George Zornick at
The Nation writes
Will the EPA’s Climate Plan Lead to a Counterproductive Fracking Boom?
There’s little doubt the Obama administration’s big push to cut carbon pollution, announced this week, will lead to much less coal-fired power in the United States. That’s a good thing.
But what if states instead turn to natural gas-powered electricity instead? That’s certainly what the administration would like them to do—it’s explicitly laid out as an alternative in the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule, and Obama echoed that suggestion when he spoke on a conference call the day the rule was unveiled. For years, his administration has pushed natural gas as a fundamental part of America’s long-term energy strategy.
If that happens, it could be a disaster for the environment, according to some leading climate experts. Federal regulations on the extraction and transport of natural gas range from insufficient to nonexistent, and the resultant methane emissions from a bigger natural gas boom could neutralize the gains made by the EPA’s rule, and possibly even accelerate climate change in the short-term.
There are, it should be noted, significant reasons that natural gas might not become an energy source of the future, according to some analysts—but any turn away from gas will be thanks to volatile market dynamics, and not an administration heavily pushing its use. [...]
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—What's so hard about this?:
Let me say right off the bat for anybody who doesn't already know it: I've never served in the military in any way. Although I have been under fire a few times, and had loaded guns pointed in my face, my risk was never close to what U.S. soldiers and Marines face every day in Iraq. I've never worn body armor, even the stuff you can buy out of catalogs, or if you're wealthy enough, can have custom-made. I've never run a test lab or had to choose the best and/or lowest-bid manufacturer of a mass-produced military product.
In other words, I don't know beans about the technicalities of making body armor to keep uniformed Americans in Iraq safer (until we can get them out of where they should never have been sent in the first place).
Given my obvious ignorance of the workings of the military-industrial complex, maybe I am missing something, something really obvious, or some itsy-bitsy arcane detail. If so, I'll be pleased if some high mucketymuck—civilian or military— can explain to me why it is that nobody at the Pentagon seems to want to do a side-by-side test of two kinds of body armor, each of the manufacturers of which say theirs is the best
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Because—correct me if I'm wrong—no matter what one thinks about the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the people who concocted it—and what I think would require asbestos pixels to fully convey—nobody here wants American troops to go into harm's way without the best protection that our $8.4 billion a month in expenditures can buy. Right? And, no matter what our views of the machinery and machinations of the military-industrial-congressional complex, the way to know whether it is the best protection is to run a fair test. Right? […]
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Tweet of the Day
According to Twitter, @CIA is only following 25 people. So chill about your precious civil rights already.
— @Wolfrum
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: the flip-flopping Bergdahl tweets from conservatives. Heartbleed redux! Are your selfies helping the NSA build a facial recognition database? Baseless speculation about "driverless cars!"
Armando joins in to discuss emptywheel's synthesis of the O'Hehir and Moglen surveillance articles we pondered last week: "What If the Democratic Response to Snowden Is to Expand Surveillance?"
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