Texas Bill Would Require Power Plants to Prepare for Cold

Mark Chediak and Naureen S. Malik
Fri, March 5, 2021, 

(Bloomberg) -- Texas state lawmakers introduced a series of bills designed to address last month’s energy crisis, including one that would require power plants to weatherize and another that would block retailers from exposing consumers to volatile wholesale electricity prices.

Owners of power generators, utilities and cooperatives would be required to make sure their facilities can operate during periods of sub-freezing temperatures and extreme heat, according to a bill filed Friday by State House Representative Chris Paddie.

More than 4 million Texans lost power for days last month during a severe winter storm that knocked out nearly half of the state’s generation capacity. A number of power plants failed during the event because of freezing instruments and valves, the state grid operator said. While the state put in place guidelines for power plants to weatherize after a winter storm in 2011, operators aren’t mandated to follow them.


Meanwhile, State House Representative Ana Hernandez introduced a bill that would ban any retail power provider from charging households and businesses rates that are tied to the wholesale market price for electricity. The measure comes after customers of retail provider Griddy Energy LLC saw their bills skyrocket to thousands of dollars during the extreme cold when prices on the grid surged to the $9,000 a megawatt-hour price cap.

Griddy, which has been found in default by the state’s power grid operator, charged customers a $9.99 monthly fee and then whatever the wholesale index price was for power.

Paddie also introduced a measure that would require all board members of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, to be Texas residents after several out-of-state independent directors stepped down last week because of controversy over their residency.

Of those independent directors, three will be appointed by the governor, including one who will represent residential consumer interests, as well as one each by the lieutenant governor and speaker of the House.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

TEXAS

Nearly three dozen power facilities that failed in the 2011 winter storm failed again in 2021, according to an analysis by ABC13.

We've been taking a look at
power plants that went offline
Records show dozens of power plants repeat failures
Sat, March 6, 2021, 

Video Transcript

KEATON FOX: Hi there. I'm ABC 13's data analyst, Keaton Fox. We've been taking a look at power plants that went offline in 2021 versus the power plants that went offline in the 2011 winter storm. 10 years ago where that was the last time before 2021 that we had to see those rolling blackouts. Let me actually show you some of the data here.

All of the red counties are where power plants went offline in 2021. And as you can see, Harris County, very much a bright red county because we had quite a few power generation units go offline. 71 units at 11 different facilities across our area that went offline. We're

Getting this data, by the way, coming to us from ERCOT, who has released some of that data, but not all of the data. Only power plants that agreed to have their names released in this data set actually got released. And we know that there are at least three dozen of those power generation units that were offline in 2011 that went offline again in 2021.

Which would signify that if they would have done some of the things that had been suggested in a 2011 federal report-- There was a FERC Commission, a Federal Energy Commission that went over everything that happened in 2011 when we lost power, including winterization. They said if you go and you winterize these plants, it is a good possibility that we're not going to see this thing happen again. Well as we know, many of those plants, if not all of the plants, did little to nothing to actually winterize.

And then 2021 rolls around and we see everything happening once again. In fact, one of those CEOs, the CEO of Energy Energy, that many of you are very familiar with, admitted that they did nothing. That at least two of their plants were not prepared for the cold and that they had not taken the appropriate steps to make sure that things should have happened. I said it was Energy. It's actually Calpine Energy.

That's their CEO who said that they weren't prepared for that. We heard a lot of that testimony over the last year, but certainly, just again looking sort of at this data that we've gotten our hands on here at ABC 13, and then been able to analyze, we can see the impact. Again, across the state here, looking at all of the counties where there were power plants offline, the widespread nature of the problem. And winterization is at the heart of it, knowing that the cold actually knocked a lot of those pipes offline.

The water pipes froze that supplied those power plants as well. So a lot more on this, obviously. There's an interactive map below this video, if you're looking on ABC13.com.

If you're watching on one of our streaming devices, you can head over to ABC13.com and see all of the different plants that went offline. We're, of course, keeping our eye on all the data here at ABC 13. For now, I'm Keaton Fox, 13 Eyewitness News.

Goldman poised to make $100 million profit off Texas deep freeze - Bloomberg News

Fri, March 5, 2021


FILE PHOTO: A sign is displayed in the reception of Goldman Sachs in Sydney

(Reuters) - Traders at Goldman Sachs Group Inc could earn roughly $100 million in profit from the winter storm last month that left many across Texas and other southern U.S. states without electricity, clean water and heat, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.

The Wall Street bank's earnings from the physical sale of power and natural gas and financial hedges after spot prices jumped, could top $200 million on paper, but they will likely take a significant write down, Bloomberg reported.

Texas's energy market saw extreme volatility in mid-February when a deep freeze reduced supplies, sending the cost of emergency fuel and power sky high. With bills now coming due, many energy companies are expected to file for bankruptcy or seek regulatory or legal remedies to put off payment.

"The polar vortex drove volatility in energy markets, and, as a market-maker and liquidity provider, we were positioned to help our clients manage their risks in that challenging environment," said a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman in an emailed statement.

Bank of America also stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars from trades related to Texas's energy market, the Financial Times reported Friday. That bank said any revenue will be offset by losses and reduced investments that resulted from business the bank has with other energy sources in Texas.

(Reporting by Sohini Podder in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Steve Orlofsky)

Competitive Texas power market hindered winter storm prep - Shell


FILE PHOTO: A neighborhood experiences a power outage after winter weather caused electricity blackouts in San Marcos

Laura Sanicola
Fri, March 5, 2021, 12:50 PM·1 min read




By Laura Sanicola

(Reuters) - Arguments that Texas should have "winterized" its electricity generators in anticipation of rare, inclement weather ignore the competitive nature of the Lone Star State's power system, a Royal Dutch Shell Plc executive said on Friday at an energy conference.

A February winter-storm surge in demand saddled the companies that sell, transmit and generate electricity in the state with about $47 billion in costs, whilst cutting power, heat and water to 4.3 million and causing dozens of deaths.


After a similar weather event in 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recommended generators winterize facilities, but the U.S. energy regulator's recommendations were not adopted.

"It's not that easy, it's not the requirement and it's a very competitive power market," Shell's Integrated Gas & New Energies Director Maarten Wetselaar said at IHS Markit's CERAWeek conference.

There is less incentive to winterize equipment if competitors do not do so, he said.

"It was a once-in-a-generation event and clearly Texas infrastructure had not been prepared for it," Wetselaar said.

His comments echoed those made by FERC Chair Richard Glick on Thursday that generators will not voluntarily weatherize their equipment if its competitors do not follow suit.

"It will put them at a disadvantage,” Glick said at the conference.

(Reporting by Laura Sanicola; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Texas regulators will not correct $16 billion in electricity ‘overcharges.’ Why?



Haley Samsel
Fri, March 5, 2021, 12:54 PM·3 min read

At its Friday meeting, the Public Utility Commission of Texas declined to adjust prices that resulted in $16 billion in overcharges to the electricity market during the February winter storm. Those charges were documented in a Thursday letter from the commission’s independent market monitor, Potomac Economics.

The governor-appointed regulatory commission, which oversees the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, met with just two members after the resignation of chairperson DeAnn Walker. Commissioners Arthur D’Andrea and Shelly Botkin addressed the Potomac report, which found that ERCOT kept electricity prices too high for at least 33 hours after most outages ended on late Feb. 17.

D’Andrea, now serving as chair, said repricing was “dangerous” because it could potentially cause new problems for customers and electricity providers who made a series of complex, private transactions outside of the official power market.

“It’s nearly impossible to unscramble this sort of egg, and the results of going down this path are unknowable,” D’Andrea said. “We’ve already set a path, we know who is hurt by that and we can focus on helping the people that were hurt instead of throwing everything up into the air again, creating another huge mess, and then a month from now we’ll have a different set of people who are hurt and we have to focus on helping them.”

At the instruction of the commission, ERCOT raised real-time prices to the maximum limit of $9,000 per megawatt hour on Feb. 15, a more than 10,000% increase from the week before. The decision reflected the scarcity of electricity amid an unprecedented statewide demand for heat, and aimed to incentivize electricity generation at a time of desperate need.

In her letter to the commission, Potomac Economics vice president Carrie Bivens wrote that these pricing interventions will result in higher levels of defaults for electricity providers if not corrected. While the firm agreed with the commission’s original decision to raise prices, the increase lasted for too long and could cause “substantial and unjustified economic harm,” she wrote.

Adopting Potomac’s recommendation would not result in revenue shortfalls for ERCOT since the corrected prices would still cover the costs of generation and reflect the supply and demand during the winter storm, Bivens wrote.

“We recognize that revising the prices retroactively is not ideal,” she wrote.

Retail electric providers and their customers could be left with at least $1.5 billion of the bill, according to the Texas Tribune, and many electricity companies and co-ops are at the brink of folding or declaring bankruptcy. Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, based in Waco with 1.5 million customers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Feb. 26 with the aim of protecting customers from huge bills.

D’Andrea and Botkin said that there is still the possibility that the commission will adjust ancillary service prices, a catch-all term for the functions provided by the electric grid that support the continuous flow of electricity.

For some electric providers, ancillary service costs soared to more than $20,000 per megawatt hour on Feb. 15. In Georgetown, the municipal electricity provider was charged $17.8 million for one week of ancillary services, compared to $710,000 charged for the entirety of 2020. Those costs alone were 25 years worth, according to a city council presentation.

“The ancillary service thing is different, there is no deadline for that,” D’Andrea said. “We can put that on hold, but the energy market is the one that has a deadline today, and I say we don’t act.”

What's your pension invested in?


Howard Mustoe - Business reporter
Sat, March 6, 2021, BBC

beer and cigarette

Perhaps during lockdown, you've been tempted to do some financial spring cleaning and checked in on a private pension. But do you know what companies you're actually investing in?

If you do, you are probably in a minority, according to Simon Harrington, senior policy adviser at the trade body for pension funds, PIMFA.

Part of it is to do with automatic enrolment. Since 2012, workers in most companies have been automatically signed up to a workplace pension without having to lift a finger.

This has swelled the number of people with a workplace pension by about 8.5 million to 19.2 million.

"The whole point of automatic enrolment is that basically, people save up [by] doing nothing at all," says Mr Harrington.

chart

"People will know, in most cases by looking at their pay every month that some money has gone into a pension scheme. But all of the data that we have suggests that they really never log on, check their annual benefit statement, or have any idea of what it is that they're invested in."

This isn't a disaster, he says. The default fund into which their money is placed is generally cheap to manage and receives a lot of attention because of its size.

But it means that many people are invested in a pot of very disparate interests, which may include tobacco, gambling, firearms, alcohol, oil or other investments that they may personally want to avoid.

Part of that is down to the rules for this large pool of pensions. A default fund - the one your money is invested in if you take no action - can only charge a maximum of 0.75% a year, which means a lot of it will follow stock indexes like London's FTSE 100, FTSE 250 or the S&P 500 in the US - so-called passive investments which will include a vast number of companies.

Ethical funds, which avoid investing in these companies, do exist, though, and they are growing in popularity, albeit from a low base.

Stockbroker Hargreaves Lansdown, one of the largest do-it-yourself investment platforms, says the number of ethical funds it offers has almost tripled in the past 12 months, and there's more than 11 times more money in these funds than a year ago.

There are now close to 200 such funds, but that's out of 3,500 funds on the platform overall.

Simon Harrington says more interest in what people are invested in will follow

Pension providers are taking action, though. The biggest by membership is Nest, which has 9.8 million members and oversees £16.5bn of savings. It has already acted and scrubbed its investments of tobacco and uranium. It has a 10-year plan to cut emissions and wants companies it owns shares in to cut out Arctic drilling and coal.

Pension companies insist that there is interest in ethical investments.

The BBC asked some of the UK's largest pension providers how many workplace pension funds they offered and how many were ethical. Of the six that came back to us, we found that on average one ethical fund was offered for every 15 regular funds.

Several insist that all their investments now follow some pattern of green or ethical investing.

Chart

Legal & General Investment Management says all its default investments avoid controversial weapons and companies that purely mine coal.

Aegon says half of pension savings using its default fund will soon be in ethical investments and that it plans to slash carbon emissions in its investments.

Aviva says it has set a target for its default fund to be carbon neutral by 2050. It wants regulators to force its competitors to do the same.

A challenge for savers is that there's no agreed-upon definition for what qualifies for an ethical investment. And switching to an ethical fund may not provide the best financial returns.

Another challenge is finding those cheap funds which track an index, says Hector McNeil, co-chief executive of European investment platform HANetf.

While there are cheap international funds which exclude tobacco, for instance, such funds are harder to come by in the UK.

Much more choice and customisation is likely to be available in the future, he says.

"I think in three years' time we're going to be talking a totally different story," he says. He thinks most products will eventually allow customers to veto certain industries at will.

Hector McNeil says more customisable investments are on the horizon

Mr McNeil's company has grown from managing $50m (£35m) to $2.25bn (£1.6bn) in a little over a year. It designs funds and rose to prominence with a tradable fund investing in gold.

"You're getting more, broader, products," he says.

Many of his funds are based around themes, such as ethical gold or medicinal cannabis, or removing carbon,

If you take a look at the funds in your pension you may find it hard to tell where the money is. Many funds only list their 10 largest investments, leaving the majority of the value unaccounted for. Unless it explicitly promises to avoid a certain investment, it could be lurking in there.

With funds like his, which can be traded on stock exchanges, all investments are listed, he says, making it easy to check where your money is held.

Even then, mistakes are made. In 2019, fund manager Vanguard accidentally invested in gun-maker Sturm Ruger for a month before correcting the mistake.

Chart

Despite the challenges and the inertia of some savers PIMFA's Simon Harrington is upbeat about ethical investing.

"The UK pension saving population is reasonably young," he says.

Before workers were automatically added to workplace schemes, "the number of people actively saving into a pension scheme was very, very small," he says. "And we have to be realistic about the fact that we're at the start of a journey to a more developed saving culture."

The demand for ethical investments in personal savings like individual savings accounts (Isas) is a good indicator for what may be to come, he says.

Varcoe: Once among the country's largest emitters, TransAlta joins journey to carbon neutrality

Chris Varcoe, Calgary Herald 


It wasn’t that long ago that TransAlta Corp. was among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Canada, largely because of its fleet of coal-fired power plants

© Provided by Calgary Herald The TransAlta Utilities Sundance Generating Plant near Wabamun Lake on August 13, 2019.

Earlier this week, the Calgary-based company announced its intention to be carbon neutral by 2050, joining a growing group of Canadian energy companies on a similar journey.

As part of its pledge, it will lower company greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by the end of the decade, a sharp drop from 2015 levels.

It will discontinue coal-fired power generation in the country by the end of this year, as it converts existing facilities in Alberta to use natural gas.

The company is also expanding the development of wind and solar projects.

If you’re looking for a Canadian example of how the tide is turning in the energy transition debate — with companies setting tough targets as government policies and economics change — TransAlta is a good place to start.

© Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press A TransAlta wind turbine is shown at a wind farm near Pincher Creek, Alta., Wednesday, March 9, 2016.

TransAlta CEO Dawn Farrell, who is retiring at the end of this month, has been working on carbon policy since the late 1980s, before the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.

She recalls being put in charge of a $15-million fund back in 1990 to buy carbon offsets for TransAlta’s coal-fired power plants, part of the company’s long journey that led to today’s point.

“Back then, we saw the technology was taking a long time to come to market. We invested in wind in 2000 and even through 2000 to 2015, we saw wind farms and solar being very, very expensive,” Farrell said in an interview.

“I don’t think anybody could have ever foreseen the acceleration of the technological development.”

Costs for developing renewable energy projects have plunged in the past decade.

Could Farrell have imagined in those days seeing a line of sight to TransAlta becoming carbon neutral?

“Absolutely not,” she added.

“But absolutely what we all missed was just how quickly, with the way information moves around, you can just accelerate technological development — and that’s what has changed the game here.”

© Larry MacDougal/The Canadian Press TransAlta Corp. CEO Dawn Farrell speaks during at the company’s annual general meeting in Calgary on Tuesday, April 29, 2014.

It was only a decade ago that TransAlta’s Sundance generating plant was the largest-single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada, according to a report at the time by the Pembina Institute.

This week’s declaration by the company earned praise from some environmental groups. They noted the power generator’s announcement contained something that’s often lacking in corporate net-zero plans: interim steps and an idea of how to get there.

“It shows how far you can go,” said Binnu Jeyakumar, the Pembina Institute’s director of clean energy.

“This is a sign of how change can happen if they’re pushed there by a combination of regulations and economics,” added Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist for Greenpeace Canada.

Alberta has the highest emissions in the country and coal-fired power generation has been a key part of the decarbonization discussion for years.

In late 2015, the former NDP government announced emissions from all coal-fired power generation had to be eliminated by 2030.

Since then, companies such as TransAlta and Edmonton-based Capital Power have been aggressively converting their plants to use natural gas, which generates significantly fewer emissions than coal.

Armed with their new corporate strategies, all coal-fired generation will be phased out by 2023.

With the federal government’s commitment for Canada to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and plans to increase the national carbon price to $170 per tonne by decade’s end, there are mounting monetary and political reasons for companies to chart such a course forward.

According to TransAlta, it has already lowered its total annual emission by 61 per cent in the past 15 years.

TransAlta’s chief operating officer John Kousinioris noted carbon neutrality is an aspirational goal, but stressed the company doesn’t need technical solutions “that are just a twinkle in someone’s eyes” to get there, he said on an earnings call.

Kousinioris, who will become TransAlta’s next CEO, said switching to natural gas will cut emissions per megawatt by almost half.

By 2022, TransAlta’s total emissions will drop to about 10 megatonnes, down from about 41 megatonnes in 2005.

Looking towards the end of the decade, emissions will be “significantly more modest,” although he noted natural gas is still needed and there will likely be more plants built.

But he’s confident in the target

.

© TransAlta.com TransAlta COO, and future CEO, John Kousinioris.

“There comes a tipping point where you can either stand on the sidelines or embrace it. Dawn was a real champion for us in saying this is something we need to embrace,” Kousinioris said in an interview.

Other companies are also setting their sights on such ambitions.

Capital Power has adopted a target of being carbon neutral within three decades. Canadian Natural Resources and Cenovus Energy and pipeline giant Enbridge have already announced plans to be net-zero by 2050.

Canadian Natural said Thursday it has lowered its emissions per barrel by 18 per cent since 2016.

The company is using carbon capture and storage in Alberta, and is running a pilot project that uses solvents in thermal oilsands projects that will cut emissions intensity by up to 50 per cent, said president Tim McKay.

For companies such as TransAlta and Canadian Natural, the push is on.

With the election of U.S. President Joe Biden and his pledge to have an emissions-free electricity sector by 2035, momentum is growing for power companies to embrace net-zero goals, said Sara Hastings-Simon, a research fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

The key for companies is to have a strategy going forward, which includes measuring emissions, setting targets and tying executive compensation to the goal.

“It is really important when companies put forward these goals, they are not just saying we are going to do this, but they have all the pieces in place that make it real,” she added.

“You are seeing a recognition from leaders in these companies that this is where the world is going — and this is what investors and customers are looking for.”

Chris Varcoe is a Calgary Herald columnist.

One of The Nation’s Largest Pipelines Caused The Biggest Spill in Decades–And We’re Just Hearing About It

Unless you’re living in Huntersville, North Carolina, you may be blissfully unaware that the U.S.’s biggest gasoline spill since 1997 happened this past summer. The slowly-unfolding, little-reported-on saga in the state involves a company controlled by special interests like the Koch brothers and Shell, and a pipeline that has been transporting dirty energy for decades. And the crisis of the Colonial pipeline points to one of the next big issues for American fossil fuel infrastructure: what to do about dangerous, aging pipelines as we move to clean energy.

© Photo: Jim Mone (AP) Pipelines used to carry crude oil.

In August, two teenagers riding ATVs around in a nature preserve outside of Huntersville, a suburb north of Charlotte, noticed gasoline gurgling out of the ground and told the town fire department. (Colonial’s owners told some state lawmakers a different story, initially claiming that they’d shut down the pipeline after noticing a pressure drop at another point in the line.) At first, the pipeline company reported that only 63,000 gallons of oil had been spilled, but throughout the fall, that number steadily crept up: 273,000 gallons in September, 311,000 gallons in November. The company now says nearly 1.2 million gallons have been leaked; that number could still rise as more assessments are done.

While pipeline owners tend to undershoot their initial estimates of spills, this level of screwup is “somewhat astronomical and not normal,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Margolis said that gasoline’s physical composition—it sinks to the bottom of bodies of water, unlike oil, which stays slick on top—could make spills like this harder to gauge.

The Keystone Pipeline Is Running Again Two Weeks After Major Spill

But the age of the pipeline, Margolis said, was also probably a culprit in how the exact number was missed. Unlike newer pipelines, older ones like the Colonial pipeline “don’t have the same mechanisms in place to monitor spills and leaks,” he said. “This is a 40-some-year-old pipeline, it just doesn’t have that kind of technology.”

The Colonial pipeline is owned by a company of the same name, which is, in turn, controlled by companies including Koch Industries (its largest shareholder, which made $85 million in dividends from the pipeline in 2016) and Royal Dutch Shell. The pipeline was initially built in 1963, and stretches from Texas to New Jersey. According to the company, the pipeline transports around 2.5 million barrels of fuel per day, mostly underground, that supplies 45% of the entire East Coast’s gasoline. In 2016, North Carolina alone got 70% of its gasoline from the pipeline. Its owners have said that technology can detect leaks as small as 3% of the pipeline’s daily flow–which works out to around 1.8 million gallons.

Colonial Pipeline (the company) has been doing damage control since the summer. As officials continued to gradually and quietly raise estimates of the spill in the press, it simultaneously bought out three properties near the leak site, spending more on those purchases than it’s spent on environmental penalties levied over the past three decades. Yet the company has not disclosed the cause of the five-foot crack in the pipe segment outside of Charlotte. (That same line segment had also been repaired in 2004.)

Margolis pointed out that the Colonial pipeline is so old that its anti-corrosion mechanism is simply a coating of coal tar. “That’s scary,” he said, pointing out that newer pipelines with updated technology still have accidents.

“When you think about Keystone 1, what’s in the ground, that thing leaked, like, fifteen times the first year or two, and that supposedly had all the bells and whistles, all the new technology,” he said, referencing the numerous accidents the TC Energy-owned pipeline, the predecessor to the Keystone XL project, has had in its 10-year existence. “What we’re talking about here is a whole step removed from that–they basically painted it with tar and threw it in the ground.”

Anti-pipeline activists tend to focus their attention on new infrastructure being built (and for good reason). New construction represents locking the world into new emissions, and it’s much harder to argue for pulling the plug on a pipeline the size of Colonial’s, which would represent a significant disruption in our daily lives if it was to suddenly disappear. The 2016 back-to-back spill and explosion, for example caused gas shortages in six states.

Yet Colonial may represent the next step forward in fighting for an energy transition: figuring out how to decommission pipelines that are falling apart.

“There aren’t that many pipelines proposed for the near future. We know they’re not economical, we know we need to move beyond fossil fuels, so at this point, it’s like, what’s the next issue with pipelines?” Margolis said, pointing out that pipelines like Colonial are particularly dangerous in terms of explosions, water pollution, and other on-the-ground impacts. “There’s a couple ways to deal with this aging infrastructure. The big way, the main way we see it, is that these things should be decommissioned. When you see a pipeline that’s this old with these kinds of problems. It shouldn’t be repaired, it should be shut down.”

There are around 190,000 miles of pipelines that transport liquid petroleum products across the U.S. Deactivating pipelines is a messy, protracted affair, with several steps required from regulatory bodies to make sure it’s done correctly. It’s also expensive: Enbridge has estimated that properly deactivating its aging Line 3 pipeline and taking it out of the ground would cost more than $1.2 billion dollars. The company is currently considering simply abandoning it and paying off the landowners involved, which it says would cost a relatively paltry $85 million, but leave corrosive pipes littered underneath the landscape.

Activists opposing new pipelines also haven’t stopped fighting them even after being built. The resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline morphed from blocking construction to shutting off a functioning pipeline after Trump lifted blocks set by his predecessor and allowed the pipeline to begin transporting oil. However, in July of last year, a judge ruled that the government did not complete an adequate impact assessment

For older pipelines like Colonial, which have been around long enough to survive any legal challenges related to their initial construction, the chance for shutdown could come when the owners make moves to make significant repairs–especially if those repairs cross new territories or require new permits. That struggle is playing out right now in Minnesota, where Enbridge is looking to construct a new pipeline to replace the crumbling Line 3. The company’s proposed route for the replacement is facing legal challenges and significant backlash from Indigenous groups and activists who say the pipeline violates treaty rights with tribes in the area.

Just because pipelines like the Line 3 replacement or Colonial aren’t technically new infrastructure doesn’t mean that they can’t keep the U.S. locked into using dirty fuels. If shareholders spend big to keep a pipeline working, they’ll be less and less interested in suddenly doubling back on that investment.

“If you rebuild a pipeline, just like building a new pipeline, you’re putting millions and millions of dollars into it,” Margolis said. “You’re locking us into fossil fuel use for decades.

OCCUPATIONALMarch 4, 2021

Advocates Of Equality For All Are More Likely To Show Prejudice Against Older Adults At Work

By Emma Young

Social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, have done huge amounts to address racism and sexism in our society. It’s now common for organisations to have diversity programmes, for example. As Ashley Martin at Stanford University and Michael S North at New York University note in their new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Facebook has famously invested millions of dollars in increasing diversity. However — and this is a big however — the pair’s work reveals that people who are keenest to advocate for women and racial minorities harbour more prejudice against a group that reports almost as much US workplace discrimination as these two: older people. 

As the researchers note, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said that “younger people are just smarter” while Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, which has won awards for diversity and inclusion, has opined that “people over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas”. They are not alone in this attitude — broader society (or at least US and UK society, as a generalisation) finds ageism acceptable, too. “Ageism is so condoned in American culture that many do not see it as an ‘-ism’, in the same manner of other forms of prejudice,” the researchers note.  And yet, older people as a group are disadvantaged, and have more limited opportunities.

To explore ageism and how it might interact with views on sexism and racism, the researchers ran a series of seven studies. A critical measure in each was a participant’s level of “egalitarian advocacy” — their belief in and commitment to creating a more egalitarian world. This was assessed using a scale that the researchers had developed, which gauged participants’ agreement with statements like “I feel angry when I think about the injustices and inequality in society”.

In initial online studies, the team found that people who scored higher on this scale were more disapproving of racism and sexism but also more likely to endorse “Succession-based ageism” — the idea that older people should step aside to improve younger people’s job opportunities.

In a later study, 298 participants were given a theoretical scenario in which a company had a million-dollar fund for improving diversity, to split between a number of minority groups. The researchers found that the more that participants endorsed egalitarian advocacy, the more money they wanted to go to women and racial minorities — and the less they wanted to go to older people. Questionnaire results showed that this was driven by a belief that older people block women and racial minorities from getting ahead. “Together, this research suggests that when it comes to egalitarianism, equality for all may only mean equality for some,” write Martin and North.

Is there any way, then, to encourage people to be less ageist? Well, the pair did also find that when participants were informed about the true, difficult economic state of many older people in the US — many of whom simply cannot afford to retire — this made a difference. In fact, after this intervention, participants who were more egalitarian showed the biggest reductions in their bias against older people.

The pair then looked for possible nuances in prejudice against older people. They found that though biases were strongest against older White men, older Black women were also subject to them. (They did explore who participants had in mind when thinking about older people who “should” step aside, and though older White men certainly did feature, the group was much broader.) Egalitarians did, though, report “liking” and wanting to interact with older Black women more. So, as the researchers note, this particular older group was supported in other ways.

Of course, older people represent a fast-growing demographic. This means there’s an urgent need for more research into ageism, and how it might be tackled. Current diversity initiatives focus far more frequently on race, gender and LGBTQ, rather than age, the researchers note. “As organisations contribute more money than ever before to increasing diversity, it is increasingly necessary to take stock of who is being included, versus who is being left behind,” the pair writes.

– Equality for (almost) all: Egalitarian advocacy predicts lower endorsement of sexism and racism, but not ageism.

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is a staff writer at BPS Research Digest

In two weeks, Israel demolished 35 Palestinian structures, displacing 98 people, including 53 children - UN

Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes in Humsa - Al Bqai'a. (File photo)

JERUSALEM, Saturday, March 06, 2021 (WAFA) – Citing the lack of building permits, Israel demolished or seized in the occupied territories in the period between 16 February and 1 March 35 Palestinian-owned structures, displacing 98 people, of whom 53 were children, and otherwise affecting about 60 others, according to a report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

It said in its biweekly Protection of Civilians report that on 22 February, the Israeli authorities confiscated another 18 residential and animal structures in Humsa – Al Bqai’a, a Palestinian Bedouin community in Area C of the occupied northern Jordan Valley in the West Bank, most of which had been provided as a humanitarian response to previous demolitions and confiscations; 10 households, comprising over 60 people, including 36 children, were again displaced.

Also in Area C of the occupied West Bank, a family of seven was displaced when their home was demolished in al Khader town near the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem, and the livelihoods of four families were affected by the demolition of vegetable stalls in Hijra, in the Hebron district.

In occupied East Jerusalem, said OCHA, 28 people were displaced in al-Isawiyya and Ras al Amoud neighborhoods when three houses were demolished by the Israeli authorities or ‘self-demolished’ by their owners under pressure from the Israeli municipality of West Jerusalem.

Obtaining an Israeli building permit in Area C of the West Bank is impossible, while in East Jerusalem it is close to being impossible forcing Palestinians to risk building on their lands without a permit.

Citing attacks by Israelis, OCHA said a 17-year-old Palestinian boy was injured in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem by Israelis gathering to celebrate the Jewish Purim holiday. Israelis also stoned and damaged in the same context several cars belonging to Palestinians while traveling near the old city of Jerusalem and near Yitzhar settlement in the north of the West Bank.

Also during Purim celebrations, Israeli settlers tried to break into Palestinian houses in the old city of Hebron. In three separate incidents in Ramallah, several Palestinian-plated cars parked near Shilo settlement, and two trucks in Ein Samiya and Kafr Malik, were vandalized.

In another four incidents in Nablus district, houses were stoned and a water reservoir was damaged in Asira al Qibliya; fences surrounding agricultural land were vandalized in Burin; seven sheep were stolen in Jalud; and olive saplings were uprooted in Beit Dajan and Qaryut.

In Ein al Hilwe in the Tubas area in the north of the West Bank, a shepherd reported that a vehicle driven by settlers rammed into and killed five of his sheep. In a number of incidents, Palestinians reported that Israeli settlers had tried to take over Palestinian land in al Baqaa near Hebron and attacked herders in Kisan and a shop owner in Husan villages, both in the Bethlehem area, stealing money.

Israeli forces also carried out during the two-week reporting period 184 search-and-arrest operations and arrested 158 Palestinians across the West Bank. The Jerusalem governorate recorded the highest number of operations (60), mostly in East Jerusalem.

Settlers chop off olive trees, assault farmers in Bethlehem

File photo

BETHLEHEM, Saturday, March 06, 2021 (WAFA) – Hardcore Israeli settlers today chopped off 15 olive trees and assaulted farmers during two separate incidents in the occupied West Bank district of Bethlehem, according to local sources.

In the village of Artas, southwest of Bethlehem, settlers from the illegal settlement bloc of Etzion broke into a ranch belonging to Mr. Jamal Abdullah Ismail, a local Palestinian farmer, and chopped off 15 olive trees belonging to him, according to Hasan Breijeyeh, director of the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission in Bethlehem.

In the nearby village of Kisan, settlers protected by a military escort assaulted a number of farmers while working in their own lands near the village and forced them to leave at gunpoint, said the deputy mayor of the village, Ahmad Gazal.

Settler violence against Palestinians and their property is routine in the West Bank and is rarely prosecuted by Israeli occupation authorities.

It includes property and mosque arsons, stone-throwing, uprooting of crops and olive trees, attacks on vulnerable homes, and others.

Between 500,000 and 600,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements across occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in violation of international law.

Peace Now: 500 words determine fate of seven Palestinian families in an East Jerusalem neighbourhood (wafa.ps)