WHITE HOUSE FINALIZES HISTORIC VEHICLE STANDARDS TO SAVE OIL, CUT POLLUTION, AND CREATE JOBS:
The Obama White House yesterday finalized new clean car rules from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Dept. of Transportation (NHTSA), securing the largest boost in fuel economy in decades and, for the first time, using the Clean Air Act to require reductions in the amount of heat-trapping emissions from cars and light trucks.
"To paraphrase the Vice-president, this is a really big deal," said Jim Kliesch, a senior engineer in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Clean Vehicles Program. "Because of these standards, Americans will drive vehicles that save them money at the pump, cut the country's oil dependence, and produce a lot less global warming pollution."
The joint rule will boost the average fleetwide fuel economy of new vehicles sold in the United States to 34.1 miles per gallon by model year 2016. The standards also set national global warming pollution standards for vehicles at 250 grams per mile, roughly 25 percent less than the emissions produced by today's average new vehicle.
Not all oil is created equal. It isn't just a matter of buring it and getting so many particulates, and so much CO2 dispersed in the air. Oil of different provenances give off different levels of crap. So, CARB is attempting to regulate. Shockingly, the National Petrochemical Assoc. is suing:
A lobby group that includes BP and Shell in its membership has launched a legal challenge against low-carbon legislation in California that in effect rules out the use of oil from Canadian tar sands. The action by the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association (NPRA) comes amid growing political, investor and consumer pressure on US oil companies not to participate in the carbon-intensive tar sands of Alberta. (Guardian UK)
It's a pretty standard interstate commerce lawsuit. It's something of a longshot case, as California has successfully regulated other products coming into the state. Like, um, say gasoline. We have our own mix here, toxic and pricey as it might be, and that has been allowed to stand for a while now. That profited the oil companies, so no rush to sue on that one. But this one is annoying to them, so they're standing up for their corporate rights.
Of course, the two big oil shale producers, BP and Shell, are hiding behind NPRA on the lawsuit. They each claim that they weren't in on the process to sue on this regulation. Convenient, that.
The case will be handled by the AG, Jerry Brown, we'll be sure to update if there is any news.
On November 19th, 52 UC Davis students were arrested after peacefully protesting the new 32% fee increases established by the UC Regents. As a second year undergraduate, I was hopeful that students were beginning to see the bigger picture: California is broken.
Students, so far, have been forcing most of the blame on the UC Regents. While it is true that the 20 Regents who voted for the increase certainly deserve a heaving portion of the blame for borrowing tens of millions (from a non-CA bank, NY Merrill Trust) while forcing students into a cycle of debt in order to protect UC's eerily superb bond rating, the only way for students to move towards enacting change is to recognize that UC's woes are symptomatic of the larger disease that has infected the entire state.
The UC student, to widen the umbrella for a movement that might have the capability of rallying support for reform, should understand that he or she risks turning people off by angling attacks towards the Regents and the Regents only. It is important to recognize that while it is a travesty that UC is becoming an unaffordable option for many California families, it is nearsighted to think that UC fees are anything more than a slice of the pie that is California's broken political system. The state workers that have been furloughed, the elderly Californians that are losing their access to Medicare, the thousands of previously middle-class Californians that have had their homes foreclosed, and the over 12% of California that is unemployed might tell students that UC is not the only government program that is underfunded, mismanaged, and increasingly unavailable to the people who need it.
Over in the Legislature, two Assembly members are working valiantly to institute a oil severance tax in the rat wheel that is also known as our Legislature. Round and round they go. How they hope to get 2/3, nobody knows. Yet, clearly it is important that the issue continue to come up in the Capitol's conversation, so that much makes these bills worth the time.
As oil companies continue to reap record profits amid strained state revenues, a pair of Democratic lawmakers are hoping to tap into their deep pockets by installing an oil severance tax that could relieve growing pressures to cut more state services.
Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Long Beach, introduced a bill Monday called the Fair Share Act, that would impose a 10 percent oil severance fee on extractions from California wells to bring in $1.5 billion to the state's coffers.
A similar bill that has already cleared one committee, by Assemblyman Alberto Torrico, D-Fremont, would impose a 9.9 percent fee, but would earmark the revenues to higher education funding. (CoCo Times 10/27/09)
But the fact is that there is never going to be 2/3 to get any oil severance tax out of the Assembly, let alone through both houses of the Legislature.
If the oil severance, or really any taxes, are going to be passed, it is going to require, for the time being, to go to the voters. The oil severance tax is supported by majorities in most polls. It will not be an easy campaign, as we saw from Prop 87 a few years ago. The oil companies will spend whatever it takes to avoid paying oil severance.
Yet we cannot continue to be the one state that doesn't charge oil severance. If there is going to be drilling in the state, the state should get something back to not only mitigate the costs of that drilling, but to also ensure that there is something left when the drilling is over. To ensure that when the oil companies leave the state, as is bound to happen, that we are left with an education system that can build innovators for the future.
It will take a strong case laid out by Democrats and other progressives, but as a Texan whose education was subsidized by such a tax, it is something that we have to do.
The Commission on the 21st Century Economy, known as the "Parsky Commission" and COTCE is supposed to be figuring out how to reform the state's tax structure. Back when the commission was announced Brian at Calitics wrote that he was hopeful that the Republican domination of the commission would lead to some solutions that were both sensible and that Republicans could vote for. In Gerald Parsky, Bush acolyte, to head tax commission he wrote,
"[In late January,] the Lands Commission rightly rejected the plan on a 2-1 vote, and that should have been the end of it. [...]
Admittedly, the state could use the money. But that's not a good enough reason to subvert the authority of the Lands Commission, sell California's coastline in exchange for empty promises, ignore the wishes of Santa Barbara residents and dismiss the outcome of a long process of analysis and public hearings. The Lands Commission, in fact, was created in 1938 to bring more transparency to the awarding of oil leases after a scandal involving the Department of Finance."
California was, once upon a time, the leader in offshore drilling. In fact, the first submerged oil wells was in the Santa Barbara Channel. Public acceptance can change rapidly when you spill 200,000 gallons of crude oil into the ocean. And change it did.
In many ways, that day in 1969 was the time when the environmental movement came of age. It had a real, tangible event to show the world of how quickly we can turn a once beautiful strip of coast into a toxic mess. And since that spill, we have cleared our coast of offshore drilling. But in the heat of the "Drill, Baby, Drill" McCain candidacy, George W Bush revoked the executive order putting a moratorium on offshore oil drilling. States across the South have invited oil companies to explore their coastlines.
America is so addicted to oil that it will take years to ween ourselves from it. To look for new ways to feed our addiction is not the answer. Anyone who tells you this would bring down gas prices anytime soon is blowing smoke.
But with Arnold, any principle can be sacrificed for the all-mighty dollar. So when it became apparent the May 19 election was going to fail, he turned his attention to the Tranquillion Ridge Project. The Project claimed that it would bring $1.8 Billion into the general fund. Each step of the way, John Garamendi fought him from his post on the State Lands Commission.
Admittedly, the state could use the money. But that's not a good enough reason to subvert the authority of the Lands Commission, sell California's coastline in exchange for empty promises, ignore the wishes of Santa Barbara residents and dismiss the outcome of a long process of analysis and public hearings. The Lands Commission, in fact, was created in 1938 to bring more transparency to the awarding of oil leases after a scandal involving the Department of Finance.
If the governor really wants more oil money, there's a better way: He could resurrect a plan he introduced last year calling for a 9.9% tax on crude oil extracted in the state. California is the only state in the union that doesn't collect such an extraction tax, and Schwarzenegger estimated in November that it would bring in roughly $1.2 billion in the next fiscal year -- dwarfing the $100 million that would be generated by the Plains Exploration project. (LAT 6/8/09)
Drill, Baby, Drill is a recipe for disaster in both good and bad economic times. We should not be coompromising our goals of a clean and sustainable energy future for a few hundred million dollars. I'll be working to provide more depth on this issue, but in the mean time, consider emailing your legislator or joining John Garamendi's facebook group to support the State Lands Commission's position against drilling. We simply cannot afford another to turn our backs on 1969, the devastating consequences of a spill are just not worth the price.
The California Department of Finance wants to "drill baby drill" off the Golden State's coastline, and they're willing to undermine 70+ years of checks and balances to do it. Will we let them get away with it?
In late January, I joined California Controller John Chiang in a two-to-one vote of the California State Lands Commission (SLC) to reject what would have been the first new oil lease in California waters in more than 40 years. As chair of the SLC, I take my responsibility as a steward of the environment very seriously, and I did not think the proposal was in the best interests of the state. Beyond the inherent environmental risks posed by all new drilling projects, I did not think assurances included in the proposal to decommission oil platforms decades down the road were enforceable.
Unfortunately, the Department of Finance is unable to take "No" for an answer. California needs your help over the flip...
(Truly an amazing reversal by Governor Hoover on this. - promoted by David Dayen)
What can $100 million buy you? Apparently California's coastline if Big Oil has its way.
In late January, as chair of the California State Lands Commission, I joined State Controller John Chiang in a two-to-one vote to deny the first offshore oil lease off the coast of California in more than four decades. To permit more oil production off the coast of California, a state seen the world over as a leader in environmental stewardship, would have sent a terrible signal that California isn't yet prepared to embrace a green economy. The risk of a major oil spill killing marine life, soiling the coast, and decimating marine-based industries and tourism is simply too high for a quick buck.
Sadly, as part of yesterday's drastic state budget May Revision, California once again faces a renewed push to allow oil drilling off the coast of California. Big Oil has essentially offered to California $100 million dollars to seduce the state into granting the first new oil drilling lease in California since the Santa Barbara oil spill 41 years ago, a spill that covered hundreds of miles of ocean and over 30 miles of sandy beaches with more than three million gallons of crude oil. Learning from history means not blindly repeating the mistakes of the past.
Another No on Prop 10 Website, this time from the Prop 87 Proponent, Anthony Rubenstein. In 2006, Prop 87, a royalty tax on the oil companies, was really the most contentious item on the ballot because Arnold had pretty much pulled away from the pack. With the support of big-time enviros like Al Gore and a ton of money, it was kind of close for a while. But then Chevron threw down and that was that. This time, Rubenstein says of Prop 10 in an email:
Prop10 is being funded by Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens and Oklahoma natural gas tycoon Aubrey McClendon who have been spending millions on TV ads pushing their national so-called "Pickens Plan" for U.S. Energy Independence. The reason these out-of-state guys operating in California's initiative process is, in my opinion, because they can use their wealth to a fund a ballot initiative campaign in order to avoid going through the California Legislature where this measures would never have stood a chance.
For example, in contrast to presently on-going California alternative fuel subsidy programs, Prop 10 requires no accountability in terms of measuring tailpipe emissions reductions, petroleum usage reductions, and doesn't even require that taxpayer subsidized natural gas powered trucks and cars even stay in California. Meanwhile Prop 10's commercials tout support for hybrid vehicles, while the only hybrid on the road that actually qualifies for funding from Prop 10 is the Toyota Prius, which arguably doesn't need any subsidy because it's on back-order.
All of prop 10's dubious programming will be funded by making the State borrow $5 billion which when paid pack with interest will cost California taxpayers around $10 billion paid over 30 years at a cost of $330-plus million per year. This at a time when our state is in the midst of a budget crisis caused by a $15 billion deficit. Think about Prop 10 this way: would you ever buy yourself a car on a 30 year mortgage? Not with your own money, you wouldn't. And neither would Prop 10's backers, Pickens & McClendon - that's why they're trying to spend yours.
The Consumer Federation of California has a No on 10 website here. While the Calitics Editorial Board is currently making decisions on the propositions, I can say for myself that I sincerely hope that Prop 10 is defeated. Soundly. It is an effort to wrap a gift to T Boone in a green pashmina.
One of the most potent objections to the Republicans' drilling zealotry has been to remind Americans of the devastation that resulted from the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. As Van Jones explained in his talk with David Dayen, the fight against drilling is a fight FOR jobs and the economy and Santa Barbara knows this well. When oil drenches the beaches, kids get sick, service industry jobs that the already-struggling Santa Barbara working class depends upon vanish, and the overall economy suffers. Which is why Santa Barbara County has led the fight against offshore drilling for the last 40 years.
Until now. The rapid growth of Santa Maria, in the northern part of the county, has shifted the county's political demography. North county conservatives now control the Board of Supervisors 3-2. And even though they voted last year to reaffirm their support of the offshore drilling ban, Santa Barbara's role as the poster child for drilling's consequences has led them to change their minds. As the LA Times reports, the Republican majority is expected to vote to support drilling:
Nearly 40 years after a disastrous oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast galvanized the nation and gave birth to the modern environmental movement, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors is poised to vote Tuesday in support of offshore drilling...
But Tuesday's vote is as much about the tension between inland and the coast as it is about the price of a barrel of crude. Population and political power have been shifting away from the more liberal coast, and the board of supervisors has a conservative, pro-industry majority for the first time in about a decade.
The result: An expected 3-2 vote to support increased oil drilling off the same beaches that were coated in crude and covered with the corpses of birds, seals and dolphins after 3 million gallons of oil leaked from an offshore drilling site in 1969.
As you can see by the lede, the LA Times is dutifully buying into the Republican game plan - if you can show America that even Santa Barbara supports drilling, then your cause is boosted that much more strongly. The devil's in the details, of course - the Supervisors that actually represent the coast support the ban, and the 3 who will vote against the ban are from inland areas. They're playing their part in the grand Republican plan quite effectively.
At the same time they're going against the economic needs of their constituents. The rapid growth of Santa Maria is driven by housing costs - it's more affordable for workers whose jobs are on the coast to live in Santa Maria and commute down 101 to Santa Barbara. If drilling is renewed, it WILL lead to more oil spills, and Santa Maria residents will suffer. And for what? So that oil companies can sell the oil on the global market.
As David Dayen and Van Jones agreed earlier today, Democrats need to fight back on economic terms. Santa Barbara County residents need permanent alternatives to high gas prices, they need good jobs, and they need affordable housing. Santa Barbara County residents would be signing an economic death warrant by backing new drilling, regardless of which side of the mountains they live on.
Brian mentioned this in the open thread, but it really deserves its own post, it's such a ridiculous column. George Skelton today made a full-throated but deeply flawed argument for offshore drilling that as far as I can tell boils down to "well we did it in the past, and it's not going to help in the future...so why not?!" and winds up arguing that we should sacrifice the future for hardly anything in return. The column doesn't start off on a promising note:
On some beaches around Santa Barbara, you could feel the oozing tar between your toes -- and that was long before a Union Oil platform five miles offshore spilled crud all over 20 miles of coast in 1969. For centuries, the tar naturally had seeped up through the sand, providing the native Chumash with caulking for their canoes.
Calling it "crud" is deliberately misleading readers about what actually happened in 1969. From UCSB:
Animals that depended on the sea were hard hit. Incoming tides brought the corpses of dead seals and dolphins. Oil had clogged the blowholes of the dolphins, causing massive lung hemorrhages. Animals that ingested the oil were poisoned. In the months that followed, gray whales migrating to their calving and breeding grounds in Baja California avoided the channel -their main route south.
The oil took its toll on the seabird population. Shorebirds like plovers, godwits and willets which feed on sand creatures fled the area. But diving birds which must get their nourishment from the waters themselves became soaked with tar....
Grebes, cormorants and other seabirds were so sick, their feathers so soaked in oil that they were not difficult to catch. Birds were bathed in Polycomplex A-11, medicated, and placed under heat lamps to stave off pneumonia. The survival rate was less than 30 percent for birds that were treated. Many more died on the beaches where they had formerly sought their livelihoods. Those who had managed to avoid the oil were threatened by the detergents used to disperse the oil slick. The chemicals robbed feathers of the natural waterproofing used to keep seabirds afloat.
In all 3686 birds were estimated to have died because of contact with oil. Aerial surveys a year later found only 200 grebes in an area that had previously drawn 4000 to 7000.
Skelton's blithe dismissal of the ecological consequences of drilling is appalling. It's not as if our oceans are healthy - oceans face crippling ecological crises and they're in no position to withstand drilling.
Skelton goes on to turn "Big Oil" into a nostalgia piece (I'm guessing someone didn't see There Will Be Blood):
Oh, another thing: My dad was an oil field roustabout, or driller or whatever job he could fill on a given shift. So were his dad, brother and cousins. They left their Tennessee farms and followed the migration to California for the 1920s oil boom.
My first summer job out of high school was in a Ventura oil field, an experience guaranteed to prod a kid into college if nothing else would. (But the oil job paid better than newspaper work, I soon discovered.)
So "Big Oil" never has been a big bugaboo for me. It was the producer of a vital commodity and provider of working-class jobs. Although oil derricks annoy many people as unsightly, I've always marveled at how they work, especially all lighted up at night.
Nostalgic memories do not count as a sound basis for public policy - unless of course he thinks we should go back to the days before OSHA, dump our toxic waste into the drinking water supply, and drive without seatbelts.
Worse is the conflation of Big Oil with working-class prosperity. Perhaps at some moment in the past this was true, but Skelton here merely reveals that he, like all the High Broderists, does not live in the 21st century, instead assuming that the conditions of the 1970s remain true today. They don't.
Here in the 21st century Big Oil sucks precious income away form working-class families while returning hardly any in the form of jobs, taxes, or anything else resembling prosperity. And as anyone living near the Torrance refinery knows, they tend to actually have rather debilitating effect on working-class communities.
As we're all painfully aware, during the '00s the US media have become ardent defenders of the status quo, generally unwilling to discuss harsh realities that might threaten that status quo unless absolutely forced to do so - Hurricane Katrina, for example, or the reaction to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Perhaps the most significant issue not being discussed in the media is peak oil - which, in its simplistic form, explains why the high fuel prices we are seeing today are going to be a permanent feature of life.
Gas prices are NEVER coming back down - rising demand is meeting a shrinking supply and the result is the end of the cheap oil that modern America was built upon.
As gas prices remain high more media outlets are discussing energy policy but only lately are they beginning to acknowledge that the era of cheap oil is over. Today's Los Angeles Times starts examining the topic with a front-page feature, Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil. It focuses on how consumers, transportation, and global trade will be affected, and even tries to examine the "upside" to this, particularly the eventual localization of American life, perhaps the closest a major American media outlet has come to embracing the ideas of Jim Kunstler.
The article is a good beginning, but it avoids the key question of how we ought to respond. Videoconferencing and staycations are not substitutes for statewide initiatives to deal with the crisis. The article discusses the airline crisis but doesn't discuss ways to provide alternative forms of transportation such as high speed rail. Nor does it discuss ways to encourage more renewable energy sources, or local food production, or urban density.
Still, just as it took Al Gore's movie to convince Californians to take even the small step of climate change action embodied in AB 32, so too will it take the media's willingness to tell Californians that cheap oil is over to produce action on shifting our state away from an oil-based economy.
Cheap oil was responsible for much of the prosperity of the postwar era, especially in California. It enabled people to find an affordable home to purchase, even if it was distant from their workplace. It enabled them to buy inexpensive food without needing to grow their own. It enabled the development of global trade networks that provided markets for Californian products and services.
The end of cheap oil is welcome from an ecological perspective but it will finish off working Californians if we don't proactively work to build a post-oil infrastructure to provide for prosperity, just as we spent the 1950s and 1960s building an infrastructure around oil to provide for prosperity.
Newspapers like the LA Times could help show Californians the need for and value of such projects. It will require them to break with the status quo - but Californians are already doing so in practice, riding mass transit and even their bikes in much higher numbers than ever before. In the absence of media coverage of our changing state, we in the blogs will do what we can to keep up.
Well, John W. McCain had a great couple of days in the Golden State. First he went to Santa Barbara, site of a huge 1969 oil spill, to promote his plan to cancel the moratorium on offshore drilling, and he ran into an expert who rebutted his entire premise.
Feeney also took issue with McCain's controversial proposal to lift the moratorium on offshore oil exploration: "It makes me nervous to think about those who are proposing to drain America's offshore oil and gas reserves as quickly as possible in the hopes of driving down the price of gasoline, because I think when you look at the good sources of information, were we to open up the California coast or the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, it would be 12, 15, maybe 20 years before those resources came online and got to full productions."
Adding that some research shows that drilling in ANWR would only "reduce our dependence on foreign oil from 70% to 67%," Feeney added, "I'm not sure most Americans would think that's really worth the price of admission."
That Charlie Black comment wasn't McCain's only off-message moment yesterday. At a town hall in Fresno, CA, McCain admitted that the offshore drilling proposal he unveiled last week would probably have mostly "psychological" benefits, NBC/NJ's Adam Aigner-Treworgy notes. "Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial." Uh oh.
Later, at a fundraiser, an attendee very nicely called him an idiot:
"We're really kind of goosey here about oil spills, and we're goosey here about federal drilling and oil lands, which are abundant offshore," the attendee said. "So we ask you to look out there to the south and the southeast and remember the greatest environmental catastrophe that's hit this state and then balance that with the notion of winning California."
I also want to make sure that we will take concrete steps towards eliminating our dependence on foreign oil.
And I am confident that uh, the, the conflicts that we are in in both Iraq and Afghanistan have also a bearing on that.
(Incidentally, is there anyone in America who doesn't know this? We've been going to war for oil since oil became profitable. Before that the world used a lot of whale oil, and if we still did America would be at war with Sea World.)
Thanks for coming, Big John! Please stop by again sometime and further ruin your candidacy!
In Dubai, people get free housing, free medical care, AND $5,000 per month. The people of Dubai share in the country's oil wealth.
In Alaska, people not only do not pay state taxes, the state government writes every state resident a check every year. The people of the state of Alaska share in the state's oil wealth.
But in California the big oil companies get to pump our oil from the ground for free, and then sell it back to us. Right now these oil companies are reaping the highest profits of any industry ever in history, making a few people immensely wealthy, and are not giving back any of this wealth to We, the People of California!
In Dubai, people get free housing, free medical care, AND $5,000 per month. The people of Dubai share in the country's oil wealth.
In Alaska, people not only do not pay state taxes, the state government writes every state resident a check every year. The people of the state of Alaska share in the state's oil wealth.
Núñez, a Los Angeles Democrat with close ties to education unions, is proposing a two-pronged approach by levying a 6 percent tax on all oil produced within the state, and imposing a 2 percent tax on windfall oil profits.
Together, the taxes would generate an estimated $1.2 billion a year for a cash-strapped state that still faces an $8 billion deficit for the fiscal year starting in July. Under the speaker's bill, ABX 9, oil tax revenues would be dedicated for schoolteachers, who are facing potential layoffs under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's across-the-board budget cuts.
This is basically Prop 87 again, and it's a worthwhile proposal. The article goes on to note that the bill is likely to be opposed by Republicans. Which is probably the point here - to further expose the Yacht Party as out of touch, elitist, and defending the wealthy at the expense of schools.
Sure, this is low hanging fruit, and it's not exactly a permanent solution to the structural revenue crisis. But I like the politics. Even though, as David notes below, we're seeing a remarkable movement come together to protect education, the Republicans remain obstinate, and not as many Californians as we'd like see the need to raise taxes to finally fix our 30-year old revenue shortfall. Calling out the Republicans like this, and forcing them to make a public defense of unpopular companies at the expense of children is a great way to lay the groundwork for what will be a long struggle.
So-called Pres. George W. Bush initiated a war of aggression and limitless occupation against the sovereign nation of Iraq in order to exact revenge on Sadaam Hussein over Hussein's assassination attempt on former Pres. George H.W. Bush and to secure Iraqi oil for Bush's Texas oil cronies. Sen. John McCain and Rep. Mary Bono Baxely Mack, absentee Congresswoman, have supported every Bush war policy without reservation. In fact, McCain is prepared for the U.S. to continue the occupation of Iraq 'for 100 years.'
The U.S. Army recently released a study on the impact of the Bush war of aggression on the mental health of U.S. troops (The Associated Press, by Pauline Jelinek, dated March 7, 2008). The findings of the report are devastating to the Bush occupation efforts and reveal the harmful impact on a significant percentage of U.S. troops.
Ca. Fire Documents Conflict With Reports
By AARON C. DAVIS - 1 day ago
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Several aircraft were able to fly in strong winds on the first full day of last month's Southern California firestorms, contradicting officials' earlier claims that the weather had grounded virtually all aircraft, according to documents released Saturday.
Twenty-eight of 52 aircraft the state was tracking for firefighting efforts remained grounded that day, and high winds were not listed in the documents as the reason.
While San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stepped up, others ducked. The lapse of time between the Cosco Busan oil spill being declared a "42 gallon spill" and a "58,000 gallon spill" isn't the only timeline scandal. I was at the joint command press conference later in the day where the fact it took 26 hours from the time of the collision until the Captain was tested for alcohol kept coming up. The snickers from the press (which included 18 TV cameras) made it clear that "he had left the ship" was an answer that begs many, many questions.
The press conference was at Fort Mason, following it I walked the two mile stretch of the Embarcadero down to where I took the first shots of it hitting SF yesterday. Everywhere, you could see it in the water. Accountability time.
