Pipeline bigger than Keystone pushed for Wisconsin

Sometimes environmental advocates are represented by their opponents as compulsively opposing progress. Loaded questions are asked whether any product, no matter how many jobs it created, could withstand environmentalists’ criticism if it were likely that it would cause any environmental damage at all.

Besides absolutism, there are also questions about means versus ends. Is it possible, for example, to accept suboptimal manufacturing practices to create environmentally benign products — such as a company that emitted excessive levels of air toxins while manufacturing bicycles or plastic recycling bins?

Or is the opposite possible? Could environmentalists support a fossil fuel project that invested heavily in environmental protection by a company with a superior environmental performance if the project contributed to the planet’s climate change? Suppose the company had no oil spills or pipeline breaks, that water quality was not compromised, workers were safe, and communities were improved by the presence of that company’s mines, pumping stations and pipelines? Could we separate the environmental impact of a product from the process of manufacturing and delivering it?

Oil pipelines are an important case in point. With increasing resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline and other new pipelines to carry Canadian tar sands crude oil to coastal processing facilities, the industry’s new strategy appears to be expanding capacity of existing infrastructure.

Just such an expansion project is proposed by Enbridge for a pipeline that goes from Superior on a southeasterly path right through Wisconsin and south. The proposal for this Enbridge Line 61 has escaped notice until recently. With nine new pumping stations and new storage facilities, it would increase capacity from 400,000 to 560,000 barrels per day in 2014 and 1.2 million barrels in 2015 — significantly more than the 830,000 barrels per day proposed for the Keystone XL pipeline.



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Even in the Wild, Mice Run on Wheels

In 2009, neurophysiologist Johanna Meijer set up an unusual experiment in her backyard. In an ivy-tangled corner of her garden, she and her colleagues at Leiden University in the Netherlands placed a rodent running wheel inside an open cage and trained a motion-detecting infrared camera on the scene. Then they put out a dish of food pellets and chocolate crumbs to attract animals to the wheel and waited.

Wild house mice discovered the food in short order, then scampered into the wheel and started to run. Rats, shrews, and even frogs found their way to the wheel—more than 200,000 animals over 3 years. The creatures seemed to relish the feeling of running without going anywhere.

The study "puts a nail in the coffin" of the debate over whether mice and rats will run on wheels in a natural setting, says Ted Garland, an evolutionary physiologist at the University of California, Riverside, who was not involved in the work. More importantly, he says, the findings suggest that like (some) humans, mice and other animals may simply exercise because they like to. Figuring out why certain strains of mice are more sedentary than others could help shed light on genetic differences between more active and sedentary people, he adds.

Even before Meijer got creative in her yard, researchers knew that captive mice are exercise maniacs. In laboratories and bedrooms, they frequently log more than 5 km per night on stationary running wheels. But scientists didn’t know why the animals did it.

more

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/05/even-wild-mice-run-wheels?rss=1

10 Years of Pollution, $2 Million in Penalties

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas—"I am in the middle of my speech about your criminal activities, give me a break," Suzie Canales tells two security officers for oil refiner Citgo as they arrive at her car window.

Canales, a longtime environmental activist, is describing a years-long court battle over air pollution from the refiner, a case that led to a 2007 conviction but, more recently, a defeat for victims seeking restitution. And she's doing it while parked next to one of two Citgo refineries along the city's "refinery row" on a recent afternoon.

Her presence (and mine), as well as the fact that we were snapping photos, has drawn security's attention. One requests that no more photos are taken, arguing a pass is needed. Canales bristles because we're on a public street. The private cops accept my business card, and that's pretty much it.

The brief incident is a reminder of long-standing tensions between activists and the city's petroleum industry at a time when even more industrial development is headed here. Booming oil and gas production from the inland Eagle Ford Shale is prompting a wave of new and expanded petrochemical and manufacturing projects in the area.

more

http://www.nationaljournal.com/new-energy-paradigm/10-years-of-pollution-2-million-in-penalties-20140521

Uncovered Papers Show Past Government Efforts to Drive Gays From Jobs

WASHINGTON — Days after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s election to his first full term, an administration official asked a subordinate to explain the policy on firing gays. In particular, he wondered whether someone with a history of gay liaisons could, through years of marriage, be “rehabilitated” into a trustworthy civil servant.

The response came quickly, and in language that would be shocking by today’s standards. Technically, rehabilitated gays could keep their jobs. But John W. Steele, a staff member of the Civil Service Commission, which handled personnel matters for the government, said that seldom happened.

“Some feel that ‘once a homo, always a homo,’ ” Mr. Steele wrote. He added, “Our tendency to ‘lean over backwards’ to rule against a homosexual is simply a manifestation of the revulsion which homosexuality inspires in the normal person.”

It was November 1964. Four months earlier, the president had signed the landmark Civil Rights Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex and national origin. The policies laid out in Mr. Steele’s memo would continue for more than another decade.

more

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/us/politics/uncovered-papers-show-past-government-efforts-to-drive-gays-from-jobs.html?hp&_r=0

Wednesday Toon Roundup 4 - The Rest

9/11



2016




Net





Georgia



Rights



Education


NYT


Penn



Football







Peace

Wednesday Toon Roundup 3- Climate

Wednesday Toon Roundup 2- Spy vs. spy

Wednesday Toon Roundup 1- Repubs

Higher and Higher- support for Marriage equality now at 55%

Probe finds scant oversight of chemical plants

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has no way of fully knowing which U.S. chemical facilities stock ammonium nitrate, the substance that exploded last year at a Texas fertilizer plant and killed 14 people, congressional investigators say. Outdated federal policies, poor information sharing with states and a raft of industry exemptions point to scant federal oversight, says a new report obtained by The Associated Press.

The report found regulatory gaps in environmental and worker protections and urged broad changes to U.S. safety rules. President Barack Obama pledged to stiffen enforcement following the explosion on April 17, 2013, in West, Texas.

Without improved monitoring, federal regulators "will not know the extent to which dangerous conditions at some facilities may continue to exist," concluded the report by the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO found that the Homeland Security Department's database captured only a fraction of the ammonium nitrate storage facilities in the U.S. The federal database shows that 1,345 facilities in 47 states store ammonium nitrate. But spot checks of similar state records found that the federal list missed as many as two-thirds of the storage sites, said the report, which faulted companies' noncompliance, legal loopholes or poor federal coordination with states.

more

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/probe-finds-scant-oversight-chemical-plants-0

But we can monitor every phone conversation in the US, if we so desire....