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As America’s “Last Best River” Suffers Through Exxon Spill, Experts Warn of Risks from Keystone XL Pipeline

By Energy Interns on Jul 14, 2011 at 5:50 pm

by Stewart Boss

RHETORIC: In its 2006 pipeline risk assessment for the U.S. State Department permit application, TransCanada predicted that Keystone would see one spill in 7 years.

REALITY: There have been 12 spills in 1 year.

Yellowstone River Clean Up.  AP Photo, Jim Urquhart

Back in 1997, National Geographic named the Yellowstone River America’s “last best river.”  That was before July 1, when ExxonMobil leaked around 1,000 barrels of crude oil that traveled as far as 240 miles downstream from the site of the spill along the longest undammed river in the lower 48 states.

As Congress struggles to understand just what went wrong with the Silvertip Pipeline spill in Montana’s Yellowstone River, the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials met Thursday morning to hear testimony and get answers on what exactly went wrong, and what government and industry can do to avoid similar oil spills in the future.

Unfortunately, this morning’s hearing was chock-full of “we don’t know” responses, illustrating big gaps in the ability of regulators and oil companies to guarantee strong oversight and adequate protection from future accidents. In opening Thursday’s hearing, subcommittee chairman Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) described the spill as a cause for “concern but not alarm.” Not surprisingly, he has received a total of $17,000 from ExxonMobil since 2000 while serving in Congress.

Thursday’s hearing was requested (and attended) by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT). The witnesses at today’s hearing were:

  • Cynthia Quarterman, Administrator, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PMHSA), U.S. Department of Transportation
  • Gary W. Pruessing, President, ExxonMobil Pipeline Company
  • Douglas B. Inkley, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Wildlife Federation

Of particular concern was Quarterman’s response to a question from Rep. Rick Larsen (D-WA), in which she admitted that it would likely not be until August or later that PMHSA would be able to recover the ruptured section of pipeline due to the persistently high water levels in the Yellowstone River. She said that it “may take weeks if not months” before the pipeline can be brought up from the riverbed to enable PHMSA to complete an investigation into the cause of the spill.

NPR has been covering the story, featuring an angry interview with Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer that you can listen to here, as well as a follow-up interview with ExxonMobil’s Pruessing, which you can listen to here. Schweitzer explained the impact of the crisis like this:

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Yglesias

The Fed Should Cut Interest On Excess Reserves

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 14, 2011 at 5:30 pm

In his testimony before Congress, Ben Bernanke also got even more explicit about the fact that he has tools at his disposal to boost economic growth, tools he simply prefers not to use:

Even with the federal funds rate close to zero, we have a number of ways in which we could act to ease financial conditions further. One option would be to provide more explicit guidance about the period over which the federal funds rate and the balance sheet would remain at their current levels. Another approach would be to initiate more securities purchases or to increase the average maturity of our holdings. The Federal Reserve could also reduce the 25 basis point rate of interest it pays to banks on their reserves, thereby putting downward pressure on short-term rates more generally. Of course, our experience with these policies remains relatively limited, and employing them would entail potential risks and costs. However, prudent planning requires that we evaluate the efficacy of these and other potential alternatives for deploying additional stimulus if conditions warrant.

It’s important to call a bit of BS on this business about “potential risks and costs,” especially as applied to the paying of interest on excess bank reserves. The Federal Reserve system never did this until the fall of 2008. There’s no scary economic risk involved in going back to the policies that we used successfully for decades. The interest on excess reserves policy was launched in the middle of the banking panic and has done nothing but exacerbate the subsequent recession.

Meanwhile, for some reason the president of the Dallas Fed thinks there’s nothing more that can be done. He needs to pay more attention.

NEWS FLASH

Another Health Repeal Measure Finds Bipartisan Support | “Lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced bipartisan legislation Thursday to remove restrictions on tax-exempt health spending accounts, the latest provision of the healthcare reform law to come under attack by Democrats,” the Hill’s Julian Pecquet reports. The provisions, which was initially offered by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), was added “as a way to keep the bill’s costs down because it was estimated to save $5 billion over 10 years by cutting down on unnecessary drug purchases.”

Alyssa

‘Questionable Content’ Cartoonist Jeph Jacques On Post-College Career Paths, the Space Program, and What He’s Learned From Readers

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 14, 2011 at 5:23 pm

Questionable Content, Jeph Jacques’ tale of post-college discontent, Massachusetts coffee shops, and tiny eccentric robots is one of the most famous and emotionally realized comics published online. Over the years, Jacques’ characters have run small businesses, entered treatment for depression, bonded over Toto songs, and grappled with what to do when weapons-grade lasers get installed in your personal computer. Jacques was kind enough to take some time to answer my questions about the stalled professional life of his main character, Marten Reed, what the world would look like if the U.S. hadn’t given up on space exploration, and what he’s learned about drawing lesbian characters from his readers.

With the exception of Dora, who is a small business owner, and Raven, who’s back to school, finding career paths seem like fairly low priorities for your characters. Is that an intentional decision to leave a clear path to focus on their emotional lives? A function of time moving more slowly in the strip than it is in the real world? Is it a function of living in a college town without a lot of non-academic industries or a terrible economy? And whatever happened to Hannelore’s counting business?

A lot of it is based on who I was in my twenties, and the Northampton folks I know who are that age now. When you’re living in a college town and all you’ve got is a liberal arts degree, you’re pretty much gonna take whatever job you can get that pays the bills and isn’t too demanding. I think the philosophy is that working a job that is relatively low-responsibility and low-committment gives you more time and energy to focus on the stuff you REALLY care about. That’s certainly how I felt about it when I was 23!

But I also think that is a bit of an illusion and a trap that you can get caught in. Even if it’s a low commitment job, you’re still giving it hours and days and months and years of your time — suddenly you’re 25, or 29, and you haven’t really “done anything” with your life, and you’re not entirely sure how that happened. And that’s something I’m planning on exploring more in the relatively near future, with Marten in particular.

I imagine that Hanners still does the counting business on the side. With her family connections, she probably doesn’t actually NEED to work to support herself, but it’s important to be at least somewhat free of that kind of a family dependency. Working at CoD is more of an enrichment exercise for her than a means to make money.
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Related Posts

NEWS FLASH

Countering Default Deniers, Paul Ryan Says Aug. 2 Is Drop Dead Date | House Republicans’ chief number cruncher pushed back on some of his fellow GOP congressmen in the so-called “hell no caucus,” who claim the Obama administration is lying or exaggerating the urgency of the Aug. 2 “drop dead” date for raising the debt ceiling. On Fox News host Sean Hannity’s radio show this afternoon, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the chairman of the Budget Committee, refused to agree with Hannity that the date was “artificial,” saying he’s run the numbers several times and concluded that Aug. 2 is indeed the day when Treasury “needs to start prioritizing bills,” give or take a day or two. Listen here:

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Jul 14, 2011 at 5:22 pm

Climate Progress

As Cuomo Plans Shut Down of Indian Point Nuclear Plant, Experts Fail to Grasp Value of Solar and Efficiency for NY City

By Stephen Lacey on Jul 14, 2011 at 5:03 pm


New York may soon decommission the four-decade-old Indian Point nuclear plant, a deteriorating 2-GW power station that supplies 25% of New York City’s electricity.

Some experts claim that closing the plant could de-stabilize supply, thus requiring a time-consuming build-out of centralized power plants and new transmission that will drive up rates.  The reality, however, is quite different.

The NY Times reported on the predicament yesterday:

Up to 2.1 million customers in southern New York would be vulnerable to power interruptions from 2016 to 2020 if Indian Point shut down, Rick Gonzales, chief operating officer of the New York Independent System Operator, or I.S.O., told a State Senate committee in May.

Some experts on New York’s electricity system suggest that existing transmission lines could be rebuilt to operate at higher voltage and thus provide more capacity. A proposal for a new line running from Quebec to New York City under Lake Champlain and the Hudson River is inching forward, for example, and sponsors say it could be completed by 2015.

Talk about a lack of imagination. We’re in the middle of a rapid shift in the economics of distributed energy and energy efficiency – with a shut-down of the plant still five years away – and the only reasonable solution people can think up is to build out more centralized infrastructure?

New York has limited transmission capacity, making it more difficult and expensive to transport electricity into the city. Because of these constraints, FERC issued a ruling in April that made it more expensive for generators to use transmission lines, potentially pushing up the price of electricity by 12%. That makes in-city generation much more valuable.

And so we come to one of the most valuable on-site electrical resources, solar PV.

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Yglesias

Debt Ceiling: Institutional Design By Accident

By Matthew Yglesias on Jul 14, 2011 at 4:44 pm

It’s clear at this point that the function of the statutory debt ceiling is to allow an opposition-party congress to try to extract some concessions from the White House. So you might think that was the purpose of the thing. But you’d be wrong. As Sarah Binder explains the original idea was simply to free congress of the responsible to authorize each individual issuance of debt:

Judging from the NY Times coverage of the 1917 episode, legislators paid little attention to the implications of mandating a ceiling. They focused instead on Treasury Secretary McAdoo’s request for a higher borrowing limit so as to fund an expensive war effort. The ceiling was created to empower, not rein in, Treasury (prompting a failed effort to create a congressional committee to oversee Treasury’s actions). Similarly, the creation of the aggregate ceiling in 1939 reflected congressional deference to Treasury, granting the department flexibility in refinancing short term notes with longer term bonds. As the Senate floor debate makes clear, senators viewed the move as removing a partition in the law that hampered Treasury’s ability to manage the debt.

This is basically just one of those things that turns out to happen when your country has an unusually long period of continuous government. An institution that was set up at one time for one reason morphs around into something else. Unfortunately, the current practice represents a major threat to the economic health of the country, one that won’t go away even if we resolve the current standoff.

Security

U.S. Officials: Ford’s Contacts With Syrians The ‘Most Important Sources Of Info In Assessing The Syrian Scene’

By Ben Armbruster on Jul 14, 2011 at 4:19 pm

U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford recently made news when he traveled to the Syrian city of Hama and joined anti-government demonstrators in a protest against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Syrian activists welcomed Ford and thanked him for his display of solidarity. One Syria expert here in the U.S. called Ford’s move “impressive” and a “significant statement.”

But all this may not have happened if many Republicans had their way. GOPers such as Marco Rubio and Tim Pawlenty were calling on President Obama to recall Ambassador Ford in the wake of the government’s violent crackdown. And on top that, the U.S. would not have an envoy in Syria at all if the Republicans in the Senate got what they wanted. Last year, Senate GOPers refused to confirm Ford because they saw sending an ambassador to Syria as a “reward” for bad behavior.

Indeed, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney recently countered Republicans calling for Ford’s recall, saying his presence there is “useful.” And there’s at least one person who agrees with that: Robert Ford himself. Over at Foreign Policy, Marc Lynch writes than in an interview, Ford “dismissed” the idea that he has not been able to engage with Syrians:

Ford dismissed the idea that prior to Hama he had been a captive in his Embassy, unable to engage with anyone. Quite the contrary. He has had access to both the Syrian government and to key sectors of Syrian society such as the business community. The threat of violent retaliation and intimidation of Syrians who meet with American officials is real, though, and he acknowledged that some had refused invitations out of this fear. Senior administration officials have told me several times in other conversations that Ford’s conversations were one of their most important sources of information in assessing the Syrian scene. This is one key reason why they considered his presence essential even before his electrifying visit to Hama persuaded most of their critics of his value.

Ford also told Lynch he can expect more Hama-like visits across Syria. “He plans to take further trips around the country, to continue to meet with as many Syrians as he can, and to push to open political space and to restrain regime violence,” Lynch writes. And Ford doesn’t seem to want to back down. “I’m not going to stop the things I do,” he said. “I can’t. The President has issued very clear guidance. It’s morally the right thing to do.”

And Ford has high regard for those challenging Assad. “I’ve met enough of them, and believe me, they are a lot tougher than anyone in the Washington Post or the U.S. Senate. They know exactly what they are doing,” he said.

But it’s unclear how much longer Ford can be in Syria representing the United States. The Washington Post noted this week that unless the Senate officially approves his post, Ford will be forced to leave Syria at the end of the year. But that might require Senate Republicans to admit that perhaps they were wrong. It is possible, however. As Brookings Middle East expert Shadi Hamid tweeted yesterday, “I previously said Obama admin should recall the US ambassador in #Syria. I was wrong.”

Alyssa

Racebending Toward Justice

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jul 14, 2011 at 4:08 pm

I’m writing a new column for The Loop21*, and the first piece is about remakes that switch characters’ races from white to black, among them Chris Rock’s foreign-film remakes, Will Smith’s adaptations of classic children’s movies as vehicles for his kids, and Clint Eastwood’s A Star is Born. Of these, I tend of find Rock’s remakes the most interesting. It’s not so much that they’re good movies, as the specific way they work on race:

“I Think I Love My Wife” is careful to demonstrate that cheating isn’t the only kind of behavior that transcends race: In one scene, a white teenager shows up in the elevator rapping the same song that a black teenager disrupted the morning quiet with earlier. And a bourgie black dinner foursome and a Japanese executive repeat the same concern about Michael Jackson: “I don’t care about “Thriller”. What kind of grown men has kids sleeping in his bed?”

White elevator passengers and Japanese corporate titans may not have to worry that an overenthusiastic music fan or a troubled pop star reflect badly on them, but we can all shake our heads at the same foolishness.

And while the sibling rivalries in “Death at a Funeral” are as old as Cain and Abel — and as persistent — there’s an additional layer of processing when Rock and Martin’s characters find out that not only is their father gay, but that he was having an affair with a man with dwarfism. They have to reconcile those challenges, and the fact that their father’s gay-dwarf lover was white.

The thing that I think is really interesting about racebending is less that it happens than the casualness with which characters are switched from people of color to white, and the general deliberateness that accompanies a switch in the opposite direction. Hollywood, it seems, never needs a justification as to why a character should be white.

*If anyone out there’s interested in race, politics, and culture, and is looking to break in to writing about things, The Loop21′s hiring writing fellows right now. It’s a great new set of editors over there, so definitely worth checking out.

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