Keystone Pipeline Goes Down to Defeat in U.S. Senate

While tonight's vote may seal the fate of Mary Landrieu (D-La.)in her upcoming run off election, the at least temporary defeat of the Keystone Pipeline is a win for the American people despite the PR efforts of the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel industry hacks and their political prostitutes.  The tar sands from which hydrocarbons to be transported by the Keystone Pipeline are produced are among the most environmentally damaging.  Yes, Canada and foul individuals like the Kochs would benefit from the pipeline, but if one cares anything about air pollution not to mention the dangers of pipelines in general, this is NOT something sane Americans should want.  And I say this as a former in-house attorney for an large oil company with knowledge of the oil and gas industry.  I would further add that America needs to reduce its dependence on oil and gas, not increase it. Here are highlights from the Washington Post on tonight's vote:

In a dramatic vote, the Senate rejected a controversial new energy pipeline Tuesday evening, dealing a serious blow to the re-election prospects of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and leaving Republicans itching for a fight next year on the issue. 

On a 59 to 41 vote, Landrieu lost her bid to pass legislation meant to compel the Obama White House to approve the nearly 1,700-mile, $7.6 billion Keystone XL pipeline, which if built would deliver 830,000 barrels of oil a day from western Canada into the American heartland.

Already six years in the making, the Keystone fight has become the rallying cry for Landrieu, a three-term senator facing a run-off election Dec. 6. For the past week she has placed a political bet on her ability to pass the legislation as a demonstration of her clout in the Senate.

Supporters said the new pipeline would lead to a more efficient delivery of oil into the domestic markets, helping boost the national economy by creating tens of thousands of jobs along the construction of the pipeline. Opponents said that the project would be harvesting oil from the environmentally dirty tar sands in Canada, leading to too many health risks and coming at a time when other domestic oil production has already shrunk gas prices to less than $3 a gallon in many regions.

A man identified as Greg Graycloud, with the Lakota Tribe in South Dakota, began chanting loudly after the vote ended. He was removed from the Senate Chamber by U.S. Capitol Police officers. Four other people opposed to the pipeline were also removed for speaking out.

Before Tuesday night’s vote, the White House was careful not to issue a veto threat even as officials made it clear Obama was likely to invoke one should the measure pass the Senate.

“It certainly is a piece of legislation that the president doesn’t support, because the president believes that this is something that should be determined through the State Department – a process that is in place to evaluate projects like this,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest, adding that Obama’s senior advisers have recommended a veto on “similar pieces of legislation” that have been introduced in the past.

Natural Gas is Not America's Energy Solution

The oil and gas industry, rather than diversifying and investing heavily in solar and wind power, continues to chant a mantra of "drill, baby drill" like the cretin from Alaska so popular with brain dead Republicans.   A new part of that mantra is that natural gas is going to deliver America from foreign oil dependence and save the environment.  Like much of what comes out of the oil and gas industry the ads run by Exxon, BP, and the Petroleum Institute don't tell all of the story.  As I not in my not yet published October column in VEER Magazine, I was once an in-house lawyer for an oil company, so I understand the intricacies of oil and gas exploration and the side effects of secondary and tertiary recovery not t mention fracking.   A column in the Roanoke Times calls attention to some of the ignored costs of the natural gas obsession.  Here are highlights:

Natural gas is indisputably cleaner and cheaper than oil or coal, a factor that makes it desirable for a nation that, until now, has been fearful of being dependent on foreign energy sources. Our country has been energized by the natural gas boom, which may not peak until 2030, allowing us to sell some of this valuable fuel, whose smaller carbon footprint makes it desirable worldwide, especially to our European friends who are tied to Russian energy sources and their unpredictable reliability.

To find the true cost of natural gas, however, requires including ancillary costs that are not part of the business model: the cost that communities accrue in their doing or having done business with the power companies; the unbudgeted costs of disaster clean-up; reduced land values where pipelines cross; remediation of by-spills from leaking pipes that invade the water table.

Ryan Hankins, in his Aug. 21 commentary (“Don’t blindly oppose pipeline based on fear”), asks us not to “blindly oppose” the Mountain Valley Pipeline “based on fear.” It would be a blessing to be “blind,” to not know so much about the havoc being wrought by this industry The pipeline to which he refers is but one of many “straws” sucking from the Marcellus Shale, siphoning off the dwindling supply of natural gas.

The natural gas industry, in its hydraulic fracturing process, requires 2 billion gallons of water a day, according to the Government Accountability Office. Fear instructs me that once approved by the Federal Regulatory Commission, the proliferation of these natural gas pipelines will encourage the growth of fracking along its length, in spite of Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s assurance that he will not allow it in the George Washington National Forest. And where will the water come from? And where will the toxic wastewater go?  . . . . Gov. Christie of New Jersey recently vetoed a law passed by his legislature that would have prevented importing and disposing of wastewater from other states.

Not mentioned in the column is the increased frequency of earthquakes in areas where fracking is active.  Too many Virginians forget the dangers of increasing earthquakes in central Virginia where the North Anna nuclear power plant sits near fault lines.  And lets not forget the vulnerability of the Lake Gaston watershed that provides a huge portion of the water for south Hampton Roads. The cost of expanded natural gas production in Virginia could be huge when these elements are factored in.

The Koch Brothers' Toxic Empire

Few figures in today's political scene represent a bigger threat to average Americans and a functioning democracy than Charles and David Koch.  Between trying to buy Congress, dismantle safety and environmental regulations, and restoring the worse excesses of the Gilded Age, they seek to make average Americans little better than serfs eking out a meager living while the Kochs luxuriate with their billions of dollars.  If there is such a thing as the sin of greed, the Kochs truly embody it.   A long piece in Rolling Stone looks at not only the Koch brothers' political machinations but also their toxic industries from which their wealth flows.  It also traces their family's racist and far right views over the years.  These men are despicable and any decent Christian ought to be opposing their policies rather than embracing them as the Christofascists have done.  Here are article highlights:

The enormity of the Koch fortune is no mystery. Brothers Charles and David are each worth more than $40 billion. The electoral influence of the Koch brothers is similarly well-chronicled. The Kochs are our homegrown oligarchs; they've cornered the market on Republican politics and are nakedly attempting to buy Congress and the White House. Their political network helped finance the Tea Party and powers today's GOP. Koch-affiliated organizations raised some $400 million during the 2012 election, and aim to spend another $290 million to elect Republicans in this year's midterms. So far in this cycle, Koch-backed entities have bought 44,000 political ads to boost Republican efforts to take back the Senate.

What is less clear is where all that money comes from. Koch Industries is headquartered in a squat, smoked-glass building that rises above the prairie on the outskirts of Wichita, Kansas. The building, like the brothers' fiercely private firm, is literally and figuratively a black box. Koch touts only one top-line financial figure: $115 billion in annual revenue, as estimated by Forbes. By that metric, it is larger than IBM, Honda or Hewlett-Packard and is America's second-largest private company after agribusiness colossus Cargill. The company's stock response to inquiries from reporters: "We are privately held and don't disclose this information."

But Koch Industries is not entirely opaque. The company's troubled legal history – including a trail of congressional investigations, Department of Justice consent decrees, civil lawsuits and felony convictions – augmented by internal company documents, leaked State Department cables, Freedom of Information disclosures and company whistle­-blowers, combine to cast an unwelcome spotlight on the toxic empire whose profits finance the modern GOP.

Under the nearly five-decade reign of CEO Charles Koch, the company has paid out record civil and criminal environmental penalties. And in 1999, a jury handed down to Koch's pipeline company what was then the largest wrongful-death judgment of its type in U.S. history, resulting from the explosion of a defective pipeline that incinerated a pair of Texas teenagers.

The volume of Koch Industries' toxic output is staggering. According to the University of Massachusetts Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute, only three companies rank among the top 30 polluters of America's air, water and climate: ExxonMobil, American Electric Power and Koch Industries. Thanks in part to its 2005 purchase of paper-mill giant Georgia-Pacific, Koch Industries dumps more pollutants into the nation's waterways than General Electric and International Paper combined. The company ranks 13th in the nation for toxic air pollution. Koch's climate pollution, meanwhile, outpaces oil giants including Valero, Chevron and Shell.

The toxic history of Koch Industries is not limited to physical pollution. It also extends to the company's business practices, which have been the target of numerous federal investigations, resulting in several indictments and convictions, as well as a whole host of fines and penalties.

Koch Industries is not a major oil producer. Instead, the company has woven itself into every nook of the vast industrial web that transforms raw fossil fuels into usable goods. Koch-owned businesses trade, transport, refine and process fossil fuels, moving them across the world and up the value chain until they become things we forgot began with hydrocarbons: fertilizers, Lycra, the innards of our smartphones.
The company controls at least four oil refineries, six ethanol plants, a natural-gas-fired power plant and 4,000 miles of pipeline.

Koch's hunger for growth is insatiable: Since 1960, the company brags, the value of Koch Industries has grown 4,200-fold, outpacing the Standard & Poor's index by nearly 30 times. On average, Koch projects to double its revenue every six years. Koch is now a key player in the fracking boom that's vaulting the United States past Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer, even as it's endangering America's groundwater.

Koch is also long on the richest – but also the dirtiest and most carbon-polluting – oil deposits in North America: the tar sands of Alberta. . . . . Over the past dozen years, the company has quietly acquired leases for 1.1 million acres of Alberta oil fields, an area larger than Rhode Island. By some estimates, Koch's direct holdings nearly double ExxonMobil's and nearly triple Shell's.

Fred [David and Charles' father] also became a major benefactor and board member of the John Birch Society, the rabidly anti-communist organization founded in 1958 by candy magnate and virulent racist Robert Welch. Bircher publications warned that the Red endgame was the creation of the "Negro Soviet­ Republic" in the Deep South. In his own writing, Fred described integration as a Red plot to "enslave both the white and black man."

Koch wasn't just cutting corners on its pipelines. It was also violating federal environmental law in other corners of the empire. Through much of the 1990s at its Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota, Koch spilled up to 600,000 gallons of jet fuel into wetlands near the Mississippi River. Indeed, the company was treating the Mississippi as a sewer, illegally dumping ammonia-laced wastewater into the river – even increasing its discharges on weekends when it knew it wasn't being monitored. Koch Petroleum Group eventually pleaded guilty to "negligent discharge of a harmful quantity of oil" and "negligent violation of the Clean Water Act," was ordered to pay a $6 million fine and $2 million in remediation costs, and received three years' probation. This facility had already been declared a Superfund site in 1984.

The Smalley trial underscored something Bill Koch had said about the way his brothers ran the company: "Koch Industries has a philosophy that profits are above everything else." A former Koch manager, Kenoth Whitstine, testified to incidents in which Koch Industries placed profits over public safety. As one supervisor had told him, regulatory fines "usually didn't amount to much" and, besides, the company had "a stable full of lawyers in Wichita that handled those situations." When Whitstine told another manager he was concerned that unsafe pipelines could cause a deadly accident, this manager said that it was more profitable for the company to risk litigation than to repair faulty equipment. The company could "pay off a lawsuit from an incident and still be money ahead," he said, describing the principles of MBM to a T.

The jury was emphatic, awarding Smalley $296 million – then the largest wrongful-death judgment in American legal history. He later settled with Koch for an undisclosed sum and now runs a pipeline-safety foundation in his daughter's name. He declined to comment for this story. "It upsets him too much," says an associate.

There is much, much more.  Read the entire article and you will be both disgusted and outraged.

Lynchburg Train Derailment/Fire Underscore Need for Regulations

The proponents of unrestricted oil and gas exploration, pipeline construction, and a laissez-faire government approach to regulations of the same - a crowd that includes the Virginia GOP - suffered a possible set back yesterday.   A CSX train carrying fracked oil derailed in downtown Lynchburg setting off a fire storm that cause portions of the city's downtown to be evacuated and dumped 50,000 gallons of the oil into the James River, force the city of Richmond to shift to alternate water supply sources.   The accident is but one of many that highlight the risks associated with pipeline and rail transportation of oil.  The only good news was that no serious injuries or deaths resulted. The Lynchburg News-Advance reports on the mess.  Here are highlights:

About 50,000 gallons of crude oil were unaccounted for late Wednesday after a CSX train derailed in downtown Lynchburg and sent three flaming tanker cars careening into the James River.

The ensuing conflagration ignited oil on the surface of the river, sent flames and smoke hundreds of feet into the air, forced evacuations of downtown businesses and homes and rattled the nerves of hundreds of downtown workers.

Businesses and residences between Fifth and Washington streets and from Main Street to the riverfront had to be cleared for several hours, as firefighters and hazardous materials workers charged toward the blaze.

Evacuees swarmed Main Street, peering around buildings and police barriers, craning for a better view of the disaster that might provide some explanation as to what went so terribly wrong.

City officials said drinking water is unaffected. Lynchburg typically gets its water from the Pedlar Reservoir in Amherst County. Downstream, Richmond began Wednesday afternoon to switch to an alternate water supply.

NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman discussed oil train wrecks last week at a two-day safety forum in Washington.

Hersman said the Obama administration needed to take steps immediately to protect the public from potentially catastrophic oil train accidents even if it means using emergency authority.

The Transportation Department was in the midst of drafting regulations to toughen standards for tank cars used to transport oil and ethanol, as well as other steps prevent or mitigate accidents. But there isn't time to wait for the cumbersome federal rulemaking process - which often takes many years to complete - to run its normal course, Hersman said.

A piece in the New York Times underscores that such derailments are a growing problem.  Here are highlights:

Train traffic carrying crude was relatively rare until four years ago, when oil companies in North Dakota began shipping large quantities of Bakken shale crude out of the state by rail because there was insufficient pipeline capacity to do the job.

Now, much of the production of the Bakken region is sent by rail on trains that can stretch up to a mile long and carry roughly 85,000 barrels of oil.

When a runaway train carrying Bakken crude derailed and exploded last July in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people, the safety issues surrounding the transportation of crude through populated areas rose in importance for both American and Canadian regulators.

Then, in December, an oil train passing through Casselton, N.D., derailed and exploded, sending flames high into the air and forcing some residents to evacuate. That followed an accident in November, when another oil train derailed in Alabama, spilling crude oil.

Many of the trains are destined for refineries on the East Coast, which have a strong desire to replace expensive imported crude from the Middle East and Africa with the high-quality, and less expensive, crude from North Dakota.

In response to the rising concerns, federal regulators and railroads agreed in February to a series of voluntary measures to improve safety, including lower speed limits for oil trains in urban areas, increasing the frequency of track inspections and adding more brakes on trains.

And last week, Canada issued tough new rules requiring emergency plans from railroads on responding to catastrophic accidents and requiring companies to retire older models of tank cars within three years. The new model of tank car, developed in 2011, would effectively set a new standard of safety for rail companies in the United States since many lines cross the United States-Canadian border.

But despite years of discussion, American regulators have lagged on requiring stronger tank cars, which are generally owned by oil companies and private investors, not by railroad companies.

Safety experts have warned for more than 20 years that the older tank cars, called DOT-111s, are prone to rupture in a derailment.