NEWSBYJAMIE FRIEDLAND

Late last month, we reported on a victory in the Keystone XL fight.  Yet we have not put this issue to rest.

Keystone XL is the proposed multibillion-dollar pipeline that would carry the world’s dirtiest type of oil from strip mines in Canada to refineries in Texas.  It would travel directly across America’s heartland and over the Ogallala aquifer, one of the nation’s most important sources of clean drinking water.  One oil pipeline spill, which as regular readers know is not at all uncommon, would devastate the Midwest.  And for what?  A Department of Energy study found that this pipeline is not even needed.

The initial environmental review of the project was grossly inadequate.  So Change.org members like you joined environmental activists around the county in demanding a more thorough review of the environmental dangers posed by this massive and risky pipeline.  At the end of March, the Department of State agreed to take another look.

“A Year of Change.”  That’s not a new Obama campaign slogan, it’s the title of a 20-minute film recently released by BP chronicling the catastrophe that now bears the company’s name.

It’s been twelve months since the blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig, and only seven months since the Macondo oil well was finally killed.  Yet today, our beaches and coastlines are as vulnerable as they were before.  “Change” is a laughably euphemistic word to define what has occurred in the last year:

Dozens of oil spill response bills were introduced in Congress, but not a single piece of relevant legislation was passed.  Oil company liability for spills is still capped at the preposterously low $75 million.

After massive shortcomings and compromising relationships with the oil industry were revealed at the federal agency responsible for overseeing offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service was given a new name and a new director.  Yet it remains underfunded, understaffed, and is still years away from establishing and enforcing a stronger, effective regulatory system.

The clean air in Longview, Washington will remain that way, at least for now.  Millennium Bulk Terminals, a subsidiary of Australian coal company Ambre Energy, withdrew its permit application to build the United States’ first West Coast coal export terminal last week.

More than 300 Change.org activists signed a petition to complement the efforts of environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and concerned local citizens to fight the project.  EarthJustice represented those groups in a legal appeal of the terminal’s project permit.

Even as advertised, the proposed project was a bad deal for Longview residents, but it turns out that Millennium Bulk Terminals had more sinister intentions than they we willing to let on.

Time and again, Millennium assured residents and government officials that the facility would export to China only 5.7 million tons of coal per year – approximately as much coal as the entire state of Washington burns.  That was already enough to raise serious concerns about the health risks of coal dust and significant traffic while waiting for coal trains to traverse the area.

Regular readers will recall that BP was not the only foreign oil company to defile American waters in 2010.  Last July, a pipeline operated by the Canadian company Enbridge Inc. ruptured in Michigan, dumping 843,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River.  The spill befouled a 30-mile stretch of the river and its floodplain, sickening hundreds of people and leaving a swath of dead fish, animals, and vegetation in its path.

Autumn Smith is the 26-year-old oil spill victim-turned-activist who spearheaded a petition here on Change.org when she discovered that Enbridge’s cleanup effort was not proceeding as advertised.  She showed up to a public forum with a bottle of oil collected from an allegedly cleaned section of the river.  She was joined that evening by John Bolenbaugh, another Battle Creek native working on the oil spill cleanup, who was fired for speaking out when he witnessed cleanup crews literally hiding oil instead of cleaning it up.

Now, eight months after the spill, we checked in with Smith, and the situation has not improved.  That stretch of the Kalamazoo River will remain closed at least until next fall.  Residents continue to sponsor community meetings, but few if any public officials attend anymore.  Last fall, according to Smith, the Calhoun County Commission was supposed to establish an Oil Task Force, but that initiative was delayed by the midterm elections and the new commission has done nothing.  On the more local level, the City of Battle Creek has been left out what official meetings have taken place and has reportedly been told its concerns are being addressed by the as of yet nonexistent county task force.

Before there was busting unions, there was blocking high-speed rail.  This is how new Republican governors are trying to appease their conservative base. Governors Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) and John Kasich (R-Ohio) together rejected $1.2 billion in federal grants for high-speed rail at the beginning of their terms.

Now, Governor Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is attempting to follow suit on a much larger scale.  Two weeks ago, he rejected $2.4 billion to build America’s first true high-speed rail line between Tampa and Orlando. There’s just one problem with his plan: Floridians want this train. Modern infrastructure stimulates local economies, and with the federal government footing the bill, to many residents, this project seems like just what the area needs.

High-speed rail was not always controversial.  It has become a partisan touchstone only recently.  So even in this political climate, it is no surprise to see a bipartisan pair of Florida state senators fighting back against Gov. Scott.

It’s one of those immutable laws of American politics: When oil prices go up, lawmakers inevitably try to get their hands on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Ans as oil prices rise inexorably back near $100 per barrel, Big Oil’s favorite senator, Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), is at it again.

Oil companies and their Congressional allies seem willing to push any excuse to defile the nation’s largest and most controversial wildlife refuge. In the past, justifications have focused on alleged energy security and at best minutely lower gasoline prices.  This year, the country is most concerned about jobs and America’s international competitiveness has been challenged, so Murkowski predictably explains that drilling in ANWR is all about job creation and global competition.  New spin on the same old plans.

As global warming thaws the Arctic, natural resources there are becoming more economically recoverable.  The Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Commission recommended conducting research to determine if and how Arctic drilling can be conducted safely. This makes sense, because Arctic conditions add yet another layer of complexity and risk to both drilling and potential (inevitable?) oil spill containment and cleanup efforts.

When Texans are protesting an oil pipeline, you know something is wrong.  Here at Change.org, we’ve been covering the ongoing controversy surrounding the proposed Keystone XL pipeline: the 1,700-mile project to pump extra-polluting heavy tar sands from massive mines in the boreal forest of Alberta, Canada across the entire American heartland to refineries on the Texan Gulf Coast.

TransCanada, the company pursuing this project, is aggressively bullying landowners into allowing the 3-ft diameter pipeline through their property. As you might expect, they have run into resistance in every state they want to cross, and Texans in particular are putting up a fight.

Concerned neighbors who might otherwise be Tea Party activists are becoming eco-activists, organizing their neighbors, distributing flyers, and holding meetings with environmental groups such as the Sierra Club.  Environmental organizers have been surprised by their reception in East Texas, where local support has blossomed from unexpected meeting attendance to letter-writing campaigns and community resistance councils.

“FACES of Coal” (Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security) is an astroturf coal front group created to try to humanize the coal lobby.

And on the heels of a major environmental victory with EPA vetoing what would have been Appalachia's largest mountaintop removal mine, FACES of Coal has rolled out a new advertising push in airports in the Washington, DC area.  But there is something strange about these FACES ads: There are no faces.

Why would FACES opt for ads of ominous chain link fences instead of showing members of the “alliance of people from all walks of life” that they claim to be?  Well, they seem to be having difficulty tracking those people down, or at least snapping their pictures. As it turns out, it is fitting that their logo features just silhouettes, not real people.

Activists in Washington State are attempting to repel a threat from outside their borders – from Montana, to be specific. Late last month, Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D-Mont.) left “Big Sky Country” to visit Longview, Washington and promote the construction of a new coal export facility there, on the Pacific coast.  Why?  So that coal companies can sell Montanan coal to the Chinese.  Proponents of the project insist that helping Montana send coal to China is somehow a boon for Washington State.  Such a claim warrants further investigation.

The export facility proposed by Millennium Bulk Logistics will create 71 permanent jobs in Longview, Washington.  The site’s current tenant, Chinook Ventures, already employs about 50 people.  So let’s put 21 new jobs in the “pro” category (plus 120 temporary construction jobs).  That’s about it on the plus side.

Now let’s examine the negatives.

2010 was the Year of the Oil Spill, and not just because of BP’s Deepwater Horizon fiasco. Aside from numerous other major domestic and international spills, last July, one of the world’s largest oil pipeline systems defiled southwest Michigan’s Kalamazoo River with nearly a million gallons of oil.  The pipeline is operated by the Canadian oil company Enbridge Inc., and this system is a primary artery for of the grossly polluting Alberta tar sands previously covered here at Change.org.

Autumn Smith, 26, is an oil spill victim-turned-activist. In the wake of the devastating spill, she had been forced to evacuate her home. Enbridge insisted that she pay for her hotel room now and claimed it would reimburse her later, but she was unemployed and could not afford this added upfront expense. That's what turned her to the streets, protesting in August outside the press conferences held in the spill's aftermath.

In the wake of this tragedy, Smith is trying to tell her story to make the oil company respect its victims and clean up their mess.  It’s a sadly familiar tale.