Labor and Working – Page 256 – The Tarbabys Blog

The Bakken Boom Goes Bust With No Money to Clean up the Mess

By Justin Mikulka August 8, 2020

Aerial view of North Dakota oil fields and roads

More than a decade ago, fracking took off in the Bakken shale of North Dakota and Montana, but the oil rush that followed has resulted in major environmental damage, risky oil transportation without regulation, pipeline permitting issues, and failure to produce profits.

Now, after all of that, the Bakken oil field appears moving toward terminal decline, with the public poised to cover the bill to clean up the mess caused by its ill-fated boom.

In 2008, the U.S. Geological Service (USGS) estimated that the Bakken region held between 3 and 4.3 billion barrels of “undiscovered, technically recoverable oil, ” starting a modern-day oil rush.

This oil was technically recoverable due to the recent success with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of oil and gas-rich shale, which allowed hydrocarbons trapped in the rock to be pumped out of reservoirs previously unreachable by conventional oil drilling technology.

The industry celebrated the discovery of oil in the middle of North America but realized it also posed a problem. A major oil boom requires infrastructure — such as housing for workers, facilities to process the oil and natural gas, and pipelines to carry the products to market — and the Bakken simply didn’t have such infrastructure. North Dakota is a long way from most U.S. refineries and deepwater ports. Its shale definitely held oil and gas, but the area was not prepared to deal with these hydrocarbons once they came out of the ground.

Most of the supporting infrastructure was never built — or was built haphazardly — resulting in risks to the public that include industry spills, air and water pollution, and dangerous trains carrying volatile oil out of the Bakken and through their communities. With industry insiders recently commenting that the Bakken region is likely past peak oil production, that infrastructure probably never will be built.

Meanwhile, the petro-friendly government of North Dakota has failed to regulate the industry when money was plentiful during the boom, leaving the state with a financial and environmental mess and no way to fund its cleanup during the bust.

Haste Makes Waste: Booms Move Faster Than Regulations

After the USGS announced the discovery of oil in the Bakken, the oil and gas industry moved fast, with both the industry and state and federal regulators ignoring whether what amounted to essentially new methods of extracting and transporting large amounts of oil called for new rules and protections.

The Bakken’s big increase in oil production quickly exceeded its existing pipeline capacity, leading producers to turn to trucks to move their oil out of the fields. But as the Globe and Mail reported in 2013, this stop-gap solution wasn’t working well: “The trucking frenzy was chewing up roads, driving accident rates to record highs and infuriating local residents.”

The industry could have restricted production until new pipelines and processing equipment were built but instead moved to rail as the next transportation option. High oil prices motivated drillers to get the oil out of the ground and to customers as fast as possible. Moving oil by rail was essentially unregulated and would not require the permits, large investment, or lead times required for pipelines, leading to the Bakken oil-by-rail boom.

Moving large amounts of this light volatile oil on trains had never been done before — but there was no new regulatory oversight of the process. Without proper oversight, the industry loaded the Bakken’s volatile oil into rail tank cars originally designed to carry products like corn oil. That’s despite the National Transportation Safety Board warning that these tank cars were not safe to move flammable liquids like Bakken crude oil.

The industry waved away these warnings. July 6, 2013 marked the first major derailment of a Bakken oil train, resulting in a massive explosion, 47 deaths, and the destruction of much of downtown Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. Bakken “bomb trains” (as train operators called them) continued to derail, creating large oil spills and often catching fire and burning for days. Regulators have still failed to address the known risks for oil trains in the U.S. and Canada.

Fracking for oil also resulted in large volumes of natural gas coming out of the same wells as the oil, further contributing to the financial troubles of shale producers. However, with no infrastructure in place to process or carry away that gas, the industry chose to either leave it mixed in with the oil loaded onto trains (making it more volatile and dangerous) or simply burn (flare) or release (vent) the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

More than a decade after the Bakken boom started, North Dakota was flaring 23 percent of the gas produced via fracking — making a mockery of the state’s flaring regulations. In July, The New York Times detailed the environmental devastation caused by flaring in the oil fields of Iraq, where they flare about half of the gas as opposed to the quarter of the gas that North Dakota has flared.

Also in July, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and University of Southern California published research that found pregnant women exposed to high levels of flaring at oil and gas production sites in Texas have 50 percent higher odds of premature birth when compared to mothers with no exposure to flaring.

Another major blindspot for the industry and regulators has been the radioactive waste produced during fracking. When the industry did finally acknowledge this issue in North Dakota, its first move was to try to relax regulations to make it easier to dump radioactive waste in landfills — a practice that is contaminating communities across the country.

In 2016, a study from Duke University found “thousands of oil and gas industry wastewater spills in North Dakota have caused ‘widespread’ contamination from radioactive materials…”

The fracking boom in North Dakota has resulted in widespread environmental damage and is worsening the climate crisis, given its high flaring levels, methane emissions, and, of course, production of oil and gas. As major Bakken producers go bankrupt and continue to lose money while the oil field goes bust, who will pay to clean up the mess?

Like most oil-producing states, North Dakota had the opportunity to require oil and gas producers to put up money in the form of bonding which would be designated to properly clean up and cap oil and gas wells once they were finished producing. Unfortunately, the state didn’t put that precaution in place, and now bankrupt companies are starting to walk away from their wells.

“It’s starting to become out of control, and we want to rein this in,” Bruce Hicks, Assistant Director of the North Dakota Oil and Gas Division, said last year about companies abandoning oil and gas wells.

The state recently decided to use $66 million in federal funds designated for coronavirus relief to begin cleaning up wells the oil industry has abandoned — costs that the industry should be covering, according to the law, but that are now shifted to the public.

The Bakken boom made a lot of money for a select few oil and gas executives and Wall Street financiers. But as the boom fades, taxpayers and nearby residents have to deal with the financial and environmental damage the industry will leave behind.

Bakken’s Best Days Are a Thing of the Past

As DeSmog reporting has revealed, shale producers have not been profitable for the past decade, even though they have drilled and fracked most of the best available shale oil deposits. While the prolific Permian region in Texas and New Mexico still has some of the best “tier one” core acreage for oil production left, that isn’t the case in the Bakken.

In June, oil and gas industry analysts at Wood MacKenzie highlighted this discrepancy in remaining core acreage between the Permian and the Bakken. According to Wood MacKenzie, the top quarter of remaining oil well inventory in the Permian would result in over 8,000 new wells. For the Bakken, however, the analysts put that number at 333 wells.

This difference is why John Hess, CEO of major Bakken producer Hess Corporation, predicted in January that Bakken production would soon peak.

The drop in oil demand due to the pandemic has hit the industry as a whole, but the Bakken was already in decline, with the best producing wells a thing of the past well before the novel coronavirus reached U.S. shores.

In September 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported on the dismal outlook for Hess Corporation’s oil wells, noting last year: “This year’s wells generated an average of about 82,000 barrels of oil in their first five months, 12 percent below wells that began producing in 2018 and 16 percent below 2017 wells.”

Legal Reviews of Pipelines Potentially Causing Shutdowns

Even when the industry did try to construct oilfield infrastructure in the Bakken, its rush to build and manage pipelines hasn’t always worked out well. Legal challenges to two major Bakken pipelines, one old, one new, may shut down both of them soon.

The controversial Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) is facing a potential shutdown after a judge ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers did not properly address oil spill risks and now must complete a full environmental review, which could result in a long-term shutdown of the pipeline while the Corps completes the study. Energy Transfer, DAPL‘s owner, appealed that ruling, and a subsequent court decision has allowed the pipeline to remain in operation while the legal battle over the environmental impact study continues.

At the same time, the Tesoro High Plains pipeline — in operation since 1953 — is facing a shutdown because it failed to renew an agreement with Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation landowners on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, meaning the pipeline’s owner, Marathon, now is trespassing on that land.

These pipelines together ship more than one-third of the oil out of the Bakken, and if they are shut down, Bakken oil producers likely would turn to rail again to move their oil. However, rail is significantly more expensive than pipelines and not economically viable at current low oil prices.

However, at current production levels, existing pipelines (other than the two in question) and current long-term rail contracts can likely handle most of the Bakken’s oil production, especially as the region becomes less attractive to investors.

Energy consulting group ESAI Energy recently released a new report on U.S. pipelines, with analyst Elisabeth Murphy concluding, “An uncertain outcome for Dakota Access will have knock-on effects for the Bakken, such as capital being diverted to other basins that have better access to markets.”

The ESAI analysis also concludes that the Bakken will decline by approximately 270,000 barrels per day on an annual basis in 2020 and by a further 65,000 barrels per day in 2021.

With declining total production and new wells producing less than the past, Bakken producers are facing rising debts without the means to pay them back.

End of the Unconventional Bakken Boom

Oil produced by fracking is called “unconventional oil” due to the new technologies used to extract it from shale. However, it is unconventional in other ways as well. One, it has never been profitable. Another is a change in the boom-and-bust cycle, which has been a part of the oil industry since its inception in the U.S. in the 1850s.

Traditionally the boom-and-bust cycle for conventional oil production was tied to the price of oil. Low prices caused busts. This was true of the shale oil industry in 2014 when oil prices crashed. However, the industry returned to record production after that.

But it’s different this time. Unlike conventional oil fields, shale field production declines much more quickly. While shale producers could retreat to the top-producing acreage during the 2014 bust, most of that acreage is now gone.

The shale industry is faced with trying to come back from a historic downturn in which even the companies that don’t go bankrupt are saddled with crippling debts. That’s because for most of the past decade, shale companies borrowed more money than they made producing fracked oil and gas, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

All of the evidence strongly suggest that the Bakken is an oil field on the decline. Its best acreage has been depleted and the economics of the remaining acreage don’t pan out these days.

Reviewing the economics of the Bakken, investment site Seeking Alpha recently concluded that the “Bakken Will Never Be The Same Again.”

Seeking Alpha was purely commenting on the economics of oil production in the Bakken. However, the same could be said about the water, air, and land in the Bakken. Shale companies polluted the environment and are now walking away from the damage — leaving the cleanup bill to the public. It is a tried-and-true approach for industries in resource extraction. Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.

Hess Corporation CEO John Hess knows more about the economics of the Bakken than most people. In February Reuters reported, “Hess plans to use cash flow from the Bakken to invest in longer-term offshore investments.” A major Bakken producer is apparently no longer viewing the region as a good long-term investment.

From here, the outlook only gets worse for the Bakken.

trump’s covid medical advise ?

The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell

Tic Tok star who gained fame for trump lip-syncs gets Netflix special.

Sarah Cooper began creating videos that lip-synced quotes from Trump’s news conferences during the coronavirus pandemic, earning millions of views.

How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020

Trump’s Golden Era of Energy Is Turning to Lead

By Justin Mikulka July 25, 2020

A drilling rig on a former ranch outside of Barstow, Texas, in the Permian Basin

It was just over a year ago that President Trump announced, “The golden era of American energy is now underway,” saying that his policies focused on exploiting oil, gas, and coal were “unleashing energy dominance.”What a difference a year makes. On July 10, the Financial Times ran an article with a headline that asked, “Is the party finally over for U.S. oil and gas?” And there is no doubt that it has been quite a party for the last decade. At least, for the fracking executives who have enriched themselves while losing hundreds of billions of dollars investors gave them to produce oil and gas. Meanwhile, profits never materialized.

Lately, prospects for the broader fossil fuel industry look more like lead than gold.

For starters, the oil and gas industry in America is facing an era of losses, bankruptcies, canceled projects, and declining demand. It is highly likely that history will show that this point in time was the beginning of the golden era of renewable energy and the decline of the fossil fuel industry.

Fracked Shale Oil and Gas Industry Failing

President Trump’s 2016 campaign was backed heavily by the oil and gas industry, with strong support from fracking CEOs like Continental Resources’ Harold Hamm. The story of record American oil production due to fracking was even being touted by President Obama, who rightfully took credit for the fracking boom that occurred on his watch. That’s despite President Trump recently taking credit for it as well.

But as we have documented over the last two years at DeSmog, the fracked oil industry has been a financial failure for more than the past decade. The industry produced record amounts of oil and gas but lost huge sums of money in the process. And now even industry leaders are admitting the U.S. oil industry has already peaked, a little more than a year after President Trump declared the beginning of the “golden era.”

In extensively detailing the failures of the shale oil and gas industry, The New York Times recently noted, “The industry’s decline may be just beginning.” It cites industry analysts’ predictions that as many as 250 oil and gas companies could file for bankruptcy by the end of 2021.

The U.S. fracking boom gave President Trump and many others the confidence to talk about unleashing America’s energy dominance. Yet today, the industry is a financial disaster, and even its leaders are admitting its best days are behind it.

Declining Demand for ‘Freedom Gas’

Weeks after President Trump’s “golden era” statement, the U.S. Department of Energy put out a now-famous press release touting the future of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and referring to LNG as “freedom gas” and “molecules of U.S. freedom.”

America is awash in natural gas from the fracking boom. That includes the gas that shale drillers intentionally sought out, as well as the large amounts of “associated gas” that comes from fracked oil wells. Due to this oversupply, at times the price for natural gas in the Permian region of Texas has gone negative.

With so much cheap natural gas in America, the industry has been racing to build out hugely expensive LNG export terminals and the supporting infrastructure needed to export this gas to the world. However, as DeSmog reported in May, the U.S. is just one of many countries flushing the global market with LNG, and the economics here no longer pencil out.

This year, global buyers are canceling orders for U.S. LNG, leading natural gas producers in America to seek out storage for the gas they can’t sell. And now the U.S. natural gas market is facing a storage crisis just like the one that ended up driving U.S. oil prices negative in April. According to The Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs recently told its clients that the U.S. could run out of gas storage capacity by October.

A new report from Global Energy Monitor is warning of a “gas bubble.” The industry is certainly facing long-term troubles. The Wall Street Journal recently summed up the U.S. gas problem: “There is simply too much of it.”

New Pipelines Face Increasing Challenges

New pipelines to move oil and gas were part of the rush to take advantage of the expected golden era of energy in America. However, oil and gas industry finances, combined with ongoing legal challenges from activists, mean the pipeline industry has also taken some serious blows recently.

The news for U.S. pipeline companies was so bad in early July that The New York Times asked, “Is This the End of New Pipelines?”

On July 5, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy — the two firms behind the proposed $8 billion Atlantic Coast pipeline that would have brought fracked gas from West Virginia to North Carolina and Virginia — announced they were cancelling the project. The companies cited ongoing legal challenges from activists who have opposed the pipeline for the past six years as the reason for the decision.

However, Dominion Energy has since sold its pipeline business to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and is planning major investments in renewable energy. These moves indicate that the cancellation might have also been a financial decision and not one driven solely by opposition from activists.

In early July, a federal judge also ordered the shutdown of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) until the U.S. Army of Corps of Engineers conducts a comprehensive environmental review for the pipeline’s impacts. But the U.S. Appeals Court since ruled on July 14 that the pipeline can operate until the legal issues are resolved. DAPL is owned by Energy Transfer, whose CEO, Kelcey Warren, recently held a fundraiser for President Trump.

The Keystone XL pipeline also lost another legal battle that will further delay its potential completion, in a situation that has broader implications for the pipeline industry. In May, the state of New York rejected the proposed Williams pipeline, which would have brought fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York.

This certainly doesn’t look like a golden era for new oil and gas pipelines in the U.S., despite multiple efforts by President Trump to ease their construction.

U.S. Coal Industry Declining Rapidly

In 2018 President Trump declared that “the coal industry is back.” In reality, the U.S. coal industry is trapped in a death spiral. Coal is in even worse shape than the oil and gas industries, leading to headlines such as, “Are We Witnessing the Death of Coal?”

Year-to-date U.S. coal production is down almost 27 percent compared to last year. Furthermore, government projections show that, for the first time, renewables are on track to power more power of the U.S. than coal in 2020. With such a steep decline, the U.S. coal industry has experienced a wave of bankruptcies under Trump.

Perhaps the best indication of how poorly the U.S. coal industry is doing comes from utility companies which are choosing to close coal power plants, sometimes years ahead of schedule — and replace them with cheaper renewable energy sources.

Even outside of considering the climate impacts, the economics of using coal for electricity in the U.S. do not make sense going forward.

The End of an Era

Despite President Trump’s policies and ongoing rhetoric, the U.S. fossil fuel industries are in decline and serious financial trouble. At the same time, the costs for wind and solar power and energy storage have fallen dramatically, making them competitive with fossil fuels for power generation.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of the troubles facing the fossil fuel industries is the fact that this scenario has unfolded under perhaps the most fossil fuel-friendly president in history. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is run by a former coal lobbyist; yet the coal industry is still failing. This administration continues to repeal environmental, health, and safety regulations to help the oil and gas industry — although the courts are blocking some of those efforts. The oil and gas industry continues to spend generously on advertising campaigns selling the false idea that natural gas is “clean energy” and a climate solution.

The fossil fuel industries still retain significant power in U.S. politics, both nationally and in many energy-producing states, but even that power can no longer hide the painful economics facing these industries — no matter what President Trump says.

Trump’s continued disregard for the environment and climate change poses a mortal threat

Los Angeles Times – Politics

Editorial: Trump’s continued disregard for the environment and climate change poses a mortal threat

President Trump’s persistent efforts to undermine environmental protections places us all at grave risk. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

It’s fitting that President Trump invoked an interstate highway expansion in Atlanta last week to announce final rules that, if they survive the inevitable legal challenges, will undermine one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act. American voters face a fork in their own road this November — stay on the Trump expressway to environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, or shift to the road, bumpy as it may be, to a cleaner environment and more sustainable future of wind, solar and other energy sources that do not involve burning fossil fuels.

The COVID-19 pandemic understandably has seized the nation’s attention, but that hasn’t lessened the risk we all face from air and water pollution and carbon-fed global warming. Trump has unabashedly sought to dismantle federal regulatory structures to speed up construction projects while forging a national energy plan based on producing and burning fossil fuels.

His embrace of the oil, gas and coal industries defies the global scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases that make the Earth less habitable by warming the atmosphere, feeding stronger and more frequent storms, triggering devastating droughts that propel human migration, and pushing up sea levels so that they encroach on cities and other human settlements. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that unusually high tides led to record flooding among one-quarter of Atlantic and Gulf Coast communities where the agency maintains tide gauges. Climate change is no dystopian vision of the future; it is here.

Trump’s efforts to eviscerate regulatory oversight of the environment is rooted in his belief that regulations are for the most part unnecessary hurdles to economic progress. He bewails the amount of time it takes for projects to clear environmental reviews and related court challenges, adding what, in his mind, are unnecessary costs and delays. To be honest, he may have something there. NEPA came into being five decades ago — signed into law by President Nixon — and it’s not out of line to suspect that there are places where the law and the regulations that arose from it could use some reasonable revising. But Trump and his industry-connected advisors are not the ones to trust with such a task.

These new rules are not reasoned updates. By requiring environmental impact analyses to be completed within two years (now they often take twice that), the administration seeks to cut short the consideration of those most affected by major projects — often people of color and low-income households — and disarm the environmental activists fighting to ensure that necessary environmental protections are respected. The rules also would require regulators to no longer weigh the cumulative effects of a proposed project and limit their review to effects “that are reasonably foreseeable” and “have a close causal relationship” to the work being done. So, for example, a proposed project’s emissions could not be added to those of other nearby emitters to determine whether their cumulative impact creates an excessive burden on a specific community.

Separately, the Government Accountability Office reported last week that the administration tweaked the formula for measuring the “social cost of carbon” so that estimates of the potential harm from emissions are seven times lower than they used to be. It’s foolhardy — and dangerous — to look at environmental impacts through such a narrow lens.

Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, after lengthy negotiations with progressive environmentalists who had backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), released a $2-trillion plan for quickly shifting the nation from its reliance on fossil fuels to renewable sources.

It’s not the controversial “Green New Deal” that progressives have been pushing, but it’s in the neighborhood. Getting such a measure through Congress even if both chambers were controlled by Democrats would be no easy task, but Biden’s proposal at least recognizes the dire future we all face if the nation — and the world — do not fundamentally alter how we produce and consume energy.

The world cannot afford to backslide on environmental protections and the all-important fight to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Yes, jobs are important, but survival more so. The errors and consequences of the past are crystal clear. The question is, will we heed those lessons?

Book by Trump’s niece paints him as habitual liar, inept businessman

USA Today

‘Far beyond garden-variety narcissism.’ Book by Trump’s niece paints him as habitual liar, inept businessman

Courtney Subramanian, David Jackson and Michael Collins, July 8, 2020

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s niece says he was scarred by his father and developed habits of lying and self-deception that shadowed him into the White House, according to a copy of her much-anticipated memoir obtained by USA TODAY.

“This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism,” Mary Trump writes in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” “Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be,” she writes.

“In Donald’s mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero – being good – is impossible for him,” she writes in the book.

The memoir, the subject of a legal battle between Mary Trump and her family members, including the president’s brother Robert Trump, is set to be published July 14 by Simon & Schuster, two weeks earlier than planned.

This cover image released by Simon & Schuster shows "Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man", by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. The book, written by the niece of President Donald J. Trump, was originally set for release on July 28, but will now arrive on July 14. — This cover image released by Simon & Schuster shows “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man”, by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. The book, written by the niece of President Donald J. Trump, was originally set for release on July 28, but will now arrive on July 14.

In many ways, the book is a biography of three Trumps: The president, his father, Fred Trump Sr., and his older brother, Fred Trump Jr., the author’s father.

Mary Trump, a 55-year-old psychologist, blames Fred Trump Sr. for giving Donald his bad habits. She also blames the family patriarch for driving her own father to alcoholism and an early death.

The elder Trump is cast as a cold and forbidding patriarch who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps – his eldest son. But as young Fred struggled, the father shifted his attention to young Donald – demanding him to follow less-than-scrupulous real estate practices and eventually propping him up if his own initiatives failed.

“When things turned south in the late 1980’s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son’s brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested,” Mary Trump writes.

“His monster had been set free.”

In the book, Mary Trump describes how she helped The New York Times obtain tax documents showing the Trump organization consistently undervalued its properties to reduce its tax bills. Those documents also showed that Fred Trump Sr. propped up Donald Trump after his business failures.

She also writes that in order to get into a private Ivy League university, the young Donald Trump hired someone to take his Scholastic Aptitude Test.

The book says that after Trump announced his White House run in 2015, Trump’s sister, retired appeals court judge Maryanne Trump Barry, mocked him.

“He’s a clown – this will never happen,” Judge Barry said, according to her niece.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Mary Trump’s memoir a “book of falsehoods.”

“It’s ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolute no bearing in truth. Have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods,” she told reporters.

In a statement, White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews accused Mary Trump of being only interested in the money while claiming “to be acting in the public interest.”

“President Trump has been in office for over three years working on behalf of the American people – why speak out now?” the statement said. “The President describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him. He said his father was loving and not at all hard on him as a child. Also, the absurd SAT allegation is completely false.”

‘Fantasy worlds’ and Madonna’s gum chewing

Donald Trump tended to create his own fantasy worlds, Mary Trump writes.

In order to get into the prestigious University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the future president paid someone to take his SAT, she writes.

“To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his SAT’s for him,” Mary Trump wrote. “That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records.”

During the 1990’s, she wrote, her uncle asked her to ghostwrite a book about him to be called “The Art of the Comeback.” Mary Trump writes that she was given little guidance on what the book would contain, so she tried to focus on the adversity that he had overcome to reach his success. But there was little evidence to support that narrative considering he was about to enter his fourth bankruptcy with the Plaza Hotel, she writes.

One night, she said, he called her, sounding excited, to let her know that Rhona Graff, his longtime executive assistant at the Trump Organization, would hand her some pages he had been working on for the book. Mary Trump said she received a manila envelope the next day, containing about 10 typewritten pages, that she had hoped would help her glean insight on how he ran his business or the role he played in development deals.

“It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met,” she wrote.

Among those women was Madonna, who “chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive,” and Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater and two-time gold medalist who Trump thought “had big calves.”

Mary Trump writes that Donald Trump never paid her for the book project and eventually he sent someone else to fire her from the gig.

Later in 1998, when Mary was first introduced to Melania Trump, the future president told his future wife that Mary had dropped out of college (true) and had come back herself from a drug problem. (Mary said she has never taken drugs).

“By conflating my dropping out of college and his hiring me to write his book (while throwing in a fictional drug addiction), he concocted a better story that somehow had him playing the role of my savior,” Mary wrote.

She added: “The story was for his benefit as much as anybody else’s, and by the time the doorbell rang, he probably already believed his version of events.”

While it may have seemed harmless at the time, the people surrounding Donald Trump – including members of the media – consistently normalized his “aberrant behavior” and mischaracterized him, Mary Trump writes. In his debut on the New York real estate scene, Trump was described as a “brash, self-made dealmaker,” she said.

“He was neither self-made nor a good dealmaker,” she said. “But that was how it started – with his misuse of language and the media’s failure to ask pointed questions,” she said.

‘He’s a clown’

Trump’s own sister dismissed the idea of him running for president, Mary Trump writes.

Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge, mocked the idea of his running after his announcement in mid-2015, Mary Trump writes.

“He’s a clown – this will never happen,” Judge Barry said, according to her niece.

Trump Barry – who said Trump has “no principles! None!” – later criticized him for invoking their brother’s alcohol problems during a campaign discussion about addiction.

She told the author: “He’s using your father’s memory for political purposes and that’s a sin, especially since Freddy should have been the star of the family.”

Putin, Kim Jong Un and Mitch McConnell

Mary Trump has especially harsh words for the people who surround Trump and enable him to stay in power.

“The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor,” she said. “Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it’s people weaker than he is who are keeping him there.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Republican Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, “all whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred,” recognized after the election that Donald Trump’s personal history and personality flaws made him vulnerable to manipulation, Mary Trump writes.

In this photo taken on February 09, 2017, a photograph of Fred Trump, the father of US President Donald Trump, is seen in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC.

“His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day – he’s the smartest, the greatest, the best – to get him to do whatever they want, whether it’s imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that’s contributed to the United States’ rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy.”

A ‘petty, pathetic little man’

The president’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic “underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs,” Mary Trump writes.

“Fear – the equivalent of weakness in our family – is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old,” she said.

She points to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s response to his state’s outbreak of COVID-19 cases as an example of “real leadership,” further revealing the president as a “petty, pathetic little man – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost to his own delusional spin.”

“He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently,” she said. “What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.”

At the end, Mary Trump writes “Donald isn’t really the problem after all” – it is his enablers, from his father to the celebrity media to the congressional Republicans who acquitted him of impeachment.

“This is the end result of Donald’s having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions – against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings,” she writes.

A golden shoe and Ivanka’s wedding

Mary Trump also dishes on other members of the Trump family.

Ivana Trump, Donald Trump’s first wife, had a penchant for regifting, according to Mary Trump. She recalls receiving a gold lame shoe with a four-inch heel filled with hard candy, wrapped in cellophane, for Christmas. The gift was so puzzling, Mary Trump wrote, and she wondered whether it had been a door prize or a party favor.

The following year solidified Ivana’s habit of passing off other gifts: a gift basket containing a tin of gourmet sardines, water crackers, vermouth-packed olives and a salami. The tissue paper in the basket had the indentation of where another jar was clearly removed. Mary Trump joked with her cousin David that the absent jar was “probably caviar.”

Mary Trump’s mother once received a luxury handbag from Ivana that “contained a used Kleenex.”

In another part of the book, she recounted seeing her family for the first time in nearly a decade at the October 2009 wedding of her cousin Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, considered by many to be the president’s shadow chief of staff.

Before the vows, she recalled Kushner’s father, Charles, recalling that when his son first introduced him to Ivanka, he “had thought she would never be good enough to join his family.”

“It was only after she had committed to converting to Judaism and worked hard to make it happen that he had begun to think she might be worthy of them after all,” she wrote.

Mary Trump said she found “his condescension a bit out of line” considering he was just released from jail over tax evasion and witness-tampering, a charge that included him hiring a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband, having the encounter secretly filmed and then sending the recording to his sister at his nephew’s engagement party.

Legal battle

Though the book’s publication date is set for next week, it remains the subject of a legal battle.

In a lawsuit he filed in New York at the end of June, Robert Trump argued that Mary had no right to speak or write about her family. His lawyers said she signed a family estate settlement almost 20 years ago that included a confidentiality clause explicitly saying members of the family would not “publish any account concerning the litigation or their relationship,” unless they all agreed.

A New York appellate court last week ruled the publication could go ahead.

But a temporary restraining order remains on Mary herself. A lower court judge in New York is due to consider whether to continue or drop that order later this week.

Mary Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for Simon & Schuster argued that blocking the book amounted to unconstitutional prior restraint, a violation of the First Amendment rights of Mary Trump and the publisher.

Chris Bastardi, a spokesman for Mary Trump, declined comment, noting that the book is still in litigation: “The restraining order is still in place on our side.”

Editorial: Trump’s continued disregard for the environment and climate change poses a mortal threat

Los Angeles Times

Editorial: Trump’s continued disregard for the environment and climate change poses a mortal threat

The Times Editorial Board July 19, 2020

President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Thursday, Aug. 1, 2019, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon) — President Trump’s persistent efforts to undermine environmental protections places us all at grave risk. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

A 20,000-tonne oil spill is contaminating the Arctic – it could take decades to clean up

By Helen Glanville, Alix Cage, Antonia Law July 14, 2020

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Permafrost near Norilsk, Russia. Romzes333 / shutterstock

After a storage tank in Norilsk, northern Russia, collapsed in late May, 20,000 tonnes of diesel fuel was released into the environment. Strong winds caused the oil to spread more than 12 miles from the source, contaminating nearby rivers, lakes and the surrounding soil.

The spill perhaps didn’t get the international attention it warranted as it happened in the midst of a global pandemic and just a few days after the death of African-American George Floyd, which sparked a wave of Black Lives Matter protests. But the spill was a major disaster with serious implications.

As experts in Arctic ecosystems, we are worried about the long-term impacts of this diesel spill in such pristine environments where cold, harsh conditions mean that life is limited. While bacteria are known to “clean up” oil spills elsewhere in the world, in the Arctic, their low numbers and slow rates of activity could mean diesel products linger for years, if not decades.

A diesel spill differs from other oil spills

Major oil spills such as that of the Exxon Valdez in 1989 or Deepwater Horizon in 2010 typically involve thick, gloopy crude oil that sits on the surface of seawater. For these sorts of spills, clean-up best practice is well known. However, the recent Norilsk spill involved thinner, less gloopy diesel oil in freshwater, making clean-up more difficult.

Diesel – in dark red – spreads along the Ambarnaya River near Norilsk. Source: European Space Agency

Diesel oil contains between 2,000 and 4,000 types of hydrocarbon (the naturally occurring building blocks of fossil fuels), which break down differently in the environment. Typically, 50% or more can evaporate within hours and days, harming the environment and causing respiratory problems for people nearby.

Other, more resistant chemicals can bind with algae and microorganisms in the water and sink, creating a toxic sludge on the bed of the river or lake. This gives the impression that the contamination has been removed and is no longer a threat. However, this sludge can persist for months or years.

How different parts of the ecosystem respond

At the bottom of the food chain in rivers and lakes are microscopic plants and algae that need sunlight to create energy through photosynthesis. When oil first enters the water it sits on the surface and forms a sort of oily sun block, and so these organisms rapidly decrease in number. Zooplankton (tiny animals) that feed on them also eventually die off.

Over time, wind and currents help disperse this oily layer, but some oil will sink to the bottom and, with their predators diminished, algae will return in even greater numbers.

Soils in the Russian Arctic harbour fewer organisms than elsewhere in the world, thanks to cold, harsh conditions, where the ground is often frozen, liquid water is scarce and there are few nutrients available. But nonetheless, these soils are still teeming with life and badly affected by oil spills.

Initially, oil coats soil particles, reducing their ability to absorb water and nutrients, negatively affecting soil organisms as they are unable to access food and water essential for survival. This oily coat can last for years as it is very hard to wash off, so often the soil has to be physically removed.

As of July 6, Nornickel, the mining company that owned the storage tank, says it has removed 185,000 tonnes of contaminated soil (about 14 times the weight of the Brooklyn Bridge). The soil is being stored on site to be “cleaned” by certified contaminant experts by early September.

The “cleaned” soil will then likely be returned to its original site. Also, 13 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of fuel-contaminated water has been pumped from the river to a nearby industrial site where harmful chemicals will be separated and the “clean” water will likely by returned to the river.

This is better than nothing, although toxins will likely remain in both the water and soil. Over months and years, these toxins will build up within the food chain, starting with the microscopic organisms and eventually causing health problems in larger organisms such as fish and birds.

Some of these small, largely invisible organisms in both the soil and freshwater can in theory be part of the solution. Diesel contains carbon (which is essential for all life) and some microorganisms actually thrive on fuel spills, helping to break down contaminants by using the carbon as a food source.

Normally, cold Arctic conditions hinder microbial activity and bio-degradation. The current Arctic heatwave may speed up this process initially, enabling oil-degrading microorganisms to grow, reproduce and consume these contaminants more rapidly than normal. But due to the region’s lack of water and the nitrogen and phosphorous needed for growth, even a heatwave can only help these microorganisms so much.

This will probably happen again

May 2020 temperatures compared to the longer-term average. Norilsk is right in the dark red area. Copernicus Climate Data Source, CC BY – SA

This spring saw Siberia experience temperatures 10°C warmer than average and, with permafrost underlying most of Russia, the region is highly vulnerable to climate warming. Indeed, 45% of oil and gas extraction fields in the Russian Arctic are at risk of infrastructure instability due to thawing permafrost.

Without more stringent regulations to improve existing infrastructure then more spills are likely to occur, especially given how rapidly permafrost is melting in these areas causing unstable ground.

While nature and her oil-degrading microbial communities can help clean up our mess, we should avoid relying on a largely invisible force that we don’t fully understand to fix a much larger human-generated problem. And how can a environment already on the edge of devastation ever fully recover?

UN: Coronavirus will create 45 million more poor people in Latin America, UN report warns

The Independent

UN: Coronavirus will create 45 million more poor people in Latin America, UN report warns

Germania Rodriguez Poleo, The Independent July 9, 2020

Â© UNICEF/UN0309959/Arcos. The coronavirus pandemic will create 45 million more poor people in Latin America in 2020, according to the United Nations.

The report, released on Thursdays by UN chief Antonio Guterres, paints a dark picture for Latin America and the Caribbean, predicting an economic contraction of 9.1 per cent — the worst the region has seen in 100 years.

Devastating economic consequences from the coronavirus pandemic such as a steep decline in tourism and sharp drop in remittances will see Latin America’s poverty levels increase by 7 per cent from 2019. This would mean there will be a total of 230 million people living in poverty in the region with a population of 630 million. Moreover, as many as 28 million Latin Americans could enter a situation of extreme poverty in 2020, meaning they won’t be able to afford to feed themselves.

More than three million people have been infected with coronavirus in Latin America and more than 132,000 have died from it.

Many Latin American countries, such as Brazil, have some of the world’s worst Covid-19 infection rates per capita. Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras are expected to see the biggest increases in poverty in their population, per the UN report.

“This is a region that for seven years has already had very low growth, with structural gaps and an unsustainable development model that have been exacerbated by very weak social protection, fragmented health systems and deep inequalities,” said executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) Alicia Bercena, according to the Associated Press.

UN chief Gutierres said in a recorded video message that in order to recover Latin America’s economy, it’s necessary to change the development model of the region.

“This implies creating fairer tax systems, promoting the creation of decent jobs, strengthening environmental sustainability and reinforcing social protection mechanisms,” he said.

Trump abuses our national parks, and he’s doing it again at Mount Rushmore

The Guardian

Trump abuses our national parks, and he’s doing it again at Mount Rushmore

Jonathan B Jarvis and Gary Machlis July 3, 2020

In the United States, parks have always been used as spaces for public protest, places for commemorating acts of resistance and the struggle for a more perfect union, and stages for presidents to call for national unity or celebrate civic purpose.

As his Mount Rushmore event scheduled for Friday makes clear, Donald Trump misunderstands and misuses all these precedents.

Consider the national park areas in Washington, especially those around the White House, which have been the sites of peaceful protests for generations. A women’s suffrage march in 1913 disrupted Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in the public park named Lafayette Square. The Reflecting Pool and Lincoln Memorial were the center of the peaceful 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when more than 250,000 demonstrators listened to Martin Luther King give his “I Have a Dream” speech.

In contrast, when Trump decided to use Lafayette Square as a photo opportunity last month, he had police and military personnel disperse peaceful protesters with flash grenades and pepper-ball munitions.

Throughout history, other US presidents have employed national parks to unify and inspire the American people. Theodore Roosevelt spoke at the 1903 commemoration of the Gateway Arch at Yellowstone national park, reminding the American people: “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”

In the summer of 1969, Richard Nixon spoke at the dedication of the Lady Bird Johnson Grove in Redwoods national park. Nixon, hardly a president with a flawless reputation, nevertheless talked of unity and pride in the country as he dedicated the grove to the wife of his former political opponent.

Trump neither comprehends nor takes seriously his responsibilities to his fellow citizens, and he can only envision our public spaces and historical parks as taxpayer-funded stage pageant backdrops for his political rallies and photo ops, which divide rather than unite.

<span>Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images</span> — Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

During his 2016 campaign for president, Trump traveled to the hallowed ground of Gettysburg national military park. At the site of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, he gave a speech that “curdled into bitter resentment”, as he railed against his perceived enemies, particularly the media, the government, the opposition party and the intellectual elite.

Last month, he held a Fox News town hall television interview inside the Lincoln Memorial, where events are supposed to be prohibited. He was only able to stage this television show at Lincoln’s feet because David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior, specially relaxed the regulations governing use of our most sacred public monuments.

We must rescind the authority of the interior secretary to create exceptions for the partisan uses of national memorials

“I assume the show is a big show, right?” Trump asked.

It has become clear that we need clearer rules and restrictions on the use of force against peaceful protesters in public parks. We also need to hold national and local leaders to account when they exploit rather than protect parks. And we must rescind the authority of the interior secretary to create exceptions for overtly partisan uses of national memorials.

The locations of current tragedies of police brutality, including the 38th Street and Chicago Avenue intersection in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, should be commemorated as national historic landmarks – just as the 54 miles that peaceful civil rights demonstrators walked in 1965 are commemorated as the Selma to Montgomery Trail. Black lives matter.

This Friday, Trump travels to Mount Rushmore to watch fireworks over the park, reversing a moratorium on fireworks that has been in place for a decade because of concern about wildfires in the park’s 1,200 acres of forest and the surrounding Black Hills national forest. The National Park Service is managing a lottery for the 7,500 tickets to the event – with no social distancing, even as South Dakota faces over 6,000 active Covid-19 cases and the audience will include visitors from around the country.

Mount Rushmore, carved over the objections of the Sioux on the stones of their sacred Black Hills, has become a symbol of America. Love it or hate it, it should not be used for partisan politics. The nightly lighting ceremony is powerful theater, as the large halogen lights warm and then illuminate the carved images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Trump knows this, and will probably use Mount Rushmore as a stage for a partisan political rally full of rancor, insults, and racial divisiveness.

It will probably take Trump’s handlers’ best efforts to prevent him, as the halogen lights warm, from having the spotlights move from Washington and Jefferson on to himself, and to prevent long, vertical, bright-red Maga banners from being unfolded as he begins his performance. His supporters will cheer, his opponents will shout, and the US national parks – often called America’s “best idea” – will be more tarnished from misuse.

Jonathan B Jarvis served 40 years with the National Park Service and was its 18th director
Dr Gary Machlis served as science adviser to the director of the National Park Service and is a professor of environmental sustainability at Clemson University
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors.

“What to the Slave is 4th of July” James Earl Jones

Open Culture

Every year on this day, Frederick Douglass’s fiery, uncompromising 1852 speech, “T he Meaning of July 4th for the Negro,” gets a new hearing, and takes on added resonance in the context of contemporary politics. It has never ceased to speak directly to those for whom the celebrations can seem like a hollow mockery of freedom and independence. The American holiday commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence—next to the Constitution, the U.S.A.’s most cherished founding document, and a text, for all its rhetorical elegance, which cannot escape the irony that it was written by a slaveholder for an emerging slave nation.

Slavery had always been a contentious subject among the colonists. And yet the American Revolution was a war waged for the full freedom and enfranchisement of only a very few white men of property. Not only were black people excluded from the nation’s freedoms, but so too were conquered Native American nations, and in great part, poor white men and women who could not vote—though they were not chained in perpetual servitude as human chattel, with little hope of liberty for themselves or their descendants.

Douglass gave the speech in Rochester, NY, seventy-six years after the first July 4th and at a time when the country was riven with irreconcilable tensions between abolitionists, free-soilers, and the slaveholding South. The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act—at least, in hindsight—made the impending Civil War all but inevitable. The speech reveals the celebration as a sham for those who were or had been enslaved, and who could not consider themselves American citizens regardless of their status (as Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would affirm five years later.)

Just above, you can hear a powerful reading of Douglass’s speech by James Earl Jones, delivered as part of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Read an excerpt of the speech below.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

Douglass’s speech condemned the “scorching irony” of American independence even after the Civil War, as racist terrorism and Jim Crow destroyed the promise of Reconstruction. In our present time, writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor Isabel Wilkerson, amidst the rash of high profile police killings and an ensuing lack of justice, events “have forced us to confront our place in a country where we were enslaved for far longer than we have been free. Forced us to face the dispiriting erosion that we have witnessed in recent years—from the birther assaults on a sitting black president to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act that we had believed was carved in granite.” We might add to this list the resumption of the failed “War on Drugs” and the federal government’s announcements that it would do little to safeguard civil rights nor to investigate and prosecute the surge of white supremacist violence.

And yet the “self evident” mythology of American freedom and equality—and of American innocence—remains potent and seductive to many people in the country. As the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute put it a few days ago, “The birth of the United States was unique because it was a nation founded not on blood or ethnicity, but on ideas.” To this ahistorical fiction, which manages to erase the founders’ own statements on race, the colonization of indigenous lands, and even the bloody Revolutionary War in its strangely desperate zeal to sweep the past away, Douglass would reply: “The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and the crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”