HIGHLIGHTS
• The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the accident near Cimarron, Kan.
• A cattle feed truck, which struck the rails, caused unreported damage to the railroad track
An Amtrak train derailed in southwest Kansas early March 14, injuring multiple people who were transferred to hospitals in Garden City and Dodge City, according to a release from Amtrak. The Amtrak train carrying 131 passengers derailed in rural Kansas moments after an engineer noticed a significant bend in a rail and applied the emergency brakes, an official said. Oliver Morrison The Associated Press
When people step aboard any Amtrak passenger train they should expect to arrive at their destination safely. However, that wasn’t the case last week when the Los Angeles to Chicago Southwest Chief derailed near Cimarron, Kan., injuring more than 30 people.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the condition of the track. An NTSB spokesman said it appeared a cattle feed truck that struck the rails shifted the track about 12 to 14 inches. Why such damage wasn’t reported immediately is mind-boggling. A notification could have prevented the Amtrak accident and what may amount to as much as $3 million in damage to the train.
The train derailed shortly after midnight March 14 after the engineer noticed a significant bend in the rail and applied the emergency brake. Eight cars derailed about 20 miles west of Dodge City.
The train with two locomotives and 10 cars had 131 passengers and 14 crew members. At least 32 people were injured, two critically, in the derailment on a section of BNSF-owned track between Dodge City and Garden City.
The McClatchy Washington Bureau reported that parts of the track in western Kansas had deteriorated so much that Amtrak was close to reducing train speeds in some locations from 60 mph to 30 mph.
Going slower may have been safer for that train and its passengers but far from efficient. Garden City, in a 2014 federal grant application, described the degraded condition of the track, noting that “much of the rail is 30 percent past its normal useful life but still in generally good condition for salvage.”
Garden City applied for a TIGER grant, which stands for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, begun in 2009 during President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus.
Joe Boardman, president and chief executive officer of Amtrak, said last week that millions of dollars in grant money in 2014, 2015 and 2016 would replace close to 160 miles of older, bolted rail with new, continuously welded track, enabling trains to travel more smoothly and at higher speeds. About 40 percent of the funding comes from state and local governments and BNSF.
Operators of cattle feed trucks and other vehicles must be more careful at train crossings and certainly be compelled to report damage. Beyond that, the condition of tracks all over the country remains a safety concern.
Derailments of trains carrying crude oil gained a lot of attention in the last year with spills damaging the environment and fires forcing the evacuation of area communities. New track standards were put in place along with improved tank cars.
Also, between 2018 and 2020, most railroads expect to start using positive train control, which depends on wireless radio and computers to monitor train positions and automatically slow or stop trains in danger of colliding or derailing.
It’s all to make freight and passenger rail service safer and more efficient. Despite the Kansas derailment and investigation, BNSF restored the track last week, and the Southwest Chief was back running two trains a day.
Ensuring that people and freight move safely, however, has to remain the highest priority.
Can the U.S. really go frack-free? Sanders, Clinton take aim at hydraulic fracturing
By Rob Nikolewski, March 19, 2016 5 p.m.
Workers tend to a well head during a hydraulic fracturing operation in western Colorado. Fracking came up in a recent debate between Democratic Party presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. — Associated Press
Earlier this month, both candidates for the Democratic Party nomination for president took shots at “fracking” — hydraulic fracturing, the process that extracts oil and natural gas by using high-pressure liquids to break through shale rock formations.
In a March 6 debate, Hillary Clinton said, “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.”
“My answer is a lot shorter,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vermont, said. “I do not support fracking.”
All three Republican candidates for president support hydraulic fracturing.
The presidential race amplifies a debate that’s more complex than the typical struggle between industry and the environment.
On a warming planet, does fracking keep the nation’s energy mix chained to fossil fuels and further delay a future where clean energy sources dominate? Critics say it does.
However, the fracking boom also is largely responsible for utilities’ accelerating shift from coal-fired power plants to cleaner-burning natural gas generators. Meanwhile, there’s fierce debate about potential threats to ground water and methane leaking into the atmosphere.
Less controversial is the energy industry’s economic and geopolitical importance. In less than 10 years, hydraulic fracturing – along with the technology of horizontal drilling – has dramatically increased oil and gas production, making the United States an energy power that has rivaled, and by some measures surpassed, countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
A ban on fracking “would be great for for the Middle East and terrible for the U.S.,” said Sabrina Demayo Lockhart, communications director for the California Independent Petroleum Association. “Hydraulic fracturing has given the U.S. an affordable, reliable energy resource.”
But Dan Jacobson, legislative director for Environment California, said a growing renewable energy market makes the prospect of going frack-free seem not so far-fetched.
“If someone said we’re not there yet, I’d say the science seems to indicate and reports indicate that we are there,” Jacobson said.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated on Tuesday that production from hydraulically fractured wells made up about half of total U.S. crude oil production.
Renewable energy may be growing but the same agency last year projected that 62 percent of U.S. energy consumption will come from a combination of oil and natural gas in 2040.
And while the Obama administration has sought stricter regulations for fracking on federal lands, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year released a study saying it did not find evidence that fracking “led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources.”
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has promoted an “all of the above” energy program that includes natural gas as a bridge fuel to help the U.S. reduce its reliance on coal and boost clean energy sources.
“If the wells are drilled and treated appropriately, we know how to do that part of it,” said DOE undersecretary Franklin Orr, who was in San Diego earlier this week, talking to clean energy business leaders.
“If the formation is a deep one and the hydraulic fracturing can be kept in the zone where it’s supposed to be, I don’t think there’s any question that it can be done in a way that it can be operated safely and do so in the long term,” Orr said.
But a number of environmental groups insist taking fracking off the table is a realistic, near-term scenario.
“We couldn’t do it tomorrow but by 2030, 2040, 2050 we could be meeting our energy needs, and we could be moving our transportation system off of fossil fuels,” Jacobson said in a telephone interview from his office in Sacramento. “It’s certainly possible. The question is, do we have the political will to get it done?”
Jacobson points to Gov. Jerry Brown’s goal to get California to derive 50 percent of all its electric power from clean energy sources by 2030, just 14 years from now.
“California’s got (nearly) 40 million people,” Jacobson said. By 2030 “that’s going to be like 20 million people getting 100 percent of their electricity from clean energy sources … So all we need is for the other states to adopt programs that are similar to California’s and we can easily get there.”
But others dismissed the comments by Sanders and Clinton.
“I’m hoping that’s just political, rhetorical arguments,” said Octávio Simões, president of the Sempra LNG & Midstream unit of San Diego-based Sempra Energy, which has made considerable investments in natural gas infrastructure in North America.
Calling the comments “irresponsible,” Simões said hydraulic fracturing has saved consumers money at the gas pump, reduced heating and cooling costs through low natural gas prices, and helped the U.S. reduce CO2 emissions.
“Ultimately, the customers are seeing the impact, and no politician likes to be tied to the impacts of one, higher carbon emissions, two, higher costs of energy and, three, more dependency on foreign oil and foreign gas,” Simões said. “Come on, it just doesn’t seem right.”
In theory, California’s Monterey Shale formation in the central San Joaquin Valley holds nearly 14 billion barrels of oil, making it the nation’s largest reserve. But 96 percent of its oil and gas isn’t recoverable using current technology, EIA analysts said in 2014, and the cratering price of oil have blunted efforts to improve its prospects.
According to the California Department of Conservation, hydraulic fracturing occurred in California 1,004 times between Jan. 1, 2014 through Sept. 30, 2015, almost exclusively in Kern County.
Polls indicate a majority of Californians want stricter rules or a moratorium on fracking.
Although the well responsible for the massive natural gas leak in Porter Ranch in Los Angeles that led to the displacement of residents of nearly 3,400 households was tapping an underground storage formation (and not fracked), the incident has fueled more complaints about natural gas production.
Two states have banned fracking — Sanders’ home state of Vermont, which has no natural gas or oil reserves, and New York, where Clinton served as a U.S. senator.
Brown has resisted calls from environmentalists to ban fracking, but regulations passed in 2013 require California producers to apply for permits, disclose what chemicals they use, notify neighbors before drilling and monitor ground water and air quality.
“The industry is essentially regulated on a state-by-state basis,” said Nicole Decker, equity sector analyst at UBS Wealth Management Research. “It’s not really left to the federal government.”
A president committed to getting rid of hydraulic fracturing would have considerable political hurdles to clear, including getting both houses of Congress, currently with Republican majorities, to agree to a ban.
However, the chief executive could make life difficult for the oil and gas industry by issuing executive orders and prompting the EPA to adopt stricter regulations.
Some have brought up concerns that an outright ban could, ironically, lead to the country using more coal.
Natural gas produces about 50 to 60 percent less carbon dioxide than coal, and the conversion of coal-fired power plants to natural gas-fired facilities has been attributed to helping the nation reduce its greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP.
“In the present legislative and regulatory environment, any severe curtailing of natural-gas fracking would just lead to a bounce back of coal, not an expansion of renewables,” said Ray Pierrehumbert, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, told the decidedly left-of-center magazine Mother Jones.
Fracking critics point to the technique’s association with leaks of methane, a gas that has an impact on climate change more than 25 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 100-year period, according to the EPA.
It’s been estimated that 107,000 tons of methane leaked at Porter Ranch, the greenhouse gas equivalent of the output of 572,000 cars in a year.
A recent study suggested the EPA has not been properly calculating how much methane released during fracking affects the nation’s greenhouse-gas footprint.
Another paper presented to the Committee on Climate Change says fracking has produced such high emissions of methane that natural gas is worse for the environment than coal.
But last week, a study released by the National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research attributed higher levels of methane in the atmosphere since 2007 to agricultural practices, not fossil fuel production.
“Our data indicate that the source of the increase was methane produced by bacteria, of which the most likely sources are natural, such as wetlands or agricultural, for example from rice paddies or livestock,” atmospheric scientist Hinrich Schaefer said in a NIWA news release.
Despite its critics, fracking has more than its share of supporters.
Combined with horizontal drilling technology, hydraulic fracturing has been attributed to an energy renaissance in North America that has swelled domestic production and made the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil.
For example, U.S. oil production in 2000 — before fracking was widely used — was about 5.8 million barrels a day. By 2015, it averaged 9.4 million barrels a day.
“I don’t see us taking that massive leap backwards and having the plug pulled, especially given that over the past several years the growth in the oil and gas industry (and) what is has done for our economy,” Decker of UBS said.
“I would certainly not support a doctrinaire, ‘no fracking, period’ (policy),” DOE undersecretary Orr said Monday.
But Jacobson of Environment California says time is on the side of fracking’s opponents.
“I was working on bills when they said California couldn’t get 20 percent of its electricity from clean energy sources like wind and solar and the lobbyists from the utilities said, ‘we can’t do it,’ ” Jacobson said. “We’ve always been told on the clean energy side we can’t do it and yet everyday we keep proving that we can do it.”
By John D. Sutter, Wed March 9, 2016 10:56 PM ET
Meet the teen suing Obama over climate change 01:14
Eugene, Oregon (CNN) > Nearly two dozen kids — ages 8½ to 19 — appeared in federal court here on Wednesday morning. They wore nose rings and braces. Suits too big in the shoulders. Some doodled, others took copious notes. The backs of some heads barely peeked above the courtroom’s wooden benches. But these plaintiffs, however young and small, united behind a massive cause that should inspire any of us old folk: They’re suing the U.S. government — and President Barack Obama — for failing to act rapidly to stop climate change.
It’s the future suing the present.
The climate kids versus the feds.
“We sat in this courtroom today, and we have filed this lawsuit, because the leaders we have elected to take care of our planet, and to take care of our country for our generation and those to follow, are failing to do their job,” said Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh, a 15-year-old from Colorado who is one of the 21 young plaintiffs. “My generation is going to be inheriting the crisis we see all around us today. We are standing up not only for the environment and the Earth and the atmosphere but for the rights we have to live in a healthy, just and sustainable world.”
“We are the generation that gets to rewrite history,” he added, speaking to a crowd of more than 100 outside the courthouse. “The pen is in our hands, and we are rewriting history today.”
Related article: Meet the 15-year-old kid who is suing Obama over climate change
The climate-kids suit, which got a pretrial hearing on Wednesday before Judge Thomas Coffin, is part of a years-long campaign by a group called Our Children’s Trust.
The organization, with the support of former NASA climate scientist James Hansen and others, asserts Congress and the President have done far too little to stem the climate crisis. So they’ve taken to courts, filing petitions and complaints on behalf of young people in all 50 states, saying governments are failing to protect them and future generations from the harms of global warming.
This is the second U.S. federal court case they’ve filed (the first failed), and they’re also working internationally. The government argued before Coffin on Wednesday that the suit should be dismissed. It’s unclear when he will reach a decision.
‘This case is about survival’
“At its core, this case is about survival and whether the federal defendants can continue to threaten it,” said Julia Olson, lead attorney for the kids.
That may sound like hyperbole, but it isn’t. Scientists and the U.S. government have known for decades that burning fossil fuels and chopping down rainforests moves CO2 from the ground into the atmosphere — and too much of it makes the Earth hotter and hotter. The consequences are stark, from rising seas that could swallow island nations to deadly heatwaves, mass extinctions in the natural world and the spread of diseases.
Lives and property are at risk, and since climate change only gets worse as we pump more pollution into the atmosphere, young people have far more at stake than older folks.
For future humans, the very habitability of the planet is in jeopardy.
On 6 degrees of climate change (Opinion)
The federal complaint in Oregon, which the government and fossil fuel industries have asked the judge to dismiss, says the constitutional rights of these young people — including the right to life, liberty and property — are being violated. Furthermore, the climate kids’ attorneys also say they’re being discriminated against as young people who have the most to lose as climate change gains steam over time but who have little or no voice in the political process.
“This is an intergenerational issue,” Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and current head of the climate science program at Columbia’s Earth Institute, told me. “It’s a case where our actions will affect our grandchildren and their children.”
Children speak to their fears of a difficult future
His granddaughter, Sophie, is among the plaintiffs. Pretty much all of them can list specific ways in which climate change is messing up their lives.
One young man, Alex Loznak, 19, grew up on a farm his ancestors settled after crossing the Oregon Trail. He’s worried it may not survive or won’t be as productive because of drought. Levi Draheim, the 8½-year-old (his mom told me he likes it when you include the ½) fears his family’s property in Florida, where he lives, will be swallowed up by the rising tides associated with warmer temperatures and melting glaciers.
Others have witnessed wildfires and hurricanes.
“There’s no way that it can’t work,” Victoria Barrett, a 16-year-old from New York, said of the lawsuit. “We are going to be here when (older generations) are not.
“We’re going to be dealing with the issues they leave behind.”
The suit names a lot of old people and institutions as defendants. There’s President Obama, several federal agencies, including the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, and the heads of some of those agencies. The complaint is asking the court to order the U.S. government to develop a plan to fight catastrophic climate change — and to stop contributing to the problem.
While there have been some reforms, one quarter of fossil fuels extracted in the United States in 2013 came from public lands, the suit says, and the government is actively working to permit the production, use and export of these dangerous fuels, according to the complaint.
Climate change: ‘Two degrees’ may decide the future
There are scholars who think only courts will do the trick.
“We are at a point with climate where nature’s math — the carbon math — counts,” said Mary Wood, faculty director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program at the University of Oregon and who is not directly involved in the case. “And we have to be sure everything adds up. Only a court is positioned to do that. The administration is not doing that. Its efforts, while important, fall short. … The time for slow incremental steps is over.”
The attorneys for the climate kids also are trying to prove that the atmosphere is an asset held in public trust by the government and that federal agencies have a duty to protect it.
On this and other points, the feds made their opposition abundantly clear.
‘No constitutional right to a pollution-free environment’
“There simply is no constitutional right to a pollution-free environment,” a U.S. Department of Justice attorney said, arguing these matters should be left to the president and Congress.
“The federal courts are not a proper forum in which to raise generalized grievances about federal policies,” the DOJ attorney said. He added that there is a “massive gap” between the harms the plaintiffs are alleging and the federal government’s actual actions; that companies and governments outside the United States contribute to the problem, too; and that young people should not be treated as a special class for discrimination in this or other cases.
The message: Sorry, kids, maybe next time?
An attorney representing fossil fuel industry associations also generally sided with the Obama administration in court. So, really, it was Obama and Dirty Energy versus the future.
The symbolism was striking, and it wasn’t lost on the young plaintiffs.
“It was a lot of big words. It was hard to follow,” Avery McRae, a 10-year-old plaintiff wearing a peacoat and gold-colored slippers, told me after court. “They (the defense and intervening attorneys) care more about their business than they do about the future of our generation.”
McRae, who’s from Eugene, Oregon, where the motion to dismiss the case was heard, became interested in climate change after she read a book about snow leopards and found out that climate change was among the factors threatening their survival.
“A few years ago, when she was young,” her mom told me (as if she’s not young now), McRae took that knowledge and held a party in honor of the imperiled snow leopards, raising $300 for a conservation group.
She then did the same for wolves and salmon.
Wednesday morning, the 10-year-old was drawing horses and singing along to musicals before going to federal court. Her mother, Holly McRae, told me it was almost “sad” to see her bright-eyed daughter sitting in such a sterile, wood-paneled environment in front of a federal judge. “It was surreal, really,” said her father, Matt McRae.
But they’re also immeasurably proud.
They hope her presence will help compel the judge to reject the government’s motion to dismiss the case — and to move it to trial.
Maybe it will be an important step toward climate justice.
As she watched the proceedings, Holly McRae thought about what the judge must be seeing as he heard oral arguments from the three attorneys.
Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
The Canadian Government is Blowing Up Bomb Trains for Practice
By Hilary Beaumont, March 18, 2016 | 9:51 am
Two and a half years after a train carrying crude oil ran off the tracks in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec and exploded, killing 47 people, the Canadian government set a tanker on fire and pretended to run a train off its tracks as practice in case it happens again.
On July 6, 2013, an unmanned train carrying ultra-flammable western crude plummeted into the downtown of 6,000-resident Lac-Mégantic, where it erupted in flames and flattened everything in its path. The Lac-Mégantic tragedy spurred a debate in Canada and the US about the safety of so-called “bomb trains”, and reinvigorated the discussion about shipping oil across Canada.
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
The debate has become a heated one, and largely comes down to whether to build large pipeline projects amid an uptick in the amount of volatile crude oil moved by rail. Both pipeline and oil by rail proponents argue their methods of transport are safe. Meanwhile, environmental groups argue both methods inevitably lead to spills or explosions, and that the oil should stay in the ground, while Canada should beef up its focus on renewable energy.
According to Transport Canada’s own data, crude oil moved by rail has increased dramatically in Canada over the past decade, from only four carloads in 2005 to 174,000 carloads in 2014.
In the case of Lac Megantic, an investigation showed a complex series of errors allowed the disaster to happen.
The goal of the recent train simulation, which used flammable liquid common in firefighter training rather than actual crude, was to improve emergency preparedness and public trust around the movement of crude and other dangerous goods by rail.
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
Firefighters arrived on the scene of 11 smoking tanks that had derailed. They were taught to identify the contents of the tanks and decide when it was better not to intervene, as that could make the situation worse. If tackling the fire directly, the firefighters were told to apply foam and water spray to extinguish the flames.
It’s taken two-and-a-half years to start upgrading the procedures around emergency response to train derailments involving crude, and they’re not done yet. Exercise Vulcan, as the simulation was dubbed, was a test run of those new procedures, and Transport Canada hopes to use the training in other parts of the country in the future.
“Better late than never,” one industry expert told VICE News in reaction to Transport Canada running the train derailment simulation last weekend.
It’s too soon to tell whether Lac-Mégantic has sparked real safety upgrades in the rail industry, transportation industry consultant Ian Naish said. “They’re replacing tank cars, [but] they’re doing it slowly.
“Speed of the oil trains is a big issue to me,” he continued. “I’d recommend they take another look at the maximum speed at which a train should operate because the two that went off the rails in Gogama last year were operating at around 40 miles per hour, which is 60 or 70 kilometres an hour, and since all the tank cars failed, that obviously was too fast.”
A photo of the aftermath of the Gogama derailment. Photo via the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.
Just over a year ago, a crude oil train exploded in a fireball and derailed near the town of Gogama in northern Ontario. No injuries or deaths were reported in the March 7, 2015 explosion. It took three days to extinguish the flames.
At the time, it was the second CN train to derail near Gogama in a three-week period. Both incidents resulted in spilled crude oil.
The tankers that derailed in both Gogama accidents were the same type of Class 111 tanks that ruptured in Lac Megantic. The Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency tasked with investigating transportation disasters in Canada, has warned for years that Class 111 tanks are unsafe because they aren’t reinforced and tend to break open when they crash.
“It will be very silly for everybody, not only Quebec — any province, and any state in the United States — not to learn from what happened in Lac-Mégantic. What happened showed so many voids in the system, and so much lack of important information.”
But it won’t be until after May 1, 2017 that the notorious Class 111 tank cars — which are most susceptible to damage when they crash — will no longer be able to carry crude. Phasing in more crash-resistant tank cars will mean the Class 111s will be off the rails “as soon as practically possible,” Transport Canada spokesperson Natasha Gauthier told VICE News.
After the disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Transport Canada says it introduced strict new rules, including a two-person minimum for crews on trains carrying dangerous goods, a requirement for railway companies on federally-regulated tracks to hold valid certificates, new speed limits for trains carrying dangerous goods.
In the US, though, there’s been pushback from the railroad industry, with one representative saying there is “simply no safety case” for two-person crews.
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
Transport Canada also introduced more frequent audits, better sharing of information with municipalities, and increased track inspections. Plus, the agency amended the Railway Safety Act, researched crude for a better understanding of the volatile oil, and made it mandatory for some railways to submit training plans to the agency.
Since Lac-Mégantic, one improvement is that local first responders are now more aware of what dangerous goods, including crude, are travelling through their communities, Naish added.
And according to an engineering professor who witnessed first-hand the scene after the Lac-Mégantic explosion, while the railway industry is ramping up safety measures, the risk of increased shipments of oil by rail could balance those out, meaning it may not actually be any safer since Lac-Mégantic.
“Is it enough?” Rosa Galvez-Cloutier told VICE News when asked about the improved safety measures. “That’s hard to say. Zero risk doesn’t exist.”
Another major concern for Galvez-Cloutier is that when government and industry look at risk and safety, they tend do so project by project.
“Who is evaluating the big picture? Who is evaluating the whole thing?” She asked. “Government needs to put more interest and focus on the cumulative impacts of transporting dangerous goods.”
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
That debate is especially hot in Quebec, where the Lac-Mégantic explosion occurred. A recent poll of Quebec residents found they aren’t as likely as the rest of Canada to trust either pipelines or oil by rail.
According to a study by the Fraser Institute published last August, pipelines are 4.5 times safer than rail for moving oil — the rate of incidents for pipelines is 0.049 incidents per million barrels of oil moved, while that rate is 0.227 per million barrels of oil for trains.
“It will be very silly for everybody, not only Quebec — any province, and any state in the United States — not to learn from what happened in Lac-Mégantic. What happened showed so many voids in the system, and so much lack of important information,” Galvez-Cloutier said.
When asked if he would rather have a pipeline or a train carrying crude through his backyard, Naish laughed and said “Well I’d rather not live in the neighborhood, personally.”
“In the ideal world, the rail lines and the pipelines would avoid all populated areas all the time.”
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
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