Dirty Politicians

Its long been no secret to progressives that one of the most important things a politician can do is put their money where their mouth is. No. Let me rephrase. Where a politician gets there money becomes their mouth. Or what comes out of it. Something like that. You know what I mean. I personally feel like Republicans (especially those on the far-right) don't care so much about where you funding comes from if you vote the right way. But that's another post.

One of a number of key planks of the progressive agenda is tackling climate change. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, getting anyone in Washington to move on this subject seems to require Herculean efforts. And for every dollar in a politician's war chest that comes from a group who is into climate change denial or just doesn't want to do anything about climate change, the less likely that politician is to want to be part of the solution. Without further adeu I present the top 10 Democratic and Republican incumbent Senators in terms of campaign contributions from the oil and coal industries. Let's take a look at this list and break it down a bit. The first couple of things I notice are these:

• Fully 1/5 of all Senators owe the Oil and Coal industries at least $10,000 in campaign funds
• 17 of the 20 that make up that 1/5 owe at least $30,000
• Republicans usually owe considerably more than Democrats
• The number one benefactor is Democrat from Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln (ahead of Lisa Murkowski from Alaska!)
• The list of "honorees" don't call any one region of the country home
• Russ Feingold is now the senator from the great new state of Wisconscion (probably a new, weird scion of Wisconsin) 

It's important to know where your elected representatives get their contributions from. It's important to know because these contributions don't come free. They come with the expectation that these senators will do favors for the industries who did the giving usually worth many times the amount donated. Recent examples include Ben Nelson and the teat of the healthcare industry as he fought valiantly for his insurance buddies to eliminate the popular Public Option from the Health Reform Bill and Blanche Lincoln and the epic job she's doing for the Oil industry in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon Spill. That first link for Lincoln also has a drop down for different years. 2008 tells us that John McCain received more than double the donations that the President did from the Oil and Gas industry during the 2008 campaign.

The fact is, our political system rewards politicians for diving into the very bottoms of lobbyists pockets and coming up with as much cash as they can. Winning a race for House or Senate is expensive. That's why decisions like the recent Citizens United v. FEC case so directly effect who represents us and what kind of government we can have. Before the Citizens United case there were caps on how much money a corporation could give to a candidate. Now, there are none, so you can expect to see those numbers go up in the next few election cycles. This sort of buying and selling of elected representatives has been going on a long time, but it has gotten much worse in the last few decades. We need to put a stop to this in the only ways we know how. We have to give our time and our money to candidates who really deserve it. Who aren't in some industry's pocket before the ever step foot in the Capital Building. And even more important that our time and our money is our votes. Research the people who are on your ballots. Especially for high federal positions like House, Senate, and the Presidency. Statistics show that once you get to Washington, you usually leave by choice. The incumbency effect is a powerful thing. Let's use it to our advantage and get people who answer to us and not to industry elected to the 112th Congress.

Here we go again.

My friend E who has his blog over at www.impossibletospell.com has an older post that I just now got around to reading that I think might be worth taking a look at. You can find it here. In it he posits essentially that there will be a "bubble" that is created around "green" jobs (specifically biofuel) much in the same way there was the .com bubble that was created and then wreaked havoc when it burst in the late 1990s. I think the theory is sound and want to play around with this idea a bit. Forgive me.

He starts by addressing the economics of the issue, talking about supply vs. demand and the Peak Oil phenomenon. All right on the mark.

I know environmentalists have been going on about peak oil since the 70′s, but it is bound to happen sooner or later. Note that doesn’t mean we’ll wake up one day to find the wells all dry. Just that we’ve drilled the most convenient wells first, and the price of oil will go up as the petroleum industry has to move on to lower grade wells, in less convenient places (ahem, Gulf of Mexico, ahem), at greater cost.

He wrote this fairly early into what is now the Deepwater Horizon Saga but you can see what he's getting at. In fact, I would argue that unless government regulations about where and how we drill for oil change, especially in very deep waters we're going to have more Deepwater Horizons in our future and it's because we've already hit peak oil and are beginning to feel it. The Deepwater Horizon well is in 5000 feet of water. That's a mile under the surface of the ocean essentially. Do you think it was cheap for BP to drill that well? And do you think if there were easier wells for them to drill they'd drill them? Yeah. We've already tapped the easy stuff. Now it's just a question of watching as quality goes down and price goes up. We've already had a little taste when gas was $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008 and a simple google search of the terms "$4 a gallon gas" produce a number of predictions that we'll see it again before the summer is gone. In milder terms, we've already mentally adjusted to a shift. I paid $3.13/gallon yesterday on the West Coast and I know that $2.50 is pretty normal in places where the prices trend lower than the national average. I can remember when gas was $0.99/gallon as a kid and how everyone started freaking out when it was suddenly $1.05. Welcome to the soft slide into the long fall that is peak oil.

Anyway, back to the biofuels. Simple high school economics explains why, as gas gets more expensive and it's quality goes down, alternatives that we now consider a tad too expensive will increase their market share. In fact, they already are in a tangential sort of way with the popularity of the Toyota Prius and new entries into America's fleet of vehicles coming soon like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt (just priced at $41,000!) A number of different competitors exist including biodiesel, wind, solar, hell even nuclear is on the table. Suddenly that giant pile of radioactive goo left over doesn't look so bad.

Moreover, many of those technologies are expensive for ‘fixable’ reasons–there’s room for more R&D to make them cheaper or more efficient, they haven’t had the chance to get good economies-of-scale going (look at the price on electric cars). Oil and coal companies have benefited disproportionately from having the living shit subsidized out of them, but that could change. Not that I expect the US will stop kissing oil company ass any time soon, but if Monsanto or the Iowa Corn Growers Association decide they want to be move into the energy market, they may get the way paved for them.

Yet another way to use the insane amount of corn grown in the midwest under federal subsidy. But farm subsidy reform and the food system are topics for another post.

He goes on to say, as I covered earlier up top, that the bust comes in if the economy does the same thing with new fuel sources that it did with the internet in the late 1990s. There IS an uncertainty about which of these new technologies will be what drives human power and innovation into the future. I'll grant that. I will however step aside for one moment and try and highlight one major difference between this and the .com bubble. While starting up an internet company requires capital it isn't physical in the way creating a company that builds thin-film solar cells or blades for an off-shore wind turbine are. I think that the physicality and the financial demands that are required to get in my be a hurdle that will help screen out all the "comp-sci dropouts with witty webaddresses", or at least a good number of them. Are their going to be businesses that fail as this industry emerges into its own, sure. But I'd like to think (and maybe I'm naive) that we'll figure this one out, if for no other reason than because we have to.

The real trick is that we an opportunity to set up a whole new industry here. Will we do it right, or will Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (metaphorically speaking) run the whole industry? We can just look at our government and see what happens when industry condenses to one or two major companies in an industry. You get crappy service and a high bill from AT&T and Verizon, it's all semantics which one you pick. You get screwed by the oil and gas industry no matter where the gas in your tank right now is BP or ExxonMobil. This is an opportunity we can't pass up. We MUST demand that this industry be built sustainably to create energy for us all instead of to create wealth for the very few.

And now we hit the crux of the matter.

...when I talk to non-scientists, including some really smart people about this issue, I hear a lot of variations on ‘Ok, so which one will it be? When the oil runs out, will we switch to ethanol? Will everything be solar powered? Who’s gonna win?’ The answer is, no one technology will replace the oil industry, ever. There’s no magic bullet. If oil and coal go way up in price, if consumers even ever start having to pay the full price of the mess they make, we’re not just going to swap one energy source for another and go on like nothing happened.

We need to get ready. Our lives are going to change whether we like it or not. If we don't prepare for it it just means that when they do, it'll be that much uglier. It means changing where and how we live, what sort of density we think is appropriate (hint: think Europe or China, not rural Idaho or suburban California), what, how, and how often we use our vehicles, where and how we buy our food, and what we do to make a living. The era of cheap, easy energy is over. We've used up what's on our planet. Now we get to figure it out.

Outmoded

An important man once said, "The most frightening nine words in the english language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" That man was of course former President Ronald Reagan. It is, of course, this President than Republicans and conservatives have lauded since he left office in 1988 as THE American President. His ideas that government wasn't just a problem, but that it was THE problem have resounded throughout American politics and continue to this day.

Aside from my feeling that if you think government is such a problem, perhaps you shouldn't be in the business of governing I take other issues with this. But I'm going to borrow from President Reagan today and say that the most frightening eight words in the english language today are, "I'm from BP and I'm here to help."

Beyond any discussion of the Deepwater Horizon Spill as an environmental disaster or as something we can use to spur, as the President said last night a "clean energy future for America" I feel like we are seeing first hand the ways the deregulation beginning in the Reagan era from that deep-seated mistrust of government have left us as a people helpless. Sure, this has been the theme on the issue of Wall Street reform for a while now, but I don't think many Americans understand how deeply this deregulation has seeped into our corporate culture. Not only have the banks been freed to do what they please, but so have other major corporations, specifically in the energy industry. We saw it with the way Massey Energy was handling the Upper Big Branch Mine and we are seeing it, and reaping the rewards all along the Gulf Coast, in the response from BP, or lack thereof, to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Mother Jones magazine has an article up right now that talks about the campaign BP is waging to make sure the public doesn't understand how poor a job they are doing. You can check the article here. Make sure you at least scroll through the whole thing. The bottom section has photos of what appear to be simple paper towels that they're placing on top of the oil. As if Brawny is going to get the job done! "It's super absorbant! Why not?" BP's board says. In general I've found very few national media outlets that are covering this in the way it should be. Rachel Maddow has been right on the ball. Most of her coverage has been of the lame ass job BP is doing of keeping oil already out of the riser pipe off shores and out of sensitive marshlands instead of focusing on "capping the well" like everybody else seems worried about. Mother Jones is the other outlet that seems to be on top of things. All the other good reporting is coming from local Gulf Coast TV and radio stations as well as newspapers! Those silly things printed on paper that no one reads anymore. Remember them? Publications like the Times Picayune. Congrats to you guys. We're all paying the price though for the poor reporting.

I'm Back!

I must apologize for being so quiet as things have continued happening around the world. I have been moving. Across the country if you must know. And it takes a bit to get plugged back into the world. Let along knowing enough to begin making commentary again. Just as a summary:

The BP Oil Spill is continuing after more than a month. We've tried the containment dome, the cut and cap, the junk shot, the top kill, booms of all kinds, fire, and what I'm calling the Pull and Pray (which is just what it sounds like). Now it looks like we're just waiting until the relief wells can be finished. Near the end of August. And this is all as we are heading into what looks to be a very dangerous 2010 Hurricane Season.

Thailand has been facing civil unrest for several months which culminated in a shoot to kill order from the military government in Thailand and the deaths of several of the redshirt protesters. See here.

We are still moving forward with the primaries in many states in preparation for the November elections. Now former Pennsylvania Senator and former Republican Arlen Specter is over and done with. Elections took place in Alabama today as well as Mississippi and New Mexico with South Carolina and some others coming in next week.

Also, at the beginning of my move the President nominated Elena Kagan to fill Justice John Paul Stevens' seat on the court. She is the current US Solicitor General. Some of you probably want to know what I think of her and the truth is that I haven't had the time to do a thorough search and read up enough. But my gut instinct from what I've heard from national media sources is that she isn't liberal enough. She doesn't come close to the "liberal lion" that some have called Stevens. And anything less than Stevens moves the court to the right which is as unacceptable now under the Obama Administration as it was when he nominated Justice Sotomayor. I'm not saying she's not qualified although some have quibbled over her lack of time on the bench. Just that she's to middle of the road for my (admittedly lefty) tastes.

So. Let's start with BP and the oil spill. I shouldn't really call it a spill. I should be calling it a geyser, or a volcano, or a gush, or a spilling. Or something to indicate that there's really no end to this thing. But leaving that aside, it's a wonder to me that we've done as little as we have to try and head off another problem like this at the pass. The President has put 33 exploratory rigs on hold and we're no longer issuing new leases. We've discovered the amazing lack of sense in what is laughably called the Mineral Management Service or MMS. But there are still literally thousands of other rigs in the Gulf and all of the United States pumping away. I understand that taking America's oil production to zero barrels a day may potentially increase the price of gas at the pump. That's a price I am willing, and I hope you are willing, to pay to protect America's environmental treasures. We've already destroyed the Louisiana Marshlands. Do we want to kill the California Kelp Forests and other such aquamarine jewels as well?

BP has made it as clear as any multi-national corporation can (which is not very) that they are willing to pay. While trying to get off the hook for paying. But still. Even if they were willing to write a big, fat, multi-trillion dollar check to pay for everything that doesn't fix it. Everyone is acting like, as long as BP pays then it's fine. Eh. Who cares! And oil spill here or there. No biggie. They could write a check for the US GDP and it wouldn't automagically clean up the environmentally sensitive areas that have already been or will be destroyed. Nothing but time can undo that. And a lot of times even time can't. Just take a look at Prince William Sound 20+ years after the Exxon Valdez. This subject has been beat to death. And so I will stop now with full knowledge that I will be back on this horse sooner rather than later. The only thing we, the people, can do is to keep ourselves informed and pressure our elected government to do right by us, and take care of BP.

She's at it Again

Friday saw another post by our beloved former governor of Alaska on her Facebook page in response to the Horizon Oil Spill. I thought about not linking it in order to not give her the traffic, but as I'm going to quote some of the post here I want it to be available to readers in full so as not to take the Governor out of context. Her note is here. As you might expect the core of her response is still "Drill, Baby, Drill", now wrapped in a shell of concern for the environment.

As an Alaskan, I can speak from the heart about the tragedy of an oil spill. For as long as I live, I will never forget the day the Exxon-Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef and millions of gallons of North Slope crude poured into the waters of our beautiful Prince William Sound.

To be honest, I'm tired of this idea that only Alaskans understand the oil and gas industry for what it really is. We all buy their products, refineries are everywhere, and there are (as has been horribly demonstrated) other places where extraction is happening inside the US other than the North Slope and Prudhoe Bay.

Alaskans understand the tragedy of an oil spill, and we’ve taken steps to do all we can to prevent another Exxon tragedy, but we are still pro-development. We still believe in responsible development, which includes drilling to extract energy sources, because we know that there is an inherent link between energy and security, energy and prosperity, and energy and freedom.

I think it's safe to say that Americans understand the tragedy of an oil spill. But leaving that aside, if Alaska has done all it can, how come twenty years later the majority of tankers operating out of the Port of Valdez in Prince William Sound are still single hulled tankers? Could it be that replacing those tankers might cost Exxon and BP money that they don't want to spend and so they haven't been pushed to make necessary changes?

She does get one thing right. And I want to give credit where it's due. There is a link between energy and security, energy and prosperity, and energy and freedom. So why is it then, as a major news contributor and a political figure of some serious heft, Governor Palin hasn't used any of her significant power to push for more money for R&D on renewable energy generation, or more money toward the technologies that we already have?  After all, we just approved the new wind farm off of Cape Cod. I agree that it was a tough decision but it comes down to whether you're willing to make the sacrifices to break America's dependency on foreign oil or not. Clearly the Governor and her friends in the Tea Party and the GOP aren't willing to make that sacrifice. For them, truly, national security always comes down to who to kill, what war to start, or what to blow up in that country several thousand miles from here. Even though their rhetoric says that they get it, they never seem to make the easy choices that will advance our national security and safeguard the lives of all Americans including those in the military.

The Governor also pushes the idea in her post that she (and by extension the GOP) has been tough on Big Oil.

This was the position I took as an oil and gas regulator and as Governor of Alaska when my administration ramped up oversight of the oil industry and created a petroleum-systems-integrity office to monitor our oil and gas infrastructure for potential environmental risks. I took a lot of heat for the stand I took “against the oil industry” (which is how political adversaries labeled my actions). But we took tough action because there was proof of some improper maintenance of oil infrastructure which I believed was unacceptable. We instituted new oversight and held British Petroleum (BP) financially accountable for poor maintenance practices.

If that is true, why is it that profits for Petroleum companies went through the roof during the Bush Administration? Well, besides the fact that two unnecessary wars opened up a big new market for them. Granted, the Obama Administration doesn't get off the hook. After all they just a few weeks ago lifted a ban on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that they are only now, in the light of a national disaster, walking back. The Obama Administration is, just like the Bush Administration, far to loyal to big business interests. We've seen this time and again from the deep water drilling, to the weak stance on Health Care Reform when Big Pharma got involved and now we're seeing it in Wall Street Reform. Everyone is to blame here. Every administration since the early 1900s, the Democrats, the GOP, the Tea Party, and yes, you and me. We take for granted that our choices at the pump and at the ballot box have no effect on these big companies and we're wrong. It's time, well past time, to make a conscious effort to drive less, take public transit, walk, and bike more, vote for representatives who legitimately want to control big business, and get America off our Oil Addiction, foreign or otherwise.