There's a lot of news this week, with Hurricane Ike threatening the Houston area and non-stop Sarah Palin coverage, but this is not be missed.

Several reports given to Congress Wednesday documented an incredible tale of bureaucrats gone wild that's been going on within a Department of Interior agency that collects royalties on oil and gas production.

The New York Times had a pretty powerful story on it. Here's an excerpt:

The report says that eight officials in the royalty program accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

And some more: 

The report also detailed cozy relationships between energy companies and other officials in the royalty-in-kind program office. Some 19 officials — a third of the staff — took gifts from oil and gas executives, some with “prodigious frequency,” it said.

On one occasion in 2002, the report said, two of the officials who marketed taxpayers’ oil got so drunk at a daytime golfing event sponsored by Shell that they could not drive to their hotels and were put up in Shell-provided lodging. Two female employees “engaged in brief sexual relationships with industry contacts,” the reports’ cover memo said, adding that “sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms’ length.”

It's quite an astonishing report. One part especially stood out to me. This line from the New York Times story: 

One of the reports says that the officials viewed themselves as exempt from those limits, indulging themselves in the expense-account-fueled world of oil and gas executives.

Made me wonder, is this how oil company executives behave?

We've got our fair share of them here. Can anyone provide us with some insight?

A U.S. Senate Committee briefing on the safety and science of land applying  sewage sludge this morning was canceled at the last minute.

Staff for the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by our own Sen. Barbara Boxer, said the hearing was called off after the committee learned late last night of a legal issue one of the witnesses is involved in related to sludge. Staff said the meeting was called off to ensure the focus of the hearing was the U.S. EPA's sludge spreading program and not a particular legal case.

The cancellation comes after another last-minute switch earlier this week when committee Democrats downgraded a planned hearing on the issue to a briefing. The focus of the briefing was to be the science and safety issues related to EPA's sludge program.

EPA had declined to participate, however.

Committee staff said a briefing or hearing will be rescheduled for next year.

Looks like the state's proposed bullet train -- which voters will weigh in on this November -- is aiming to be pollution-free. I'll copy the press release I just received below.

But it brings me to a different question: will you vote to approve funding for the bullet train?

Proposition 1A will appear on the Nov. 4 ballot seeking voter approval for $10 billion in bond sales to start construction of the rail system, which would eventually zip from San Francisco to San Diego in about 4 hours. Oh, and there would be a stop in Bakersfield.

(Bakersfield to LA would take under and hour, and Bakersfield to San Francisco would be about 2 hours.)

The California High-Speed Rail Authority estimates it would cost about $40 to $45 billion to build the project over 20 years, with construction starting as soon as 2011. Additional funding would come from the federal government and public/private partnerships.

Today's press release:

California High-Speed Rail Authority Determines Train System Is Capable of Pollution-Free Operation
Zero Emissions Called Well Within Capabilities
 
San Diego, CA–A leading energy specialist has reported to the California High-Speed Rail Authority that the state's proposed high-speed train system can run with zero greenhouse gas emissions. The zero emissions strategy report was presented by Navigant Consulting Inc, a leading consultant on the energy, electric power and natural gas industries at the Authority's most recent board meeting held in San Diego. At the meeting, the Board adopted a renewable energy/zero emissions strategy for the high-speed train project.
 
Researchers noted that the train system is expected to use 3,380 Gigawatt hours a year of energy to transport 94 million passengers by 2030.  According to their findings, generating this amount of energy from renewable sources is “well within the capabilities of the state.”  This amount represents one percent of the state’s electrical load, or about three and a half days worth of electricity consumed throughout the state.
 
“Integrating renewable energy into the high-speed train project would be neither cost- nor resource- prohibitive and would be well in line with the more sustainable future that California is trying to ensure for itself. The benefits in this regard are clear and, with several avenues to ‘green’ the train, the CHSRA could achieve the goal of low-cost, efficient and clean travel," according to the Navigant report.
 
“We’ve always known that electric high-speed trains represent a tremendous opportunity to meet greenhouse gas reduction goals by removing cars from the road and by slowing demand for additional air travel,” said Judge Quentin L. Kopp, Chairman of the High-Speed Rail Authority. “But today, we welcome the news that this train is even greener, in that it can be powered with none of the emissions that cause global warming.”
 
For more information about the zero emissions strategy, please visit www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov
(“The Use of Renewable Energy Sources to Provide Power to California High-Speed Rail.”)
 

larger view

A group calling for an end to the land application of sewage sludge is collecting stories from people who have been affected by the practice in their community.

Their stories will be submitted to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which had planned to hold a hearing Thursday to look into the safety of land applying sludge. As of today, it's unclear if the hearing will still take place.

"We want the committee to hear stories directly from people who are being adversely impacted by land application," said Laura Orlando, a Boston University public health professor and member of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems, a non-profit based in Boston that works on sanitation and water quality issues.

"We want them to hear from people out there who live near this, who smell these trucks, and who've tried to stop this practice. We want to get the story out there that people around the country are suffering from this practice of disposing sewage sludge on land."

The group wants Congress to declare an immediate moratorium on land application of sludge. They say new science on sludge shows that land application is not the safe practice that federal regulators say it is. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has promoted land application of sludge as the best disposal option for leftover sewage waste since it banned dumping the material into oceans three decades ago.

The Senate committee's investigation into sewage sludge was called for by Sen. Barbara Boxer, among others, earlier this year following several news stories that raised questions about the safety of the land application.

• In February, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a Georgia farmer whose land and animals had been poisoned by free sludge form a local wastewater treatment plant. In his ruling, the judge in the case raised questions about the reliability of data used by federal environmental officials to endorse the practice of land applying sludge, calling it "unreliable, incomplete, and in some cases, fudged."

• In April, the Associated Press reported on a government-funded study that spread sludge in the backyard of some low-income homes in Baltimore to test whether it was effective in protecting children from lead-poisoning in the soil. While questions existed about the safety of human exposure to sludge, the participants in the study were never informed of those risks, the AP reported.

As of Monday morning it was unclear if the hearing will still take place. The committee has not posted the hearing on its Web site. Orlando said the sludge industry has been pressuring some committee members not to go forward with hearing.

So far, my calls to the committee's office and to Boxer's office have not been returned.

I'll keep you updated on what I hear.

Just wanted to mention that the Kern County Planning Department has scheduled three public workshops on the environmental impact report  for the Big West of California refinery. The first is tonight from 6 to 8 p.m. at Discovery Elementary School, 7500 Vaquero Ave. The other two meetings are also 6 to 8 p.m. on:

• Tuesday, Sept. 9 at Caroline Harris Elementary School, 4110 Garnsey Lane
• Tuesday Sept. 16 at Columbia Elementary School, 703 Mondavi Way

The workshops are intended to get feedback from the community on the expansion, though I imagine many people attending will simply want to ask questions, considering that the environmental report was thousands of pages long.

If you've followed news about the expansion, you know there's been great community interest in this project primarily because Big West's original plans called for the use of large quantities of a new toxic chemical.

The revised environmental report released a couple months ago was significant in that it it contained an alternative way to build the expansion without using the chemical. This alternative was also described as the "environmentally superior" project, because it would create less air pollution, greenhouse gases and odor than the company's initial project.

It will be interesting to see what happens at these meetings. It's been hard to gage public response to the alternative presented in the environmental report so far.

Anyone planning to go?