Category Archives: Trump administration

Bomb Trains, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DeSmog Blog, Federal deregulation, Keeping Watch on Earth News, Oil trains, Trump administration

Latest bomb train accident shows failures of Trump deregulation

Another Bomb Train Accident Highlights Regulatory Failures

Desmogblog.com, by Justin Mikulka, December 23, 2020
Image: Oil train “pipeline on wheels” rolls through Watertown, Wisconsin. Credit: Justin Mikulka

A train carrying over 100 cars of volatile Bakken oil derailed in Washington state, causing the evacuation of the town of Custer. At least two of the train cars ruptured and the oil ignited and burned — reminding us once again why these dangerous trains are known as bomb trains. 

Matt Krogh of Stand.earth has been leading efforts to keep these dangerous trains off the tracks for years, so he was well aware of the potential deadly consequences of oil train accidents in populated areas. Krogh could see the smoke from this latest accident from his home in Bellingham, Washington.

“I think we got lucky today,” Krogh told the Associated Press, echoing the words of others after previous close calls with oil trains — several of which were highlighted in the DeSmog piece Luck Rides the Rails. 

It’s easy to feel lucky after a near miss with an oil train derailment and fire near a populated area because in 2013 an oil train full of Bakken oil derailed and caused catastrophic fires and explosions in the Canadian town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, — killing 47 people and destroying much of the downtown area. Downtown Lac-Mégantic has yet to be rebuilt more than seven years later.

Regulators Argue Safety Is Not A Pretext for Regulation

The state of Washington is well aware of the dangers the oil trains pose to the public and the environment and have attempted to address this issue with state regulations. Washington has five oil refineries that all are highly dependent on Bakken crude by rail. Crude-by-rail movements in the U.S. and Canada fluctuate significantly based on market conditions, but the Washington refineries are one destination for Bakken oil that maintain consistent demand for the oil, and rail is the only option to get it to Washington — so the risks to Washington residents who live near the train tracks are ever present.

In 2016 a Bakken oil train derailed in Mosier, Oregon along the Columbia River highlighting the risk the trains pose in the Pacific Northwest. Many trains bring the Bakken oil through Oregon and the Columbia River gorge to Washington.

In my 2019 book Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk I explain why the trains carrying highly volatile Bakken oil are dangerous and the simple steps the oil and rail industries could take to remove these dangers. All are steps the industries have successfully lobbied against despite the risks to the public and the 47 fatalities in Lac-Mégantic.

Washington regulators and politicians tried to take the most important safety step by passing a law that limited the volatility of the crude oil being moved by rail through Washington, a move that would greatly reduce the risk of fires and explosions during derailments. A rule proposed at the end of the Obama administration to limit the volatility was officially withdrawn by the Trump administration in May of 2020.


“If the federal government won’t act to protect public safety and adopt a safer nationwide standard, we will adopt our own,” state Sen. Andy Billig (D-Spokane) said in March 2019 of the bill he sponsored. “There is just too much to lose — for people and our environment.”

As DeSmog reported in May, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) did act, but that action was to overrule Washington’s proposed regulation with the argument that safety regulations could not get in the way of markets — arguing that a state can not use “safety as a pretext for inhibiting market growth.”

New Administration May Offer Chance at Safety Regulations

The act by the Trump administration’s regulators of withdrawing the proposed federal rule to limit oil volatility for transportation of crude oil by rail by was consistent with the official stated policy of deregulation with regards to rail safety.

This policy led to the removal of the most important safety regulation for oil-by-rail transportation that was enacted during the Obama era, which would have required oil trains to have modernized braking systems. The Trump administration removed that regulation in December of 2017.

The incoming Biden administration will have the opportunity to finally address the known dangers of moving hazardous oil, ethanol and liquefied natural gas (LNG) by rail. Reinstating the braking requirement and regulating oil volatility would be important first steps. Two other areas that would improve safety would be limiting train lengths and requiring tank cars that weren’t easily punctured in derailments.

DeSmog has reported on how longer trains derail more often and yet there are no regulations for train length for trains moving hazardous materials. Most of the major derailments involving oil trains have involved trains with more than 100 cars, like the train in Custer.

The 2015 regulations for new tank cars for oil trains required the use of new DOT-117 model tank cars. As they did in this latest derailment, these tank cars have failed in all of the major derailments involving the cars hauling oil and ethanol.

Four years of the Trump administration overseeing the rail industry has put the public at even greater risk. The administration’s reckless approval of LNG-by-rail without proper safety testing or new regulations greatly increases the future danger to the public if the LNG industry starts using rail as a major mode of transportation.

Pete Buttigieg has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Transportation where he will have oversight of rail safety. At the very least Buttigeig could begin to protect the public by simply reinstating the oil-by-rail safety regulations that have been repealed, and then moving forward with the proposed regulations to limit the volatility of any crude oil moved by rail.

Until the oil and rail industries are properly regulated, the public will continue to be at great risk from bomb trains and will have to trust in luck to keep them safe.

Earthjustice, Environmental justice, Trump administration

Funny video: The Birds & the Bees (Taking flight for the survival of all living things)

BirdsAndBeesPSA.com (Repost from YouTube)

Taking flight for the survival of all living things. With the voices of Sean Astin, Anjelica Huston, and Hasan Minhaj.

Did you know that 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean annually? Over 1 million birds die as a result of plastic, every year. Bee colonies are reducing at a record-breaking number.

We are #OutOfTime to listen to our planet and elect leaders that care about science and humanity. We, Americans, want a sustainable future.

Take action: http://www.birdsandbeespsa.com

Follow the journey and spread the word: http://www.facebook.com/birdsandbeespsa http://www.twitter.com/birdsandbeespsa http://www.instagram.com/birdsandbeespsa

The Birds and The Bees PSA was created by concerned citizens as an act of free speech, and is not financially supported by any non-profit or political organization.

The Bird House Gang presents a Solo Pictures and Six Point Harness Animation Studios Production
Voiced by: Sean Astin Anjelica Huston Hasan Minhaj
Executive Producers: Lorraine Gallard Bob Tzudiker & Noni White
Produced by: Nancy Dickenson John L Solomon
Written by: Bob Tzudiker & Noni White
Music Producer: Hal Willner
Associate Producer: Leilah Franklin
Producer’s Assistant: Amy Harrington Stephanie Furtun
Animation Production Provided by: Six Point Harness, Inc.
Supervising Director: Greg Franklin
Directed by: Justin Young
Storyboards: Eddie Lin Ryan Jouas Chris Toms Justin Young
Character & Background Design: Adan Contreras Kati Prescott Kelsey Suan
Layouts: Eunbeal Cho Adan Contreras AnnMarie Roberts
Editor: Tony Christopherson
Animation Services: Regh Animation and Design
Audio Post Services: Studiopolis, Inc.
Supervising Producer: Vera M. Hourani
Production Manager: Max Minor
Production Coordinator: Shelby Sims
Head of Production: Barb Cimity
Sound Editor-Audio Mixer: Ernie Sheesley
Web Design: David Fodrek Heroa
Social Media Manager: Daniel E. Kaplan
Graphic Editor: Budd Diaz
Special Thanks: Vera Beren Aaron D. Berger Brendan Burch Sylvia Desrochers / Big Time PR & Marketing Rachel Fox John Kilgore (sound & recording) Stephen Nemeth Deborah Skelly Little Giant Studios, Inc. (poster design) WME Student Interns: USC School of Cinematic Arts BirdsNest Ambassadors
Coronavirus, Covid 19, Donald Trump, Trump administration, United States of America

In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm

Washington Post, By Rick Noack, June 19, 2020

As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.

“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”

Visitors to the River Walk pass a restaurant that has reopened in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Visitors to the River Walk pass a restaurant that has reopened in San Antonio. (Eric Gay, File)

China’s actions over the past week stand in stark contrast to those of the United States. In the wake of a new cluster of more than 150 new cases that emerged in Beijing, authorities sealed off neighborhoods, launched a mass testing campaign and imposed travel restrictions.

Meanwhile, President Trump maintains that the United States will not shut down a second time, although a surge in cases has persuaded governors in some states, including Arizona, to back off their opposition to mandatory face coverings in public.

Commentators and experts in Europe, where cases have continued to decline, voiced concerns over the state of the U.S. response. A headline on the website of Germany’s public broadcaster read: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?” Switzerland’s conservative Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper concluded, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”

Image without a caption

“The only thing one can say with certainty: There’s nothing surprising about this development,” a journalist wrote in the paper, referring to crowded U.S. beaches and pools during Memorial Day weekend in May.

Some European health experts fear that the rising U.S. caseloads are rooted in a White House response that has at times deviated from the conclusions of leading scientists.

“Many scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on [in the United States], but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” said Thomas Gerlinger, a professor of health sciences at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. For instance, it took a long time for the United States to ramp up testing capacity.

Whereas the U.S. response to the crisis has at times appeared disconnected from American scientists’ publicly available findings, U.S. researchers’ conclusions informed the actions of foreign governments.

“A large portion of [Germany’s] measures that proved effective was based on studies by leading U.S. research institutes,” said Karl Lauterbach, a Harvard-educated epidemiologist who is a member of the German parliament for the Social Democrats, who are part of the coalition government. Lauterbach advised the German parliament and the government during the pandemic.

Despite its far older population, Germany has confirmed fewer than 9,000 coronavirus-linked deaths, compared with almost 120,000 in the United States. (Germany has about one-fourth of the United States’ population.)

Lauterbach cited in particular the work of Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, whose research with colleagues recently said that forms of social distancing may have to remain in place into 2022. Lipsitch’s work, Lauterbach said, helped him to convince German Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the pandemic will be “the new normal” for the time being, and it impacted German officials’ thinking on how long their strategy should be in place.

Regarding the effectiveness of face masks, Lauterbach added, “we almost entirely relied on U.S. studies.” Germany was among the first major European countries to make face masks mandatory on public transport and in supermarkets.

Lipsitch said Thursday that he was not previously aware of the impact of his research on German decision-making, but he added that he has spoken to representatives of several other foreign governments in recent weeks, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and officials or advisers from Canada, New Zealand and South Korea.

Even though Lipsitch cautioned it was impossible for him to say how or if his conversations influenced foreign governments’ thinking, he credited the overall European response as “science-based and a sincere effort to find out what experts in the field believe is a range of possible scenarios and consequences of decisions.”

Lipsitch said he presented some of his research to a White House group in the early stages of the U.S. outbreak but said the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic did not reflect his conclusions. “I think they have cherry-picked models that at each point looked the most rosy, and fundamentally not engaged with the magnitude of the problem,” he said.

—

European researchers dispute that the U.S. government’s reliance on scientists to inform decision-making comes anywhere near the degree to which many European policymakers have relied on researchers.

After consulting U.S. research and German studies, for instance, German leaders agreed to make reopening dependent on case numbers, meaning restrictions snap back or reopening gets put on hold if the case numbers in a given region exceed a certain threshold.

Meanwhile, several U.S. states have reopened despite rising case numbers.

“I don’t understand that logic,” said Reinhard Busse, a health-care management professor at the Technical University of Berlin.

Lauterbach said that even though most Germans disapproved of Trump before the pandemic, even his staunchest critics in Germany were surprised by how even respected U.S. institutions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, struggled to respond to the crisis.

The CDC, for instance, initially botched the rollout of test kits in the early stages of the outbreak.

“Like many other aspects of our country, the CDC’s ability to function well is being severely handicapped by the interference coming from the White House,” said Harvard epidemiologist Lipsitch. “All of us in public health very much hope that this is not a permanent condition of the CDC.”

Some observers fear the damage will be difficult to reverse. “I’ve always thought of the CDC as a reliable and trusted source of information,” said Wiles, the New Zealand specialist. “Not anymore.”

#BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter, Public protest, Racism, Trump administration

Chainsaw-wielding racist gets boosted by a top Trump aide as race protests sweep the nation

The activity by a senior Trump campaign adviser, and former White House aide, reflects a broader movement by some Republicans to attack the protests against police brutality.

Mercedes Schlapp

Politico, by Marc Caputo, June 6, 2020

President Donald Trump and his allies for years have amplified racist messages on Twitter while simultaneously reaching out to black and Hispanic voters, a dissonant balancing act that’s now rocking the GOP amid nationwide racial-justice protests.

The two competing forces collided Saturday on the Twitter feed of Trump campaign senior adviser Mercedes Schlapp, when she boosted a tweet that lauded a man in Texas in a viral video as he yelled the n-word and wielded a chainsaw to chase away anti-racism demonstrators.

After POLITICO reached out to her and the campaign Saturday morning, Schlapp then retweeted another account that posted a version of the video that muted the racist slur. After this story published, she removed both her retweets and issued a written apology Saturday evening.

“I deeply apologize and I retweeted without watching the full video. I deleted the tweet,” Schlapp wrote. “I would never knowingly promote the use of that word. This is time for healing the nation and not division.”

Beyond Trump’s inner circle, Republicans have been under fire over racist social-media posts in Texas, where the chainsaw incident happened, triggering strife within GOP circles.

A dozen GOP county chairs in the state are under scrutiny for sharing racist social media posts commenting on the unrest and uprisings across the nation in response to the killing of a black man, George Floyd, by a white Minnesota police officer. One county chair juxtaposed a Martin Luther King Jr. quote next to an image of a banana, and another commented that “pandemic isn’t working. Start the racial wars.”

Against this backdrop, Schlapp‘s Saturday retweets highlighted how the Trump campaign operates in contradictory worlds of its own making. On one hand, Schlapp favorably promoted a man spewing anti-black racism and on the other she urged black people to vote for Trump just three days prior in an online campaign discussion on race. In that setting, she attacked Joe Biden’s tough-on-crime past while eliding Trump’s past record and rhetoric.

“Joe Biden supported the mass incarceration of black and Hispanic communities and has failed to lift them out of poverty,” Schlapp said. “In stark contrast, President Trump has delivered unprecedented opportunity for black Americans.”

The Twitter activity from Schlapp was part of a longstanding practice by Trump and his backers who occasionally use Twitter to amplify inflammatory messages that are at odds with the campaign’s appeals to black and other minority voters. Trump, who has fought accusations of racism for years, was in the midst of a black-voter outreach effort when Floyd’s killing changed the political dynamics.

The night before Schlapp’s retweet of the video to her 140,000 followers, the president retweeted a clip of conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s interview with a conservative black commentator, Candace Owens, who has taken a lead role in bashing Floyd.

“@RealCandaceO gave her thoughts: ‘The fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me,’” Beck tweeted on Wednesday. Trump boosted the post Friday with a retweet.

Trump has not personally criticized Floyd, called on the federal government to investigate his killing by Minneapolis police and has also used his Twitter feed to praise supporters who are black.

But after the looting erupted amid some protests over Floyd’s killing, Trump was criticized for denouncing “THUGS” in a Twitter post that warned “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a phrase traced back to a segregation-era Miami police chief. Twitter flagged the tweet for violating its rules against inciting violence. The White House then posted the message, getting flagged as well. Trump later claimed he didn’t know where the phrase originated.

Retweeting used to occupy a type of gray area on Twitter. The phrase “retweets are not an endorsement” was long a mantra of those who wanted to essentially repost content from another account on their own for a variety of purposes, from an interest in engaging in honest discussion to plausible deniability. But Twitter behavior evolved with new functionality to allow a person to comment on a retweeted post through “quote tweeting.” Now when campaign staff retweet messages, they generally lose the ability to credibly argue they weren’t reinforcing and broadcasting a message that aligns with their viewpoints.

The controversy with Trump surged again in April when the president was criticized for retweeting a message that said “fire Fauci,” concerning one of his top advisers on the coronavirus pandemic.

Before he became president, Trump came under fire for a wide variety of Twitter activity — from promoting the false “birther” conspiracy about President Barack Obama to retweeting a false message about “black on black” crime. The following year, he tweeted an image of a Star of David set on a field of cash, which many viewed as anti-Semitic. The latter tweet has been deleted.

The president’s son and namesake last year questioned the race of Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), a candidate for president at the time who’s now on Joe Biden’s running-mate shortlist. He deleted the tweet after outcry.

In Schlapp’s case, she retweeted a quoted tweet of the viral video that had been viewed about 7.5 million times on Twitter as of Saturday afternoon. The video originated in McAllen, Texas, where demonstrators had gathered downtown, only to be confronted by a man with a chainsaw that he revved at them as they fled.

“Go home!” yells the man, who was arrested Friday. “Don’t let those f—— n—— out there fool you!”

The man’s use of racist language and violent threats were roundly condemned on social media, with some sarcastically referring to the cult classic “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” movie. A pro-Trump account from Texas, though, lauded the assailant on Twitter and said he is “a Mexican business owner.” Another pro-Trump account, called Latino Townhall, approvingly quote-tweeted the post Friday night and exclaimed: “That’s how to do it.”

Hours later, Schlapp retweeted that post. Schlapp, who is married to the prominent head of the American Conservative Union that hosts the popular CPAC conference, later retweeted it from another account that censored the racist comment but wrote the protesters had said “f— the police.” There is no evidence the demonstrators said that.

The man in Texas, identified as Daniel Peña by local press, exposed a little-discussed issue among Latinos: anti-black racism. The McAllen police department on Saturday confirmed Pena’s ethnicity as “White/Hispanic.”

The issue of anti-black sentiment among Latinos has surfaced as an issue in Schlapp’s original hometown of Miami, where Democrats and progressives fretted that support for demonstrations over Floyd have been under-represented by Hispanics in the community.

Juan Peñalosa, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, said his organization is trying to address the issue of racism among Hispanics while Trump’s is helping to fuel it.

“The Trump campaign strategy has always been to win through division. But Mercedes’ tweet shows they are taking it to the next level,” said Peñalosa.

“While most of us are having honest discussions on how to expose racism and eliminate it — the Trump campaign has moved beyond their 2016 dog whistles and passive nods to fringe racist groups,” he said. “Now they are giving racists a platform, retweeting them and actively amplifying their message. It makes my skin crawl.”

Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.