Articles by Christina Larson

Water safety rules will be more lax in rural areas

Has the White House declared war on farmers and ranchers?

The brunt of the Bush administration's rush to expand energy development in western states has been most directly borne by rural voters. Water-intensive gas-extraction procedures run ranchers' wells dry and expel water so salty it's toxic to crops. Gas compressor stations and their generators pump sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide into the air. Livestock drink from uncovered drip pans containing antifreeze and perish. "People can't believe this can happen to them until their own ox is gored," says Jill Morrison of Wyoming's Powder River Basin Resource Council, which works with rural communities facing environmental concerns.

If that wasn't stunning enough, now there's this, courtesy of The Washington Post ... in March the EPA proposed regulating drinking water quality differently in rural America than in the rest of the nation.

Bottom line: If you live in a community of less than 10,000 people, your water would be permitted to contain three times the level of arsenic as your counterparts in urban and suburban areas. (The proposal is open for public comment until May 1.)

The logic is that smaller communities have more trouble than other areas paying to update and repair water treatment systems. But isn't this a clear case where the federal government should step in to bridge the gap -- not shrink away?

Update: More on the EPA proposal here from Carl Pope, who notes that one community that would be at risk is Crawford, Texas.

How’d they do it in the ’70s?

Today, it's a good bet that if you consider yourself an environmentalist, you lean left politically. That's especially true here in D.C. But it wasn't always. Once leaders in both parties fell all over each other competing to be known as champions of the environment.

Recently I had a chance to speak with the former chiefs of staff for both Democrat Ed Muskie and Republican Howard Baker -- the dynamic duo whose early-1970s Senate subcommittee produced the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, among other landmark environmental laws.

My basic question: How'd ya do it?

Leon Billings, Muskie's staff director, said one thing that didn't grind meaningful action to a halt was waiting indefinitely for more data to roll in: "We know so much more about the science of global warming now than we knew about the science of leaded gasoline and auto emissions in 1970 when we wrote Clean Air Act," he said.

His counterpart, Republican Jim Range, says: "Once we had identified the problem, there was a commitment on both sides of the aisle not to agree on everything, but to agree that you would work together until you had addressed the problem."

In other words, just sitting on your hands wasn't an option.

Let's hope we're fast approaching the day when Washington takes the same approach toward global warming. We can't afford to wait much longer.

Beyond SOTU

New York Times reporter Simon Romero dug up suggestions for reducing oil imports that didn't make it into the president's speech. Among them:

Perhaps the most significant step the nation could take in reducing oil dependence is to change the way cars are produced, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute ...

In fact, overall federal funding for research and development in energy efficiency has declined 14 percent since 2002, adjusted for inflation.

Some measures that President Bush left out of his state-of-union address could also bring big payoffs: measures that might actually curb oil consumption like greater fuel-efficiency rules for cars, a gasoline tax or increasing ethanol imports from Brazil...

"It's remarkable that we're not taxing fuel from Saudi Arabia while we're taxing fuel from Brazil," said Gal Luft, a co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a research organization in Washington that specializes in energy issues.

With good reason

Here at Gristmill David has already raised questions about the president's stated goal "to replace more than 75% of our oil imports from the Middle East" (which accounts for less than a quarter of imported oil) as opposed to trying to reduce total imports, let alone reduce total consumption.

Tom Doggett, a business reporter for Reuters, looks at projections from the Department of Energy and wonders if even that goal would be achieved by the president's current proposals:

U.S. ethanol supplies will be just 783,000 barrels a day in two decades -- a drop in the bucket compared to the more than 26.1 million barrels per day of crude and petroleum products the country will consume, according to the EIA, which is the Energy Department's analytical arm.

Even if ethanol production were to increase by 2025 to levels sought by the administration, it would not necessarily displace crude oil from the Middle East, because the region has the lowest costs for producing oil in the world and U.S. companies would continue to seek the cheapest source of energy, according to EIA analyst Anthony Radich.

"When I speak of expanding ethanol production it's not at all clear that it's going to reduce import dependence," Radich said.

"Barring some (government) policy that explicitly discourages oil imports, even if we do find cheaper ways to produce cellulose ethanol, the imports from the Middle East are among the last to go," he said.

Two quick thoughts: First, if Venezuelan or Mexican or Canadian oil remains more expensive to extract than Saudi Arabian oil, we would simply import less from those countries.

Second, if the goal is to achieve energy independence, then seeking alternative supply channels ("technology!") without addressing demand is a bit like picking a fight with one hand tied behind your back. Your left hook better be really good.