TV News LIES

The incident in Mayflower, 25 miles north of Little Rock, pales in comparison to the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, when hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude spilled from an Exxon oil tanker into Alaskan waters. It's too early to estimate the financial cost from Mayflower to Exxon, but it is likely to be a drop in the bucket for the $400 billion company.

But the spill has stoked a national debate about the safety of carrying crude in pipelines across the United States just as politicians weigh whether to approve the mega Keystone XL pipeline that will help to link the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, with oil refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

And although significant pipeline spills happen every three days on average in the United States, according to federal data, rarely do they occur in a town and rarely in these volumes.

So far, most of the fight over fracking in California has played out in Sacramento, with legislators introducing bills to study hydraulic fracturing or stop it cold.

But some environmentalists have also taken the fight to court. And on Sunday, they scored a victory. A judge ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management did not take a “hard look” at fracking’s possible dangers before selling leases to drillers hunting for oil in California’s vast Montery Shale formation.

When I see raw tar sands coursing through people's yards and across wetlands, it makes me sick. My thoughts are with the people in Arkansas who are dealing with this river of toxic mess. And my thoughts instantly move ahead to what could happen to farms, families, homes, and wild areas across our country if we support expansion of tar sands with permits for pipelines such as Keystone XL.

The answer seems clear, especially when we look at the graphic video footage from Arkansas: tar sands expansion rewards the oil industry while putting us all at risk of oil spills and climate change. That's a raw deal by any calculation.

UPDATE: Correction: We originally reported that Exxon had allegedly pumped diluted bitumen which spilled into the Northwood Subdivision into a nearby wetland. We were mistaken; they power washed it into the nearby wetland via storm drains.

Mayflower, AR, April 5: We spent most of the day chasing down reports of oil sightings and talking to residents.

Current U.S. energy policy is, in fact, a hodgepodge of disconnected policies designed for specific constituencies with no coherent goal. The country has subsidies for fossil fuels, subsidies for nuclear power, subsidies for wind and solar, and subsidies for insulating and retrofitting buildings. We also have energy standards for some appliances and miles per gallon standards for automobiles.

What never gets asked and answered definitively in the policy debate is this: What should our ultimate goal be and when should we aim to achieve it? The first part of the question has elicited so many answers from so many constituencies that I may not be able to represent them all here. But here is an attempt to categorize the main lines of thinking concerning the country’s energy goals:

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Water contaminated with radioactive material that leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan may have seeped into groundwater, officials said Saturday.

Tokyo Electric Power Co., the plant's operator, said 120 tons of water leaked early Saturday as workers transferred it from a leaking tank to another one, The Asahi Shimbun reported. Company officials said none of the tainted water has gotten into the ocean.

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