Among much hoopla Thursday, the Presidential Oil Spill Commission released a letter from lawyer Fred Bartlit, Jr., saying that 3 of 4 tests that Halliburton conducted of the cement designed for BP's Macando well were unstable.  They also published a report of tests performed by Chevron that all nine of their tests using Halliburton ingredients showed it as unstable.  One of Halliburton's tests run prior to the actual cement job showed that formulation to be stable and work.  The letter also stated that the communication about the instability of the slurries between Halliburton and BP was unclear, and that BP may not have even read the report until after the blowout had occurred.

The media and stock market immediately jumped to the conclusion that Halliburton was at fault, and shares of the company dropped about 8% in value when the news hit.  The problem is, though, that this report issued by the commission doesn't matter.  While interesting and demonstrative of the instability of nitrified cements, the main message here is that bad cement does not equal blowout.  Bad cement jobs in the oil and gas industry are common, and there are several ways to remediate those bad jobs after the fact. It's very difficult to determine if a cement job is not effective, even with a bond log, especially in the early hours after a cement job has been pumped.  Bond logs are often inconclusive and the longer cement has to hydrate and gain compressive strength, the higher the likelihood of a better log.  As we all know from the Deepwater Horizon story, there were only about 16 hours from the time the cement job was pumped to the negative test, riser displacement, and the subsequent blowout.

The overriding issues here are casing design and risk management.  Relying solely on the cement job to prevent the well from coming to see them was poor decision making.  I continue to believe that their decision to run only the long string, rather than a liner/tieback combination, as well as the decisions to not wait on more centralizers or to not circulate bottoms up, was BP and Transocean's concern about getting pipe to bottom and getting cement in place, not money.  This well had been scary difficult to drill, losing circulation, then kicking, that they just wanted to get off as quickly as possible.  This rush to get the well finished lead to the disaster.  Add that to displacing the riser with seawater with questionable well integrity was the final straw.  After the blowout, the inhibited alarms and safety shutdowns on the Transocean rig proved deadly.

This disaster was certainly preventable and caused by poor design, poor decision making, and rushing to get the well completed. The tragic consequences should be a lesson to the entire industry, but I'm not holding my breath.

Bob Cavnar's new book, Disaster on the Horizon is now available.

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by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger

Since national energy reform is on the rocks, ethanol subsidies for the Midwest and ballot propositions to roll back progressive energy legislation in California are the most important policy fights to watch right now.

Neither will revolutionize the way Americans get power, and in both cases, moving forward could actually mean moving away from a sensible energy future. In California, voters could turn back progress the state has made towards holding down carbon emissions. And Washington's support for ethanol reveals the static thinking that's smothering our ability to address climate change.

More important than legalizing pot

In 2006, California passed a law that would take effect in 2011 and put an ambitious plan in place to decrease the state's carbon emissions by 2020. Even after the law passed, however, the debate over its merits continued. This being California, that debate made its way onto this November's ballot.

The most commonly floated line of reasoning against the law focuses on negative impacts to job growth: Increasing the price on carbon increases the cost of doing business, limiting economic growth and the resources that businesses have to dedicate to expansion. Proposition 23, a ballot initiative that will come to a vote next Tuesday, would delay the carbon bill's enactment until the state's economy takes a turn for the better.

But Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard knocks down the economic argument against the 2006 law (AB32):

While enacting AB32 could cause job loss in some sectors, most independent experts actually forecast growth in jobs in the renewable energy, transportation, and efficiency sectors. In fact, green jobs are pretty much the only sector growing in the Golden State. The number of green jobs grew 36 percent in California between 1995 and 2008. The rate of growth for regular old jobs was only 13 percent.

Double trouble

Activists have focused on shutting down Prop 23 (check out, via The Washington Independent's Andrew Restuccia, this clever campaign to flip "yes" voters), but as Amy Westervelt points out at Earth Island Journal, that initiative is not the only one that could free companies from their environmental responsibilities.

It turns out another California proposition, Prop 26, could raise the threshold legislators would have to meet in order to make companies pay for their pollution, including from oil spills. As Westervelt writes:

While some companies have steered clear of the Tea Party-backed Prop 23, which seems to be losing popularity every week, California companies interested in slowing down AB32 and maybe ridding themselves of responsibility for pollution altogether have been quietly funneling money to Prop 26.

California has long been a leader on energy issues. If either of these propositions goes the wrong way, it will be yet another troubling sign of the failure of progressive energy policy.

The other ethanol

Although environmentalists have fought hard since 2008 to pass cap-and-trade, the policy was always fundamentally conservative one. The Obama administration has always tried to map out a middle path on energy policy, and so far it has been ineffective. Ethanol is yet another case in point.

As Lynda Waddington reports at the Iowa Independent, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced last week that the administration was moving forward with a program that aids farmers producing crops (in addition to corn) that could be turned into ethanol. Switchgrass, the foundation of Brazil's much-touted ethanol system is one example. Notably, the arguments Vilsack advanced for the program had more to do with the economy than with energy.

Pros and cons

This type of cellulosic ethanol, Brooks Lindsay explains at Change.org, would go mainly towards fueling cars. Lindsay weighs the pros and cons of producing this sort of ethanol in general, and comes down against it. His reasoning: "At best, cellulosic ethanol is just a stop-gap measure while electric cars slowly replace liquid-powered cars....But, a stop-gap fuel does not deserve massive investments and government attention."

Indeed, progressives across the board have long argued that politicians' support for ethanol derives from political calculation, not from practical policy. (Ethanol states are swing states.) Ethanol is energy-intensive to produce, and it has a slew of negative environmental consequences that outweigh the cuts in carbon emissions.

Rethinking the politics

Before they rush to back the Obama administration's policies, however, policymakers should consider this news from Heather Rogers, author of Green Gone Wrong. Rogers reports for The Washington Monthly:

As I discovered on a recent reporting trip through Iowa, many farmers there would welcome a way to break free of the ethanol-industrial complex. The people I met said they'd rather cultivate crops using ecologically sound methods, if they could do so and still earn a decent living. It's not as if midwestern farmers don't know--better than the rest of us--that growing crops for biofuels damages their soil and keeps them at the mercy of predatory multinational corporations.

The article is worth reading in full, but fast-forward to the end to find Rogers' sensible policy proposal. Instead of enlisting farmers in a complicated energy-production procedure that ultimately keeps Americans in their cars, why not aide the work they're already doing to reduce carbon emissions on their farms? After all, farms are responsible for a huge portion of the country's carbon burden -- they just have lobbyists savvy enough to keep their business from being regulated. As Rogers puts it:

Paying farmers to sequester carbon is sound public policy, but it's also, and just as importantly, good politics. By helping to preserve farmers economically while also allowing them to be the stewards of land most want to be, it peels farmers away from the agribusiness coalition that is pushing the Obama administration to bet the country on a failed biofuels energy strategy.

Now there's a bit of thinking that could move energy policy forward.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger

Here's the harsh truth about our immigration system: When 392,000 immigrants are detained per year and 33,000 more are detained everyday with limited staff and minimal federal oversight, institutional misconduct is inevitable.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is moving record-breaking numbers of immigrants through its ancillary agencies and, in the process, immigrant women are being raped by Border Patrol agents, LGBT detainees are being sexually assaulted at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, and citizens and legal residents are certainly being deported.

How can such things come to pass? Simple: Both overworked and overzealous officials are enforcing overly broad immigration laws. It should be no wonder that people, inevitably, slip through the cracks--whether immigrant, citizen, or soldier.

Immigration judges subverting the law

Misconduct, corruption and a general inability to handle impossibly high caseloads aren't exclusive to DHS and its many agencies. On the contrary, organizational mismanagement plagues every aspect of the immigration process.

As Jacqueline Stevens reports at the Nation, immigration courts are rife with lawlessness and corruption. Charged with adjudicating the hundreds of thousands of immigrants thrown their way by DHS every year, judges are authorizing deportations without even seeing the defendants, issuing rulings at mass hearings (usually with no lawyers present), and abandoning due process for a quicker turn-around.

What's more: the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR)--a separate agency from DHS--is actively shielding this misconduct from the public and trying to avoid federal oversight:

The public's ignorance of the idiocies endemic to the EOIR's business as usual and the calamities these entail is no accident. The agency deliberately withholds basic information from the media and researchers, and its top officials routinely decline requests for interviews [...] Complaints about immigration judges fall under the jurisdiction of the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), and people may file there directly, but the EOIR instructs immigration court stakeholders to lodge complaints with the EOIR itself. Instead of passing complaints on to the OPR, as the website promises, the EOIR top brass, to protect their cronies and avoid outside scrutiny, sweeps complaints under the rug.

Consequently, American citizens--as well as immigrants who could qualify to remain in the country--are being deported indiscriminately by judges whose decisions are rarely, if ever, questioned.

Immigrant soldiers deported after serving in the U.S. military

Immigrant soldiers serving in the U.S. military are among those routinely cheated by deportation-happy immigration judges.

Julianne Hing reports at Colorlines that 17,000 non-citizens are on active duty in the armed forces, and 4,000 immigrant veterans have already been deported or are facing deportation because of criminal convictions. Hing argues that, while some of those veterans are certainly guilty of violent crimes, many others have committed only minor crimes, like drug possession, and have already served time in jail. Deportation is a secondary, and wholly incommensurate, punishment.

There is certainly a double standard at play here. Veterans, regardless of immigration status, are more likely than the general population to abuse drugs and alcohol and to commit violent crimes. But while non-citizen soldiers are indiscriminately deported for minor offenses, thousands of American military rapists have deftly avoided punishment in the past 15 years.The U.S. government's prejudicial treatment of non-citizen soldiers isn't new (to date, Filipino veterans who fought alongside American soldiers in WWII are still waiting to receive the benefits promised to them), but it remains reprehensible.

The unique plight of immigrant veterans certainly puts into perspective the ongoing push for passage of the DREAM Act--proposed legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for immigrant youth who serve in the military.

New York governor to pardon deportees?

Fortunately, some government officials are working towards a fairer immigration system. Elise Foley at the Washington Independent reports that New York governor David Paterson (D) has created a panel to review thousands of pardon requests from immigrant detainees awaiting deportation:

The idea behind the panel is to allow relief from the "extremely inflexible" federal law for green card holders "who have contributed as New Yorkers and who deserve relief from deportation or indefinite detention," Paterson said when he announced its creation in May. [...] While Paterson's pardon panels would not change the way immigration courts are run, the effort is arguably a push to add a bit of discretion back into the system.

Paterson's laudable commitment to protecting the interests of immigrants, particularly when doing so is far from politically expedient, is proof positive that the rectifying our broken immigration system is entirely within the reach of our politicians. Misconduct and corruption within our immigration agencies are not merely the product of overcrowding and understaffing, but rather persistent inaction on the part of powerful lawmakers and government officials.

As Stevens wryly notes for The Nation: President Barack Obama, whose own citizenship is repeatedly questioned, ought to get on board.

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Last week the State Department and the Pentagon jointly announced the largest arms sale in U.S. history -- dozens of fighter planes and attack helicopters supplemented by transport helicopters, over 16,000 bombs, 10,000-plus laser guided missiles, machine guns, ammunition, night vision devices and other weapons systems too numerous to describe here. The total price tag of over $60 billion is three times as large as the next largest sale in U.S. history, a 1981 offer of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia. The only difference: the earlier deal drew heavy fire from Congress, passing by a margin of 52 to 48. The current deal is likely to sail through without even a hearing, much less any serious effort to block it.

It's not just the Saudi deal. Conventional arms sales in general have received less scrutiny than they did during the arms sales booms of the 1970s through the early 1990s. Congress passed the Arms Export Control Act in the late 1970s in the midst of concerns over U.S. sales to rivals (as with the arming of both sides in the conflict between Greece and Turkey over Cypress), to one side or another of a civil war (as in Angola), or to repressive regimes (such as Iran under the Shah). The sheer size of the trade was also a concern, as newly rich members of the OPEC oil cartel went shopping for top-of-the-line weaponry, with the encouragement of the Nixon and Ford administrations. Jimmy Carter's administration almost came to a deal with the Soviet Union to curb sales to regions of conflict, and after the first Gulf War there were talks among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council about limiting arms sales to the Middle East and other regions of concern. The talks collapsed, in part because the U.S. was boosting its sales to the region even as it talked the language of restraint. The size of the trade eventually dropped off, more for economic reasons than due to effective regulatiion, but at least there were serious policy debates about the wisdom of individual sales and the direction of overall arms sales policy.

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