20 September 20
Get in Here and Donate Folks, Come On!
Let's kill this fundraiser now. Don't let it drag out another X number of days. Fewer than 300 readers to of 400,000 have donated. That is both pathetic and abusive.
Sincere thanks to all those who have responded.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
18 September 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Trump Campaign Called Out for Antisemitism Over Anti-Bernie Sanders Ad Using Nazi Imagery
James Crump, The Independent
Crump writes: "The Trump campaign has been accused of using antisemitic tropes in a new Facebook ad, which depicts Bernie Sanders as Joe Biden's puppet-master."
The new ad, that was paid for by the Trump Make American Great Again Committee features Bernie Sanders, one of the US’ most prominent Jewish politicians, holding the strings of a puppet with the Democratic presidential nominee’s face superimposed on.
A caption next to the image reads: “The Radical Left’s Puppet,” and the ad has been confirmed as real by The Daily Beast.
The ad, which began its campaign on Tuesday 15 September, has the potential to reach between 100,000 to 500,000 people, according to Facebook’s Ad Library.
The depiction of a powerful Jewish person as a puppet-master pulling the strings of world affairs from behind the scenes is one of the oldest and most prominent antisemitic tropes, which dates back to at least the 18th century.
The trope was used often in Nazi Germany to stir hatred towards Jewish people and has been utilised to target Jewish Democratic donor George Soros in recent years.
Last month, Facebook updated its Hate Speech guidelines, to ban on its site depictions of “Jewish people running the world or controlling major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government.” The Independent has contacted Facebook for comment.
The ad has been condemned by Jewish advocacy groups Bend the Arc: Jewish Action and Jews Against White Nationalism, who run the website How to Fight AntiSemitism together.
In a tweet, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action tweeted: “The Trump campaign is running Facebook ads portraying Bernie Sanders as the puppet master behind Joe Biden.
“There’s a long, dangerous history of Jews being scapegoated as all-powerful puppet masters.”
The group added: “Trump is using this antisemitic lie to spread fear & division.”
An article on How to Fight AntiSemitism also accused the Trump campaign of antisemitism and reported that the GOP published an article on its website in June that was titled: “Joe Biden: A puppet of Bernie and the radical left.”
Senior Republican officials have also used the trope in the last two years, and in 2018 house minority leader Kevin McCarthy claimed that Jewish billionaires Tom Steyer, Mike Bloomberg and George Soros were attempting to buy the 2018 midterm elections.
The trope also appeared to be used by Donald Trump Jr in October 2019, when he wrote on Twitter: “For those who don’t know who Adam Schiff is, he is not just a radical liberal, he is someone who has been hand-picked and supported by George Soros.”
Forbes reporter Andrew Solender noted on Twitter that the Trump campaign has run similar ads depicting former president Barack Obama and Democratic house speaker Nancy Pelosi as puppet-masters.
The Independent has contacted the Trump campaign for comment.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy arrives to testify during a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing in August. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Federal Judge Blocks USPS Sabotage, Blasts DeJoy's
'Politically Motivated Attack' to Rig Election
In 'Tense' Call, DeJoy Tells Election Officials That USPS Can Handle Mail Ballots
Miles Parks, NPR
Parks writes: "In a call that included a number of 'tense moments,' Postmaster General Louis DeJoy sought to reassure a group of the nation's top election officials Thursday that election mail will be his agency's highest priority this fall, according to one state election official on the call."
Specifically, DeJoy told the officials that his agency was undertaking a public information campaign to explain to voters that the U.S. Postal Service is equipped to handle the expected increase in mail volume that comes during election season, according to New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who leads the National Association of Secretaries of State, which organized the call.
DeJoy also talked more in depth about training for Postal Service employees about how to handle election mail, including postmarking, which in some jurisdictions needs to happen for a mail ballot to count.
"We're at the 'trust but verify' point," said Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. "We will be taking [the Postal Service] at their word that they are going to put these much-needed processes and guidelines into place. And only through ongoing communication and accountability will we be able to be assured."
"Better in the future"
The implementation of the aforementioned information campaign got off to a rocky start, with one state election official even calling postcards the USPS sent out last week "misinformation."
The cards urge voters to "plan ahead" if they expect to vote by mail this fall, which is a message consistent with what officials nationwide have tried to relay.
But the cards also tell voters to "Request your mail-in ballot ... at least 15 days before Election Day" — a message that has alarmed officials in states where ballots are automatically sent out to registered voters, like Colorado, Utah and Washington, and where voters might be then confused about whether they need to make a request.
"I just found out the @USPS is sending this postcard to every household and PO Box in the nation," tweeted Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, last Friday, with an image of the card. "For states like Colorado where we send ballots to all voters, the information is not just confusing, it's WRONG."
On Thursday's call, DeJoy said the fact that election officials didn't proofread the mailers before they were sent to millions of people was a mistake and he promised to do "better in the future," according to Toulouse Oliver. She said there were multiple "tense" moments during the questioning period about the postcards.
But that issue, which culminated in a lawsuit and a judge temporarily blocking the mailing of the cards in Colorado on Saturday, is just the latest in a string of USPS mishaps over the past few months.
The agency has been mired in controversy virtually since DeJoy, a former logistics executive and prominent Republican Party donor, took over in June. The urgency around those concerns grew after he instituted policy changes later in the summer.
DeJoy has disputed the specific changes he made, but regardless, mail delays followed shortly thereafter, leading to bipartisan calls for him to reverse the changes. He did so, and on Thursday, a federal district judge in Washington state also ordered the changes be halted.
Speaking from the bench on Thursday, that judge, Stanley Bastian, said the changes were a "politically motivated attack" on the efficiency of the Postal Service, according to The Associated Press. DeJoy faced similar accusations during congressional hearings last month and ardently denied that his moves were about anything more than trying to right the ship at a federal agency operating on a multibillion-dollar annual shortfall.
Regardless, mail is still being delivered at a slower-than-average pace than it was at the beginning of the pandemic, according to a tracker maintained by The New York Times.
Most of those delays are by only a single day, but the general air of doubt hanging over the Postal Service may push some voters, especially Democrats, to vote in person instead of by mail this fall.
A CNBC/Change Research poll in late August found an 11 percentage-point decline in the share of Democrats nationwide who said they planned to vote by mail, compared with a poll taken two weeks before the changes at the Postal Service became well-known.
Toulouse Oliver called the conversation Thursday "extremely productive" and said she's optimistic that DeJoy appears to be making more of an effort to communicate with the public and election officials about policies he is implementing.
"We have to take the election process out of the realm of toxic partisan rhetoric and make sure that voters have the best information possible to make their decisions about how, where and when to cast their ballot," she said.
Mail ballot. (photo: George Frey/Getty)
North Carolina Is Already Rejecting Black Voters' Mail-In Ballots More Often Than White Voters'
Kaleigh Rogers, FiveThirtyEight
Rogers writes: "In every election, a small percentage of mail-in ballots get rejected. But this election is likely to have a whole lot of mail-in ballots."
READ MORE
Acting Deputy of DHS Ken Cuccinelli. (photo: Getty)
At Least 15 Trump Officials Do Not Hold Their Positions Lawfully
Becca Damante, Just Security
Damante writes: "The president has been thumbing his nose at the Constitution and the rule of law."
The Constitution Assigns the Senate a Key Role in Determining Who Fills Senior Executive Branch Positions. But Under Trump, the Senate Is Far Too Often Being Cut Out.
he Trump administration’s disregard for the law governing presidential appointments finally caught up with it. This week, a federal judge in Maryland ruled that because Chad Wolf was likely serving unlawfully as acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), she was barring the administration from enforcing new asylum rules.
Judge Paula Xinis is not the only one who’s concluded this. Last month, the Government Accountability Office released a report concluding that Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli are both serving in their positions illegally. And, they aren’t the only high-level Trump officials who are serving illegally. Rather, this administration has shown a blatant disregard for the critical and constitutionally prescribed role the Senate is supposed to play in determining who should fill high-level positions in the executive branch. Indeed, by our count at the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), there are currently at least 15 other officials serving in at least 12 executive branch departments who do not hold their positions lawfully and, as we explain below, this figure surely understates the severity of the problem. This pervasive evasion of the Senate’s advice-and-consent requirement is deeply troubling—and hugely consequential.
Under the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, the president is required to obtain “the Advice and Consent of the Senate” in order to
appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law.
As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist No. 76, the Framers imposed this requirement because they recognized that giving the president the “sole disposition of offices” would result in a Cabinet “governed much more by his private inclinations and interests” than by the public good.
While federal law has long allowed acting officials to temporarily fill offices that require Senate confirmation, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) was passed in 1998 in response to the executive branch’s failure to comply with federal law and its evasion of the Appointments Clause. The FVRA imposes strict limits on who may serve as acting officials and for how long they may serve. Among other things, the statute provides that an acting official may not serve for more than “210 days beginning on the date the vacancy occurs.” That period can be extended if there is a nomination to fill the position—but it cannot be extended for any other reason.
The Trump administration has repeatedly been ignoring this strict time limit set out in the FVRA, allowing offices to continue to be filled by acting officials long after the FVRA’s time limit has expired. In fact, although the GAO Report highlighted the fact that Wolf’s initial appointment to serve as acting secretary was unlawful, it could also have concluded that his continuing service as acting secretary was unlawful because, at the time of the GAO’s report, the period during which that office could be filled by an acting official had long expired. It had been well over a year since the last Senate-confirmed DHS secretary resigned, and the president had not nominated anyone to fill the position permanently. (After the GAO issued its report, the president nominated Wolf to serve as DHS Secretary, and his nomination is currently pending.)
To be sure, the Trump administration has argued that the FVRA’s time limits do not apply because Wolf was appointed under the Homeland Security Department’s organic statute, not the FVRA. According to the government, the provision in the DHS statute, which allows the department to create an order of succession for the secretary’s office, displaces the entire FVRA—not just its rules affecting who may serve as the acting secretary, but also its time limits on acting service. As my organization has explained elsewhere, this is wrong. DHS’s organic statute does not displace the FVRA; to the contrary, it explicitly incorporates it. And while the DHS statute trumps in the event of a conflict with a provision in the FVRA, there is no conflict between the DHS statute’s order of succession provision and the FVRA’s time limits.
Wolf is not alone in having served as an acting officer long after the FVRA time limits for the office expired. By our count at CAC, as of September 2, there were at least 15 other offices with acting officials even though the FVRA time limit for those offices had expired. To identify these offices, we used the Washington Post’s list of 757 key positions that require Senate confirmation and Congress.gov’s nominations database, which provides information on pending nominations. Each of the offices we identified can no longer be filled by acting officials, and yet according to government web pages, they are. (In a couple of cases, while at least one government web page continues to identify these offices as being filled by acting officials, the acting officials are elsewhere identified only as “performing the functions and duties” of the relevant office.” While the practical difference between these labels is unclear, allowing individuals who have not been Senate-confirmed to perform the functions and duties of an office raises different legal questions than formally giving them the “acting” title. ) Here are the 15 offices we identified:
- Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Department of Commerce
- Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness, Department of Defense
- General Counsel, Department of Education
- Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources, Department of Health and Human Services
- Special Trustee for American Indians, Department of the Interior
- Assistant Administrator of the Bureau of Asia, U.S. Agency for International Development
- Administrator, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Justice
- Chief Counsel for Advocacy, Small Business Administration
- Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, Department of State
- Assistant Secretary for Population, Refugees, and Migration, Department of State
- Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, Department of State
- Administrator, Federal Transit Administration, Department of Transportation
- Inspector General, Department of the Treasury
- General Counsel, Department of Veteran Affairs
- Deputy Secretary, Department of Veteran Affairs
Significantly, this list only includes offices that are being illegally filled by acting officials in violation of the FVRA’s time limit. It does not include offices that are being filled by officials whose initial appointments were not in conformity with the FVRA or other federal law. Nor does it include all of the offices that have been filled by illegal acting officials at various points over the last four years, but are no longer being illegally filled.
Moreover, the list above does not include offices that are ostensibly being kept vacant, but the functions and duties of which are being performed by another official. By our count at CAC, at least 21 officials in at least 10 executive branch departments[i] are performing the functions and duties of vacant offices that can no longer be filled by “acting” officials due to the FVRA time limit. For example, an acting official could not serve as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) after December 28, 2019, but Cuccinelli has been serving as the “Senior Official Performing the Duties of USCIS Director” since December 31, 2019. Given that the administration has chosen not to nominate anyone to fill this position, this is no less an evasion of the Senate’s advice-and-consent power than illegally filling an office with an acting official.
These examples are deeply troubling because it means that senior-level officials throughout the executive branch are taking actions that they may have no legal authority to take. Perhaps the most prominent example is Wolf, who was at least partially responsible for the federal government’s response to protests in Portland, Oregon. In early July, Wolf sent approximately 114 agents to Portland from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Some of those agents were members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, an elite paramilitary arm of CBP that is trained to respond to high-risk operations, not protests protected under the First Amendment. Several lawsuits have been filed against DHS challenging these actions, and as one of them notes, Wolf “could not have served as Acting Secretary under the FVRA because the 210-day limit on such service expired before he purported to assume the Office.” Should the court in this case agree, this could have real effects on the legality of Wolf’s response in Portland because as Judge Xinis pointed out in her recent ruling on asylum rules, any “acts taken by a person selected under the FVRA but in excess of the FVRA’s terms have no force and effect.”
Filling vacant positions illegally also prevents the Senate from playing any role in determining who holds offices that can wield significant power. For example, the inspector general at the Department of the Treasury is
required to keep both the Secretary and the Congress fully and currently informed about the problems and deficiencies relating to the administration of department programs and operations and the necessity for corrective action.
Given that the Department of the Treasury is responsible for distributing $500 billion as part of the CARES act, it is deeply troubling that the Senate played no role in determining who is currently serving as the Treasury Department’s inspector general.
Similarly, the assistant secretary for financial resources at the Department of Health and Human Services is
responsible for the overall budget, financial management, acquisition policy and support, and small business programs of HHS’s roughly $1 trillion annual budget, as well as the Department’s performance management.
Jen Moughalian is unlawfully serving in this position today. HHS is responsible for distributing more than $175 billion to hospitals and healthcare providers battling coronavirus.
The Constitution’s Appointments Clause provides a critical check on the president in determining who fills the most important positions in the executive branch. While the FVRA offers a president some latitude in filling those positions temporarily, it does not give President Donald Trump nearly as much latitude as he may think. In this context (as in so many others), the president has been thumbing his nose at the Constitution and the rule of law. And the evidence of that can be found in the highest reaches of numerous executive branch departments.
—
[i] 1) Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement, U.S. Department of Commerce;
2) Under Secretary for International Trade, U.S. Department of Commerce;
3) Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, U.S. Department of Commerce;
4) Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, U.S. Department of Defense;
5) Under Secretary, U.S. Department of Education;
6) Assistant Secretary, Office of Communications and Outreach, U.S. Department of Education;
7) Assistant Secretary, Office of Legislation and Congressional Affairs, U.S. Department of Education;
8) Assistant Secretary, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, U.S. Department of
Education
9) Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;
10) Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
11) Under Secretary for Management, U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
12) Director, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
13) General Counsel, U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
14) Under Secretary for Science and Technology, U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
15) Deputy Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland
Security
16) Commissioner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Department of Homeland Security;
17) Principal Deputy Director, Office of the Director of National Intelligence;
18) Inspector General, Office of Personnel Management;
19) Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State;
20) Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Transportation;
21) Under Secretary for Health, U.S. Department for Veterans Affairs.
Olivia Troye, Vice President Mike Pence's former homeland security, counterterrorism, and coronavirus adviser. (photo: unknown)
Trump Called the Coronavirus 'a Good Thing' Because He Didn't Like Shaking Hands With 'Disgusting' Supporters, According to Report
Eliza Relman, Business Insider
Relman writes: "Trump is well known to be a germophobe and has publicly said he doesn't like shaking hands."
livia Troye, who until recently served as Vice President Mike Pence's top coronavirus task force adviser, slammed President Donald Trump's pandemic response in an interview with The Washington Post and in a new video for the group Republicans Voters Against Trump.
In the video, Troye describes a COVID-19 task force meeting in which she says the president remarked that the pandemic might be a "good thing" because it prevented him from having to shake hands with "disgusting people." Troye said the president was referring to his supporters.
"When we were in a task-force meeting, the president said: 'Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing — I don't like shaking hands with people. I don't have to shake hands with these disgusting people,'" Troye says in the two-minute video. "Those disgusting people are the same people he claims to care about. These are the people who are still going to his rallies today, who have complete faith in who he is."
Trump is well known to be a germophobe and has publicly said he doesn't like shaking hands.
Troye, who served as a senior aide to Pence on homeland security and counterterrorism for two years, was deeply involved in the administration's coronavirus response. She said she left her White House job in August after concluding that the president was undermining efforts to keep Americans safe.
"The truth is he doesn't actually care about anyone but himself," she said.
In an interview with The Washington Post published Thursday, Troye said that Trump's pandemic response showed a "flat-out disregard for human life" and that he was more concerned with the economy and his reelection than with protecting Americans.
"The president's rhetoric and his own attacks against people in his administration trying to do the work, as well as the promulgation of false narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made this ongoing response a failure," Troye told The Post.
Troye also said any vaccine produced before the election might be dangerous.
"I would not tell anyone I care about to take a vaccine that launches prior to the election," she told The Post. "I would listen to the experts and the unity in pharma. And I would wait to make sure that this vaccine is safe and not a prop tied to an election."
The White House and Pence's team dismissed Troye's allegations, characterizing her as a "disgruntled" former employee.
"Ms. Troye is a former detailee and a career Department of Homeland Security staff member, who is disgruntled that her detail was cut short because she was no longer capable of keeping up with her day-to-day duties," Pence's national security adviser, Lt. General Keith Kellogg, told The Post in a statement. "Ms. Troye directly reported to me, and never once during her detail did she every express any concern regarding the administration's response to the coronavirus to anyone in her chain of command. By not expressing her concerns, she demonstrated an incredible lack of moral courage."
Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, called Troye's allegations "flat-out inaccurate."
Bolivian opposition leader and senator Jeanine Anez Chavez. (photo: Marco Bello/Reuters)
Bolivia: Coup Government Leader Jeanine Añez Withdraws From October Elections After Little Support
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Bolivia's de facto president Jeanine Ánez announced Thursday through a recorded message her decision to 'put aside' her candidacy for the upcoming October 18 presidential elections."
READ MORE
Gas well No. 095-20708, 4 miles north of Rio Vista, California, in 2017. (photo: Lisa Vielstadte)
Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever
Mya Frazier, Bloomberg
Frazier writes: "Gas wells never really die."
Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it
he story of gas well No. 095-20708 begins on Nov. 10, 1984, when a drill bit broke the Earth’s surface 4 miles north of Rio Vista, Calif. Wells don’t have birthdays, so this was its “spud date.”
The drill chewed through the dirt at a rate of 80 ½ feet per hour, reaching 846 feet below ground that first day. By Thanksgiving it had gotten a mile down, finally stopping 49 days later, having laid 2.2 miles of steel pipe and cement on its way to the “pay zone,” an underground field containing millions of dollars’ worth of natural gas.
It was ready to start pumping two months later, in early January. While 1985 started out as a good year for gas, by its close, more than half the nation’s oil and gas wells had shut down. How much money the Amerada Hess Corp., which bankrolled the dig, managed to pump out of gas well No. 095-20708 before that bust isn’t known. By 1990 the company, now called simply Hess Corp., gave up and sold it. Over the next decade or so, four more companies would seek the riches promised at the bottom of the well, seemingly with little success. In 2001 a state inspector visited the site. “Looks like it’s dying,” he wrote.
Gas wells never really die, though. Over the years, the miles of steel piping and cement corrode, creating pathways for noxious gases to reach the surface. The most worrisome of these is methane, the main component of natural gas. If carbon dioxide is a bullet, methane is a bomb. Odorless and invisible, it captures 86 times more heat than CO₂ over two decades and at least 25 times more over a century. Drilling has released this potent greenhouse gas, once sequestered in the deep pockets and grooves of the Earth, into the atmosphere, where it’s wreaking more havoc than humans can keep up with.
Well No. 095-20708 is also known as A.H.C. Church No. 11, referring both to Hess and to Bernard Church, who like so many in California’s Sacramento River Delta sold his farmland but retained the mineral rights in the hope that they’d make his family rich. The Church well is a relic, but it’s not rare. It’s one of more than 3.2 million deserted oil and gas wells in the U.S. and one of an estimated 29 million globally, according to Reuters. There’s no regulatory requirement to monitor methane emissions from inactive wells, and until recently, scientists didn’t even consider wells in their estimates of greenhouse gas emissions. With the pandemic depressing demand for fossil fuels and renewable energy development booming, why should owners idle or plug their wells when they can simply walk away?
In the past five years, 207 oil and gas businesses have failed. As natural gas prices crater, the fiscal burden on states forced to plug wells could skyrocket; according to Rystad Energy AS, an industry analytics company, 190 more companies could file for bankruptcy by the end of 2022. Many oil and gas companies are idling their wells by capping them in the hope prices will rise again. But capping lasts only about two decades, and it does nothing to prevent tens of thousands of low-producing wells from becoming orphaned, meaning “there is no associated person or company with any financial connection to and responsibility for the well,” according to California’s Geologic Energy Management Division.
“It’s cheaper to idle them than to clean them up,” says Joshua Macey, an assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago, who’s spent years studying fossil fuel bankruptcies. “Once prices increase, they could be profitable to operate again. It gives them a strong reason to not do cleanup now. It’s not orphaned yet, although for all intents and purposes it is.”
The life cycle of the Church well exemplifies this systemic indifference. Hess’s liability ended when it sold more than 30 years ago; the last company to acquire the lease, Pacific Petroleum Technology, which took over in 2003, managed to evade financial responsibility entirely as the well’s cement and steel piping began to corrode. Letters from state regulators demanding that the company declare its plans for the well went unanswered. In November 2007 the state issued a civil penalty of $500 over Pacific’s failures to file monthly production reports on the well. Instead of paying, Pacific requested a hearing, at which a representative testified that there was still $10 million worth of natural gas waiting to be pumped and promised the company would secure funds, make necessary repairs, and start producing again. The state was unconvinced and demanded Pacific plug the well. Another decade passed. The company never pumped a single cubic foot of gas and made no effort to plug the well. (Representatives of Pacific couldn’t be reached for comment.)
If Church were the only neglected well, it would be inconsequential. But these artifacts of the fossil fuel age are ubiquitous, obscured in backyards and beneath office buildings, under parking lots and shopping malls, even near day-care centers and schools in populous cities such as Los Angeles, where at least 1,000 deserted wells lie unplugged. In Colorado an entire neighborhood was built on top of a former oil and gas field that had been left off of construction maps. In 2017 two people died in a fiery explosion while replacing a basement water heater.
These kinds of headline-grabbing episodes are anomalies, but all this leaking methane also has dire environmental consequences, and the situation is likely only to get worse as more companies fail. “The oil and gas industry will not go out with a bang,” Macey adds, “but with a whimper.” As it does, the wells it orphans will become wards of the state.
Days before the 33rd anniversary of Church’s spud date, in November 2017, Eric Lebel, a researcher with the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford, arrived at the wellhead. The rusted 10-foot structure—a “Christmas tree,” as it’s called in the industry—loomed over him.
While Lebel knew the well’s depth, it was still hard for him to envision its scale. “If you don’t see it, you don’t think about it,” he says later. “What’s underground is impossible to imagine.” The Earth’s interior has been unfathomably scarred by hydrocarbon infrastructure, he says. For almost two centuries, since the drilling of the first gas well in 1821, the fossil fuel industry has treated the planet like a giant pincushion. The first U.S. gas well in Fredonia, N.Y., extended only 27 feet underground, but drilling since has gone ever deeper. Ten-thousand-foot wells like Church are common today.
Now imagine each of those pins in the global pincushion is a straw inside a straw. In Church’s case, the outer straw is 7.625 inches in diameter and made of steel, encased in cement; inside is a 2.375-inch-wide steel tube. The deeper the well, the more the heat and pressure rise. At Church’s deepest point, 10,968 feet, the temperature likely exceeds 200F. The weight of the Earth exerts more and more pressure as the well goes deeper—reaching about 5 tons per square inch at the bottom. That’s the equivalent of four 2,500-pound cars on your thumb. All of this puts a huge amount of stress on that underground infrastructure. As it breaks down, eventually it begins to leak.
Astonishingly, no one had even bothered to ask how much until the past decade. In 2011, Mary Kang was a Ph.D. student at Princeton modeling how CO₂ might escape from underground storage vessels after being captured and buried. She looked for similar models on methane and came up with nothing; some of the industry sources she spoke with were confident that it wasn’t much—and that even if it was, technology existed that could fix it. “It’s one thing to assume,” Kang remembers thinking to herself. “It’s another thing to go get empirical data.”
Kang went to Pennsylvania, where boom and bust cycles over the years have left a half-million gas wells deserted. Of the 19 she measured, three turned out to be high emitters, meaning they released three times more methane into the atmosphere than other wells in the sample. “There were no measurements of emissions coming out of these wells,” she says. “People knew these wells existed, they just thought what was coming out was negligible or zero.” By scaling up her findings, Kang was able to estimate that in 2011, deserted wells were responsible for somewhere from 4% to 7% of all man-made methane emissions from Pennsylvania.
Those findings inspired Lebel and other researchers in the U.S. and worldwide to start taking direct methane measurements. The industry responded by ignoring them and fought fiercely against the Obama administration’s efforts to start regulating methane emissions. (A 2016 rule requiring operators to measure methane releases at active wells and invest in technology to prevent leaks was summarily overturned by the Trump administration at the beginning of August.)
Meanwhile, scientists trudged on. So far researchers have measured emissions at almost 1,000 of the 3.2 million deserted wells in the U.S. In 2016, Kang published another study of 88 abandoned well sites in Pennsylvania, 90% of which leaked methane.
Internationally, researchers tracked increasingly bad news. German scientists discovered methane bubbles in the seabed around orphaned wells in the North Sea. Taking direct measurements of 43 wells, they found significant leaks in 28. In Alberta, researchers estimated methane leaks in almost 5% of the province’s 315,000 oil and gas wells. In the U.K., researchers found “fugitive emissions of methane” in 30% of 102 wells studied. Such findings are both a threat and an opportunity, says Lebel, who considers abandoned wells the easiest first step to cutting methane emissions globally. That’s what brought him to Church in the first place.
According to his field logs, Lebel spent his first hour on site building a secure air chamber using a Coleman canopy tent draped in tarps, which he held in place with sandbags. Inside the tent, fans effectively created a convection oven of rapidly circulating air. As he worked, a farmer who leases the land wandered over. Be careful, he warned Lebel. Sometimes fire comes out of that well. Just yesterday he’d seen a plume of flames erupt from it, he said.
At 3:41 p.m., using an instrument that resembles a desktop computer with an abundance of ports, Lebel took his first methane measurement. “We knew right away it was a major leaker,” he recalls. It exceeded the instrument’s threshold of 50 parts per million almost immediately. Lebel collected air samples in tiny glass vials to take back to his lab. The analysis was damning: Two hundred and fifty grams of methane were flowing out of the well each hour. A rough calculation shows that over a decade and a half the Church well had likely emitted somewhere around 32.7 metric tons of methane, enough to melt a sizable iceberg.
Despite the flurry of recent research, the full scale of the emissions problem remains unknown. “We really don’t have a handle on it yet,” says Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell who’s studied methane leaks from active oil and gas wells for decades. “We’ve poked millions of holes thousands of feet into Mother Earth to get her goods, and now we are expecting her to forgive us?”
There’s no easy way to bring up the thousands of feet of steel and cement required to carry gas out of a well as deep as A.H.C. Church 11. That means the only way to keep the well from leaking is to fill it up. Plugging a well costs $20,000 to $145,000, according to estimates by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. For modern shale wells, the cost can run as high as $300,000.
On a Wednesday morning near the end of June 2018, a crew of workers from the Paul Graham Drilling & Service Co., hired by the state of California after Pacific Petroleum failed to respond to years of notices, arrived at the well site. As they would on any job, they first dropped a “string,” a lengthy metal cable, into the well; in ideal circumstances, it’d be a straight shot to the bottom. But not that day.
Well records indicate that a “packer,” a ring-shaped device used to create a seal between the outer and inner straws of gas wells, had been installed about 7,000 feet down. It would have to come out first, or they wouldn’t be able to get the cement all the way to the bottom. When they tried to pull out the packer, the string broke.
The tiny packer, just 2.5 inches wide, stayed stuck for weeks. As the crew tried to get it out, tubing inside the well broke—“structurally compromised due to corrosion,” they told California’s Department of Conservation in the work log they submitted. They were forced to go “fishing,” using specialized tools to retrieve the tubing, piece by broken piece. But the packer was still in there. Eventually they used even more specialized tools to grind it away.
It wasn’t until July 26, almost a month after workers arrived at the Church site, that they were able to start “running mud,” the industry term for pumping cement into the outer straw. This straw had been purposely perforated to allow oil and gas to flow from the pay zone into the well. The plugging cement is supposed to accumulate upwards as more gets pumped in. But if it leaks off into that porous pay zone, no matter how much mud the team runs, it simply disappears. Unless the cement and other sealants reached every nook and cranny, the site might continue to leak.
Thankfully, Church filled easily, requiring 36,500 pounds of cement. The unforeseen difficulties added $171,388 to Paul Graham’s original estimate, raising the total bill to $294,943, more than double the crew’s $123,555 bid. (Neither the cleanup company nor the state representatives who oversaw the work responded to interview requests.) Ingraffea examined the myriad work orders from the job and called it a “well from hell.”
By late August, almost two months after they arrived at the Church site, the crew had cut off the Christmas tree and welded a half-inch-thick steel plate to the top of the wellhead. It had taken nine days longer to fill the well than it had to drill it in the first place. Looking across the landscape today, it’s as though Church never existed.
The atmospheric evidence, of course, shows otherwise.
The cost to plug just California’s deserted wells—an estimated 5,500—could reach $550 million, according to a report released earlier this year. While not an insignificant price tag, the real shock would come if the industry collapses and walks away for good. In that doomsday scenario, the costs to plug and decommission 107,000 active and idled wells could run to $9 billion. And yet so far in 2020, California has approved 1,679 new drilling permits.
“We make the same mistake over and over again,” says Rob Jackson, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford who oversees Lebel’s work. “Companies go bankrupt, and taxpayers pay the bills.”
Congressional efforts to create a well-plugging program for cleanup are stalled. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies have made trillions of dollars in profits over the past century and a half while enjoying relative impunity. On federal lands, where oil and gas companies actively drill, bond levels haven’t been adjusted for inflation since 1951, when they were set at $10,000 for a single well and $150,000 for however many wells a single operator controls nationwide. In California a company drilling 10,000 feet or more needs only $40,000.
Even spending all the billions of dollars required to plug the world’s millions of deserted wells won’t stave off environmental catastrophe. The vast heat and pressure of the Earth’s subsurface—the same forces that crushed dinosaur bones into hydrocarbons in the first place—mean that no plugging job lasts forever. Scientists and engineers debate how long cement can survive in the harsh environment of the Earth’s interior. Estimates typically fall from 50 to 100 years, a long enough time horizon that even some of today’s biggest oil and gas companies may no longer exist, but short enough to be uncomfortably within the realm of human comprehension. No regulations require states or federal agencies to measure emissions after wells are plugged.
While little is being done to prevent methane from creating catastrophic warming, less is being done to prevent water contamination. Researcher Kang, now an assistant professor of civil engineering at McGill University, worked as a groundwater monitoring consultant before getting her Ph.D. In 2016 she published a paper with Jackson showing that California’s Central Valley, where a quarter of the nation’s food is produced, has close to three times the volume of fresh groundwater as previously thought. Such good news came with an urgent caveat: Nineteen percent of the state’s wells came close to these aquifers. “It’s definitely a threat and something that needs protection,” Kang says. “There’s so much we don’t know.”
What we do know is scary enough. “The cement will deteriorate,” says Dominic DiGiulio, a senior research scientist for PSE Healthy Energy, an Oakland, Calif.-based public policy institute, who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency for more than three decades in subsurface hydrology. “It’s not going to last forever, or even for very long.” A.H.C. Church lies in the Solano Subbasin, part of the Sacramento Valley Groundwater Basin. Almost 30% of the region’s water comes from subsurface sources, according to a 2017 report from the Northern California Water Association. “Given sustained droughts, groundwater resources are going to be very important in the coming decades,” DiGiulio says. “California is going to need these resources.”
Among the hundreds of pages of records chronicling the well’s spud, activity, and plugging, the one consistent name was Bernard Church. One afternoon this summer, I called the phone number listed on the most recent document, from a 2004 inspection, and reached his wife, Beverly Church. She now lives in Walnut Creek, Calif., about 40 miles southwest of the well site, and she told me her husband had died nine years earlier.
He and their family never became rich. Holders of mineral rights can lease them back to oil and gas companies and receive royalties on what their wells produce. But because so little had been pumped from Church, none of the 20 or so family members who eventually held a stake wound up with much. “We didn’t make any money off of it,” Beverly says.
That’s not an uncommon outcome, explains Kassie Siegel, director of the Climate Law Institute at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “Every once in a while someone might” get rich, she says. “But it’s not a thing. Big Oil is getting rich. For individual, ordinary people, it’s all risk and no reward.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.