Category Archives: Politics

I’m happy to announce that my latest Op-Ed has been published in two major newspapers, the Baltimore Sun and New Jersey’s Star-Leger! I’ve placed links to the article below. I chose these two papers because I grew up in NJ and currently live in Baltimore.

The Star Ledger (NJ’s top newspaper, circulation of 230,000)
The Baltimore Sun (Maryland’s top newspaper, circulation of 196,000)
Pipeline Reviews (redirects to Star-Ledger)

Here’s the text of my original, unedited article:

The Keystone XL Pipeline, designed to pump unrefined oil tar sands from Alberta to Texas, won a critical victory Friday when the US State Department concluded the project posed “no significant impacts” to the environment. This conclusion is horribly misaligned with reality.

TransCanada, a Calgary firm, intends its XL to move over 500,000 highly pressurized barrels per day through what it calls “the safest pipeline in North America,” faint praise for a company whose existing Keystone pipeline has spilled 12 times in one year. That the 1711-mile long, half-inch thick pipeline traverses fragile ecosystems and public aquifers doesn’t aid matters.

More dangerous, though, is the resource-intensive extraction process. The EPA estimates carbon emissions from tar sand extraction to be 80% greater than average crude. Noted Columbia University climatologist Jim Hansen spoke bluntly of the project, claiming “exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts,” adding, “if the tar sands are thrown into the mix it is essentially game over.”

But some advocates, including Cindy Schild (Baltimore Sun – “Keystone XL pipeline, bringing oil from Canada, is a step towards the future”, August 22), a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute, claim the pipeline is needed to create jobs. Environmental effects aside, this misses the larger point. After the short-term stimulus provided by construction of the Keystone XL, the pipeline locks the US into a long-term dependency on Canadian crude. We will have sent a negative signal to our domestic renewable energy markets all while American energy dollars continue to leak abroad.

Environmental advocates have been vocal in their opposition, staging a two-week sit-in at the White House which culminated earlier this month. The peaceful protest resulted in over 1000 arrests including those of prominent climate scientists. That our nation’s scientific experts have been incarcerated for defending our shared environment is nothing short of an American embarrassment.

To be clear, this decision is out of the hands of Congress. Final approval of the pipeline lies entirely with the Obama administration’s State Department. Instead of striving for a future of crisp, clean, green American energy, the federal government seems desperate to prolong our addiction to finite, filthy, foreign fuels and tar sands are perhaps the dirtiest of the bunch. Their penetration through our American heartland should be staunchly opposed.

At last count, the Star-Ledger article had 1,426 Facebook Likes, 3 Facebook recommendations, and 7 tweets, one Google +1 (I’m not sure this is catching on yet), and 6 comments! Not too bad for a “boring” issue like a pipeline.

Big Oil execs and their political counterparts love to sing the praises of the domestic oil sector.  They argue that the industry unleashes “job-creation activity” and will generate up to one million new jobs by 2018, according to the American Petroleum Institute.   They argue that increased domestic production will “enhance our energy security” by maximizing the quantity of liquid fuel obtained from “secure” North American sources.  Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) stated in a GOP weekly radio address, “Tapping our own vast resources will help lower energy costs for Americans, add high-paying jobs to our economy, and strengthen our security for future generations.”

The danger here is that many Big Oil advocates have defended expanded drilling and deregulation in pursuit of jobs and security without realizing that, unfettered, the oil industry will instead pursue its primary goal, profit.  In instances where these ideals run counter to each other, “pro-oil” policies intended to create jobs and security can more than just miss their target.  They can be directly counterproductive.

Consider a NY Times story published on September 27 (In North Dakota, Flames of Wasted Natural Gas Light the Prairie) which reports that petroleum outfits operating western North Dakota’s Bakken shale field are unintentionally releasing natural gas during the oil extraction process.  The industry has claimed that the infrastructure needed to capture the gas is expensive and has chosen to burn it off instead, a process known as flaring.  An estimated 30% of all natural gas produced in the state, the annual carbon equivalent of a medium-size coal-fired power plant, is combusted in this manner.

There are no federal regulations against flaring and none are expected any time soon.  State governments have greater flexibility, but North Dakota has made no indication that it will act to restrict the process.

Let’s first examine how this fits into Big Oil’s jobs narrative.  In the case of the Bakken shale field, petroleum operators have a genuine opportunity to put people back to work creating, transporting, installing, and operating the infrastructure required to capture the available gas reserves.  But because collecting these natural gas resources fails to optimize profit, they have opted against it.  Now this is not to say that capturing the Bakken field’s natural gas reserves makes the entire enterprise unprofitable.  It simply makes it less profitable, and they view this as an unacceptable cost even if it creates jobs.

The simple truth is that the oil industry is not the engine of job growth that many advocates claim it is.  Between 2005 and 2010, ExxonMobile, BP, Shell and Chevron combined to reduce their US workforce by 11,200 while simultaneously raking in $546 billion in profits.  They, along with ConocoPhillips, followed up that performance in 2010 by shedding another 4,400 jobs amidst profits of $73 billion.  They reinvested a paltry 1.2% of their profit in alternative fuels R&D and instead chose to buy back their own stock, enriching their board of directors, senior executives and shareholders in the process.

Then there is the claim that “pro-oil” policies enhance domestic security.  In pursuit of greater domestic energy supply, the United States is presently promoting a wide array of risky fossil fuel acquisition projects.  The risks are warranted, so the argument goes, because maximizing our domestic supply of liquid-fuel energy is too important to sacrifice.

For example, Congress has failed to pass a single piece of legislative reform in the wake of last year’s Deepwater Horizon disaster (which killed 11 people), yet will allow BP to resume offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.  There is no proven method to clean up an oil spill in icy Arctic waters, yet the US has issued leases which will allow Royal Dutch Shell to explore for oil in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea.  TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline would pump over 500,000 barrels of highly pressurized tar sands per day straight through the American Heartland (an amount large enough to be “game over” for climate change according to one prominent climate scientist), yet the US government seems primed to approve it despite the risks.

The list goes on, but the essential point is that Big Oil and its government supporters expect Americans to suffer significant environmental and health burdens in defense of maximizing our domestic energy supply.  These are public costs worth bearing, they argue (if they chose to acknowledge them at all), in defense of the greater good.  Yet when the North Dakota oil firms are presented the opportunity to absorb their fair share of the cost in defense of our natural gas reserves, they balk.

The case of Keystone XL is particularly emblematic of profiteers’ other tactic, blatant distortion of the facts.  Cindy Schild, a refinery manager with the American Petroleum Institute, has defended the XL by arguing that “it will be a part of the nation’s energy future” without which “the oil will be shipped to other countries.”  What she fails to mention is that a full three-quarters of the tar sands have already been contracted out to five foreign companies and one domestic, Valero, whose business model is geared towards export.

Make no mistake, “job creation” and “energy security” are little more that thinly veiled justifications for policies designed to maximize corporate oil profits.  It is this obsession with profit that explains why taxpayers are needlessly lavishing oil companies with tens of billions of dollars in subsidies.  It explains why Americans are being placed in danger by weakened environmental standards and by refusals to strengthen pipeline safety rules.  It explains why some politicians have even supported shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency.  It’s the same reason companies like Exxon deliberately spread misinformation about the veracity of human-driven climate change and why oil billionaires like the Koch brothers support bogus studies discrediting offshore wind farms.

If politicians are truly concerned with creating jobs and increasing security, then the status quo of coarsely and broadly liberalizing the oil industry must be abandoned in favor of narrowly focused policy goals.  Require that natural gas in the Bakken field be collected, not flared.  Place a price on carbon pollution, which would level the playing field with other emergent sectors critical for energy security, like wind and solar.  Empower the Environmental Protection Agency to protect our water and air as much as our energy supply.

Until then, the fact remains that North Dakota is on fire, energy resources are being squandered, jobs lie fallow, and at least two million tons of carbon dioxide are being released into the atmosphere each year.  Big Oil will persist in telling us they are interested in creating jobs and preserving security.  If only it weren’t a bunch of hot air.

This question was the first sentence from last Sunday’s NY Times article A Debate Arises on Job Creation and Environment.  It’s particularly timely as environmentalists and conservatives/business interests have been battling ferociously over issues like the Keystone XL pipeline, ozone regulations, and the very existence of the EPA.  Environmental proponents contend these regulations protect health, business productivity, and a sustainable environment for future growth.  Their opponents contend these rules impose onerous business expenses and can lead to lost jobs and even the closure of facilities.

But who’s right?  Apparently, no one knows!  It’s striking to me that many government regulations are issued, but not followed-up on.  From the NY Times article,

 “Regulations are put on the books and largely stay there unexamined,” said Michael Greenstone, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This is part of the reason that these debates about regulations have a Groundhog’s Day quality to them.”

Are the regulations having their intended effect?  Are there unintended consequences, and if so, how costly are they?  Can the rules be improved?

During my time working as a Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, I came across a number of ostensibly “boring” studies of how several Department of Energy research programs were progressing.  Dull reading perhaps, but perpetual assessment and refinement of policy should be an absolute requirement of sound government.

In that spirit, I want to summarize the benefits and costs of environmental regulations presented in this article and others alongside some evidence to support those positions.

ARGUMENTS AGAINST REGULATION

• Too expensive to implement in a depressed economy
• High cost of clean-up can cause factories to close or relocate abroad
• Can lead to a loss of jobs

ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF REGULATION

• Numerous health benefits including reduced infant mortality and instances of autism, better health of children and the elderly, increased life spans, reductions in the number of hospitalizations, and other health benefits
• Increase housing prices (e.g. lack of regulation makes living next to coal plants more hazardous than living next to nuclear plants)
• Improve quality of life by maintaining a pristine environment with breathable air and clean ecosystems
• Complying with regulations requires new job-creating projects and technologies that become less expensive over time as the the clean-tech sectors mature
• Rules set far in advance can guide new investments; e.g. when choosing new technology, businesses will choose the greener one even if the initial cost is slightly greater
• Preferable in down economies to invest in upgrades rather than sit on cash

But good golly there’s a lot of tit-for-tat.  Environmentalists claim that regulation is often the scapegoat for poor economic performance caused by other factors, such as low demand, poor tax and labor policies, and inadequate communication and transportation infrastructure.  They argue the costs of regulation are almost always exaggerated.

For example, the electric utility industry warned that amendments to the EPA’s Clean Air Act would cost $7.5 billion and tens of thousands of jobs but studies have shown the cost of the program to be closer to $1 billion and even suggested the law was a modest net creator of jobs by spurring new clean compliance technologies.  And while the cement industry projected 13,000 lost jobs and plant closures because of stricter sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide standards, EPA analysis claims the truth lies somewhere between 600 jobs lost and 1300 gained.

Even if the regulations are net beneficial, is implementing them now (i.e. in a down economy) the right thing to do?  Business leaders argue that regardless of whichever and whenever regulations are enacted, there must be stability and predictability.  They cannot be a “moving target.”

Some business leaders at least appear willing to strike a fair balance.  Spencer Weitman, president of the National Cement Company of Alabama has stated,  “we agree that we need to protect the environment and we need regulations in place to make sure that we all do it right. That’s not the argument that we’re coming up with. We do need regulations that are achievable and that make sense.”  The CEO of Caesars Entertainment has agreed to go green even if it means taking a slight economic loss.

What seems lost in this discussion, as always, is climate change, which I personally believe is the greatest existential crisis than humanity has ever faced (with the possible exception of nuclear proliferation).  Its long-term impacts on heat waves, agricultural yields, water availability, ecosystem vitality and sustainability, health, energy demand, transportation infrastructure, losses due to extreme weather, rising sea levels, forced migrations, violent conflict, etc. that will be forced irreversibly on future generations for hundreds to thousands of years decisively tilt the scales towards regulation.  Which regulations, however, may yet require deeper assessment.