The Koch’s coke

A belated tip of the hat to Quentin Compson at Eschaton.

What is wrong with this picture? A major American city is becoming a dumping ground for toxic waste. Ian Austen, NYT:

WINDSOR, Ontario — Assumption Park gives residents of this city lovely views of the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit skyline. Lately they’ve been treated to another sight: a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block on the other side of the Detroit River.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom.

And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it.
…
Coke, which is mainly carbon, is an essential ingredient in steelmaking as well as producing the electrical anodes used to make aluminum.

While there is high demand from both those industries, the small grains and high sulfur content of this petroleum coke make it largely unusable for those purposes, said Kerry Satterthwaite, a petroleum coke analyst at Roskill Information Services, a commodities analysis company based in London.

“It is worse than a byproduct,” Ms. Satterthwaite said.“It’s a waste byproduct that is costly and inconvenient to store, but effectively costs nothing to produce.”

and coincidentally, Detroit has been deprived of its municipal government by the emergency manager.

Scoring the Media on Coverage of the West Fertilizer Explosion

All roads lead to Charles and David.

Hugh Kaufman of the EPA in an interview with FAIR

HK: I think the worst [coverage] was the New York Times. The New York Times claimed that the company notified EPA that they had 270 tons of this explosive ammonium nitrate, but they did not notify EPA of that. In fact, they told EPA that the facility posed no fire or explosion hazard. The New York Times did not say that, and I think that’s probably the biggest problem.

Interestingly, Texas is a Republican state — a red state — and in fact, many of the leaders want to secede from the union, and they despise EPA — they want the EPA abolished. And yet the Republican newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has probably has the best environmental coverage of the case, which makes it very ironic to me.

CS: You also pointed to Reuters.

HK: Reuters did a piece where they implied and stated that EPA and OSHA do not have authority to regulate the facility or this ammonium nitrate, and that’s totally false. Again, you have the Reuters and the New York Times taking the public off the scent. Of course, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox — none of the cable channels are covering the details. The only cable channel I’ve seen that mentioned the fact that this is law-breaking and they lied to EPA was on the Young Turks on YouTube.

CS: I think it’s still on Current TV too.

HK: Is it still on Current, yeah? And the Wall Street Journal has done very good coverage too. So you’ve got the Wall Street Journal on the right, Dallas Morning News on the right and Current on the left, doing the good coverage, and everybody in the middle doing no coverage or bad coverage. By the way, MSNBC did one good thing. They put on their website the sheet the company gave to the state of Texas that identified they did have 270 tons of the explosive material, so that was a good thing.
…
HK: Reuters did a piece where they implied and stated that EPA and OSHA do not have authority to regulate the facility or this ammonium nitrate, and that’s totally false. Again, you have the Reuters and the New York Times taking the public off the scent. Of course, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox — none of the cable channels are covering the details. The only cable channel I’ve seen that mentioned the fact that this is law-breaking and they lied to EPA was on the Young Turks on YouTube.

CS: I think it’s still on Current TV too.
…
HK: … You know who the largest owner of fertilizer business in the world is?

CS: I think you’re going to tell me.

HK: The Koch brothers.

These are the guys who want to buy the LAT and the Chicago Trib, so that their voice can be heard.

The de-leading of America

Via Atrios, an article by Kevin Drum, MoJo.

The key takeaway:

A followup is here.

Reckless geoengineering/profiteering

Martin Lukacs, The Guardian

As controversy mounts over the Guardian’s revelations that an American businessman [Russ George] conducted a massive ocean fertilisation test, dumping around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate off Canada’s coast, it has emerged the Canadian government may have known about the geoengineering scheme and not stopped it.

The news combined, with Canadian obstructionism in negotiations over geoengineering at a United Nations biodiversity meeting in Hyderabad, India, has angered international civil society groups…

Why would anyone do such a thing? For money, of course. Martin Lukacs:

A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a “blatant violation” of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week.

Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.
…
Scientists are debating whether iron fertilisation can lock carbon into the deep ocean over the long term, and have raised concerns that it can irreparably harm ocean ecosystems, produce toxic tides and lifeless waters, and worsen ocean acidification and global warming.

Hell is not hot enough.

Oops

Abraham Lustgarten, ProPublica:

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

“George W. Obama” a term of praise by global warming denialists?

Ouch. That’s got to leave a mark. Democracy Now:

Democracy Now! caught up to Marc Morano, publisher of the Climate Depot, at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa. “They [the Obama administration] have kept the exact same principles and negotiating stance as President George Bush did for eight years,” Morano says. “Obama has carried on Bush’s legacy. So as skeptics, we tip our hat to President Obama in helping to crush and continuing to defeat the United Nations process. Obama has been a great friend of global warming skeptics at these conferences.”

Add to that the fact that Abigail Borah, who disrupted the plenary speech of US delegate Todd Stern by telling him that the US is the principal obstacle to effective negotiations got copious applause from the delegates, probably more than Stern got for his talk, plus the fact that the 12 big US environmental groups have said the same thing, and one can see that Obama is in serious trouble with his base.

Macondo continues to blow out

Via Ritholtz, an extensive report by Geri Miller at Forbes says that the remnants of the Deepwater Horizon rig at the Macondo Prospect in the Gulf continue to leak large amounts of oil:

“Lives are devastated by this environmental crime for which no one has been indicted,” said attorney Stuart Smith, who represents more than 1,000 individuals and businesses in the Gulf and appears in the film. Citing the thousands of dolphins, turtles, shellfish and other marine creatures that have died, “The impact is bad enough, but what’s even more frightening is the oil is still leaking and bubbling up at the site where the rig once stood,” he said.

Actually, what’s even more frightening are the chemical vesication and other reactions reported by the Tim Robbins documentary this article talks about.

The Truth Hater, Rick Perry edition

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian (the original report is by MoJo’s Kate Sheppard, if you prefer the horse’s mouth):

Officials in Rick Perry’s home state of Texas have set off a scientists’ revolt after purging mentions of climate change and sea-level rise from what was supposed to be a landmark environmental report. The scientists said they were disowning the report on the state of Galveston Bay because of political interference and censorship from Perry appointees at the state’s environmental agency.

By academic standards, the protest amounts to the beginnings of a rebellion: every single scientist associated with the 200-page report has demanded their names be struck from the document.
….
Texas is the only state to refuse to sign on to the federal government’s new regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. “I like to tell people we live in a state of denial in the state of Texas,” said John Anderson, an oceanography at Rice University, and author of the chapter targeted by the government censors.

That state of denial percolated down to the leadership of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The agency chief, who was appointed by Perry, is known to doubt the science of climate change. “The current chair of the commission, Bryan Shaw, commonly talks about how human-induced climate change is a hoax,” said Anderson.

But scientists said they still hoped to avoid a clash by simply avoiding direct reference to human causes of climate change and by sticking to materials from peer-reviewed journals. However, that plan began to unravel when officials from the agency made numerous unauthorised changes to Anderson’s chapter, deleting references to climate change, sea-level rise and wetlands destruction.

“It is basically saying that the state of Texas doesn’t accept science results published in Science magazine,” Anderson said. “That’s going pretty far.”

Officials even deleted a reference to the sea level at Galveston Bay rising five times faster than the long-term average – 3mm a year compared to .5mm a year – which Anderson noted was a scientific fact. “They just simply went through and summarily struck out any reference to climate change, any reference to sea level rise, any reference to human influence – it was edited or eliminated,” said Anderson. “That’s not scientific review that’s just straight forward censorship.”

Annals of cynicism, Hillary Rodham Clinton October edition

If you have something to tell the State Department, better hurry. The cutoff is October 9th.

State Department, 10/7/11:

MR. HAMMER: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. We have today Dr. Kerri-Ann Jones, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, to talk to you and brief you on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline.

…
ASSISTANT SECRETARY JONES:…

First of all, I want to let you know that the Department of State is committed to an impartial, rigorous, transparent, and thorough process for the National Interest Determination to determine whether or not this pipeline proposed by Keystone XL is in the national interest.
…
QUESTION: Madam Assistant Secretary, I’m with Al Jazeera English. We wanted to know what your opinion is on the fact that there’s been much criticism about these e-mails that were released by an NGO that suggest that not only one of the lobbyists worked for Secretary Clinton, but that there’s also a relationship or a favoritism towards TransCanada, and that was stated in the e-mails. We wanted to know your response to that.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY JONES: Well, we are running an objective process, and we have met with interested parties from all the different perspectives, including the applicant, environmental groups, yesterday I personally met with a number of faith-based groups, representatives of Native American groups as well as Native American tribes themselves, people from the First Nations in Canada. I also met with a number of student activists. So in the course of this, we have been dealing with many different perspectives, and this is what we are doing. We want to hear from every perspective, and we are on listening mode, and there has been impartiality.

QUESTION: Do you think there’s a conflict of interest that the lobbyist worked for Secretary Clinton, (inaudible)?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY JONES: Past relationships are not of importance.
…
QUESTION: It’s (inaudible) with Dow Jones. To kind of follow up on Gary’s question a little bit, the environmental impact statement found that there were no significant impacts from the pipeline. So can you tell us what other qualities it is about the pipeline that might convince the Department not to approve it?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY JONES: Well, what the environmental impact statement said was that there were no significant impacts – suggested there were no significant impacts, but it did list some areas where there may be impacts. It did mention issues related to cultural issues. It did mention a particular species of beetle which is a threatened species where there had to be a mitigation plan. It did touch on the issue that – regarding spills. That is still out there. You can’t really address that specifically because that has to do with the nature of the spill.

For “nature of the spill,” how about “catastrophic,” Madame Functionary?

Meanwhile, it’s notable that only Al Jazeera asked a challenging question. Even The Guardian and MoJo didn’t really get much of a nip out of Jones’ hide, although Goldenberger did identify Cardno Entrix as the firm to whom State has outsourced the management of meetings to discuss the pipeline. Media Matters notes: “The State Department’s Environmental Impact Statement was prepared with the help of Cardno ENTRIX, a consulting firm that works for TransCanada.”

No conflict of interest?

Speaking of ents…

Sustainable Business News:

Often referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the North Pacific Gyre could be twice the size of Texas and contains about 3.5 million tons of trash – it’s called the world’s largest landfill.

Much of the trash is plastic that’s broken down into suspended particulates, a testament to humanity’s reliance on petroleum and our failure to dispose of products made from it properly. For years it was believed the trash was unredeemable.

Not any longer. A California-based green household and personal products company called Method has figured out a way to use plastic from the Gyre in the production of 100% post-consumer polyethylene bottles. 25% of the plastic used in the bottles is recovered from the Gyre.

Now that’s entertainm-ent!