"Spill. Baby. Spill"

[Nitrox]

Right, the barn door is open. It wouldn't be retroactive to the start of the last legislation.

 

 

New legislation seeks to retroactively increase liability limits for BP.

 

The bill would apply to future spills, but White House officials say they also want the legislation to impose measures retroactively on BP PLC, the oil company whose well has been belching crude into the Gulf of Mexico since an April 20 rig explosion.

 

Um, yeah. Retroactive legislation is passed all the time in all kinds of situations (telecom spying immunity, torture immunity...HELLO).

 

Guess there are still folks out there who've never heard of such a concept...and those people are fucking morons.

 

 

Post the retroactive legislation that was passed for "torture immunity".

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

Military Commissions act of 2006.

[Nitrox]

Military Commissions act of 2006.

 

And of the three cases that have been brought with this legislation one plead out and two were dismissed. Ex Post Facto is generally regarded as unconstitutional, but you knew that, right? I'd love to hear about the telecom legislation you mentioned, I'm unfamiliar with it but I'd bet its more of the same.

 

I think the use of Ex Post Facto legislation against the BP will only result in an expensive legal battle assuming the proposed bill passes. In the end I think the legislation is just going to make a bad situation worse.

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

The point of retroactive immunity is prevent lawsuits or charges from being brought against those who have tortured. You're referring to military commissions held under the law: two different things.

 

FISA Amendment Act of 2008 granted telecoms retroactive immunity during their participation in Bush's illegal spying program.

 

This law effectively quashed numerous class action law suits, many at the state level. The effect was huge.

 

Retroactive immunity clauses are increasingly common, unfortunately. You won't see punitive ex post facto legislation, however.

 

The constitutional debate in Congress prior to passing telecom immunity focused on taking without compensation rather than ex post facto. Proponents (apparently successfully) argued that what was taken (records, communications) wasn't property.

 

The ACLU begged to differ, of course. Retroactive immunity laws make it difficult to sue or bring charges and therefore test the constitutionality of those laws. They also send the signal to those parties involved that, when in doubt, go ahead and break the law. You'll be let off the hook later. They are a bad idea.

Edited May 16, 2010 by tvashtarkatena

[Nitrox]

Thats true but retroactive immunity is not the same as a retroactive penalty. The MCA '06 does not make a retroactive crime or retroactive penalty. Your examples are of immunity and not criminality or penalty.

 

The link Rob provided was to a bill that would create an Ex Post Facto penalty which is generally considered unconstitutional unless BP just doesn't pursue fighting it and pays, which they could do.

 

The article claims it is not unconstitutional in some way so I guess we'll just have to see how it plays out. BP is going to be under a lot of pressure so they may just pay without saying anything. Dunno at this point.

 

[tvashtarkatena]

I don't think a retroactive penalty against BP will pass even cursory constitutional muster, nor should it. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" means nothing if legal acts committed in the past can become illegal. In that world, it would be impossible to know what the law is.

 

[tvashtarkatena]

IMO, any time you hear about retroactive anything in the legislature, it's a clear sign that somebody fucked up and the system is attempting to pile another fuck up on top to fix it.

[Nitrox]

I don't think a retroactive penalty against BP will pass even cursory constitutional muster, nor should it. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" means nothing if legal acts committed in the past can become illegal. In that world, it would be impossible to know what the law is.

 

IMO, any time you hear about retroactive anything in the legislature, it's a clear sign that somebody fucked up and the system is attempting to pile another fuck up on top to fix it.

 

Agree on both.

[rob]

I don't think a retroactive penalty against BP will pass even cursory constitutional muster, nor should it. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" means nothing if legal acts committed in the past can become illegal. In that world, it would be impossible to know what the law is.

 

It's not a penalty. Nobody is saying they did anything illegal. It's an increase in liability caps. That's not the same as saying that something you did is now retroactively illegal. That's a boondogle, this isn't quite the same thing. Taxes have been retroactively changed, for example.

 

In addition, it seems most people I've read agree that this legislation is not likely to face any serious ex post facto constitutional claims as it is a change to existing legislation, and affects liability limits for ANY oil company (in other words, not just a punishment for BP).

 

Either way, it seems like a bit of hyperbole to say that retroactively increasing liability caps is the same thing as retroactively making a legal activity illegal. Not really quite the same animal, imo.

[Nitrox]

They're trying to increase the current penalty retroactively.

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

I'm going to have to disagree. A retroactive increase in liability caps retroactively increases damage awards for lost lawsuits, and that constitutes a penalty, and that is a violation of a basic constitutional principle designed to insure that people can know what the law is and act accordingly. The fact that the law already exists is irrelevant.

 

That the existing liability limits are too low to repair the damage may suck, but the fair way to correct this is to raise them for next time.

 

Let's say you're a doc. You pay insurance based on certain malpractice liability caps. If those caps go up, you buy more insurance.

 

You don't get the opportunity to do that if those caps can be raised retroactively. In that world, you don't really know how much insurance to get. That's fundamentally unfair to those who want to act responsibly. Our system should protect those who do.

 

Another example: insurance payouts. What if insurance payouts could be lowered retroactively? You've paid your premiums based on the coverage you need, and when its time to make a claim, guess what? You get fucked. Not good.

 

The bottom line is that the government, and that is to say ultimately us voters, fucked up by under regulating this industry through lower liability caps and other means. We wanted that oil on the cheap. We wanted BP's stock to net us a pretty profit, so we turned a blind eye to the possibility of such a disaster. Well, guess what? Now we get to pay for our fuck up by footing more of the cleanup bill.

 

That seems fair to me.

Edited May 16, 2010 by tvashtarkatena

[tvashtarkatena]

From a political standpoint, retroactively increasing award caps allows politicians to dodge the hard decisions they're paid to make. Rather than regulate industry properly, such a scheme allows them to reduce regulation, which only increases that chance that such a disaster will occur, then, if it does, conveniently shift blame/cost to the offender. The end result is that these disasters happen more often than they should, and the environment takes it in the shorts more often than it should.

[tvashtarkatena]

This means that risky activities like offshore drilling are artificially cheaper than they should be, which means there will be more offshore drilling.

[Fairweather]

The technology to drill in deep water is not as safe as that for shallow water. Environmental groups don't want these safer oil platforms close to shore and have successfully lobbied/sued to get drilling operations moved to deep water. Now they are upset that an accident has happened due, in part, to the rules they antagonized for. They are, in part, to blame.

[tvashtarkatena]

Gave a talk on Camano I and my host was complaining about how ugly the Wildhorse wind farm was.

 

Watcha gonna do?

 

I think those things look fucking cool. They're one of the few things modernity has produced that look like the future I imagined as a pup.

[mkporwit]

Wow, you've got shit for imagination. If your image of a futuristic energy source involves hundreds of tall stalks dotting the countryside, then you should watch "Back to the Future" again and pay attention to that "Mr. Fusion" gizmo at the end of the movie...

[j_b]

The technology to drill in deep water is not as safe as that for shallow water. Environmental groups don't want these safer oil platforms close to shore and have successfully lobbied/sued to get drilling operations moved to deep water. Now they are upset that an accident has happened due, in part, to the rules they antagonized for. They are, in part, to blame.

 

 

Liar. Enviros campaigned for no offshore drilling while fuckwits like you chanted "drill, baby, drill".

[rob]

The technology to drill in deep water is not as safe as that for shallow water. Environmental groups don't want these safer oil platforms close to shore and have successfully lobbied/sued to get drilling operations moved to deep water. Now they are upset that an accident has happened due, in part, to the rules they antagonized for. They are, in part, to blame.

 

The claim that deep water drilling only occurred because environmentalists wanted it, is totally specious. There are VAST oil reserves in extremely deep water and oil companies have spent DECADES researching how to get to it.

 

You make it sound like BP would rather have not gained access to this incredibly HUGE oil well, but only did so because of those darn environmentalists and their lawsuits.

Edited May 18, 2010 by rob

[j_b]

More news in the "move right along, there is nothing to see" department: Study ties organophosphates (pesticides) to ADHD in kids

[ivan]

Wow, you've got shit for imagination. If your image of a futuristic energy source involves hundreds of tall stalks dotting the countryside, then you should watch "Back to the Future" again and pay attention to that "Mr. Fusion" gizmo at the end of the movie...

my unofficial survey of the teens i teach shows a 75%ish agreement w/ tvash - the things make that dogshit country look like the cover of a pink floyd album!

[olyclimber]

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure.

[AlpineK]

[video:youtube]

[Crux]

Military Commissions act of 2006.

 

And of the three cases that have been brought with this legislation one plead out and two were dismissed. Ex Post Facto is generally regarded as unconstitutional, but you knew that, right? I'd love to hear about the telecom legislation you mentioned, I'm unfamiliar with it but I'd bet its more of the same.

 

I think the use of Ex Post Facto legislation against the BP will only result in an expensive legal battle assuming the proposed bill passes. In the end I think the legislation is just going to make a bad situation worse.

 

 

Ex Post Facto imposition of penalties for crimes comitted (e.g., fines and imprisonment) is clearly prohibited by the Consitution, but this limitation does not apply to civil penalties (i.e., compensatory and punitive damages). However, legislated limitations to damages, which are a civil matter, are subject to change Ex Post Facto. Therefore, to whatever extent the BP offenses of topical concern are a civil matter, rather than being a violation of criminal code, the legislated cap on penalties for those offenses can be changed by the legislature now or later. Moreover, to whatever extent that damages can be shown to be a result of fraud on the part of BP, all bets are off for contractual obligations that would spare BP from related damages; that is, contractual protections that BP might otherwise enjoy are null and void to the extent that BP fraudulently claimed compliance with said contract(s). In this case, BP explicitly -- and fraudulently -- claimed a full preparedness to prevent the damage now underway.

 

[j_b]

The technology to drill in deep water is not as safe as that for shallow water. Environmental groups don't want these safer oil platforms close to shore and have successfully lobbied/sued to get drilling operations moved to deep water. Now they are upset that an accident has happened due, in part, to the rules they antagonized for. They are, in part, to blame.

Liar. Enviros campaigned for no offshore drilling while fuckwits like you chanted "drill, baby, drill".

 

As it turns out Fairweather was only regurgitating Limbaugh's lie. So, Fairweather may not have lied, he may have simply acted out of stupidity for trusting anything Limbaugh says.

[j_b]

The Anthropocene Debate: Marking Humanity’s Impact

Is human activity altering the planet on a scale comparable to major geological events of the past? Scientists are now considering whether to officially designate a new geological epoch to reflect the changes that homo sapiens have wrought: the Anthropocene.

by elizabeth kolbert

 

The Holocene — or “wholly recent” epoch — is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch — informally dubbed the Anthropocene — has begun.

 

In a recent paper titled “The New World of the Anthropocene,” which appeared in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, a group of geologists listed more than a half dozen human-driven processes that are likely to leave a lasting mark on the planet — lasting here understood to mean likely to leave traces that will last tens of millions of years. These include: habitat destruction and the introduction of invasive species, which are causing widespread extinctions; ocean acidification, which is changing the chemical makeup of the seas; and urbanization, which is vastly increasing rates of sedimentation and erosion.

 

Human activity, the group wrote, is altering the planet “on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient past. Some of these changes are now seen as permanent, even on a geological time-scale.”

 

Prompted by the group’s paper, the Independent of London last month conducted a straw poll of the members of the International Commission on

 

Are we living in the Anthropocene? The answer, the group of geologists concluded, was probably yes.

 

Stratigraphy, the official keeper of the geological time scale. Half the commission members surveyed said they thought the case for a new epoch was already strong enough to consider a formal designation.

 

“Human activities, particularly since the onset of the industrial revolution, are clearly having a major impact on the Earth,” Barry Richards of the Geological Survey of Canada told the newspaper. “We are leaving a clear and unique record.”

 

The term “Anthropocene” was coined a decade ago by Paul Crutzen, one of the three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds. In a paper published in 2000, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, a professor at the University of Michigan, noted that many forms of human activity now dwarf their natural counterparts; for instance, more nitrogen today is fixed synthetically than is fixed by all the world’s plants, on land and in the ocean. Considering this, the pair wrote in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, “it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch.” Two years later, Crutzen restated the argument in an article in Nature titled “Geology of Mankind.”

 

The Anthropocene, Crutzen wrote, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane.”

 

[..]

 

One argument against the idea that a new human-dominated epoch has recently begun is that humans have been changing the planet for a long time already, indeed practically since the start of the Holocene. People have been farming for 8,000 or 9,000 years, and some scientists — most notably William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia — have proposed that this development already represents an impact on a geological scale. Alternatively, it could be argued that the Anthropocene has not yet arrived because human impacts on the planet are destined to be even greater 50 or a hundred years from now.

 

“We’re still now debating whether we’ve actually got to the event horizon, because potentially what’s going to happen in the 21st century could be even more significant,” observed Mark Williams, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group who is also a geologist at the University of Leicester.

 

In general, Williams said, the reaction that the working group had received to its efforts so far has been positive. “Most of the geologists and stratigraphers that we’ve spoken with think it’s a very good idea in that they agree that the degree of change is very significant.”

 

Zalasiewicz said that even if new epoch is not formally designated, the exercise of considering it was still useful. “Really it’s a piece of science,” he said. “We’re trying to get some handle on the scale of contemporary change in its very largest context.”

 

more: http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2274