[Biofuel] Rick Perry, Tapped for Energy Department, Has Multiple Ties to CEO of Controversial Pipeline Project
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38756-rick-perry-with-multiple-ties-to-ceo-of-controversial-pipeline-project-tapped-for-energy-department [Conflict of interest? Not in the Trumpian world. links in on-line article] Rick Perry, Tapped for Energy Department, Has Multiple Ties to CEO of Controversial Pipeline Project Friday, 16 December 2016 00:00 By Ashley Balcerzak, openDemocracy | News Analysis The Dakota Access Pipeline protesters just got a new reason to keep their Standing Rock encampment intact: former Texas governor and two-time presidential candidate Rick Perry, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to head his Energy Department. Never mind that Perry -- who now becomes the second of Trump's competitors named to his Cabinet (Ben Carson is slotted for Housing and Urban Development) -- previously wanted to scrap the agency altogether. Now the department will be helmed by a man whose biggest fan -- as measured by donations supporting Perry's presidential bids -- is Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial pipeline. Warren gave super PACs supporting Perry's presidential bid $6 million last year, though he got nearly $4.5 million of it back after Perry dropped out. And beyond that, Perry is on the board of directors of Energy Transfer Partners -- a position he would have to relinquish if he's to become secretary. Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers, in response to the protests in North Dakota, said it would explore alternate routes for the pipeline segment at issue, but the demonstrators on site fear the Trump administration will reverse that decision. Perry raised just $1.4 million for his 2016 campaign, a fraction of what he brought in four years earlier. But his super PAC, Opportunity and Freedom PAC, brought in almost 10 times that much. Besides Warren, the most generous donors included rancher Julianna Holt and her husband, Peter Holt, CEO of Holt Companies, which owns the largest US Caterpillar dealership ($500,000). The Holts are more than just donors, though: According to a financial disclosure form Perry filed last year, the candidate had a $250,000 consulting gig with Holt. Warren and Darwin Deason of Deason Capital Services (whose son, Doug, is a big player in the Koch network) each donated $5 million to a second super PAC, creatively named Opportunity and Freedom I, but were reimbursed most of the funds in late August. The group didn't report any independent expenditures, refunding $8.8 million and transferring the additional $1 million to the first Opportunity and Freedom PAC. Top Household Donors to Rick Perry, 1998-2016 Mostly thanks to these large donations, the oil & gas ($1.6 million) industry led the way in giving to Perry's campaign committee and super PACs combined. And that's a pattern that's been in place pretty much throughout Perry's political career; renewable energy advocates aren't likely to find much interest in their projects at the top of DOE's organizational chart for a while, assuming Perry is confirmed by the Senate. The miscellaneous finance ($480,000) and livestock ($376,000) industries were a distant second and third. Perry played a far better fundraising game in 2012, collecting $19.7 million for his campaign, almost all from donations of $200 or more. Oil & gas was No. 1 for him in that cycle ($1 million) after retired folks ($1.1 million); real estate professionals pulled in third ($926 million). His campaign's top donors came from Ryan LLC, Murray Energy and the United States Automobile Association. His biggest outside backer, Make Us Great Again (sound familiar?), spent almost $4 million trying to get Perry to the White House, with large donations coming from Dallas-based Contran Corp., formerly headed by now-deceased GOP funder Harold Simmons ($1 million); Kelcy Warren and Darwin Deason again ($250,000 each); and trial lawyer Tony Buzbee (also $250,000), who became Perry's general counsel two years later when a grand jury indicted him on two felony counts, later dismissed. (The Travis County grand jury charged him with "abuse of official capacity" for threatening to veto $7.5 million in funds for a public corruption department, and "coercion of a public servant" for pushing for the resignation of a district attorney after she was convicted of drunk driving.) Perry's first presidential run came while he was still governor of Texas, a slot he occupied from 2000 to 2015, making him the longest-serving chief executive of that state. Voters elected Perry to three full terms: He raised $24.7 million in 2002, $30.4 million in 2006 and $49 million in 2010, according to data from the National Institute on Money In State Politics. In his last state election in 2010, he received $5.9 million from -- guess who? -- oil & gas interests, $3.8 million from lawyers and lobbyists and $3 million from conservative policy organizations.
[Biofuel] Trump's Carbon-Obsessed Energy Policy and the Planetary Nightmare to Come
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38757-trump-s-carbon-obsessed-energy-policy-and-the-planetary-nightmare-to-come
[This is your energy policy on Koch, clearly a reality-altering
substance. links in on-line article]
Scroll through Donald Trump's campaign promises or listen to his
speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists
of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel
companies: lift environmental restrictions on oil and natural gas
extraction, build the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, open more
federal lands to drilling, withdraw from the Paris climate agreement,
kill Obama's Clean Power Plan, revive the coal mining industry, and so
on and so forth ad infinitum. In fact, many of his proposals have simply
been lifted straight from the talking points of top energy industry
officials and their lavishly financed allies in Congress.
If, however, you take a closer look at this morass of pro-carbon
proposals, an obvious, if as yet unnoted, contradiction quickly becomes
apparent. Were all Trump's policies to be enacted -- and the appointment
of the climate-change denier and industry-friendly attorney general of
Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt, to head the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) suggests the attempt will be made -- not all segments of the
energy industry will flourish. Instead, many fossil fuel companies will
be annihilated, thanks to the rock-bottom fuel prices produced by a
colossal oversupply of oil, coal, and natural gas.
Indeed, stop thinking of Trump's energy policy as primarily aimed at
helping the fossil fuel companies (although some will surely benefit).
Think of it instead as a nostalgic compulsion aimed at restoring a
long-vanished America in which coal plants, steel mills, and
gas-guzzling automobiles were the designated indicators of progress,
while concern over pollution -- let alone climate change -- was yet to
be an issue.
If you want confirmation that such a devastating version of nostalgia
makes up the heart and soul of Trump's energy agenda, don't focus on his
specific proposals or any particular combination of them. Look instead
at his choice of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state
and former Governor Rick Perry from oil-soaked Texas as his secretary of
energy, not to mention the carbon-embracing fervor that ran through his
campaign statements and positions. According to his election campaign
website, his top priority will be to "unleash America's $50 trillion in
untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in
clean coal reserves." In doing so, it affirmed, Trump would "open
onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands, eliminate [the]
moratorium on coal leasing, and open shale energy deposits." In the
process, any rule or regulation that stands in the way of exploiting
these reserves will be obliterated.
If all of Trump's proposals are enacted, US greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions will soar, wiping out the declines of recent years and
significantly increasing the pace of global warming. Given that other
major GHG emitters, especially India and China, will feel less obliged
to abide by their Paris commitments if the US heads down that path, it's
almost certain that atmospheric warming will soar beyond the 2 degree
Celsius rise over pre-industrial levels that scientists consider the
maximum the planet can absorb without suffering catastrophic
repercussions. And if, as promised, Trump also repeals a whole raft of
environmental regulations and essentially dismantles the Environmental
Protection Agency, much of the progress made over recent years in
improving our air and water quality will simply be wiped away, and the
skies over our cities and suburbs will once again turn gray with smog
and toxic pollutants of all sorts.
Eliminating All Constraints on Carbon Extraction
To fully appreciate the dark, essentially delusional nature of Trump's
energy nostalgia, let's start by reviewing his proposals. Aside from
assorted tweets and one-liners, two speeches before energy groups
represent the most elaborate expression of his views: the first was
given on May 26th at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in
Bismarck, North Dakota, to groups largely focused on extracting oil from
shale through hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") in the Bakken shale oil
formation; the second on September 22nd addressed the Marcellus Shale
Coalition in Pittsburgh, a group of Pennsylvania gas frackers.
At both events, Trump's comments were designed to curry favor with this
segment of the industry by promising the repeal of any regulations that
stood in the way of accelerated drilling. But that was just a start for
the then-candidate. He went on to lay out an "America-first energy plan"
designed to eliminate virtually every impediment to the exploitation of
oil, gas, and coal anywhere in the country or in its surrounding waters,
ensuring America
[Biofuel] Latest Climate Report: "The Arctic Is Unraveling"
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38752-latest-climate-report-the-arctic-is-unravelling [links in on-line article] Latest Climate Report: "The Arctic Is Unraveling" Friday, 16 December 2016 00:00 By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | News Analysis The Arctic's average surface air temperature for the year ending September 2016 was, by far, the highest since 1900. New monthly record high temperature records were recorded for January, February, October and November of this year. Spring snow cover extent in the North American Arctic was the lowest ever in the satellite records, which began in 1967. In the nearly four decades of Greenland Ice Sheet observations, only one year had an earlier onset of spring melting than this year. The Arctic's biodiversity is changing, radically, before our eyes, including a movement of sub-Arctic species northward and an increase in parasites. These are just a few of the highlights from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) recently released 2016 Arctic Report Card. The report, sponsored by NOAA and coauthored by more than 50 scientists from three continents, is extremely sobering, with the report's authors concluding that, "The Arctic is unraveling." A Completely New Arctic Climate Data from the report indicate that the Arctic is warming at double the global average temperature rate. The report shows that if this fall's extreme warmth in the Arctic persists for another few years, it will likely signal a completely new climate for the region. "We've seen a year in 2016 like we've never seen before … with clear acceleration of many global warming signals," NOAA's Arctic Research Program Director Jeremy Mathis told reporters at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week where the report was released. "The Arctic was whispering change," report coauthor Donald Perovich, who studies Arctic climate at Dartmouth, said. "Now it's not whispering. It's speaking, it's shouting change, and the changes are large." The report showed that extremely warm Arctic air temperatures last January and February caused the smallest maximum winter sea ice extent on record. The previous record was hit in 2015. Then, just last month, the return of extremely warm temperatures caused a period of retreating and melting ice during a time of year when the ice has typically grown extremely rapidly. And as usual, the impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) are extremely evident in Greenland. "The Greenland Ice Sheet continued to lose mass in 2016," Columbia University Earth Observatory climate researcher Marco Tedesco said. "The melt onset was the second earliest and the melt season was 30 to 40 days longer than average in the northeastern US." According to the report, Greenland's spring snow cover extent reached new record lows. Meanwhile, the snow depth is also decreasing, leading to even earlier, as well as faster, melting of the ice. Another ramification of the dramatic warming of the Arctic is that permafrost is now releasing more greenhouse gases, like methane, which is 100 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2, during the winter. The report notes that this is happening now at a rate faster than that at which plants can absorb the gas during the summer, which means the Arctic has now become a net source of heat-trapping pollution. It's not just the ground that's warming rapidly: Air temperatures across the Arctic have continued to soar past previous records. Between January and March 2016, temperatures blew away previous record highs, with some areas reporting records of more than 8 degrees Celsius above prior highs. The report addresses how the melting of the Arctic is literally changing the path of the jet stream, which is what is likely going to lead to even more sustained extreme weather events across the entire Northern Hemisphere. One example is the so-called Polar Vortex that has been wracking the northeastern US in recent years -- including right now. University of Sheffield geographer Edward Hanna, who coauthored the report's chapter on air surface temperatures, wrote about how the warming Arctic air temperatures are causing a trend towards younger, thinner Arctic sea ice, which means that its meltdown could well already be irreversible. "It's hard to see how the summer sea ice will survive," Hanna concluded. Trump's Denialism The election of Donald Trump could not have come at a worse time for the climate, as the Arctic meltdown intensifies and dramatic warning signs around the planet continue to escalate. President-elect Trump has stacked his cabinet with ACD deniers much like himself. This week, the Trump transition team launched an "Energy Independence" website that underscores his intentions to open vast areas of the Arctic to fossil fuel development, as well as to scrap all existing climate action plans. Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21
