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12,000 Encircle White House In Protest of Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline | Today, more than 12,000 people from across the United States and Canada gathered at the White House to call on President Obama to stop the TransCanada Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.  After a rally in Lafayette Square addressed by elected officials, youth climate activists,  environmental leaders, climate scientist James Hansen, religious leaders, Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams, Naomi Klein, and local opponents of the pipeline from South Dakota, Texas, and Nebraska, the boisterous crowd formed a human chain that completely encircled the White House.  The protest, organized by Tar Sands Action, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, 350.org, and others, appeared to exceed turnout expectations, with the human chain running several people deep in most areas.  President Obama acknowledged last week that he will make the final decision on the controversial pipeline — a decision expected before year’s end.

Climate Progress

Oil Lobbyist On CNN: ‘There Are No Loopholes’

By Brad Johnson on Nov 6, 2011 at 1:34 pm

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, American Petroleum Institute lobbyist Marty Durbin claimed “there are no loopholes” for the massively profitable oil industry. CNN’s Candy Crowley asked the lobbyist, after showing one of API’s ads that claim that removing oil subsidies would kill jobs, how the industry can tell Americans to suffer massive cuts while the top five oil companies have already made $100 billion in profits this year on high gas prices. Durbin said that Crowley just got her facts wrong:

CROWLEY: Six big oil companies piled up $36 billion maybe be profits at the end of this year $100 billion. Can you see how people go we need to help the oil industry?

DURBIN: Part of problem is that the facts aren’t out there. There are no loopholes. These are basic tax deductions that every industry is allowed to use.

Watch it:

In fact, there are tens of billions of dollars of special tax breaks and programs that are special to the fossil fuel industry. Here is a short list of such loopholes, with their ten-year cost on the federal budget:

$12.6 billion in percentage depletion for oil and natural gas wells and hard mineral fossil fuels
$12.9 billion in expensing of intangible drilling costs for oil and gas and expensing of exploration and development costs for coal
$18.7 billion domestic manufacturing deduction for oil, gas, and coal production
$0.4 billion in capital gains treatment for coal royalties
$0.2 billion exemption to the passive loss limitation for working interests in oil and natural gas properties
$0.1 billion deduction for tertiary injectants
$2.5 billion in federal tax subsidies to coal companies
$1.3 billion tax credit for refineries
$9.5 billion in royalty-free oil and gas leases

The big oil lobbyist is partly telling the truth, however. There are massive tax loopholes that are also used by other industries in addition to big oil, although they especially advantage the oil industry:

$52 billion in “last in, first out” accounting for inventories, a tax credit that disproportionately helps the oil and gas industry
$10.5 billion dual capacity tax credit, which also largely benefits oil and gas companies

Federal tax policy and programs subsidize the oil industry in other ways that add up to billions of dollars of taxpayer money a year, from oil defense to oil spill liability caps. The biggest oil loophole may be the free pollution of greenhouse gases that have an estimated cost to society of $100 a ton. The American Petroleum Institute is willing to spend millions running ads on CNN and sponsoring its presidential debates.

Marty Durbin is Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) nephew. Sen. Durbin has called for the end to oil subsidies worth $4 billion a year.

Yglesias

Two Ways Of Looking At The Job Market In March 2010

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 6, 2011 at 1:32 pm

Here’s the way I think the Obama administration saw it:

That’s a steep downturn at the end of the Bush administration followed by a sharp recovery. Verdict: Our crisis intervention measures worked, and the conditions for future growth are set. Here’s the way they should have seen it:

This is a steep decline at the end of the Bush administration, which slows and then ends. Verdict: Our crisis intervention measures worked, but now we’re at the bottom of a big ditch and need a new set of measures to climb back to the top.

Note that these are just two different presentations of the same US private employment data. Both valid glances at the situation, and indeed to a trained eye they’re perfectly equivalent. But the affect associated with them is quite different. Everyone knows better than to just naively project that current trends will continue, but the human mind has trouble not implicitly seeing momentum in these visualizations. In the first chart, things are on the upswing. In the second chart, things have just bottomed out. The second chart was a much better guide to future action.

Security

Evan Bayh Plays Bill Kristol’s Role On Fox News Sunday, Says U.S. Should Bomb Iran

By Ben Armbruster on Nov 6, 2011 at 1:23 pm

Talk of Iran’s nuclear program has heated up in recent weeks with reports that the IAEA will soon release details showing that the Islamic Republic is developing an atomic weapons capability. And this week, Israeli media outlets have been reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is mobilizing support for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilites. The news prompted Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace to ask the show’s weekly panel for reaction. While leading neocon Bill Kristol usually fires off about attacking Iran, today he was a bit measured. “It seems to me the United States has an obligation to act and not leave it to Israel to stop this threat,” he said.

The real warmongering was left to former Democratic senator and member of the war charging Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, Evan Bayh, who boosted the right-wing claim that the Iranians are suicidal maniacs incapable of being deterred and added that, ultimately, the United States will have to attack Iran:

BAYH: The Israelis may be able to launch a one off strike on Iran but they don’t have the ability for the kind of sustained bombing campaign that it would really take to degrade their nuclear arsenal. … You’d have to bomb them for several weeks in a row. There’s only one country that has that kind of capability and that’s the United States. For Israelis it is an existential question. For us it raises the issue, is the Iranian nation a normal nation-state that’s belligerent and does things we don’t like but ultimately is not suicidal and can be deterred. Or are they really a suicidal theocracy that might actually use nuclear weapons even if it meant a nuclear retaliation against them. That’s a different case. … The odds are that they are not a suicidal theocracy. But the question is if you’re Israel can you afford to run that risk? Probably not. …

For us it may be better to try and stop that [proliferation] before it gets started by using limited force to prevent Iran from going nuclear when it gets right down to it. … We have to ask ourselves, is a nuclear Iran acceptable? If the answer is no, there’s really only one way to keep that from coming about and that’s the use of force.

Watch the clip:

While Bayh claimed that for Israelis, the Iran issue “is an existential question,” ex-Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy pushed back on this narrative last week, saying Iran is “far from posing an existential threat to Israel.”

And the claim that Iran is ruled by suicidal maniacs hell bent on blowing up Europe, the United States and Israel with nuclear weapons is an alarmist charge that the right trots out when advocating for military strikes to stop Iran from weaponizing its nuclear program. CAP’s Matt Duss recently outlined this “martyr state myth” over at Foreign Policy and notes that it is based on ” flawed assumptions.”

Thus, Bayh’s warmongering is also based on flawed assumptions. Perhaps he has yet to learn any lessons from his days hawking war with Iraq.

Climate Progress

Canadian PM Harper Says Okaying the Tar Sands Pipeline Is a “Complete No-Brainer.” I Could Not Agree More.

By Joe Romm on Nov 6, 2011 at 12:40 pm

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Aof-2-CNFoQ/TkAkJMXkMOI/AAAAAAAADgg/PTXuWGWiT8k/s1600/ffo_stoptarsands_175x175.jpgThe more we learn about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, the wiser the decision to cancel it becomes.

I agree with the statement by the Center for American Progress (where I’m a senior fellow) that Obama should reject the permit because:

It is not in the national interest, nor is it in humanity’s interest.

I agree with our top climatologist, James Hansen, that “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”  Though just to be clear, avoiding full exploitation of the tar sands is a necessary — but not anywhere near sufficient –  condition for avoiding catastrophic climate change, as Hansen himself has made clear.

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

The Canadian tar sands are substantially dirtier than conventional oil as the chart above shows (longer analysis here).  They may contain enough carbon-intensive fuel to make stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at non-catastrophic levels all but impossible.  I’ll repost Real Climate’s analysis on this subject below.

I am not impressed by the argument of Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations:

Slash oil demand and oil sands development goes away; keep oil demand on its current trajectory and we’ve got huge climate problems regardless of whether Keystone XL is approved.

That argument cleverly allows one to argue against the impact of any individual carbon-intensive action.

But both governing and morality are about choices.  Obama can’t slash oil demand by himself (though he is certainly aggressively pursuing fuel efficiency).  He can stop this pipeline.  The “everybody is doing it” argument is morally indefensible and precisely why we humanity is headed over a cliff with our foot on the accelerator of the fossil-fuel engine.

UPDATE:  Levi has replied to this post with an analogy that simply makes no sense and misses the entire point of the previous paragraph.  You can’t eliminate the moral consequences of any decision simply by saying that it would be a better idea to focus one’s efforts on (seemingly) more consequential decisions.  I’ll explain this at greater length on Monday.

By the way, Memo to all: They ain’t “oil sands.” I can understand why greenwashing Canadian promoters of turning tar into oil use the phrase rather than the traditional term “tar sands” (see “Canada tries to tar-sandbag Obama on climate“), but not why the U.S. media does, and certainly not why Obama does.

No doubt the phrase makes it seem like, oh, I don’t know, maybe up through the sand came a bubblin crude, oil that is, black gold, Texas tea, Athabasca euphemism (see ClimateProgress commenter, Jim Eager, here).  I digress.

The Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a decision to approve Keystone a “complete no-brainer.”  I could not agree more.  See Turns out humans are not like slowly boiling frogs … we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs, since “frogs will indeed remain in slowly heated water, but only if their brain is removed.”

The only “benefit” of  constructing a pipeline is a few thousand mostly temporary jobs, as the WashPost makes clear today.  Republicans attack Obama’s stimulus for creating only temporary jobs, but how they love it when the fossil fuel industry does it.

TP Green has a good chart from Cornell showing  the minimal job benefit in its post “Fact Check: Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline Isn’t A Job Creator“:

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Read more

Security

Rice: Cain Uzbekistan Gaffe ‘Wasn’t A Great Thing To Say If You’re Running For President’

By Ali Gharib on Nov 6, 2011 at 12:08 pm

On ABC’s This Week, former George W. Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dinged the sometimes goofy, gaffe-prone foreign policy of Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain. Asked by host Christiane Amanpour about Cain’s seeming ignorance, and in particular the now-infamous “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan” gaffe, Rice responded with a chuckle that those sorts of comments weren’t the sort of things you like to hear out of a presidential candidate’s mouth:

AMANPOUR: [I]n this particular campaign, [Republicans] all seem like they’re rushing for the exits when it comes to foreign policy. Or, in the case of Herman Cain, kind of making fun of a lack of knowledge — I mean, he did the whole “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan.” Do you find that a little cavalier?

RICE: Well, I think in retrospect it probably wasn’t a great thing to say if you’re running for president. And foreign policy ought to be more a part of the debate than it is, because we’re so interconnected.

Watch the video:

Amanpour also brought up Cain’s statement this week that China’s “indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability,” when, as Amanpour put it, “obviously we all know China has been a nuclear power since the 1960s.” Last week Rice said “not everybody’s a foreign policy expert” when asked to comment on Cain’s China claim. But today when Amanpour asked if she was “alarmed” by the gaffe, the former Secretary of State demurred and said Cain might have misspoke — a suggestion that left Amanpour incredulous. “Christiane, I wasn’t listening and I really don’t know,” said the former Secretary of State. “It concerns me that we are not having a discussion about foreign policy.”

Economy

George Will On Public Sector Job Losses: ‘That’s Good’

By Ben Armbruster on Nov 6, 2011 at 12:01 pm

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced last Friday that 80,000 jobs were added to the American economy last month, ticking the unemployment rate down slightly to 9 percent. The 80,000 added is a net gain, factoring in 104,000 private jobs added and 24,000 public sector jobs lost. Today on ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will said people losing their public sector jobs is a good thing:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Let me turn to you George and ask you about the unemployment numbers. Is that something of a trend or is that scratching the surface? What difference is that going to make?

WILL: Not much. First of all, 80,000 isn’t nearly enough to accomodate even the natural growth month by month of the workforce. There are two bits of good news in there. The 80,000 is a net number. The private sector created 104,000 jobs. The public sector happily shrank by 24,000 jobs. Both of that’s good.

Watch the clip:

Conservatives rejoice at public sector job loss because they think it will spur private job creation (and also fulfill their collective fantasy of controlling the ever encroaching tentacles of the federal government). But the reality is that public sector losses are equaling out private sector gains and thus holding back a wider recovery. And as Matt Yglesias has noted, public sector job loss over the last yeah and a half has not been “delivering any private sector magic.” Federal, state and local governments have shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past year alone while the percentage of millionaires grew by 20 percent. And as the AP noted, the public job “losses add strain” on the overall economic recovery.

“As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, you’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector — teachers, police officers, firefighters losing their jobs,” President Obama said this summer trying to push his jobs plan that Republicans continually object to.

But to George Will, this is all a good thing; he celebrates when Americans lose their jobs with the unemployment rate stagnant at 9 percent.

NEWS FLASH

Jon Huntsman: Personhood Movement ‘Goes Too Far’ | Former Utah Governor and GOP presidential candidate Jon Hutsman told Meet The Press’ David Gregory this morning that state efforts to declare a fertilized human egg a legal person go “too far,” joining a growing chorus of anti-abortion Republicans, doctors, and religious leaders, in questioning the extremist “pesonhood” movement. At least half-dozen states are considering personhood amendments, with Mississippi slated to vote on the measure this coming Tuesday. The measure would essentially criminalize abortion, outlaw contraception like the birth control pill, and even prevent couples from having a child through in vitro fertilization. Watch it:

Yglesias

SimCain

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 6, 2011 at 11:21 am

I believe credit for this SimCity theory belongs to Amanda Terkel, even when the newspaper reporting on it is French.

Still just seems like a coincidence to me.

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