#ECOCIDE

Indonesia Pertamina Aims to Restart Refinery in Days After Blaze



BY BERNADETTE CHRISTINA and Fransiska Nangoy

 By Reuters, Wire Service Content March 28, 2021

JAKARTA (Reuters) -Indonesian state oil company Pertamina said on Monday it hoped to restore operations at its Balongan oil refinery in West Java in four or five days, as firefighters worked to extinguish a massive blaze that broke out overnight, injuring six people.

Pertamina shut the plant and evacuated about 950 nearby residents, with videos shared on social media showing huge flames engulfing the 125,000 barrels per day facility, while a large explosion could be heard.

Pertamina chief executive Nicke Widyawati told reporters the fire was concentrated in the refinery's storage tanks and there had been no impact on the processing plant.

"The main equipment at the refinery is not affected," she said. "We hope the plant can be operational again soon after we put out the fire so there are no disruptions to supply."

Separately, Nicke told local media that only four storage tanks were affected, out of the total 72 tanks in Balongan with total capacity of 1.35 million kilo litres.

Efforts to estinguish the blaze were continuing, she said, adding that the fire had been contained to a small area and she's optimistic it will be put out soon.

Pertamina expects operations can be restored in four to five days, Pertamina director Mulyono said.

The fire started just after midnight during bad weather, Pertamina said, although the cause was currently unknown.

Six people were being treated in hospital for burns, a company statement said. No Pertamina staff were hurt.



FUEL STOCK "SECURE"

Pertamina's Mulyono said the company had "secure" levels of fuels stocks to supply Indonesia, including for the upcoming Islamic holidays of Eid Al-Fitr.

"There is no need for panic because stock is abundant. This is of course because demand conditions are not fully normal yet, so the stock is still very high," Mulyono said.

Balongan, one of Pertamina's biggest refineries, supplies fuel to Jakarta and the western regions of Java island.

Pertamina will use fuel from its refineries in Cilacap and Tuban to help provide supplies to Jakarta while Balongan is shut, Mulyono added.

Television footage earlier showed a massive column of black smoke rising from the site, which is about 225 km (140 miles) east of the capital Jakarta.

Ahmad Dofiri, West Java police chief told local media that police suspected there was a leak at the site prior to the fire.

"Initial information we received is that there was a leak at the plant. While the leak was being handled, the lightning struck," Dofiri said, adding that police are looking into what ignited the fire.

Nicke said investigation is still ongoing.

A nearby resident told Metro TV she was awoken by a pungent smell of oil fumes and saw lightning strikes in the sky.

"We smelled a strong fuel scent first, so strong that my nose hurt, while we heard lightning strikes," said Susi, who gave only one name

"Suddenly the sky was orange," she said.

The refinery is expected to receive about 600,000 barrels of Rabi crude from Gabon onboard tanker Aristodimos on April 10, shipping data on Refinitiv Eikon showed.


(Additional reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costa, Florence Tan; Editing by Ed Davies, Lincoln Feast, Richard Pullin and Louise Heavens)

Forests on caffeine: coffee waste can boost forest recovery

BRITISH ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY

Research News

 

IMAGE: COFFEE PULP DELIVERY (DAY 1) view more 

CREDIT: REBECCA COLE

A new study finds that coffee pulp, a waste product of coffee production, can be used to speed up tropical forest recovery on post agricultural land. The findings are published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence.

In the study, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawai`i spread 30 dump truck loads of coffee pulp on a 35 × 40m area of degraded land in Costa Rica and marked out a similar sized area without coffee pulp as a control.

"The results were dramatic" said Dr Rebecca Cole, lead author of the study. "The area treated with a thick layer of coffee pulp turned into a small forest in only two years while the control plot remained dominated by non-native pasture grasses."

After only two years the coffee pulp treated area had 80% canopy cover compared to 20% in the control area. The canopy in the coffee pulp area was also four times taller than that of the control area.

The addition of the half metre thick layer of coffee pulp eliminated the invasive pasture grasses which dominated the land. These grasses are often a barrier to forest succession and their removal allowed native, pioneer tree species, that arrived as seeds through wind and animal dispersal, to recolonise the area quickly.

The researchers also found that after two years, nutrients including carbon, nitrogen and phosphorous were significantly elevated in the coffee pulp treated area compared to the control. This is a promising finding given former tropical agricultural land is often highly degraded and poor soil quality can delay forest succession for decades.

Dr Cole said: "This case study suggests that agricultural by-products can be used to speed up forest recovery on degraded tropical lands. In situations where processing these by-products incurs a cost to agricultural industries, using them for restoration to meet global reforestation objectives can represent a 'win-win' scenario."

As a widely available waste product that's high in nutrients, coffee pulp can be a cost-effective forest restoration strategy. Such strategies will be important if we are to achieve ambitious global objectives to restore large areas of forest, such as those agreed in the 2015 Paris Accords.

The study was conducted in Coto Brus county in southern Costa Rica on a former coffee farm that is being restored to forest for conservation. In the 1950's the region underwent rapid deforestation and land conversion to coffee agriculture and pasture with forest cover reduced to 25% by 2014.

In 2018, the researchers set out two areas of roughly 35 × 40m, spreading coffee pulp into a half meter-thick layer on one area and leaving the other as a control.

The researchers analysed soil samples for nutrients immediately prior to the application of the coffee pulp and again two years later. They also recorded the species present, the size of woody stems, percentage of forest ground cover and used drones to record canopy cover.

Dr Cole warns that as a case study with two years of data, further research is needed to test the use of coffee pulp to aid forest restoration. "This study was done at only one large site so more testing is needed to see if this strategy works across a broader range of conditions. The measurements we share are only from the first two years. Longer-term monitoring would show how the coffee pulp affected soil and vegetation over time. Additional testing can also assess whether there are any undesirable effects from the coffee pulp application."

A limitation of using coffee pulp or other agricultural by-products is that its use is mostly limited to relatively flat and accessible areas where the material can be delivered and the risk of the added nutrients being washed into nearby watersheds can be managed.

On further research into the use of coffee pulp, Dr Cole said: "We would like to scale up the study by testing this method across a variety of degraded sites in the landscape. Also, this concept could be tested with other types of agricultural non-market products like orange husks.

"We hope our study is a jumping off point for other researchers and industries to take a look at how they might make their production more efficient by creating links to the global restoration movement."

CAPTION

Year 1: Edge between coffee pulp and control plot.

CREDIT

Rebecca Cole.

CAPTION

Year 3 Coffee pulp plot.

CREDIT

Rebecca Cole.

RIP

George Segal, Oscar-nominated actor from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, passes away aged 87

George Segal's wife said in a statement that the actor passed away 'due to complications from bypass surgery'

The Associated Press March 24, 2021 

George Segal, the banjo player turned actor who was nominated for an Oscar for 1966′s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked into his late 80s on the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs, died Tuesday in Santa Rosa, California, his wife said.

“The family is devastated to announce that this morning George Segal passed away due to complications from bypass surgery,” Sonia Segal said in a statement. He was 87.

George Segal was always best known as a comic actor, becoming one of the screen’s biggest stars in the 1970s when lighthearted adult comedies thrived.

But his most famous role was in a harrowing drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, based on Edward Albee’s acclaimed play.

He was the last surviving credited member of the tiny cast, all four of whom were nominated for Academy Awards: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton for starring roles, Sandy Dennis and Segal for supporting performances. The women won Oscars, the men did not.

To younger audiences, he was better known for playing magazine publisher Jack Gallo on the long-running NBC series Just Shoot Me from 1997 to 2003, and as grandfather Albert “Pops” Solomon on the The Goldbergs since 2013.

“Today we lost a legend. It was a true honour being a small part of George Segal’s amazing legacy,” said Goldbergs creator Adam Goldberg, who based the show on his 1980s childhood. “By pure fate, I ended up casting the perfect person to play Pops. Just like my grandfather, George was a kid at heart with a magical spark.”

In his Hollywood prime, he played a stuffy intellectual opposite Barbra Streisand’s freewheeling prostitute in 1970′s The Owl and the Pussycat; a cheating husband opposite Glenda Jackson in 1973′s A Touch of Class; a hopeless gambler opposite Elliot Gould in director Robert Altman’s 1974 California Split; and a bank-robbing suburbanite opposite Jane Fonda in 1977′s Fun with Dick and Jane.

Groomed to be a handsome leading man, Segal’s profile had been rising steadily since his first movie, 1961′s The Young Doctors in which he had ninth billing. His first starring performance came in King Rat as a nefarious inmate at a Japanese prison camp during World War II.

In Virginia Woolf, he played Nick, one half of a young couple invited over for drinks and to witness the bitterness and frustration of a middle-aged couple.

Director Mike Nichols needed someone who would get the approval of star Elizabeth Taylor, and turned to Segal when Robert Redford turned him down.

According to Nichols’ biographer Mark Harris, the director said Segal was “close enough to the young god he needed to be for Elizabeth, and witty enough and funny enough to deal with all that humiliation.”

He rode the film to a long run of stardom. Then in the late 1970s, Jaws and other action films changed the nature of Hollywood movies, and the light comedies that Segal excelled in became passe.

“Then I got a little older,” he said in a 1998 interview. “I started playing urban father roles. And that guy sort of turned into Chevy Chase, and after that there was really no place to go.”

Except for the 1989 hit Look Who’s Talking, Segal’s films in the 1980s and 1990s were lacklustre. He turned to television and starred in two failed series, Take Five and Murphy’s Law.

Then he found success in 1997 with the David Spade sitcom Just Shoot Me in which he played Gallo, who despite his gruff manner hires his daughter (Laura San Giacomo) and keeps Spade’s worthless office boy character on his payroll simply out of a sense of affection for both.

Series co-star Brian Posehn was one of many paying Segal tribute Tuesday night.

“I grew up watching him, total old school charm, effortless comedic timing,” Segal’s Just Shoot Me Posehn said. “Doing scenes with him was one of the highlights of my life, but getting to know him a little and making the legend laugh was even cooler.”

Throughout his long acting career, Segal played the banjo for fun, becoming quite accomplished on the instrument he had first picked up as a boy. He performed with his own Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band.

Born in 1934 in Great Neck, New York, the third son of a malt and hops dealer, Segal began entertaining at the age of 8, performing magic tricks for neighbourhood children.

He attended a Quaker boarding school in Pennsylvania and as an undergraduate at Columbia University organised “Bruno Linch and His Imperial Band,” for which he also played banjo.

After graduating Segal worked non-salary at the New York theatre Circle in the Square, doing everything from ticket taking to understudy acting. He studied drama with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen, and made his first professional acting appearance off-Broadway in Moliere’s Don Juan. It lasted one night.

After a stint on Broadway in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, he was drafted into the Army. Discharged in 1957, he returned to the stage and would begin getting small film roles.

In 1956 Segal married television story editor Marion Sobel and they had two daughters, Elizabeth and Polly, before divorcing in 1981.

He married his second wife, Linda Rogoff, in London in 1982 and was devastated when she died of a stomach disease 14 years later.

“It was a time when I said, `It’s not adding up; I don’t get it anymore,” he recalled to an interviewer in 1999. “With Linda dying, I lost interest in everything. I worked just to make a living. Acting, like life, became a joyless job.”

Eventually, he reconnected with Sonia Schultz Greenbaum, who had been his girlfriend in high school some 45 years earlier. They talked on the telephone, sometimes as long as six hours, and were married just a few months after reuniting.

“She helped me through the worst days of my life just listening to me unload,” Seagal said in 1999. “It was magic.”

Updated Date: March 24, 2021 10:06:38 IST

And the brand played on: Bob Dylan at 80


Bob Dylan outside his Byrdcliffe home in Woodstock, New York, 1968. Photograph: ©Elliott Landy / Magnum Photos

With a slew of books to mark the songwriter’s birthday due, we look at the industry that has grown up around the man who forced academia to take pop seriously
Scroll down for Q&As with the authors of four new Dylan books

by Neil Spencer 

THE GUARDIAN

3/29/2021

LONG READ  FEATURE

And the brand played on: Bob Dylan at 80 | Bob Dylan | The Guardian

 

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Academy Awards 2021: Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania hails first-ever 'historic' Oscar nomination

Kaouther Ben Hania's film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated in the Best International Feature category.

Agence France-Presse March 16, 2021 

The director of the first-ever Tunisian film to be tipped for an Oscar has hailed the "historical" nomination and urged the North African country's authorities to support homegrown cinema.

Kaouther Ben Hania's film The Man Who Sold His Skin was put forward for best foreign-language film ahead of the 25 April Oscars ceremony in Hollywood.

"It's a historic event, a first for Tunisia," said Ben Hania via phone from France.

"It's a dream come true."

The film, starring Italian actress Monica Bellucci alongside Syrian Yahya Mahyani and Belgian Koen De Bouw, tells the story of a Syrian refugee who allows a tattoo artist to use his back as a canvas in order to get to Europe.

Ben Hania said she hoped the Oscar nomination would lead to more support for cinema and filmmakers in Tunisia.

The French-Tunisian director, 43, was born in the marginalised rural town of Sidi Bouzid which in late 2010 was the site of the events that sparked the Arab Spring uprisings.

She won plaudits at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 for her feature-length film Beauty and the Dogs, the story of a Tunisian woman who pushes for justice after being raped.

Tunisian cinema, in the doldrums in the early years of the century, was given a boost by the country's 2011 revolution and new-found freedom of speech.

A new generation of screenwriters and directors have since focused their efforts on social and political topics that were long taboo under the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Updated Date: March 16, 2021 10:57:14 IST

 LANGUAGE OF SPACE EXPLORATION RHETORIC CAN AFFECT PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF SPACE ACTIVITIES

Would we want futuristic Mars settlements to operate like modern-day Earth towns, or could we do better?

UNDARKMAR 29, 2021 11:05:13 IST

By Joelle Renstrom

Last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars to much fanfare, just days after probes from the UAE and China entered orbit around the Red Planet. The surge in Martian traffic symbolizes major advancements in space exploration. It also presents an opportune moment to step back and consider not only what humans do in space, but how we do it — including the words we use to describe human activities in space.

The conversation around the language of space exploration has already begun. NASA, for instance, has been rooting out the gendered language that has plagued America’s space program for decades. Instead of using “manned” to describe human space missions, it has shifted to using gender-neutral terms like “piloted” or “crewed.” But our scrutiny of language shouldn’t stop there. Other words and phrases, particularly those that invoke capitalism or colonialism, should receive the same treatment.

To some extent, language influences the way we think and understand the world around us. A dramatic example comes from the Pirahã tribe of the Brazilian Amazon, whose language contains very few terms for describing numbers or time. A capitalist culture in which time equals money likely wouldn’t make sense to them. Similarly, language likely affects humans’ thoughts and beliefs about outer space. The words scientists and writers use to describe space exploration may influence who feels included in these endeavors — both as direct participants and as benefactors — and alter the way people interact with the cosmos.

Take, for example, John F. Kennedy’s 1962 Moon Speech, in which he three times used the words “conquer” and “conquest.” While Kennedy’s rhetoric was intended to bolster U.S. morale in the space race against the USSR, the view of outer space as a venue for conquest evokes subjugation and exploitation and exemplifies an attitude that has resulted in much destruction on Earth. By definition, conquering involves an assertion of power and mastery, often through violence. Similarly, former President Donald Trump is the most recent American president to use the term “Manifest Destiny” to describe his motives for exploring space, tapping into a philosophy that suggests humanity’s grand purpose is to expand and conquer, regardless of who or what stands in the way.

In a recent white paper, a group comprising subject-matter experts at NASA and other institutions warned of the hazards of invoking colonial language and practice in space exploration. “The language we use around exploration can really lead or detract from who gets involved and why they get involved,” Natalie B. Treviño, one of the paper’s coauthors, told me.

Treviño, who researched decolonial theory and space exploration for her Ph.D. at Western University in Canada, is a member of an equity, diversity, and inclusion working group that makes equity-related recommendations in the planetary science research community. She notes that certain words and phrases can be particularly alienating for Indigenous people. “How is an Indigenous child on a reserve in North America supposed to connect with space exploration if the language is the same language that led to the genocide of his people?”

Perseverance rover's MASTCAM-Z has captured its first high-resolution panorama of its landing site in the Jezero Crater on Mars. The image will help the mission team narrow down rocks of interest to return to Earth for study. Image: NASA

In a 2020 perspective for Nature Astronomy, Aparna Venkatesan of the University of San Francisco, also a coauthor of the recent white paper, wrote with colleagues that in the dialects of the Indigenous Lakota and Dakota, the concept of thought being rooted in language, space, and place “is epitomized by the often used phrase mitakuye oyasin, explained by Lakota elders as a philosophy that reminds everyone that we all come from one source and so need to respect each other to maintain wolakota or peace.” It’s difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the ideas of wolakota and conquest, especially given the increasing weaponization of space.

Treviño argues that the word “frontier,” the guiding metaphor for American space exploration, is also problematic. The crossing of new frontiers — because frontiers always must be pushed or crossed — is inevitably “tied to nationalism, and nationalism is tied to conquest, and conquest is tied to death,” she says. When humans push frontiers, they often do so with the belief that it is their right as individuals or as representatives of a country or state. Throughout history, this sense of entitlement has been taken as license to wipe out Indigenous people and fauna, pollute rivers, and otherwise demonstrate ownership and mastery.

Foundational concepts such as “conquest,” “frontier,” and “Manifest Destiny,” can affect not only how people think about space but also how they act toward it. In their Nature Astronomy paper, Venkatesan and her colleagues argue that in addition to promoting colonialist ideals, such concepts promote space capitalism and a lack of regulation. Potent symbols of this trend are the more than 3,000 operational satellites currently orbiting Earth, many of them privately owned. For people who use the stars to navigate, or who incorporate celestial bodies into cultural, spiritual, and religious practices, this intrusion into the skies threatens to compromise a way of life. And it is a sobering reminder that space and the sky don’t really belong to everyone after all. The lack of protections and regulations for the night sky — as well as monetary incentives for commercial satellites, which make up almost 80 percent of U.S. satellites — make it vulnerable to the highest bidder.

“Treating space as the ‘Wild West’ frontier that requires conquering continues to incentivize claiming by those who are well-resourced,” writes Venkatesan and her colleagues. In fact, the staking of claims in space has already begun, with space tourism predicted to develop into a lucrative industry, and with the U.S. government opening the doors to commercial endeavors such as the mining of asteroids and the colonization of Mars.

While scientists often devote themselves to questions of feasibility, scalability, and affordability, they rarely give as much thought and effort to questions of inclusivity and morality. “In the space community, when ethics or values or planetary protection come up, they’re immediately coded as feminine and they’re immediately coded as not as important,” Treviño told me. For many scientists, she says, “thinking about ethics isn’t nearly as important as building the rovers that are going to go to the moon.”

The “act first, ask questions later” approach typifies the mindset that has led some to argue that humans need to colonize space to survive. But attitudes and ethics cannot be applied retroactively. Science might get people to Mars, but without ethics, what are the chances of survival?

In Kennedy’s words, space exploration is our species’ most “dangerous and greatest adventure.” It makes sense to address factors that influence human behavior in space — and that will ultimately determine our odds of success there — sooner rather than later. That includes asking everyone, not just NASA or Elon Musk, what we want an interplanetary future of humanity to look like. Would we want futuristic Mars settlements to operate like modern-day Earth towns, or could we do better?

Crafting a code of ethics for space exploration may seem daunting, but our words offer a potential starting point. Space is one of few places humans have gone that thus far remains peaceful. Why, then, use the language of war, imperialism, or colonialism to describe human actions there? Eliminating the language of genocide and subordination from the space discourse is one easy step anyone can take to encourage the great leaps for humankind that we dream of for the future, on Earth and beyond.

Joelle Renstrom is a science writer who focuses on robots, AI, and space exploration. She teaches at Boston University.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

MICROSOFT EXCHANGE VULNERABILITIES AFFECTED BANKING, FINANCE SECTORS THE MOST: REPORT

The Check Point Research report revealed that 32 firms globally were targeted via these vulnerabilities.


TECH2 NEWS STAFF

MAR 29, 2021 

Microsoft recently announced there were some vulnerabilities in the Exchange software that were being exploited by cybercriminals. Soon after, the company released emergency patches for Exchange Server 2019, Server 2016 and Server 2013. In addition to this, Microsoft rolled out a handful of mitigation tools and updated Microsoft Defender Antivirus to combat such vulnerabilities. The Check Point Research report revealed 32 firms worldwide were targeted via these vulnerabilities.

Microsoft has acknowledged that patching a system does not necessarily cut off an attacker's access to any particular account.

Further, researchers revealed the banking and finance sectors were the worst hit, with 28 percent of the total hacks directed at them. Following these are the government and military sector with 16 percent, manufacturing with 12.5 percent and the insurance and legal sector with 9.5 percent.

Microsoft has acknowledged that patching a system does not necessarily cut off an attacker's access to any particular account. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "The Exchange security update is still the most comprehensive way to protect your servers from these attacks and others fixed in earlier releases. This interim mitigation is designed to help protect customers while they take the time to implement the latest Exchange Cumulative Update for their version of Exchange."

According to the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team, "Many of the compromised systems have not yet received a secondary action, such as human-operated ransomware attacks or data exfiltration, indicating attackers could be establishing and keeping their access for potential later actions."

Exclusive: Big Oil pushed school officials to make "dishonest" claims on Biden climate policy

State school chiefs wrote "unusual" and "absurd" letter to Biden, clearly based on oil industry talking points

By IGOR DERYSH

SALON
MARCH 24, 2021 

Oil well pads operated by Continental Resources dot the wheat fields of eastern Montana north east of Sidney, Montana in Richland County in the Bakken oil formation. (William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images)

Oil and gas industry advocates were involved in an "unusual" effort by five top state education officials to stoke economic fears about President Joe Biden's climate policy, according to internal emails reviewed by Salon.

The American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade organization representing the oil and gas industry, and its allies have gone on the offensive against Biden's early executive orders, which included a temporary but indefinite moratorium on new gas and oil leases on federal land. API has framed the order as a "ban," which is misleading at best, since it applies only to new leases. New drilling permits are still being awarded under existing leases, and the industry is sitting on millions of acres of leased but unused land.

Internal emails show that the API's allies were involved in crafting a self-described "unusual" letter signed by five Western state school superintendents to Biden, which was later published as an op-ed. The letter raised concerns that the moratorium would cost thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue that could impact education funding, relying heavily on misleading data from an API report written before Biden was even elected.

The emails show that the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a former division of API that has grown into a standalone organization, sent data to one of the superintendents and later thanked her for the "fantastic" op-ed. API later promoted the superintendents' talking points on social media, though it did not mention that it supported the Trump administration's cuts in oil royalties that had made up a much larger share of industry revenue distributed to states that helps fund education.

The letter immediately set off alarm bells among industry experts.

"That letter was clearly drafted for them and they were just asked to sign it," Mark Squillace, a former Interior Department official who is now a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado Law School, concluded in an interview with Salon. "I don't know what they actually know about oil and gas revenues, but the idea that hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be lost by the states is just ridiculous. It's absurd."

Squillace added that he has never previously seen the oil industry work with elected state education officials to push "misleading" claims.

"Obviously, the education sector is going to be more sympathetic" to the public than the oil and gas industry, he said, "so it was clearly an interesting tactic. But it's fairly dishonest, or at least misleading, for them to be putting out that kind of information and broadly suggesting that a leasing moratorium is somehow going to cost the state all this money. The leasing moratorium is not going to do that. It's going to have a nominal impact."
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The emails were obtained through a public records request by the progressive government watchdog group Accountable.US and the Climate Power Education Fund, which on Wednesday launched "Polluters Exposed," a joint initiative aimed at holding API and its allies "accountable for decades of spreading misinformation" about climate and pollution.

"Oil and gas executives love to talk about working with the Biden administration to address climate change, but these documents show behind closed doors they are actively working to undermine that very effort," said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. "Polluters Exposed will shine a light on Big Oil and show the American people how industry lines its pockets by spreading misinformation and corrupting policymakers."
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The groups accused the oil industry's top advocates of helping "orchestrate a scheme to use public schools as a Trojan horse" to attack the administration's climate policy.

"They have zero shame. API and their allies should stop using our teachers and schools to halt progress on climate action. Our children will pay the price for these lies," Lori Lodes, executive director of Climate Power Education Fund, said in a statement. "The days of the American Petroleum Institute and its allies lying with impunity are over. Americans deserve the truth and we are going to give it to them."

An API spokesperson denied any involvement with the letter.
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"These individuals are entitled to their own opinion, and highlight many valid points about the real, serious impact a long-term federal leasing and development ban would have on education in their communities. Their concerns about school funding should be taken seriously," the spokesperson said in a statement to Salon, adding that New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, and the state's two Democratic senators, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, have expressed "similar concerns," though they had largely expressed concerns that energy firms would move to states with more private land available, like Texas.

"Our industry believes it's important all the facts and potential effects be considered when crafting policy," the spokesperson added. "The NDPC is not a part of API, but they, the superintendents, and others are free to cite the publicly posted information on our website."

API has vowed to deliver "solutions that reduce the risks of climate change" and even plans to endorse a carbon pricing plan to help meet the Paris climate accord's targets, even though it fiercely opposed such legislation for the past decade, according to a draft statement obtained by The Wall Street Journal. API president and CEO Mike Sommers told the Washington Examiner that he is "optimistic" and "hopeful" that the group will have a "seat at the table to discuss these big issues" with the administration. But days after Biden took office, Sommers attacked the lease moratorium, framing it as a "federal leasing and development ban" even though the order did not apply to existing operations and Biden has repeatedly made a point of vowing not to ban drilling. Sommers warned that such a "ban" could result in significant cuts to state funding that supports schools.

That same week, Kristen Hamman, director of regulatory and public affairs at the North Dakota Petroleum Institute, sent North Dakota State Superintendent Kirsten Baesler an email sharing data claiming that an oil and gas lease ban would cost her state thousands of jobs, $600 million in tax revenue, and $750 million in personal income over the next four years.

"Ron wanted me to send you some ND stats on oil impacts," Hamman wrote, referring to Ron Ness, the group's president, who was copied on the email.

"Thank you, Kristen!" Baesler replied. "This is very helpful."


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The following month, the "unusual" letter to Biden signed by Baesler, along with Wyoming State Superintendent Jillian Balow, Montana State Superintendent Elsie Arntzen, Utah Superintendent Sydnee Dickson and Alaska State Commissioner Michael Johnson, contained the exact figures shared by Hamman.

"In North Dakota, the lease moratorium would result in 13,000 lost jobs over four years, along with $600 million in lost tax revenue and a $750 million loss in personal income," the letter said. "North Dakota's oil and gas industry accounts for 24,000 direct jobs in the state."

Ness followed up with Baesler a few days later.

"Thank you, this is fantastic," he wrote.




Baesler told Salon the North Dakota data did not come from an API report but an analysis by a researcher at the University of Wyoming, and denied that she had coordinated with oil and gas industry advocates.

"State school chiefs in Western energy-producing states coordinated their efforts on this letter," she said in an email. "We are rightly concerned about the Biden administration's open hostility to domestic energy production, and its effects on energy income that our states rely upon for educating our young people. The president's approach to our states' resources is not only reflected in his executive orders affecting energy, but also his action to stop the Keystone XL pipeline project, which as envisioned would carry oil production from Alberta and western North Dakota to refineries to the east and south."

Baesler cited reports predicting that the moratorium is "widely viewed as a precursor to a more permanent ban" and disputed that Biden's order would not affect existing operations.
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Representatives for Balow, the letter's lead signatory, and Johnson also denied they had "coordinated" with representatives of the oil and gas industry. Dickson and Hamman did not respond to questions from Salon.

"Coordinate, no," Linda Finnerty, a spokesperson for Balow, said in a statement to Salon. "We maintain relationships with industries of all types and routinely ask for information, clarification, and data."

Finnerty pointed to a letter from Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon to the Interior Department disputing that the order did not affect existing operations. Gordon argued in his letter that the order had resulted in a slowdown of permitting for existing leases, despite denials from the department.

"'Moratorium' is a misnomer," Finnerty insisted.

"The leasing "pause" – which appears to be indefinite - discourages the pursuit of continued energy independence for the United States," Sharyl Allen, a spokesperson for Arntzen, said in a statement to Salon.

But Hannah Wiseman, a law professor and faculty fellow at Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, said the superintendents' data was based on revenue that was unaffected by the moratorium.

"The superintendents are using the royalty numbers from oil and gas wells on lands that are already leased and producing and translating those numbers into job losses," she said in an email. "But the moratorium on new leases does not order existing production to shut down; the royalties that states are already receiving to fund schools and other essential programs are not affected."

The letter falsely described Biden's temporary halt on new leases as "actions taken to ban oil and gas leases."

"It is imperative that we bring to light the arbitrary and inequitable move to shut down oil and gas production on federal lands in our states that depend on revenues from various taxes, royalties, disbursements, and lease payments to fund our schools, community infrastructure, and public services," the letter said.

The superintendents repeatedly cited data from the API study, echoing its claims that a ban would cost 13,300 jobs in Wyoming, 3,300 jobs and $30 million in revenue in Montana, 11,000 jobs and $72 million in revenue in Utah, and 3,500 jobs and $24 million in Alaska.

Industry experts said the data was highly misleading.

"The 'costs' mentioned in the letter, or in some other studies, assume not just a pause on new leases, but rather a long term cessation in oil and gas operations," Brad Handler, a former Wall Street analyst covering oilfield services and drilling who now serves as a senior fellow at the Payne Institute for Public Policy, said in an email.

"What the Biden administration has implemented is a temporary (albeit of undefined duration) pause on issuing new leases on public (federal) lands," he continued. "The Department of Interior has been directed to conduct a review of leasing and management policies. … The executive action makes clear that permitting and extraction operation can continue on existing leases. Thus, broadly there is almost no impact on employment or state revenues in the near to medium term as a result of this action."

API later promoted the superintendents' talking points on Twitter, citing a quote from Balow claiming that Biden's moratorium was a "lockdown of an industry our students in Wyoming really depend on."

The API report, which was compiled last September, was based on a hypothetical "federal leasing and development ban." But Biden's executive order does nothing even close to that. It pauses new leases while requiring nearly a third of federal lands to be conserved over the next decade.

In fact, Reuters noted that the order only affects "leasing activities, and not permitting, raising the possibility that the government could resume providing drilling permits to those who picked up leases in a series of auctions held in the waning days of the Trump administration."

The Interior Department approved 33 such permits in the week following Biden's leasing pause, Bloomberg News reported. The oil and gas industry also has a stockpile of 7,700 unused leases, according to the Interior Department, leaving more than 13.9 million acres of public land available for drilling operations without any new leasing.

"Since President Biden's Executive Order directing a review of the federal oil and gas program and pause on new leasing, API has been very clear that our concern is that this action is the first step towards a long-term federal leasing and development ban," an API spokesperson told Salon. "Our analysis was released in September 2020, and was not in response to Biden's EO. It found that should a long-term ban be implemented it would shift the U.S. to foreign energy sources, cost nearly one million American jobs, increase CO2 emissions and reduce revenue that funds education and key conservation programs."

Squillace said the industry was manipulating and distorting the issue in order to attack the administration, even though Biden's order will have little impact on revenues.

"This is a really bad time to be leasing federal oil and gas because the price has been historically low," he said, adding that demand for new leases has been so low that most are now auctioned at the minimum bid price of $2 an acre. "That doesn't suggest a robust market for oil and gas leases. This is just a big industry making it out to be a lot more than it is."

Squillace said that if education officials were actually interested in boosting revenues for schools, they would support increasing the minimum bid prices as well as other revenue streams from oil and gas drilling operations.

Most of the money schools receive from public lands comes from royalties on oil and gas production, though states also get revenue from rents, bonuses and potential penalties, according to the Interior Department. Bonuses, which are payments associated with winning bids on lease sales, are the only revenue even theoretically impacted by Biden's pause. Most revenue comes from royalties, which are calculated as a percentage of the sales value of any oil produced by the drilling operations. Although revenue from bonuses increased as the Trump administration awarded a large number of new leases, royalties make up the vast majority of revenue collected by states, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The Trump administration last year drastically cut royalty rates, which had provided states a total of $2.9 billion in revenue in 2019. In Superintendent Dickson's state of Utah, the Bureau of Land Management cut standard royalty rates of 12.5% to as low as 0.5%, according to E&E News. BLM said the move was temporary, but House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., called for an investigation into to determine how much the change would cost in revenue and whether the cuts were necessary and properly handled.

Accountable.US and the Climate Power Education Fund argued in a news release that the oil industry's "feigned worry about school budgets is hypocritical" given that the industry had enthusiastically supported the Trump administration's move to slash oil and gas royalty rates, "costing states and schools untold millions during the height of a pandemic when they needed it most."

Unlike the concern raised by superintendents, Trump's order "involved a direct reduction in royalty revenues as opposed to a speculative one," Wiseman told Salon.

"These oil and gas royalties are an integral component of many western states' budgets, and suspending their collection would have a direct negative effect on states," the Western Governors' Association warned then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, in April of 2020.

"This is a ludicrous outcome that provides an extremely generous subsidy to the oil and gas industry while robbing taxpayers and states of valuable revenue," Grijalva argued in his own letter to Bernhardt.

The Government Accountability Office concluded last October that BLM had botched the royalty cut, failed to determine whether the policy — which cost taxpayers around $4.5 million at the time — was actually necessary and said it may have resulted in cuts for oil wells that did not need it.

Despite data showing the overwhelming share of revenue coming from oil and gas operations is from royalties, Finnerty, the Wyoming superintendent's spokesperson, argued that "royalties are only part of the revenue realized from oil and gas."

"Leases, bonuses, and other forms of indirect revenue are also in play," she said. "The overall economic impact of oil and gas activity is very significant."

Allen said in a statement that "a comparatively small number of producing wells are subject to this lawful reduction, which, in this time of the Covid pandemic, will assist in preserving jobs, supporting families, communities and critical infrastructure, i.e. schools."

Grant Robinson, a spokesperson for Johnson, acknowledged in an email that "bonuses from lease sales generate less revenue for the state than royalties" but noted that Trump's policy was a temporary one — as is Biden's new policy.

Baesler denied that Trump's policy posed a greater threat than Biden's but acknowledged that most of the state's oil and gas revenues come from royalties. Still, she said, "the Biden administration's anti-energy policies pose a much greater threat to education funding than any action taken by the Trump administration."

Squillace rejected that argument and said it was ironic that education officials had not raised similar concerns when Trump reduced the royalty rate.

It was "so absurd," he said, that states would complain about "this silly little moratorium when they said nothing about the royalty relief package Trump put into effect. I mean, it just boggles the mind."



IGOR DERYSH

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

 

Religious freedom protects our right to worship. It doesn’t protect discrimination.

People of faith look the other way as legislators codify discrimination in the name of ‘religious liberty.’

A gay pride flag flies along with the U.S. flag in front of a church in Prairie Village, Kansas, April 19, 2019. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

March 9, 2021

By 

David W. Key Sr.

(RNS) — As Americans, we have been entrusted with two sacred duties that arise from our Constitution: the duty to protect our faith from overreach by the government and the duty to protect our fellow Americans from overreach by the church.

For too long, people of faith have looked the other way while our leaders codify discrimination against LGBTQ Americans in the name of “religious liberty.” In the past months, that effort has been accelerated, with vile and inhumane laws being proposed in states across the country to restrict the freedoms of LGBTQ people.

More than a dozen states are moving to extend religious exemptions that would allow discrimination against LGBT people in adoption, foster care, health care and student organizations. Twenty-six states are considering bills excluding transgender youth from accessing health care. Existing protections in adoption, marriage and access to basic public services and businesses are being threatened.

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RELATED: A prayer for a more just, inclusive future for LGBTQ folks in 2021

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As a historian of the Baptist faith, I can say with certainty that these efforts are a perversion of the concept of religious liberty.

The Baptist tradition has long held religious liberty as a core conviction. At the same time, I am guided by that very faith which teaches that discrimination is wrong. There is no contradiction here. We are all created in God’s image. We are all called to treat others the way we would want to be treated. We are all deserving of equal rights and protection under the law. 

LGBTQ people are no exception. Our LGBTQ friends and neighbors should have the same protections as everyone else: to live their lives with safety, privacy and dignity.

Photo by Jiroe/Unsplash/Creative Commons

That is not the case today. A recent survey found that more than 1 in 3 LGBTQ Americans faced discrimination of some kind in the past year, including more than 3 in 5 transgender Americans. More than half of LGBTQ people said they experienced harassment or discrimination in a public place such as a store, transportation or a restroom. Let’s be clear: No one should be discriminated against just for being who they are. 

Freedom of religion is of course important. It’s one of our nation’s fundamental values — and that’s why the First Amendment of the Constitution already protects it. Religious liberty protects our individual right to worship how we see fit. It does not create a right to harm others. 

Today, when we advocate for the freedoms of Christians, Muslims and Jews who want to worship in countries like Saudi Arabia and China, that is a struggle for religious liberty. Refusing to bake a cake for your neighbors is decidedly not a struggle for religious liberty. In fact, it trivializes the experience of people of Abrahamic faiths who have fought, bled and in some cases died for their right to worship. 

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RELATED: Bethany Christian Services to allow LGBTQ couples to adopt, foster children

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With the election of a president, vice president and majority of congressmen and women who support LGBTQ equality, Americans are clearly ready for LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections nationwide. With the election of two Democratic senators from Georgia, including the Rev. Raphael Warnock, we now have a window of opportunity to pass a federal law to ensure that 13 million LGBTQ Americans are protected in every aspect of their lives, no matter what state they call home. 

The Senate should bring such a bill to a vote within President Joe Biden’s first 100 days — as he and Vice President Kamala Harris committed to do. As we stand on this threshold, embarking on a journey toward true equality for LGBTQ Americans, I call on people of faith to stand united in our support of extending equality to all.  

(The Rev. David W. Key Sr., formerly director of Baptist studies at Emory University, is the founding pastor of the Lake Oconee Community Church in Greensboro, Georgia.  The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)