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energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, Keystone XL, tar sands

Common Dreams via PRWatch.org: Oil Industry Conjures Illusion of Public Support for KXL Using ALEC Politicians

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/12-7
Published on Wednesday, March 12, 2014 by
by Nick Surgey

keystone pipeline protestors
According to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the American Petroleum Institute (API) and other oil industry groups have been directing state legislators to make public and legislative statements in favor of the pipeline project. Millions of U.S. citizens have voiced their opposition to the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline in recent months, with more than 2 million public comments opposing the project hand delivered to the State Department last week. At the same time, hundreds of state legislators have been lining up in favor of KXL, seemingly just as passionate and as heartfelt as those opposed to the project. But many legislators have been tasked with promoting the project by oil industry lobbyists who provide them with model bills, talking points and draft op-eds.

According to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the American Petroleum Institute (API) and other oil industry groups have been directing state legislators to make public and legislative statements in favor of the pipeline project, and have provided legislators with draft legislation, language for op-eds and testimony to be presented as their own. Central to these efforts is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), through which lobbyists — such as those from API — can meet in secret with state legislators from across the country.
Consumer Energy Alliance Gives Marching Orders at ALEC

During the most recent annual ALEC meeting in August 2013, held in downtown Chicago, oil-industry lobbyist Michael Whatley provided legislators at the group’s International Relations Task Force meeting with a briefing on the KXL pipeline, urging legislators for their help in getting the project approved. Whatley — a lobbyist for the Consumer Energy Alliance (CEA) — has regularly attended ALEC meetings in recent years, and has presented to the organization on KXL in the past. CEA receives funding from the two leading U.S. oil lobby groups — the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) — and lists among its members leading oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Shell and BP amongst many others. Whatley’s lobbying firm HBW Resources also has a somewhat unexplained relationship with the Alberta Government – see Salon.

According to the internal minutes from the ALEC meeting provided to CMD, Whatley called on legislators to help push the pipeline project to approval. Much as environmental groups view KXL as being a line in the sand, as symbolic of how serious the Obama administration is about tackling climate change, the oil industry considers the project to be a possible harbinger of things to come. “We’re very concerned about the precedential impact of this refusal,” Whatley told the group.

Whatley and CEA have briefed ALEC legislators on Keystone before. When speaking at the group’s conference in Arizona in December 2011, Whatley gave a presentation to the International Relations task force, titled “Keystone XL – A Critical Project for America.”

At the 2013 meeting, Whatley explained to legislators that it was important for the State Department to hear their individual support for KXL. “It is crucial that they hear from state legislators” said Whatley. “We will have information for you to submit letters to the State Department.”

In recent months, state legislators seem to have heeded the industry’s marching orders.

On February 13, 2014, 75 state legislators from Michigan, led by ALEC member Aric Nessbit, wrote to the State Department calling for the pipeline to be approved. Then on March 4, 2014, a letter was sent from 29 State Senators in Nebraska, led by Senator Jim Smith, who has been a vocal and controversial figure in the fight for Keystone XL in his state. Smith was one of nine state legislators to attend a 2012 ALEC Academy trip to Alberta to view the tar sands — a trip organized by CEA through ALEC and funded by TransCanada.

Letters supporting Keystone were also sent from state elected officials from the Kentucky Senate, Ohio Senate, Ohio House of Representatives, Texas Assembly and the Wisconsin Assembly as well as letters from Governors in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Montana and Maine.
ALEC Pushes State Resolutions as Oil Industry Ghostwrites Opinion Pieces for Legislators

So far, in the 2014 session, legislative resolutions supporting the pipeline have been introduced in Kansas, Missouri and Florida. That’s in addition to resolutions introduced in Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota during 2013.

ALEC has encouraged its members to introduce its own “model” legislation supporting KXL, titled the “Resolution in Support of the Keystone XL Pipeline.” Since that language was written in 2011, ALEC told its members by email in 2012: “If you would like to introduce a similar resolution in your state legislature, we have suggestions to update it given all that has happened.” The bills that have appeared since then have varied in language somewhat, with the updated version alluded to in the ALEC email not yet made public. Many of the pro-KXL bills introduced in 2013 and 2014 closely follow a set of TransCanada’s own talking points, as CMD has previously reported.

Since many of these states do not allow for much disclosure through state public record laws, it is difficult to fully document the influence of oil industry lobbyists. However, what can be documented is extremely revealing of their role.

CMD previously reported on the pro-KXL resolutions in the 2013 session in a series of articles, including reporting about Rep. John Adams from Ohio who, after attending an ALEC/TransCanada trip to Alberta, was asked by ALEC to send “thank you notes” to the lobbyists who paid for the trip and took him for dinner. As CMD documented, not long afterward, Rep. Adams introduced a pro-KXL resolution provided to him by a TransCanada lobbyist.

In Florida, freshman representative Walter Bryan ”Mike” Hill sponsored a pro-Keystone resolution, HM 281 in December 2013. Laying the ground for his bill, in December Hill published an opinion piece in the Pensacola News Journal in Florida, his local newspaper.

According to emails obtained by CMD under the Florida Public Records law, the language for Hill’s opinion piece came directly from API lobbyist David Mica, who sent Hill’s staff member, Ryan Gorham, a draft version on November 26th. “I have ideas for distribution… please give me a holler,” wrote Mica attaching the draft.

An hour later, Gorham emailed the draft opinion piece to Hill. According to the exchange, the only change made by Hill and his staff was to spot a missing preposition in one sentence — the word “to” had been left out. The piece was published under Hill’s name on December 27, 2013. Staff from API and related projects funded by the organization such as “Energy Tomorrow” celebrated the piece on social media. A very proud — but oh so modest — David Mica tweeted: “@MikeHillfl nails his op-ed viewpoint! Way to go Representative Hill.”

This industry-legislator-opinion strategy was explicitly expressed in August 2013 by CEA’s Whatley at the ALEC conference in Chicago. According to ALEC’s own meeting minutes, obtained by CMD, Whatley called on ALEC legislators to publish op-eds in support of the project. “Put an op-ed in any paper in your district talking about the positive values of Keystone XL,” Whatley said. ALEC has also directly asked its members to publicly speak out in support of Keystone. In a 2012 email to members, Karla Jones, Director of International and Federal Relations, wrote: “Senator Pam Roach has been quoted in the media about Keystone, and I would like to encourage and provide information to any of you that would like to do the same.”
Politicians Parrot Industry Talking Points, “Part of a Nationwide Effort to Show Washington States Support the Pipeline”

In July 2013, Jim Snyder, who was writing for Bloomberg, reported on a dozen Republican federal and state lawmakers repeating the same talking points from CEA in letters they sent to the State Department during its previous review of the Keystone XL project in 2013:

“In doing so, they (the lawmakers) often pointed to the same facts and the used the same language. ‘Keystone XL will be critical to improving American energy security and boosting our economy,’ Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio wrote. So did Representative Jackie Walorski of Indiana. And Steve Daines of Montana. And John Carter of Texas. And Phil Gingrey of Georgia.

The wording similarities aren’t coincidental. The letters are all based on correspondence written by the Consumer Energy Alliance, a Washington-based coalition of energy producers and users, including Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) in Irving, Texas, and Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) in Midland, Michigan.”

Those talking points appeared again during a hearing for the pro-KXL resolution in Kansas HCR 5014. The bill sponsor, Rep. Hedke’s testimony to the Kansas State Senate Utilities Committee on February 13, 2014, parroted the same CEA language, writing: “Keystone XL will be critical to improving American energy security and boosting our economy.” CMD asked Hedke for a comment on the source of his testimony, but as of publication the representative had not responded.

When not working as a legislator, Hedke runs a company called Hedke-Saenger Geoscience, which according to the representative’s most recent financial disclosures feature a long list of oil industry clients including Hess Oil Company, Prospect Oil, Landmark Resources, and Trans Pacific Oil Corp.

Hedke told CMD by email that he was given the initial language for his resolution by a lobbyist from the Kansas API affiliate, before he “passed it out for reviews with numerous individuals, including a lobbyist representing TransCanada.”

At the hearing, Ken Peterson, Executive Director of the Kansas Petroleum Council (the API affiliate) stated as part of his testimony that “(t)his resolution is part of a nationwide effort to show Washington that states support the pipeline.” Truer words have never been spoken. API and the organizations that it funds including CEA have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to create the impression of a groundswell of passionate opposition to KXL.
© 2014 Center for Media & Democracy
Nick Surgey

Nick Surgey is director of research for the Center for Media & Democracy. He work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian.

energy policy, fossil fuels, offshore oil

Oceana: Bradley Beach town council takes action concerning Seismic Airgun Blasts

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 12, 2014

Contact: Nancy Pyne 202.467.1903 or npyne@oceana.org

Seismic Airgun Testing Threatens Marine Life and Coastal Economies

Bradley Beach, NJ – Last night, the Bradley Beach town council met to discuss the proposed use of seismic airguns, which are currently being considered to search for oil and gas deposits deep below the ocean floor in an area twice the size of California, stretching all the way from the southern tip of New Jersey to Florida.

They unanimously adopted a resolution opposing the use of seismic airgun testing in the Atlantic Ocean.

Seismic airguns shoot extremely loud and repeated blasts of sound, each 100,000 times more intense than what one would experience if standing near a jet engine. The Department of the Interior estimates this testing to injure or kill 138,500 marine mammals like dolphins and whales. Estimates include injury to critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, of which there are less than 500 left worldwide.

Below is a statement from Oceana’s Grassroots Manager, Nancy Pyne:

“I commend Mayor Englestad and the Bradley Beach Borough Council for adopting this resolution. Seismic airgun testing is the first step toward offshore drilling, and could be disastrous for New Jersey and other East Coast states.

Seismic airguns emit one of the loudest man-made sounds in the oceans. To this day, we’re still learning about their true impact, including how far their sound travels and how they affect marine animals, especially when they occur every 10 seconds for days, to weeks on end. The Department of Interior itself estimates that seismic airgun testing could injure or possibly kill as many as 138,500 dolphins, whales and other marine mammals.

Seismic airguns are loud enough to harm fish eggs and larvae, and scare fish away from important fishing grounds. In fact, the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council called on President Obama to oppose the use of seismic airguns in the Atlantic last year. We have also seen their impact off the coasts of Namibia and Australia which has caused declines in tuna catch and decreasing productivity for the scallop fishery.

Millions of people flock to the beaches of New Jersey every year to walk the boardwalks and lie in the sand-my family included. We can’t put our marine resources and coastal communities at risk by allowing seismic testing off the East Coast. We encourage other coastal mayors to speak out against seismic blasting and enact similar proposals in their communities. ”

Last week, right on the heels of the Obama administration releasing the final version of its proposal to allow seismic testing in the Atlantic Ocean, the town of Carolina Beach enacted a proposal opposing seismic testing off the coast of North Carolina. In addition, more than 100 scientists called on President Obama and his administration to wait on new acoustic guidelines for marine mammals, which are currently in development by the National Marine Fisheries Service. These guidelines are 15 years in the making and aim to provide a better understanding of how marine mammals are impacted by varying levels of manmade sound as well as demonstrate the measures that are needed to protect them.

In September, Oceana delivered more than 100,000 petitions opposing seismic airguns to Tommy Beaudreau, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. Fifty members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have also called on President Obama to stop the use of seismic airguns.

For more information about Oceana’s efforts to stop seismic airguns, including an infographic and animation about how they work, please visit www.oceana.org/seismic.

Oceana is the largest international advocacy group working solely to protect the world’s oceans. Oceana wins policy victories for the oceans using science-based campaigns. Since 2001, we have protected over 1.2 million square miles of ocean and innumerable sea turtles, sharks, dolphins and other sea creatures. More than 600,000 supporters have already joined Oceana. Global in scope, Oceana has offices in North, South and Central America and Europe. To learn more, please visit www.oceana.org.

Nancy Pyne
Grassroots Manager, Climate and Energy Campaign

OCEANA | Protecting the World’s Oceans
1350 Connecticut Ave. NW, 5th Floor | Washington, D.C., 20036 USA
D +1.202.467.1903 | C +1.202.486.6406
E npyne@oceana.org | W http://oceana.org
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/OceanaGreaterDC

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, fracking, oil pollution, tar sands

Wild West Oil Boom Video of the Week from Gasland Grassroots, Dakota Resource Council

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This week, we’d like to share the film This Is Our Country: Living with the Wild West Oil Boom by the Dakota Resource Council.
Like many of the families in the GASLAND films, the people of North Dakota are seeing their livelihoods destroyed in the mad race to extract oil and gas.

Please watch and share this incredible film that shows the true cost of extreme energy extraction.
Watch This Is Our Country: Living with the Wild West Oil Boom http://blog.gaslandthemovie.com/?p=480

While you’re at our blog, check out our past videos of the week and be sure to follow us on facebook and twitter so you don’t miss our posts.

We have a Video of the Week because sharing films like these can make a big difference. Meeting the affected families and seeing their struggle makes it very clear that extreme energy extraction is not the path we want to take our country down.
So go ahead, forward this on to a few friends. Help us share the stories that can bring positive change.
Watch and share This Is Our Country: Living with the Wild West Oil Boom
Lee Ziesche, Gasland Grassroots Coordinator

energy policy, fossil fuels, fracking, offshore oil

Press Telegram: Long Beach to be site of anti-fracking rally on Wednesday

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http://www.presstelegram.com/business/20140310/long-beach-to-be-site-of-anti-fracking-rally-on-wednesday

By Andrew Edwards, Press-Telegram
POSTED: 03/10/14, 8:23 PM PDT |

LONG BEACH >> Environmentalists will demand the California Coastal Commission order a stop to the fracking of offshore oil wells on Wednesday during a demonstration at City Hall in which protesters plan to cover themselves in hazmat suits and tote boogie boards.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group with offices in California and several other states, announced on Monday its plans for the protest at the Coastal Commission’s next meeting site in Long Beach.

Fracking, slang for hydraulic fracturing, refers to the controversial process of injecting a highly pressurized mixture of water, sand and other chemicals into oil wells to break up the Earth’s crust and facilitate the extraction of oil and natural gas. Although oil industry advocates such as the Western States Petroleum Association say fracking is safe, many environmentalists say it increases the risks of groundwater contamination and earthquakes.

Although the Coastal Commission’s two-day agenda does not appear to have much room for a discussion of California fracking rules outside of the possibility of the issue being brought up during a briefing on offshore oil and gas activities, Center for Biological Diversity spokesman Patrick Sullivan said speakers from the public will seek a response when the panel holds its public comment session. “The Coastal Commission has been talking about fracking at recent meetings,” he said. “We’re not sure whether the commission itself will address the topic this month.”

Fracking has taken place in the Long Beach area since 1994. Sullivan said records pulled from FraFocus, an online registry of fracking activities, show fracking took place four times in December in waters near Long Beach. California law requires the development of permanent regulations to govern fracking by the start of next year. At present, interim rules require the industry to evaluate well casings and cement linings for safety prior to fracking, among other regulations.

Coastal Commission officials want to ensure that whatever regulations are developed apply to offshore drilling, Coastal Commission legislative liaison Sarah Christie said. State Sens. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, and Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, last month introduced a bill that would temporarily halt fracking in the state, pending scientific study.

The rally is planned to begin at 10 a.m. Wednesday. The Coastal Commission is set to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Council Chambers.

Contact Andrew Edwards at 562-499-1305.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, offshore oil

NJ.com Star-Ledger: Renewed search for offshore oil along Atlantic coast raises concerns in NJ

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http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/03/renewed_search_for_offshore_oil_along_atlantic_coast_raises_concerns_in_nj.html

sonic ship
An oil exploration surveying ship towing an air gun and acoustic receivers used to search for undersea oil and gas formations through seismic shock waves. The oil industry is looking to resume exploration in the Atlantic, south of New Jersey, for the first time in 30 years. (International Association of Geophysical Contractors)

By Ted Sherman/The Star-Ledger
Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on March 10, 2014 at 6:45 AM, updated March 10, 2014 at 8:58 AM

Thirty years ago, after spending billions to drill a series of dry holes, the oil industry abandoned a costly search for new oil and gas reserves off the Atlantic coast.
Now, armed with new technology and computerized modeling data, it wants to take another look.

Last month, the Interior Department endorsed a plan that would allow sophisticated seismic testing from Delaware Bay to Florida’s Cape Canaveral – a controversial decision urged by the industry, but angering environmentalists who fear potential harm to marine life – which could lead to renewed drilling in the coastal waters south of New Jersey.

State environmental officials, neither opposing nor supporting the plan, noted New Jersey is not in the immediate survey area, and said they were reviewing the federal report. “It is preliminary exploration to look at the subsurface geological framework and could have some scientific value that could benefit the state in the future,” said a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection.

Gov. Chris Christie, who has repeatedly opposed any drilling off the New Jersey coastline, has not changed his position on the issue, said Kevin Roberts, a spokesman for the governor.

The Atlantic Coast had long been off limits for oil exploration, under a federal moratorium continued in the wake of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf. But for the past four years, the Interior Department has been holding hearings to determine whether to reopen at least parts of the East Coast to exploratory testing. Officials said newer studies were needed to make informed decisions regarding future oil and gas leases, through the use of seismic testing.

Such testing involve ships that use blasts of compressed air to generate sonic waves aimed at the seabed. The reflected sound is picked up by a towed array of acoustic sensors, providing a 3D image of the underlying geology.

“They are sonograms of the earth,” explained Rutgers University deep-sea geologist Greg Mountain, a member of the university’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, who uses similar technology in researching sea level changes. “We’re looking at the top half mile at most. The oil companies are looking 3 to 5 miles deep,” he said.

Mountain said such surveys must be done under strict federal guidelines, including the use of observers, to make sure there is no harm to marine animals.

“There is a lot of the economy that depends on a clean and healthy ocean.”

Oil industry officials say the survey technique lessens the environmental impact of exploration. But opponents say the high energy sound pulses used by the industry can deafen marine mammals and disrupt habitats. Cindy Zipf executive director of Clean Ocean Action, expressed disappointment with the Obama administration for green-lighting the testing. “There is a lot of the economy that depends on a clean and healthy ocean,” she said. “We’ve been working since 1984 to keep this at bay.”

The testing itself would adversely affect the marine environment, asserted Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, and could be especially harmful to marine mammals, such as dolphins and the North Atlantic Right Whale.
“It also can change migratory fish patterns,” he said.

David Pringle, New Jersey Campaign Director for Clean Water Action, said the only reason to be doing seismic testing would ultimately be to drill for oil. “The testing area begins at the Delaware-New Jersey border and the areas they want to explore are within 100 miles of New Jersey,” said Pringle, who warned that even without drilling directly off the coast, prevailing ocean currents would bring an oil spill from wells further south directly to the Jersey Shore.

“It is very much a New Jersey issue,” he said.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th Dist.), a long-time opponent of offshore drilling, said any oil spill would destroy the beaches in New Jersey. He said while the oil and gas industry is pushing to open the Atlantic to drilling, the proven sources discovered in the past were very limited and involved deep water drilling.

“I maintain that the technology doesn’t exist to prevent the real possibility of a spill,” he said.

The decision by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management does not actually authorize any survey activities. It only proposes rules governing seismic testing of the ocean floor.

“The Department and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management have been steadfast in our commitment to balancing the need for understanding offshore energy resources with the protection of the human and marine environment using the best available science as the basis of this environmental review,” said BOEM Director Tommy P. Beaudreau in a statement. “Our scientific knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean is constantly building, and new information and analyses will continue to be developed over time.”

The bureau said new data would be used to not only to locate oil and gas resources, but also site renewable energy facilities.

The area in question was the focus of a four-year exploration effort beginning in 1978, when a number of wells were drilled 100 miles east of Atlantic City in the Baltimore Canyon, and elsewhere off the Continental Shelf in the early 1980s. While some of the holes yielded natural gas, geologists concluded that whatever was there was not economically feasible to develop.

Kenneth Miller, a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers, who also studies rising sea levels, said data from those drilling sites recorded significant amounts of gas in five of the wells.

“They know there’s gas. They don’t know how much, but they know it’s worth looking into,” he said.

Officials at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association that represents the country’s oil and natural gas industry, said new technologies offer the ability to get a clearer picture of the seabed geology. At the same time, Andy Radford, API’s senior policy advisor for offshore issues, said there are new geologic theories based on discoveries in off the coasts of West Africa and Brazil, driving the effort to go back to the East Coast.

“It’s really just an effort to see what’s out there,” he said.

Special thanks to Richard Charter