By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger

President Barack Obama announced this week that his administration would open areas from Delaware to Florida and in Alaska to offshore drilling for gas and oil. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Transportation also released new guidelines for auto emissions to cut carbon emissions, and the EPA said new benchmarks for issuing mountaintop mining permits would prevent damage to waterways in Appalachia.  The environmental community welcomed these last two announcements but both were overshadowed by the off-shore drilling decision, which green groups largely condemned.

Off-putting off-shore drilling decision

Although as a candidate President Obama began by opposing off-shore drilling, by the end of the campaign he said he would support an expansion of drilling areas.  Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard explains the series of decisions that made this week’s announcement possible:

“In October 2008, amidst calls of “drill, baby, drill” from conservatives, Congress failed to renew the long-standing moratorium on offshore drilling. Months earlier, George W. Bush had lifted an 18-year-old executive ban on offshore drilling, which had originally been imposed by his father in 1990. Obama, of course, could have issued his own order, but didn’t.”

The administration had been considering the decision to go ahead with drilling for about a year but kept deliberations quiet. Key senators, however, knew the decision was coming, and it’s pushing Democrats like Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) to warm towards energy legislation, TPMDC reports.

Cars’ carbon emission

The EPA’s announcement on auto emissions, on the other hand, comes as no surprise. It marks the first big step the Obama administration has taken to limit carbon emissions through regulation. Auto regulations are a relatively easy sell.  A chunk of Congress wants to keep the EPA from taking these sorts of actions, but in this case, the auto industry supports the federal regulations. At the Washington Independent, Aaron Wiener notes that “the guidelines drew immediate praise from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which has long advocated national emissions and efficiency regulations rather than patchwork state-by-state rules.”

Mountaintop removal mining

The coal industry will be less happy about the EPA’s announcement on mountaintop removal mining. The agency admitted that the practice causes significant damage to streams and said its new guidelines would lead to significantly less harm.

The new policies, Jeff Biggers writes at AlterNet, will “effectively bring an end to the process of valley fills (and the dumping of toxic coal mining waste into the valleys and waterways).” It could be, he says, “the beginning of the end of mountaintop removal.”

One sign that mountaintop removal’s doomsday is nigh? Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), one of coal’s staunchest and most powerful advocates on the Hill, praised the EPA’s decision, reports Mike Lillis at the Washington Independent.

Green groups groan

Green groups are lauding the EPA’s two announcements. (The Sierra Club called the mining announcement “the most significant administrative action ever taken to address mountaintop removal coal mining,” for instance.) But the push for off-shore drilling has environmental advocates squirming.

“As the president extends olive branches to his critics, he’s alienating allies in the environmental community, who say his policies are reminding them more and more of those of his predecessor, George W. Bush,” says Mother Jones’ Sheppard. “Some enviros are even likening Obama to Alaska’s oil-loving ex-governor, Sarah Palin.”

On Democracy Now!, Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity, called the decision “horribly disappointing” and said, “Obama is essentially embracing wholeheartedly the policy of: we can drill our way to energy independence.”

The Obama administration’s energy and environmental policy is creeping ever further towards the center. Ken Salazar, Secretary for the Interior, said this week that “Cap-and-trade is not in the lexicon anymore,” TPMDC reports. It’s no wonder that progressive members of Congress are starting to feel uncomfortable with the direction their climate bill is taking, as Sheppard reports. The president may be using up his reserves of political support from his allies as he stretches to meet conservatives and centrist Democrats on some shaky middle ground.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

 

 

The funniest thing about the appeals of various Republicans to the xenophobia of "real", White Americans isn't even that Obama is outperforming among white voters compared to all Democratic candidates since Carter, demonstrating that Republican politicians don't get white people, either. Certainly not all of us, and getting it wrong to the point where their overtly divisive behavior is turning off members of their own party. The funniest thing is that their definitions of what makes a real American (I know I'm not the first person to notice this) excludes the Americans who were here first.

I found a YouTube clip of a video address of Obama's to a Native gathering while searching for something unrelated last week, and in it, he covered in more detail the points he makes in the clip embedded here, saying "We're going to end nearly a century of mismanagement of Indian Trusts. We're going to work together to settle unresolved cases." Hmm. And, "I believe treaty commitments are paramount law." Hmmm.

You may have been aware of the class action lawsuits, the Cobell trials (Cobell v Kempthorne, prev. Cobell v Norton), brought by Native Americans against the Department of the Interior for mismanagement of resource royalties. I knew about them mainly through the good offices of the Wampum bloggers who've been writing about DOI corruption and other Indian issues for years.

So I went looking for recent news stories related to the Trust, and found a doozy. While the finance industry was beginning to unravel, a report was released on the Minerals Management Service's oversight practices:

... On Sept.10, Earl Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, released a report to Congress that documented - in lurid and embarrassing detail - the widespread use of sex, bribes and drugs by MMS employees to lubricate their professional relationships with officials of the oil and mineral industries.

...This is the office responsible for collecting royalties from energy companies that drill for oil and gas on public land owned by you and me. Last year alone, more than $14 billion in royalties was collected by MMS and deposited in our account. We cannot be sure of the real total, however, since MMS accounts are so bungled that no one can be sure if the reckoning is close to correct.

Coincidentally, the MMS is also responsible for collecting royalties for resources taken from more than 11 million acres of Indian land. ...

The accounts for the Indian Trusts alone had been so poorly kept that the judge who ruled on the Cobell case found it impossible to determine how much the plaintiffs were even owed, and levelling part of the blame for the sorry state of affairs at Congress for failing to properly fund an internal investigation and full accounting. That the whole oversight arm was managed the same way should hardly have been surprising.

And it happened that I had a real all-in-this-together moment, because it was clear that, just as Jack Abramoff had perfected his corruption by playing tribes off of one another, the DOI disregard of Indian treaty obligations seem long ago to have spilled over and become standard practice. This is more than just an Indian issue, but perhaps fittingly, the persistent marginalization of Indian concerns means we've all been taking a bath on this.

The oil and gas industries have a history of fraud and underpayment of all federal and local royalty obligations. Since Bush took office, even MMS' efforts to collect what was owed without expensive court cases have dropped off considerably, and they weren't great to begin with. Is the government missing millions? Billions? No one in government even knows.  

You could think of this lack of enforcement as a back door tax cut for ExxonMobil. At a time when the country is in a financial crisis and Americans' standards of living have been dropping, the government has been letting our wealthiest corporate citizens out of their financial responsibilities on the sly.

Or put another way, the coal, oil and gas companies have been stealing from the rest of us, from the First Americans to the vast majority of taxpayers, to pad their profits. Unless they do business in Alaska.

They've been getting to cut their costs of doing business below what they ought to be, in addition to all the other tax breaks they get. This not only helps them push healthy alternative energy technologies out of the market, but undercuts government attempts to transition to sustainable energy. That's costing us at the pump, costing us in utility bills, and costing us at the doctor'soffice. Privatizing profit and socializing risk, as usual.

Anyway, I hope Obama's as good as his word, and makes the treaty obligations right. While he's at it though, might as well clean up the Interior Department and get a full accounting to the public of what's been going on there and in Congress.

Might turn up some extra money to pay off Paulson's ransom demands. Let's hear the corporatists scream about spreading the wealth, then.

There's more...

This morning I heard on C-SPAN radio about 10 minutes of an Anne Korin speech (Co-Director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, and Chair of Set America Free), delivered live to the National Conservative Student Conference in DC.  In the space of a few minutes, filled with a fast-paced presentation of data on global oil production and US oil consumption, I learned that she favors quick adoption by the US of plug-in hybrids, combined with flex-fuels combustion engines, as the most immediate path to extricating ourselves from our current national security pickle.

She sure made sense to me -- but then, I'm a sucker for arguments set up with a marshaling of seemingly relevant facts (that why I'm a Biden supporter, by the way - but that's another topic).  She made so much sense that I'm about to sit down and watch the video on C-SPAN's site (Korin appears about one hour in on the morning session).  

I did a quick search online looking for any critiques of her analysis -- nothing so far.  I'm curious what the progressive blogosphere thinks of her work.  Anyone?  I did learn she teamed up with James Woolsey on a National Review article last September: "Turning Oil Into Salt," and that apparently Woolsey is now advising McCain.  I also found a KCRW radio show she appeared on last November (in a segment titled, "Is America's Thirst for Expensive Oil Fueling Dictators?")

Thanks for any comments.

~ Rob

There's more...

John McCain, desperately trying to seize upon the one topic he has some leverage with, derided an aside of Barack Obama's regarding gas conservation. He and MN Governor Tim Pawlenty seized on a comment Obama made that maintaining proper tire pressure could help save gas. Clearly, this is pretty lame. McCain is taking a single line from Obama's comments out of context. That's pretty typical political hack work, but nothing unusual.

But check out this insight from David Brauer at MinnPost, a Minnesota news site:

According to fueleconomy.gov, gas use drops 3.3 percent when tire pressure is right, offering a bigger savings than, say, offshore drilling.

Brauer has a fantastic point here. Recently, on my personal blog, I showed that that the conservative energy plan would save us $1 per barrel of oil in 2030. John McCain should avoid taking Obama's comments out of context when even Obama's small ideas pack more of a punch than McCain's major policy initiatives.

Crossposted to the Twin Cities Daily Liberal

There's more...

It might not surprise you that the answer is "no." He doesn't care about your price at the pump; all he cares about is increasing profits for the oil companies that have donated $210,000 to his campaign. That's the only possible reason for some of his ridiculous votes and fuzzy math.

Let's look at his ridiculous votes first. Coleman's campaign said he "voted against last week's [proposal to reduce oil speculation] because it lacked an offshore provision." Let me see if I understand this correctly: Coleman believes that oil speculation is hurting Americans, but he won't fix it unless we allow more drilling to increase oil companies' windfall profits. Clearly, Coleman's not being motivated by a desire to help Minnesotans.

Now, in the fuzzy math department, Coleman has essentially admitted that his offshore drilling plan is useless. He has criticized Al Franken's plan to sell 50 million barrels from the strategic oil reserve between now and election day, saying it would make only an "incremental difference."But Franken's plan would provide at least 30% more oil per day than Coleman's plan for offshore drilling. I've explained previously why conservatives' plans to lower gas prices are useless, and Coleman's is no better.

Now, I'll admit I don't believe Franken's plan will be helpful. Why? Because adding small amounts of oil to the supply in a global market hardly causes prices to budge. The exact same principle applies to Coleman's plan to dramatically expand drilling, just to produce an amount of oil he has already admitted will not have an impact on prices. So, if Coleman admits that this won't lower prices, why is he so focused on offshore drilling? You guessed it: $210,000 is a lot of money.

There's more...