WHO WANTS TO KILL THE ELECTRIC CAR...AGAIN?

HUFFINGTON POST HEADLINE.

"The Kochs Are Plotting A Multimillion-Dollar Assault On Electric Vehicles

A new group could spend $10 million a year on the campaign.

 02/18/2016 06:12 pm ET | Updated 4 days ago

30 K

• Peter StoneFreelance Reporter

DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR

Billionaires Charles and David Koch, prominent donors to conservative causes, are now looking to put their money behind an advocacy group that would promote petroleum-based transportation fuel and fight government subsidies for electric cars, sources say. 

The oil and gas industry may have thought it had killed the electric car, but sales -- boosted by generous government subsidies -- rose dramatically between 2010 and 2014, and energy giants are worried the thing may have come back to life. 

Time to kill it again. 

A new group that's being cobbled together with fossil fuel backing hopes to spend about $10 million dollars per year to boost petroleum-based transportation fuels and attack government subsidies for electric vehicles, according to refining industry sources familiar with the plan. A Koch Industries board member and a veteran Washington energy lobbyist are working quietly to fund and launch the new advocacy outfit.

Koch Industries, the nation's second-largest privately held corporation, is an energy and industrial conglomerate with $115 billion in annual revenues that is controlled by the multibillionaire brothers -- and prolific conservative donors -- Charles and David Koch. James Mahoney, a confidante of the brothers and member of their company's board, has teamed up with lobbyist Charlie Drevna, who until last year helmed the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, for preliminary talks with several energy giants about funding the new pro-petroleum fuels group.

Late last year, Mahoney and Drevna flew into San Antonio to explain the need for a new group to executives at two Texas refining giants, Valero Energy and Tesoro Corp. Then, in late January, Mahoney moderated a seminar on “Changing the Energy Narrative” at the brothers' twice-a-year retreat for mega-donors in California. The panel drew a mix of CEOs from big energy companies and other wealthy attendees who, in conjunction with the Koch brothers, bankroll numerous conservative advocacy groups. And last month, Mahoney and Drevna had further conversations with Koch executives about the new project, sources say.

Neither Mahoney nor Drevna returned multiple calls seeking comment about the new group. A Koch spokesman also didn't respond to a request for comment.

It’s not clear when the still-unnamed group will be launched, but energy industry sources predict it’s likely to be up and running by this spring or summer, and that Koch Industries -- or a Koch foundation or allied nonprofit -- will be the lead financier.

“The fact that Jim Mahoney is leading the effort appears to indicate that this is being driven by the business side of Koch,” rather than the political operation that helps oversee the brothers' conservative advocacy empire, said one refining industry source familiar with the early plans for the new group.

Once launched, the new group is expected to use paid and earned media to push its pro-petroleum transportation messages, and do research to bolster the cause.

“I think they (are) approaching all the major independent refiners,” added a second industry source, who requested anonymity because he had not been authorized to speak about the private discussions. The group’s broad mission will be to “make the public aware of all the benefits of petroleum-based transportation fuels,” he explained, adding that “the current administration has a bias toward phasing out” these fuels.

The source also stressed that the new initiative is partly attributable to “electric vehicles and the subsidies for them." 

"They’re worried about state and community subsidies," he added. "In 20 years, electric vehicles could have a substantial foothold in the U.S. market.”

The fledgling Mahoney and Drevna efforts seem to signal an expansion of Koch-backed drives against subsidies and tax breaks for alternative fuels to the transportation sector, at a time when support may be on the rise in Washington and some states for boosting electric vehicles.

Industry analysts and conservatives familiar with Koch world say the new initiative seems to fit the playbook that advocacy outfits backed by the Koch network have deployed in recent years to fight solar and wind power, battles that are fueled by ideology mixed with bottom line concerns.

“The Kochs have invested heavily in a pugnacious defense of fossil fuel consumption,” said one conservative energy analyst. “They’ve done this in the electricity sector, and as the debate shifts to transportation they’re behaving true to form.”

Other energy analysts point out that electric vehicle usage is likely to accelerate before long, which could catch a number of energy companies off guard.

“Electric vehicle adoption started slowly, but it certainly is going to follow an exponential growth trajectory,” said Varun Sivaram, an energy and environment fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Once electric vehicle adoption hits a critical mass, I think it will take refiners, petroleum producers and automakers by surprise.”

More broadly, some veteran energy lobbyists note that attacks on electric vehicle subsidies could backfire.

"Producers and refiners need to be careful in going after clean energy subsidies and incentives -- unless they're being paid for by the petroleum industry," said Don Duncan, a former top lobbyist for ConocoPhillips (which has now split in two). Duncan added that attacks on clean energy subsidies potentially “could again refocus the debate on subsidies and incentives enjoyed by producers and refiners."

Electric vehicles make up just 1 percent of the U.S. market, but some analysts see them rising to as much as 5 percent by 2025. Much of the impetus for boosting electric vehicles to curb climate change is coming from the government in the form of tax breaks and subsidies, and that’s a key reason why Koch and some refining industry allies are riled up.

Not long after the Obama administration took office, it set an ambitious goal of having 1 million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by last year. But only some 400,000 have reportedly been sold in the U.S. to date. In a new effort to spur the electric car and driverless car markets, Obama early this month called for a $10-a-barrel oil tax, a proposal that has little chance of passing Congress.

For Koch and other large refiners, the impact of a growing electric vehicle market could be significant down the road. Koch Industries' refining, pipeline and exploration operations contribute a healthy chunk of its $115 billion in annual revenues.

In their early forays to find financial backers, Mahoney and Drevna have turned to some old allies. Koch Industries has teamed up with Valero and Tesoro before. In 2010, Valero and Tesoro were the leading donors behind a multimillion-dollar California ballot initiative that was aimed at killing new state standards to reduce carbon emissions. Koch was also a big donor to the ballot campaign, which was defeated by environmental groups and other liberal interests.

The new group’s formation comes in the wake of other discussions in Koch circles, going back to 2013, about building a stronger pro-fossil-fuels message. At a donor retreat in mid-2013, discussions were held about the need to do more to bolster traditional fuels, according to an April 2014 email that Koch operative and fundraising honcho Kevin Gentry sent to scores of donors.

In that email, Gentry alluded to the importance of a new initiative that would “drive the national narrative around energy and the tremendous benefits of reliable affordable energy for all Americans, especially the less fortunate.” Gentry indicated that the energy initiative would be mounted by Freedom Partners, the fundraising hub for the Koch donor network which officially hosts the semiannual donor retreats.

To be sure, the Koch brothers and their network allies have long backed several nonprofit groups that have spent millions of dollars to fight alternative energy, notably wind and solar power projects, and poke holes in climate change science and regulations. The Koch brothers have repeatedly voiced skepticism that fossil fuel use contributes to global warming, and have long maintained that subsidies and tax breaks for alternative energy don't fit with their free-market libertarian ideology. 

In a twist, Koch interests held talks more than a year ago with Securing America’s Future Energy, a group focused on reducing American dependence on foreign oil, about making a sizable investment, say two sources familiar with those talks.

SAFE, which was launched in 2006 with major funding from FedEx CEO Fred Smith, never received any Koch money, a spokesperson said.

The group seemed an odd choice for a Koch investment: One of its key priorities is promoting alternative transportation, including electric vehicles.

While the full dimensions of the Mahoney-Drevna initiative aren’t clear, some sources believe there could be some overlap with other advocacy outfits backed by the Koch donor network. “The new organization may be doing work that’s now being done by the Institute for Energy Research,” a Koch-backed think tank, according to one source.

Although IER in recent years has issued several statements and papers attacking electric vehicle subsidies as part of a broad pro-fossil-fuels agenda, the new initiative is expected to expand the focus on electric vehicles and sell its message to a bigger audience through ads to generate more political backing.

Serendipitously, Drevna became a “distinguished senior fellow” at IER last May, after he left his perch running the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. The month after Drevna came aboard, the think tank posted a new paper attacking subsidies for a leading player in the electric car market: Elon Musk's Tesla Motors.

MORE:

 Politics, Charles Koch, David Koch, "

STARVING SYRIAN CHILDREN TO DEATH! STOP THIS CRIME!

The Great Debate

The cheap, brutally effective medieval tactic shaping the Syrian civil war

By Annia Ciezadlo

 

February 10, 2016

Tags:

 BASHAR AL-ASSAD | SIEGES | STARVATION | SYRIA | UNITED NATIONS

A Syrian girl waits to depart Madaya with her family, whose members say they have received permission from the Syrian government to leave the besieged town, after an aid convoy entered Madaya, Syria January 11, 2016.  REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

On Feb. 3, the United Nations suspended talks between the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and representatives of the Syrian opposition. The Geneva talks, which were aimed at ending the five-year-old civil war, had bogged down in distrust and regional politics before they even got underway.

The UN mediator, Staffan de Mistura, hinted that the initial round of discussions collapsed because the Syrian regime refused to lift the sieges that are slowly starving hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Assad’s regime has been using starvation as a weapon — technically a war crime, when used against civilians — for the past four years.

As the war has progressed, various rebel factions, like Islamic State and Nusra Front, have also adopted the strategy. But the vast majority of the people under siege in Syria are being starved by their own government. Today, up to a million people are being slowly and deliberately starved to death in the heart of the Fertile Crescent, many of them a stone’s throw away from grain silos full of wheat.

The Syrian opposition demanded, before participating in talks, that Assad’s regime allow food and medicine into rebel-held areas. De Mistura proposed that the talks resume by Feb. 25, once the foreign powers that back the different sides can exert pressure on their allies to make political concessions.

Assad could lift the government-imposed sieges with a wave of his hand. But his regime has been loath to give up this horrific tactic for one main reason: it works. The regime realized early in the war that instead of waging costly street battles to retake territory, it is cheaper and easier to surround an opposition-held area and starve its residents into submission.

Assad won’t abandon the sieges unless he comes under sustained international pressure. The external powers that are helping to fuel and prolong the war in Syria — Russia and Iran, which support the Assad regime on the one hand, and the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that support the rebels, on the other — must exert pressure on both sides to end the sieges.

The sieges and the resulting humanitarian crisis captured the world’s attention in early January, when Syrian activists began sharing photographs from Madaya, a mountain village close to the Lebanese border. The photos showed starving children with hollow eyes and skin stretched over bulging ribs.

After six months of siege by the Syrian government and its ally, the Lebanese Shi’ite militia Hezbollah, the people of Madaya were forced to eat grass and cats to stay alive. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, at least 46 of the approximately 42,000 people trapped in Madaya are estimated to have died from starvation since December. Madaya is not the first place besieged in Syria, nor is it the only part of the country under siege.

Like the indiscriminate use of barrel bombings in civilian areas, and the use of chemical weapons, the sieges represent yet another failure by the United Nations and the international community to protect Syrian civilians. In the matter of sieges, the UN was particularly craven: a Security Council resolution requires it to maintain a list of areas it considers “under siege,” as opposed to “hard-to-reach.” But UN officials left Madaya and other besieged areas off its official list of areas under siege — even as people there were starving — most likely to placate the Syrian regime, which allows the world body to maintain its base in Damascus.

Four years ago, the Syrian military began slowly restricting food and medical access to Mouadhamiyah, a town in the ring of suburbs around Damascus known as the Ghouta. Because the military imposed the siege gradually — restricting one food item at a time, until supplies of each ran out — people did not initially realize the danger. By the time the siege became total, in November 2012, it was too late to bring in food supplies. At least 16 people starved to death. Mouadhamiyah remains under siege.

Over the next four years, the Syrian military used a strikingly similar progression of restrictions in Eastern Ghouta, in the Yarmouk refugee camp south of Damascus, and in sections of the western city of Homs. This is no accident: Assad’s military has carefully planned and executed each siege, refining its playbook with each one.

The sieges serve a dual purpose: by using civilian deaths as leverage, they gain back rebel-held territory as cheaply as possible. And by making civilians fight for basic survival, the hunger often forces them to abandon any larger hopes or political goals. “They start to question their belief in the revolution, and even if it was worth all this suffering,” said Qusai Zakarya, the nom de guerre of an opposition activist from Mouadhamiyah, when I interviewed him two years ago. “All that they care about is to eat, no matter what the cost will be.”

In each case, the government allows guns and gunmen to infiltrate besieged areas — but not food. The dizzying patchwork of armed groups end up indirectly helping the regime, because they make the living situation worse. The sieges allow armed groups to profit by hoarding food and selling it at inflated prices. Many anti-government militias are guilty of such profiteering, but this warlordism would not be possible without the artificial scarcity imposed by the government’s sieges in the first place.

In early January, a political deal allowed the UN to send convoys of aid to Madaya and two other areas besieged by rebel militias. They delivered 7,800 food parcels to Madaya — enough for 39,000 people, by their numbers, which consider each parcel enough for a family of five to cover basic food needs for a month. But unless the regime permits more deliveries, those supplies will run out soon. When that happens, Madaya — just like all the other besieged parts of Syria — will go back to starvation and bitter cold.

The Syrian regime, which is extremely skilled at managing public perceptions, is counting on that. Sadly, it is right to do so: Assad’s strategy of waiting for the world’s attention to wane has succeeded for years. Two years ago, a picture of thousands of starving civilians waiting for food went viral, and briefly galvanized international attention. The result was a flurry of aid convoys and UN Security Council resolutions; but as soon as the world’s attention stopped, the aid deliveries did too.

The UN and foreign powers can restart the Geneva talks by forcing the Assad regime to end its sieges and allow humanitarian aid without restrictions to all parts of Syria. This won’t happen without sustained international pressure — not just from world leaders, but also the public. Otherwise, we’ll be looking at new photographs of starving children two years from now. The world cannot justify forgetting the starving people of Syria once again.

Hooray! El Nino killed the Blob!

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In the winter of 2013-14, an unusually strong and persistent ridge of atmospheric high pressure emerged in weather maps of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The feature, which was so unrelenting that meteorologists took to calling it the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, weakened winds in the area enough that the normal wind-driven churning of the sea eased. Those winds usually promote upwelling, which brings deep, cool water up toward the surface; instead, the resilient ridge shut down the ocean circulation, leaving a large lens of unusually warm surface water in the northeastern Pacific.

At times, this patch of warm water seeped into the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the coastal waters off Washington, Oregon, and California. In fact, many parts of the northeastern Pacific experienced the greatest sea surface temperature anomalies in the historical record. Scientists and journalists took to calling the patch of warm water “the Blob.” Nicholas Bond, a University of Washington meteorologist and the Washington state’s climatologist, coined the term in a June 2014 newsletter.

As unusually warm surface water sloshed around for months, the grim consequences began to ricochet through the marine food web. Microscopic phytoplankton thrive in cool waters, so the lack of upwelling water meant surface waters became increasingly starved of nutrients. With fewer phytoplankton, fish and other marine life began to suffer. Certain types of fish started avoiding the region altogether, and by 2015 record numbers of starving sea lions and fur seals were found stranded on California’s beaches. Meanwhile, the warm water also began to produce some strange weather in the western United States.

Thanks in part to the strong El Niño in the equatorial Pacific, the Blob has finally broken up. Beginning in November 2015, strong winds blowing south from Alaska began to pick up, and sea surface temperatures in the northeastern Pacific began to cool.

Data collected by the U.S. Navy’s WindSAT instrument on the Coriolis satellite and the AMSR2 instrument on Japan’s GCOM-W satellite bear this out. The maps above show sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific in July 2015 (top) and January 2016 (bottom). The maps do not depict absolute temperatures; instead, they show how much above (red) or below (blue) water temperatures were compared to the average from 2003 to 2012. The maps were built with data from the Microwave Optimally Interpolated SST product, a NASA-supported effort at Remote Sensing Systems.

In July 2015, temperatures were unusually warm across a large swath from the Gulf of Alaska to the California coast. By January 2016, more seasonable temperatures had returned. The development came as no surprise to weather watchers. In September 2015, Clifford Mass, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist, explained in his blog that El Niño generally brings lower-than-normal sea surface pressures to the eastern Pacific—the opposite of the systems that sustained the blob. By mid-December 2015, Mass declared that the blobwas dead.

Remnants of the warm water patch still persist. “There are significant temperature anomalies extending down to a depth of about 300 meters. So while the weather patterns the past few months have not been that favorable to warming, it will take a while for all of the accumulated heat to go away,” explained Bond. That means impacts on marine life and on weather in the Pacific Northwest could linger, though Bond does not think the blob will return in the near term.

• References and Further Reading

• Alaska Public Media (2016, January 11) ‘The Blob’…on winter vacation or gone for good? Accessed February 12, 2016.
• Cliff Mass Weather Blog (2015, September 2) Godzilla El Nino Versus The BLOB: Who Will Win? Accessed February 12, 2016.
• Cliff Mass Weather Blog (2015, December 17) Dead Blob. Accessed February 12, 2016.
• Hakai (2016, February 4) Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of the Pacific. Accessed February 12, 2016.
• Marine Mammal Center (2015, November 19) Unusual Ocean Conditions Continue to Cause Record Strandings.Accessed February 12, 2016.
• NOAA (2014, September) Unusual North Pacific warmth jostles marine food chain. Accessed February 12, 2016.
• NOAA Fisheries (2015, December 10) November Takes a Bite Out of ‘the Blob’. Accessed February 12, 2016.
• NASA Earth Observatory (2015, April 18) Warm Water and Strange Weather May Be Connected. Accessed February 12, 2016.
• The Star (2016, January 1) Pacific ‘blob’ breaking up, but that may not be good news. Accessed February 12, 2016.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using microwave and infrared multi-sensor SST data from Remote Sensing Systems. Caption by Adam Voiland.

Instrument(s): 

Terra - MODIS

GCOM-W1 - AMSR-2

The World Humanitarian Peace and Ecology Movement presents:

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Our international website index. 

Freedom with honesty and justice and courage…

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4.= https://www.google.ca/?gws_rd=cr&ei=mKPmUor8O4zxrAGy44BY

5.=  http://www.Youtube.com>

6. = http://www.Greenpeace.org
7.=  http://www.magicleap.com/#/home 

8. = http://www.NASA.GOV</>

9. = http://www.teamsternation.com
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10.=  http://www.Ted.com

11.=  http://ca.yahoo.com/?p=us

12. = http://www.Reuters.com

13.=  http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles

14.=  http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/360-panorama-paris/index-en.html

15.=  http://www.greatwallchina.info/news/index.htm

16.=  http://www.geographia.com/russia/moscow02.htm

17. = http://www.wwfindia.org/

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19.=  http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80167&eocn=te&eoci=index

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21. = http://storyofstuff.org/

22. = wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

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A POET IS DISCOVERED!

Too Tranquilo in Guatemala

Chocolate-black sand
on this stretch of Pacific Beach
off the vast volcanic slope
that is southern Guatemala.
Spotted a bright white egret in the mangroves so far.
A lone tern wandering up and down the coast
flying just overhead while I bobbed in the swells.
And a long and curious line of pelicans,
like a wandering, dotted pencil drawing.
They gathered in one spot in the sky,
and then flew overhead single file
same distance apart one from the other, quietly organized.

Basura is on the sand and in the brush
and burning on the step-away streets.
Industrial smell of smoldering plastic.
Up in smoke may be better than in the tern's belly.
Two massive dark objects on the horizon.
Boxy, obvious right angles of man,
three distinct smoke stacks.
clear, even from my distance.
Staking a terrible claim to rake the ocean,
processing the catch on board into frozen ingots of lost wilds.

Shrimp is everywhere on the local menu,
because nearly all of the mangroves in the area
have been turned into shrimp farms.
Manatees and cranes and juvenile fish
become homeless overnight.
I can't eat the shrimp knowing this.
My silent boycott about as significant as a grain of sand.
The sole tourist boat
must charge $200 U.S. a head,
to buy gas to get out far enough,
to see big marine life.
Not sure if that's a product of anything or if it's always been that way.
But I imagine there was a time when you
could sit on the beach and see
whales and bottlenose dolphin, and maybe even a manta.

Vaunted turtle sanctuary in the ramshackle town,
just past Johnny's Saloon,
has empty pools with dry black sand in the bottom.
But also flat sand beds protected and marked off
as if growing tomatoes but nothing has sprouted yet,
not the tiny paws
or the small snout of a newborn sea turtle.
Life is brave the turtle says,
life is delicate and brief, but resilient,
to a point.
The turtles hatch and are corralled into mesh cylinders,
later they are set off into the ocean,
like seeds in a brisk wind.
Stuff whatever money I have in my pocket
into their donation box.
Someone is trying.
Lizards, birds, insects, marine life, mangroves?
All quiet. Too tranquilo.