New England Coalition for Affordable Energy: The Latest Fracked Gas Pipeline Front Group

For the second time in a year, the oil and gas industry is launching a new front group in Massachusetts to try to trick voters into supporting new fracked gas pipelines. Strangely, Big Oil is being much more up front than usual about creating the "New England Coalition for Affordable Energy."

I'm not sure why you'd create a front group claiming to represent "business and labor groups," then put "Sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and America's Natural Gas Alliance" right at the bottom of the website, but there it is:

The stock photos of "supporters" are fantastic. Obviously they're just models dressed up like different key demographics, but it's fun to imagine why you'd need, say, a doctor and a chef standing next to each other. And with the guy in the tank top and headphones - showing that the key bro demographic endorses fracked gas pipelines? 

Who's actually in this "coalition"? A handful of industrial groups, a Koch-backed national lobbying group, the Independent Oil Marketers Association of New England, and the one and only union they could find to sell out every other thing unions believe in the name of a handful of pipeline-building jobs. 

Last fall, fracked gas pipeline giant Kinder Morgan tried to hide behind a front group called the "Coalition to Lower Energy Costs," though seeing through that isn't very hard either: The Coalition's spokesman, Tony Buxton, is a lawyer for Kinder Morgan.

If more fracked gas would lower energy costs as these polluter front groups claim, why have electricity prices spiked in Pennsylvania, ground zero of the fracking boom? New England is already alarmingly dependant on fracked gas, which today is providing 57% of the region's electricity.

Fracked gas is scientifically shown to destabilize our climate, pollute our drinking water, and trigger earthquakes. Instead of doubling down on our dangerous fossil fuel dependence, our leaders should continue moving Massachusetts to new sources of clean energy like home and utility-scale solar as well as onshore and offshore wind.

Big Government for Me, Not for Thee

Libertarians in practice are people who support government programs that directly benefit them but oppose the ones that don't.

So basically, they're just selfish. Which is fine, but lay off the FREEEEDOM shtick.

They say every small-government, anti-tax Tea Party Libertarian is only one disaster away from being a socialist. #morefreedom Source: http://bit.ly/1JklQVo Photo: Elaine Thompson, AP
Posted by Red State Dems on Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Nothing Natural About Fracked Gas

We don't call it "natural oil" or "natural coal." So why do we refer to methane gas - especially the gas that's been fracked - as "natural"?

Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure which allows the gas to flow out to the head of the well. [...]

The extensive use of fracking in the US, where it has revolutionised the energy industry, has prompted environmental concerns.

The first is that fracking uses huge amounts of water that must be transported to the fracking site, at significant environmental cost. The second is the worry that potentially carcinogenic chemicals used may escape and contaminate groundwater around the fracking site.

If all that isn't enough, fracked gas also destabilizes our climate and causes earthquakes. Fracking now produces half of the oil and a majority of the gas produced in the United States.

This isn't a semantic debate - it has a real impact in moving public opinion. Ask voters if they want more natural gas and most say yes. Ask if they support fracking and a plurality oppose it.

If you're trying to convince voters to oppose fracked gas pipelines or power plants, call it fracked gas. It's accurate, it communicates the damage caused by fossil fuels, and it's politically effective.

Hottest Month Ever: Time to Stop Leaving Climate Action to the Politicians?

July was the hottest month in recorded human history, with 2015 on track to be the hottest year ever, which would break the record set just last year.

While climate activists and science deniers get most of the attention, the vast majority of Americans remain on the sideline. That's enabled by media coverage that either ignores the latest science or paints it as a horse-race political issue. But you have to wonder: How bad will things have to get before more Americans start moving from disengaged to concerned and from cautious to alarmed?

If you do want to get involved, find your local 350.org group here. Deniers of climate science need to feel constant pressure, and supporters of climate science need to know you support doing even more.

How Big Coal Gave Us The Clean Power Plan

As polluters and their political allies decry President Obama's Clean Power Plan, it's understandable they're ignoring the reality that they created it. As Kate Sheppard recounts at Huffington Post, friends of the coal industry, namely the minority of Republican and coal state Democrat senators, filibustered the 2010 clean energy & climate bill, which contained the ungodly sum of $177 billion to subsidize carbon capture & storage at coal-fired power plants.

Despite that massive giveaway offer negotiated by coal ally Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), despite President Obama making clear that if the bill died he'd use the Clean Air Act to limit carbon pollution, coal allies blockaded the bill anyway. And then they voted their powerful Democratic ally Boucher out of office, replacing him with an inept, back-bench Tea Party Republican.

Coal and its allies were gambling they could kill the climate bill and block the Clean Power Plan. Here in 2015, it's breathtaking to look at just how spectacularly that plan blew up in Big Coal's face.

Even at the time, it was clear the climate bill's death also killed any hope coal could ever be clean. But just five years later, even the old-fashioned coal-fired power that's allowed to dump carbon pollution into the atmosphere for free is now in a death spiral - well before the Clean Power Plan takes effect.

I talked about the Clean Power Plan with Bruce DePuyt on News Channel 8's Newstalk:

Bike Manual's Top Safety Tip: Avoid Getting Run Over

My wife and I recently bought new Electra Townie bicycles and the manual is basically 54 pages of "if you get hit by a negligent driver, you're done for, so avoid that."

I don't blame Electra, it's just an interesting window into how we take it for granted that the vast majority of our roads aren't designed to be safe for people on bikes. (Wearing a bike helmet does much less to keep you safe than proper bike infrastructure like protected bike lanes.)

Got my first bike since middle school, a Townie #ElectraBike, thanks to nudging from the lovely @bethaniegrant. Going to start a new series, #WorstBikeRacksOfSouthcoast. First one: @riteaid in Fairhaven. (Given lack of racks, most will probably be lean-to's like this.)

A photo posted by Miles Grant (@thegreenmilesgrant) on Jun 18, 2015 at 10:21am PDT

CNN Ignores Climate Science, Embraces Science Denier Meme

CNN almost completely ignored last year's landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, but this week CNN.com extensively covered a discredited climate science denier theory that was mentioned in a non-peer-reviewed study.

If "objective" news outlets were proactively trying to get people to not care about the climate crisis, how would it look different than what we have now?

The Only One Direction Video I Will Ever Post

One Direction is asking its fans to help solve problems like poverty and climate change:

GOP: I'm Not a Scientist, and I Don't Listen to Them Either

@Uptomyknees POPE: Global warming is real! conservatives: leave science to scientists! EVERY SCIENTIST: um? conservatives: fuck off nerds

— Todd Slade (@todd_slade) July 8, 2015

But More People Don't Bike Because #AmericasLoveAffairWithCars!

Mailbox post in trash can filled with cement
in middle of sidewalk in Mattapoisett, MA

We're constantly told Americans drive everywhere because of our mythical love affair with cars, but trying to bike in car-dependent areas feels a lot more like we're trapped in a bad relationship.

Obstacles encountered on the sidewalk of Route 6 in Mattapoisett recently while trying to bike home:

• Utility poles
• Trash carts left by pickup crews in the middle of the sidewalk
• Abandoned traffic cones
• Abandoned utility pole support posts now supporting nothing
• Mailbox posts
• Shards of old mailbox posts sticking up out of the sidewalk
• Mailbox posts built into trash cans filled with cement in the middle of the sidewalk, because mailbox safety clearly trumps people on bicycle safety 
• Untrimmed tree branches hanging down
• Untrimmed bushes pushing out from the side
• Deep driveway curb cuts, because the last thing we'd want to do is make cars slow down while driving across the sidewalk

There's no bike lane on Route 6 and the speed limits range up to 45 miles an hour, which means people drive around 50 miles an hour. For casual bicyclists, the sidewalk is your only option (and there's only sidewalk on one side of the road).

Considering Route 6 is lightly traveled and I-195 parallels it just one mile to the north, it would be easy to add a bike lane, or at least an adequately wide sidewalk.

But that would mean slightly reducing vehicle speeds! How much of our freedom are we really willing to give up for complete streets? As a neighbor asked in nearby Wareham, won't someone think of the children?

"You want them to make room for all these bikers? It'll be a narrower road for ambulances heading to Tobey Hospital and school kids traveling home. There is limited space down there."

Clearly bike paths are death traps that eat the young & sick. The only way to make things safe is to give cars even more room to drive even faster!

Parking Lot Historic, Solar Farm Not

NextSun Energy wants to build a small solar farm not far from me in Rochester, MA. While I don't know if this is the right place for the project, some of the opposition is ... not exactly honest. From the Sippican Week:

“I know there are four abutters or more. It’s an island of commercial in a residential area,” Monteiro said.

The historic district is an area that encompasses three square miles in the center of town. Buildings such as Plumb Library, the First Congregational Church and Town Hall are all located in the area.

Such a historic area, clearly undisturbed since colonial times!

Except it's right across the street from a shopping plaza with a huge parking lot:

The New Bedford Standard-Times doesn't mention the disconnect either.

And what kind of bucolic-character-destroying development are we talking about? Here's another NextSun project:

Looks exactly like lower Manhattan to me!

People can oppose whatever they want & that's certainly their right. But let's be honest: Historic preservation is often used as a shield for personal preference. At a time when we need to be building clean energy as quickly as possible to slow the climate crisis, is that enough justification to use government authority to block projects like this?

Alberta's Carbon Tax is Pocket Change to Big Oil

Alberta! Apparently lots of people live there? Who knew!

Alberta is raising its carbon tax to $30 a ton by 2017, but that's projected to only cut carbon emissions two percent. So basically, it’s pocket change for the oil industry because it will barely change their behavior, and the government gets millions in revenue. 

There's plenty of evidence in the states that putting a price on carbon pollution is great for state budgets without hurting state economies. California's carbon cap and trade system raised $850 million last year. Business Insider recently ranked California's economic growth second-fastest in the US, so cap and trade is not exactly crippling its economy.

In the Northeast, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative just raised $85 million in its second auction of 2015. It raised $82 million in the first auction, meaning it's on pace to raise in the neighborhood of $330 million for the year, and continuing to prove that carbon cap and trade works really, really well.

Note that Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) pulled New Jersey out of RGGI, and now the state is having to raise taxes to make ends meet. I bet New Jersey could use those millions in easy money right about now.

Imagine how much in revenue Congress and other states are leaving on the table? It’s crazy.

More Evidence of Air Pollution's Impact on Health, This Time Our Brains

New research links air pollution from fossil fuels like coal and oil - particularly from diesel engines - to dementia, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, as Aaron Reuben reports for Mother Jones:

Controlling for things like ethnicity, gender, income, education, and other possible environmental exposures (including cigarette smoke), elderly individuals living in areas with polluted air appear to lose their mental abilities faster, show more predementia symptoms (also known as mild cognitive impairment), and develop Alzheimer's disease at greater rates. Six years ago, researchers in Germany assessed the cognitive abilities of 399 elderly women who lived in the same place for more than 20 years. Regardless of her socioeconomic status, the closer a woman lived to a busy road, the authors reported, the greater the chance that she would have mild cognitive impairment.

Four years ago, researchers from Harvard linked estimates of higher daily exposure to black carbon, a solid type of fine particulate matter, to lower cognitive ability in older men in Boston. In a larger, national study tracking the mental status of more than 19,000 retired nurses over several years, researchers connected the rate of mental decline in women 70 and older to their exposure to coarse- and fine-particle pollution and found that those exposed to more particles lost their mental abilities at a faster rate. In a group of 95,690 elderly Taiwanese, researchers this year found that a slight increase in fine-particle exposure over 10 years led to a 138 percent increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. A smaller, more recent study published in the Annals of Neurology followed 1,403 elderly women without dementia. Scientists found that exposure to air pollution over time to led to a major decrease in the subjects' white matter, a part of the brain essential for cognition. [...]

And there is growing evidence that particle pollution's assault on the mind is not limited to elderly brains. Researchers in Mexico City, which still has some of the worst urban air on the planet, have found signs of advanced brain damage in children as young as six and seven years old: overactive immune cells, degraded white matter, and damaged vasculature typically seen only in older brains. In one autopsy study comparing children raised in Mexico City with their counterparts in less polluted parts of the country, half the Mexico City children had notable aggregations of a protein called amyloid beta—which is strongly associated with Alzheimer's—grouped in clumps across their brains. In the children from less polluted areas, there were none.

If all costs remained the same, and global warming were not occuring, it would still be worth it strictly from a public health perspective to end our use of fossil fuels. From lead damaging our children's brains to air pollution's link to autism to mercury's link to ADHD, the toll of coal and oil pollution is incalculably immense.

But the climate crisis is already well underway and the costs of inaction are staggering, which makes the decision a complete slam dunk. That our elected officials aren't moving us away from polluting energy as quickly as possible shows that there are truly enormous amounts of money to be made from keeping us hooked on fossil fuels and maintaining our energy status quo.

The Fraud of Climate Science Deniers Telling the Pope to Shut up

With Pope Francis issuing an encyclical this week declaring that we have "a moral and religious imperative" to cut carbon pollution, climate science deniers are scrambling to explain how their continued obstruction isn't immoral. Their new version of "I'm not a scientist" is "the Pope shouldn't mix religion and politics."

That's beyond hypocritical. As Steve Benen writes at MSNBC, for many of these same conservatives, mixing religion and politics is their bread and butter:

In culture-war debates over gay rights and reproductive rights, for example, the right routinely argues that policymakers should heed the appeals from religious leaders. More generally, conservatives express alarm about the left trying to push voices from the faith community “out of the public square.” It’s these religious leaders, the GOP argues, that should help guide public debate.

Except when the climate is on fire, at which point the pope is apparently supposed to keep his mouth shut?

A related fraud: When polluter front groups like the Heartland Institute, which believes we should have no minimum wage whatsoever, claim to be better advocates for the poor than Pope Francis.

Read These Two Stories, Then Tell Me We Can Separate Environmental Problems From Inequality

Hillary Clinton delivered her first major campaign speech over the weekend, painting climate science denial as part of the same elite obstruction that keeps wages down and public infrastructure shoddy.

It's a powerful case that brings together seemingly unrelated issues. And it's one that's more believable the more you know about how many of the ultra-wealthy simply don't care about solving America's problems:

• After California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered water restrictions in the face of crippling drought, Rob Kuznia reports in today's Washington Post that the ultra-wealthy community of Rancho Santa Fe has actually increased its water use 9 percent:

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” [Steve] Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

• The Russell Sage Foundation polled the 1% (average income of $1 million or more a year) and found they're 37% more likely than the average American to say we should cut environmental protections than expand them.

As David Roberts writes at Vox, there's growing evidence that, as a group, rich people are selfish jerks.

Why Else Would You Want to Build a Fracked Gas Pipeline to the Coast?

There's tons of news coverage about proposed fracked gas pipelines in New England, but almost never mentioned is that they're clearly export pipelines. We're really supposed to believe they want to build these pipelines to lower our energy costs? Why would they do that even if the pipelines are built?

Fracked gas companies are just exploiting high prices to get customers to pay for new pipelines to get their gas to the export market. It's a huge scam.

They're never going to volunteer to stop gouging us. Until we force them to bargain by shifting our energy supplies into utility-scale wind and solar, we're negotiating with the people holding us hostage.

Robert Reich on How to Save the Planet AND Our Economy

Watch this new video from Robert Reich & MoveOn, then read more here:

Jeb Bush's Allegiance to Big Polluters Must Never Be Discussed

Reporters wonder why Jeb Bush is so hard to pin down on climate change.

Then days later, it's revealed Jeb is desperately courting coal money.

It's a real mystery!

Best to present this as some inscrutably brilliant political strategy that only he understands. Surely can't point out his painfully transparent true motivations.

Cruz: We Mustn't Ask If Climate Polluters Made Texas Floods Worse

CNN reports the unprecedented floods in Texas - exactly the kind climate scientists have been saying we'll see more of in a warming world - are really harshing the science denial of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX):

The Republican presidential contender has held two press conferences over the past two days to address the flooding and the government's response. At each one, he was asked about the impact of climate change on natural disasters like the Texas flooding, and at each one, he dodged the question.

"In a time of tragedy, I think it's wrong to try to politicize a natural disaster -- and so there's plenty of time to talk about other issues," he said in response to a question on his views on climate change during a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.

Yes, the last thing we should be doing is using science to figure out if carbon pollution from fossil fuels made the never-before-seen flooding worse. Remind me again how it's "libertarian" to let polluters make deadly disasters worse without having to pay for it?

Do Voters Really Want to Spend More on Roads?

Following in the footsteps of Massachusetts voters last fall, Michigan voters recently rejected a gas tax increase. This reaction from Gov. Rick Snyder (R-MI), who pushed the tax hike referendum, caught my eye:

"While voters didn't support this particular proposal, we know they want action taken to maintain and improve our roads and bridges," Snyder said.

We hear that from politicians and political commentators all the time, but is that really true? And what if it's not?

Raising the gas tax is a very good idea, yet it's also extremely unpopular. This is always interpreted as anti-tax fervor, or that there's something unique about the gas tax that voters don't want that raised but they'd be more tolerant of some other tax hike to fund roads, because voters are dumb, I guess?

As Gov. Snyder said, it's always taken on faith that voters want to spend more on roads and bridges, but don't want to have to pay for it. Most polling isn't helpful in that it just asks if voters want to raise the gas tax to fund transportation projects, but doesn't ask whether funding more transportation projects is itself a worthy goal.

Here's what some polling can tell us:

• A 2014 YouGov/Huffington Post poll found fewer voters wanted to spend more (45%) on roads and bridges than wanted to spend the same (31%) or less (15%). That's not exactly a mandate for saying "we know they want action taken," is it?
• A Smart Growth America poll back in 2007 found voters supportive of spending more on road repair, but strongly opposed to spending more on new roads. This is a key point because states spend most of their transportation money on building new roads.
• A poll ahead of the Michigan referendum showed the biggest chunk of voters didn't want their taxes raised and others didn't like the complex referendum proposal. But at least 1 in 5 voters didn't want to spend the money spent at all, calling it wasteful government spending. 

What would it look like if we stopped increasing spending on roads and bridges? In the short term, we'd build fewer brand new or expansion projects, and focus on repairing existing ones. If those polls are right, that's actually much more in line with public sentiment than our Big New Project status quo.
Would it be a traffic nightmare if we stopped expanding roads? Transportation researchers say no:

The Surface Transportation Policy Project and other researchers have found that for every increase in our highway network, half of the new capacity is taken up by "induced demand" -that is, traffic drawn to the road because it's there. Building new roads and adding more lanes draws people who otherwise would not have driven onto the roads. Combined with the delays created by construction and the time it takes to complete a major project, roadbuilding provides almost no relief from traffic delays. And it's incredibly expensive.

Maybe instead of spending more money on roads and bridges whether voters like it or not, politicians and pundits should try listening to them instead?

UPDATE 5/31/15: I joined the BradCast to discuss this topic, you can listen here.