Popping in with a couple of overdue book reviews

For whatever reason, I've taken up a project of transferring several years backlog of book notes I've had sitting in a spreadsheet onto more fleshed out reviews for Goodreads, an app I've been on forever but never really got into using.  What is the purpose? Who even knows?

Anyway, in the process of going through these, I hit upon a couple titles I read in 2021 that seemed to pair well for a blurb here. Especially, so if one is in the mood to think about where we've been and where the US political economy has been and where it might be going a week out before, "the most important election of our lifetimes" again. 

Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America by Darren Dochuk (2019)

This is a sweeping history of the American oil industry with a focus on its peculiar relationship to American Christianity. The book describes political and religious tensions throughout the history of oil between the rationalizing paternalistic ecumenism of the major firms vs the independent libertarian evangelism of the wildcatters.It's a division we can recognize as threaded through the long Hamiltonian vs. Jeffersonian archetypes of American political economy although I don't recall Dochuk stating this in the book. 

In part, it explains why we see the inheritors of the Rockefeller and Pew fortunes involved in supporting liberal-ish causes today through legacy NGOs while a contrasting strain of evangelical cosmology can fold concepts like “peak oil” and climate change into their expectation that the Apocalypse is near and the fact they feel fine about that. 

For an example of the latter, here is Dochuk writing about Ernest Manning, Premier of Alberta in the 1950s and an evangelical thought leader. 

Manning, like Aberhart before him, held to a dispensational premillennialist view, which encouraged him to decode signs of societal strain as evidence that Christ’s return was nigh. His eschatology grafted onto contemporary theories of petroleum geology. At that moment, M. King Hubbert, a founder of the social movement known as Technocracy, which underscored the importance of engineers in the management of society and had ties to Social Credit, crafted his theory of “peak oil” holding that US domestic production would crest by 1971, then steadily decline. This prediction confirmed Manning’s belief that the world was entering its last phase. Not only did time seem to be running out on America - God’s City On A Hill - but it was now favoring non-Christians located in the very place to which Christ would return: the Middle East. His response was twofold: first, to train Western Christians’ eyes on the Middle East, where rising oil production and politics seemed to portend Christ’s return, and second, to extract expeditiously whatever oil was left under their soil before their dispensation expired. In Manning’s scheme, wildcatters offered North Americans a last glimmer of hope: they alone had the courage to find new reserves and inspire patriots with pure capitalist drive.

In other words, the rational response to “peak oil” was to keep on producing oil as quickly as possible. The mere prospect of a cataclysm is not necessarily going to cause a change in behavior. Which is why, now, as the climate crisis worsens in ways that more and more Americans can feel in their daily lives, the policy response from a rather loud faction of our body politic continues to be an unreserved chant of, “Drill, baby, drill!” 

Anyway, in his conclusion, Dochuk entertains the notion that the wildcatters have "won" their battle with the patricians. Or at least, it appears their political and religious expression has retained a surprising power and resonance. Here is the key graph there.

Battered by oil’s bloody cut-throat system, yet determined to follow their calling, they clung to a personal trust in the supernatural, which came with a transaction. Place your faith in a higher being and honor his rules for holy living, the logic read, and ride the capricious offerings of the earth and the markets to heavenly fulfillment - no matter the heavy human (and ecological) costs. Place your trust in a God who giveth and taketh suddenly, but who is always there, and watch (and feel) the pain of oil’s boom-bust cycles and ever-present maladies melt away in the face of his saving grace. Our current age, in which the fluctuations of economy have intensified on a global stage and during which the inequalities of capitalist society have calcified, has only emboldened that ethic all the more. Its promises of spiritual and, in unpredictable moments, financial returns on the magical, miraculous workings of oil, its allowances for stark enigmas and contradictions in the modern condition - between hope and futility, empowerment and despair, hyperwealth and utter poverty - and its panic to drill, find and sell redemption before the Messiah returns have proved more than prescient and resilient.

 

Ages of American Capitalism: A History Of The United States by Jonathan Levy (2021)

A history of the United States from colonial times up until the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Much in the way Taylor Swift divides her career into eras, Levy breaks the American economy up into “ages.” There is an Age of Commerce (1660 until 1860), an Age of Capital (1860 to 1932) an Age of Control (1932 to 1980) and the Age of Chaos which we, presumably, are experiencing now. 

After acknowledging the elusiveness of a proper definition of capital, Levy settles on this phrase: “The process through which a legal asset is invested with pecuniary value, in light of its capacity to yield a future pecuniary profit.” The political push and pull over the nature and direction of those investments; the tension between short term hoarding and long term redistribution is central to his narrative. 

Obviously, this is a story told on a big sprawling scale. But it’s one well worth diving into for students of US history. One doesn’t need a whole lot of background in economics to access it. Rather than get too far into the discussion, here are a few items I wrote down in my notes as I read. 

1) Levy’s commentary on Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man illustrates that a "booming" market in short term speculation is fundamentally the same thing as a stagnant economy. 

Melville’s novel parses three contradictory desires and emotional states. His analysis was correct: the capitalist credit cycle of boom and bust, only just emerging in his day, is motivated by a contradictory drive of speculative investment. The contradiction consists in the fact that while credit-fueled and energetic speculation can lead to genuine capitalist investment booms, instigating wealth-generating enterprise, individuals can also succumb to the temptations of short-term speculation alone, in which, benefiting from the transactional liquidity of capital markets, they simply move their bets in and out of assets, confidently seeking short term gain. But speculations may not fix on objects of investment long enough for long-term economic development to happen. Capital just spins its top. And the speculative desire to leave all potential investment options open is only a fantasy. For if all options are kept open, but never exercised nothing actually ever happens. 

2) Nostalgia is also a symptom of stagnation. 

Capitalism demands an orientation of economic life toward the future, and so the constant urge to look back, and nostalgically stamp past ages “golden” is probably some kind of psychic compensation for the unremttingness of that demand, especially in moments when, to many, it feels difficult to muster a positive vision about the future. 

3) By the time of the 1970s neoliberal turn, capacity for a coherent collective economic policy was diminished by a politics of alienation, fractionalization and “individual practitioners of narcissism.” 

The federal government simply did not have the mechanisms at hand to master inflation. There was no notion of a unified public interest on the basis of which to act anyway. Instead the polity was splintering into Nixon’s Silent Majority, black nationalists, “back to the land” farmers, white ethnic revivalists (including neo-Confederates), Friends of the Earth, pro-live evangelical “family values” Christians, radial lesbians, international bankers, advocates of Indian sovereignties, Business Roundtable CEOs, black women activists of the National Welfare Rights Organization, white nationalist Vietnam veterans, and last but not least, individual practitioners of narcissism. 

4) Finally, this book (along with Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto later on. I may post about that one too, eventually.) drove home for me the huge impact Herbert Hoover has had on the American political economy of the 20th Century and beyond. Ideologically, Hoover was the equivalent of today's centrist Democrats. He believed the nation's business leaders should contribute to progress. But he wanted that to happen through public-private partnership or at his polite request. 

On the telephone and at two White House conferences, the president personally pleaded with the corporate executives of the largest, most regulated industries to increase capital investment expenditures. In 1930 railroads and utilities obliged. Yet everywhere else, especially in residential construction, fixed investment kept falling. Hoover recognized that during the 1920s, corporate profits had run ahead of wages, and he believed that high wages would stabilize spending, a good thing. “The first shock,” he declared, “must fall on profits and not wages.” Whether because of Hoover’s promptings or not, the nation’s largest employers agreed not to slash wages, even as they continued to fire their less desirable employees, a pattern that would persist. Proudly, Hoover said the agreements were, “not a dictation or interference by the government with business.” Rather they were the result of “a request from the government that you co-operate in prudent measure to solve a national problem.” The president boasted, “This is a far cry from the arbitrary and dog-eat-dog attitude of the business world of some thirty for forty years ago.” Hoover believed his “associational state” transcended the Jacksonian sphering of public and private, state, and market, which under the banner of equal commercial opportunity, had withered state action throughout the Age of Capital. But he drew one line in the sand. He would not coerce capitalists to invest. 

This is famously the path to failure. And yet it has persisted as canon for respectable politicians and pundits far and wide. Case in point, here is Joe Biden in 2021 taking the Hoover approach with insurers and utility companies after Hurricane Ida. 

“I’m calling on the insurance companies at this critical moment. Don’t hide behind the fine print and technicality. Do your job. Keep your commitment to your communities you insure,” he continued. “Do the right thing. Pay your policy holders what you owe them to cover the cost of temporary housing in the midst of a natural disaster. Help those in need. That’s what all of us need to do.” 

Biden also expressed that, throughout the week, he’d expressed that same message to local officials and utility and energy company representatives during virtual meetings.

How has that approach worked out?

A Louisiana State University survey last year found that 17% of Louisiana homeowners reported their provider canceled their policy. Sixty-three percent of policyholders said the cost of their insurance coverage increased from the prior year, the survey found. 

There was roughly a 10% to 12% increase in homeowners’ insurance costs last year in the United States, said Mark Friedlander, spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute, a nonprofit industry association.

You can't just ask these people to be nice. You have to force them. These “commitments to community” Biden imagines exist in corporate America are more tenuous than ever, if they even existed at all. And today’s political leaders, having abandoned the lessons of the New Deal, are less equipped to deal with that reality as a result.

That's how it's supposed to work

This is what is classically known as a perverse incentive. But is it, really? What if the incentives are actually doing what they were always meant to do?

That’s because many of these carbon capture projects will be handling emissions from facilities that rely on oil and natural gas – in fact, many of the projects are tied to major oil and gas companies through subsidiaries. Under new federal rulesnew federal rules, the projects can receive generous tax subsidies. The more carbon dioxide the factories produce and capture, the more federal money the projects can receive.

The coup de grâce: Louisiana can authorize as many of these federally subsidized projects as it sees fit. The Environmental Protection Agency recently approved its quest to become only one of three states with regulatory “primacy” over such carbon storage wells.

Fossil fuel industry advocates are eager to get projects approved. “Louisiana has a chance with our geological structures to make a big splash in the pond for CO2 in the world,” Mike Moncla, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, told a legislative task force in December 2023.

It's a familiar story.  The solution to the crisis is to make sure whoever created the crisis in the first place can keep getting rich. The reason this always makes sense to do is the crisis itself is a fait accompli. The climate is already screwed up. The sea is already rising. The Louisiana coast is already beyond saving. But that's all external to the purpose of politics. The purpose of politics is to make sure the resulting disaster doesn't upset the established hierarchy.  So whether you call it, "energy security" or "infrastructure investment" or even "climate mitigation" preserving the wealth of those currently at the top of the ladder is what these policies are actually designed to do.  It's all they can do. 

Seems bad

I don't really know what else we're supposed to say about the legislative session.  Every week is just gonna be a new load of very bad ideas cruising right on through.  Today, the latest scheme for de-funding public education passed out of committee without objection. 

Elected school board members also are starting to speak out against ESAs. On Thursday, just hours after the pro-ESA rally in Baton Rouge, the Livingston Parish school board discussed the bills at a special meeting.

One board member warned that a reduction in state funding could force the district to close schools and lay off teachers. Superintendent Joe Murphy said that an ESA program open to all families could guzzle up tax dollars, leaving less money for the “minimum foundation program,” or MFP, the state’s public school funding formula.

“I think this absolutely has the potential to devastate our schools from an MFP standpoint,” Murphy told the board. After all, money for the ESA program “has got to come from somewhere.”

The money coming out of the public schools' MFP will be at least half a billion dollars a year, in fact. But that's far from the only way in which our "fiscally conservative" legislature has determined to bankrupt the state this year.  Keeping in mind the already much talked about half billion dollar "fiscal cliff" that approaches in 2025, lawmakers spent the special session on "crime" adding tens (growing perhaps to hundreds) of millions of dollars to the budget for throwing people in prison and keeping them there. And the current session may expand that further. Bills are advancing that would jail people for panhandling on the streets or perhaps attending professional conferences. Maybe those are the same thing. Or at least one leads to the other. I haven't quite worked it out. 

Anyway, the legislature has the big checkbook out. But we know how much these fiscal hawks like to talk about prudent budgeting. So they must have some pretty great expectations of future revenues. Wonder where that's going to come from.  One things for sure, it won't come from the oil companies. 

The state House on Monday passed a bill that would cut the oil severance tax rate by 4 percentage points, a measure that aims to revitalize Louisiana’s oil industry but could leave an $80 million gap in state tax revenue.

House Bill 259, sponsored by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, faced virtually no pushback on the House floor, passing the chamber 86-13. It now heads to the state Senate.

With a vote of 96-6, the House also overwhelmingly passed a second Beaullieu bill, House Bill 418, which would halve the tax currently levied on oil and gas produced by wells that have been orphaned and inactive.

The Louisiana Budget Project.. or whatever the hell they call themselves now.. these NGOs "re-brand" themselves all the time for no reason..  estimates the severance tax cut could end up costing the state $80 million year.  Seems bad. 

Decommissioning in place

I now have a new phrase for describing my system of leaving clothes on the floor until laundry day. 

The GAO found that the offshore oil and gas industry has left behind about 18,000 miles of inactive pipeline in the Gulf since the 1960s. While federal rules require removal of decommissioned pipelines except in special cases, the GAO found that 97% of pipelines have been allowed to stay on the seafloor.

“Such a high rate of approval indicates that this is not an exception ... but rather that decommissioning-in-place has been the norm for decades,” the report said.

This, by the way, is exactly what a "market driven" transition to a greener economy is going to look like. Abandoned, rotting infrastructure leaking poisons into the water with no one left to take any responsibility.  Ideally the alternative is a mitigation initiative funded by something like a federal Green New Deal bill. But that ain't happening anytime soon. 

Maybe we can get something written into the Fossil Fuel Sanctuary State Act that politely asks the protected class to pick up after itself every now and again. 

Whoa, settle down, Bill, you won

This is from a few weeks ago but I'm still thinking about it for some reason. Bill Cassidy says here that a half-hearted Joe Biden proposal to slowly replace fossil fuels over time will only happen, "over my dead body."  Seems a little bit much.  He's even embarrassing the oil lobbyists now. 

Tyler Gray, the president and CEO of Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, expressed less concern than Cassidy with Biden’s comments.

“We don’t have to choose between reducing emissions and meeting energy needs. We can do both,” Gray said in a statement. “We are proud of the grit, innovation, and progress we’ve made so that Americans no longer have to choose between environmental progress and access to affordable, reliable, and cleaner energy and we aren’t going anywhere.”

Interesting that Gray is more or less saying the Biden rhetoric verbatim. I wonder who he expected to win the Presidency. 

Of course when the window of discourse is only wide enough to allow for a "debate" between burning the world up as fast as possible vs. kind of pretending we are trying not to while it burns anyway, I guess people like Gray are playing with house money.  And since both Cassidy and Biden are going back to D.C. next year, it's going to stay that way.

When in doubt.... tax breaks for oil companies

The emergency special session the legislature called supposedly to deal with governing and budgetary issues emanating from  the COVID pandemic has taken a not-very-surprising turn. 

House Bill 29, filed by Rep. Phillip DeVillier, R-Eunice, which would suspend a 12.5% severance tax that oil and gas companies pay on crude fossil fuels extracted from newly-drilled wells or enhanced wells, passed after a floor debate with a 68-22 vote.

The bill, requested by the Louisiana Mid-Continent’s Oil and Gas Association, is estimated to cost taxpayers $157 million over the next five years, according to the legislature’s fiscal office. It allows companies to claim credits on each well for up to 24 months or until the company recovers the amount it spent to drill or enhance the well, whichever comes first.

Unlike other tax breaks such as those under the Industrial Tax Exemption Program, DeVillier’s proposed tax suspension carries no job-creation or residency requirements or investment thresholds in order for a company to qualify. Companies can also claim it in addition to other breaks such as those under ITEP as well as a separate tax credit being proposed in House Bill 78, which would allow local governing bodies such as school boards and sheriffs to accept a lump sum of no more than two years of property taxes from a company and exempt them from taxes for the next nine years. That bill is slated to be considered before the full House on Oct. 12.

Sure. That ought to fix it. I remember way back when they would at least go through the motions of caring about keeping the budget afloat by kicking the can ahead to a series of "fiscal cliffs" that would have to be narrowly averted.  Now that we're living in the end times, everyone is content to just leap right off the ledge straight away. 

Also in this package, a "sales tax holiday" because why not. But since we are already busted, why stop there?  Probably there is public money to throw at some private schools in a way we haven't thought of yet. 

The final tax bill considered Tuesday was House Bill 20, authored by Rep. Rick Edmonds, R-Baton Rouge. It offers a state income tax credit to residents with certain narrowly-defined education expenses related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I know we’ve done a lot to help businesses, so I just wanted to give something to the people,” Edmonds said.

The bill offers a credit on “educational coaching services for an in-person facilitator of virtual education delivered by a public or approved nonpublic elementary or secondary school.” The bill would help parents defray the costs of an in-person tutor who assisted with virtual courses for college students. It would only apply if the student being tutored is a qualified dependent and is at least 18 or a high school graduate.

Not sure what they'll do next year when they have to fix this mess.  But I'm willing to bet it will involve still more tax cuts for oil companies.

Murdered Gulf

BP really got away with one.  Who woulda thought, right? 

Published in the journal PLOS One in June, Montagna’s full analysis of his 10-year-old samples showed damage to seafloor organisms stretching across at least 124 square miles. That’s nearly two times larger than the 66-square-mile footprint described in the abbreviated report Montagna turned over for the disaster’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment.

The NRDA process helped determine how much BP owed for the harm done to marine organisms, from the little mud-dwelling creatures Montagna studied to the dead dolphins and oil-drenched pelicans that washed up on Louisiana’s shores. In April 2016, the case was settled for $8.8 billion. It was both the largest environmental settlement in the nation’s history and the biggest infusion of cash for restoration purposes the state had ever seen.

But it might have been larger had the full scope of the damage been known.

“BP got a good deal by settling early,” Montagna said.

How did they get away with it? Well one thing they did was exercise control over the scope of the research that eventually determined their liability. 

Keeping watch over every step was a BP representative.

“He asked a lot of questions, and was with us 24-7,” she said.

Company officials carefully documented each sample’s chain of custody.

“BP didn’t want anybody spiking the samples with oil,” Montagna said.

BP and Montagna “had many difficult conversations” over how to conduct the sampling. BP wanted a narrow focus, concentrating the sampling close to the well. Montagna wanted to travel farther afield, gathering cores from a wider area. Montagna won out on the scope, but not on which samples to analyze for the damage assessment. On that count, BP got its way, zooming the focus on the 58 samples taken closest to the well.

The company used that tighter scope to its advantage. In a statement in 2013, BP said the 58 samples “confirm that potential injury to the deep sea soft sediment ecosystem was limited to a small area in the immediate vicinity of the Macondo well-head.”

BP required all the samples to be kept in a locked cage in a secure, air-conditioned storage room. That is, until the settlement was reached.

“There was zero interest the next day,” Montagna said. “No one cared.”

As for the lasting environmental damage done to the sea floor, we're still learning about how bad it really is.  But, well, it's bad. 

Montagna says plenty of evidence is waiting quietly at the bottom of the Gulf. Recent check-ins by other scientists have revealed little improvement since 2010. Slow to degrade thanks to the deep sea’s cold, dark and sterile conditions, the oil remains nearly as potent as the day it soaked into the mud and formed black pools on the seafloor.

“There’s been almost zero recovery, and it’ll likely stay that way for a long, long time,” Montagna said.

Judge nullification

Maybe this seems tacky to some but anything that strips away the myth that judges are somehow a-political or act outside of the influence of the interests who elect them is good.  If, for example, you are suing the oil and gas industry over the irreparable damage it has inflicted on your parish's coastal environment and you know the judge presiding over your case works for the oil companies, well then you ought to do what you can to get that judge out of the way. 

Will Crain, who was elected to one of the seven seats on the Supreme Court late last year after a bitter race, has been the subject of three recusal motions from the Talbot, Carmouche and Marcello law firm since the start of the year.

The firm often represents landowners or governments in coastal and property damage lawsuits against oil and gas companies. In asking for Crain's recusal, the firm's attorneys have pointed to a mailer from Crain’s campaign that targeted attorney John Carmouche and questioned his spending in support of Crain’s opponent, appeals court judge Hans Liljeberg. Carmouche’s firm has argued that the mailer, which warned voters “don’t be deceived” by Carmouche, showed that Crain harbors “actual bias” against him.

Yes, there is some transitory reasoning at work here.  But that's how politics works. Before you understand anything else, make sure you figure out who is giving money to whom and why.  (Remember this, also, as the First City Court runoff develops.  There is likely to be an awful lot of real estate money interested in that outcome.)

Should there be a lesson in that, maybe?

Probably not. It's too much to get your head around.

Now broken in two and less than 2 miles long, the island is a mere shadow of the long, sturdy chunk of land Roosevelt visited in 1915, eight years after he made East Timbalier one of the nation’s first wildlife sanctuaries.

The protection didn’t last. Most barrier islands are bereft of natural resources, but East Timbalier promised such a bonanza to oil companies that its federal protections were largely ignored and, in 1969, revoked. A slew of companies have drilled more than 160 wells in and around the island. Canals dug to locate fonts of oil were the first alteration that sped the island’s unraveling. The canals allowed saltwater to seep in and the soil from the crumbling banks to flow out.

See Teddy wanted them to save an island. But later they decided instead that is needed to die for "The Economy." That seems like the wrong choice now but then again maybe not. We're still making it all the time.

And I'm not only talking here about our choice to march hundreds of meat packing workers off to their deaths so we can keep quartet pounders on the dollar menu, although we are doing that too. No I'm talking about the choice to continue deliberately sinking the coast for the sake of oil exploration. Remarkably,  that is still the long term strategy.

Lafourche did not join seven other coastal parishes — Plaquemines, St. John the Baptist, St. Bernard, Vermilion, Jefferson, Cameron and Orleans — in suing oil and gas companies for widespread environmental damage. The lawsuits, which charge that the companies failed to follow state law in drilling wells, building canals, disposing of waste and restoring wetlands, have encountered fierce opposition in the Legislature.

On Wednesday, May 20, the Senate narrowly passed a measure aimed at killing the lawsuits. Critics say the lawsuits are chilling investment in Louisiana. A big settlement could fund an array of restoration efforts as money from the BP settlement, a main funder of coastal projects, dwindles.

About that "chilling" effect. Are they sure?

The COVID Caucus

What are they even doing there?

While the work went on at the speaker’s podium, the 78 legislators in attendance – many of whom were not wearing masks as prescribed by leadership – milled around the chamber chatting and joking with one another. Often groups of lawmakers gathered in clusters so large that House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzalez, dispatched a sergeant-at-arms to break them up.

I mean, I know there is work to do but at least we could expect everyone to take it seriously given the circumstances.  But if they aren't even going to take the public health threat (or even the health of their colleagues) seriously, what do we think they're going to do about the effects of a crashing economy? 

The crashing price of oil, which was trading in the $20 a barrel range Monday, will likely have the biggest effect on the state’s revenues, Albrecht said. Currently, the state’s revenues are based on a roughly $60 barrel of oil, and for each $1 drop in the price over a year, Louisiana’s revenues drop by around $12 million.

Complicating the picture is Louisiana’s economy wasn’t roaring to begin with, Albrecht said, which made the state particularly vulnerable to such a dramatic shock. Manfred Dix, the economist for Edwards’ administration, said the state was facing a “double-whammy” of oil prices and business closures from the pandemic.

“It’s not easy when from one day to the next you basically tell the economy to shut down and close doors,” Dix said.

Which, again, is why we have to be extra diligent in making sure people are taken care of during the hard times.  A lot of what they're able to do in that regard begins with what the federal government allows. But in the meantime the state lawmakers need to be thinking about ways to keep critical state services available, keep people paid, that sort of thing.

Are they taking that task seriously? Of course not. They're just there to give tax breaks to oil companies. Everybody knows that's their real job anyway.

Happy BP Day!

Wow has it been 10 years already?  It seems like only yesterday that Cat Island... existed.

For decades oil and gas companies dug exploration canals in the marshlands, which allowed for saltwater intrusion and blocked the hydrological flow of the wetlands. These factors caused the land to erode, subside and disappear at some of the highest rates in the world. Add sea level rise to this, and "we are sinking like a rock," Hahn said.

"You hear all the time, 'Louisiana is losing a football field every 45 minutes.' And when you are with these old timers, they're like: 'This used to be marsh, this used to be land.' You don't get your mind wrapped around it till you get out there."

Talking about Cat Island, Hahn said, "I saw it, not only in my lifetime ... it was only a couple of years ... you could actually see this piece of land shrinking until it was finally gone and became open water."

The oil from the 2010 disaster dramatically worsened the threat to coastal Louisiana. Researchers from LSU found that the BP oil spill accelerated land loss by almost 300% in the first six months after the spill.

For the most part we've been ignoring the problem since then.  Has it gotten better?  You would think it must have. Otherwise the Trump administration wouldn't be rolling back emissions limits now, right? In fact we're pretty sure everything is just fine out there now.

So, yay, we made it! Ten whole years. To celebrate, we're giving away as much crude oil as you can take.

WTI Crude now under $2 per barrel pic.twitter.com/Z2ruuFL1Cb

— Michael McDonough (@M_McDonough) April 20, 2020

Busted

The legislature isn't working right now.  That's probably a good thing. I mean, it's usually a good thing when that bunch doesn't have to get together but in this case it's especially so because they would all be freaking out over the budget.

Economists assumed oil prices would average $59 a barrel when compiling the state’s revenue forecast, but state leaders are expected to meet early next month to adopt a new revenue forecast that will determine how much money lawmakers and Gov. John Bel Edwards have to spend. The price of oil has dropped by nearly half ahead of that meeting, trading in the low $30s a barrel in recent days.

For every $1 drop in the price of oil, Albrecht said, Louisiana loses about $11 million to $12 million in direct tax revenues.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean they  will have lost $330 million just like that.  For one thing the revenue estimate is based on the expected price of oil over the course of the entire year. So if the price rebounds later, it could average out to be a negligible difference. 

Of course, that story was from a week ago.  Today we have another look and...

The American oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate dropped 24 percent to just over $21 a barrel, the lowest price since 2003. 

The global Brent benchmark fell to just above $25 a barrel, a level just below January 2016. Oil prices are more than 60 percent below where they were at the beginning of the year.

Aaanyway... just tell the legislators to sit tight for now.  Coming back in to work too soon could be even more dangerous than it already is.

Toxic Gulf

This development probably doesn't surprise many but a new study says the BP Horizon oil spill (which is about to turn 10 years old, holy shit) was worse for the health of the Gulf Mexico than previously thought.

“The impact of the oil’s toxicity is larger than previously assumed,” said Igal Berenshtein, a University of Miami marine scientist and the study’s lead author. "It's important to account for the toxicity that's invisible and also the three-dimensional nature of the (oil) plume, and our study does that."

He estimates the extent may be 30% larger than 2010 satellite imagery indicated. The imagery was widely accepted by the public and scientists as showing the spill’s reach, but a growing body of field data collected just after the spill indicates the oil had a much larger footprint. Berenshtein and the study’s other scientists combined data from water, seafloor and beach sampling, fish toxicity studies and oil transport models to track oil invisible to satellites.

Delicious but deadly

I'm telling you man, I have an absolute iron stomach.

The same toxic chemicals also found in nonstick pans and shampoo are in New Orleans’ drinking water system at higher levels than previously thought, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released Wednesday.

The environmental nonprofit tested water in 44 areas in 31 states and D.C. and found that New Orleans’ water system had levels of chemicals, known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), that reached 41.8 parts per trillion.

Since 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had a health advisory for lifetime exposure to PFOS and PFOA — two types of PFAS — in drinking water set to 70 parts per trillion, but the limit is not enforceable.

The thing is, they say in there that some of the cleanest water in the country comes from Meridian, Mississippi and I have had the water in Meridian and can tell you it tastes like trash. Maybe the water here has a lot of actual trash in it but.. still....


Meanwhile, have you seen this? Have you heard about this?

The first state to enact any protections at all was Louisiana, in the late 1980s. “It was the only environmental issue in Louisiana anyone ever sprang on me I didn’t know anything about,” says chemical physicist Paul Templet, who as the state’s lead environmental regulator at the time ordered a study on oil-and-gas radioactivity. The results horrified him.

The levels of radium in Louisiana oil pipes had registered as much as 20,000 times the limits set by the EPA for topsoil at uranium-mill waste sites. Templet found that workers who were cleaning oil-field piping were being coated in radioactive dust and breathing it in. One man they tested had radioactivity all over his clothes, his car, his front steps, and even on his newborn baby. The industry was also spewing waste into coastal waterways, and radioactivity was shown to accumulate in oysters. Pipes still laden with radioactivity were donated by the industry and reused to build community playgrounds. Templet sent inspectors with Geiger counters across southern Louisiana. One witnessed a kid sitting on a fence made from piping so radioactive they were set to receive a full year’s radiation dose in an hour. “People thought getting these pipes for free from the oil industry was such a great deal,” says Templet, “but essentially the oil companies were just getting rid of their waste.”

So, you know, pipes. They've got bad stuff in them.

What do we want for our city during the brief time it has left?

Gambit asks various political players and advocacy groups what they would like to see from the Governor during the next legislative term. There are some good answers as wells as some bad ones. LaToya says some good words about some interesting topics like the LaSalle Street controversy, the public defender's office, and "rail connectivity." We should wait to hear what she has in mind for those items, though, since she also takes a minute here to thank the Governor for his help with the Fair Sham. If her solutions to the new priorities are involve more giveaways to oligarchs the way that plan did, then that's going to be a problem.

Ethan Ellestad wants the Governor to appoint better people to the Convention Center board and Superdome Commission. But he's not likely to do anything different with those patronage opportunities than in his first term.  If anything, the fact that he doesn't have a reelection campaign to worry about now could make this even worse. Appointments are more likely to reward past donors now than they are to encourage community or labor support in the future.

Ethan also talks about housing but he frames that in stark capitalist terms as an "investment."

“For the culture,” Ellestad says, “it is investing in making sure people can stay in the communities where they’re from, because they are not just the creators of the culture, which comes from working class black communities, but also they are part of the service industry, which is the backbone of the tourism industry.”

Of course we need to make sure poor and working class people are not displaced from their neighborhoods.  But to turn that question of basic human dignity into a matter of "tourism industry" benefit is demeaning.  Your right to your city isn't based on your potential commoditization as a "culture bearer." You deserve more respect than that. I've written about this before. Unfortunately Ethan Ellestad's organization has embraced this dehumanizing and exploitative rhetoric wholeheartedly. It's going to continue to be an impediment to true housing justice.

Gambit also asks for comments from GNO Inc. for some reason.  Nobody should care what they think.

If I had to pick the best comment out of all of these it would probably be this from Anne Rofles.

“New Orleans’ risk of sinking into the Gulf of Mexico is already pretty high, but it is assured if Gov. Edwards continues to allow every chemical plant, oil refinery, pipeline and gas terminal that wants to come here to come here,” says Anne Rolfes, founding director of the environmental advocacy group Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “Right now he is rolling out the red carpet for them, and New Orleans will simply not exist if he does that.”

Last week we learned that, over the past decade, the state of Louisiana, one of the most environmentally threatened places in the nation, has slashed funding for its Department of Environmental Quality more than almost any other state.

In a 10-year period marked by a dramatic increase in newly built and planned petrochemical plants in the state, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has seen its budget slashed by nearly 35 percent and its staff cut by almost 30 percent.

So says a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that terms itself an environmental enforcement watchdog.

Louisiana’s funding cut percentage ranked second among the states, tied with Texas. The state ranked fourth in the percentage of staffing cuts, with Illinois, North Carolina and Arizona seeing larger cuts of 38% to 32%, according to the report.

Meanwhile the state continues to pour millions of dollars into state subsidies for the very industries most in need of monitoring. During this year's election campaign, John Bel told us as plainly as he could that that isn't likely to change in his second term.

Edwards has suggested Louisiana can continue to embrace natural gas for “20, 30, 40 years,” as the U.S. transitions to renewable energy. “There’s going to continue to be a demand for hydrocarbons for a long time to come,” he said, adding, "We are a natural gas state." 

John Bel was just narrowly reelected specifically because New Orleans turned out to vote in record numbers.  And yet he'd prefer to go on subsidizing oil and gas production for "20, 30, 40 years" even if it means New Orleans no longer exists. Enjoy those years while you have them, I guess.

Might be a good time to do some business with St. John Parish

The school board there just denied Marathon Oil a tax exemption that will result in something like $25 million in revenue for the district. This is good news, of course. The state has been handing over massive public subsidies to petrochemical interests for decades. Thanks to John Bel's decision to revert ITEP authorization to the local level, the public is only now beginning to recoup their losses. Had Eddie Rispone been elected Governor last week... and he very nearly was... we'd be preparing to forfeit all of this progress.

At the same time, knowing what we know about how local government works, we can't help but wonder about the inevitable side effects of this.

But the $25 million is small potatoes compared to larger, expiring exemptions looming on the horizon for St. John Parish.

Although Marathon is the parish's biggest taxpayer, it also enjoys industrial tax breaks on a whopping $3.1 billion in property. Those exemptions are set to expire next year, which would mean a $44 million windfall in parish property tax collections.

That would push St. John's total property tax revenue, now around $55 million, according to the Assessor’s Office, to close to $100 million.

That's a lot of money about to suddenly fall into the laps of some heretofore small time criminals... erm... elected officials.  No telling where it all ends up eventually.  But, still, it's important to remember that even if a school board member's brother-in-law gets a chunk of the money sunk into a new school building, well, that is still a new school building. And it's all a much better way to blow money than on kickbacks to Marathon Oil.

Out of sight out of mind

Apparently it is worse than they would have expected.

Mark Benfield, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at LSU, led monitoring of visible marine animals, called megafauna, for about a year after the Deepwater Horizon spill. He found the lack of vitality seen in the video "disturbing."

The video offers the first glimpse of the site since visual inspections ended in 2011.

"Given the amount of time that's passed, I figured that the site would look normal or well into recovery," Benfield said. "I was surprised."

Recall that BP's primary response to the Macondo disaster was to spray the slick with a chemical dispersant called Corexit.  Workers exposed to the chemicals during clean up operations also complained of serious health problems. Their symptoms were positively liked to that exposure.   As early as 2012, it was found to have caused major disruptions to the Gulf marine food chain.

In April 2012, Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences was finding lesions and grotesque deformities in sea life—including millions of shrimp with no eyes and crabs without eyes or claws—possibly linked to oil and dispersants.

The shocking story was ignored by major U.S. media, but covered in depth by Al Jazeera. BP said such deformities were “common” in aquatic life in the Gulf and caused by bacteria or parasites. But further studies point back to the spill.

A just-released study from the University of South Florida found that underwater plumes of BP oil, dispersed by Corexit, had produced a “massive die-off” of foraminifera, microscopic organisms at the base of the food chain. Other studies show that, as a result of oil and dispersants, plankton have either been killed or have absorbed PAHs before being consumed by other sea creatures.

But the important thing to remember about Corexit as it relates to the sea floor anyway, was its purpose. It wasn't intended to clean up the oil so much as it was to sink it. Get it out of sight and out of mind as fast as possible.  Seems like that strategy is still paying dividends. 

The video and study were only possible because researchers were near the site for an unrelated project.

No one is funding research into the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill on the surrounding sea floor, said Craig McClain, director of LUMCON. Getting money for deep sea research can be difficult because it's "out of sight, out of mind," he said.

But damage to the sea floor ecosystem can permeate through the food chain to commercial fisheries and disrupt the process by which oceans pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the deep sea.

All we have is a brief glimpse of the undersea wasteland around the well head. No telling how bad it really is.

Who is this a good deal for?

I have a long history of being not very smart which is why I spend so much time typing stupid questions out on the internet.  So apologies for this one, but why does this read to me like a pretty sweet deal for Freeport?  I'm missing the point, I guess.

Lawyers representing coastal Louisiana parishes have negotiated their first settlement with one of the oil and gas companies accused in court of damaging the state’s coast, a potentially ground-breaking move in the effort to find funds for coastal restoration.

Hey that sounds pretty good.  Not great, though. It's just one company estimated to represent about 4 percent of drilling activity over the past century or so in Louisiana. (The story includes a helpful graphic clarifying that 4 percent still comes out to over 2,000 wells so let's not diminish Freeport's impact that much.)  The Advocate sees this as a good sign, though. As in, this $100 million is "only a fraction" of what we can expect to realize as other firms follow Freeport's lead and settle up.

Assuming Freeport's contribution is proportionately typical, that's potentially $2.5 billion if my math is good which is always a big if.  The 2017 version of the state's coastal restoration/mitigation master plan is expected to cost $50 billion if fully funded. Soooo, again, if we can trust my math, this means, the oil and gas industry, by a long stretch the first and greatest cause of coastal loss in Louisiana both in terms of physical damage and in terms of sea level rise brought on by global warming, will be on the hook for about 5 percent of the cost of dealing with that catastrophe.  Yay?

And that's if we assume every firm decides to pay up.  That's far from a given, if their lobbyists' statements are any indication.

Two of the state's most powerful energy lobbyists, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association and the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, denounced the deal, calling it a win for trial lawyers and their plans "to shake down Louisiana oil and gas companies for legally conducting production activities" that followed the rules laid out by state and federal regulators over decades.

"This misguided effort to go back in time and rewrite history amounts to an all-out legal attack on the entire regulatory framework through which oil and gas operations have been conducted for nearly a century," the two lobbying groups said in a joint statement. "Regardless of how one company may choose to handle their case, LOGA, LMOGA and our members remain confident these claims will not stand up in federal court."

Well they sound really upset.  What about this assertion that the Freeport has been the victim of a "shake down"?  Remind us what they've agreed to again. 

As part of the deal, Freeport would make an upfront payment of $15 million upon formally signing the settlement, would pay an additional $4.25 million each in 2023 and 2024, conditioned on the creation of a special fund by the Legislature to receive the money, and would contribute up to $76.5 million more “subject to contemporaneous reimbursements from the proceeds of the prior sales of environmental credits,” according to Hayes.

Carmouche estimated that Freeport would disburse the money over 22 years.

So the only part of this that's real is $15 million. Five years from now there might be another $8.5 million if the Legislature does some things.  After that, we're off to the secondary market to sell our environmental credits. What this means. Or at least what I think it means is Freeport gets to pay over 75 percent of its fine to the state by selling "pay to pollute" licenses to other companies in the market to do that.  That doesn't sound like a particularly punitive burden on Freeport at all. I'm not even sure they won't make money on the deal in the long run.

Traditionally this is done to help light Santa's way

Sometimes Christmas comes early, I guess.

A black-stained patch of marsh grass in Cox Bay, just east of Port Sulphur in Plaquemines Parish, will be put to the torch Wednesday to remove about 1,000 gallons of crude oil spilled there last week when a Time Energy oil well flowline sprang a leak, the U.S. Coast Guard announced Tuesday.

The in-situ burn is scheduled to begin at 8 a.m., weather permitting, and is expected to last until 4 p.m. The burn is tentatively scheduled for Thursday if weather conditions don't allow it Wednesday.

One hopes that "weather conditions" involve  taking into account which way the wind is blowing.  Nobody wants to breathe that shit.  Although, at this point, how would we know the difference between a plume of black smoke and a regular day?

Speaking of shitty laws signed by John Bel Edwards

The pipeline protest criminalization law is going to court now.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by the Center for Constitutional Rights, argues that the law is “so vague, overly broad, and sweeping in scope that people in the state cannot be sure of where in the vicinity of Louisiana’s vast 125,000-mile network of pipelines they can legally be present, who decides where they can be present, or what conduct is prohibited.”

“Its actual aim,” the suit continues, “is to chill, and harshly punish, speech and expression in opposition to pipeline projects.”