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Keystone Kops: During Pipeline Protest, Texas Woman Arrested For Trespassing — On Her Own Property!

By Public Lands Team on Oct 7, 2012 at 12:18 pm

By Jessica Goad

The recent protests against the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline have reached a new height in Texas.  On Thursday, Eleanor Fairchild, a 78-year old great-grandmother, was arrested for trespassing after she stood in the path of bulldozers and machinery on her 300-acre ranch outside of Winnsboro, Texas that were tearing down trees to make the way for pipeline construction.

Fairchild, who was joined in her civil disobedience by actress and activist Darryl Hannah, explained her actions in a video saying:

Get off my land.  Period.  I don’t want tar sands anywhere in the United States. I am mad.  This land is my land. It’s been our land since ’83, our home is on it.  They are going to destroy the woods, and also they could destroy the springs.  It’s devastating, but it also is not very good to have tar sands anywhere in the United States.  This is not just about my land, it’s about all of our country.  It needs to be stopped.

Watch it:

 

At issue is the power of eminent domain, which allows the government to seize (for fair compensation) private property without the consent of the owner for projects considered to be for the public use or benefit.  Steve Mufson of the Washington Post reported earlier this summer that:

The vast majority of landowners have signed agreements with TransCanada, the pipeline owner. But where necessary, the Calgary, Alberta-based company is busy going to state courts to exercise eminent domain and lining up rights to cross properties throughout the Great Plains

While eminent domain and the laws and statutes surrounding it are complicated, the Keystone XL situation in Texas has come down to whether the pipeline is a common carrier of oil (giving it the right to eminent domain) or a private project (meaning that the company would have to negotiate individually with landowners).  Just recently, a judge ruled in favor of TransCanada and granted it eminent domain.  As Fairchild refused to sell any of her land to TransCanada and did not sign any contracts, the company was able to use eminent domain and legally have her arrested for trespassing on her own land.

The Washington Post described TransCanada’s general attitude towards landowners fighting pipeline by quoting one of the company’s lawyers who said:

We are not going to have one landowner hold up a multibillion-dollar project that is going to be for the benefit of the public.

The Keystone XL pipeline consists of three legs.  The northern and most well-known portion runs from Alberta, Canada to Steele City, Nebraska, and it remains under additional review by the U.S. Department of State because landowners in Nebraska raised serious concerns about its impacts on the Ogallala Aquifer.  Construction on the southernmost leg began in August (President Obama directed his administration to “make this project a priority” in March), and a middle leg that is already online runs from Steele City to Cushing.

In addition to Fairchild and Hannah’s arrests, currently a handful of protestors are camped out in a tree house in the path of the pipeline construction.  And protestors have been arrested after chaining themselves to heavy machinery over the last few weeks.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Election

GOP Strategist Says Romney Is Withholding Details Of His Tax Plan To Avoid Criticism

By Josh Israel on Oct 7, 2012 at 11:46 am

Mike Murphy

Republican consultant Mike Murphy, a former Romney strategist, said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that it is unfair to criticize Mitt Romney’s lack of specificity on how to pay for his proposed 20 percent income tax cut. Should Romney identify what loopholes he would cut to offset the tax cuts, Murphy argued, he would be criticized for doing so.

Murphy argued:

Here is the problem. You guys won’t give him any credit for closing loopholes, because like you guys, he won’t name the loopholes. Why? Because you’ll attack him for doing it. You attack him for not giving you a little target… and then you attack him when you get the target.

Watch the video:

Murphy’s argument is that if Romney is transparent with the American people about what tax loopholes he would close to offset the roughly $5 trillion such a 20 percent tax cut would cost — those proposals might be subject to scrutiny and criticism.

What sort of “loopholes” might Romney include? Murphy suggested perhaps it might include reductions in how much families with mortgages can deduct their interest payments from their taxes. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center estimates that those deductions save taxpayers an average of $559 annually.

Health

Mary Matalin Calls Paul Krugman A ‘Liar’ For Telling The Truth

By Sy Mukherjee on Oct 7, 2012 at 11:21 am

During a roundtable discussion on George Stephanoupolos’ This Week Sunday morning, GOP political consultant Mary Matalin got into a heated exchange with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, calling him a “liar” for previously referring to Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan as a “voucher” program:

MATALIN: You have mischaracterized and you have lied about every position and every particular of the Ryan plan on Medicare, from the efficiency of Medicare administration, to calling it a voucher plan, so you’re hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar.

Watch it:

But this is exactly what the Ryan proposal is — turning Medicare from a “defined benefit” into a “defined contribution” plan. Seniors would get a voucher from the federal government that they could use to help pay for a selection of private plans.

Although the Romney/Ryan campaign has shied away from this phrase in favor of the euphemistic “premium support,” Ryan himself has specifically referred to his proposal as a “voucher” program in the past.

Security

VIEWPOINT: Why This Election Is About More Than Drones

By Zack Beauchamp on Oct 7, 2012 at 10:57 am

The United States government is killing people. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are all being pounded by missiles launched from US drones, and though the missiles are ostensibly targeted against terrorists, it seems possible that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the crossfire. Neither party’s nominee will debate this issue. That’s a terrible shame – the drone campaign is a morally fraught policy that merits a full-throated public debate. The innocents killed by the strikes demand it.

In that sense, then, Conor Friedersdorf’s massively viral essay focusing on the drone war and other don’t-call-it War on Terror policies is a welcome spotlight on some critically ignored issues. It’s unfortunate, then, that the piece itself and the underlying thinking it represents are disappointing.

Conor believes the drone campaign is indefensible; it kills without appreciable benefit. Anyone who supports it must be deluded:

At worst, this policy creates more terrorists than it kills; at best, America is ruining the lives of thousands of innocent people and killing hundreds of innocents for a small increase in safety from terrorists. It is a cowardly, immoral, and illegal policy, deliberately cloaked in opportunistic secrecy. And Democrats who believe that it is the most moral of all responsible policy alternatives are as misinformed and blinded by partisanship as any conservative ideologue.

As a consequence, he argues, one cannot in good faith support Obama or Romney for President; the former escalated drone strikes and the other would continue them. Together with other civil liberty violations, drone strikes ought be electoral “dealbreakers,” particularly for progressives. You’ve seen similar arguments before, but Conor’s variant has struck a nerve, so it’s worth using it as a proxy for the broader debate.

As it happens, both sides of his syllogism are wrong. It’s not obvious that drone strikes are indefensible and, even if they are morally wrong, they shouldn’t determine your vote alone.

Let’s start with the first half: Conor’s strident judgment about the drone program is belied by a wealth of credible evidence. Al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan depends on physical space in order to conduct its activities; having a location where senior leaders can train and socialize new recruits is critical to developing operatives capable of doing significant damage to high-value and/or Western targets. Given the precarious political and nuclear situation in Pakistan, it seems that degrading al-Qaeda in the Af-Pak region should be a paramount goal of American counterterrorism policy.

Targeted killings appear to be severely hampering al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Pir Zubair Shah, reporting from Pakistan, believes the strikes have weakened al-Qaeda “to a significant extent” and that they are “the only politically viable option for U.S. counterterrorism goals.” Shah is backed up by two studies finding that targeted campaigns against terrorist and insurgent leaderships have been effective in the past. The reason is relatively simple — targeted killings terrorists kill key leaders and make others afraid to risk open organization. There’s some evidence we’re seeing this effect in Pakistan already; another study found that drone strikes are lowering the frequency and lethality of militant violence.

This evidence also complicates Conor’s contention that drones are an unjustifiable assault on Pakistani civilians. Local surveys suggests that militant attacks, not drones, are viewed as the principal threat by people in the affected areas. Moreover, there’s some reason to believe that many fewer civilians and a concomitantly higher percent of Taliban/al-Qaeda are killed by drone strikes than Conor believes. If drone strikes really are less dangerous than local militants, and the costs of said militant attacks are being blunted by drones, the humanitarian calculus isn’t as simple as “drones kill civilians, ergo they’re unjustifiable.”

Put this together and you have a reasonable argument for the drone campaign along these lines:

There are high-value al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. If left unchecked, these terrorists might kill a significant number of American citizens. Campaigns targeted at leaders of terrorist organizations have had success the past and, while there’s reason to believe the US is hitting more than just leaders, the consequent blowback isn’t helping al-Qaeda enough to make up the damage. Moreover, drones are decreasing the frequency of militant attacks that kill civilians, which balances against their occasionally overstated harm. There are serious concerns about transparency and targeting procedures, but overall the status quo is morally preferable to simply ending the drone strikes.

Do I believe this case? I’m totally unsure. I find myself equally persuaded by arguments mounted by people like Conor and Kevin Gosztola as by the above. There’s good reason to believe the historical data on targeted strikes is incomplete and muky; the case for strikes is also much weaker outside Af-Pak. Even there, strikes might not defeat al-Qaeda given blowback and Pakistani policy. The civilian casualty count could be much higher than usually reported. Conor et al. may very well be right; I’m genuinely unsure as to which side gets the better of the argument.

But that’s the point; the drone issue is hard to resolve on the merits. We’re dealing with a highly classified program operating in what are essentially war zones about which the relevant data is uniquely muddled. Has Conor spent time in Pakistan? Falsified competing local reports? Does he have reason to believe Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal would be safe from a reconstituted al-Qaeda after strikes ceased?

Someone can disagree with Conor on these questions without being a dupe. The drone campaign might well be morally wrong, but it isn’t obviously so. Reasonable people with shared values can disagree without, as Conor says, being “misinformed and blinded by partisanship.” Drones are the topic of a particularly difficult debate; disagreement isn’t irrational or blasphemous.

This brings me to my second point: given the opacity of the drone debate, there’s no reason it should outweigh other, clearer issues that might incline one towards an Obama vote. Consider the following :

– Lack of health care kills up to 45,000 Americans per year. Romney wants to repeal the most significant effort to limit these preventable deaths in American history and doesn’t appear have a real policy alternative, let alone a legislatively viable one.

– Climate change could take 100 million lives around the globe; Romney belongs to a party that denies the reality of climate change and mocks the issue himself while Obama has taken modest but important steps toward addressing it.

These are just two examples of Obama-Romney differences separated from drones by a world of evidentiary difference. The overwhelming consensuses among climate scientists and health experts are that warming and lack of insurance are real problems with very high costs in human lives — thousands, potentially millions of lives are at risk, many more than are taken by drones. Unlike the murky issues surrounding the drone war, these facts are well-established by relevant reporting and research. Conor has said he’d be willing to vote for Obama if half the world were at stake; just where does he draw the line?

There’s a caveat here — Conor may not think Obamacare will effectively expand access to health insurance or that regulating CO2 is a cost-effective response to climate change. And fair enough; he’s a libertarian. But Conor’s piece was addressed to people on the left; his goal was to explain, on their terms, why Obama’s drone and civil liberties record should be a dealbreaker. Such people tend to believe — rightly, I might add — that the evidence clearly shows that Obama has made significant (albeit incomplete and reversible) progress on health and climate relative to the status quo or Romney.

Conor says this audience should ignore the hundreds of thousands of lives that they’re convinced would be imperiled by a Romney victory and stay at home because of a debatably justifiable program with a much lower cost in lives. In essence, an issue that’s difficult on the merits for progressives should outweigh all of their other core priorities!

In a later piece, Conor clarified that the point of his original polemic was to “spur readers to confront the problematic policies and attitudes that have taken hold here since the September 11 terrorist attacks.” That’s commendable; as I’ve said, we need be having a conversation that takes Conor’s concerns about drones much more seriously. Inasmuch as that’s what he’s done, I applaud him and the piece. But you can’t fully separate goal from content here, and the substance of Conor’s actual argument blinds his readers to the substantive debate surrounding the drone program and whitewashes the real cost in lives attendant in adopting his priorities. Politics by its nature demands terrible tradeoffs; Conor’s Kantian voting scheme makes the issues he cares about seem simple and the issues he doesn’t disappear. This isn’t about “lesser evils;” it’s about accomplishing the greatest amount of good we can, starting with minimizing the amount of unnecessary death in the world. The fact that we can’t save every life doesn’t mean we shouldn’t save some.

Climate Progress

‘End of Nature’ Question Of The Week: Are ‘We As Gods Upon This Earth’ Or ‘More Like Chewbacca in Star Wars’?

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 7, 2012 at 10:55 am

As Stewart Brand put it: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

…. If we are as gods upon this Earth, then we are peculiarly bumbling gods.

… we are more like Chewbacca in Star Wars, pounding the walls of the ship in hopes it will continue to go.

USFWS Pacific, via Flickr

by Rob McDonald, via The Nature Conservancy

The tropical sun rises early over Palmyra Atoll, shining light on a beautiful coral reef, a sliver of an island, and little else. Pamyra is 1,000 miles south of from the nearest major airport and city, a little speck of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Signs of military activity from World War II remain — an airfield, some old buildings — but most days there are less than two dozen people on the whole island, scientific researchers there to study.

Palymra Atoll’s remoteness was what led The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect it in 2000, for it has one of the most ecologically intact coral reef ecosystems in the world, with a diversity of fishes and corals that have been lost from reefs with more human activity. And yet even here, human actions have put coral reefs in danger of being destroyed. Climate change will warm ocean waters, killing many of Palmyra’s corals, and trash from all over the world washes up on its beaches. Decisions by people in Beijing or New York to drive to work will affect how many greenhouse gases are emitted, which will control the severity of climate change, which in turn will determine the fate of Palmyra.

From climate change to deforestation to water flows to soil erosion, the impacts of human actions are now having global impact. Some scientists are calling this new era of human domination “the Anthropocene.” In a recent front-page article, the Washington Post even revived Kenneth Boulding’s famous description of “Spaceship Earth,” a craft whose life-support system we must maintain if we want to survive.

Many environmentalists feel regret about the thoroughgoing way people have domesticated the natural world to suit our interests. Bill McKibben has even movingly written about “the end of nature” — at least, if “nature” is conceived as something separate and apart from people. But a recent flood of books and articles have a response to McKibben: get over it. Whether intentionally or not, these authors argue, humans are managing many of the major ecological processes on the planet.

From this point of view, what we feel morally about past human actions is irrelevant to the future. McKibben and his ilk (including me!) may mourn the disappearance of wild nature, places that are “no man’s garden” (to use Daniel Botkin’s term); while others may be indifferent to its loss.

Many of the thinkers of the Anthropocene have focused on a very important practical question: Given that we are already managing the planet’s natural systems, how can we make the domestication of nature smarter — both in the sense of increased productivity and enhanced sustainability?

Or, as Stewart Brand put it: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

I spend most of my professional life as a conservation scientist working to answer pieces of this practical question, and I believe answering it is key to our civilization continuing to thrive. Our domestication of the Earth’s surface is almost certain to increase as global population and economies continue to grow and consume more resources. But in the rush to embrace better management of the planet as the new paradigm of environmentalism, we shouldn’t fail to ask a more basic question: Do we actually know enough about how nature works to actively manage many ecosystem processes — or even improve them? There’s a gradient of human control over ecosystems, from the heavily managed lawn of my apartment building to the bits of relatively wild nature like Palmyra. Even if humans are impacting every point on the Earth’s surface, our degree of management varies greatly. If we are masters of the planet, can we manage or replace everything natural?

To put it another way, humans depend on nature for a lot of things that allow them to survive and prosper. These benefits from nature are called by ecologists, rather dryly, “ecosystem services.” Some of these are tangible goods that come off managed lands, like the food we all eat. But less managed lands can be important too. Many cities depend on forests to maintain the quality of water that runs off into their reservoir, either by filtering out pollutants or by preventing erosion. If the forest wasn’t there the city could build a treatment plant to increase water quality, but at much greater financial cost. Ecosystem services can be more intangible, like the role that wild pollinators play in pollinating some food crops. In places where wild pollinators are gone, humans have stepped in as “bee wranglers” who drive around in trucks full of bee hives, providing pollination to those farmers that can pay for it. If we are planetary gardeners, do we have the technical skill to replace or actively manage all the world’s ecosystem services?

In asking that question, I should add that I reject the fundamental pessimism of some “deep” ecologists who argue that the biosphere’s exquisitely balanced processes of self-regulation could never be equaled by wise human management (or, more darkly, that human management can never be wise).  I see no reason to believe that, if scientists can discover the bizarre world of particle physics and general relativity, that they cannot also discover how to sustainably manage ecosystems.

But our track record of such management thus far is not terribly encouraging.

Bumbling gods

Read more

Politics

Gingrich Concedes Romney Wasn’t Honest About His Tax Plan During Debate

By Judd Legum on Oct 7, 2012 at 9:51 am

This morning on Meet The Press, Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs confronted Newt Gingrich on a fundamental inconsistency in Romney’s description of his tax plan. During the primary debates, Romney insisted that everyone in America would get a 20% tax cut, including the 1%. But last week’s during his debate with Obama, Romney insisted that his tax cut would not reduce taxes at all for wealthy Americans.

Gingrich acknowledged the clear inconsistency, saying “I think it’s clear he changed.” He described the change as “good politics.”

Watch it:

Of course, while Romney’s spin regarding his plan has changed, the plan itself has not. Independent experts have concluded that, even if Romney eliminated every tax deduction, it still wouldn’t counterbalance his massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

His tax plan was one of 27 issues where Romney was less than honest during the debate. Romney’s campaign also conceded he misstated the truth on green jobs.

Climate Progress

Video: eLab Is Setting The Course For A New Electricity Paradigm

By Climate Guest Blogger on Oct 7, 2012 at 9:39 am

by Rebecca Cole, via Rocky Mountain Institute

Rapid innovation and change, cooperation and conflict, are occurring at the “seams” in the electricity sector where no single stakeholder or industry group can control the outcome.

The most important new source of competitive advantage in today’s rapidly changing electricity sector is not technology or market position, it’s the ability of innovators to work efficiently and effectively in complex multi-stakeholder environments.

But shifting the electricity sector will require engagement across traditional institutional boundaries.

“We think that eLab is a new model of innovation and collaboration,” said Lena Hansen, RMI electricity principal. “It’s not a typical project. It’s not something that we’ve done before or that anyone has really done before. I think it has a real shot at doing something different that can move the system forward.”

Watch now and learn:

  • Why “business as usual” is the biggest threat to changing our balkanized electricity system
  • How collaboration on shared issues is key to shifting complex systems
  • How eLab is focused on action—not just talk

What do you think it will take to change our electricity system to one that is cleaner, more reliable, and customer-friendly?

Rebecca Cole is Director of Communications for the Rocky Mountain Institute. This piece was originally published at RMI and was reprinted with permission.

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