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Wind Takes Lead In Reducing Red Ink; Will Big Oil & Other Fossil Fuels Abandon Their Special Tax Breaks?

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 12, 2012 at 8:11 pm

by Richard W. Caperton

The American Wind Energy Association has just released a plan to phase out the Production Tax Credit, an important federal incentive that has led to the doubling of wind generated electricity. This proposal would provide wind companies with six years of certainty before eliminating it.

This makes the wind industry the only energy resource that has volunteered to help reduce the deficit and our country’s huge debt.  Now, it’s time for Big Oil and the rest of fossil fuel industries to propose a plan to phase out their permanent special tax breaks, some of which have been in place for nearly a century.

It’s worth highlighting two points from AWEA’s proposal.  First, the PTC must be extended through 2013 during the current Congressional lame duck session, using the language that passed out of the Senate Finance Committee with bipartisan support.  Second, the phaseout must include long-term certainty so that a healthy, diverse supply chain remains in place.

The complete letter is available here and is pasted below:

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NEWS FLASH

By Next Week, There Will Be 1 Million Concealed Carry Permits In Florida | ThinkProgress has previously reported that Florida would become the first state to reach 1 million concealed carry permits issued, and now it looks like the state will hit that grim milestone next week. Bloomberg News reports that there were 993,200 active concealed carry permits at the end of November. This puts the state on track to hit 1 million by next week. 4.6 percent of the state’s current residents can now legally carry a concealed firearm.

NEWS FLASH

Catholic University Rejects LGBT Student Group | The Catholic University of American has rejected the creation of a group to support LGBT students and allies (CUAllies). According to Ryan Fecteau, the student who has organized the group, administrators considered the proposal for nine months, then announced last week it could not form because it “might become an advocacy organization.” The Catholic Church condemns homosexuality as sinful, but still claims that gay people “must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity.” The University of Notre Dame is taking steps — albeit imperfect ones — to recognize there are LGBT students on its campus with unique needs, which is apparently going too far for CUA.

Economy

Federal Reserve Chair Decries ‘Enormous Waste Of Human And Economic Potential’ To Explain New Fed Actions

By Pat Garofalo on Dec 12, 2012 at 5:05 pm

The Federal Reserve today announced a new approach to monetary policy, announcing that it would keep interest rates low until unemployment hits 6.5 percent (or inflation exceeds 2.5 percent). This is the first time the Fed has explicitly laid out an unemployment target.

During a press conference today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke explained that the Fed took its latest step due to the “enormous waste of human and economic potential” that is resulting from persistently high unemployment:

It’s been about three and a half years since the economic recovery began. The economy continues to expand at a moderate pace. Unfortunately, however, unemployment remains high. About 5 million people, more than 40 percent of the unemployed, have been without a job for six months or more and millions more who said they would like full-time work have been able to find only part time employment or have stopped looking entirely. The conditions now prevailing in the job market represent an enormous waste of human and economic potential.

A return to broad-based prosperity will require sustained improvement in the job market which in turn requires stronger economic growth. Meanwhile, apart from some temporarily fluctuations, largely reflected swings in energy prices, inflation has remained tame and appears likely to run at or below the Federal Market Committee’s 2 percent objective in coming quarters and over the longer term. Against a macro economic backdrop that includes both high unemployment and subdued inflation, the FOMC will maintain its highly accommodative policy.

Watch it:

As Tim Duy explained at Fed Watch, “The Fed delivered an early Christmas present to the economy by acting above expectations with not only a one-for-one conversion of Operation Twist to outright asset purchases, more than doubling the pace of balance sheet expansion, but also shifting the communications strategy to thresholds. The latter ties policy explicitly to outcomes rather than dates, which I think is the appropriate direction for policy.” Several members of the Federal Reserve board have been pushing for the central bank to adopt an explicit unemployment target.

Bernanke is also right to worry about the plight of the long-term unemployed. Due to an expiration of extended federal unemployment insurance, only one-quarter of the nation’s unemployed will have access to unemployment benefits come January.

Health

Michigan Advances One Of The Nation’s Most Extreme Abortion Bans

By Tara Culp-Ressler on Dec 12, 2012 at 4:55 pm

The Michigan State Senate passed HB 5711, an omnibus anti-abortion bill that sparked widespread protests over the summer when it was first considered in the House, by a 27-10 vote on Wednesday afternoon. The legislation has been stalled since it passed Michigan’s House in June.

The measure represents one of the nation’s most far-reaching abortion restrictions. When Michigan lawmakers first took up HB 5711 over the summer, hundreds of protesters rallied against the massive 45-page, GOP-sponsored legislation. HB 5711 would impose a host of new restrictions on women seeking to terminate a pregnancy — such as requiring doctors to prove that their patients haven’t been “coerced” into having the procedure, limiting abortion access for women in rural areas, and imposing guidelines for disposing of fetal remains in the same way that the state disposes of dead bodies. The legislation also seeks to mandate unnecessarily and complicated regulations that could force the state’s abortion clinics out of business.

In addition to the recently approved anti-union legislation that Michigan lawmakers pushed through their current lame duck session, state legislators have also been busy advancing a slew of extreme anti-choice initiatives over the past week. The Michigan Senate approved measures that will prevent private insurance companies from offering coverage for abortion services and allow doctors to refuse to perform abortions based solely on their personal beliefs.

HB 5711 is now headed back to the House to be considered for final passage, since the Senate made a few minor changes to the legislation. Republicans hold the majority in the state’s House by a 59-51 margin.

Security

STUDY: Cable News Regularly Refers To Torture Using Euphemisms

By Hayes Brown on Dec 12, 2012 at 4:49 pm

A new project has found that when covering instances of torture, cable news refers to it via euphemisms (such as the Bush administration’s preferred language “enhanced interrogation techniques”) almost 75 percent of the time rather than actually using the word “torture.”

The study, published at CoveringTorture.org, monitored over thirty print, television, and online news sources for two years to develop an infographic of how frequently euphemisms for torture were used in place of the actual word. During the observed period of Oct. 2010 through Oct. 2012, the news wire services AP and Reuters fared the best when describing torture for what it is, using euphemistic terms only 43 and 37 percent of the time respectively.

Among the newspapers indexed in the infographic, the Wall Street Journal is by far the least likely to use the word “torture” in its reporting. The Washington Post fares slightly better, with the New York Times performing best, calling “torture” for what it is two-thirds of the time. Cable news networks scraped the bottom in the study’s findings, with MSNBC proving the best of the bunch by calling torture by name only half of the time. Fox News used the term “torture” in place of other phrases only 21 percent of the time.

All of this matters as polling have shown that public opposition to the use of torture decreases when euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation techniques” are used in the place of the actual word “torture.” Usage in the media may well have improved in the last few years, though. In a previous study on whether waterboarding was deemed torture by the media — conducted in 2010 by Harvard students — the major newspapers fared far worse, refusing to refer to the act as torture throughout the years of 2002-2006. As late as 2009, the Washington Post found itself in hot water for refusing to refer to waterboarding as torture because the Bush administration, apparently, would dispute that terminology.

Debate over torture and its use in extracting information has resumed following the release of Zero Dark Thirty, a film dramatizing the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the film, scenes are included showing waterboarding of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay facility and are reportedly depicted as being an integral part of locating bin Laden. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Monday revived the claim himself, saying “the CIA program, whether you find it repugnant or not, actually was effective with KSM [9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed] and other people getting actionable intelligence.” His statement comes despite experts and former Bush officials saying that waterboarding did no such thing. (HT: Dan Froomkin)

Justice

Reagan-Appointed Judge Strikes Down North Carolina Anti-Abortion License Plates

By Ian Millhiser on Dec 12, 2012 at 4:40 pm

In an opinion by Reagan-appointed Judge James Fox, a federal court in North Carolina held that North Carolina can no longer issue license plates promoting an anti-abortion view unless it also provides supporters of reproductive choice with the opportunity to display a similar plate advertising their views — in Judge Fox’s words, “[t]he State’s offering of a Choose Life license plate in the absence of a pro-choice plate constitutes viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment.” During the debate over the 2011 law that authorized the anti-abortion plate, six amendments were offered authorizing plates that would have stated either “Trust Women. Respect Choice” or just “Respect Choice,” but each of these amendments were voted down. The final bill authorized the following plate:

Judge Fox’s decision will appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which is one of the few federal appeals courts dominated by Democratic appointees. In 2004, the Fourth Circuit struck down a similar instance of viewpoint discrimination against supporters of reproductive freedom, although the three judges who decided that case could not agree on their reasoning.

Health

U.N. Posed To Endorse Universal Health Care, Affirming Insurance Access Is A Human Right

By Zack Beauchamp on Dec 12, 2012 at 4:30 pm

The United Nations General Assembly, with support from the United States, appears likely to approve a resolution Wednesday calling on every country to implement universal health care systems. The resolution reaffirmed the holding in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that access to health care was a human right owed to all persons and, from that, concluded that member states should provide health care to all of their citizens:

Encourages Member States, in collaboration with other stakeholders where applicable, to plan or pursue the transition of their health systems towards universal coverage, while continuing to invest in and strengthen health-delivery systems to increase and safeguard the range and quality of services and to adequately meet the health needs of the population.

Post-Obamacare, all of the world’s 25 wealthiest nations provide universal health coverage. Citizens of poorer countries who do not enjoy universal access to affordable health care suffer far worse health outcomes: while infant mortality is relatively rare in more developed countries, to take one example, four million infants die before their first month of life worldwide. Before the United States had a universal health care system, roughly 45,000 Americans died per year because they lacked health insurance.

Government universal access programs are proven to improve access to health care, even in the developing world. India’s push to expand health care coverage roughly sextupled the number of people with access to basic health services between 2003 and 2010, and is on pace to double that number again by 2015.

Another recent U.N. vote on health care enshrined access to contraception as a universal human right.

Climate Progress

Exxon’s Dangerous Energy Outlook

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 12, 2012 at 4:30 pm

by Lorne Stockman, via Oil Change International

ExxonMobil recently issued its latest global energy projections in a report called the “2013 Outlook for Energy: a view to 2040.”

The report (pdf) is chock full of figures and graphs showing an inexorable rise in global energy demand and supply, as well as the growing market for Exxon’s products.

As can be expected, the report shows that despite some recent efficiency gains, the world is on course to consume ever growing amounts of energy, a large proportion of which will likely be derived from fossil fuels. Exxon places global growth in energy demand at 35% between 2010 and 2040.

In this regard, the report is in line with recent business-as-usual forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA).

But the report differs greatly from the IEA’s report in some vital areas. The IEA is a public agency, funded by the tax dollars of developed countries including the United States, while Exxon is the world’s largest private oil and gas company, with a self-interested agenda behind every public communication it makes.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the Exxon Outlook fails to mention that if energy demand were to rise 35% to 2040, and if 60% of energy demand in 2040 were to be met by oil and gas as Exxon predicts (the IEA has it at 50%), then the planet would be on an unstoppable collision course with a 4 degree Celsius warmer world. While the IEA’s report was very clear about where current energy demand trends will lead it was also clear that this could be avoided if serious action is taken soon.

Our collision course with a 4 degree world was recently highlighted by the World Bank, a relatively recent convert to the urgency of climate change action that still needs to match its actions with its words. On the release of a recent report called Turn Down the Heat, the Bank’s President Jim Yong Kim said:

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NEWS FLASH

Trans Student Allowed To Return To School Identifying As Girl | The Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund has successfully resolved a claim with a school district that originally refused to let a transgender 12-year-old attend school and identify by her authentic identity. Rather than force her to wear boys’ clothes per the school’s demand, her parents opted to homeschool her instead, which lasted for several months. The school originally claimed she “would disrupt and interfere with the learning environment,” but when challenged with legal action, the district relented and helped her transition to a new elementary school, where she has since thrived. (Her name and the identifying details of her school have been kept confidential.)

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