk first about the above-ground retorting of the oil-shale as this taught us about problems that will occur OUT-OF-SIGHT if one works underground as well.
Others, like the Schlumberger Corporation started to eye the Shale Gas & Liquids production in situ – thus avoiding the mess above-ground that made for easy criticism. But doing it underground – who will see that? The idea was – in situ retorting that involves heating the oil shale while it is still underground, and then pumping the resulting liquid to the surface.
To the Americans it sounded at first like a great idea: While oil shale is found in many places worldwide, by far the largest deposits in the world are found in the United States in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.2 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable; however, even a moderate estimate of800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Green River Formation would last for more than 400 years. In theory – for those pushing for the continuation on the dependence on an oil economy – this was a great idea. In practice it did not work – this because despite the great fires underground only very little oil came out above ground – and those were still the days that the industry was looking for oil and was not interested in developing sources of gas that had the potential to compete with their oil refineries.
For those interested in more about the US search for new feeds to the petroleum refinery – here a link to a RAND Corporation study: http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/oilshale/
But things change and the US has learned to use gas – this by learning it from the European experience.
So, now gas is in demand and gas can be obtained from these underground shales with us not seeing how it is done – and that is very important to realize!
THE PRESS IS FULL WITH ARTICLES ABOUT GAS COMING OUT WITH DRINKING WATER – SO YOU CAN LIGHT A FIRE WITH YOUR CIGARETTE LIGHTER APPLIED TO YOUR HOME DRINKING WATER TAP. WE HEAR OF CHEMICALS COMING OUT WITH THAT WATER – BUT WE DO NOT HEAR WHAT IS PUT IN WITH THE INFLOW TO THE THIS GAS MINING PIPE. WE HEAR ONLY OF THE OUTFLOW – THUS WE HAVE NO UNDERSTANDING OF THE UNDERGROUND PROCESS – IS IT HYDRAULIC, CHEMICAL, or THERMAL?
The US IS FULL WITH THE SO CALLED FRACKING TECHNOLOGY TO RELEASE GAS FROM SHALE, AND NOW IT SEEMS AUSTRIA IS LUCKY AS WELL – GAS WAS FOUND!
OMV findet riesiges Gasfeld in Niederösterreich.
Gas für mehr als 30 Jahre: Im Norden von Niederösterreich sollen gewaltige Erdgasmengen schlummern. Die OMV sucht nach Wegen, sie zu fördern.
The KURIER, LETZTES UPDATE AM 05.12.2011.
Poysdorf ist vor allem durch seine Weine – insbesondere den DAC – bekannt. Die Stadt im nö. Weinviertel könnte demnächst aber schon ein ganz anderes Image bekommen: Denn die OMV AG will rund um die Weinstadt Gas fördern. Nicht konventionelles Erdgas, sondern Shale-Gas, deutsch: Schiefergas. Dabei handelt es sich um natürliches Erdgas, das in Tonsteinen entsteht und gespeichert wird. Seine Gewinnung ist technologisch sehr anspruchsvoll, aber durch die steigenden Gaspreise zunehmend rentabel.
Das Gasvorkommen soll dort derart groß sein, dass der österreichische Inlandsbedarf auf lange Zeit – Insider sprechen von 30 Jahren und mehr – zu 100 Prozent abgedeckt werden könnte.
"Ja, das Shale-Gas-Vorkommen wird dort als sehr mächtig eingeschätzt. Bis wir aber so weit sind, dass wir das Gas auch fördern können, dauert es noch einige Jahre. Abgesehen davon muss die Förderung sowohl technisch möglich als auch wirtschaftlich sein", bestätigte am Dienstag eine OMV-Sprecherin.
vergrößern (enlagement)
Bedeutung der "Bruderschaft" nimmt ab.
The OEMV company, intends to start first drilling experiments at Poysdorf and Herrnbaumgarten already February 2012 and aims at commercial production by 2014. The two mayors of the above named locations seem to go along with these plans and expect windfall of profits from the oil company.
The way OEMV has explained the project to the local people it says that the fracking process is a hydraulic pressure attack against walls of shale that stand between us and pockets of gas which they call shale gas rather then Natural Gas. I wonder if anyone has asked the oil people to explain the difference in clear terms. They also say that chemicals are needed in order to avoid biological processes that lead to the closing up of the pipes and state that they will not use pesticide chemicals but natural means. This is not clear to us and we wonder what other events will occur undergroup besides the application of pressure in mechanical ways. What chemical reactions, or thermal reactions, are intended and what organic chemicals and heavy metals are expected to be found in the returning water and in the effluents that will reach the underground water.
It seems that Poland, Germany, and France were also looking at production of shale-gas, but while in Poland there is high enthusiasm by a people that are struggling to disengage themselves from the dependence on Russian gas – a highly inflamed political and economic issue, in France the government has decided not to proceed to extract the gas. The protest from an environmentally conscious population led to this stand by the government.
The gas production in Austria is intended at above two locations in the Wine-Quarter (Vineviertel) outside Vienna with some of the local people, led by local officials of the Green Party, state that the region lives from tourism, Wine, and ambiance and if known as the Gas-Quarter (Gasviertel) all this will be lost.
December 2 and 3, 2011 papers printed the news of a press conference in the Vine-Quarter as in:
and today – December 17, 2011, the Wiener Zeitung had another series of three articles on the subject – both as related to Austria and Poland.
"It is, after all, wine district and not gas-quarters" – By Christian Roesner
It also mentions that Fritz Gall, head of Nonmuseums in Baumgarten: said "Fossil energy is not the official line of Austria in terms of energy policy." Gall is about to establish a platform and invite independent experts to the local population to offer also other perspectives than those of OMV.
Ein Totenkopf gegen das Aufreißen: Frankreich gilt nach Polen als das Land mit dem höchsten Schiefergasvorkommen in Europa. Doch nach vielen Demonstrationen hat Paris im Sommer den Abbau von Schiefergas mittels hydraulischem Fracturing verboten.
Huge shale gas reserves make Poland independent from Russia
Freedom, equality, gas
Drill deep cracks in the earth – but only for 80 years.
By Eva Stanzl
Vienna. OMV boss Gerhard Roiss want to win in the wine district existing shale gas reserves, provided that it is "ecologically sound" is what he says. His research team is working intensively on an environmentally friendly process for the promotion of the coveted raw material from the depths of the earth. The deposits could meet Austria's annual consumption of eight billion cubic meters of gas for at least 20 years.
People do worry about the effects of the gas production on the environment and things get worse when groups like EUROSOLAR Austria, get angree at this because they believe that there is no need to follow the dictum of the oil industry in order to stay dependent on oil and gas when renewable energy is possible and the sun is a main supplier.
Why let OEMV spend 130 million Euro, to just start these experimental drillings when the government provides only for 50 million Euro for the safer whole renewable energy yearly allowance? Investing in Renewables seems rather a safer way of detaching from fossil fuels – even in economic terms – not just environmental.
Thursday December 15, 2011, The monthly discussion table of the Vienna EUROSOLAR group had the time dedicated to Shale Gas – this being an exception as the group deals with renewables. This exception was obviously prompted by the worries that the shale gas project could derail the interest in renewables by creating in the minds of some of the people that this false saviour could answer the need for more energy independence – as it is felt seemingly in Poland.
Ing. Herbert Eberhart brought along the GASLAND documentary of the International WOW Company that showed the effects of shale oil production in the US.
The film talks about the Green River shale area in Wyoming, the old area of the attempt to produce Shale Oil, and moves to the Chesapeake area, to Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale up to New York State and the endangered Croton River water system that supplies the New York City water. We lean about the Cabot Oil & Gas Company and Halliburton – the company that was under the leadership of Vice President Dick Cheney. Under Mr. Cheney's days at the White House laws were changed and Federal Lands in the West opened to exploitation for oil and gas by private companies. It turned out that things were as in a song that said: "YOUR LAND – MY LAND – GASLAND" – and people were left in unhealthy conditions because of the effects of this drilling for gas.
What attracted my attention was a hearing in US Congress where the gas producing companies refused to divulge the chemicals they were using in those pipes and personally I was left with the uncertainty that perhaps we do not even know what actually is being done underground. The analysis of water from the home taps in the area of production shows the presence of some 596 chemicals including Naphthalene, Methyl Pyridine etc. – as these are probably not chemicals used as inputs – it means they are results of breakdown of the Kerogene – thus reminding me of the spent shale from above ground retorting and this is an old NO! NO!
Important to note that the same companies working in the US are now lining up to work also in Europe – and Poland was their port of entree. Will Halliburton be as well the technological outfit that will be used by the Austrian OEMV?
From the Financial Times of December 17, 2011, we learn: "The recent revelation that PetroChina successfully extracted natural gas from shale formations in China's Sichuan Basin has confirmed the commercial viability of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", in the country. The news also confirmed the major export opportunity that has emerged for the growing number of American companies that produce the array of equipment, chemicals and technologies that will be needed to exploit China's vast shale gas reserves. At an estimated 1,275 trillion cubic feet, these reserves comprise the world's largest source."
"Chinese shale gas developments herald major US industrial export opportunities," and "the companies with the know how are the American companies – oil field service majors like Baker Hughes, Halliburton, and National Oilwell Varco as well as ITT's water treatment spin-off, Xylem. Barclays Capital oilfield services analyst, James West, expects US companies like these will add a combined USD 8 to 10bn in shale gas-related equipment and services economic activity over the next year."
Will the results look like what one seen is GASLAND?
The Tursday evening event at EUROSOLAR turned out to be a five hours affair. After the 90 minutes documentary came the actual meeting of EUROSOLAR with a guest presentation by Green Member of Parliament of Lower Austria, Mrs. Amrita Enzinger who is active in bringing to the public's attention the dangers inherent in the extraction of the shale gas as experienced in the United States. Lower Austria is not the county in Wyoming that has only 600 residents that was mentioned in the documentary – and that is why the issue deserves a more serious go-through then an agreement with two mayors that might be ill advised in their effort to bring some fast money to their area and forfeiting the future of the area.
The moderator of the evening was energy autarky proponent,businessman Hermann Mentil, former Member of Parliament and present was also a specialist on energy from Poland.
19. Dezember 2011
Riesige Schiefergasvorräte machen Polen unabhängig von Russland
Freiheit, Gleichheit, Gas
Wien/Warschau. (wak) Na Zdrowie – auf die Gesundheit! Auf die Unabhängigkeit. In Polen wird derzeit ein Glas nach dem anderen des nationalen Wodkas Ma… weiter
Tiefe Risse in die Erde bohren – aber nur für 80 Jahre
Wien.OMV-Chef Gerhard Roiss will im Weinviertel vorhandene Schiefergas-Vorräte gewinnen, sofern es "ökologisch vertretbar" sei, wie er betont. Sein Fo… weiter
"Es heißt ja schließlich Weinviertel und nicht Gasviertel"
Wien. "Als wir zum ersten Mal vom Schiefergasvorkommen in unserer Region hörten, haben wir gegoogelt und diese furchtbaren Infos gefunden, die uns und… weiter
UPDATED- 3: Mitt, Rick, Newt, and Ron – had on Tuesday January 31st in Florida an important game of poker that is still going on strong on February 9th and dancing on February 12th. On March 14th are we moving to a situation with two clear front-runners and two king-makers?
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 14th, 2012
The third update is of March 14, 2012 – and the game of strip-poker is still on! And we still work on it.
As per the Voice of America:
"The three top Republican presidential candidates are locked in a tight race, as results trickle in following primaries Tuesday in two southern U.S. states.
At midnight March 13-14, 2012 – it seems that – Rick Santorum has won Tuesday's Republican presidential primary elections in the states of Alabama and Mississippi, solidifying his status as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, the leading candidate in the race.
Santorum narrowly won both staunchly conservative states, with Newt Gingrich finishing second and Romney coming in third. The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania told supporters that his campaign was "about ordinary folks doing extraordinary things" and that he was "defying the odds" with their help.
He said it was time for conservatives "to pull together" so they can take on Democratic President Barack Obama in the November general election.
Gingrich had hoped to win in at least one of the two states to keep his candidacy viable. But the ex-U.S. House speaker told supporters at a late-night rally that he will ignore calls to drop out of the race, describing himself as a "visionary" leader who can restore the country.
The twin losses were another blow in Romney's efforts to win support from very conservative and religious Republicans who have so far backed Santorum.
Early exit polls in Mississippi made it look like Romney was primed for a breakthrough. He held an early lead with blue collar voters, tea party supporters and even evangelicals — the one group that has beguiled him more than any other.
Problem was, it was too good to be true.
Indeed, by the end of the night, reality set in, the numbers in Mississippi shifted, and Romney lost all three groups in both states.
Romney again relied heavily on non-evangelical voters, more moderate voters, wealthy voters and voters who just want someone who can beat President Obama — just as he has in every other state. It's been good enough in most states; in the South, it's just not.
And his track record there speaks volumes.
How consistent is Romney? He has taken between 26 percent and 30 percent of the vote in every Southern state dominated by conservative voters — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee.
The thing is, while that consistency cost him on Tuesday, it's likely to benefit him going forward. While the voting is just halfway done, Romney is almost done with his most troubling region, the South, and his most troubling contests, Midwestern caucuses.
Even in the remaining Southern states, things may get better; both Texas and Louisiana feature more concentrated urban populations (a Romney strong suit) than other Southern states, which should help him perform better. (Romney also performed well in Western Mississippi, which is a good omen for his campaign in the state's neighbor-to-the-west, Louisiana, on March 24.)
Romney's problems outside the South have been almost completely relegated to Midwestern caucus states with low turnout. In fact, the only primary Romney has lost outside of the South was in Missouri, which was a beauty contest in which Romney didn't compete.
A Bloomberg National Poll of Republicans shows Romney with the support of 37 percent, compared with 27 percent for Santorum. Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich's backing is 13 percent while U.S. Representative Ron Paul draws 11 percent.
"He's a businessman and has a better idea of how to run something," said a Republican poll participant, 68, a clerical worker from Maumee, Ohio. "So many things about our country should be run more like a business, instead of just throwing money at everything."
There are warning signs in the poll for Romney, should the former Massachusetts governor become his party's presidential nominee. The extended primary season has driven his unfavorability rating up 10 points, to 48 percent, since September.
His past private equity work cuts both ways: it's a credential that appeals to Republicans, while a slim majority — 52 percent — of all Americans – view his business practice as harmful to the economy, and 68 percent object to the favored tax rate applied to profits generated by the industry.
We conclude. that in the electorate at large, there is no excitement of business practices of candidate like Romney.
But from the Obama – Biden campaign headquarters we got:
"If the general election were held today, President Obama would lose to Mitt Romney — according to the latest poll fromWashington Post-ABC News.
Now, many other polls put the President on top, but all point to the same reality: We're looking at a race that will be tighter than you think. And the other side has groups ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to tear down President Obama.We cannot underestimate someone like Romney who has shown he will spend and say anything to win."
This is an update of the January 29, 2012 article – this after results from Florida, Nevada, Missouri, Minsesota, and Colorado are in.
Santorum solidly defeated Romney in Minnesota and Missouri, and he narrowly edged the former Massachusetts governor in Colorado, according to state GOP officials.
The victories mark a sharp turnaround for Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, whose candidacy had been sputtering after he failed to capitalize on his narrow win in Iowa last month. Santorum's wins across the Midwest Tuesday could bestow new legitimacy on his insurgent efforts and boost his fundraising in the critical period before next month's major contests.
Santorum now appears to pose a more serious threat not only to Romney, but also to Gingrich, who had been positioning himself as the logical alternative to Romney.
Santorum staked his own claim on Tuesday. "Conservatism is alive and well," he told supporters at his election night party in Missouri. "I don't stand here and claim to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. I stand here to be the conservative alternative to Barack Obama."
For Romney, his poor showing Tuesday raised anew the question that has dogged his candidacy all along: Can the relatively moderate, former Massachusetts governor become an acceptable standard-bearer of a party that is increasingly dominated by evangelical conservatives and tea party activists who have long been skeptical of Romney?
After big wins in Florida and Nevada, Romney had hoped to extend his winning streak as he moved to strengthen his claim to the mantle of presumptive nominee. But in recent days, he was clearly bracing for losses on Tuesday.
Romney enjoyed strong establishment backing in Minnesota, with the vocal support of former governor Tim Pawlenty, yet he trailed not just Santorum but also Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), finishing a distant third.
Addressing supporters in Denver, Romney congratulated Santorum and insisted that he still expects to eventually become the nominee eventually. Thus – two weeks after Florida – nothing was resolved and the poker game is on in a spit party where one way or another – the minority will be turned into the majority.
UPDATE 2 comes after non binding caucuses in Maine and a straw poll of the Conservative leadership – finalized Saturday February 11, 2012. These show Mitt Romney in front by a breeze.
Mr. Romney scraped by Mr. Paul by just 194 votes. But fewer than 6,000 votes were cast — about 2 percent of registered Republicans.
Mr. Paul was unbowed, and gave no indication that he would drop out.
"We're not going away," he told his supporters.
Although the vote had no substantive meaning in terms of delegates, losing it could have created a political headache for Mr. Romney, the former governor of nearby Massachusetts, and extended a negative storyline that had been building since last week when he lost Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri to Mr. Santorum.
Those losses suddenly increased the symbolic importance of Maine's all-but-ignored caucuses, and an additional loss on Saturday in his own backyard would have magnified concerns that he cannot seal the deal with voters.
As it was, Mr. Romney also won the annual straw poll of activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. He took 38 percent of the 3,408 votes cast, compared with 31 percent for Mr. Santorum, 15 percent for Mr. Gingrich and 12 percent for Mr. Paul of Texas, who won the last two years but did not attend this time.
Mr. Romney was among those who had ignored Maine, assuming he had it sewn up, until he arrived Friday night. In the face of tough questioning at a town-hall-style meeting in Portland and the evidence of strong organization by Mr. Paul, Mr. Romney decided to stay over Saturday and campaigned at caucus sites. His campaign added a last-minute jolt of radio and television advertisements.
Mr. Paul made a foray to the state last month and also visited caucus sites on Saturday.
It was not clear how much the late activity helped either candidate because many people had already voted in the rolling caucuses, which began on Jan. 29.
"Romney's win shows that the pragmatists in the Maine Republican Party really came out in force," said Sandy Maisel, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Me.
"Remember, this is a state party that has elected Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins to the Senate, over and over," he said.
"While the Tea Party element is strong," Dr. Maisel added, "those whose principal goal is beating President Obama came to the fore."
Mr. Romney easily won the low-turnout caucuses four years ago, with Mr. Paul coming in third.
But this time around, Maine offered a rare opportunity for Mr. Paul, a libertarian, to plant his flag.
Although New England Republicans are generally more moderate than the party's supporters elsewhere, the Maine members are fiercely independent, and the state has become a cauldron of activity for Tea Party supporters, fiscal conservatives and libertarians.
The honestly insignificant numbers of Republicans of Maine, joined by the straw-poll of Conservatives that once backed Santorum then moved to Gingrich – show that the eventual time that it will be a pasodoble rather then a Texas Waltz is being slowly set in motion.
Maine Caucus Results for the 6000 that showed up to vote as per percentage of the hands up – is »
Buoyed by 3 Victories, Santorum Campaign Sets Ambitious New Goals
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Rick Santorum is setting sights on home-state challenges to Newt Gingrich in Georgia and Mitt Romney in Michigan after a trifecta of wins on Tuesday.
In Santorum's Sweep, Sign of G.O.P. Unease With Romney
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Rick Santorum's defeat of Mitt Romney in three states could scramble the dynamics of the race.
Romney Faces Rebels on the Right and Softness in the Middle
By JEFF ZELENY
The persistent competition with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich is forcing Mitt Romney to guard his right flank instead of directing his attention to President Obama.
The winner in South Carolina is clear – not by 8 votes or 34 but by a stretch of a mile!
The vice president portrayed congressional Republicans as a stubborn crew unwilling to cooperate with Democrats in Washington to solve the nation's problems. He called out several by name, including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
He said the GOP is solely intent on obstructing action in order to ensure Obama's defeat this fall.
three days before the Florida primary, at a moment when Gingrich is badly in need of something to rekindle the momentum he gained in the wake of his South Carolina primary victory, former contender Herman Cain has publicly endorsed Newt Gingrich.
Since then, polls have shown that he is losing ground against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the State of Florida, even as Gingrich has gained a lead in national surveys.
"I had it in my heart and mind a long time," Cain said of his endorsement, appearing with Gingrich at a Republican fundraiser. "Speaker Gingrich is a patriot. Speaker Gingrich is not afraid of bold ideas."
Gingrich joked, "I had no idea it would be this interesting an evening," he said last night.
Cain is the latest in a series of popular conservative figures to back the former House speaker, while much of the GOP establishment is marshaling against him.
Candy Crowley of CNN decided to interview this Sunday Ron Paul who just returned to his home in Clute Texas from two days of campaigning in Maine. He was a no show in Florida and preferred to have his organization handle this State for him. Ron Paul concentrates on Caucus States where he can fire up easier his local troops. He knows that in the Republican primary in Florida with Romney and Gingrich pitted against each other it will be the the upward mobile Latinos, that are impressed by success and steady family life, will go for Romney rather then Gingrich, but in the real elections in November it can be expected that the Latino vote will go for Obama – this because of issues like the Dream Act that Obama supports in order to help legalize the status of Latino immigrants that served in the army and served well their host country in which they are not allowed to become citizens. Ron Paul talks to the Occupy Wall Street crowd and hopes that some of this reaches also to the future voters in the primaries, and in the eventual election – the strategy seems to be about the long haul – not really about the immediate skirmish.
Mitt Romney may be the favorite of the Republican establishment, the Republican politicians, the great majority of the "1%" that funds the campaign, the media that belongs to that 1%, but when adding up the the votes that Newt + Rick + Ron get – Mitt is in the minority. The fact that the Conservatives and the remnants of he Tea alliance flock now to Newt, we think that there is a chance Florida will push out Rick and that after Florida, with only Ron Paul still in the running besides Mitt and Newt, the field will have narrowed to a battle that will then drag on so that the show on the road will last at least to April.
Carlos Gutierez who was the G.W. Bush Secretary of Commerce is campaigning for Mr. Romney among the Latinos of Florida, and Governor Rick Scott is worried that the skirmish among the Republicans may eventually weaken the party in the general elections.
Ron Paul says the Tea Party is an agglomeration of different people with different issues of discontent. He knows he has there a wedge that will stay with him.
Master gambler Sheldon Gary Adelson provided Newt Gingrich with $5 Million for South Carolina and wife Dr. Miriam with another $5 Million for Florida, so entering the post-Florida long haul there must be now a consolidation of the two major camps, with the only cloud hovering on the side – Ron Paul and his Libertarian friends. President Obama's State of the Union speech was intended to make sure that the disenchanted young people that backed him in 2008 do not look sidewise to Ron Paul as the alternative for change.
Looking at the results so far Mr. Romney has obtained 25% in Iowa of those that bothered to vote in the Republican primaries, 39% in New Hampshire and 27% in South Carolina. That means that even in the most favorable State to his candidacy stil it was a total of 43% – thus more then his 39% – went to the other three members of the present quartet – with Ron Paul getting 23% and the other two 10% each. Assuming that Ron Paul manages to hang on to a 20% of the vote – what is left is a very heated contest between Messrs. Romney and Gingrich and the possibility that none of the above will reach a clear majority before going to the convention.
"Should the United States join OPEC?" The case for higher and stable oil prices follows the success of phasing in ethanol, incentivising fuel efficiency, and new production by the US of environmentally checked gas and oil. New Visions for The United States and for the environment. For the US sake – SET A MINIMUM PRICE FOR OIL and A TAX IF THE PRICE GETS BELLOW THAT LIMIT!
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 26th, 2012
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Thomas Friedman.
In print – Sunday, February 26, 2012 – based on a communication from oil advocate consultant to Saudi Arabia Phil K. Verleger.
During his long and distinguished career, Dr. Verleger has correctly anticipated most of the major structural changes occurring in the oil industry over the last 25 years. For example, in 1986 he became the first economist to fully comprehend and explain the appearance and development of energy commodity markets. Since then, Dr. Verleger has chronicled the evolution of these markets in The Petroleum Economics Monthly. Over a quarter century, he has examined many developments and anticipated the outcomes of a number of market manipulation strategies, including Metalgesellschaft's disastrous trading program in 1992. More recently, Dr. Verleger was one of the first to examine and again correctly predict the impact of outside investment in commodities.
Dr. Verleger's investigations have influenced developments in oil markets. His work includes two important academic studies on petroleum markets: Adjusting to Volatile Oil Prices (1994) and Oil Markets in Turmoil (1982). His research in 1998 contributed to Saudi Arabia's adoption of a new market strategy in March 1999. In April 1999, Dr. Verleger correctly predicted that the Saudi strategy would take crude oil prices to the mid to high 20s.
In August 2004, Dr. Verleger warned that U.S. environmental regulations would cause crude oil prices to rise to $60 per barrel by limiting the availability of key petroleum products. He later wrote that the squeeze on product supply, combined with the absence of central bank concern, could take crude prices to $100. Both events came to pass.
A Good Question.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
An e-mail came in the other day with a subject line that I couldn't ignore. It was from the oil economist Phil Verleger, and it read: "Should the United States join OPEC?" That I had to open.
Josh Haner/The New York Times – Thomas L. Friedman
Verleger's basic message was that the knee-jerk debate we're again having over who is responsible for higher oil prices fundamentally misses huge changes that have taken place in America's energy output, making us again a major oil and gas producer — and potential exporter — with an interest in reasonably high but stable oil prices.
From one direction, he says, we're seeing the impact of the ethanol mandate put in place by President George W. Bush, which established fixed quantities of biofuels to be used in gasoline. When this is combined with improved vehicle fuel economy — in July, the auto industry agreed to achieve fleet averages of more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025 — it will inevitably drive down demand for gasoline and create more surplus crude to export. Add to that, says Verleger, "the increase in oil production from offshore fields and unconventional sources in America," and that exportable U.S. surplus could grow even bigger.
Then, add the recent discoveries of natural gas deposits all over America, which will allow us to substitute gas for coal at power plants and become a natural gas exporter as well. Put it all together, says Verleger, and you can see why America "will want to consider joining with other energy-exporting countries, like those in OPEC, to sustain high oil prices. Such an effort would support domestic oil and gas production and give the U.S. a real competitive advantage over countries forced to pay high prices for imported energy — nations such as China, European Union members, and Japan."
Indeed, Bloomberg News reported last week that "the U.S. is the closest it has been in almost 20 years to achieving energy self-sufficiency. … Domestic oil output is the highest in eight years. The U.S. is producing so much natural gas that, where the government warned four years ago of a critical need to boost imports, it now may approve an export terminal." As a result, "the U.S. has reversed a two-decade-long decline in energy independence, increasing the proportion of demand met from domestic sources over the last six years to an estimated 81 percent through the first 10 months of 2011." This transformation could make the U.S. the world's top energy producer by 2020, raise more tax revenue, free us from worrying about the Middle East, and, if we're smart, build a bridge to a much cleaner energy future.
All of this is good news, but it will come true at scale only if these oil and gas resources can be extracted in an environmentally sustainable manner. This can be done right, but we need a deal between environmentalists and the oil and gas industry to lock it in — now.
Says Hal Harvey, an independent energy expert: "The oil and gas companies need to decide: Do they want to fight a bloody and painful war of attrition with local communities or take the lead in setting high environmental standards — particularly for "fracking," the process used to extract all these new natural gas deposits — "and then live up to them."
Higher environmental standards may cost more, but only incrementally, if at all, and they'll make the industry and the environment safer.
In the case of natural gas, we need the highest standards for cleanup of land that is despoiled by gas extraction and to prevent leakage of gas either into aquifers or the atmosphere. Yes, "generating a kilowatt-hour's worth of electricity with a natural gas turbine emits only about half as much CO2 as from a coal plant," says Harvey, and that's great. "But one molecule of leaked gas contributes as much to global warming as 25 molecules of burned gas. That means that if the system for the exploration, extraction, compression, piping and burning of natural gas leaks by even 2.5 percent, it is as bad as coal."
Hence, Harvey's five rules for natural gas are:
Don't allow leaky systems;
use gas to phase out coal;
have sound well drilling and casing standards;
don't pollute the landscape with brackish or toxic water brought up by fracking;
and drill only where it is sensible.
******* I'd add a sixth rule for crude oil: ——- No one likes higher oil prices. —— But — perversely — the high price benefits America as we rapidly become a bigger oil producer and it ensures that investments will continue to flow into energy efficient cars and trucks. If we were smart, we would establish today a floor price for any barrel of crude oil or gallon of gasoline sold or imported into America — and tax anything below it. *********
A stable, sufficiently high floor price serves the environment, our technology investments and our energy productivity. As our producers succeed, we would become increasingly energy self-sufficient, keep a lot more dollars at home for our Treasury, stimulate innovation on renewables and drive down the global oil price that is the sole source sustaining Iran and other petro-dictators.
But all of this depends on an understanding between the oil industry and the environmentalists. If President Obama could pull that off, it would be a huge contribution to America's security, economy and environment.
Now focus on Rick Santorum – Sex and Santorum – and a great finding on the original "America the Beautiful" – "God shed his grace on thee Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free!"
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 4th, 2012
Sex and Santorum
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
04 January 12
he race for the Republican presidential nomination has been an edifying spectacle. No, really: we are learning a lot of things that we might not have if it had been a simple Romney coronation. Until he rose in the polls, Ron Paul was seen by many liberals as an almost cuddly figure, a nice antiwar guy with some quirky ideas about gold; we've learned a bit since.
Now Rick Santorum, whose frankness gives us an education in what "moral values" is really about, at least for a significant number of people:
Beautifying America
Andy Rosenthal, our editorial page editor, notes that Mitt Romney likes to quote from "America the Beautiful", and tells us something I for one didn't know:
The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.