Email from Sarah Trumble, Director of Federal Legislative Campaigns, Everytown for Gun Safety, September 11, 2019
Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee advanced three pieces of lifesaving gun violence prevention legislation:
The Disarm Hate Act, which would prohibit people convicted of threatening or violent hate crimes from buying or possessing guns.
New prohibitions on high-capacity magazines, like the ones used by the shooter in Dayton.
A strong Red Flag law, which strengthens and expands the tools family members or law enforcement can use to intervene and temporarily suspend someone’s access to guns if a judge finds there is evidence that person poses a serious threat to themselves or others.
Yesterday’s Committee vote follows the critical steps the House already took to prevent gun violence in this country earlier this year. It passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019, addressed the Charleston Loophole, took action to close the deadly “boyfriend loophole,” and allocated funding for gun violence research. The contrast between the House’s lifesaving action and the Senate’s inaction could not be more clear.
As the House continues to move important gun safety legislation forward, the Senate STILL has not taken a single action to prevent gun violence in America. We need to keep up the pressure and urge the Senate to pass stronger gun laws, starting with background checks on all gun sales and a strong Red Flag law. Send a message to your U.S. Senators and demand action to address gun violence in our country.
[Editor: I was wrong. In a recent post, I applauded Valero Energy for planning a new “renewable diesel” refinery in Texas, and I wondered if Valero Benicia might someday convert to production of renewable fuels. Here’s why “renewable” doesn’t necessarily mean “clean.” – R.S.]
Corn is the main crop used in the U.S. to produce biofuel. Credit: Jim Deane/Flickr
Years of number crunching that had seemed to corroborate the climate benefits of American biofuels were starkly challenged in a science journal on Thursday, with a team of scientists using a new approach to conclude that the climate would be better off without them.
Based largely on comparisons of tailpipe pollution and crop growth linked to biofuels, University of Michigan Energy Institute scientists estimated that powering an American vehicle with ethanol made from corn would have caused more carbon pollution than using gasoline during the eight years studied.
Most gasoline sold in the U.S. contains some ethanol, and the findings, published in Climatic Change, were controversial. They rejected years of work by other scientists who have relied on a more traditional approach to judging climate impacts from bioenergy — an approach called life-cycle analysis.
Following the hottest month on record globally, and with temperatures nearly 2°F warmer and tides more than half a foot higher than they were in the 1800s, the implications of biofuels causing more harm to the climate than good would be sweeping.
“I’m bluntly telling the life-cycle analysis community, ‘Your method is inappropriate,’” said professor John DeCicco, who led the work. “I evaluated to what extent have we increased the rate at which the carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere?”
Lifecycle analyses assume that all carbon pollution from biofuels is eventually absorbed by growing crops. DeCicco’s analysis found that energy crops were responsible for additional plant growth that absorbed just 37 percent of biofuel pollution from 2005 to 2013, leaving most of it in the atmosphere, where it traps heat.
“The question, ‘How does the overall greenhouse gas emission impact of corn ethanol compare to that of gasoline?’ does not have a scientific answer,” DeCicco said. “What I can say definitively is that, whatever the magnitude of the emissions impact is, it is unambiguously worse than petroleum gasoline.”
The findings were criticized by scientists whose work is directly challenged by them.
Argonne National Laboratory scientist Michael Wang, who has led lifecycle analyses that found climate benefits from different biofuels, called the research “highly questionable” for a range of technical reasons, including its focus on growth by American crops instead of the global network of farms.
Driven by federal and Californian policies that promote biofuels to slow global warming, the use of ethanol, biodiesel and similar products more than trebled nationwide during the years studied, providing 6 percent of Americans’ fuel by 2013. Federal data shows gasoline sold in the U.S. last year contained about 10 percent corn ethanol.
Thursday’s paper provided fresh fuel for a heated debate among opposing groups of scientists over bioenergy’s climate impacts. Some are certain it’s a helper in the fight against climate change. Others are convinced it’s a threat.
“In the long run, there’s no question that biofuels displacing petroleum is a benefit,” said Daniel Schrag, a geology professor at Harvard who advises the EPA on bioenergy climate impacts. His views sharply oppose those of DeCicco. “It’s just a question of how long you have to wait.”
Eight years of pollution from biofuels compared with extra carbon absorption by energy crops. Michigan scientists found 37 percent of the pollution remained in the atmosphere — 83 teragrams. Credit: DeCicco et al., Carbon balance effects of U.S. biofuel production and use, Climatic Change, 2016
Schrag dismissed Thursday’s findings, saying there’s no reason to develop a new approach to measuring biofuels’ impacts. He said the proposed new approach fails because it doesn’t account for the years it can take for bioenergy to benefit the climate.
Analyses by scientists who have studied the life-cycle impacts of growing corn and other crops to produce ethanol have generally concluded biofuels can create between 10 percent to 50 percent less carbon dioxide pollution than gasoline.
Those estimates have been based on the notion that although bioenergy releases an initial blast of carbon dioxide pollution, the benefits of it accrue over time, as crops, trees and grass grow and suck that carbon dioxide back into their roots, flowers and leaves.
Such benefits are more conceptual than scientific, turning scientific debates at the EPA and elsewhere over how to calculate them into seemingly intractable policy quagmires.
“What timescale should we look at?,” Schrag said. “Some of the fundamental questions about timescale are not scientific questions. They are societal questions.”
The University of Michigan scientists dispensed with the timescale-based approach altogether, eliminating the need for policy decisions about which timeframes should be used. Instead, their research provided an overview of eight years of overall climate impacts of America’s multibillion-dollar biofuel sector.
The findings from the new approach were welcomed by Timothy Searchinger, a Princeton researcher who has been a vocal critic of bioenergy. He has been speaking out for years about the shortcomings of traditional approaches used to measure its climate impacts.
Searchinger said the approach developed in Michigan provides an “additional calculation” to help overcome the flawed assumption that climate pollution released when bioenergy burns does not matter.
Although European officials have warned of the limitations of the use of lifecycle analyses in assessing the climate impacts of bioenergy, the EPA has been steadfast for more than five years in its attempts to create a new regulatory framework that would continue to embrace the approach.
“The U.S. is not coming close to offsetting the carbon released by burning biofuels through additional crop growth,” Searchinger said.
During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.
At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.
I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.
“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
That statement has been validated.Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.
The most recent example is the president’s bizarre fixation on falsely insisting that he was correct to warn that Alabama faced a major risk from Hurricane Dorian, to the point that he doctored a hurricane map with a black Sharpie to include the state as being in the path of the storm.
“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who is in frequent contact with the White House told Business Insider on Friday. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “You should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”
We have repeatedly heard versions of that sentiment over the course of Trump’s presidency. It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.
That’s true, up to a point. Yes, it is best to leave it to experts to determine whether Trump satisfies the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, some combination of both, or nothing at all.
But if a clinical diagnosis is beyond my own expertise, Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?
An analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.
Accepting the reality about Trump’s disordered personality is important and even essential. For one thing, it will help us to better react to Trump’s freak show.Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”
To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit. But it would be helpful if they did.
Among other things, it would keep us feeling less startled and disoriented, less in a state of constant agitation, less susceptible to provocations. Donald Trump thrives on creating chaos, on gaslighting us, on creating antipathy among Americans, on keeping people on edge and off balance. He wants to dominate our every waking hour. We ought not grant him that power over us.
It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions. Nor should it weaken our resolve to stand up to it. It does complicate the picture just a bit, though, eliciting some pity and sorrow for Trump.
But above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.
The office is too powerful, and the consequences are too dangerous, to allow a person to become president who views morality only through the prism of whether an action advances his own narrow interests, his own distorted desires, his own twisted impulses. When an individual comes to believe his interests and those of the nation he leads are one and the same, it opens the door to all sorts of moral and constitutional devilry.
Whether or not his disorders are diagnosable, the president’s psychological flaws are all too apparent. They were alarming when he took the oath of office; they are worse now. Every day Donald Trump is president is a day of disgrace. And a day of danger.
PETER WEHNER is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.
[Editor: I suppose this is almost good news – although in the manufacture and ultimate burning of these “renewable” fuels, large amounts of CO2 and other pollutants are produced, contributing to our climate emergency in the same way as fossil fuels. (Thanks for the clarification, AZ!) I wonder … could Valero’s Benicia Refinery be converted someday to production of RENEWABLE fuels? Also, I’m curious about San Francisco’s 2015 plan to convert its municipal fleet from petroleum to renewable diesel by the end of the year. Did it happen? – R.S.]Houston Chronicle, by Jordan Blum, September 9, 2019
The Valero refinery in Port Arthur. Photo: Jon Shapley, Staff Photographer / Staff Photographer
Valero Energy and Darling Ingredients said Monday they’re planning to build a massive renewable diesel refinery in Port Arthur.
The companies, which have a 50-50 joint venture called Diamond Green Diesel, would build the first-ever renewable diesel plant in Texas. They’re currently in the early engineering and cost review stages, so the project isn’t definitely going forward, but it’s clear they want to make the project happen.
Renewable diesel is a much cleaner product that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, instead making diesel out of waste animal fats and waste vegetable oils, including used cooking oil and inedible corn oil.
Renewable diesel uses similar ingredients as biofuels, but it is more chemically similar to crude oil-based diesel and can more easily be used in conventional engines without as many blending ingredients.
Valero Chief Executive Joe Gorder said he expected more political mandates for low-carbon fuels across the globe to continue to drive demand growth for renewable diesel fuels.
Darling CEO Randall Stuewe added, “The demand for a low-carbon fuel solution continues to grow, as markets move to reduce their carbon intensity. Leveraging its proven technology, (Diamond Green Diesel) continues to adapt and expand production to address that need for the benefit of our environment, our customers and our shareholders.”
San Antonio-based Valero and Dallas’ Darling first teamed up to build a small renewable diesel plant outside of New Orleans, and now they’re dramatically expanding that refinery.
The project proposed for an undisclosed location in Port Arthur would churn out 400 million gallons of renewable diesel per year, or 1.1 million gallons daily.
The companies don’t expect to make a final decision and commence construction until 2021 and the refinery wouldn’t open until 2024.
You must be logged in to post a comment.