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To put it mildly, this is bizarre.

“Have you ever read Franz Kafka’s The Trial?”

That is the first thing that Patrick Shea, a member of jailed climate activist Tim DeChristopher’s legal defense team, says to me when I call him this morning to ask him about reports that DeChristopher has been pulled out of his minimum security camp at Herlong federal prison in California and thrown into isolated confinement in an 8 x 10-foot cell. His latest crime?  Sending an email to a colleague with a “threat” to give back a $25,000 donation to his legal defense fund because DeChristopher, one of the most principled people I have ever encountered, discovered that his donor was exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs.

If you don’t know the backstory to DeChristopher’s imprisonment, you can read about it here. (Short version: He was sentenced to two years in prison last July for having nonviolently disrupted a federal auction of oil and gas leases in 2008.) This case was a sham before it took this latest turn.  If there were any justice in the world, DeChristopher would have been pardoned before he ever set foot in jail.  The fact that it is now possible he will serve out the rest of his sentence in a tiny cell with only one break a week to go outside is an outrage, and one that should have everyone who cares about justice and the abuse of political power in America marching in the streets.

In short, this is Alice in Wonderland time. That’s right: the guy who stood up for saving taxpayers money gets thrown in jail - now in solitary – while a bunch of oil-funded clowns in Congress stand in the way of cutting wasteful welfare checks to oil companies, yet are living it up on Capitol Hill. Personally, I think there are far better candidates for jail time than Tim DeChristopher!

The natural gas “fracking” industry can downplay or deny the potentially harmful effects of the chemicals it uses, but a new study highlights why that doesn’t make them any less harmful.

The higher the dose, the more dangerous the toxin—that principle is the basis for most regulatory chemical testing in the United States. But a new report [3] shows that even low doses of some toxins can be harmful, and that finding could have implications for the long-standing debate over the chemicals used in natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

The toxins surveyed in the report affect the endocrine system, which produces hormones, the small signaling molecules that control reproduction, brain development, the immune system and overall health.

Although the report doesn’t specifically mention hydraulic fracturing, a separate peer-reviewed study [4] released in September identified 649 chemicals used during natural gas production and found that at least 130 of those could affect the endocrine system. They include petroleum distillates, methanol and other, more obscure compounds with names like dibromoacetonitrile and ethoxylated nonylphenol.

Given these risks, would you want any of this stuff in the water you and your family drinks? Of course you wouldn’t. Yet the natural gas “fracking” industry insists that there’s no risk to its drilling methods.  To which we’d like to know, if they’re so confident, how about they and their families agree to drink and bathe in water from areas near their “fracking” operations? Don’t all volunteer at once, guys!

Despite an incessant barrage of pro-natural-gas-”fracking” propaganda coming from the industry and its political allies, a new poll indicates that the American people are not buying it.

The U.S. public favors greater regulation of hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas drilling technique that has reduced prices for consumers while raising environmental concerns.

More than three times as many Americans say there should be more regulation of fracturing, known as fracking, than less, according to a Bloomberg News National Poll conducted March 8-11. The findings coincide with recent surveys in Ohio and New York where people who believe fracking will cause environmental damage outnumber those who say the process is safe.

[...]

When asked by Bloomberg if there needs to be more or less regulation of fracking, 65 percent said more, 18 percent said less and 17 percent said they weren’t sure. The poll of 1,002 adults 18 and older was conducted by Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Why would such an overwhelming majority of Americans support increased regulation of “fracking?” Perhaps because it resembles “a Ponzi scheme?” Or maybe because it poses a significant threat to water supplies and public health? Or possibly because it also has been proven to cause earthquakes? How about all of the above?

Needless to say, we never believed a word the tar sands industry says, whether it relates to the supposed number of jobs created by the Keystone XL pipeline (see here for the real number), or the supposed lack of environmental harm inflicted by tar sands operations. Well, now a new study, published yesterday in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (and cited in the New York Times), demolishes the tar sands industry’s “contention that its planted forests may actually be better than the boreal forest they replace.” To the contrary:

Claims by industry that they will “return the land we use including reclaiming tailings ponds – to a sustainable landscape that is equal to or better than how we found it” (33) and that it “will be replanted with the same trees and plants and formed into habitat for the same species” (34) are clearly greenwashing. The postmining landscape will support >65% less peatland. One consequence of this transformation is a dramatic loss of carbon storage and sequestration potential, the cost of which has not been factored into land-use decisions. To fairly evaluate the costs and benefits of oil sands mining in Alberta, impacts on natural capital and ecosystem services must be rigorously assessed.

The bottom line is this: the more we examine tar sands oil development, including the Keystone XL export pipeline, the worse it looks on every level. How about we focus our efforts – and investments – on clean energy development instead?

P.S.  Cornell is out with a brand new study which finds that “Keystone XL could, over a 50-year period, generate up to 91 major spills.” In turn, a major spill “could inflict significant economic damage, causing workers to lose jobs, businesses to close, and residents to relocate. “

An article at Huffington Post points out that, “If you follow the popular polls, you might think that Americans are growing ever more skeptical about man-made climate change — despite the consensus among published climate scientists.”  However, according to new research by Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, that’s simply not the case:

Gallup and Pew polls show that the percentage of Americans that believe in climate change now hovers around 50 percent, but Krosnick’s latest poll – which asked the question in a more detailed way — suggests the figure is 83 percent — up from 79 percent in 1997. Of the global warming believers, the majority also reported thinking that the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities play a role. The trend held after the researchers broke the data down by political party: 66 percent of Republicans said climate change is happening.

Further, not a single U.S. state had a majority opinion on the skeptical side, noted Krosnick. Even in Oklahoma, the home of one of the country’s most outspoken skeptics, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a large majority of the people polled agreed with the scientific consensus.

So, if the vast majority of Americans agree with the overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, then why does it often seem the “message is not getting across to Washington,” as Krosnick puts it?  We suspect that the denial themes are driven by the dirty energy interests that are threatened by the obvious solutions to climate disruption. After all, these industries are no strangers to heavy spending on anti-clean energy propaganda. I don’t know where public opinion really falls on global climate disruption, but this latest poll is interesting, to say the least.