WolfeNotes.com

Welcome to historic Hummelstown, Pennsylvania – where “Give, Advocate, Volunteer” is a way of life.

They celebrate history in Hummelstown, with monuments and downtown streetscapes:

They are mostly god fearing Christians here in Hummelstown:

And the streets are lined with modest flag draped homes of patriots, where everyone is proud to chant “USA, USA, USA!”, hates terrorists, and always takes their hats off for the Star Spangled Banner before the Friday night High School football game:

In Hummelstown, they take care of their own, including those who can’t take care of themselves:

Hummelstown also has a police force that flies Old Glory alongside the State flag and is proud to “to protect and serve” the community:

Which takes us to our story today:

What kind of town finds an out of control cop who tazed and tortured an unarmed man for what seemed an eternity – when he was knocked down, incapacitated and lying face down in the snow with his hands clearly visible and screaming in agony – and then proceeded to shoot him not once but twice in the back as he lay face down in the snow, and then let him die, not guilty of all criminal charges?

What kind of perverse jury of peers is that?

What kind of town has elected officials who support that cop and allow her to return to duty, without hesitation?

What kind of town is full of residents who raise no objections to any of this?

A town like Hummelstown.

Watch the video, if you can stomach it. Viewer warning.

How FERC Can Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions & Promote Renewable Energy

I’ve described the byzantine and significantly privatized federal and state regulatory framework for energy as the “Twilight Zone”.

The Christie State BPU is run by a former energy industry lobbyist, while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is “captured” by the energy industry it regulates and promotes and serves the energy industry’s interests, not the public interest. Therefore, participation in the FERC review process is a joke and waste of time. That view is shared by many others:

we were unable to find a single FERC denial of an application for a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for an interstate gas transmission line.

Just this morning, I came upon another example of the degree of FERC’s capture, as FERC reversed its historical policy and will now allow gas companies to pass through to consumers the costs of complying with EPA and other regulations – that’s right: they impose risk and pollute and profit, while we pay for protections, see:

• Cost Recovery Mechanisms for Modernization of Natural Gas Facilities

20. Accordingly, the Commission proposes to establish a policy outlining the analytical framework for evaluating proposed cost recovery mechanisms to recoup infrastructure modernization costs necessary for the efficient and safe operation of the pipeline’s system and compliance with new regulations. 

Given those fatally flawed federal regulatory conditions – and the proliferation of pipelines and other fossil fuel  energy infrastructure under FERC’s jurisdiction – in my view,  a State government strategy is required and a moratorium at the State level is justified until the non-prempted State safeguards are developed.

The only state regulatory tools I’ve found that are not preempted are delegated Clean Water Act and Coastal Zone Management Act powers.

Obviously, a State moratorium is a radical approach – which I think is completely justified given the climate emergency and the rate and sheer scale of the fossil energy industry’s expansion.

But, aside from the State strategy, if FERC were serious about climate change, even incremental federal regulatory reforms are feasible – if demanded by public pressure and political leadership – if FERC were serious about climate change.

Although there are huge project specific political battles and environmental campaigns going on in communities across the country, I see little evidence that people want to change the policies and rules of the game FERC operates under.

That is the typical failed environmental strategy: invest in single battles, while ignoring the regulatory framework that virtually guarantees you will lose that battle.

Very few activists or people are even aware of the rules, never mind how to change the rules of the game that dictate consistently losing outcomes.

The energy industry surely knows better, that’s why they invest tremendous resources in controlling the regulatory apparatus that guarantees their profits and assures that the public and the environment get screwed.

But, in a refreshing counter to the energy industry regulatory capture agenda, a recent Report from Berkeley Law School “How FERC Can Use Its Existing Legal Authority To Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Increase Clean Energy Use” lays out a FERC reform agenda.

FERC is NOT going to do any of this without enormous public pressure to change policies.

But I see no evidence of focused public pressure – and I see no public interest, climate, or environmental groups even working on this kind of federal regulatory policy reform (or the State moratorium/safeguards strategy either).

Since there is virtually zero chance of Congress acting on climate, energy, or the public interest – the Bernie Sanders “Leave it in the Ground” Senate bill was another political stunt, as was Obama’s big PR on killing Keystone XL – the only question in my mind is whether activists should pursue a radical State moratorium strategy or focus on incremental FERC (and EPA) regulatory reforms.

The system is badly broken – either take direct acton to shut it down, or fix it.

Time to choose.

Consider:

Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent, the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it, means of free communications between man and man, works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful,  – all thing which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth.

William Morris “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil”  (1885) quoted in ‘Communitarian Luxury“ (Kristin Ross, 2015, Verso, p. 142)

This is the kind of revolution in values that is required if we are to survive as a civilization and “adapt” to the climate chaos that is certain to ensue.

The only things I would add to Morris’ view of wealth would be time – sufficient time to create, to explore, to think, to reflect, and to enjoy the kind of real wealth that is meaningful, not possessive materialistic.

That Morris quote closes her book.

But in the introduction of her book, Ms. Ross suggests that William Morris’ ideas, views, and values have continuing meaning and resonance for our times:

It has become increasingly apparent, particularly after the unraveling of societies like Greece and Spain, that we are not all destined to be immaterial laborers inhabiting a post-modern creative capitalist techno-utopia the way some futurologists told us we were ten years ago – and continue desperately to try to tell us even today. The way people live now – working part-time, studying and working at the same time, straddling those two worlds or the gap between work they are trained to do and the work they find themselves doing in order to get by, or negotiating the huge distances they must commute or mitigate across in order to find work – all this suggests to me, and to others as well, that the world of the Communards is in fact much closer to us than is the world of of our parents. It seems utterly reasonable to me that young people today, put off by a career trajectory in video-game design, hedge-fund management, or smart phone bureaucracy, trying to carve out spaces and ways to live on the edges of various informal economies, testing the possibilities and limitations of living differently now within a thriving – if crisis-ridden – global capitalism economy, might well find interesting the debates that took place among Communard refugees and fellow travelers in the Juras in the 1870’s that led to the theorizing of something called “anarchist communism” – debates, that is, about decentralized communities, how they might come into being and flourish, and the way they might become “federated” with each other in relations of solidarity.

Think about it.

[Update: Ms. Ross states the relationships between past and present and the possibilities of the moment in this interview:

These thinkers were all extremely attentive to what we might call “wrinkles in time” — moments when the seamlessness of capitalist modernity appears to crack open like an egg. Historians in general fear anachronism as the greatest possible error. They are given to dismissing Morris’s interest in the Iceland of his day and its medieval past, for example, as wooly-headed nostalgia. Morris was in fact perfectly capable of seeing pre-capitalist forms and ways of life like those that had flourished in medieval Iceland as at once gone, past, part of history and, at the same time, as the figuration of a possible future.

This is the mark, to my mind, not of nostalgia, but of a profoundlyhistoricizing way of thinking. Without it we have no way of thinking the possibility of change, or of living the present as something contingent and open-ended.

Oil & Gas Pipelines Proliferating

Data show that Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy is maximizing US fossil fuel production

The run-up to the Paris climate conference is all show 

Data supporting this map may be found here – table format can be found here.  The energy industry consulting software is known as “MIDI”

The same day that climate activists were declaring victory and the main stream media was making such a big deal about the request by TransCanada to the Obama Administration for a time out in reviewing their Keystone XL pipeline from Canadian tar sands to Gulf of Mexico refineries, an energy consultant known as  RBG Energy LLC issued a Report about oil and gas infrastructure in the Gulf.

That report shows massive new imports of oil to Gulf refineries via huge expansions in pipeline capacity, including from the Canadian tar sands. The new pipeline delivery is so large it has displaced prior imports from shipping, and is driving a search for storage capacity for the glut of supply.

Here is the ugly truth printed in energy industry trade journals that is not reported by media or the climate activists:

Prior to 2012 the only U.S. produced crude delivered by pipeline to Houston area refineries came from offshore Gulf of Mexico or onshore Louisiana fields. The majority of supplies were imports delivered by waterborne tanker. But in just three short years between 2012 and 2015, roughly 2 MMb/d of crude pipeline capacity was built or repurposed to deliver surging light shale crude production and heavy crude from Canada into the Houston area. Refiners have adapted quickly to take advantage of new sources of supply. But with much of the newly minted infrastructure underutilized, midstream companies still need to improve pipeline connectivity and storage accessibility to overcome area logistical challenges. Today we review RBN’s latest Drill Down report on Houston crude infrastructure – released today — and announce RBN’s new infrastructure database and mapping system, called MIDI.

In 2011 average waterborne imports to Houston area ports were 1.7 MMb/d – enough to supply more than 70% of local refinery needs. Since April 2012 when Phase 1 of the Seaway pipeline reversal (150 Mb/d) came online to deliver crude from the Midwest Cushing, OK trading hub to Houston, that position has been largely reversed as multiple new pipelines have come online delivering domestic and Canadian crude to the Houston area – pushing out imports in the process. In July 2015 crude delivered by pipelines developed since 2012 accounted for about 55% of Houston supply and waterborne imports had dwindled to 0.8 MMb/d. Our latest Drill Down report – available exclusively to Backstage Pass subscribers provides detailed analysis of the changing crude supply/demand balance for 9 refineries and two condensate splitters in the Houston area that between them consume about 2.4 MMb/d.

The run-up to the Paris climate conference is all show –

The data show that Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy is maximizing US fossil fuel production.

Its the Fossil Fuel, Not The Pipeline

rising purple line is projected emissions – solid red line is reductions to meet 2 degrees C. Doted red line reflects need for demand reduction to reflect rate of scaling up zero carbon energy.

The above chart comes from an outstanding truth telling lecture by Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center (please watch the whole thing Delivering on 2 Degrees C – Evolution or Revolution?).

Anderson looks at carbon budgets and what kind of radical changes in energy and economic life would be required to meet the current consensus goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

He also critiques various studies and asks why they all share totally unrealistic assumptions and gloss over the hard reality and implications of the science.

Climate chaos is why I oppose pipelines – its the investment in fossil infrastructure that should be going into lowering energy demand and making a transition to the concept of “degrowth” – or planned economic recession.

(of course I oppose the landscape destruction, water and air pollution, and risks of pipelines, but the #1 issue is obviously and overwhelmingly climate).

This goes beyond the “leave it in the ground” approach, because renewable energy sources will not be available to scale up rapidly enough to meet energy demands of a growing economy – we must change the growth and consumption dominated economic model.

But no one wants to acknowledge that continued economic growth makes it impossible to avoid climate chaos and that deep emissions reductions will force revolutionary changes in current consumption rates and US lifestyles.

In fact, most of the pipeline and energy infrastructure debates in NJ completely ignore the climate imperative.

The climate and renewable energy debates follow many of the flawed assumptions and politicized thinking that Anderson critiques, such as a focus on long term goals (80% renewable energy by 2050) and magical thinking that these kinds of dramatic transitions will occur painlessly and with little or no sacrifice in lifestyles or radical change in the current concentrations of political and economic power.

I share Anderson’s perspective that in order to solve a problem, it’s full dimensions and implications must be acknowledged. While failure is likely, its better to fail honestly than to avoid the hard truths.

Plus, these kind of truths need not trigger despair – they could just as likely mobilize emergency action and radical change.

Either way, it looks like revolutionary change is coming soon – one way or another – via mitigation of emissions or via adaptation to the climate chaos that will ensue if we don’t (or maybe both).