Blog

Ohio (along with my own California) has one of the nation’s biggest tax give-aways to the fossil fuel industry. It’s severance tax on natural gas is essentially zero — only 0.42 percent. Texas levies 7.5 percent, Oklahoma 7.1 percent, and neighboring West Virginia and Pennsylvania 5.79 percent.

So it might seem sensible that Governor John Kasich, whose proudest credential when he served in Congress was that he was serious about budgets and deficits, called on the Ohio legislature to raise the severance tax very modestly — 1.4-4 percent, but only on oil and natural gas liquids and only 1 percent on methane itself. So small were the increases that groups concerned about the state’s huge financial shortfall and cuts to education blasted them, pointing out that if Kasich had simply gone along with Texas, “enough money would be generated to pay for damages to local roads and infrastructure, stop the layoffs of thousands of police, fire and other public safety workers — or prevent increases in local property taxes that pay for schools.”

Former Presidential candidate Rick Santorum loudly proclaimed the Koch Brothers-Tea Party orthodoxy on such efforts to eliminate tax give-aways to oil and gas so they would “drive up the cost of energy, destroy this economy and do so at the behest of a bunch of radical environmentalists who do, in fact, want to drive up the cost of energy and slow down this economy…”

Of course Santorum was talking about President Obama, so you couldn’t be sure if this was simply a partisan slam, or a serious, principled policy position — that taxes on fossil fuels companies are bad, regardless of how low. But the reaction of the Tea Party in Ohio to Kasich’s efforts is revealing; it shows just how far the oil industry’s hold on the Tea Party faction of the Republican party goes, and how irrational the opposition to fair taxation has become.

Kasich was careful to make clear that he wasn’t going to raises overall; the increases severance revenues would all go to fund a billion dollar cut in the state’s income taxes. That didn’t buy him any cover at all. First the Ohio Oil and Gas Association came out against the tax — or any tax on natural gas liquids, the petroleum like substance that makes Ohio gas drilling profitable. (more…)

OK, we now know that Walmart’s meteoric rise to Mexico’s biggest retailer and employer appears to have been fueled by a massive bribery scheme. We know that millions of dollars were apparently paid to “gestores,” fixers whose job was to ensure that local zoning and environmental laws didn’t slow the approval of new stores. We know that when a whistleblower brought the scandal to the attention of Walmart headquarters in Arkansas, the company’s general counsel and compliance officers called for a full-fledged investigation. And we know that company’s senior leadership allegedly not only refused to allow such an investigation but strategically and intentionally defanged the ability of its investigative units to pursue such problems in the future.

As the New York Times investigation that brought all this light summarized, it found “credible evidence that bribery played a significant and persistent role in the Wal-Mart’s rapid growth in Mexico.”

We know in short that Walmart’s much heralded commitment to ethical behavior has once again proven to be a pathetically flimsy shield against the driving imperative of its “grow at any cost” business model. And we can see that even when grow at any cost means “break the law” the company is not only willing to overlook, but actually to reward, success purchased at that price.

We know all this, incidentally, even if it should turn out (almost tooth fairy implausibly) that every peso of the fees Walmart paid its fixers were stolen by those agents and none actually passed along as intended to bribe Mexican officials — because either way, whoever was paid off, Walmart knew that company funds had been used illegally, did nothing about it, and concealed the evidence from shareholders and law enforcement officials in both Mexico and the US.

The scale of this potential bribery dwarfs the fears that have been expressed that Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp’s reliance on bribing the police and hacking cell-phones to obtain stories in Britain might entail violations of the US Corrupt Practices Act by its US operations. Based on the Times’ investigation, Walmart’s greatest recent business success, the explosive growth of Walmex, was overwhelmingly empowered by a strategy of rushing new locations through Mexico’s permitting processes so quickly that Walmart’s opponents could not compete — the entire enterprise was based not on better service or prices, but on obtaining, if necessary through illegal means, a monopoly.

These revelations come on the heels of a series of previous scandals in which Walmart’s growth at any cost mandate led its leadership to abuse its workers, violate its ethical standard, and taken the company far too often out of the gray zone and into the black. It’s faced criminal charges for employing illegal workers, and outraged communities when it adopted the practice of locking its workers into some US stores overnight, so they could not even leave if they had medical needs. Recently workers at Walmart’s seafood processing facilities in Asia were subjected to human rights violations. Even in Mexico five years earlier, Walmart had been implicated in a massive scheme to avoid sales taxes, eventually paying $34.3 million in back taxes, but along the way refusing to take corrective action when the problem was flagged for its leaders. EXAMPLES EXAMPLES. (more…)

The week made it official: the 2012 election will be the first in American history to be driven by the nexus between innovation, clean energy, manufacturing and the role of the federal government in shaping the economy. The president followed up his  State of the Union message with a thematically reinforcing budget and visits to “in-sourcing” manufacturing facilities — staking out his territory. The Republicans responded with their refusal to extend the Production Tax Credit for the wind industry and House passage of legislation making Congress, not the Executive Branch, the permitting agency for the oil industry’s pet Keystone XL Export Pipeline. It’s clear that the Tea Party GOP’s response is simple: “Hell, no, we won’t let the federal government spark a manufacturing and economic revival by accelerating the clean energy transition.” 

But it’s still true that nascent Republican front-runner Rick Santorum has wrapped his campaign in the need to restore American manufacturing, even if his actual voting record consistently supported outsourcing, not insourcing. Santorum’s “Made in America” website doesn’t actually much resemble the far-reaching manufacturing revival agenda “Make“ assembled by the business and labor leaders in the Council of Competitiveness — and there is considerable reason to doubt, based on his presidential record and current trade approach,  that Obama truly “gets” what reviving manufacturing requires. But the fact that two of the three presidential front-runners have embraced the same theme is quite unusual and signals that the American people, implicitly, have come to a conclusion — we need an economic and manufacturing revival, and clean energy needs to drive it.

Let’s look first at last month’s State of the Union and this week’s Budget — the markers Obama  had laid down before he flew to Wisconsin to celebrate the “in sourcing” of manufacturing jobs at Master Locks. The State of the Union was billed by the White House as focused on “an America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world.  An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.” 

Pollsters reported that the clean energy portions of the speech, and the emphasis on an economy “built to last” (a phrase I like a lot more than its green-flavored synonym, “sustainable”) got particularly strong responses from the American people. The 22 percent gain in his standing on energy was one of the two strongest results of the speech on his audience. (more…)

The United States is still the wealthiest nation in the world — we’re far from broke. What’s broken, though, is the way we allocate our considerable national resources. Fixing that would put our economy back on track faster than any “supercommittee” rep could posture and bloviate on Fox News.

That’s the message of The Story of Broke, the latest release from the folks who created the short film Internet sensation The Story of Stuff a couple of years ago. In just eight minutes, The Story of Broke makes the case that, instead of obsessing about budget cuts, we should be re-prioritizing how our tax dollars are spent. Why are we giving money to highly profitable polluting industries, for instance, instead of promoting clean-energy solutions that would put more people to work and fewer people in the hospital?

The obvious answer is that political priorities are so distorted by the gravitational influence (read “campaign contributions”) of big corporations that what’s best for “we the people” frequently gets overlooked. (Contrary to what Mitt Romney may have claimed in the heat of the Iowa sun, corporations are not people. I’ve yet to see a corporation get cancer from polluted water or asthma from dirty air, for instance. I don’t think you could pepper spray one, either.)

This corporate influence isn’t subtle — it’s blatant. As The Story of Broke points out, U.S. senators who voted to keep Big Oil subsidies in 2011 received five times more in Big Oil campaign cash than did the senators who voted to end the subsidies. And it’s happening again right now, with Big Oil’s senators trying to force the Keystone XL pipeline on the American people any way they can.   (more…)

During the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton and Madison couldn’t agree on what kind of president they wanted — or how to choose one. So they turned it over to the states, giving the legislatures free rein to decide how to allot their electoral votes. After many twists and turns, we ended up with our present mongrel system: We take enormous pains to tally every vote but then allow most of them not to count.

The skunk in the garden party of democracy is the winner-take-all rule that 48 of the 50 states use (not Maine and Nebraska), although the Founders never envisaged it. For most of our history, it didn’t systematically warp our politics, although it did allow minority candidates to win a fair number of presidential elections. But over the past several decades, as the country has settled into an evenly divided and fairly ideologically coherent two-party system, it has meant that, in running for re-election in 2004, George Bush didn’t even bother to poll in 32 of the 50 states — because he knew they were either lost to him or certain.

The cult of the battleground state, as intensified by the obsession with the swing voters who are assumed to deliver those states, relegates most of the country (and virtually all of the voters) to invisibility. Presidential candidates, campaigns, and first-term presidents, just don’t care about most of us. In 2008, the presidential candidates, neither of them an incumbent, spent two-thirds of their time in just six states.

No Republican presidential campaign worries about voter registration or turnout in Texas. No Democrat sweats Massachusetts. A tiny handful of voters in Ohio, Florida, or even Nevada and Iowa, matter more than huge voting blocks of African-Americans in Mississippi and Alabama.

But because Madison and Hamilton couldn’t agree and knew they were leaving a mess, they also left a solution. The states can — and often do (Massachusetts almost a dozen times) — change how they allocate their electors. The solution on the table today is the National Popular Vote. State legislatures are gradually joining a compact among themselves. Once states with more than half the electoral votes have joined, all of their electoral votes will go to the candidate who wins the popular vote. Every vote would count equally in every state in every election. (more…)

Have you ever been to Bryce Canyon National Park? I still remember standing at Sunset Point on my first visit as a teenager, hoping to sneak away to climb the hoodoos in the valley below. It’s one of the most beautiful, inspiring places in the country, which is why when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced a public meeting in Salt Lake City to gather public comments on its proposal to approve a giant coal strip-mine next to Bryce Canyon National Park, it wasn’t hard to find citizens ready to object. More than 200 showed up at the Salt Lake City Library to speak their minds.

What they found when they got there, though, was that this particular “hearing” would be like a silent film — only written comments allowed.

When asked why there would be no opportunity for public testimony, BLM officials said they were required to hold only one public meeting and it had already happened the week before in Cedar City, where testimony was gathered from mine employees and other mine boosters.

That answer didn’t sit well with disgruntled participants who had come to voice their objections to the strip mine. What happened next was citizen democracy at its most inspired.

Borrowing a tactic from Occupy Salt Lake City (where some of the participants had come from) a group of protesters started a “human microphone” and began reading their testimony in short tight phrases that were then repeated by the crowd around the room. The stunned BLM officials watched nervously as the actual public took over their “public” meeting. (more…)

Lost in the kerfuffle over whether or not new Republican frontrunner Herman Cain’s tax plan actually proves that he is the anti-Christ (as hinted by Michele Bachmann) was some much more serious business.

Members of the House of Representatives have been casting a string of votes of staggering recklessness and cupidity. The House voted to delay EPA’s authority to regulate toxic air pollutants from cement kilns, but it also voted, in a virtual partisan lockstep, to defeat a series of amendments designed to retain at least minimal protection for the public health. The House voted 246-166 to prevent the EPA from limiting emissions from cement kilns even if the emissions caused learning disabilities or harmed brain development. It voted 253-166 to prevent the EPA from acting even if it was essential to improve children’s health. It rejected several amendments that merely required Congress to admit that mercury and other cement-kiln emissions cause premature deaths, heart attacks, asthma, and brain damage. The House even voted, 254-169, to reject an amendment by Representative Henry Waxman that conceded that the rules, if allowed to go into effect, would reduce the amount of mercury deposited on land and water.

Then the House turned its machete to EPA standards designed to protect the public from toxic emissions from industrial boilers. Once again, when the Democrats proposed that regulations go into effect if they were essential to protecting health, Republicans voted them down. Even if these regulations were needed to prevent brain damage, House Republicans said, they should be blocked. Even if the nation’s ten most polluted cities — no way. (more…)

Washington, DC — President Obama’s jobs speech struck me as more remarkable for its message framing than for its contents. The president offered a centrist, roughly half-trillion-dollar combination of taxes and spending to revitalize the economy. The package is probably half as big as it ought to have been, given the economy. But Obama faces enormous resistance from the Republicans in Congress to even this step, so a larger proposal would have seemed less serious, I suspect.

Obama framed his proposal with two even more critical bits of rhetorical craft. First, he clearly defined the difference in ideas between his approach and that of the Tea Party. He rejected an America in which everyone would be left to fend for themselves, and he made it clear that we are a nation of communities, not isolated individuals. He called for America to win a race to the top, not settle for a race to the bottom. He made government action and regulation into synonyms for keeping Americans safe, and presented his jobs bill as a stand-in for this entire debate.

The contrast with the Republican debate the night earlier couldn’t have been clearer. Rick Perry’s call to eviscerate Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” (and the willingness of the other Republican candidates to eliminate parts of the social safety net) might not have sounded that different to Washington insiders than Obama’s willingness to consider reforming those programs. But to most of us, “Ponzi schemes” and “safety nets” are very different. One is a con. The other is a good thing that could perhaps be made even better. (more…)

Washington, D.C. — So one of the Department of Energy’s big clean-energy bets — Solyndra — didn’t make it. But this city is wrangling over which wrong conclusion to draw. The Tea Party Republicans, of course, see this as proof that America can’t expect to compete — and that clean-tech advocates and environmentalists were silly for thinking we could. The Republican National Committee turned Solyndra’s bankruptcy into an example of the one modern innovation for which America’s preeminence is unchallenged — the campaign attack ad.

Mainstream media, like the New York Times, pointed out that Solyndra failed not because it wasn’t able to make electricity — this was no “cold fusion” chimera — but because cheap Chinese solar panels that use more conventional technologies beat its price point. How did the Chinese get so cheap? Not through innovation — they lag behind the U.S. in solar tech. Not through labor costs, which are insignificant in making solar panels. No, the Chinese got cheaper loans, faster permits and more support from their government for their exports.

The Tea Party storyline ignores the fact that the global solar market is expanding fast — and global solar costs are dropping equally fast. Solar really is the 21st-century equivalent of the previous century’s automotive industry — yet the Tea Party is willing to let America be left behind with coal and oil.

But the other D.C. solar storyline is equally lame. It’s the “we tried to go too fast story,” and the most spectacular example was Friday’s Obama administration decision to postpone issuing new air-quality standards for ozone. But the ozone standard that is being “postponed” wouldn’t have required a single factory to buy a single piece of new equipment for years. What it would have done is signal to markets that America is ready to move from being the global laggard to the middle of the pack in implementing innovation. But that was way too fast for today’s Washington — on either side of the aisle. (more…)

By Carl Pope
Chairman, Sierra Club

New York — The business executives and bankers at the Bloomberg New Energy Summit are living in a world in which Bank of America CEO Chad Holliday says he discourages companies he loans to from investing in mountaintop-removal mining. The panels — a blend of Americans, Canadians, Europeans, and Asians — wrestle thoughtfully with the question of how to bring down the financing cost of wind and solar projects, which are far higher in the U.S. than in Europe and vastly higher than in China. They take seriously the graphs showing how rapidly the costs of renewable energy have been coming down. They discuss the enormous benefits Europe will reap by getting to its 20 percent renewables target, not only environmentally but also in the trillions of dollars that will remain in their own economies instead of flowing out for imported natural gas and oil as they currently do. The summit attendees clearly understand that the global competition for new energy is not a zero-sum game. Any country that enters will win, but some will win more than others.

But most of them can’t fathom that a nation would simply not enter the race at all, unless it were a petro-state getting rich from exporting oil. (Actually, there are representatives here of clean-energy projects supported by the oil-rich government of Abu Dhabi.) It seems inconceivable that a nation would simply abandon the future.

But 250 miles to the south, the mood is very different. Giving up on the future is precisely what the Tea and Oil Party is determined to do, and they are going to extraordinary lengths to accomplish it. The latest maneuvers towards a U.S. federal government shutdown are motivated in large part by the demand from the extremist caucus in the House that the Clean Air Act effectively be repealed, not only for carbon pollution but also for mercury, soot, smog, and sulfur. A bill by Louisiana senator David Vitter and Utah representative Rob Bishop would go even further — in addition to gutting clean-air protections, it would require the federal government to turn the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge over to the oil industry, along with huge swaths of Utah wilderness. The Endangered Species Act would be eviscerated, and the right of ordinary citizens to protect themselves from pollution in court would be terminated. (So much for the Tea Party standing up for the rights of the little guy.) (more…)