President — finally — stands up to GOP, Big Oil

President Barack Obama finally seems to be standing his ground in the philosophical fight with Republicans over the direction of the country.

The decision to not approve the Keystone oil pipeline was the right one. Obama clearly signaled to Republicans, Big Oil and his own supporters that he won’t be blackmailed into a rushed judgment on an environmentally sensitive project that has not been adequately studied.

Now, of course, the GOP will say that Obama failed to grasp an opportunity to create jobs. But he’s on solid ground. This was an obvious political ploy, and caving in would have left the president — and the nation — in a far worse position.

House Republicans, backed by the petroleum industry, forced the president’s hand by inserting language into the payroll tax bill that required him to say yes or no to the pipeline within 60 days. It was preposterous. The 1,700-mile route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico hasn’t even been established, in part because of possible risks to Nebraska’s drinking water. And that’s not just environmentalist carping. Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, is one of many who think the proposed route doesn’t work because it runs through a crucial aquifer in his state.

Heineman knows the risks are real. A similar existing pipeline has leaked nearly a dozen times in the past year, and a spill from a tar sands oil pipeline in Michigan in 2010 dumped 800,000 gallons into a creek that feedsthe Kalamazoo River, causing severe damage and proving to be significantly more difficult to clean up than expected.

Pipeline proponents are hammering the president’s decision, repeating assertions that the pipeline oil supplies would create as many as 250,000 jobs across the country over the long term. According to GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney, “If Americans want to understand why unemployment in the United States has been stuck above 8 percent for the longest stretch since the Great Depression, decisions like this one are the place to begin.”

However, the oil industry’s job numbers for the project are wildly inflated. Like job estimates for the high-speed rail project in California, Keystone really counted job years — one year of work for one person — and expressed them as jobs. Independent sources now are estimating about 6,000 actual temporary construction jobs, which would barely put a dent in national unemployment numbers.

Obama didn’t rule out the pipeline altogether, but he should have. Rather than encouraging huge investments to eke out a few more years of fossil fuel addiction, the United States should be encouraging clean energy projects that are proven job creators, building on Silicon Valley tech expertise and making the country more competitive on the world stage. Oh, and reducing global warming: The pipeline and the method of oil extraction that would feed it are horrific generators of greenhouse gases.

Obama’s decision postpones that debate for another day, but he did what he needed to do now. He showed he would not pander. He also showed that he will stand up for the rights of Americans to clean water supplies — even Americans in Republican states such as Nebraska.

Good thing Heineman didn’t have to rely on his own party to watch his back.

The Fairfield, California Reporter has a different view:

Pipeline not delivering oil, but plenty of politics

The Washington insider newspaper Politico described President Barack Obama’s decision to reject the planned Canada-U.S. Keystone XL pipeline as a political “win-win” for both parties.

The reasoning is that the Republicans would attract independent voters angered by high gas prices — although it would be years before the Canadian oil would reach the market and affect prices — and attract generous political contributions from the oil companies, a slightly better bet politically.

Meanwhile, the environmentalists would be jolted out of their political lethargy and hit the bricks for Obama’s re-election, and the construction unions, who really want the project and the jobs, would have no choice but to stick with Obama because the Republicans have become anathema to most of labor.

Whatever the political benefits of the decision, it is a lose-lose for domestic energy policy and our relations with Canada.

Technically, the pipeline is not dead; a final decision has only been delayed while a more acceptable route through an environmentally sensitive region of Nebraska is negotiated. Obama is merely rejecting the project to circumvent a Feb. 21 deadline imposed on him by Congress, giving him more time to review the route.

The White House would like to stall the whole business until after the election, but he may not have that luxury.

The Canadians professed themselves “profoundly disappointed” by the decision and pointedly noted that there is another energy project on the boards, a $5.4 billion pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to ports in British Columbia where the oil could be sold to eager Asian buyers.

Already, the Republicans are trying to make the pipeline a campaign issue. “Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping American energy security to the Chinese,” said House Speaker John Boehner, exaggerating on both counts. (The number of potential jobs tends to fluctuate wildly depending which side of the argument is trying to make the case.)

Obama insisted that his announcement was “not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline,” but on “the arbitrary nature of the deadline.” OK. The deadline is now a moot point, but negotiations should begin on an acceptable route and protections for the water table. After all, the disputed section is only 65 miles in Nebraska, a small fraction of the line’s 1,700-mile length.

Sparsely populated western Canada and eastern Alaska have immense oil and natural-gas reserves, and the lower 48 states are the natural market for them. Ethanol, solar panels, windmills, dim light bulbs, bike paths and switchgrass are all very nice, but they’re not going to do it for us. At best, they chip away at the margins of our energy needs.

North America has the capacity to be self-sufficient in oil and gas, but we shouldn’t wait until a crisis point — or the politics are just right — to do something about it.

Thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement, there’s a deeper understanding about the power that corporations wield over the great majority of us. It’s not just in the financial sector, but in all facets of our lives. The disparity between the top 1 percent and everyone else has been laid bare – there’s no more denying that those at the top get their share at the expense of the 99 percent. Lobbyists, loopholes, tax breaks… how can ordinary folks expect a fair shake?

No one knows this better than family farmers, whose struggle to make a living on the land has gotten far more difficult since corporations came to dominate our farm and food system. We saw signs of it when Farm Aid started in 1985, but corporate control of our food system has since exploded.

From seed to plate, our food system is now even more concentrated than our banking system. Most economic sectors have concentration ratios hovering around 40 percent, meaning that the top four firms in the industry control 40 percent of the market. Anything beyond this level is considered “highly concentrated,” where experts believe competition is severely threatened and market abuses are likely to occur.

Many key agricultural markets like soybeans and beef exceed the 40 percent threshold, meaning the seeds and inputs that farmers need to grow our crops come from just a handful of companies. Ninety-three percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn grown in the United States are under the control of just one company. Four companies control up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of beef in the U.S.; four companies dominate close to 60 percent of the pork and chicken markets.

Our banks were deemed too big to fail, yet our food system’s corporations are even bigger. Their power puts our entire food system at stake. Last year the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Justice (DOJ) acknowledged this, hosting a series of workshops that examined corporate concentration in our farm and food system. Despite the hundreds of thousands of comments from farmers and eaters all over the country, a year later the USDA and DOJ have taken no action to address the issue. Recent decisions in Washington make clear that corporate lobbyists have tremendous power to maintain the status quo.

In November, the Obama administration delivered a crushing blow to a crucial rule proposed by the USDA (known as the GIPSA rule), which was meant to level the playing field for independent cattle ranchers. The large meatpackers, who would have lost some of their power, lobbied hard and won to leave the beef market as it is – ruled by corporate giants. In the same month, new school lunch rules proposed by the USDA that would have brought more fresh food to school cafeterias were weakened by Congress. Food processors – the corporations that turn potatoes into French fries and chicken into nuggets – spent $5.6 million to lobby against the new rules and won, with Congress going so far as agreeing to call pizza a vegetable. Both decisions demonstrate that corporate power wins and the health of our markets and our children loses.

Despite all they’re up against, family farmers persevere. Each and every day they work to sustain a better alternative – an agricultural system that guarantees farmers a fair living, strengthens our communities, protects our natural resources and delivers good food for all. Nothing is more important than the food we eat and the family farmers who grow it. Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, destruction of our soil, pollution of our water and health epidemics of obesity and diabetes.

We simply can’t afford it. Our food system belongs in the hands of many family farmers, not under the control of a handful of corporations.

Bill Moyers believes that capitalism is out of control and there can be no people’s democracy as long as corporations are considered people.

Bob Cuddy reports in the SLO Tribune:

After a four-hour hearing that capped months of debate, the county’s little-known waste management board voted Wednesday evening to ban plastic shopping bags at most stores in San Luis Obispo County.

Unless blocked by litigation, which has already been threatened, or a referendum, retailers will not be permitted to distribute plastic shopping bags at most supermarkets, pharmacies, convenience stores, warehouse stores or other shops.

The vote came after robo-calls rang the phones of a lot of county residents over the weekend. Exactly who was behind the calls remains a mystery. Cuddy tried to find out:

The Tribune editorialized in favor of the ban:

Health advocacy groups have worked for decades to get the Environmental Protection Agency to require coal and oil-burning power plants to restrict emissions of mercury, dioxin, lead, arsenic and other toxic pollutants that can cause cancer, heart and developmental diseases, asthma and premature deaths. Though more than a dozen states have adopted such rules on their own to spare their citizens the health-damaging consequences of such pollution, electric power industry lobbyists have generally pressured Washington to resist establishment of federal standards on such toxins. Last week, the EPA and the Obama administration finally imposed the standards.

The new rule, 20 years in the making, marks a huge and notable Christmas gift of cleaner, healthier air in the near future. If it is fully implemented over the next four years, studies show it will save tens of thousands of lives and diminish health care costs by an estimated $90 billion.

The new rule to restrict the electric industry’s worst emitters of toxic air pollution is, indeed, long overdue. Even TVA agrees its past time to clean-up or shut-down its dirtiest old plants. Resisting this rule in Congress would be myopic and wrong-headed. Americans deserve cleaner, healthier air. It’s time they got it.

via Hope for healthier air | timesfreepress.com.

THE ISSUE:New EPA regulations for mercury emissions have been imposed at last.THE STAKES:Cleaner air, cleaner water and economic opportunity.The last days of 2011 offer those concerned about the air we breathe and the waterways we enjoy all the more reason to celebrate. They might party like it’s, oh, 1990.That’s when the landmark legislation known as the Clean Air Act had last been amended in any major way.The law’s regulations of air pollutants, significant as they were, had one notable omission: More needed to be done to control the mercury and other toxins from coal- and oil-burning power plants.President Obama’s adoption last week of the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards is a complement to environmental regulation that was two decades in coming.

via Editorial: In celebration of cleaner air – Times Union.

We all long for a day in which human beings see themselves not as lords and masters of the earth but as good stewards of creation. To get there, the way of thinking about animals as things to be used and abused must be replaced with a model reflecting a more gentle meaning of the word “dominion.”

Contrary to the connotation of the word that has seemed to justify the tyranny of humans over animals, dominion may be interpreted as “sovereignty” as it exists in human government. A legitimate government holds the collective power of its citizens, and is thus able to exert a measure of authority that serves the best interests of all. What we think of as legitimate sovereignty in the human sphere of government does not include murder and mayhem of the sort practiced by humans against the animal kingdoms.

The concept of dominion as brutal domination is sometimes blamed on western religion, because in eastern religions there is no strict line drawn between humans and other animals, and yet in practice, animals in lands where eastern religions have flourished have been subject to the same brutal domination as in the West. The problem of animal cruelty was not caused by any particular religious mindset–though religion has often been used as a justification for mistreatment of animals…continuing even today in barbaric sacrifices practiced by animist religions as well as by some Hindus and Muslims.

The problem is that throughout human history, until very recently, cruelty to animals was simply normal.

        This letter was supposed to be mailed so that it would reach you some time before the holidays. However, I was determined that it should contain a happy message, and so in late October, I began to read a newly published 696-page book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker. It took six weeks of very late nights to finish it, and so this letter is late getting to you.

It was worth the time, though, and while I believe Pinker may over-reach in applying his thesis globally, there is good and surprising news about how and why a decrease in violence, including violence to animals (not an overall decrease but a decrease relative to human population), “happened in a narrow slice of history, beginning in the Age of Reason in the 17th century and cresting with the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th.” This Humanitarian Revolution continued through the 19th century, when slavery was abolished in the West, but it lost momentum during the first half of the 20th century, as the world entered another tragic cycle of war and genocide, with the World Wars the last convulsions of an old order in Europe. Even between the World Wars, however, the idea of an intergovernmental entity dedicated to peace was conceived for the first time. The Humanitarian Revolution energized again in the “Rights Revolutions” that arose in democratic countries in the 1960s and ’70s, which included civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and animal rights.

Steven Pinker traces the history of violence back to proto-humans who evolved into humans living in anarchic states, who were eventually subjected to a “pacification process” when states (often in the form of monarchies) emerged. These early governments forced a degree of order on their citizens–though such order did not reduce violence between states or cruel practices within states. Reducing violence required a very long civilizing process which involved the imposition of self-control, the beginning of commerce, and the invention of the printing press in the early Renaissance. According to Pinker, “Some of the early expressions of a genuinely ethical concern for animals took place in the Renaissance. Europeans had become curious about vegetarianism when reports came back from India of entire nations that lived without meat. Several writers, including Erasmus and Montaigne, condemned the mistreatment of animals in hunting and butchery, and one of them, Leonardo da Vinci, became a vegetarian himself.”

via Editorial: EPA finally will enforce long-delayed clean air standards.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the Washington, D.C., politicians attacking clean-air safeguards don’t have the same view out their front windows as the families in my small community of 300 people.

We look out on four polluting smokestacks, a small mountain of coal ash and seeping wastewater ponds. All are part of the Reid Gardner coal-burning power plant that was built in 1965, just a few hundred yards from our homes on the Moapa River Indian Reservation in southeastern Nevada.

Because coal-burning power plants operate largely out of the sight of most Americans, worries about coal pollution might seem remote. But the soot, nitrogen, sulfur and carbon pollution coming from these plants lands not just on our heads (and inside our lungs); it gets carried across the West by the wind. The Reid Gardner plant’s emissions, for instance, cloud the Grand Canyon in Arizona and worsen particulate and ozone pollution across southern Nevada and Utah.

My neighbors and I feel coal pollution up close. Our children and elders suffer from asthma and other respiratory ailments, and that makes the issue immediate and personal. Emissions from coal plants have been linked to lung disease, premature death, heart disease and asthma, according to the Harvard Medical School.

via The Foul Air Outside My Window – ICTMN.com.