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By Joseph Romm

John McCain’s new coziness with Big Oil is in many respects just a replay of his old coziness with Charles Keating. In both cases, money and access bought influence. Let’s start with oil.

Last month, Time reported that McCain tapped a “prominent Washington lobbyist,” William E. Timmons, Sr., to run his transition, should he win the election. Who does Timmons and Company lobby for? As of this year, they are getting about $100,000 a quarter from the American Petroleum Institute (API).

More than 20 top McCain advisers and fundraisers have lobbied for Big Oil, including Charlie Black, Senior Political Adviser (whose clients include Occidental, Yukos Oil, Chinese National Off-Shore Oil Corp.) and Wayne Berman, National Finance Co-Chairman (Hess, Chevron, Texaco, API).

What does the access get Big Oil? Let’s see. McCain has almost completely walked away from the climate issue. He picked Big Oil’s dream VP, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. And, of course, back in July, as the Washington Post headline blared, “Industry Gushed Money After Reversal on Drilling“:

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month — three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban — compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

That is a lot of quid for a lot of quo, a lot of cash for trashing his image as an environmentalist or as a reforming maverick. Of course, we’ve seen that the environmental image was always fictional.

Yet, the image of McCain as someone who fights against lobbyists, rather than cozies up to them, is also fictional, as the sordid story of the Keating Five (excerpted below) makes clear. The past is indeed prologue:

Keating was the chair of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California, and he “ultimately served five years in prison for his corrupt mismanagement of Lincoln.” Lincoln had become “burdened with bad debt resulting from its past aggressiveness, and by early 1986, its investment practices were being investigated and audited” by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board over whether it had violated rules limiting certain kinds of risky, direct investments. [Hmm. That certainly sounds familiar.] “Lincoln had directed FDIC-insured accounts into commercial real estate ventures. By the end of 1986, the FHLBB had found that Lincoln had $135 million in unreported losses and had surpassed the regulated direct investments limit by $600 million.”

The core allegation of the Keating Five affair is that Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators, and he called on those Senators to help him resist regulators. The regulators backed off, to later disastrous consequences.

In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee found that McCain had exercised “poor judgment” for meeting with federal regulators on Keating’s behalf. Other members of the Keating Five were found to have acted improperly. Many independent observers thought all five got off lightly, especially McCain, who had far closer ties to Keating than the others:

Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, which had initially demanded the investigation, thought the treatment of the senators far too lenient, and said, “The U.S. Senate remains on the auction block to the Charles Keatings of the world.” Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, called it a “whitewash.” Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said it was a classic case of the government trying to investigate itself, labelling the Senate Ethics Committee “shameless” for having “let four of the infamous Keating Five off with a wrist tap.” Margaret Carlson of Time suspected the committee had timed its first report to coincide with the run-up to the Gulf War, minimizing its news impact. One of the San Francisco bank regulators felt that McCain had gotten off too lightly, saying that Keating’s business involvement with Cindy McCain was an obvious conflict of interest.

McCain’s incredibly close ties with Keating foreshadow his incredibly close ties with lobbyists today, especially with the oil industry. Consider just how cozy Keating was to McCain:

McCain was the closest socially to Keating of the five senators … Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates. In addition, McCain’s wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating’s expense, sometimes aboard Keating’s jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating’s opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.

So McCain’s unethical behavior today in his campaign, his cozy relationship with lobbyists and industry fat cats whose agenda he pushes, is nothing new.

It is time for everyone, including the media, to stop pushing the myth that McCain is now or has ever been a maverick or a reformer. As Rolling Stone puts it in the best article I’ve seen at connecting the dots of McCain’s entire life, he is nothing but a “Make-Believe Maverick.”

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Reduce Asthma And Breathe Free
Asthma can be a serous and often frightening condition that is typified by a tightening of the chest, wheezing and difficulty breathing.

Asthma is made up of two underlying components: inflammation and constriction. During normal breathing, the bands of muscles that surround the airways are relaxed, and air moves freely. But in people with asthma, the bands of muscle surrounding the airways tighten and air cannot move freely.

Migraines and Hormones – A Natural Approach
It’s estimated that 40 million Americans suffer from chronic headaches. Headaches are one of the leading causes of missed work or school. So why is it that so many of us suffer from such annoying and often debilitating pains in the head? Honestly, there are several reasons.

Some of the most common triggers of migraines are stress, food allergies, caffeine withdrawal, medications, lack of sleep, extreme weather conditions, blood sugar fluctuations, and hormone imbalances.

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Is the Chicago Climate Exchange selling ‘rip-offsets’?

By Joseph Romm

I’m going to (try to) coin a new term here, “rip-offsets,” since I can’t think of a better word for the rip-off offsets the Chicago Climate Exchange is peddling to a gullible public and media.

The Washington Post has a front-page story, “There’s a Gold Mine In Environmental Guilt Carbon-Offset Sales Brisk Despite Financial Crisis,” that echoes articles written a few years ago on the mortgage industry. Sales are way up. Prices are rising. Everybody is jumping in. Oversight all but nonexistent.

Yeah, a few of those pesky “Watchdog groups say offset vendors sometimes do not deliver what they promise,” but for most people it’s just one big party:

At the Chicago Climate Exchange, where offsets are sold like pork bellies or stocks, Sept. 23 was the second-busiest trading day in the four-year history of the market.

Buried at the very end of the article is a description of just how worthless many Chicago Climate Exchange offsets are. The article describes an offset so pathetic, so questionable, that it shocked even me, and I already thought most offset are no better than mortgage-backed securities:

In the western Virginia town of Christiansburg, the operators of a landfill sell carbon offsets tied to a project that captures methane, a powerful greenhouse pollutant, and burn it in a tall orange flare. They’ve made $43,000 on the Chicago Climate Exchange in just a couple of months.

But that project was put in long before the offsets were sold and for a different reason: to keep dangerous gases from accumulating in a capped landfill. So if the offset market dried up completely?

Nothing would change.

The money “is gravy to us right now,” said Alan Cummins, executive director of the regional authority that runs the landfill. Even without it, he said, “we would always continue to flare.”

I was trying to come up with a better word than fraudulent to describe such an “offset,” and “rip-offsets” is what came to mind, since this has got to be the biggest climate rip-off since China crashed the Clean Development Mechanism party with its own brand of fraudulent offsets that don’t offset anything.

People are actually paying the Chicago Climate Exchange tens of thousands of dollars to pay this landfill to keep doing what they would do anyway — and what they are doing anyway isn’t even particularly good for the environment.

Yes, flaring methane is better than emitting it into the environment; methane is 20 times as potent greenhouse gas as the carbon dioxide you get from burning methane. But flaring landfill gas is a pretty lame idea. Heck, this January, an entire new organization, StoptheFlares.org, was founded solely for the purpose of stopping the entire practice worldwide by 2020. The whole point of extracting methane from landfills is to use it to make useful heat or electricity or both. Offsets have so little utility in the real world that if your money isn’t in some tiny way helping to jumpstart the transition to a clean energy economy, then the whole thing is just a joke.

Talk about burying the lede.

What makes this story particularly disturbing to me is that Fahrenthold wrote a front-page story for the Post earlier this year that explained at length just how dubious offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange are. And he coathored a front-page story last year on how dubious other companies’ offsets are, where many climate benefits “are only estimated, extrapolated, hoped-for or nil” or would have happened anyway.

The bottom line: The vast majority of offsets are, at some level, just rip-offsets. Spend your money elsewhere.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

ReGeneration Roadtrip: Can’t fight the tides

By Sarah van Schagen

This is a guest post by my travel partner, Todd Dwyer, head blogger for Dell’s ReGeneration.org.

—–

Four times a day, without fail, New York City’s East River will change directions. It’s been doing that for ages and will continue to do so long after we are gone. The tides are a constant, powerful force, and the folks at Verdant Power are on Roosevelt Island experimenting with a way to draw energy from them without impeding their flow or harming the local wildlife.

The Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project gives Verdant Power the rare opportunity to test turbines that were developed by Dean Corren, their director of technology. Submerged beneath the surface of the river, these turbines turn passively to face the tides the same way a weather vane would. What makes these turbines special is that unlike dams and barrages, they will employ a kinetic hydropower method will have little to no effect on the local ecosystem.

So far, the tests have been very promising. They are drawing power successfully, and in the two years they have been monitoring the project, there has been no evidence of any harm to local fish or birds. While the flow of the tides are strongest and the turbines are getting the bulk of their work done, the fish aren’t even around. They prefer to save their energy for when the tide is weaker. Of course, during that time, the turbines are not turning. Also, the fish there tend to spend their time near the banks of the river, and the turbines are in the depths near the center. In fact, Verdant Power has gathered so much new data about local fish and bird populations that biologists have benefited from the project.

I must admit, a lot of this stuff is over my head, but Jonathan Colby, Verdant Power’s hydrodynamic engineer, knows more than a thing or two about going with the flow. Sarah and I caught up with him on a beautiful afternoon on Roosevelt Island:

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November 22nd, 2008UncategorizedRead More >No Comments

By Grist

This Guardian story was written by reporter Haroon Siddique. Grist is a member of the Guardian’s Environment Network.

—

A unique proposal to protect one of the world’s most biodiverse places from oil drilling is facing a looming deadline without any funding in place.

The Ecuadorian government has said it is prepared to keep hundreds of millions of barrels of heavy crude oil in the ground, but in return it wants the international community to compensate it at the level of $350m ( 202m) a year for a decade.

The deadline - already postponed twice - is in December. While there has been political support from Spain, Germany and Norway, as yet there has been little in the way of hard cash.

The Yasuni national park in Ecuador lies at the intersection of the Amazon, the Andes and the equator and spans almost a million hectares of primary rainforest. It is home to indigenous tribes, who wish to be left in isolation, and an extraordinary array of wildlife and plants, much of it endangered. Avoiding the oil extraction would also prevent the release of an estimated 100m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

Environmentalists believe the innovative proposal has the potential to be a model for how developing countries manage their environments and the global fight against climate change.

Nelson Torres, the Ecuadorian deputy ambassador to the UK, described it as a “third way of management of climate change” and said that it would “lay the groundwork for energy transformation globally”. Anita Rivas, the indigenous mayor of Orellana, where Yasuni is located said: “It’s a brave proposal, a unique proposal.”

The Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) field block lies in the south of Yasuni park, within an area officially designated in 1999 as an “untouchable zone” - a safe haven for those indigenous people who have chosen to live in isolation. The compensation package the Ecuadorian government is demanding is designed to deliver half the income that would accrue if the oil was extracted, over a period equating to the likely lifetime of the field.

The government has shown a greater will than previous administrations to protect indigenous people and the environment. Last week, the nation overwhelmingly passed a constitution that granted Ecuador’s tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans. But the president, Rafael Correa, is faced with the harsh economic reality that 70 percent of the country’s income comes from oil and 38 percent of people in the South American republic live below the poverty line.

In recent years, drilling has been allowed up to the boundaries of the “untouchable zone” but the region has seen little of the economic benefits, with a poverty rate in Orellana far higher than the national average.

A statement from Penti Baihua, a member of the Huaorani tribe, said oil companies had contaminated water, soil and air, scared away animals, and brought diseases that had made members of their families ill and even killed them.

“The oil must stay in the ground in the ITT and the [untouchable] zone because it is our home. If the oil companies destroy all of the Yasuni, where will we live?” he said.

There is widespread support for drilling to be blocked in the ITT but not everyone agrees with the government’s method. The meeting in London was organised by the Yasuni Green Gold campaign to launch its book of the same name which highlights the park’s vast array of plants and animals, believed to have resulted because the area did not freeze over during the last ice age.

The campaign director and joint author of the book, Ginés Haro Pastor, emphasised that while he supported financial help for Ecuador’s development he felt it should be separated from the issue of the Yasuni.

Yasuni Green Gold wants an unconditional commitment from the government not to drill oil in the untouchable zone regardless of financial pledges and wants it to scrap the idea of a deadline altogether.

Environmental campaigner Tony Juniper, formerly executive director of Friends of the Earth, is enthusiastic about the concept of developing countries being compensated for protecting the environment. He believes taxes, including a small duty on foreign currency trades, could raise the tens of billions of pounds needed to replicate the Ecuadorian scheme around the world.

But, he added, there were issues that needed to be ironed out, including whether countries should be able to seek compensation in respect of rainforest they had previously designated as protected, and whether wealthy nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia should be able to claim cash for not extracting oil.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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