The following video has been labeled “The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See.” Hyperbole? It’s just a lecture on math, given by a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder. It explains how just a 7% annual growth in energy use equals a 100% growth in 10 years. After a few decades, you’ve got a really big number. And a tremendously enormous problem. Watch and learn, please.
[H/T Peter Hufnagel]
Merle Hazard is the one and only country-music singer writing songs about the Financial Crisis. He’s been on PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; he’s been the subject of articles by The Economist, London’s Financial Times, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. And by gum, the man can carry a tune! Here’s Merle Hazard performing “Double Dippin'”!
According to The New York Times today ––
On Dec. 10, one of the lawmakers under investigation, Representative Joseph Crowley, a New York Democrat who sits on the Ways and Means Committee, left the Capitol during the House debate to attend a fund-raising event for him hosted by a lobbyist at her nearby Capitol Hill town house that featured financial firms, along with other donors. After collecting thousands of dollars in checks, Mr. Crowley returned to the floor of the House just in time to vote against a series of amendments that would have imposed tougher restrictions on Wall Street.
He’s just one of our national legislators under investigation by Congress to determine exactly how money flows in Washington, and how it directly influences inhibits reform. Here’s another:
The right honorable Tom Price just happened to schedule a “Financial Services Luncheon” on December 10, the same day as Rep. Crowley’s fundraising event and the exact same day that the first full House vote on the financial reform bill was held. During a two-month period around the vote, he scored $23,000.
Now, old hands around D.C. like Tom DeLay might call this “business as usual in Washington.” Any sane person, however, would rather be inclined to call this bribery. No, I’m not suggesting that you members of the governmental elite will ever actually be convicted of such a crime. Just know that we know exactly what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it. You are colluding with business interests to keep yourselves employed, to the detriment of the future of the United States of America. You are the epitome of the fault Tocqueville foresaw in the American system –– to wit, that people would be more inclined to vote their immediate self-interest than have the education and wisdom to consider long-term ramifications. Crowley and Price, and all others –– we’ll be seeing you.
Read to your heart’s content at The New York Times.
Okay, it’s like this. The main reason we’re in a Great Recession is that, back in 1999, the U.S. government compromised itself to death. Bill Clinton wanted to increase lending to minorities. The Republican-controlled Congress (swept into office by Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America”) said, “Only if you decrease regulation at the same time,” and so Phil Gramm (appointed senior economic adviser to McCain’s presidential campaign) drew up a bill that gutted Glass-Steagall, the 1933 act that prevented the Depression from happening again. President Clinton, weakened by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, didn’t have much wiggle-room in the Oval Office any more, and signed the legislation.
So, naturally, you get a huge housing boom totally based upon dodgy accounting and ludicrous credit standards which blows up in the world’s face.
You can’t make this stuff up, right?
Guess what. The BP oil spill is a result of exactly the same legislative deathmatch. The New York Times has a superb piece this morning by David S. Abraham declaring, this is a disaster that Congress voted for. In a highly balanced and nuanced argument, Abraham details how Congress really and truly has been addicted to providing the oil industry with economic incentives beyond all reason:
In a 1995 attempt to encourage more exploration, Congress agreed to reduce the cut of the proceeds the government could collect on oil and gas drilling in deep waters. Ten years later, despite higher oil prices and declarations from President George W. Bush that more incentives were not needed, a Republican-led Congress reduced royalties yet again.
It’s madness, of course – especially when
at the same time that Congress called for new drilling incentives, it also gutted oversight. From 2002 to 2008, legislators approved budgets reducing regulatory staffing levels by more than 15 percent… A 2004 Coast Guard study found that its “oil spill response personnel did not appear to have even a basic knowledge of the equipment required to support salvage or spill clean-up operations.”
When Bobby Jindal calls for more offshore drilling in order to help pay for coastal damage inflicted by offshore oil-and-gas operations (yeah, you read that right), then we have truly entered a land of the comedic insane, where the Mad Hatter starts writing Catch-22 contracts. The astounding thing is that, at base, it’s an exquisitely simple recipe for disaster: radically lower the barriers to enter the market, while radically de-regulating (by which we mean: knocking down the laws and rules that govern participation in this country’s economy) and what you get are toxic assets. That’s what we call a house, these days: a toxic asset, destroying the person who possesses it (for D&D fans, that’s kind of like a poisoned amulet, except with lots of bricks and mortar and wiring and plumbing).
But we should be calling the oil spill a toxic asset too. The definition’s more apt; no metaphors needed here. It’s a natural resource that’s killing our economy and destroying the ecosystems of our oceans. It’s a substance that, for decades now, has powered our economy; now it’s bringing the Gulf to a standstill. It’s the toxic asset, our home mortgage that’s underwater. The rich will probably walk away from it, their dirty souls skimming the tops of the oily waves in that Gulf between them and us.
David Harvey, Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, gives the world’s most pithy and complete explanation of the cumulative financial crises over the last 80 years to show us what’s happened. It’s an 11-minute showstopper of a lecture, and it is the only coherent 360-degree view of the crisis I’ve ever seen. I can’t emphasize how brilliant this is. Harvey is having an open online course reading Book I of Marx’s Capital. Watch this, and it’ll all make sense. Plus, it’s cartoony!
[H/T 3QuarksDaily]
The Guardian reports quite a heavy bill for BP, and this may really set a buzz for the President’s fist Oval office speech tomorrow.
BP is facing a bill of up to $34bn from the Gulf of Mexico disaster after US senators demanded the oil company deposited $20bn into a ring-fenced account to meet escalating compensation costs.
The sum dwarfs many analysts’ previous estimates, shared by BP, that put the cost of the clean-up effort and payment of damages to affected communities, such as fishermen, closer to a total of $5bn.
Shares in BP nose-dived by more than 9% today as investors took fright at the demand by the 54 Democratic senators, who represent a majority in the US upper house. The company is now worth almost half what it was before the accident of just under two months ago.
BP already faces up to $14bn in civil penalties, payable under US environmental law, assuming the leak is plugged in August. These punitive damages are directly linked to the size of the spill – already estimated at being up to eight times worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 – with BP liable for up to $4,300 for each barrel-worth spilt.
Senate leaders insisted the $20bn ring-fenced account should be exclusively for “payment of economic damages and clean-up costs” and should not be seen as a cap on BP’s other legal liabilities. With punitive damages pending too, the theoretical total of $34bn is equivalent to more than half the corporation tax paid by all British companies last year.
Tony Hayward, chief executive of BP, and other directors of the company, will meet Barack Obama at the White House on Wednesday prepared to offer concessions in the hope of taking the sting out of mounting political attacks on the company.
BP will be in “listening mode”, willing to cut its next dividend, worth about $2.5bn, possibly paying the cash into the clean-up fund. It will also reiterate its commitment to paying all legitimate claims arising from the disaster. But the company does not believe that the demand by the senators to stump up $20bn is justified.
Looks like somebody read Gov. Bobby Jindal’s letter. President Obama is soon to announce the new rules for moderate depth off shore drilling as early as this week, lifting the freeze on coastal exploration. You may recall a spokesperson for BP this weekend called the halt on exploration sensible, but hoped for a quick prognosis and reform in order for the industry to plan for the future. The White House didn’t miss a beat. Let’s hope when it comes to the bigger depths they include a mandatory relief well to accompany production as they do in some parts of Canada. Response Coordinator Admiral Thad Allen suggested that was a good idea just yesterday.
WASHINGTON—The Obama administration, facing rising anger on the Gulf Coast over the loss of jobs and income from a drilling moratorium, said Monday that it would move quickly to release new safety requirements that would allow the reopening of offshore oil and gas exploration in shallow waters.
Gulf Coast residents, political leaders and industry officials said delays in releasing the new rules, along with the administration’s six-month halt on deepwater drilling—both issued amid public pressure—threatened thousands of jobs.
Well-owner BP PLC, meanwhile, faces penalties “in the many billions of dollars,” for the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster that has been spewing an estimated minimum 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf, said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. The costs of the spill will “greatly exceed” the amount BP could recoup by selling any of the captured oil on the market, he said Monday.
After several reports of its demise, the Climate Bill is back on the burner. The president made a speech in its support today at Carnegie Mellon University . If Obama passes this one, he will be known as the President of reanimated zombie bills. Speaking of familiar, Republican support for the bill is no where to be found since Sen. Lindsey Graham backed off from Sen. Kerry’s shadow, but there are a pack of moderates targeted for swinging sides. Mentioning them, Obama said, “The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months,”
While he had the microphone, he took the time to outline some of his ideas for the legislation. The President said he would like to roll back the oil tax breaks and use that money to invest in our energy independence. This is something that has been talked about during drum circles for over four decades, but this time the talk may become law in the wake of the disaster in the Gulf.
Here is an excerpt from his speech,
And the time has come to aggressively accelerate that transition. The time has come, once and for all, for this nation to fully embrace a clean energy future. (Applause.) Now, that means continuing our unprecedented effort to make everything from our homes and businesses to our cars and trucks more energy-efficient. It means tapping into our natural gas reserves, and moving ahead with our plan to expand our nation’s fleet of nuclear power plants. It means rolling back billions of dollars of tax breaks to oil companies so we can prioritize investments in clean energy research and development.But the only way the transition to clean energy will ultimately succeed is if the private sector is fully invested in this future — if capital comes off the sidelines and the ingenuity of our entrepreneurs is unleashed. And the only way to do that is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.No, many businesses have already embraced this idea because it provides a level of certainty about the future. And for those that face transition costs, we can help them adjust. But if we refuse to take into account the full costs of our fossil fuel addiction — if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and the national security costs and the true economic costs — we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.The House of Representatives has already passed a comprehensive energy and climate bill, and there is currently a plan in the Senate — a plan that was developed with ideas from Democrats and Republicans — that would achieve the same goal. And, Pittsburgh, I want you to know, the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months. (Applause.) I will continue to make the case for a clean energy future wherever and whenever I can. (Applause.) I will work with anyone to get this done — and we will get it done.
We all know that big companies search for loopholes in the tax code, but sometimes you read a case that just questions the whole system. Apparently there is a new fun practice called Transfer Pricing in which with very flittle foreign investment, you can bounce your companies profits through other nations that have light taxes. It literally takes a financial transaction in America and transfers the profits to another country. It’s a miracle every hot dog stand in Battery Park hasnt figured a way to game this.
Off shore banks have now become metaphysical.
Jesse Drucker writes for Bloomberg News,
After an economic bailout in which the U.S. government lent, spent or guaranteed as much as $12.8 trillion, the Obama administration faces a projected budget deficit of $1.5 trillion this year. In February, the administration said it would target some of the techniques companies use to shift profits offshore — part of a package intended to raise $12 billion a year over the coming decade.
Losing $60 Billion
That’s only about a fifth of the $60 billion in annual U.S. tax revenue lost to thousands of companies’ income shifting, according to a study published in December in the National Tax Journal by Kimberly A. Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
The lost revenue could pay the federal government’s share of health coverage for more than 10 million uninsured Americans, such as Hurst — more than a third of the people who will gain insurance under the health-care overhaul passed in March. The administration’s proposed tax on certain financial institutions would take almost seven years to generate $60 billion.
“Transfer pricing is the corporate equivalent of the secret offshore accounts of individual tax dodgers,” said Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in a statement to Bloomberg News. Levin has overseen hearings on tax shelters including those sold to wealthy people by KPMG LLP. “Now that progress has been made in addressing offshore tax abuse by individuals, transfer pricing is an issue that deserves scrutiny.”
Don’t even ask. Just take from this what you want, but I see it as both ambiguous and profound.
Analysts are arguing today as to the cause of a major sell off in the stock market that took place yesterday May 6, 2010. Suggestions range from the Greek debt crisis all the way to a trader mistake who typed B for billion, when he meant to type M for million. At one point DOW had lost nearly 1000 points causing a rush of buyers to move in and snatch up the low prices. Whatever the cause yesterday, The massive movement reminded everyone that the Market is prepared to behave like a swarm of angry bees at the drop of a hat. Here’s some of the buzz from the trading floor.
We have known since the Enron in 2001 that this is a common scam, in which every major bank that was approached by Enron agreed to help them deceive creditors and investors by doing these kind of transactions.
And so what happened? There was a proposal in 2004 to stop it. And the regulatory heads — there was an interagency effort — killed it. They came out with something pathetic in 2006, and stalled its implication until 2007, but it ’s meaningless.
We have known for decades that these are frauds. We have known for a decade how to stop them.
That’s Bill Black, the former Litigation Director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, in testimony before Congress. This is the true story of the mortgage crisis, the financial crisis and the Great Recession, available on video on FireDogLake. You must watch it to believe it.
My name is Sam E. Antar. I am a convicted felon, former CPA, and former Chief Financial Officer of Crazy Eddie, Inc. During the 1980s, I helped mastermind with my cousin Eddie Antar and Uncle Sam M. Antar (co-founders of the company) one of the largest securities frauds of its time. Crazy Eddie Antar was coined by US Attorney Michael Chertoff as, “the Darth Vader of Capitalism.”
I believe that former criminals like me must do more than just express regret for our crimes and pay whatever punishment society imposes upon us. I believe that it is our obligation and responsibility to educate society, so that society can avoid future perils caused by new generations of criminals.
I teach law enforcement, government entities, businesses, professionals, and students about white collar crime and train them to catch corporate miscreants.
With that preamble, how can you not read his blog, especially this post about the SEC’s kick-ass tactics on Goldman Sachs? Antar writes, “When a company or individual receives a surprise subpoena on a Friday from the SEC, it is usually designed to ruin their weekend plans.” Antar also notes that the SEC’s chief counsel on this case is none other than Richard E. Simpson, who was the guy who put Sam and Crazy Eddie behind bars. After decades of SEC fecklessness (to put it charitably), finally they are swinging for the bleachers.
Hi guys. Whether or not you believe all this claptrap about global climate change, there’s a little fact we ought to bring to your attention: the Siberian permafrost is melting and woolly mammoth bones are surfacing – so many that Russian scientists are doing a splendid side trade in woolly mammoth tusks. In fact, they used to go for as much as $700 per kilogram; however these finds so endangered the market for African ivory that African ivory merchants made a huge sell-off of their wares to gut the woolly mammoth-tusk trade to about $220 a kilo.
The Los Angeles Times, which had its own news staff gutted by the financial crisis, has done a brilliant job at getting us this story. (We here at “WHEN HISTORY ATTACKS!” had almost written off the L.A. Times as a true functioning news organization.) And in this story, they’re telling us several things. First, the global financial meltdown has caused such frantic competition across the world, that a whole lot of people are forced into side trades (including Russian scientists and, by corollary, journalists). Second, these side jobs often have the negative effect of pressuring illegal economies – like the African ivory trade, which is banned worldwide with just a couple of exceptions. They will have to slaughter more elephants to make their living, and that means both legitimate, honest journalists and elephants are increasingly becoming very endangered species.
This is all embedded – but unstated – in the Los Angeles Times article, as well as the minor fact that the melting of the permafrost is an extremely bad thing. Trapped in the frozen ground is the world’s biggest reservoir of methane, which is a greenhouse gas. Its release virtually guarantees an acceleration in global climate change. So if you still have any doubts about global warming, come back to us in a couple of years and tell us “You were right.”
P.S. WOOLLY MAMMOTH tusk scavengers v.s. the African ivory trade is analogous to recycling vs. consumption of dwindling resources. The very issue of conservation itself is scalable from paleontology to global warming. Which is kind of a neat trick, if it weren’t all so deadly serious.
I was traveling via Los Angeles International Airport — LAX — last week. Walking through its faded, cramped domestic terminal, I got the feeling of a place that once thought of itself as modern but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. In some ways, LAX is us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance.
Why is Thomas Friedman absolutely, completely, the last person to understand anything?
On Wall Street, they pay you so much that they own you. You know? So it’s different. They have your soul. You gave it to them for the money.
—Mrs. Bradley Jack
Read an excerpt from the book at Vanity Fair.
I have a couple friends who have the most exciting job imaginable in a field with a really boring reputation: they’re forensic accountants. They’re the folks who are called upon to tease out the fake numbers of financial fraudsters once an indictment’s come down. They helped put Bernie Madoff in jail, and a lot of other Wall Street hooligans too. How do I know? Because I asked ’em. I also asked ’em if they’d like a post at the National Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). One laughed. He said, “When they pay me as much as I’m making here!”
Now, these folks I know, they’re brilliant. And they’re right on. But they make their money after everyone else has lost theirs. That’s not right. And when I read something like this, I get really mad:
Why do you think the S.E.C. failed to wake up to Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme until he turned himself in?
They weren’t even asleep at the switch; they were comatose. They didn’t respond to heat and light, much less evidence of wrongdoing. They were not engaged in the fight.
That’s Harry Markopolos, who describes himself as “the SEC’s doormat for nine years,” who’s being profiled in The New York Times and has a new book out, No One Would Listen.
Simply put, we need to reform the compensation system for federal employees. People who work in finance are, naturally, motivated by money. People who are motivated by money and ethics and personal accountability and interesting problems go into fields like venture capitalism and forensic accounting. It makes no sense to hire SEC investigators and put them on a bureaucratically-contrived federal tier pay system tied to seniority. If, long ago, we had created enough incentives for my brilliant friends to work for the federal government and stop the Ponzi schemers and mortgage tranchers before the crap hit the fan, we could all have breathed a sigh of relief and continued to sip our martinis. As it stands, my friends the forensic accountants are skiing at Killington and sipping martinis while the rest of us are on the Mad Dog 20/20.
~ David Schneider
Would you like to make a billion dollars and save the planet?
K.R. Sridhar is a NASA scientist who was working on a project to terraform Mars. He invented a machine that would produce oxygen in the Martian atmosphere and make the Red Planet habitable for humans.
But the budget got cut. The program got cancelled. So K.R. Sridhar took the invention and reversed it to suck in oxygen. He created an entirely new kind of fuel cell, which is far more compact and more efficient than anything now producing electricity. It is designed to replace the grid. And it’s coming.
DAVID BARBOZA writes for the New York Times,
SHANGHAI — China took a major step Friday toward making its capital market system more sophisticated and perhaps more stable as it agreed to give investors a new and powerful set of risk-management tools.
The government said it had approved, “in principle,” the creation of stock index futures, trading on margin and short selling, investment tools that are commonly used in New York, Chicago, London and many other financial markets, according to Xinhua, China’s state run news agency.
The announcement means that for the first time investors in China have more options than simply buying and selling their favorite stocks. They will soon be able to invest in a stock index (or set of stocks, collectively) and borrow money to trade stocks on margin.
Investors will also be able to make financial bets that stock prices will fall, a practice called short selling.
“This is a major step for China’s capital markets,” said Chang Chun, a professor of finance at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. “The government has been studying this for a long time.”
The China Securities Regulatory Commission said on its Web site Friday that it may take three months to complete preparations for the new investing tools to become available.
“This improves the stability and the healthy development of the capital markets,” the C.S.R.C. said in its statement.
By approving the new tools, the government hopes to accomplish several goals, including giving Shanghai more credibility as a financial capital and encouraging more ordinary Chinese to invest in equity markets. Many households still keep a large amount of their savings in low-interest accounts at state banks.
The announcement Friday did not come as a surprise to investors here.
Rumors that such an announcement was imminent have excited market players in recent days.
They drove up the share prices of Chinese brokerage houses, which expect to cash in on the new rules by making margin loans to investors and giving them additional options to hedge their risk.
The consequences of this mining in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southwestern Virginia are “”pervasive and irreversible,” the article finds. Companies are required by law to take steps to reduce the damages, but their efforts don’t compensate for lost streams nor do they prevent lasting water pollution, it says.
The article is a summary of recent scientific studies of the consequences of blasting the tops off mountains to obtain coal and dumping the excess rock into streams in valleys. The authors also studied new water-quality data from West Virginia streams and found that mining polluted them, reducing their biological health and diversity.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to this growing scientific evidence of the damages, they wrote, adding: “Regulators should no longer ignore rigorous science.”
New permits shouldn’t be granted, they argued, “unless new methods can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”
The Science article cites a number of potential health risks from removing mountaintops and filling in valleys, including contaminated well water, toxic dust and fish that are tainted with the chemical selenium. It also looked at environmental damage to the mining and fill areas and to streams below them, the reasons that forests are difficult to re-establish on mined areas and increased risks of downstream flooding.
“The reason we’re willing to make a policy recommendation is that the evidence is so clear-cut,” said Margaret Palmer of the University of Maryland, the lead author of the Science study and a specialist on the ecology of streams. Her co-authors were experts on chemistry, biology, engineering and health from Duke University, West Virginia University and other institutions.
Palmer said she started studying mountaintop mining’s effects on streams in Appalachia, then sought help from the others to pull together scattered studies. Her family is from western North Carolina, and she spent much of her childhood there.
The assessment came days after the Environmental Protection Agency approved a permit under the Clean Water Act for Patriot Coal Corp.’s mountaintop Hobet 45 mine in West Virginia. The EPA reached a deal with Patriot to change the original plans. Instead of burying six miles of streams, the company will bury three. The EPA said that other changes would reduce stream contamination and protect public health.
At the same time, the agency acknowledged the environmental costs.
Mountaintop-removal mining has destroyed roughly 2,040 square miles of land in Appalachia and buried more than 2,000 miles of streams, EPA spokeswoman Enesta Jones said in an e-mail.
In a statement about the Science article, the EPA said: “This report underscores EPA’s own scientific analysis regarding the substantial environmental, water and health impacts that result from mountaintop mining operations. EPA’s responsibility under the Clean Water Act is to ensure that mining activities do not degrade the quality of water used by communities, and we intend to ensure this requirement is met.
“EPA will continue to rely on the latest scientific information to inform our Clean Water Act review of mountaintop mining permits. We look forward to reviewing the details of this latest study and considering carefully its recommendations.”
The EPA’s approval of the Hobet 45 mine, announced Tuesday, was the first major mountaintop mining permit the agency has approved from a batch of 79 that it said raised concerns. The mine is expected to employ 460 unionized miners.
Environmental groups condemned the decision and said that even with the changes, the mine would destroy forests and streams.
Terry Macalister writes for the Guardian,
Vauxhall’s car plant at Ellesmere Port on Merseyside and British Sugar’s refineries at Bury St Edmunds and Newark are among nearly 100 factories that have had their gas cut as Britain’s energy infrastructure creaks under the strain of the great freeze.
The National Grid has told British Gas and other power firms to cut the supply to major corporate customers, in an attempt to preserve gas supply for households as the weather causes a surge in demand.
Opposition MPs said inadequate planning by the government in previous years had left the country heading towards an “energy crisis” that could only dent the UK’s fragile economic recovery.
But the government maintained last night that gas cuts were now only affecting 27 factories, and that all these had signed up to discount contracts allowing suppliers to interrupt their supplies in periods of high demand.
Energy minister Lord Hunt said: “This is a period of exceptionally high demand. The system is coping as it should. These sort of arrangements have been commercially entered into.”
Factories in the north-west of England and east Midlands are worst hit out of the 94 customers who have had gas supplies axed for the first time in up to 20 years, in some cases in a response to severe weather and creaking power infrastructure.
In the first tangible sign that fears over energy shortages are translating into supply disruption, the grid has demanded cuts to those customers who signed “interruptible” contracts.
In addition the grid issued a second “gas balancing alert” in four days – the first time it has had to issue two such warnings in quick succession. The call to customers to voluntarily reduce usage wherever possible came as the supply squeeze was made worse by production problems at Troll, a Norwegian North Sea gas field.
“There are some customers in the north-west and east Midlands who have had supplies interrupted because they are on interruptible contracts and we are facing high demand,” said a grid spokeswoman.
Well-known manufacturers at locations around the country, including the south and east of England, confirmed they were experiencing power supply problems but most asked for their names to be kept private to avoid panicking shareholders. Vauxhall and British Sugar both confirmed gas had been cut off but said production was being kept up by use of stand-by generators fired by oil.
“From 6pm on Monday British Gas asked us to stop using gas, so ever since we have used oil; and we will do that until they tell us we can start using gas,” said a spokesman for Vauxhall.
British Gas could not immediately confirm it had cut off some customers in line with grid demands, but said the problems were caused by transmission overload rather than supply shortages.
“If anything there is an oversupply of gas and certainly no shortage at this time. This [the current problem] is about moving it around the country,” said a spokesman.
MARIANNE LAVELLE & M.B. PELL write for Politico
The next round of the battle over climate change policy on Capitol Hill will involve more than the usual suspects — way more.
Watch soup makers face off against steel companies. Witness the folks who pump gas from the ground fight back against those who dig up rock. And watch the venture capitalists who have money riding on new technology try to gain advantage in a game that so far has been deftly controlled by the old machine.
An analysis of the latest federal records by the Center for Public Integrity shows that the overall number of businesses and groups lobbying on climate legislation has essentially held steady at about 1,160, thanks in part to a variety of interests that have left the fray. But a close look at the 140 or so interests that jumped into the debate for the first time in the third quarter shows a marked trend: Companies and organizations that feel they’ve been overlooked are fighting for a place at the table.
The amount of money involved quite likely rose as well. Although amounts spent on lobbying by issue are not disclosed, if the groups involved spent just 10 percent of their lobbying budgets on climate issues, they shelled out $30.5 million in the third quarter — up nearly 13 percent over the previous quarter.
Of course, the framework for climate change legislation developed by a trio of senators — Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham and Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman — already makes clear that the climate debate will expand into new realms. Incentives for nuclear power construction and more offshore oil and gas production are key proposals they’ve floated for gaining Republican and moderate Democratic votes for a climate change package. But beyond what are sure to be high-profile battles over those issues, the lobbying records also reveal that a host of smaller battles are brewing — sure to greatly complicate the already immense challenge of writing a successful bill. It’s one of the reasons that — despite the pledge by President Barack Obama and other world leaders to exhibit “strong political will” on climate — it most likely will be months before the Senate moves on a measure to curb fossil fuel emissions.
WHEN HISTORY ATTACKS! 