Tag: bp
Birds

Biden Saves ‘Billions Of Birds’ That Trump Tried To Kill

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

President Joe Biden this week delayed a Trump administration rule that experts said could have led to the deaths of "billions" of birds.

Under the Trump era rule, which would have rolled back the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA), companies, landowners, or other entities would not be penalized or prosecuted for accidentally killing birds. In effect, this means that a company like BP would not have been punished for the deaths of 100,000 birds resulting from its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. (Other research concluded that more than a million birds may have perished from the spill.)

The Trump rule was set to take effect on Feb. 8, but was blocked Thursday by the Biden administration.

Experts say that without guardrails limiting companies from being held accountable, the carnage could be devastating.

"Because of the interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, BP rightfully had to pay large fines," conservation scientist Kenneth Rosenberg of Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology toldNational Geographic in February 2020, after the rule change was first announced. "Without that system, that opens the door not only for corporations to not pay for damages but to not worry about it and not put safeguards in place. And at some point, it can have a larger effect on certain species."

The Biden administration is now putting the Trump rule on pause for review.

"At President Biden's direction, Interior is delaying and reviewing the Trump administration's rollback of the MBTA to ensure continued progress toward common-sense standards that protect wildlife and their habitats," Interior Department spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz said in a statement on Thursday.

Schwartz touted the MTBA, passed in 1918, as "a bedrock environmental law critical to protecting migratory birds and restoring declining bird populations," adding that "the Trump administration sought to overturn decades of bipartisan and international precedent in order to protect corporate polluters."

Indeed, for more than a century, the MBTA has protected over 1,000 different bird species.

The National Audubon Society, a nonprofit bird conservation group, called the MBTA "the most effective bird conservation policy in our nation's history."

"Bird survival is human survival and birds are telling us they are in trouble. We have no time to lose," said the society's president and CEO David Yarnold. "The relentless attempts by the Trump Administration to undo existing environmental protections have placed us at a significant disadvantage."

Scientists and former federal officials have said Trump's new rule could have led to the demise of "billions" of birds in the coming decades, according to the Associated Press.

Steve Holmer, the American Bird Conservancy's vice president of policy, told the wire service that "all indications are the birds need more protections and that the public strongly supports protections and loves birds."

"We know that millions of birds will die," conservation group Center for Western Priorities deputy director Aaron Weiss told the Progressive Pulse. "And we are already facing an extinction crisis."

While in office, Trump also took aim at many other vulnerable species, including gray wolves, grizzly bears, wolverines, owls, among otherimperiled wildlife.

Noah Greenwald, the Center for Biological Diversity's endangered species director, said Trump has "the worst record" in history since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973.

"Just 25 species have been listed as threatened or endangered in the past four years, leaving hundreds of at-risk species without badly needed protection," the center said in a January announcement of its intent to sue the Trump administration for its delay in protecting 11 threatened species.

Greenwald added separately, "The Trump administration's undermining of the Endangered Species Act puts the monarch butterfly, eastern gopher tortoise and hundreds more plants and animals at risk of extinction."

The Biden administration's delay of Trump's MTBA rule is the start of "addressing this misguided decision," Schwartz said. The Fish and Wildlife Service will now allow for "additional engagement," providing 20 days for the public to comment on the rule.

Legal experts have said the administration will most likely "withdraw" the rule entirely, given "long-standing policy" and "intense opposition" from prominent environmental advocacy organizations.

"There has been great progress in finding solutions to bird mortality," Holmer told the AP this week. "...We're hopeful the administration will create a process to start implementing those solutions."

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

pandemic, planet earth

The Pandemic Is Already Cooling The Planet — Will It Do More?

Some say the pandemic has become a permanent ally in the fight against climate catastrophe. It has jump-started a drop in the burning of fossil fuels, and that will continue. Others say this is short-term thinking: The public may abandon its concerns over global warming as it tries to climb out of the economic hole left by the COVID-19 lockdowns. Let's accentuate the positive.

First off, the government-mandated social distancing and its freezing of much industrial activity has already cut greenhouse gas emissions, certainly for the time being. The International Energy Agency predicts that global carbon emissions will have fallen about eight percent this year from 2019's level. That would be the biggest annual decline ever.

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Why Are We Taxpayers Subsidizing Corporate Crime?

Why Are We Taxpayers Subsidizing Corporate Crime?

“Do the crime, do the time,” the old saying goes. Unless, of course, the criminals are corporate executives. In those cases, the culprits are practically always given a “Get out of jail free” card.

Even the corporate crimes that produce horrible injuries, illnesses, death, massive pollution, consumer ripoffs, etc. are routinely settled by fines and payoffs from the corporate treasury, with no punishment of the honchos who oversee what amount to crime-for-profit syndicates. The only bit of justice in these money settlements is that some of them have become quite large, with multibillion-dollar “punitive damages” meant to deter the perpetrators from doing it again. Yet the same bad corporate actors seem to keep at it.

What’s going on here is a game of winkin’ ‘n’ noddin’, in which corporate criminals know that those headline-grabbing assessments for damages they’ve caused have a secret escape hatch built into them. Congress has generously written the law so corporations can deduct much of their punitive payments from their income taxes! As Senator Pat Leahy points out, “This tax loophole allows corporations to wreak havoc and then write it off as a cost of doing business.”

For example, oil giant BP certainly wreaked havoc with its careless oil rig explosion in 2010, killing 11 workers, deeply contaminating the Gulf of Mexico and devastating the livelihoods of millions of people along the Gulf coast. So, BP was socked with a punishing payout topping $42 billion. But — shhhh — 80 percent of that was eligible for a tax deduction, a little fact that’s been effectively covered up by the bosses and politicians.

This crazy quirk in America’s laws to deter corporate crime forces victims to help subsidize criminals. Follow the bouncing ball here: First, a court orders a corporation to pay punitive damages to a victim of its criminal acts; second, the corporate offender pays up, and then merrily subtracts a big chunk of that payment from its income tax, effectively taking money out of our public treasury; third, while the criminal is counting its tax break, the victim is notified that the punitive damage money he or she received from the corporation will be taxed as “regular income;” fourth, that means a big chunk of the victim’s payment goes into the treasury to replenish the public money the corporate villain subtracted.

This is nothing but shameful pandering by government officials to rich and powerful criminals. It’s bad enough that corporate-financed lawmakers legalize such encouragement of criminality, but corporate-coddling judges are playing the same disgraceful game — drastically reducing the amounts that juries order corporations to pay. In a Montana case, for example, a jury awarded $240 million in punitive damages to the families of three people, including two teenagers, killed in a car crash. The deaths were blamed on a steering defect that South Korean automaker Hyundai was found to have known about and “recklessly” ignored for more than a decade. But a district judge has since supplanted the jury’s ruling with her own. While declaring that Hyundai’s “reprehensibility” certainly warrants a sizeable punishment, she cut the corporation’s punitive payment down to $73 million.

Hello — that’s not punishment to a $79-billion-a-year car giant, it’s pocket change. Why would Hyundai executives quit putting corporate profits over people’s lives if that’s their “punishment”?

Plus, we taxpayers and the victims’ families are still lined up to subsidize whatever “punishment” Hyundai ultimately pays. With subsidies and wrist-slaps, the corporate criminal whirligig will continue to spin, making a mockery of justice. Fortunately, Senator Leahy has had the good sense to introduce legislation to lock down this escape hatch for thieves, killers and other executive-suite villains. For more information on the moral outrage of ordinary taxpayers being forced to subsidize corporate criminals, contact U.S. PIRG at www.uspirg.org.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: lincolnblues via Flickr

Drilling In Atlantic Raises Alarm

Drilling In Atlantic Raises Alarm

As a monster storm roared up the northeastern seaboard last week, the White House announced plans to open a wide swath of offshore waters to gas and oil exploration. Nice timing.

Although drilling is years away, future rigs in the Atlantic would lie in the path not only of fierce winter clippers but also hurricanes, presenting the year-round potential for devastating winds and pounding seas.

The risk doesn’t trouble the oil companies or the governors of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, all eager for a piece of the action.

Already the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010 is a fading memory, except for the families of the 11 workers who died and the hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents whose lives were upended.

We’re told that the BP disaster was a jarring wake-up for the energy industry. Today the drilling technology is much better, the companies boast, and so are the safety measures.

Trust us, they say. Something that terrible can’t happen again.

Which is what they said after the tanker Exxon Valdez dumped its load in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, polluting a thousand miles of shoreline. Twenty-six years later, there’s still crusted oil on the beaches.

After the BP rig blew up off the Louisiana coast, crude oil gushed for almost three months before the company could cap the pipe. Day after day, underwater video cameras let the whole nauseated country watch the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico.

Nobody knows how much oil really leaked out, but BP’s early estimates proved absurdly (and predictably) low. The U.S. government says the amount was at least 210 million gallons, much of which is still suspended as a spectral goo somewhere in the depths, according to many experts.

Tar-balled beaches from the Mississippi to the Florida Panhandle have been cleaned, groomed and re-cleaned to make them presentable to tourists, but the Gulf still shows signs of sickness.

In the time since the spill, marine biologists have documented more than 900 dead bottle-nosed dolphins and 500 dead sea turtles — and those are just the corpses that were found. Infant dolphins continue dying at a suspiciously elevated rate.

While some prized species of Gulf fish seem to be rebounding, life-threatening deformities are occurring in the organs of tuna and amberjack. A University of Miami study found that larval and juvenile mahi exposed to Deepwater crude were much weaker, losing up to 37 percent of their swimming strength.

The possibility of a similar calamity along the eastern seaboard hasn’t deterred the Obama administration or politicians in the lower coastal states, but it’s scaring many oceanfront municipalities with economies that rely on clean beaches and healthy, abundant seafood.

And scared they should be. One blowout is all it takes.

Fortunately, Florida was spared from Obama’s offshore-lease plan, thanks to Sen. Bill Nelson and others who don’t suffer from Deepwater Horizon amnesia.

Energy-industry lobbyists insist that oil spills are extremely rare, but that’s not true. According to the Associated Press, at least 73 domestic pipeline-related spills happened in 2014, an 87 percent jump since 2009.

Two weeks ago, a pipeline broke near Glendive, Mont., spewing more than 50,000 gallons of crude into the Yellowstone River and contaminating the public water supply. A similar accident happened less than four years earlier, when an ExxonMobil pipeline ruptured and dumped 63,000 gallons into the Yellowstone near the town of Laurel.

Those spills weren’t on the nightmare scale of Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon, yet they jolted the rural communities that treasure the Yellowstone and depend on it for irrigation, drinking water and family recreation.

(Boosters of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry foreign-bound Canadian oil through Montana and elsewhere, say recent mishaps demonstrate a need for larger, more modern pipes.)

Major ocean spills don’t happen often, but the damage is long term and far reaching. If a major well ruptured off the Atlantic seaboard, the resulting spill could impact millions of residents by killing tourism and destroying vital fisheries.

Obama said the rig platforms must be at least 50 miles from land, not much of a comfort zone. The Deepwater Horizon was about the same distance offshore, and that wasn’t enough to spare the beaches or the marine life.

At the same time the president declared his intention to allow oil leases in the Atlantic and expand exploration of the Gulf, he said he will prohibit drilling in parts of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in the Arctic Ocean.

These areas, explained Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, “are simply too special to develop.”

That’s another way of admitting that drilling is still very risky.

The shorelines of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas evidently aren’t “special” enough to deserve protection.

Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.

Photo: Berardo62 via Flickr