Like Lord of the Flies, on Acid

In appears that in response to the widening miasma of corruption surrounding EPA chief Scott Pruitt, he has directed his staff to start leaking damaging information on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke:

As Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt faces a seemingly endless stream of scandal, his team is scrambling to divert the spotlight to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. And the White House isn’t happy about it.

In the last week, a member of Pruitt’s press team, Michael Abboud, has been shopping negative stories about Zinke to multiple outlets, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the efforts, as well as correspondence reviewed by The Atlantic.

“This did not happen, and it’s categorically false,” EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said.

The stories were shopped with the intention of “taking the heat off of Pruitt,” the sources said, in the aftermath of the EPA chief’s punishing congressional hearing last week. They both added, however, that most reporters felt the story was not solid enough to run. On Thursday, Patrick Howley of Big League Politics published a piece on the allegations; he did not respond to request for comment as to his sources.

Abboud alleged to reporters that an Interior staffer conspired with former EPA deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski to leak damaging information about the EPA, as part of a rivalry between Zinke and Pruitt. The collaboration, Abboud claimed, allowed the Interior staffer to prop up Zinke at the expense of Pruitt, and Chmielewski to “get back” at his former boss.

Not a surprise.  Both Pruitt and Zinke have little interest in the underlying purpose of their jobs, or their agencies, and as such, it's all about that old career ladder.

This is Impressive

The costs of renewable energy installations, including storage, has fallen precipitously:

Proposals for renewable electricity generation in Colorado are coming in cheap, like, $21/MWh-cheap for wind and battery storage. Though there are a few caveats to those numbers, federal incentives and quickly falling costs are combining to make once-quirky renewable projects into major contenders in an industry where fossil fuels have comfortably dominated since the 19^th century. 

Early last year, Colorado energy provider Xcel Energy requested proposals for new electricity generation. Specifically, the company needed 450 megawatts of additional generation to meet future demand. In a separate request called the Colorado Energy Plan, Xcel said (PDF) it would consider replacing two coal plants providing 660MW of capacity with "hundreds of megawatts of new wind and solar as well as some natural gas-fired resources" if new resources could be found cheaper than what those coal plants cost to operate (including costs to shut down the plants early).

By late November, energy companies had submitted their best offers. Although exact details of the offers aren’t available yet, Xcel Colorado was required to make public a summary of the proposals (PDF) in the month after the bids were submitted.

………


Still, the prices quoted were encouragingly competitive. Although Xcel's report doesn't have a lot of details, this is what we know:

• Out of 152 standalone solar bids, the median bid price was $29.50/MWh.
• Standalone wind received the second-most bids from potential developers (that is, 96), and the median bid price was an astonishingly low $18.10/MWh. That's on the same level as a record-low $17.70/MWh bid put forward in Mexico in November.
• 87 bids were placed to develop solar-plus-storage installations, with a median bid of $36/MWh. Still, we don’t know what kind of storage was proposed or how much of it was proposed. If you have a giant solar field sending electricity to the grid as it gets made, and a small battery installation to manage frequency regulation or serve a local community for an hour of downtime, that’s not terribly exciting. This median price is down from a previous competitive price of below $45/MWh signed by Tucson Electric.
• 11 bids were placed to build wind-with-storage at a median bid of $21/MWh. The same problem with evaluating Xcel's solar-and-storage bids is present in the reported wind-and-storage bids: without more detail, it’s hard to evaluate how much storage comes with that.
• Seven bids suggested a combination wind, solar, and battery storage installation, with a median price of $30.60/MWh.
• Five bids suggested combining solar and wind for around $19.90/MWh.

A few more traditional, dispatchable technologies were proposed as well, but Xcel asked bidders to price these out in terms of dollars per kilowatt-month ($/kW-mo). That unit of measurement is considered capacity pricing, or pricing for electricity that's generated when demand exceeds a certain point, so it's not quite comparable to the $/MWh seen above.

Among those resources, combustion turbines came in at $4.80/kW-mo, and combustion turbines with battery storage came in at $6.20/kW-mo. For context, in a 2010 paper (PDF), New England's grid saw a $4.50/kW-mo bid for more traditional fossil fuel generators.

Renewables are still more expensive to install, but the differential is falling quickly.

Damn

After decades of deaths from collisions with ships and entanglements with fishing nets, the North Atlantic Right Whale is on the brink of extinction:

Officials with the US federal government say it is time to consider the possibility that endangered right whales could become extinct unless new steps are taken to protect them.

North Atlantic right whales are among the rarest marine mammals in the world, and they have endured a deadly year. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there are only about 450 of the whales left and 17 of them have died so far in 2017.

The situation is so dire that American and Canadian regulators need to consider the possibility that the population won’t recover without action soon, said John Bullard, the Northeast Regional Administrator for NOAA Fisheries. The high year of mortality is coinciding with a year of poor reproduction, and there are only about 100 breeding female North Atlantic right whales left.

“You do have to use the extinction word, because that’s where the trend lines say they are,” Bullard said. “That’s something we can’t let happen.”

Bullard and other NOAA officials made the comments during a Tuesday meeting of the regulatory New England Fishery Management Council. Mark Murray-Brown, an Endangered Species Act consultant for NOAA, said right whales have been declining in abundance since 2010, with females hit harder than males.

………

The U.S. and Canada must work to reduce the human-caused deaths of the whales, Murray-Brown said. Vessel-strikes and entanglement in fishing gear are two frequently cited causes of the whales’ deaths.

Any fix is probably going to be greeted by howls of protests from the fishing and shipping industries, but f%$# them.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

Over at Bloomberg, we have a bit of history which describes how US Chipmakers dealt with the toxicity of their manufacturing processes by moving overseas, where they could harm brown people and no one would care:

Results in epidemiology often are equivocal, and money can cloud science (see: tobacco companies vs. cancer researchers). Clear-cut cases are rare. Yet just such a case showed up one day in 1984 in the office of Harris Pastides, a recently appointed associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

………

SIA, representing International Business Machines Corp., Intel Corp., and about a dozen other top technology companies, established a task force, and its experts flew to Windsor Locks, Conn., to meet Pastides at a hotel near Bradley International Airport. It was Super Bowl Sunday, January 1987. “That was a day I remember being at a tribunal,” Pastides says. The atmosphere “bordered on hostility. I remember being shellshocked.” Soon after the meeting the panel formally concluded that the study contained “significant deficiencies,” according to internal SIA records. Nevertheless, facing public pressure, SIA’s member companies agreed to fund more research.

………

Pastides felt vindicated. More than that, he considered the entire episode one of the greatest successes in public-health history, as do others. Despite industry skepticism, three scientific studies led to changes that helped generations of women. “That’s almost a fairy tale in public health,” Pastides says.

Two decades later, the ending to the story looks like a different kind of tale. As semiconductor production shifted to less expensive countries, the industry’s promised fixes do not appear to have made the same journey, at least not in full. Confidential data reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek show that thousands of women and their unborn children continued to face potential exposure to the same toxins until at least 2015. Some are probably still being exposed today. Separate evidence shows the same reproductive-health effects also persisted across the decades.

The risks are exacerbated by secrecy—the industry may be using toxins that still haven’t been disclosed. This is the price paid by generations of women making the devices at the heart of the global economy.

………

Yet in virtually every study published since the 1990s, Kim read one form or other of the same phrase: The global semiconductor industry had phased out EGEs in the mid-1990s, signaling the end of reproductive-health concerns. The statements made sense. Not only had IBM and other companies publicly announced that the use of EGEs had been discontinued, but the chemicals also had become classified as Category 1 reproductive toxins under international standards, and European regulators had placed them on a list of the most highly toxic chemicals known to science, designating them Substances of Very High Concern.

Still, something nagged at Kim. In focus groups, young South Korean women working in chip plants told Kim’s colleagues it was not uncommon to go months, or even a year, without menstruating. (Some saw these potentially ominous changes to their reproductive systems as blessings, not warnings. It was just easier not to have periods.) As in the U.S., women dominated production jobs in South Korea’s microelectronics industry, which employs more than 120,000 of them, mostly of childbearing age; they’re often recruited right out of high school. Kim and a colleague decided they needed to conduct a new reproductive-health study. They faced a challenge, however, that Pastides and the other U.S. researchers hadn’t, at least on the front end: a lack of industry cooperation.

In 2013 they persuaded a member of South Korea’s parliament to pry loose national health-insurance data. They got five years of physician-reimbursement records through 2012 for women of childbearing age working at plants owned by the country’s three largest microelectronics companies: Samsung, SK Hynix, and LG. Samsung and SK Hynix accounted for the vast majority of women in the study, as the two have long been among the world’s largest chipmakers. The data covered an average of 38,000 women per year. From that number, the researchers looked at the records of those who had gone to doctors for miscarriages.

The results were both undeniable and shocking to Kim, just as they had been for Pastides almost three decades earlier. She found significantly elevated miscarriage rates and a rate for those in their 30s almost as high as in the U.S. factories. And the findings were conservative, because many women don’t go to the doctor for miscarriages, and because production workers couldn’t be separated in the study from those who worked in offices. “This was not the result I had expected,” Kim says.

As an aside here, this is another argument for single payer in some form, it creates a demographic database that is both available and universal that can be used to find problems like these.

………

After the outcry in the U.S. in the 1990s, chemical companies said they’d changed the formulations for the photoresists and other products they supplied to chipmakers, including those in Asia. But testing data obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that changes weren’t made quickly or, in some cases, completely.

………

Kim, the epidemiologist, says the secrecy of these settlements is a reason there was so little discussion for so long of the risks in chipmaking. “It was not published in academic papers,” she says. “Just some hidden settlements between the companies and some victims.”

Even today, the chipmakers themselves sometimes don’t know what they’re bringing into their facilities and exposing their workers to. That’s what SK Hynix discovered in 2015 after hiring a team of university scientists to assess the toxic risks in two of its plants.

Some of their results were made public in Korean, but many of the findings remain confidential. An extract of the research reviewed by Bloomberg Businessweek shows scientists found that the plants used about 430 different chemical products each. These included more than 130 deemed to be dangerous enough that employees exposed to them must undergo special health checks; those chemicals are called CMR agents—shorthand for carcinogens, mutagens, and reproductive toxins. In addition to benzene and EGEs, they’ve historically included arsenic, hydrofluoric acid, and trichloroethylene.

The ability to directly or indirectly poison unsuspecting employees is one of the goals of globalization.  It's all about labor and regulatory arbitrage, which is why promises of labor, safety, and environmental protections that we hear about whenever they want to push through a trade deal are empty.

Allowing the 1% to f%$# the rest of us is the goal of modern trade deals, so it's no surprise that this is their actual effect.

Here's Hoping that Someone Rolls on the Governor

There have now been manslaughter charges filed against senior officials in Michigan over the poisoning of Flint.

Given that the water change appears to have largely been driven by Governor Snyder attempting to benefit political supporters from the fracking industry, so if this gets followed to the top, Snyder may find himself in the dock:

Michigan’s health department director and four other officials involved with Flint’s lead-contaminated water were charged Wednesday with involuntary manslaughter, the most serious charges to date in the criminal investigation.

Nick Lyon was accused of misconduct in office and involuntary manslaughter, becoming the highest-ranking member of Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration to be targeted in the criminal probe. The manslaughter charges carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison and a $7,500 fine, while the misconduct charge carries a prison sentence of up to five years and a $10,000 fine.

Lyon, former Flint Emergency Manager Darnell Earley, former Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Drinking Water Chief Liane Shekter-Smith, state Water Supervisor Stephen Busch and former Flint Water Department Manager Howard Croft are accused of failing to alert the public about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the Flint area. Earley, Shekter-Smith, Busch and Croft already have been charged with less-serious crimes.

I am so hoping that Snyder ends up in the dock.

Not a Surprise

Donald Trump has announced that he is pulling the US out of the Paris climate deal.

This is not a surprise. He promised to do so during the election, and the political cost of keeping this promise is pretty small.

Of note is that he took the least aggressive option to do so:

But he will stick to the withdrawal process laid out in the Paris agreement, which President Barack Obama joined and most of the world has already ratified. That could take nearly four years to complete, meaning a final decision would be up to the American voters in the next presidential election.

This is not a surprise.  Unlike EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who has sold his soul to climate deniers, Trump views this in an almost exclusively political context.

Taking 4 years to get out of the deal was quite literally the least that he could do without pissing off his supporters.

Did Not Expect This

It looks like Senate Republicans could not muster the votes to repeal an Obama administration rule on methane emissions:

Some Republican lawmakers balked at fully embracing the Trump administration’s climate skepticism Wednesday, as the Senate failed to kill an Obama-era plan for containing methane emissions that had deep support among environmental activists and many landowners in the West.

Three Republican senators joined Democrats in blocking the effort to kill the methane restrictions that the GOP congressional leadership had been confident it could scuttle. The push to scrap the methane rules faltered amid an uprising of protest in Western states, where tens of thousands of residents near drilling operations risk exposure to the toxic compounds that leak in tandem with the methane.

At issue is 41 billion cubic feet of a greenhouse gas leaking from many of the nearly 100,000 oil and gas wells on federally owned land. Methane is among the most potent accelerators of global warming, 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

A House vote in March to eliminate an Obama-era Bureau of Land Management rule requiring energy firms to trap the escaping gas and convert it to electricity was followed by a swift public backlash. Several Republican senators wavered on the measure in recent weeks.

I don't think that this vote was about pissed off land owners in the west, as none of the Senators who flipped, Collins (R-ME), Graham (R-SC), and McCain (R-AZ) are from states where potential landowner objections to leaky gas wells are not a huge factor.

I think that more prosaic political considerations are taking place here:  McCain and Graham clearly detest Trump, and Collins needs to pretend to be liberal every now and then in order to secure her political popularity in Maine.

Still, it's a win for the good guys.

Well, This is Reassuring

Pucker factor: 11

At one of the myriad of radioactive waste dumps in Hanford, Washington, a tunnel has collapsed:

Hundreds of workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford nuclear site in Washington state had to “take cover” Tuesday morning after the collapse of 20-foot-long portion of a tunnel used to store contaminated radioactive materials.

The Energy Department said it activated its emergency operations protocol after reports of a “cave-in” at the 200 East Area in Hanford, a sprawling complex about 200 miles from Seattle where the government has been working to clean up radioactive materials left over from the country’s nuclear weapons program.

The agency said in a statement that the 20-foot section is part of a tunnel that is hundreds of feet long and is “used to store contaminated materials.” The tunnel is one of two that run into the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, also known as PUREX. The section that collapsed was “in an area where the two tunnels join together,” the department said.

The PUREX facility, once used to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel, has been idle for years but remains “highly contaminated,” the agency said.
………

An August 2015 report by Vanderbilt University’s civil and environmental engineering department said the PUREX facility and the two tunnels had “the potential for significant on-site consequences” and that “various pieces of dangerous debris and equipment containing or contaminated with dangerous/mixed waste” had been placed inside the tunnels.

………

Former Energy Department official Robert Alvarez said that remotely controlled rail cars once carried spent fuel from a reactor to the PUREX chemical processing facility, which then extracted dangerous plutonium. He said the plant lies near the middle of the sprawling 580-square mile Hanford site and was “a very high-hazard operation.”

Many contaminated pieces of equipment, including the rail cars, have simply been left in the tunnels, he said. The Vanderbilt report said that there were eight rail cars in the older tunnel and 28 in the newer one.

The cave-in was discovered during “routine surveillance,” according to the Energy Department. Photographs showed a gaping hole, plainly evident because the tunnels are largely above ground.

Workers near the PUREX facility were told to shelter in place, and access to the area was restricted, according to the Energy Department statement. Officials requested that the Federal Aviation Administration put a temporary flight restriction in place, according to the FAA.

We still have billions of dollars of nuclear waste to clean up from the Truman administration.

Nuclear power is a suckers game.

Pull All of His Security Detail, and Let Market Forces Rule

Scott Pruit, environment hating wingnut and current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is requesting a round the clock security detail in his next budget.

It appears that in addition to being a corrupt stooge of the energy industry, he's also an abject coward:

The administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, historically, has had some measure of government-funded personal security detail. Agents routinely picked Gina McCarthy from the airport, for example, or accompanied her on site visits during her time as EPA administrator from July 2013 to Jan 2017. But Scott Pruitt, the new EPA chief, wishes to be guarded 24/7.

………

The Times calls it a first for an EPA chief, and notes that the 10 additional agents would more than double the agency’s current security staff, which has hovered between six and eight agents in recent years. Similarly, security detail for education secretary Betsy DeVos has reached unprecedented levels: Typically, the secretary of education is guarded by about six agents from within the Department of Education. Since her contentious confirmation, DeVos has been under the protection of the US Marshals Service, costing $8 million over eight months.

What security menace is Pruitt guarding against? According to Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s EPA transition team but is no longer employed by the administration, Pruitt is at risk from his own employees—and “the left.”

Seriously, the wingnuts spend their days soiling their pants in abject terror.

Not the Sort of Thing I Expect to See in Forbes

But this article sounds an awful lot like eco-socialism:

Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale.

• Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale.
• Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School).
• Since 2000, 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost each year. That’s 14,826,322 acres, or just less than the entire state of West Virginia (see the 2010 assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN).
• Even in the U.S., 15% of the population lives below the poverty line. For children under the age of 18, that number increases to 20% (see U.S. Census).
• The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 (see United Nations' projections).

 ………  

Corporate capitalism is committed to the relentless pursuit of growth, even if it ravages the planet and threatens human health. 

We need to build a new system: one that will balance economic growth with sustainability and human flourishing.

Personally, I would not be impressed with the article, it's advocacy for a sort of techno-utopian viewpoint common among Silicon Valley types who have their hand in your pockets, but I do not expect to see this in Forbes magazine.

It's significance is that it appears to indicate a shift in the Overton Window.

The Term Here is Eating Our Seed Corn

It appears that Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bees across the nation, is not just an issue with a specific type of insecticide, but a more general consequence of chemical intensive farming:

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

 When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

This is going to get ugly, and I expect to see a collapse of some bee pollinated crops, most likely almonds, before we actually start applying some common sense regulation to the industry.

What About the Higher Ups?

6 low level employees have been charged for allegedly falsifying reports in the Flint, Michigan lead tainted water crisis:

A special investigator for the Michigan Attorney General's office said six state employees who were criminally charged today hid and manipulated data last summer that showed a change in drinking-water sources was poisoning people here.

Liane Shekter-Smith, Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook worked for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality; and Nancy Peeler, Corinne Miller and Robert Scott worked for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services last summer and are charged in the case filed this morning in Flint District court.
………

The Health and Human Services employees "effectively buried" research indicating high lead levels in children's blood from July through September 2014 could be connected to the switch in water sources and needed further research, Seipenko said.

The epidemiologist researching the tests wasn't yet finished with her report when Peeler and Scott "worked together to produce a graph of elevated blood levels without applying any statistical method. Peeler, relying on this unscientific graph, drafted and sent (an) unfounded email to MDHHS management (that) inappropriately concluded that the switch of water sources was not the cause of elevated blood levels within the children," Seipenko said.

Peeler was manager of the Early Childhood Health section of MDHHS, and Scott is acting coordinator and data manager for the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention program at the MDHHS. Miller was director of the Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention at MDHHS, Seipenko said.

………

Smith faces charges of misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Cook is charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to engage in misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Rosenthal is charged with misconduct office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence or engage in misconduct in office, and tampering with evidence as a public officer engaged in a willful neglect of his duty.

Peeler, Miller and Scott are charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty.

These do not appear to particularly high level employees.

Ignoring these results was clearly a directive made at a more senior level, probably at the level of Governor Rick Snyder's cabinet, but I see no evidence of a higher level investigation so far.

It's pretty clear that his office had to be involved in authorizing the cover up.

Thanks, Hillary

What a surprise, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton aggressively supported the right wing coup in Honduras.

Now we discover that the government's US trained military has been assassinating indigenous environmental activists:

Berta Cáceres, the murdered environmental campaigner, appeared on a hitlist distributed to US-trained special forces units of the Honduran military months before her death, a former soldier has claimed.

Lists featuring the names and photographs of dozens of social and environmental activists were given to two elite units, with orders to eliminate each target, according to First Sergeant Rodrigo Cruz, 20.

Cruz’s unit commander, a 24-year-old lieutenant, deserted rather than comply with the order. Cruz – who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for fear of reprisal – followed suit, and fled to a neighbouring country. Several other members of the unit have disappeared and are feared dead.

“If I went home, they’d kill me. Ten of my former colleagues are missing. I’m 100% certain that Berta Cáceres was killed by the army,” Cruz told the Guardian.

Cáceres, an indigenous Lenca leader who won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for a campaign against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, was shot dead in her home in March. Before her murder, she had reported 33 death threats linked to the campaign and had warned international human rights delegates that her name was on a hitlist.

According to Cruz, Cáceres’s name appeared on a list given to a military police unit in the Inter-institutional Security Force (Fusina), which last summer received training from 300 US marines and FBI agents.

………

Cáceres’s daughter, Bertita Zúñiga, said Cruz’s testimony strengthened the family’s calls for an independent international investigation to find the intellectual authors.

“This shows us that death squads are operating in the armed forces, which are being used to get rid of people opposing government plans. It shows us that human rights violations are state policy in Honduras.”

Hillary Clinton's foreign policy cred is a myth.

She has been wrong, and continues to be wrong, on Everything.

Peter Thiel's America

There are a lot of people out there who support Peter Thiel using his billions to harass Gawker through the legal process because they and its founder and CEO Nick Denton are bad people who practice shallow gossip journalism.

Well, this sort of action most often cuts against ordinary citizens who choose to raise their voices against the powerful as is shown in the case of the $30,000,000.00 lawsuit against activists in Uniontown, Alabam who have the temerity to object to Green Group Holdings and Howling Coyote's poisoning their water by dumping of millions of pounds of toxic coal ash there:

“We all should have the right to clean air and clean water.”

Would you agree with that sentence? Would you say it yourself? It seems uncontroversial — something kids might be taught in school. Something any of us might say without blinking an eye. Unless, that is, you happened to say it in Uniontown, Alabama — an overwhelmingly Black and poor rural town in the heart of the South’s Black Belt. In Uniontown, it turns out that having the audacity to fight for your fundamental human rights — for instance, by saying the exact sentence above — can get you sued for $30 million in federal court by companies seeking to silence their critics.

………

Fighting for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.

………

In the lawsuit, Green Group and Howling Coyote claim that by advocating against hazardous waste in their town, Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have engaged in “defamation” that’s harmed them to the tune of a cool $30 million. But the only harm evident in this lawsuit is the gripping terror that average citizens — not scientists or paid policy wonks — feel after being sued for millions for speaking their truth in order to protect their community. Fortunately, the First Amendment protects a person’s right to do precisely what Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis have so bravely done.

Think again about that sentence: We all should have the right to clean air and clean water. Would you say it if you knew a powerful corporation would sue you for (more than) everything you’ve got? No one should have to make that choice.

The law in this case may focus on the First Amendment, but the story of Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis is one about racial justice. In Uniontown, racial justice means environmental justice. And the road to justice starts with voices calling out injustice. The ACLU is representing [6] Esther, Ben, Mary, and Ellis to make sure their voices are not silenced.

This is exactly the same thing that Peter Thiel is doing.

The only difference is that these companies are not attempting to claim that this is some sort of act of philanthropy, as the PayPal founder does.

These are all SLAPP suits, and they are all profoundly corrupting and profoundly evil.

Koch Brothers Want to Strip Mine the Grand Canyon ……… Literally

And you have to figure that, staunch libertarians that they are, they will find a way to extract subsidies from the taxpayer to do this:

Amid rumors that Charles and David Koch will be withdrawing their presence at the Republican National Convention, it has been revealed the billionaires have been funneling money into an Arizona-based group fighting a plan to ban uranium mining around the Grand Canyon, which would also protect 1.7 million acres of land.

The proposal is supported by 80% of Arizona residents, environmental groups, and native tribes, the Guardian reports. Yet, Greg Zimmerman of the Center for Western Priorities has found that a non-profit group, the Prosper Foundation, is fighting to block the move. The group received 83% of their total budget, over $1.5 million, from an organization called American Encore.

Zimmerman, digging deeper, found that American Encore is run by one Sean Noble, a man with very close ties to the Koch brothers. A donor from a Koch brothers’ “dark money” funding network has also channeled cash to the group.

“Prosper, which was formed in 2013, covers nearly its entire budget with funds from Koch-backed American Encore—formerly known as the Center to Protect Patient Rights. According to tax filings, American Encore has funded 83 percent of Prosper Inc.’s total budget since its creation, donating over $1.5 million to the organization in 2013 and 2014,” Zimmerman wrote for ThinkProgress.

What a surprise.

I can think of no better reason for increasing the inheritance tax than these guys, who seem to think that they to deserve to run the world because they won the birth lottery.

Well, That Didn't Take Long

As some of you know, even though Obama shut down the Keystone XL project, significant portions of the pipeline, the plain old Keystone (no XL) have already been completed in the upper Midwest.

And that part just had an oil spill:

The Keystone pipeline will likely remain shut down for the rest of the week while officials investigate an apparent oil spill in southeastern South Dakota.

Oil covered a 300-square-foot area in a farm field ditch 4 miles from a Freeman-area pump station, about 40 miles southwest of Sioux Falls. It was discovered Saturday. TransCanada hasn't released the amount of oil.

About 100 workers are investigating where the oil came from and removing the contaminated soil. No pipeline damage had been found as of midmorning Tuesday, company spokesman Mark Cooper said.

TransCanada also said it had found no significant environmental harm. State officials were monitoring the cleanup, and so far TransCanada has "taken the necessary steps," said Brian Walsh, an environmental scientist with the South Dakota Department of Natural Resources.

The pipeline runs from Alberta, Canada, to refineries in Illinois and Cushing, Oklahoma, passing through the eastern Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. It's part of a pipeline system that also would have included the Keystone XL pipeline had President Barack Obama not rejected that project last November.

The Keystone pipeline can handle 550,000 barrels, or about 23 million gallons, daily. Cooper didn't immediately know the status of the oil that normally would be flowing through the pipeline.

I am so not surprised.

Oil pipelines are difficult, and TransCanada sucks it managing and maintaining them.

Emails: Flint water warnings reached gov's inner circle

Another email dump, and now we have proof that the Governor's senior staff knew of the problems with Flint's water over a year before they acknowledged the problem

Two top advisers to Gov. Rick Snyder urged switching Flint back to Detroit’s water system in October 2014 after General Motors Co. said the city’s heavily chlorinated river water was rusting engine parts, according to governor’s office emails examined by The Detroit News.

Valerie Brader, then Snyder’s environmental policy adviser, requested that the governor’s office ask Flint’s emergency manager to return to Detroit’s system on Oct. 14, 2014, three weeks before Snyder’s re-election.

Mike Gadola, then the governor’s chief legal counsel, agreed Flint should be switched back to Detroit water nearly a year before state officials relented to public pressure and independent research showing elevated levels of lead in the water and bloodstreams of Flint residents.

“To anyone who grew up in Flint as I did, the notion that I would be getting my drinking water from the Flint River is downright scary,” Gadola wrote. “Too bad the (emergency manager) didn’t ask me what I thought, though I’m sure he heard it from plenty of others.”

………

Brader’s email alludes to festering concerns about how the chlorine used to kill the bacteria outbreak was causing the formation of a harmful disinfection byproduct known as trihalomethane, a carcinogen that can increase the risk of cancer, liver, kidney and central nervous system problems.

“Specifically, there has been a boil water order due to bacterial contamination,” Brader wrote. “What is not yet broadly known is that attempts to fix that have led to some levels of chlorine-related chemicals that can cause long-term damage if not remedied (though we believe they will remedy them before any damage would occur in the population).”

Two months later, the Department of Environmental Quality issued a Safe Drinking Water Act violation to Flint for the high levels of trihalomethanes in the water. Flint violated the law twice more until coming into compliance on Sept. 2, 2015, state records show.

Despite the staff concerns about the city’s brownish water quality, Snyder’s staff never took a recommendation to him that Flint be switched back to Detroit water until the following October.

The Governor was not told because he made it clear that he did not want to be told.

We need to see some depraved heart murder prosecutions.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has released more of his emails, and it is pretty clear that he knew that he was poisoning the people of Flint, and he did not care:

Gov. Syder released 1.02 GB of emails in pdf form from various departments in his administration. However, none of them are pre-2014, a time period when many of the decisions regarding Flint’s move to the Flint River as its temporary source of drinking water were being made. Still, there is a LOT of new information in these emails and much of today’s news round-up comes from analysis of them by various news outlets. If you have a burning desire to plow through the gigabyte and change of files, here are the links to all of them:

………

In late March 2013, a full year before Flint switched to the Flint River as the source for its drinking water under the order of its Emergency Manager and with sign-off by their boss State Treasurer Andy Dillon, DEQ officials warned them about the potential for problems. In an email sent on March 26th, Stephen Busch, a staffer in the drinking water division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) informed his superiors about problems they could anticipate making the switch. That email was then forwarded up the food chain to Treasurer Dillon. Here’s are some of the warning flags he raised:

………

Mike Glasgow, Flint’s laboratory and water quality supervisor at the time of the switch to the Flint River made it very clear in an email to DEQ officials that the city’s water treatment plant was not going to be ready to treat river water in time for the conversion from water obtained from the Detroit Water and Sewerage (DWSD). However, his superiors were blowing him off:

………

On September 30th, Gov. Snyder finally acknowledged what nearly everyone else already knew: Flint had a problem with poisoned water and his administration had made mistakes, including not properly treating the water to prevent corrosion. However, it took until November 4th for his administration to finally authorize the installation of the corrosion control equipment:

………

Between Gov. Snyder’s admission and the approval of the corrosion control equipment, DEQ director Dan Wyant, a man with no background in water treatment or water regulations, assured the public that corrosion control had been in place the whole time. By the time he got around to approving the equipment, Flint had already switched back to DWSD water (that is already treated with phosphate for corrosion control.)

All of this happened, by the way, months after the EPA had been pushing them to begin phosphate treatment back in August:

The original docs are at the link along with some damning quote.

I want to see some prosecutions for depraved heart murder.

They knew that they were putting people's lives at risk, and they did not care.

TransCanada, Calm Down and Have a Piping Hot Cup of Shut the F%$# Up

Everyone's favorite oil spill pipeline company is suing the United States for stopping the pipeline:

TransCanada said on Wednesday that it would seek $15 billion in damages over the Obama administration’s decision to cancel the company’s Keystone XL pipeline project.

The company is taking the unusual step of suing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, calling the decision “arbitrary and unjustified.” The Canadian business also filed a lawsuit in Houston asking that the decision be overturned.

“TransCanada has been unjustly deprived of the value of its multibillion-dollar investment by the U.S. administration’s action,” the company said in a statement. “Rather, the denial was a symbolic gesture based on speculation about the (false) perceptions of the international community regarding the administration’s leadership on climate change.”

Seriously, just stop whining.

And this is Mild Compared to the Trans-Pacific Partnership

The WTO has just ruled that requiring the labeling of dolphin safe tuna is an unacceptable restraint of trade:

International trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) need to be carefully examined piece by piece because they can take precedence over a country’s own laws.

Case in point: the World Trade Organization (WTO) on Friday ruled that dolphin-safe tuna labeling rules — required by U.S. law, in an effort to protect intelligent mammals from slaughter — violate the rights of Mexican fishers.

As a result, the U.S. will have to either alter the law or face sanctions from Mexico.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how the “investor-state dispute settlement system” baked into trade agreements can force countries to compensate corporations when regulations cut into their profits.

The long-running quarrel over tuna reveals another way that domestic laws can be overturned by trade agreements: when countries can file trade challenges on behalf of domestic industries.

“This should serve as a warning against expansive trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would replicate rules that undermine safeguards for wildlife, clean air, and clean water,” said the Sierra Club’s Ilana Solomon in a statement.

This short of crap is a feature of trade deals, not a bug.