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Nasheed beaten up in Male’ – urgent appeal by Maldivian Democratic Party
Urgent Appeal by Maldivian Democratic Party
We strongly condemn the violent attack by the Maldivian Police
Service on President Nasheed and senior officials of the MDP.
President Nasheed is being beaten up as of now in an ongoing peaceful protest in the capital Male’. Mariya Didi and Reeko Moosa
and several other MPs have been beaten up and arrested.
We urgently appeal to the international community to assist us
in securing their release and to call upon the government of Dr.
Mohamed Waheed Hassan to halt beating up of unarmed and peaceful
protesters.
ENDS
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Keystone XL benefits from taxpayer subsidies
Sen. Mitch McConnell claimed recently that the Keystone XL Pipeline “doesn’t require a penny of our taxpayer money all the president has to do is approve it.” But our research reveals many places that the pipeline project benefits from many taxpayer subsidies.
The refineries that are linked to the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline as committed shippers will receive between $1 billion and $1.8 billion in tax breaks. They are paid specifically for investing in equipment to process the heavy sour oil the pipeline promises to deliver.
The largest of these refineries, Motiva, is half owned by Saudi Refining Inc., and will receive between $680,000 and $1.1 billion in U.S. taxpayer support.
Keystone XL, like all oil industry projects, is enabled by substantial taxpayer subsidies. Three of the refineries that are planning to process the pipeline’s oil have invested in special equipment to handle the extra heavy tar sands oil. According to our conservative estimates, the U.S. taxpayer is subsidizing these investments to the tune of $1.0-1.8 billion. Here’s how it works.
Tar sands oil is not like most other crude oil. It is a semi-solid bituminous sludge that has to be diluted with much lighter oil in order to be transported by pipeline. Once it arrives at a refinery, the diluent is removed and the bitumen is refined into petroleum products using special equipment. The equipment required includes cokers and hydrocrackers.
In anticipation of the Keystone XL pipeline, three refineries in Port Arthur, Texas have added this equipment in order to be able to profitably process the bitumen. Their goal is to maximize their production of high value fuels such as gasoline and diesel rather than be left with less valuable fuels such as residual oil (for shipping and industrial burners) and Petroleum Coke, a coal like substance that is burned in aluminum smelters and the like. Heavy oil yields high proportions of these less valuable fuels if you do not have the specific equipment to increase the higher value yield.
Special tax rules apply to these investments that are unique to the refining industry. Title 179C of the tax code allows the refining companies to deduct the value of these investments from their tax returns at a highly accelerated rate. Rather than spread the expense over the life time of the equipment, say 20-30 years, the refiners are allowed to expense (i.e., deduct from their taxable income) 50% in the first year and expense the rest through the next 9 years. This is tantamount to a massive interest free loan from the taxpayer to big oil refiners, making it cheaper for them to process a particularly dirty form of foreign oil. In the case of the three Port Arthur refineries preparing to process Keystone XL crude, we calculate this to cost the taxpayer between $1.0 billion and $1.8 billion.
In the case of the Valero Port Arthur refinery’s hydrocracker project, the company has described the project to investors as one that will enable the refinery to process Canadian heavy oil into diesel and jet fuel for the export market. See below.
Does that look like the ‘national interest’ to you?
Of the three refineries involved, two of them, Valero Port Arthur and Total Port Arthur made these investments explicitly to process Canadian heavy oil that would be delivered by Keystone XL. Both companies are committed shippers on the pipeline meaning they have signed contracts committing them to a specific proportion of the pipeline’s capacity.
The other refinery, Motiva Port Arthur, jointly owned by Shell and Saudi Aramco, is expected to take some Keystone XL oil but it is also expected to use the new equipment to process large quantities of heavy sour oil imported from Saudi Arabia.
When the work finishes later this year, this refinery will become the largest in the United States. It will have the capacity to process up to 325,000 barrels per day of heavy sour oil. The United States is not a significant producer of heavy sour oil. Countries that are expected to increase their production of this difficult-to-process crude include Canada (tar sands), Venezuela, Colombia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait among others. So the subsidy received by this refinery is directly to enable the processing of a particularly dirty form of oil that is not produced in America.
Hmm, what was it pipeline proponents, including the owners of these refineries, were saying about reducing dependence on oil from hostile and unstable countries?
The special tax treatment of refinery investments that allows the 50% accelerated depreciation was introduced in the 2005 Energy Policy Act and was targeted at refinery investments that expand the capacity of the refinery. However, in August 2011, the act was amended specifically to extend the tax break to refinery investments that enable the refinery to process tar sands oil or enable an increase in capacity to refine tar sands oil if the new equipment is commissioned between 2008 and 2014. All of these projects qualify.
We have calculated the value to these three companies of this accelerated depreciation for the investments listed in the table below. These investments were made specifically to process heavy sour oil in refineries closest to the terminus of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline and owned by companies who are known committed shippers on the pipeline.
Finally, all the refineries that will receive Keystone XL tar sands crude operate are in a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ), which gives tax benefits to companies that use imported components to manufacture items within the United States (FTZ Act – 19 USC 81a-81u). Usually, refineries importing oil tax-free will still pay taxes when selling the refined products into the U.S. market. By both importing into and exporting from foreign trade zones the companies will avoid paying tax on the product sales. In other words, it’s a great deal for the oil industry, and a raw deal for the taxpayer.
Nobody in the oil industry can claim that Keystone XL, or any other oil and gas project, is free of taxpayer support. The subsidies we have revealed here are just a few examples among many forms of fiscal support to Keystone XL and the tar sands industry. Further, the full costs of our oil addiction in terms of health, environment and security are never included in an official analysis of these projects.
The public has the right to both know how our money supports Big Oil and see a thorough evaluation of any proposal the oil industry has for expanding its infrastructure. Such an examination would throw light on the true costs of expanding fossil fuel infrastructure at a time when we need to reduce our dependence on oil, rather than simply trumpeting the short term benefits to companies involved. Now that the project has been stopped, the true cost of Keystone XL is only just coming to light.
For full details of our analysis see here.
Table: Three refinery refit projects intended for processing Keystone XL oil
Project
Company
Investment ($millions)
Value of accelerated depreciation ($millions)
Port Arthur Hydrocracker Project
Valero
1,604
156-273
Port Arthur Coker
Total S.A.
2,200
214-375
Port Arthur Expansion
Motiva Enterprises (Shell and Saudi Aramco)
7,000
680-1,192
Total
10,804
1,050-1,840
Statement by British MP David Amess, Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group re: Coup in Maldives
David Amess MP, Chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group to the Maldives, has issued the following statement on behalf of the group.
I was shocked and saddened to learn of the coup d’état inthe Maldives resulting in the removal of President Nasheed. When he took office in November 2008, it was as the first democratically elected President of the Maldives ever. He faced enormous challenges in underpinning democratic rule in the Maldives. There can be little doubt that, during his time in office, he worked tirelessly to improve the living conditions and general welfare of the Maldivian people.
It is tragic that, 20 months before the next Presidential elections were due; he has been forced from office under duress. During his time as President he had done all he possibly could to promote the Maldives throughout the international community and without any doubt ”stole the show” at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
There is now concern for his safety and that of his family. I very much hope that the British Government will do all in its power to ensure that he is not harmed in any way.
Statement by Hon. David Amess, Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group
The Hidden Danger of the Gas Boom
The hype surrounding the US gas industry continues to grow as America moves ever closer to its cherished dream of energy independence.
Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that “the U.S. is the closest it has been in almost 20 years to achieving energy self-sufficiency, a goal the nation has been pursuing since the 1973 Arab oil embargo triggered a recession and led to lines at gasoline stations.”
On the surface, at least, America’s recent gas revolution is great news for people worried about energy security and jobs. Domestic oil output is said to be the highest in eight years.
And as Bloomberg reports “The U.S. is producing so much natural gas that, where the government warned four years ago of a critical need to boost imports, it now may approve an export terminal.”
So America is moving from an importer to having so much gas it has a gas glut. Bloomberg reports that so great is the gas boom that it could even become the world’s top energy producer by 2020.
Other media outlets are full of stories of even more unexplored basins that could have huge gas reserves too.
As any regular reader of this blog will know the expansion in gas production isn’t without a hugely controversial downside – fracking – which has been shown to cause widespread water contamination and ever minor earthquakes.
Ironically Bloomberg points out that gas glut is forcing down the gas price which is also making the use of alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and nuclear power less attractive. Still, says Bloomberg, “those concerns probably won’t be enough to outweigh the benefits of greater energy independence.”
But there is another major downside about gas that the oil industry doesn’t want you to know about. One which has major ramifications for climate change.
Proponents of natural gas have long argued it is a “clean” fossil fuel, cleaner than oil and a great transition fuel that bridges our addiction to fossil fuels as we head towards renewable energy sources.
But gas may not be as clean as the industry would like you to believe, due to high leakage of methane.
As Nature reported yesterday: “When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.”
Nature reports that researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder, estimate that gas producers in an area known as the Denver-Julesburg Basin are losing about 4% of their gas to the atmosphere and this does not include potential losses in the pipeline and distribution system, which could also be significant.
This is more than double official estimates by the industry. As Nature argued “And because methane is some 25 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, releases of that magnitude could effectively offset the environmental edge that natural gas is said to enjoy over other fossil fuels.”
“If we want natural gas to be the cleanest fossil fuel source, methane emissions have to be reduced,” argues Gabrielle Pétron, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA and at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and first author on the study, currently in press at the Journal of Geophysical Research. “I think we seriously need to look at natural gas operations on the national scale.”
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Shipping causes 'chronic stress' to whales
First evidence of physical harm of propellor noise on the animals
Shipping noise causes chronic stress to whales, scientists have shown for the first time, after using the halt in marine traffic after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to conduct a unique experiment.
The effect on whales of propellor noise, military sonar and explosions set off in the search for oil and gas is highly controversial. Environmental campaigners claim the noise interferes with the singing of whales, or even kills the animals, and are currently suing the US government over the navy's use of sonar.
The research, published on Wednesday, provides the first evidence of physical harm, according to Rosalind Rolland, a researcher at the New England Aquarium, in Boston, US.
"We showed whales occupying oceans with high levels of ship noise have a chronic stress response," said Rolland, who led the study. "We knew whales changed the frequency of their calls to adapt to the ship noise, but this work shows it is not merely an annoyance – it is having a physical effect."
She had not originally set out to study the effect of noise on the animals. The hormone data was part of a study of the whales' health and reproduction but Rolland realised many years later it could be combined with data on noise levels from shipping to draw conclusions about how the whales are being affected.
Whales use sound as their primary sense, just as humans use sight, and their singing enables them to find food, mates and to navigate. They are believed to be able to communicate over hundreds of kilometres. But the frequencies they use largely overlap with the frequencies generated by human activities in the oceans, which have increased tenfold in volume since the 1960s, disrupting their ability to communicate.
A separate study published in January showed the singing of humpback whales was disrupted by sonar noise caused over 200km away while measuring fish stocks.
Rolland was at sea in the Bay of Fundy on 11 September 2001: "There was a dramatic reduction in ship traffic that day. It was like being on the primal ocean." The noise levels from shipping fell by half, as transport was shut down in response the terror attacks. Rolland's team also collected faecal balls from the whales, which float, and analysed the levels of stress hormones present. They found a "highly significant" decrease in stress hormones coincided with the drop in shipping noise.
"Instant responses to stress – like running away from a tiger – can be life-saving," said Rolland. "But if it becomes chronic, it causes profound depression of the immune system, making them vulnerable to disease, and it depresses reproduction."
The northern right whales Rolland studied are one of the most endangered whales, with 475 in the world and a population growing at just 1% a year. In contrast, the southern right whale numbers 8-10,000 and a growth rate of 7-8% a year, as they recover from the decimation of whaling. Rolland dubbed the northern right whale "the urban whale" in a book she co-authored, because its territory is close to the busy eastern seaboard of North America. She said damage caused by noise is very likely to be a factor in the population's slow recovery, and may also affect other whales. Beaked whales, which Rolland is now studying, are particularly sensitive to sonar she said, and are frequently the species involved in mass beachings.
"The positive aspect to this particular issue is that it is a solvable problem," Rolland said. The noise is largely down to engine inefficiencies, she said, which is possible to remedy and doing so would reduce fuel consumption in return for upfront investment. The International Maritime Organisation and the European Union are both investigating how to reduce marine noise. But with 50,000 large ships travelling the oceans on any given day and a ship lifespan of about three decades, changing the fleet will not occur overnight.
Danny Groves, at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, said: "Not enough is being done to reduce noise in our oceans Very little is known about its long-term effects and more research is needed.
"Amazingly, there are currently no accepted international standards regarding noise pollution in our seas."
Asked how the whale faecal balls were found, Rolland said: "We find the pellets opportunistically, but we do also use trained scent-detection dogs. They are phenomenal. They work off the bow and can detect the scent up to 1km away."
Damian Carringtonguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
