Obama signs bill remaking NSA phone records program

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has signed legislation reviving and reshaping surveillance laws that expired temporarily Sunday night.

The White House says Obama signed the bill late Tuesday evening, hours after the Senate gave its final approval.

Obama says in a statement that he’s gratified Congress finally approved the bill. He says his administration will move quickly to restore the lapsed surveillance tools.

The law eliminates the National Security Agency’s bulk phone-records collection program and replaces it with a more restrictive measure to keep the records in phone companies’ hands.

Obama had blamed Congress for needless delays and an “inexcusable lapse” in national security tools. But he also praised some senators and House members for working in bipartisan fashion to come up with a compromise.

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Senate under pressure after House votes to end NSA program

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WASHINGTON (AP) — After the House’s lopsided bipartisan vote to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, the Senate is under considerable pressure to pass a similar measure. If it doesn’t, lawmakers risk letting the authority to collect the records expire June 1, along with other important counterterrorism provisions.

The House bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, would replace bulk collection with a system to search the data held by telephone companies on a case-by-case basis. It passed 338-88.

In the Senate, however, the legislation faces a 60-vote hurdle to begin debate. A similar bill failed to do so last year after passing the House by a wide margin. And the Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, has expressed his opposition to the current House bill.

What’s different this year, though, is that if Congress doesn’t act, three provisions will expire. Not just the law authorizing the bulk collection of phone records, but also a measure allowing so-called roving wiretaps, which the FBI uses for criminals who frequently switch cell phones. A third provision makes it easier to obtain a warrant to target a “lone wolf” terror suspect who has no provable links to a terrorist organization.

McConnell has said he will put a bill on the floor to reauthorize all three provisions without changes. But Wednesday’s vote suggests the House won’t pass such a bill, said Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“The overwhelming support for the House measure should show Senate leaders that a straight re-authorization … is a nonstarter in the House,” Schiff said, “and the time to move forward on these vital reforms is now, not after the statutory deadline passes.”

McConnell has said he is open to a compromise. If one materializes, and something close to the House bill becomes law, it would represent one of the most significant changes stemming from the unauthorized disclosures of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

President Barack Obama supports the House legislation, known as the USA Freedom Act, which is in line with a proposal he made last March.

The issue also has implications for the 2016 presidential contest, with Republican candidates staking out different positions.

The revelation that the NSA had for years been secretly collecting all records of U.S. landline phone calls was among the most controversial disclosures by Snowden, who in 2013 leaked thousands of secret documents to journalists. The program collects the number called, along with the date, time and duration of call, but not the content or people’s names. It stores the information in an NSA database that a small number of analysts query for matches against the phone numbers of known terrorists abroad, hunting for domestic connections to plots.

Officials acknowledge the program has never foiled a terrorist attack, and some within the NSA had proposed abandoning it even before it leaked — on the grounds that its financial and privacy costs outweighed its counterterrorism benefits.

Proponents of keeping the program the way it is argue that the rise of the Islamic State group, and its efforts to inspire Westerners to attack in their own countries, make it more important than ever for the NSA and FBI to have such phone records at their disposal to map potential terrorist cells when new information surfaces. And they say there is no evidence the program has ever been misused.

Under the House measure, the NSA would no longer collect and store the records, but the government still could obtain a court order to obtain data connected to a specific number from the phone companies, which typically store them for 18 months.

The House measure also provides for a panel of experts to advocate for privacy and civil liberties before the secret intelligence court that oversees surveillance programs. And it allows the government to continue eavesdropping on foreign terrorists without a warrant for 72 hours after they enter the U.S., giving authorities time to obtain a warrant.

On Tuesday, NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers and FBI Director Jim Comey briefed senators on the program. Afterward, Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters the NSA was not collecting all the data it should be. He declined to be specific, saying the briefing was classified, but he appeared to be addressing the fact that the collection does not include most mobile calls in an era when many people have stopped using landlines.

“The way it’s being implemented today, I don’t see how it’s … useful at all to the American people,” said Corker, who wants to reauthorize the current law. “And I’m shocked, shocked … by the small amount of data that is even part of the program. It needs to be ramped up.”

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$4 million in US projects aim to protect sage grouse habitat

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BOISE, Idaho (AP) — Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on Wednesday announced more than $4 million in projects in four states as part of a wildfire-fighting strategy to protect a wide swath of intermountain West sagebrush country that supports cattle ranching and is home to a struggling bird species.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management will use the money in Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Oregon to counter wildfire threats, invasive grasses and flammable juniper trees encroaching in native sagebrush habitat.

“These projects will not only improve rangeland health, but also help mitigate the risks to local economies that depend on healthy lands,” Jewell said in a statement.

The projects follow Jewell’s order in January calling for a “science based” strategy that safeguards the greater sage grouse while contending with wildfires that have grown larger over the years and have been especially destructive in the Great Basin region.

The wide-ranging bird found in 11 states is under consideration for federal protection, and another giant habitat-consuming fire could factor into the decision. Just the potential listing has put on hold development of wind farms and oil and gas drilling plans in some areas. Experts say an endangered-species listing could damage Western states’ economies.

Though Congress voted last year to withhold funding to list the sage grouse as threatened or endangered, protections could complicate energy development.

The $4 million in projects could help sway decision-makers.

“I think a lot of people were hoping to see something like this,” said John Freemuth, a Boise State University professor and public lands expert, noting that the collaborative efforts by ranchers, environmentalists and state and federal officials to protect sage grouse habitat.

“It’s a reward,” he said. “You’re seeing the Interior Department saying here is a bigger commitment we can make that will further the bigger effort so that there won’t be a listing of greater sage grouse.”

Idaho will receive $1.78 million to be used to create fuel breaks along transportation corridors in the southwest part of the state that will help firefighters halt wildfires.

The $1.03 million for Oregon will be used for prescribed fires to take out juniper stands, mechanical thinning of juniper stands and planting native grasses. Juniper trees soak up the limited amount of water other plants depend on.

Utah will receive $811,000 for projects that include removing juniper stands and seeding with native plants and grasses.

Nevada will get $638,000 for projects that include mowing along roadways to reduce fire potential, seeding native plants and preventing the spread of cheatgrass, an invasive species that increases risks for fires.

“The BLM is targeting our existing resources to address the biggest threats to the West’s most productive sage grouse habitat,” agency Director Neil Kornze said in a statement. “By strategically focusing our fire prevention and restoration efforts, we are laying the foundation for long-term conservation of the healthy rangelands that help define and sustain the West and its people.”

Jewell said in March that the strategy for this year’s wildfire season would prioritize the protection of sage grouse habitat during any blazes.

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New low in relations between Obama, congressional GOP

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Relations between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans have hit a new low.

There has been little direct communication between Obama and the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill since Republicans took full control of Congress in January. Obama has threatened to veto more than a dozen Republican-backed bills. And House Speaker John Boehner infuriated the White House by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without consulting the administration first.

But the dispute over Obama’s high-stakes nuclear negotiations with Iran has put the relationship perhaps beyond repair.

The president and his advisers are seething over Republican efforts to undermine the sensitive discussions with Iran, most recently by sending an “open letter” to the country’s leaders warning that any nuclear deal could expire the day Obama walks out of the Oval Office. “I cannot recall another instance in which senators wrote directly to advise another country – much less a longtime foreign adversary – that the president does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them,” Vice President Joe Biden, who spent nearly four decades in the Senate, said in an unusually harsh statement.

For their part, Republican lawmakers call their outreach to a hostile nation a reasonable response to an administration they say has spurned Congress and ignored its prerogatives at every turn. It’s the starkest sign yet that Republicans see an adversary, not a potential partner, in Obama’s White House – even on foreign policy issues where partisan differences have traditionally been somewhat muted.

“The mutual efforts to work together under this administration have just disappeared, so I think there’s a sense now that extraordinary things occasionally need to happen to be sure that the president understands how strongly the Congress feels,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

The dismal state of the relationship has largely sunk the slim prospects for bipartisan cooperation in Obama’s final two years in office, with one exception being work on international trade agreements that the White House and Republicans have long supported. And with Obama firmly eying his legacy, even his own advisers have conceded that a president who took office vowing to bridge partisan divides is virtually powerless to influence his political opponents.

“We don’t have the ability to communicate with them,” Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s recently departed senior adviser, said in an interview with New York magazine. “They are talking to people who agree with them, they are listening to news outlets that reinforce that point of view, and the president is probably the person with the least ability to break into that because of the partisan bias there.”

Not surprisingly, each side blames the other for letting things get so bad.

To hear Republicans tell it, Obama has eroded their trust by going around Congress time and again with executive actions, particularly on health care and immigration, where he took steps as far back as 2012 to extend deportation stays and work permits to hundreds of thousands of younger immigrants in this country illegally.

Instead of easing up on the strategy after Democrats took a beating in the November midterm elections, Obama doubled down with a raft of new immigration directives affecting millions more immigrants.

At the same time, Republicans complain he has made few overtures to work with them since the election. The president and GOP leaders last met face-to-face on Jan. 13 during a meeting at the White House, and Boehner and Obama have not spoken since a phone call later that month. There has been scant contact between the president and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and a so-called “bourbon summit” that the president and majority leader had lightheartedly talked about arranging is on neither party’s calendar.

“They don’t want to work with us, they don’t want to do anything with us,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. “I mean, come on. I can’t imagine Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Herbert Walker Bush doing some of the things that they’re doing that make all of these things more difficult.”

The White House and Democrats blame Republicans, arguing they can’t find a way to compromise because of the outsize sway held by the most conservative, tea party-backed elements of the party. Boehner has had repeated difficulties controlling this group of lawmakers, finally passing a bill to fund the Homeland Security Department last week only with Democratic help. Democrats increasingly question whether Republicans treat Obama’s administration with the deference due to the presidency. The Iran letter was the most visible example, but some Democrats also chafed when McConnell penned an opinion piece urging states to ignore Obama administration climate rules.

The dynamic of a lame-duck president clashing with Congress on his way out of the door is not a new one. President George W. Bush struggled over Iraq troop levels and pushed unsuccessfully to pass an immigration bill. President Bill Clinton faced impeachment proceedings.

Republicans and White House officials agree they must find some way to get along well enough in coming months to perform the basic functions of government, such as raising the borrowing limit and extending the highway trust fund. Aside from potentially trade, there is little hope of bigger deals on taxes or anything else.

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Tug of war: Obama, Congress at odds over who’s in control

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Since Republicans took control of Congress two months ago, an elaborate tug of war has broken out between GOP lawmakers and President Barack Obama over who calls the shots on major issues for the next two years.

On some fronts, Obama has held his ground, watching near-gleefully as Republicans bungled early attempts to legislate and put their own internal disputes on vivid display. But lawmakers are challenging his authority on foreign policy, threatening to gum up major trade and climate deals while putting up obstacle after obstacle to a nuclear deal with Iran.

Rarely has the separation of powers appeared as muddied as on Tuesday. In the course of a few hours, House Republicans caved to the president on Homeland Security funding and immigration, but also poked him in the eye by giving Israel’s prime minister a prime perch before Congress to rail against Obama’s overtures to Iran.

The push and pull has laid bare the weaknesses that each party must contend with as they navigate a new political reality.

With his party out of power in the Capitol and his time left in office dwindling, Obama has less clout over Congress than ever before. Increasingly, he’s had to resort to veto threats to show he’s still the gatekeeper for any laws Republicans want to pass. But despite decisive midterm gains, Republicans have been unable to deliver on campaign promises to rein in the president, illustrating the limits of their power despite their majorities in both the House and Senate.

So who’s in charge? It depends, it seems, on the issue.

For months, Republicans had adhered to their plan to use Homeland Security funding to force Obama to swallow a repeal of his actions on immigration and deportations. Obama vowed to veto any such bill and Republicans lacked the votes to push it through the Senate. The GOP’s strategy began falling apart last week when Republicans couldn’t even muster enough support to give themselves more time to fight by extending funding for three weeks.

After passing a weeklong extension with Democratic votes just hours before Friday’s deadline, Republican leaders capitulated Tuesday, with little to show for the fight.

“We are pleased that congressional leaders in the House have apparently relented,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said just before the House vote. “They’ve abandoned the search for political advantage and are instead just trying to move forward to do the right thing.”

White House officials said they were holding back from full-on gloating until the bill was passed and signed, and critical Homeland Security funding assured. But the Republican retreat raised serious doubts about whether Congress will be able to use its control of the federal purse strings as leverage against the president.

Score one for Obama.

Yet on the same day, House Speaker John Boehner gaveled in an extraordinary joint session of Congress so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could warn U.S. lawmakers of the perils that await if the U.S. and world powers sign a nuclear deal with Iran. From the same dais where the president delivers his State of the Union address, Netanyahu offered a dramatic take-down of Obama’s foreign policy on Iran, winning countless standing ovations from lawmakers as the world watched on live television.

“It was putting Netanyahu on an equal level with the president of the United States,” said Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee.

For lawmakers intent on stopping the nuclear deal, Netanyahu’s speech – orchestrated by Republicans without the White House’s knowledge – was just the beginning.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate next week would start debating legislation granting Congress a vote on any deal reached with Iran – a notion Obama has already rejected. McConnell, R-Ky., said he was worried about the Obama administration’s “seeming determination to pursue a deal on its own, without the input of the people’s elected representatives.”

Senators are also pursuing new sanctions on Iran, despite the White House’s insistence that doing so now would scuttle the talks and make it more likely Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon. But Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid urged everyone to “take a deep breath” and consider whether new Iran legislation would actually help Israel or merely serve to “score cheap political points.”

On domestic matters, too, Obama and Republicans are tussling over whether the president’s authority should reign supreme. Republicans are looking to the Supreme Court to derail a key component of Obama’s health care law, and hoping the courts will stop Obama where they could not on immigration, too. Last month the GOP successfully passed a bill forcing Obama to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, but Obama promptly vetoed it, although Republicans are attempting this week to override his veto.

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The Federal GMO Labeling Bill Is Back With New Celebrity Support

It was one of those Groundhog Day-like moments that happens so often in Congress: Thursday morning, lawmakers and activists gathered in Washington, D.C., to announce a bill, the Genetically Engineered Food Right-to-Know Act, which would require that all products containing genetically modified ingredients be labeled. In 2013, the same lawmakers—Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.—introduced a bill with the same name that, despite the Democrats’ control of the Senate, failed to go much of anywhere.

So here we are again, two years later—following the passage of state laws that promise to eventually label GMO items in Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont, and ballot initiative failures in Colorado and Washington state—presenting the tweaked legislation once again. While the language of the bill is somewhat different, the biggest difference this go-around is the bill’s new celebrity champion: restaurateur and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio.

“The public wants more information about the food they are buying and how it’s grown,” Colicchio said in a press release. “I applaud Sens. Boxer and Blumenthal and Rep. DeFazio for their leadership and urge their colleagues to join them in standing up for the 93 percent of Americans who want to know whether their food has been genetically modified.”

The reality television star has become increasingly vocal on food politics, using his celebrity to address antihunger efforts and going so far as to cofound the pro-GMO labeling organization Food Policy Action.

Despite having support from both of Alaska’s Republican Senators, who strongly oppose the development of genetically engineered salmon, the bill seems unlikely to pass in the GOP-controlled Congress. But it’s far from being the only labeling law under consideration. Labeling laws are being considered in 11 states, and New York’s state assembly passed a bill this week that would help protect small farmers who are sued for patent violation by seed companies. The law allows farmers to argue that they aren’t responsible for the presence of patent-protected genes on their farm—or in their seed—if it drifted from a nearby property. A similar bill is currently being considered by the New York state senate. The federal labeling requirement so many right-to-know activists desire may be far off, but other, smaller victories could come this year.

“We cannot continue to keep Americans in the dark about the food they eat,” Rep. DeFazio said in a press release today. “More than 60 other countries make it easy for consumers to choose. Why should the U.S. be any different?

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Is the GOP Waging a War on Science?

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, have gone out of their way in recent months to say that they’re not waging a “war on science.” They just want the National Science Foundation to stop funding frivolous “pet projects” with funny-sounding titles.

“Americans are tired of writing a blank check for researchers’ pet projects,” Smith wrote in The Hill last November, responding to criticism of his legislation that would require NSF to only fund research that was “in the national interest.”

Smith, who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, and Paul, a leading GOP presidential contender, defend their efforts to require NSF to prove that all of their grants are in the national interest as nothing more than a way to make sure that the “best science” is funded – not to gut the scientific peer-review process.

“Unfortunately, in recent years, the federal government has awarded taxpayer dollars toward research that few Americans would consider to be in the national interest,” they wrote in Politico on Jan. 12. “Congress has a responsibility to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely and are focused on national priorities. In the new Congress, Republicans, the party of limited government, should propose legislation to eliminate the funding of wasteful projects—and focus on smart investments instead.”

Their view is that marginal research based on “pet projects” should be replaced with other, better research in the national interest – which Congress would define for the scientific community. “To remain a world leader, the United States must ensure that our investments are funding not just any science but the best science,” they wrote.

Smith has been at this for more than a year now. Paul, as he gears up for the 2016 presidential campaign, is a more recent entrant in the NSF-bashing process that critics in the scientific community have said would harm the peer-review federal science funding process. Clearly, both Paul and Smith believe that a war on science is a political winner.

NSF, for its part, has largely defended these attacks on the scientific peer-review process by privately asking Smith and Paul to stop being so mean, and to look for non-confrontational ways to appease their overseers. It is essentially the Neville Chamberlain approach to the attacks on the peer-review process.

It’s doubtful, though, that this approach will work in any meaningful way. Smith, especially, has been unrelenting in his attacks on grants with silly-sounding names. Cherry-picking NSF grants (out of the thousands made each year) with weird names or a seemingly ridiculous hypothesis or premise is a nearly surefire way to guarantee media coverage for your criticism of federal science funding. It isn’t a “war on science.” It’s just a war on certain parts of the scientific process, they say.

So, to help this process along, here are a couple of examples of NSF-funded research projects with stupid or silly names created largely on a whim by academic researchers with the freedom to basically experiment with novel approaches.

Both were built in the early, chaotic days of the World Wide Web. Both would look quite ridiculous under the Smith/Paul microscope of what constitutes the “best science” that’s in the national interest.

One was essentially a popularity contest. The other was designed to make things more interesting for consumers. Neither was designed to change the world or defend the national interest. Both would have likely failed the Smith/Paul test.

The first project was a subset of a bigger grant to a university. It was, by every definition, a “pet project” of the two researchers who were both struggling to finish their graduate degrees and saw the project as a way to test their theories about what was popular and how this could be sorted out more easily. They even gave the research project a funny name that they themselves had difficulty explaining, and which sounded a bit ridiculous.

The project was called BackRub, and the first year of the research project was designed to see whether anyone could make sense of the nascent World Wide Web. It struggled early on. A Wayback Machine screen capture of its earliest incarnation tells anyone paying attention that they didn’t quite have their act together yet.

“Sorry, many services are unavailable due to a local network failure beyond our control. We are working to fix the problem and hope to be back up soon,” the BackRub researchers said at the top of their earliest archived website.

The website did explain to users that it wasn’t about back rub massages – though that would certainly lend itself to a great headline for a House Science Committee press release. Its logo was a picture of one of the researcher’s hands, with “BackRub” superimposed over the top. Its name referred to the ability to look at backlinks (a precursor to the notion of hyperlinks) inside a page that was popular.

One of the researchers said on his personal homepage at the time that he’d gotten involved with the research project because, basically, it was sort of the cool thing to do. It was, in effect, a whim. “Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I’m no exception,” this researcher wrote.

He described one of the key components of his research in terms that would clearly seem vague and meandering to Smith and Paul. “We demonstrate a technique for extracting relations from the WWW based on the duality of patterns and relations. We experiment with it by extracting a relations of books,” the researcher wrote about his efforts to define BackRub.

The other BackRub researcher’s homepage was even more illuminating about his interests at the time. He features a picture of Lego building blocks, which he describes as a “programmable plotter” made out of Legos.

“Legos and other lesser construction toys have been quite important to me,” he wrote in explaining why the picture is featured on his homepage alongside his NSF-funded research into BackRub. “I have constructed numerous amazing contraptions out of Legos. I built a four-foot wide inkjet printer out of Legos (and a few things from the hardware store and a bunch of electronics).”

The second project was a small end-of-year grant awarded to two researchers at the University of Illinois. It was tacked onto a bigger grant without a great deal of forethought. The researchers wanted to see if there might be a better way to show things like funny cat pictures with text files.

At the time, anyone reading an article about cats on the World Wide Web who also wanted to watch a funny cat video or see a picture of a cute cat had to go to another file system and actually download the cat video.

The researchers who got the small NSF grant had a better idea. Why not just make it easier to see the funny cat pictures while they were reading? Why not just write some lines of code that would seamlessly populate text with pictures, making the page consumer-friendly and easy on the eyes?

So they did. One of the researchers locked himself away for a few days and wrote the code that was designed to make the World Wide Web more visual, and less boring. Then another researcher started talking about it to fellow programmers, who thought the idea was interesting and started to copy the idea.

The researchers described their efforts as a “graphical user interface” (or GUI). They gave it away for free at the time. It was built to mostly just embed pictures inside text so that consumers could actually visualize the World Wide Web. It wasn’t a grand design to change the world.

I once asked the NSF program director how the NSF grant for this particular research project came to be, and he told me it was mostly fortuitous timing because there was some funding at the end of the year available to add on to an existing grant to the university – hardly a determination that was built around defending the national interest. It was, like the first, a “pet project” of two researchers who wanted nothing more than to see if something could work better.

I’m sure most have guessed what these two projects are by now. The first is Google, which was created out of the first NSF digital library grant to Stanford University in the mid 1990s. The second project is the Mosaic web browser, which popularized the World Wide Web because it made it easy for pictures to accompany text in browsers. Mosaic was the foundation for both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and made the Internet accessible to millions of consumers.

Today, looking backwards in time, we can see how BackRub and Mosaic changed the world. But at the time of their research funding and creation, would anyone have guessed at that potential? Hardly. Both were “pet projects” in their earliest research phases. Both had awkward, geeky names that might lend themselves to ridicule.

Read Full Article: US News

The Senate Actually Just Acknowledged Climate Change Is Real

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Wednesday to acknowledge that climate change is real, bringing itself up to date with every major scientific body in the world.

But the Senate also voted down a pair of measures acknowledging that human activity plays any role in that change.

The measures were introduced as amendments to legislation that would force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline over the ongoing presidential decision-making process. Democrats had been preparing a variety of amendments that would force Republicans on the record on climate change.

The first amendment, from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), stated: “It is the sense of the Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.” That amendment passed by a vote of 98 to 1. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) was the lone senator voting against it.

Even Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who wrote a book titled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, joined as a co-sponsor on the Whitehouse amendment. His contention, he said, isn’t that climate change isn’t real. “The hoax is that there are some people who are so arrogant to think that they can change climate,” Inhofe said. “Man cannot change climate.”

After the votes, Inhofe took the floor again to re-emphasize his belief that “this whole thing was cooked up by the United Nations.”

But then the Senate voted on a second amendment, this one from Republican John Hoeven of North Dakota, that acknowledged human activity is contributing to climate change. That measure fell one vote short of the 60 needed to pass, at 59 to 40, after Hoeven voted against his own amendment.

The Senate held a third vote on an amendment from Democrat Brian Schatz of Hawaii that went even further, stating that climate change is real and “human activity significantly contributes” to it. That measure, too, went down, by a vote of 50 to 49.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told her colleagues to vote against the Schatz amendment based on the inclusion of the word “significantly.”

“I would suggest to colleagues that that inclusion of that word is sufficient to merit a no vote at this time,” said Murkowski.

The Schatz measure did manage to gain the votes of several Republicans, however: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Mark Kirk of Illinois, Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Democrats say they’re not done trying to force Republicans on the record on climate change. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said there will be a vote Thursday on his own amendment on climate change.

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

Lawmakers Who Back Big Polluters Risk Losing GOP Voters

Energy prices may be plummeting, but oil, gas, and coal companies are seeing a dramatic return on investment in one sector: the US Congress. The fossil fuel industry spent $721 million on the 2014 midterm elections. And now the GOP majority has vowed to make life easier for polluters by gutting long-standing protections for clean air and water and blocking measures the fight climate change.

Last week, for instance, House Republicans voted to fast-track the Keystone XL pipeline for dirty tar sands oil. Representatives who supported the Keystone XL bill received over 8.5 times more oil and gas money in 2014 than those who voted against it. Now the action moves to the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raked in $608,000 from oil, gas, and coal companies in 2014.

These fossil-fuel favors may please donors, but new research shows that lawmakers risk painting themselves into a corner with Republican voters.

Because in order for GOP leadership to carry out the Big Polluter Agenda, they have to ignore the giant elephant in the room: climate change.

To push for Keystone XL, they have to discount the fact that tar sands oil generates 17 percent more climate change pollution than conventional crude. To block the Environmental Protection Agency’s from limiting carbon pollution from power plants, they have to pretend that unchecked emissions won’t make America’s families, farms, coastal cities and local communities more vulnerable to extreme weather.

In other words, they have to reject the facts.

Many Republican lawmakers are comfortable with this arrangement. The Senate alone is now home to 38 climate deniers who received $28,152,466 from fossil fuel companies over the course of their careers, according to Climate Progress.

But Republican voters who notice the costly increase in drought, floods, and fires are starting to question the wisdom of denial.

New comprehensive analysis from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication reveals a growing divide within the Republican Party over climate change.

Overall, 56 percent of GOP voters say they favor government action to reduce climate change pollution. A full 62 percent of moderate Republicans said climate change is a real and present threat, while 38 percent of conservative Republicans and only 29 percent of Tea Party Republicans recognize the reality of climate change.

GOP candidates would be wise to ponder these numbers. They may be able to win primaries by appealing to the most conservative base. They may even carry a few Congressional races by playing to the skeptics. But they cannot win the White House in 2016 by denying climate change.

Climate change has become an inescapable issue on the campaign trail. It emerged in every 2014 Senate race, with journalists, debate moderators, and voters demanding to know where candidates stood. The same will happen in the presidential election. And in a year where the geopolitical map favors Democrats, a GOP candidate can’t afford to alienate Republican moderates who understand the steep cost of extreme weather and unchecked pollution.

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

Why the Fight Over the Keystone Pipeline is Completely Divorced From Reality

In the six years since TransCanada Corp. first sought U.S. approval to build the pipeline, the debate over Keystone XL pipeline has, somewhat strangely, become one of the central fights in U.S. politics. It’s about to get even bigger. On Wednesday, Republicans will inaugurate the new Congress by taking up a Senate bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline that would connect oil producers in Western Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast. The House will vote on the measure on Friday.

Several years ago, liberals looking for a cause to rally around settled on Keystone because the oil it would transport, extracted from tar sands, is especially damaging to the environment. James Hansen, then the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, famously declared that if the pipeline goes forward and Canada develops its oil sands “it will be game over for the planet.”

Conservatives seized on Keystone because it offered a clear example of liberals prioritizing the environment over the jobs the pipeline’s construction would create, an effective political attack in a lousy economy. President Obama’s anguish over whether or not to approve it only added to the appeal.

As a result, Keystone has attained tremendous symbolic importance for both Democrats and Republicans. But this is the opposite of how it should be — the political fight has become completely divorced from reality. The pipeline’s actual importance to oil markets, the economy and the environment has steadily diminished. Whoever wins, the “victory” will be pointless and hollow.

The liberal claim that blocking Keystone would limit Canadian oil sands development, or even slow Canadian oil exports to the United States, has turned out to be wrong. Over the last four years, Canadian exports to the Gulf Coast have risen 83 percent. Last year, U.S. oil imports from Canada hit a record. This year, Canadian oil producers expect shipments to double.

One way producers achieved this is by building new pipelines, such as the Flanagan South pipeline, which can transport 600,000 barrels a day of heavy crude, and expanding old ones. At the same time, the Canadian government has approved two new lines as a fallback to Keystone—one running east to Quebec, the other west to the Pacific—that avoid the U.S. entirely. Collectively, these projects dwarf Keystone’s 800,000 barrel-a-day capacity. “Keystone is kind of old news,” Sandy Fielden, director of energy analytics at Austin, Texas-based RBN Energy, told Bloomberg News. “Producers have moved on and are looking for new capacity from other pipelines.”

On Monday, oil fell below $50 a barrel. But even plunging prices won’t halt oil sands development, at least not for many years. Although costlier to produce because it requires more energy and water (causing greater carbon emissions), oil from tar sands is actually less price sensitive than other forms of crude. That’s because the cost structure is more akin to mining than convention oil drilling, as Bloomberg Businessweek’s Matthew Philips has noted. Oil sands operations require a large up-front investment, but they operate cheaply for many years thereafter. By contrast, fracked wells are quickly depleted, so U.S. oil companies have already begun slashing future investment and laying off workers in response to falling prices.

Conservative claims about Keystone have fared no better. The notion that the pipeline would lower gasoline prices or cause meaningful job growth was always silly. A State Department study last year concluded that Keystone would create 35 permanent, full-time U.S. jobs—about what you’d get from opening a new Denny’s franchise. Unemployment and gas prices have both fallen dramatically without it.

But the biggest misconception may be the idea that completing Keystone would benefit U.S. businesses. In fact, the southern leg of the pipeline, from Cushing, Oklahoma to Port Arthur, Texas, was finished last year and has already improved U.S. producers’ access to Gulf Coast refineries. The major beneficiaries of the northern leg—the one under dispute—would be Canadian companies such as Suncor Energy, Imperial Oil, and Canadian Natural Resources. “At issue in Keystone is not American oil, it is Canadian oil,” Obama emphasized at his year-end press conference two weeks ago. “It’s very good for Canadian oil companies and it’s good for the Canadian oil industry.” It doesn’t do much for U.S. oil companies.

Nevertheless, in opening the new Congress by forcing a showdown over Keystone, Republicans ensure that it will become the first big political drama of 2015. The idea is to show they’re forging in a bold new direction, though they’re actually mimicking the last Congress by provoking huge fights over minor issues. Congress has already voted ten times on Keystone. This time, with Republicans in full control, the pipeline will almost certainly be approved, forcing Obama to finally make a decision.

Read Full Article: Bloomberg

Net neutrality to dominate D.C.’s tech agenda

For the White House, a major win on net neutrality might come at a cost — scuttling everything else on Washington’s tech and telecom agenda next year.

The Federal Communications Commission is racing to write rules that require Internet service providers to treat all Web traffic equally, and many expect the agency will follow President Barack Obama’s call to treat broadband service like a utility. Telecom giants and Republican lawmakers say that will create burdensome new regulation — and the issue has already incited a lobbying frenzy, raised the specter of lawsuits and ignited new partisan fires on Capitol Hill.

Some GOP members are planning to use their soon-to-be majority status to knock down the FCC’s net neutrality actions, perhaps even before any rules are announced in early 2015. And the growing tensions threaten to spill over into larger policy debates, as Congress takes on the complex process of updating the nation’s central communications laws.

“I don’t doubt there’s going to be a major confrontation if [the president] and the chairman of the FCC press ahead with rules as they have been described,” said Virginia GOP Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, in an interview.

The FCC finds itself back at the drawing board on net neutrality after its previous set of rules, issued under former Chairman Julius Genachowski, drew a lawsuit from Verizon and ultimately was tossed by a federal court.

It’s been left to current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to craft a new net neutrality regime that can withstand another anticipated legal challenge from telecom companies while still satisfying Democrats and consumer groups, who pine for tough new protections. Wheeler stumbled with his early proposal — a draft that critics said would permit pay-for-play Internet ‘fast lanes’ — and he later seemed caught by surprise when Obama endorsed utility-style regulation of broadband, known as Title II.

Wheeler’s final offering, slated to arrive early next year, is expected to track closely with the president’s views on the matter — but a White House victory may prove short-lived.

Republicans, who oppose any net neutrality rules at all, have already telegraphed their game plan heading into 2015. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who’s set to take the helm of his chamber’s powerful Commerce Committee, has floated the idea of a bill that would pre-empt an FCC move to adopt Obama’s favored approach.

The senator is “very interested in finding a legislative solution to protect the open Internet, especially if it means keeping the FCC from imposing public utility regulations,” a spokeswoman told POLITICO.

Thune’s House counterpart — Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who leads his own telecom subcommittee — has pledged a net neutrality hearing early next year to focus attention on the issue. Goodlatte said his House Judiciary Committee is exploring legislation that would erode the FCC’s net neutrality authority by shifting it to antitrust enforcers. And other Republicans have suggested cutting the agency’s funding.

“One of the things the telecommunications community has always taken pride in is that virtually all policy debates are relatively bipartisan,” said Michael Powell, a former Republican FCC chairman who now heads the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.

Net neutrality is “the most dramatic policy issue that has collapsed into rigid partisanship,” Powell said. “And it would immediately become the most dominant of telecommunications issues on the Hill.”

The GOP’s onslaught faces clear hurdles: Obama surely could veto any legislative effort to weaken or overturn net neutrality rules. But the congressional hearings and political sniping on the horizon could delay deeper legislative work on other telecom reforms — namely, a planned overhaul of the core laws that govern the FCC and its regulation of cable, wireless and phone companies.

House Republicans have spent more than a year reviewing possible changes to the Communications Act, which was last updated in the mid-1990s, and the new Senate GOP majority is expected to begin a similar process in 2015. Already, there are signs the party is eager to transform the debate into a proxy war over net neutrality.

“Each time it has tried to regulate the Internet, the FCC has been overruled by the courts because existing telecommunications laws were written decades ago for a completely different era,” the Thune spokeswoman said. “The most straightforward approach would be for Congress to update and modernize those laws to take into account technological transformations while not discouraging the private-sector investment and innovation that is critical for consumers and our nation’s modern economy.”

Democrats vehemently argue the so-called Comm Act update and the fight over net neutrality should remain separate. “I don’t think one should be part of the other,” remarked Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), who leads her party on the House’s top telecom subcommittee. “If a party wants to be insistent on being … anti-Internet equality, that’s a bad place to be.”

To solidify that point, outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid led other Democrats in a letter urging Republicans to support strong net neutrality rules while decoupling it from any broader overhaul of the nation’s telecommunications laws. A day earlier, roughly 40 Democrats — including Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Al Franken of Minnesota — encouraged the FCC to “act without delay to finalize rules that keep the Internet free and open for business.”

But Republicans are pressuring the FCC to slow down. “Businesses and consumers deserve legal certainty and confidence in the marketplace. Forcing legacy regulations on providers and billions of dollars of taxes on middle-class Americans serves neither of these purposes,” said Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), a member of her chamber’s Commerce Committee. “The FCC would be well-advised to engage constructively with Congress instead of polarizing the issue of net neutrality further.”

In the meantime, the threat of new regulation has galvanized industry lobbying, prompting groups like Powell’s NCTA to run digital ads around the Beltway slamming the Obama administration’s proposal. The association has argued that net neutrality rules issued under Title II would prompt a spike in consumers’ broadband bills. NCTA declined to say how much it is spending on the spots, which have run in POLITICO, The Washington Post and other outlets.

Net neutrality also has featured prominently in the FCC’s review of two megamergers. Comcast, which is seeking regulatory approval for its $45 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable, for months has touted that it’s already bound by net neutrality rules. The cable giant agreed to heed the FCC’s previous open Internet order as a condition of its 2011 purchase of NBC Universal, though that commitment is set to expire in 2018. AT&T has promised it will adhere to the same rules for three years, if it gets the nod to acquire DirecTV for $48.5 billion.

At the same time, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have made it clear to the FCC that they overwhelmingly oppose any effort to treat broadband as a utility — and AT&T, for one, said in November it “would expect to participate in a legal challenge” if the government goes that route. The telecom giants did not comment for this story.

Read Full Article: Politico

In 83 speeches, senator pushes for climate change

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – Like he did 82 times before, Sheldon Whitehouse stood on the Senate floor and preached the dangers of climate change.

In his last speech before Congress adjourned, the senator warned that 2014 is on track to be the hottest year on record.

It was a familiar sight: Whitehouse has given a speech about climate change each of the last 83 weeks Congress has been in session.

He never has to give the same speech twice, he says – there are plenty of new angles to take on such a big problem.

The Rhode Island Democrat’s ever-changing, ever-present floor speeches – warnings over rising sea levels, warmer oceans, eroding coastlines and more – make him the Senate’s loudest, most persistent voice on the dangers of climate change.

Whitehouse is still haunted by what he saw after Superstorm Sandy: oceanfront houses in Rhode Island teetering into the sea. He fears future storms will be more catastrophic as sea level rises.

“We’re not a very big state so we don’t have a lot of land to give away to the sea,” he said. He noted that Rhode Island finds itself “on the receiving end” of the climate change problem because it doesn’t have coal mines or oil drilling.

Whitehouse, now in his second term, is a former federal prosecutor and Rhode Island attorney general. His wife, Sandra Thornton Whitehouse, is a marine scientist who helped him see the importance of the oceans in everyone’s lives, he said.

“On a personal level, I have a deep fear of being ashamed,” he said. “I don’t want, 20 years from now, when this is way past our current discussion, to be ashamed that I didn’t do my best when we still had a chance to fix this problem.”

Whitehouse co-chairs the Senate Oceans Caucus and a congressional climate change task force. The caucus is working to get bipartisan legislation passed on fishing issues, ocean data monitoring and marine debris.

As the Senate switches to a Republican majority, however, Whitehouse faces significant hurdles in getting meaningful climate change legislation passed.

The oil and gas industry spent $53 million on the 2014 elections and nearly $75 million in 2012, with close to 90 percent of the contributions going to Republicans, according to the political money-tracking website OpenSecrets.org.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said his top priority will be to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency, which is trying to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. He has said their “overreaching efforts” are strangling the economy. New environmental regulations have hampered U.S. job growth and caused a depression in eastern Kentucky coalfields, according to McConnell.

But Whitehouse is hopeful. In his speeches, he has candidly described how climate change will affect individual states – particularly ones with Republican leaders who he thinks might support new environmental policies.

And Whitehouse thinks Republicans will have to take more responsibility for solving problems when they’re in charge, and it will become a “colossal liability” for them to continue denying climate change as the 2016 elections near, he said.

Whitehouse thinks there’s a chance his latest proposal, to impose a carbon fee on industries that emit carbon pollution into the atmosphere, can gain some traction.

Prominent Republicans outside of government have endorsed a revenue-neutral fee on carbon, including Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz, Reagan’s economic adviser Arthur Laffer and former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis. To make it palatable to conservatives, Laffer and Inglis say the fee should be offset by a cut to the income tax.

“What conservative wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to reduce the tax on income and put a tax on anything else?” said Inglis, a former South Carolina congressman.

Shultz, now a distinguished fellow at Stanford University, said the party is more concerned about climate change than it appears. Today’s highly partisan atmosphere, he said, “causes people to get on opposite sides of everything.”

“They’re sensible people and given the chance, they’ll do sensible things,” Shultz said. “I’m sure of it.”

Whitehouse has formed an unlikely energy alliance with U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia. Manchin visited Rhode Island in October to see the effect of climate change firsthand and Whitehouse toured coal and energy resources in West Virginia. They plan to work on crafting legislation to invest in technology for cleaner fossil fuel energy.

In the new Congress, Whitehouse said, he’ll keep making speeches about climate change until there is “serious action” to address it.

Another environmental advocate, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, said Whitehouse’s climate change speeches present a “compelling, absolutely riveting case for action.”

Read Full Article: AP