Author: Andrew Sullivan

The State Department’s Environmental Impact Report on the Keystone XL pipeline, released on Friday, concludes that the project won’t have any significant effect on carbon emissions:

The pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf coast, has been attacked as the release valve for the more carbon-intensive bitumen that is fueling Canada’s energy boom. While the heavy crude coming from the Alberta fields would release roughly 17 percent more carbon than the heavy crude it would displace from U.S. refineries, the report claims that Keystone “remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States.” In short, the oil is coming out one way or another — it’s only a matter of how it travels.

Plumer digs into the report:

More specifically: The 830,000 barrels of oil that the pipeline would transport each day would add an extra 1.3 million to 27.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year. That’s a whole lot of carbon — it’s like putting an extra 250,000 to 5.5 million cars on the road. But the key question is how much of that oil would get burned anyway, even if the pipeline is blocked. And the State Department believes most of it will get produced regardless.

Joshua Green notices that the much-touted job creating effect of the pipeline isn’t expected to last long:

The State Department concluded that the project would create 42,100 temporary jobs during the two-year construction period. But the report says once the pipeline enters service, it will support only 50 U.S. jobs—35 permanent employees and 15 temporary contractors.

And Heather Smith points out that this report isn’t necessarily the final word:

The State Department, which prepared the EIR, is also due to release the results of an investigation by the Inspector General into the review’s first draft, which turned out to be written by a contractor who had also done work in the not-too-distant-past for TransCanada, the company that wants to build KXL. If the investigation finds a conflict of interest, the State Department may be forced to do an entirely new EIR.

The politics make approving or rejecting the pipeline a tricky call for Obama:

A group of big Democratic donors, including Esprit co-founder Susie Tompkins Buell and Taco Bell heir and Democracy Alliance head Rob McKay, have publicly pressured Obama to reject the pipeline. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who poured money to help Terry McAuliffe win the Virginia governor’s race last year, ran an anti-Keystone ad during the State of the Union and is expected to spend millions of dollars more.

But Obama isn’t running again and several moderate Senate Democrats, including Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, Mark Pryor and Kay Hagan, already support building the pipeline. It’d take an anti-Obama talking point off the table and avoid the possibility of an international spat with Canada.

Greens also realistically have nowhere to go — even if disappointed on one issue, a Democratic president and Senate is far better than anything the GOP can offer them.

Chait sees blocking Keystone as a losing issue for environmentalists:

[Ryan] Cooper mockingly asks readers to envision a protest where organizers shout,“What do we want?” “More stringent carbon dioxide emission regulations on extant coal-fired power plants!” “When do we want it?’ “After the extraordinarily complicated rule-writing process over which the president has no direct control!” It certainly may be easier to get people excited about opposing a pipeline. It may also be hard to get people excited about favoring new regulations.

But if your goal is to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, you need to have a strategy designed to advance policies that limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Stopping Keystone doesn’t do that. EPA regulations would. Would blocking the Keystone pipeline make it easier for Obama to issue tough regulations on existing power plants, and to negotiate an international climate treaty in 2015 after such regulations bring us into compliance with our reduction targets? I don’t see how.

Ryan Cooper counters:

Now, it is true that fighting individual pipelines one by one is a pretty dumb strategy if one’s goal is stopping climate change by that method alone. Oil companies will always win in the end at that game. Of course, that has never ever been the long-term strategy for Bill McKibben (who knows all about EPA regulations, even mentioning them before Keystone in this piece) and the other Keystone activists. The point is to use Keystone as a coordination point to create political pressure on the administration to take more drastic action. In that, they’ve already succeeded.

Exciting news for all you classicists out there:

Fragments of two previously unknown poems by seventh-century Greek lyric poetess Sappho have been discovered on an ancient papyrus. An anonymous private collector owned the papyrus, which dates back to the 3rd century A.D. He showed the tattered fragments to Dr. Dirk Obbink, a classicist at Oxford University, who recognized its significance and asked for permission to publish it. Dr. Obbink’s article will appear in a scholarly journal this spring, but an online version of one of the poems is already available via the Guardian. The first of the two poems mentions “Charazos” and “Larichos,” the names given to Sappho’s brothers in the ancient tradition. The second poem is a fragment of a piece about unrequited love.

Tom Payne, who provides a translation of the first poem, marvels at its integrity:

What we have of Sappho has often survived because ancient critics and philologists quoted her, so that we have a word here and a line there. (This has a musical quality of its own: Hugh Kenner called it “the poesis of loss,” and Anne Carson evoked these beguiling gaps in her 2003 edition of Sappho: If Not, Winter.) This poem comes with nine lines of another one, which would have been exciting enough on their own – they show Sappho using words typical of her other poems such as longing and desire, and addressing Aphrodite.

It’s also exciting to have something like a story.

It is a formula of sorts, and its wish that her brother sail back safely from his mission is a frequent trope in the verse of the stormy ancient Mediterranean. But it has an urgency that makes us sense the real Sappho. … And that’s why new glimpses of Sappho will always be thrilling. It’s not just that it’s new ancient poetry; it’s poetry that the ancients loved because it felt so new.

Laura Swift, elated by the discovery, wonders what else is out there:

There are thousands of unpublished papyrus fragments in university collections. Many of them come from Greco-Roman settlements in Egypt, where the dry sands preserved discarded books and papers that would have rotted in the damp soil of Europe. Still, it’s rare to find something as substantial and as well preserved as this new discovery, and papyrologists often have to satisfy themselves with a few tattered lines. Undergraduates studying classical literature are often told the depressing statistic that at least 90 percent of it has been lost.

The thread that connects us to the ancient past is incredibly fragile, and it could be broken each time a medieval monk decided not to copy a text, a fire or flood destroyed a precious manuscript collection, or a book failed to make it onto a school syllabus. But if this papyrus survived, who knows what other lost gems may be waiting in libraries, archives, or tucked away in basements or attics?

(Image of “Saphhos’ poem “An Old Age” (lines 9-20). Papyrus from 3 cent. B.C.” – not one of the newly discovered texts – via Wikimedia Commons)

Liza Mundy sees the late-in-life rise of Janet Yellen as evidence that “women’s careers have a different trajectory than men’s do – and that women may be defining a new career trajectory for everybody”:

One emerging insight, among those who study work-life issues, is that women’s careers may peak later than men’s do. That revelation could prove immensely helpful for families:

If women – and men – re-orient their thinking to accept that significant achievement can, and should, occur well beyond mid-life, they may be able to strike a work-life balance with less dissonance and tension. Life is long, and we now know that parents who dial back their work hours when their children are younger can still ascend to the highest career heights. There is a lot of work life left, after all, when the nest empties and the college tuition bills roll in.

It’s a liberating notion, really, to think that you don’t have to accomplish everything in your life – or “have it all” – simultaneously; that leaning back during one life stage doesn’t preclude leaning in later. Along these same lines, any number of workplace experts and career gurus are urging women to think of their career not as a “ladder” but as a lattice, or a jungle gym: Horizontal moves are followed by upward ones, followed by horizontal ones, etc. It may take longer to get to the top, but it doesn’t mean you won’t reach it eventually.

(Photo: Janet Yellen smiles after being sworn in as Federal Reserve Chairman by Federal Reserve Board Governor Daniel Tarullo on February 3, 2014. By Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Legalization vs. citizenship is shaping up to be the central point of contention:

The debate over immigration illustrates how truly difficult it often is to strike a big deal in politics, especially in divided government. Winning enough support to get a bill passed on a hot button issue lies in finding not just a gray area but the best possible gray area. If the middle ground includes things that are too hard for both sides of the debate to swallow, there will be nobody left in the middle to support it.

The most contentious part of the immigration debate is the question of whether most undocumented immigrants should be allowed a special path to citizenship. The House GOP plan says no. The plan that passed the Senate says yes. The initial plan being forwarded by House Republican leadership endorses legal status but not a path to citizenship — except for those who were brought into the country illegally as children.

Right now, that appears a middle ground worthy of at least a closer look, in the eyes of many major players invested in the issue.

Sargent points out that talk of even limited legal status counts as progress for the GOP:

It’s dispiriting that Republicans have ruled out a path to citizenship. But it’s important to understand how much of a shift these principles nonetheless represent.

Less than two years ago, the de facto party-wide position — echoed by the 2012 GOP presidential nominee — was self deportation, i.e., doing everything possible to get them the hell out of here. Now the party’s operating principle is that they should all stay, provided certain conditions are met — a real change from pandering to GOP base nativists to stiff-arming them in a big way. As the New York Times puts it today: “From absolute denial to the brink of grudging acceptance is a big step away from neo-nativism.”

Ramesh prefer a more gradual approach to reform:

A better idea would have four parts: We’d increase enforcement of immigration laws at the border and in the workplace. We’d put people who were brought here illegally while they were minors but have otherwise obeyed the law on a path to full citizenship. We’d signal that amnesty for other illegal immigrants might be possible in the future once we’re sure that enforcement is working. And we’d reform our legal immigration policies to let in more high-wage workers.

That compromise still wouldn’t win over anyone who opposes amnesty in principle. But it would be fair to the children of illegal immigrants, and it would be good for assimilation. It would also accord with what the public seems to want as measured by polls.

Any sort of legalization elicits a “no way, José” from NRO:

For some reason, House Republicans have fastened on eventual citizenship as the key issue. It isn’t. What will matter most to the illegal population is getting legalized. The experience of the 1986 amnesty was that most formerly illegal immigrants didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to become citizens. And it is the legalization itself that will act as a magnet to new illegal immigrants. They will take notice that we eventually welcome anyone who manages to come here to live and work in defiance of our laws.

Kilgore suspects that any Republican-led immigration reform will be designed to fail:

In all the analysis of the GOP’s immigration stance, it’s pretty much been taken for granted that the “self-deportation” stance of Mitt Romney—perhaps his most popular policy stance for movement conservatives, and an important key to his nomination—has to be discarded. But all this insistence on ruling out any “special path” to citizenship, however limited and remote, and on “hard triggers” for legalization that are designed to be unreachable, thinly disguises a fundamental unwillingness to accept the presence of unauthorized immigrants and the hope they will all find life here miserable enough to eventually go home. Illegal border crossings have already slackened significantly. The number of deportations remain very high. So all the talk of “enforcement first” increasingly sounds like an excuse for avoiding or at least delaying legalization in any form.

A bill that grants legal status without citizenship would not be popular on the left, but Yglesias imagines that Obama would gladly go along with it:

I think it would be genuinely a bit nutty for the president to refuse to sign a bill along these lines were it to pass congress. Immigrants and their families want a path to citizenship, and Democrats want new citizens who can vote for them, but legal status alone would be a boon to both unauthorized migrants and the national economy. If the bill were on Obama’s desk, I just don’t see how he could avoid signing it. That said, we’ve time and again seen the political problems with pre-emptive compromise in this administration. The absolute best way to destroy conservative support for a legal status measure would be for the White House to embrace it.

After reading Masha Gessen’s Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, David Remnick asked its subjects for their take on Putin’s Russia:

“For Putin, the Olympic Games are an attempt to inflate the inflatable duck of a national idea, as he sees it,” [Nadezhda] Tolokonnikova told me. “In Russia today, there are no real politics, no real discussion of views, and meanwhile the government tries to substitute for this with hollow forms of a national idea—with the Church, with sports and the Olympics.”

“These Olympic Games are central to the meaning of his life—they are as important to him as anything he has done,” [Maria] Alekhina said. “For us, it is important from an entirely different point of view. People need to note the corruption involved in building Sochi for the Games; they should notice the demolitions of buildings.”

Tolokonnikova and Alekhina said they thought that Putin, despite managing to suppress the wave of anti-government protests that erupted in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia two years ago, is weaker than he seems to the outside world. Even though they are now traveling in Europe and the United States, they said that they had no intention of emigrating or backing off; they plan to remain in Russia and concentrate their efforts on human-rights issues, particularly the plight of prisoners in Russian jails and prison colonies.

Reviewing Masha’s book, Graeme Wood comes away with a newfound respect for Pussy Riot:

Tolokonnikova read out a long closing statement that Gessen quotes in full. Nothing we previously knew about Tolokonnikova can prepare us for that statement’s decency, wisdom, and sadness at how little Russia has learned from the still-living memory of Stalin. “It is the entire Russian state system that is on trial here, a system that, to its own detriment, is so enamored of quoting its own cruelty toward the human being, its own indifference toward his honor and integrity,” she said. “If the political system turns all its might against three girls who spent a mere thirty seconds performing in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, that means only that this political system is afraid of the truth.”

Read in tandem with Gessen’s Putin book, Words Will Break Cement would indeed seem to suggest that anti-Putinism is its own source of strength, and that oppression can prematurely impart wisdom to the young and ennoble the frivolous. Pussy Riot’s movement started silly but was forced to into a position of dignity and principle by its tremendously undignified and unprincipled opponent. Tolokonnikova’s speech — delivered, I am impressed to say, by a twenty-two-year-old — is a great deal more sophisticated than throwing cats at fry cooks, and it is sure to outlast any words uttered by the man who had hoped to render her silent.

Previous Dish on Pussy Riot here, here, and here.

(Photo: Pussy Riot – Denis Bochkarev, 2012. Via Wiki.)

Faiza Patel checks in on efforts to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons:

Finding a country willing to take the toxic chemicals turned out to be impossible; early candidates Norway and Albania backed out. The U.S. came forward with an innovative solution: priority chemicals would be destroyed at sea aboard an American vessel, the specially-outfitted Cape May, using mobile units developed by the American military.   Although there remain concerns about whether the units will work consistently on a ship at sea, the idea is not as outlandish as it might sound. The offshore approach has been taken before, albeit on a smaller scale: in the mid-2000s, Japan destroyed World War II-era bombs found at sea off the port of Kanda.

Here’s where the project has hit a snag.

In order to get the priority chemicals onto the Cape May, the Syrians first have to transport them to the northern port of Latakia.  The December 31, 2013 deadline for doing so has passed. Two batches of priority chemicals have been moved offshore. These reportedly comprise about 4% of Syria’s total 1300 ton stockpile. However, since we don’t know how much of the stockpile is priority chemicals, we cannot evaluate progress in moving the most toxic chemicals out of the country.  The OPCW has attributed the delays to security concerns, as well as logistical issues (although the recent remarks by the U.S. seem to point the finger at Syria). Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. According to the plan approved by the OPCW, priority chemicals must be destroyed—not just spirited out of Syria, but destroyed—by March 31, 2014.  And planners estimate that it will take approximately 45 to 60 days to complete the operation at sea.

The final deadline for destruction of all Syrian chemical weapons is June 30th. Hayes Brown looks ahead to it:

Should the delays continue past the June deadline … the OPCW will have a decision to make, one that may bring force back onto the table. Under the terms of the United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded Syria hand over its stockpile, Ban and the OPCW Executive Director are required to jointly report Syrian non-compliance to the Council. Should that occur, the resolution promises that the Council will “impose measures under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter.” This can range from the imposition of economic sanctions to the use of military force, neither of which permanent members China and Russia are in favor of. Given the wording of the resolution, though, should Syria be found in non-compliance, they may not have much of a choice.