Are the Canadians crying foul about this?  Or are they looking the other way if it means a big boost to their oil sands projects?  

A sign of more to come when scarcity really hits home.  

That Indiana was a HUGE KKK state in the early 20th Century.  The state government was loaded with Klan.  So you're dealing with a pretty shallow gene pool to start with ...

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Uh... why are they dumping ammonia when other companies are burning fossil fuel to make it? I assume there is a good reason. I just want to know what it is.

Forward!

Former Congressman Lee Hamilton (D) is of course a widely respected senior statesman, and co-chaired the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.  Senator Evan Bayh (D) was briefly thinking of running for president, and may be on the nominee's short list for VP.  His late father Birch Bayh was held in high regard.  Senator Richard Lugar (R), ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the most intelligent and least ideological members of his party, created a stir a couple of weeks ago when he expressed dissatisfaction with the progress of the war in Iraq and called for downsizing the US military presence there; but then, as if to quash his own show of independence, he just voted with his party against closing debate on the Democrats' bill favoring a time table for withdrawal, for which Paul Krugman has now called him an "enabler" of George W. Bush's denial of reality.

So, whatever one thinks of Lugar's latest vote, Indiana's congressional delegation has often achieved prominence and won respect.

I am not so sure, however, about its universities.  Indiana University at Bloomington is no doubt a decent place, with an impressive number of majors, and is said to have a beautiful campus; but an alumnus of my acquaintance, having fled to NYC for graduate study, bitterly referred to the state capital as "India-no-place."  The charming 1979 movie "Breaking Away," about a young Italianizing bicyclist, was shot in Bloomington, and features the social divide between the "townies" and the students.

Perhaps even better known than IU is the University of Notre Dame at South Bend.  I do not really know it, but have read a number of things by people who teach there, mostly in theology.  It is a leading Catholic school in this country, of course, and I cannot help feeling that it has been going resolvedly more conservative in the age of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  Is there any kind of student activism at all?  South Bend is 30 or so miles inland from Lake Michigan, but it would be nice to know that at least a few students are outraged by this unspeakably bad move on the part of the state government to allow for increased pollution of the lake.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Plugins reduce emissions 33% assuming our current heavy cars, and our current grid. If you use carbon fiber to make them light, and shape them to be aerodynamics (make them cars, not freakin tanks) you can come closer to a 50% reduction even with our current grid. Bring wind, sun, wave and so forth on-line rather than coal and reduce emissions to close to zero. A PHEV with a 70 mile range that gets 75 mpg when it switchest from electricity to gas would exceed a 90% reduction if it ran on a renewable grid. (Because 85% of the miles or more would be on electricity.)  Of course if it had 100 mile range, even with current U.S. driving habits, the reduction would be more like 95%. So an 8 kwh battery and a 4 gallon gas tank - that is something that would be practical with current battery technology

...references on this?  Wouldn't it be better to just skip the hybrid/phev phase and go directly to electric? What's your impression of battery life and recycling?  (No need for a remedy for acne, anything on the above would appreciated).

Couldn't they feed it to some organism in a big holding pond and then compost the critter (plant or microbe, not warm fuzzy creature) to make a nice organic soil amendment for parks, soccer fields, flower gardens, et cetera?

Forward!

...either that, or it's just the way they do things -- it's like when corporations decide to look at their efficiency in their processes, and discover that they can save billions by conserving...why BP doesn't do it is beyond me.

Hey, all:

I think JustLou's response (the very first) is the best, and it certainly does appear that they want their tar sands project to move forward, and the slightly displaced source of the pollution outfall and the thinly spread out jobs bait is enough to influence their position.  That's the politics.  That's the Corporate Oligarchy.  And it is probably a good example of Gobblizeation, since they can probably invoke some rule in NAFTA or other environmentally disastrous document.  

On the economics, Jon asked a very good simple rhetorical question:

"Isn't water more important than gasoline?"

Of course, this is meaningless to BP, since water is not the commodity they own and wish to promote.  If it was the other way around, or regardless of the commodity, they will try to tip things their way.  And the courts and the political appointees in EPA, as we have seen repeatedly, are all too willing to go along with them.  So it is all about money.

"BP = Bad Pollution?"  What's new?  As we have also seen repeatedly, marketing and operations are frequently completely divorced from each other.  Do anything to extract the product, do anything to cover up the process and sell the product.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!    

Hey, all:

One other thing: Yeah, extraction of tar sands is as bad as strip mining coal, plus as we see, tar sands extraction has huge water pollution and thermal impacts.  Since it is so resource intensive it depends on a high cost for the product (petroleum) to justify it.    Assuming all we do is rely on the market to save our asses, driving down demand, switching to sustainable sources of energy, but adding a progressive tax on to petroleum products, will help prevent this next disastrous resource boondoggle from proceeding.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Actually, I never knew where Purdue was, till you told me right now.

I also overlooked the federal prison at Terre Haute, where the all-American terrorist Timothy McVeigh was executed -- an institution of higher learning of a different kind.

And then, I somehow neglected to give Dan Quayle his rightful place in my list of famous Indianans in Washington.

DC, that is.  I guess you are the famous Indianan in the other Washington.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Michael Jackson's from Indiana, so ...

Ummm, ok, never mind.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

...I once spent part of a summer selling dictionaries door-to-door there, the people were nice...now if they would just stop the polluters.

Hey, all:

I have my own very strong opinions about my own state of Texas, but I would defend it--well, in most cases, on a selective basis.  I really see no point in castigating the entire state of Indiana.  Certainly its politicians and business leaders could be at fault, but the people themselves--what is the point?  

I drove from Texas to Michigan and back through Indiana 4 Summers ago, and one of the few times I saw a wind turbine installed at a farm was in Indiana. I stopped and had a great conversation with them.  

The politically appointed administrators of the state and Federal agencies are almost always suspect, especially when the agency operates contrary to business and industry interests.  We see it ALL the time.  It is quite possible BP shopped around the permit until they got a response they liked.  Just like one of us would do a plumbing job.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Certainly not I.  It was BioD, pointing out at once that he is from there, who was the one who called the place "backward."  I do not subscribe to that, and only made some remarks about the state, which on balance are as mixed as any that one could come up with for most other states.

And there is an important moral in that, no?  If the Indiana state regulators have given BP a free pass to dump toxic substances into Lake Michigan, in exchange for BP's creating eighty jobs, we should certainly not come away thinking that they did that because they are "backward."  Still less should we feel confident that our own state officials would be any more enlightened.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

...for all the pollution that oil and coal have been fouling the air and waters with for all of these years.  Just think how much cleaner this continent would be (including Canada) without them.  

"High-speed rail now!" (from the Museum of Science and Industry model train exhibit).

Hey, all:

Heh heh, I have (and have had for a long time) the same frustration about how the country is going.  Actually, being marketed to death is more accurate.  

And it appears it was the Michael Jackson reference that was over the top.  I would trade, however, the Stooge-in-Chief for The Ghost of  "Thriller" in an instant.  

Canis, you are right--every state has a mix of good and bad.  But I would disagree that it was all about 80 jobs--that was just for the public's consumption.  All the investments and political pull is the real reason.  

We really need to focus now on finding progressive environmental candidates to run and be elected in November 2008.  

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

I received this email from a reader in Washington state:

I'm fed up with all these rape the environment companies and the people that work there.  I live in Curlew, WA and have been dealing with Kinross Gold and their plan to mine gold.  Same old story they come to an area hard pressed for jobs and locals (along with government officials) give them the key to the area to do, as they want.

My question to BP, which made $22 billion net income in 2006, is why can't more jobs be created by making the process clean? They need to  
go outside their own little hamlet and look at all the feeder business that would be making the products to purify the by products.

What people forget is that no one gets away from pollution - not even the rich.  Water and air is indispensable to all humans.  Tell BP to keep that in mind.

Richard Charlson

The great lakes need to (BP)- BE PROTECTED - from

                   BP
Petroleum,
 BP is protected from being stopped.
BP transporting crude from Alberta by way of? The destination to be the south end of Lake Michigan for refining w/o waste restrictions in check. Also the possible sulfide mining in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on the water shed known as the Yellow Dog Plains = Again ='s a potentially irreversible contaminating scenario for life  all life microbe to top of the food chain. This has got to stop. The dabbling around the worlds largest base of fresh water needs to be protected from the out and out greed. Mom says it's time for alternitive ways of running things and it starts now. Quit pissing in the pool. The chlorine and sludge you dump is way out of line. Is that simple enough to understand.

This part of the country is about as corrupt as Louisiana.

Hallelujah!  Today, a mainstream Illinois environmental thing said something beside "Lake Michigan":

"The reason for the increase in pollution is that the facility will be processing dirty Canadian "tar-sands" oil, which is more difficult
to refine."

That one bullet point of six in an environmentillinois.org flyer/petition to be delivered to BP stations, ends:
"I am shocked that you would increase your pollution of Lake Michigan, so I'm going to buy gas somewhere else today, and every day until you agree to avoid any increase in pollution to Lake Michigan."

Difficult, but not dirty?  As long as it doesn't dirty Lake Michigan we'll gladly burn through it.  That's about as good as the environment gets from Chicago to Springfield, IL., so I guess the people doing this deserve some sort of thanks

With metal prices rising mining looks to be starting up again in the copper and iron country on the shorelands of Lake Superior.

Meanwhile a wind resource that could power the upper midwest is neglected.  Mining jobs that leave a devestated ecosystem and layed off miners at the end with destitite families...or good jobs building out clean renewable wind energy that continue on into the forseeable future?

Another choice that will be made by industry lobbyists instead of we the people.  Unless the grass roots and net roots can combine to overcome the cold cash of the lobbyists.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Instead of consuming natural gas, those tar sands ought to be made into natural gas under ground.  No mining mess or refining sludge or water contamination.

Transportation fueled by clean wind energy is the answer, not gas guzzling fueled by massive contamination and massive release of GHG.

But once again lobbyists will have their way.  Maybe a campaign across the board against lobbying is needed.  with all grassroots orgs joining in.

On a related energy note:  the daily show featured anti-cape wind activists who have probably posted here at Gristmill?  The program airs today in reruns.  Starting in 2 minutes actually.  The main featured activist surely sounds like one of the posters here.  see if you agree.  Hehehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog