Posts Tagged Canada

Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Ecology, Environment, Perspective on May 19, 2013


A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Petroleum coke, a waste byproduct of refining oil sands oil, is piling up along the Detroit River.

By IAN AUSTEN

Published: May 17, 2013

 

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.

Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Brian Masse, a member of the Canadian Parliament, wants a bilateral agency to investigate the pile accumulating in Detroit.

 

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.

The company is controlled by Charles and David Koch, wealthy industrialists who back a number of conservative and libertarian causes including activist groups that challenge the science behind climate change. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

The coke comes from a refinery alongside the river owned by Marathon Petroleum, which has been there since 1930. But it began refining exports from the Canadian oil sands — and producing the waste that is sold to Koch — only in November.

“What is really, really disturbing to me is how some companies treat the city of Detroit as a dumping ground,” said Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan state representative for that part of Detroit. “Nobody knew this was going to happen.” Almost 56 percent of Canada’s oil production is from the petroleum-soaked oil sands of northern Alberta, more than 2,000 miles north.

An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.

Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States, which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.

Marathon Petroleum’s plant in Detroit processes 28,000 barrels a day of the oil sands bitumen.

Residents on both sides of the Detroit River are concerned that the coke mountain is both an environmental threat and an eyesore.

“Here’s a little bit of Alberta,” said Brian Masse, one of Windsor’s Parliament members. “For those that thought they were immune from the oil sands and the consequences of them, we’re now seeing up front and center that we’re not.”

Mr. Masse wants the International Joint Commission, the bilateral agency that governs the Great Lakes, to investigate the pile. Michigan’s state environmental regulatory agency has submitted a formal request to Detroit Bulk Storage, the company holding the material for Koch Carbon, to change its storage methods. Michigan politicians and environmental groups have also joined cause with Windsor residents. Paul Baltzer, a spokesman for Koch’s parent company, Koch Companies Public Sector, did not respond to questions about its storage or the ultimate destination of the petroleum coke.

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.”

Murray Gray, the scientific director for the Center for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta, said that about two years ago, Alberta backed away from plans to use the petroleum coke as a fuel source, partly over concerns about greenhouse-gas emissions. Some of it is burned there, however, to power coking plants.

The Keystone XL pipeline will provide Gulf Coast refineries with a steady supply of diluted bitumen from the oil sands. The plants on the coast, like the coking refineries concentrated in California to deal with that state’s heavy crude oil, are positioned to ship the waste to China or Mexico, where it is burned as a fuel. California exports about 128,000 barrels of petroleum coke a day, mainly to China.

Tony McCallum, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, played down the impact of Keystone XL. “Most of the Canadian oil earmarked for the U.S. Gulf Coast is to replace declining heavy oil imports from Mexico and Venezuela that produces the same amount of petcoke, so it doesn’t create a new issue,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Much of the new coking investment has gone into refineries in the Midwest to allow them to take advantage of the oil sands. BP, the British energy company, is building what it describes as the second-largest coke refinery in Whiting, Ind. When completed, the unit will be able to process about 102,000 barrels of bitumen or other heavy oils a day.

And what about the leftover coke? The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer allow any new licenses permitting the burning of petroleum coke in the United States. But D. Mark Routt, a staff energy consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies in Houston, said that overseas companies saw it as a cheap alternative to low-grade coal. In China, it is used to generate electricity, adding to that country’s air-quality problems. There is also strong demand from India and Latin America for American petroleum coke, where it mainly fuels cement-making kilns.

“I’m not making a value statement, but it comes down to emission controls,” Mr. Routt said. “Other people don’t seem to have a problem, which is why it is going to Mexico, which is why it is going to China.”

“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he said. One of the world’s largest dealers of petroleum coke is the Oxbow Corporation, which sells about 11 million tons of fuel-grade coke a year. It is owned by William I. Koch, a brother of David and Charles.

Lorne Stockman, who recently published a study on petroleum coke for the environmental group Oil Change International, says, “It’s really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth,” he said.

Rhonda Anderson, an organizing representative of the Sierra Club in Detroit, said that the mountain’s rise took her group by surprise, but it had one benefit.

“Those piles kind of hit us upside to the head,” she said. “But it also triggered a kind of relationship between Canada and the United States that’s allowed us to work together.”

 Mountain of Petroleum Coke From Oil Sands Rises in Detroit – NYTimes.com.

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Reservoir deep under Ontario holds billion-year-old water : Nature News & Comment

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Environment, Nature on May 18, 2013


Reservoir deep under Ontario holds billion-year-old water

Search is on for signs of microbial activity isolated in Earth’s crust.

Jessica Marshall

15 May 2013

Water filtering out of the floor of a deep Ontario mine has been trapped underground for more than a billion years. It bubbles with gasses carrying nutrients that could sustain microbial life.

J TELLING

 

 Reservoir deep under Ontario holds billion-year-old water : Nature News & Comment.

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‘Star Trek’ Spaceship Model Soars Into Stratosphere

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Aviation/Aerospace on May 18, 2013


‘Star Trek’ Spaceship Model Soars Into Stratosphere

by ELIZABETH HOWELL on MAY 17, 2013

It was billed as the U.S. S. Enterprise’s first “real” flight in space, but the spaceship didn’t get quite that far.

A group of Star Trek fans launched a model of the famed fictional vessel to an altitude of 95,568 feet (29,129 meters) above Canada, or about 18.1 miles (29.1 kilometers), they told media.

The Karman line — a commonly accepted threshold for the edge of space — is at about 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, above sea level.

Still, the high-flying feat made the Canadian group quite happy, even though the ship made a suicidal crash landing at the end of its flight.

“We lost our engines,” said Steve Schnier, a member of the group that set Enterprise aloft with a weather balloon from Stayner, Ontario, in an interview with Canada AM.

Dropping out of warp speed could have deadly results. (Image: Paramount Pictures/CBS Studios)

The Enterprise takes flight in a Star Trek showing. (Image: Paramount Pictures/CBS Studios)

“It wasn’t a smooth ride,” Schnier added concerning the ship’s final minutes. “It was moving, at one point, at 117 kilometres [72.7 miles] an hour.”

Enterprise smashed into the water near a Georgian Bay island in an area roughly 2.5 hours’ drive north of Canada’s largest city of Toronto. Searchers found it using a GPS signal.

The launch at the end of April came just weeks before Star Trek: Into Darkness, the next installment of the nearly 50-year-old franchise, zoomed into theaters in Canada and the United States this week. (Read our full review here.)

Weather balloon flights are used in science to collect information about the upper atmosphere. Other amateur groups have had fun using the idea, flying tokens ranging from teddy bears to Lego figurines.

‘Star Trek’ Spaceship Model Soars Into Stratosphere.

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Suffer. Spend. Repeat. – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Economics, Economy, Social, Society on December 9, 2012


Suffer. Spend. Repeat.

Sam Vanallemeersch

By OLIVER BURKEMAN

Published: December 8, 2012 

 

IN these final weeks before Christmas, it may strike you that retailers have gone out of their way to make holiday shopping as unpleasant an experience as possible. The odd truth is that they probably have. And there’s a reason for that: evidence suggests that the less comfortable you are during the seasonal shopping spree, the more money you’ll spend.

So stores crank up music, repeat the same songs, over and over again, pipe in smells, race shoppers around to far-flung points of purchase and clog their heads with confusing offers. All of which makes it more likely we’ll part more readily with more money.

Take those Christmas songs — the ones that begin to playin stores in November and last for what seems like eternity. Few of us would claim to love listening to “The Little Drummer Boy” over and over; just last month, customer complaints reached such heights in Canada that Shoppers Drug Mart, the country’s largest pharmacy chain, caved to consumer pressure and announced it would switch off Christmas music “until further notice.”

But what we love or don’t love isn’t really the point. (The Canadian chain’s ban lasted only a couple of weeks.) Music played at high volumes, for example, may be irritating, but researchers from Penn State and the National Universityof Singapore concluded it was one of several factors that leads to overstimulation and “a momentary loss of self-control, thus enhancing the likelihood of impulse purchase.”

Those who create shopping environments really don’t care what music you like to listen to. A classic 1982 study by the marketing professor Ronald E. Milliman, now at Western Kentucky University, found that slower tempos make it more likely that shoppers will linger inside stores — and spend more money. If “White Christmas” keeps you in the store, who cares whether you like its languid phrasings?

Not that faster music slows spending. The researchers at Penn State and in Singapore found that upbeat music can, in fact, overstimulate shoppers and prompt impulsive purchases. Other studies suggest that classical music incites more spending than Top 40 tunes when played in wine stores and that songs with “pro-social” lyrics result in higher tips for restaurant staff.

Smell is another part of the retailer’s arsenal. Like music, smells are selected to encourage spending, not to make your shopping experience more comfortable.

Eric Spangenberg, a Washington State University professor who specializes in the marketing power of scent, explains how retailers try to fill stores with what he calls “congruent” smells, meaning aromas that customers connect with the season or seasonal products.

“Just because people prefer something doesn’t necessarily make it effective for commercial purposes,” Mr. Spangenberg adds. Cinnamon, for example, may smell like holiday time and family togetherness, even to those of us who have never cared for cinnamon. Deploying the same olfactory reasoning, the British toy-store chain Hamleys filled its aisles with the aroma of piña coladas a few summers ago, evidently on the theory that piña colada says “vacation” — if not to children, then to the parents who pay for their toys.

Customer inconvenience can also work to retailers’ advantage. It’s well known that staples like bread and milk are often found at opposite ends of the supermarket, because this forces shoppers to travel the length of the store, past shelves of tempting nonessentials. In a department store, the same logic may guide designers to create store layouts that make it impossible for customers to move far without stopping — to let others pass, for example — thereby increasing the chances that their eyes will come to rest on products they can’t resist. Products that seem conveniently placed, including low-cost items in bins near the entrance, are probably there to coax you through the initial “deliberation phase” of shopping.

According to the theory of “shopping momentum,” as explained by researchers from Stanford, Yale and Duke Universities, we fret far more about whether to buy the first item we purchase during a trip than we do subsequent ones.

PERHAPS the subtlest technique in the salesclerk’s repertory, and a reliable way to turn negative emotions into sales, is known as “disrupt-then-reframe.” The idea is to confuse a potential customer, so as to evoke uncertainty, then rush in and offer a reassuring path through the resulting confusion. In a vivid demonstration of the effect in 1999, the psychologists Barbara Price Davis and Eric W. Knowles sent researchers door to door, selling holiday cards for charity. When they described the price as $3 for one package of cards, 35 percent of people decided to buy. But when they described the same offer in terms of “300 pennies,” and then added a clarifying coda — “It’s a bargain!” — their success rate shot up to 65 percent.

We hunger for what psychologists call “cognitive closure,” and if spending is the solution, so be it.

To stretch the idea slightly, might we think of most holiday shopping ploys as a large-scale exercise in “disrupt-then-reframe”? The music’s too loud, the lights are too bright, the streets, subways and buses are sardine tins. The relentless sensory overload — from the cinnamon smells to the Salvation Army bells — fuels agitation and an impulse to escape. How convenient, then, that there appears to be one obvious route through the chaos: buy that Nintendo Wii or that iPad or that designer perfume — whatever you’ve been wavering over — and be done with it.

We might, and probably should, rail against such techniques. We could choose to shop online, as millions do. But we might also turn our attention within, to ask why it is we’re so bothered by the lights and the crowds, so disturbed by anxiety that we’ll shop in order to make it go away. An alternative might be to cultivate what Buddhists call “nonattachment” — and if the earliest Buddhists tended to practice this in beautiful natural settings, perhaps that’s only because they lacked shopping malls. Stand on a busy downtown street at dusk on a pre-Christmas Saturday with this in mind, and decline to be swayed by the exhortations to spend, and it suddenly becomes a purely exhilarating spectacle, as breathtaking, in its own way, as any waterfall or mountain panorama.

A final truth about holiday shopping and happiness: even those of us who don’t enjoy the experience might be forced to admit that we enjoy disliking it. After all, nobody is forced to wait till December to buy gifts, yet every year we do so in droves, plunging with abandon into the precisely choreographed awfulness the retailers work so hard to perfect. I’m not quite ready to go as far as the poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, who writes that holiday shopping fulfills “an ancient need to gather and tithe, and serves as a modern-day ritual of renewal.” I won’t claim that “The Little Drummer Boy” actually improves my holiday season. But things would feel very strange without him.

 Suffer. Spend. Repeat. – NYTimes.com.

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Free Wood Post – Canada and Mexico Scramble to Build National Security Fences to Keep Out Republicans

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Free Wood Post, Humor/Parody on November 9, 2012


Canada and Mexico Scramble to Build National Security Fences to Keep Out Republicans

November 8, 2012

By Kyle Murphy

The Canadian and Mexican governments announced on Wednesday plans to build security walls along their borders to prevent Mitt Romney’s supporters from illegally seeking sanctuary in their countries.  While moving to Canada under a Republican presidency has long been suggested by American liberals, it appears the U.S.’s northern neighbor had never been concerned with the threat until it was made by the American right.

“If you think I’m some right-wing nut,” said Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a CBC news interview, “just wait until THOSE guys get here.”

“They make me look like Che-freakin’ Guevara.”

Mexican President Juan Del Sandro Il Saint Sanduvale had a similar reaction, though in Spanish.

American Conservatives expressed shock that other countries would want to keep them out, especially in light of their history of launching illegal wars, destroying the environment, opposing equal rights, and possessing an unflinching belief that health care is a commodity rather than a necessity.

“I don’t know what exactly we could do to win these Canadians over,” said Dale Johnson, a dejected Tea Party supporter considering a move north.  “Maybe offer to bring up tons of free automatic rifles with us and give them out as gifts?”

Construction of the separate Canadian and Mexican security fences is set to begin by Friday.

 Free Wood Post.

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US detention of Imran Khan part of trend to harass anti-drone advocates | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Foreign Policy on October 28, 2012


US detention of Imran Khan part of trend to harass anti-drone advocates

The vindictive humiliation of Pakistan’s most popular politician shows the US government’s intolerance for dissent

 

Imran Khan, head of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf

 

Imran Khan, centre, chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, with party’s supporters. He has led a high-profile campaign against US drone strikes. Photograph: A Majeed/AFP/Getty Images

Imran Khan is, according to numerous polls, the most popular politician in Pakistan and may very well be that country’s next Prime Minister. He is also a vehement critic of US drone attacks on his country, vowing to order them shot down if he is Prime Minister and leading an anti-drone protest march last month.

On Saturday, Khan boarded a flight from Canada to New York in order to appear at a fundraising lunch and other events. But before the flight could take off, US immigration officials removed him from the plane and detained him for two hours, causing him to miss the flight. On Twitter, Khan reported that he was “interrogated on [his] views on drones” and then added: “My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop.” He then defiantly noted: “Missed flight and sad to miss the Fundraising lunch in NY but nothing will change my stance.”

The State Department acknowledged Khan’s detention and said: “The issue was resolved. Mr Khan is welcome in the United States.” Customs and immigration officials refused to comment except to note that “our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband,” and added that the burden is on the visitor “to demonstrate that they are admissible” and “the applicant must overcome all grounds of inadmissibility.”

There are several obvious points raised by this episode. Strictly on pragmatic grounds, it seems quite ill-advised to subject the most popular leader in Pakistan – the potential next Prime Minister – to trivial, vindictive humiliations of this sort. It is also a breach of the most basic diplomatic protocol: just imagine the outrage if a US politician were removed from a plane by Pakistani officials in order to be questioned about their publicly expressed political views. And harassing prominent critics of US policy is hardly likely to dilute anti-US animosity; the exact opposite is far more likely to occur.

But the most important point here is that Khan’s detention is part of a clear trend by the Obama administration to harass and intimidate critics of its drone attacks. As Marcy Wheeler notes, “this is at least the third time this year that the US has delayed or denied entry to the US for Pakistani drone critics.”

Last May, I wrote about the amazing case of Muhammad Danish Qasim, a Pakistani student who produced a short film entitled “The Other Side”, which “revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical effects of drones on the people in tribal areas of Pakistan.” As he put it, “the film takes the audience very close to the damage caused by drone attacks” by humanizing the tragedy of civilian deaths and also documenting how those deaths are exploited by actual terrorists for recruitment purposes.

Qasim and his co-producers were chosen as the winner of the Audience Award for Best International Film at the 2012 National Film Festival For Talented Youth, held annually in Seattle, Washington. He intended to travel to the US to accept his award and discuss his film, but was twice denied a visa to enter the US, and thus was barred from making any appearances in the US.

The month prior, Shahzad Akbar – a Pakistani lawyer who represents drone victims in lawsuits against the US and the co-founder of the Pakistani human rights organization, Foundation for Fundamental Rights – was scheduled to speak at a conference on drones in Washington. He, too, was denied a visa, and the Obama administration relented only once an international outcry erupted.

There are two clear dynamics driving this. First, the US is eager to impose a price for effectively challenging its policies and to prevent the public – the domestic public, that is – from hearing critics with first-hand knowledge of the impact of those policies. As Wheeler asks, “Why is the government so afraid of Pakistanis explaining to Americans what the drone attacks look like from a Pakistani perspective?”

This form of intimidation is not confined to drone critics. Last April, I reported on the serial harassment of Laura Poitras, the Oscar-nominated documentarian who produced two films – one from Iraq and the other from Yemen – that showed the views and perspectives of America’s adversaries in those countries. For four years, she was detained every single time she reentered the US, often having her reporters’ notebook and laptop copied and even seized. Although this all stopped once that article was published – demonstrating that there was never any legitimate purpose to it – that intimidation campaign against her imposed real limits on her work.

That is what this serial harassment of drone critics is intended to achieve. That is why a refusal to grant visas to prominent critics of US foreign policy was also a favorite tactic of the Bush administration.

Second, and probably even more insidious, this reflects the Obama administration’s view that critics of its drone policies are either terrorists or, at best, sympathetic to terrorists. Recall how the New York Times earlier this year - in an article describing a new report from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documenting the targeting of Pakistani rescuers and funerals with US drones – granted anonymity to a “senior American counterterrorism official” to smear the Bureau’s journalists and its sources as wanting to “help al-Qaida succeed”.

For years, Bush officials and their supporters equated opposition to their foreign policies with support for the terrorists and a general hatred of and desire to harm the US. During the Obama presidency, many Democratic partisans have adopted the same lowly tactic with vigor.

That mindset is a major factor in this series of harassment of drone critics: namely, those who oppose the Obama administration’s use of drones are helping the terrorists and may even be terrorist sympathizers. It is that logic which would lead US officials to view Khan as some sort of national security threat by virtue of his political beliefs and perceive a need to drag him off a plane in order to detain and interrogate him about those views before allowing him entrance to the US.

What makes this most ironic is that the US loves to sermonize to the world about the need for open ideas and political debate. In April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lectured the planet on how “those societies that believe they can be closed to change, to ideas, cultures, and beliefs that are different from theirs, will find quickly that in our internet world they will be left behind,”

That she is part of the same government that seeks to punish and exclude filmmakers, students, lawyers, activists and politicians for the crime of opposing US policy is noticed and remarked upon everywhere in the world other than in the US. That demonstrates the success of these efforts: they are designed, above all else, to ensure that the American citizenry does not become exposed to effective critics of what the US is doing in the world.

 US detention of Imran Khan part of trend to harass anti-drone advocates | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

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Canada Tightens Border as Romney Surges : The New Yorker

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Borowitz Report, Humor/Parody on October 9, 2012


 

The Borowitz Report

 

OCTOBER 9, 2012

CANADA TIGHTENS BORDER

POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ

 

borowitz-canada.jpg

OTTAWA (The Borowitz Report)—Canada announced today that it was tightening security along its border with the United States amid concerns that there could be a mass migration of illegal Americans after Tuesday, November 6th.

According to Randolph McTavish, Deputy Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, border patrols are on alert due to an “increase in chatter” indicating that a threat to Canada’s border might be imminent.

“We’ve been intercepting troubling comments from some very freaked-out people,” he said. “Most of it has been on NPR call-in shows.”

Stating that the R.C.M.P. is patrolling every kilometre of the Canadian border, he issued this warning to Americans who might try to cross into Canada illegally: “If you drive a Prius, you will be stopped.”

He also warned Americans against trying to slip across the border in the hopes of passing as Canadians: “It is very difficult, if not impossible, to pretend to like hockey.”

Mr. McTavish said that he was sympathetic with those who might flee across the border in search of a new life and socialized medicine, but added, “At the end of the day, forty-seven per cent of Americans is more than Canada can handle.”

 Canada Tightens Border as Romney Surges : The New Yorker.

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Congress Chooses Recess Over Work – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Editorial on September 19, 2012


Hello, We Must Be Going

Published: September 18, 2012

 

After a five-week recess and the hard labor of political conventioneering, members of the House managed to stop briefly at the Capitol last week to enact a temporary budget to avoid a government shutdown. But, after Friday, they will be back home politicking nonstop until Election Day, and the Senate is also expected to cancel its scheduled October duties in Washington. Lawmakers call their latest hiatus from the job of legislating “an extended district work period,” but it will be spent mostly bragging to voters about imaginary accomplishments.

 

Even Tea Party budget-cutting firebrands are so eager to get back to campaigning that many approved a six-month budget resolution (based on annual spending of $1.047 trillion) that is $19 billion more than the plan of their champion, Representative Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

The 112th Congress has earned a reputation for monumental procrastination and toxic paralysis. Unyielding Republican obstructionism is the root of this dysfunction, and no amount of “extended district work” can change that fact. Yet, as they prepared to head home, both political parties were teeing up single-chamber bills designed to help troubled incumbents who need to pander to special-interest groups that might help their re-election.

In one final paroxysm of anti-regulatory hostility, House Republicans are scheduled to bring to the floor a bill called the Stop the War on Coal Act. It contains just about every bad anti-environmental idea they have tried to advance without success. The bill would cripple the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases, overturn fuel efficiency standards and undermine clean air and clean water laws. Less damaging but no less frivolous are House bills like the No-Hassle Flying Act (to ease luggage restrictions) and the Stolen Valor Act (to criminalize people who concoct military résumés) that should cause taxpayers to wonder why lawmakers could not spare the time to finish important work like completing a new farm bill, advancing cybersecurity and disclosing donors bankrolling re-election politics.

In the Senate, there is no lack of proposed bonbons for special interests, like the bill that would provide more federal land access for hunters and fishermen, a well organized special interest. That bill would also reverse important environmental regulations limiting the use of lead in ammunition and barring American hunters from importing dead polar bears from shooting expeditions in Canada, as hunters used to do. The 112th Congress, for all its rush to depart, has found time for some particularly bad ideas.

 Congress Chooses Recess Over Work – NYTimes.com.

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Romney’s Energy Plan: Let States Manage Public Lands – NYTimes.com

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in GOP, Opinion on August 24, 2012


 

Taking Note - The Editorial Page Editor's Blog

 

August 24, 2012

Romney’s Energy Plan

By ROBERT B. SEMPLE JR.

 

Mitt Romney on Saturday, Aug. 18, 2012.

Evan Vucci/Associated Press Mitt Romney on Saturday, Aug. 18, 2012.

Ridiculing a campaign document is like shooting unusually large fish in a barrel, but Mitt Romney’s new energy “plan” is so fantastical and extreme that I feel compelled to fire away.

Let’s start first with the premise of the plan, which is also its promise: that energy independence is an achievable goal for America by 2020.  Presidents have been talking about energy independence since Richard Nixon and haven’t come close. The simple truth, as President Obama has recognized, is that a country that holds less than 3 percent of the world’s reserves but consumes more than 20 percent of the world’s supply cannot drill its way to energy independence. More production will help, but true independence from foreign imports – not to mention fewer greenhouses gases and a safer climate, a subject Mr. Romney never touches upon – will depend on developing alternative fuels and more efficient vehicles.

Mr. Romney’s position paper says that independence can be achieved if we “partner closely with Canada and Mexico. “ But that wouldn’t do the job either, even if Mexico and Canada sent every single barrel they produce to the United States—highly unlikely since they might want to use some of it for themselves.

Mr. Romney further suggests that oil production in the United States would magically increase if the states were allowed “to oversee the development and production of all forms of energy on public lands within their borders.” An act of Congress would be required to transfer to the states hundreds of millions of acres now managed by the Interior Department and the Forest Service.  But, setting that aside, Mr. Romney’s federalist plan echoes an election year perennial, the idea (dating all the way back to the Sagebrush Rebellion a generation ago, and fostered by the oil and gas and timber interests) that all will be well if we allow the states to reclaim public land originally ceded as a condition of statehood, or acquired by act of Congress .

At one campaign stop, Mr. Romney said he did not know the “purpose” of the public lands. The purposes, under established law, are various: recreation, preservation, resource development. States, as a rule, tend to be interested mainly in resource development. In the energy future envisioned by Mr. Romney, that is precisely what would prevail.

Finally, Mr. Romney would have us believe that domestic oil and gas production has fallen off a cliff during the Obama administration. That too is ridiculous. Domestic crude oil production is actually up slightly from 2004, to 5.6 million barrels a day. And despite a necessary slowdown in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill, the number of rigs in American oil fields has quadrupled over the last few years.

Mr. Romney has raised millions of dollars in Texas over the last few days, and it would be tempting to draw a connection between this bonanza and his energy policy were it not for one fact: Fossil fuels have been front and center in Mr. Romney’s energy policy since the beginning of this race.

 Romney’s Energy Plan: Let States Manage Public Lands – NYTimes.com.

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Should Making A Threat On Facebook Be A Crime? | Techdirt

Posted by Michael B. Calyn in Facebook, Legal on August 23, 2012


 

Should Making A Threat On Facebook Be A Crime?

from the determining-real-vs.-fake dept 

There have been a few instances lately of various mass killings around the world (though certainly not all of them) where those responsible have either left strong hints via their online presence, or have even been pretty direct about their intentions. Of course, at the same time, you have stories like Paul Chambers’, where a joke was over-inflated by some law enforcement officials to pretend that it was a threat. Ditto the story of Joe Lipari, who quoted a line from Fight Club on Facebook, and got arrested for his trouble.

So, I find it somewhat troubling that police in Canada seem to think that any threat online or off is a criminal offense. There’s been an increase in people charged in Canada for merely making a threat, and some are reasonably concerned that many of those threats are idle chatter on social networks. The article seems to think that there’s no good way of dealing with this other than to change the law so that online threats are treated differently than offline threats:

Section 264.1 of the Criminal Code says a person who knowingly utters, conveys or causes another person to receive a threat of death or bodily harm can receive a prison term of up to five years. A person who threatens to damage property, or kill or injure an animal, can receive a prison sentence of up to two years.

Cpl. De Jong said under the Criminal Code “a threat is a threat is a threat,” regardless of how it’s made.

But Bentley Doyle, of the Trial Lawyers Association of B.C., said some sort of distinction should be drawn between online threats and those made in person.

“The more specific you get, the easier it is to actually follow through and charge somebody specifically,” he said.

Of course, rather than separating out online and in-person speech, what’s wrong with just looking at the details of the situation, and making a reasonable assessment as to whether the threat is legitimate or just someone saying something stupid? In the cases of Chambers and Lipari above, law enforcement should have quickly realized that neither individual was likely to do anything violent. But if someone is legitimately planning to shoot at a group of people and talking about it online, it seems that, at the very least, that could be worth investigating. The problem is criminalizing the statement, rather than using it as evidence to see if there’s actually any real intent to follow through.

Should Making A Threat On Facebook Be A Crime? | Techdirt.

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