Texas Pols Shocked To Learn Their Bill Let Gas Companies Off The Hook For Climate Change Preparedness

from the you're-not-helping dept

Having covered telecom for a long time, I've lost track of the times I've watched some befuddled lawmaker shocked by the content of their own bill. Usually, that's because they outsourced the writing of it to their primary campaign contributors, which in telecom is usually AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter. Sometimes they're so clueless to what their "own" bill includes they'll turn to lobbyists in the middle of a hearing to seek clarity. This is, of course, outright corruption. But we tend to laugh it off and normalize it, and the press generally refuses to accurately label it corruption.

There are endless parallels when it comes to the energy sector. Like this week, when Texas lawmakers were shocked to realize their recent state energy bill failed to require that Texas natural gas companies harden their infrastructure for climate change--despite the fact their own bill included giant loopholes to that effect.

In the wake of the disastrous and deadly climate-related crisis in Texas last winter, the state passed several bills purporting to fix the problem. Many, like Senate Bill 3, largely just punted the can down the road, urging for a mapping of Texas's existing energy infrastructure, and giving the Texas Railroad Commission 180 days to finalize its weatherization rules. None of the solutions, of course, challenged entrenched energy providers, or tackled the core of the problem in Texas: an almost mindless deference to wealthy local energy executives.

At a recent hearing in Texas, lawmakers blasted both the Texas Railroad Commission and local natural gas companies when they realized the latter had failed to weatherize their infrastructure with winter looming. The problem was that their own legislation provided the loopholes that made this possible:

"In a committee hearing Tuesday, Texas senators were furious that natural gas companies won’t have to better prepare their facilities for extreme weather before this winter and rebuked the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s massive oil and gas industry, for not fixing the problem sooner.

“Wait a minute,” state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, told Wei Wang, executive director of the Railroad Commission. “You haven’t done it yet?”

But the “loophole” that lawmakers spent the hearing condemning and the slow timetable for winterizing the state power grid were part of legislation they approved during the regular legislative session in the spring."

Basically the bill in question lets natural gas companies opt out of system hardening requirements if they simply don’t voluntarily declare themselves to be “critical infrastructure” with the state. This was all but certainly a provision included by the companies themselves and rubber stamped by the politicians paid to love them. More often than not, a politician's only understanding of their own bill comes from a .pdf provided by the companies that actually wrote the legislation (usually via some sort of proxy organization like ALEC to give it a thin veneer of faux legitimacy), resulting in obvious outcomes like this one.

Reports continue to illustrate the grotesque cronyism and corruption that resulted in countless deaths in Texas last winter. And of course it's not only a Texas problem. Our mindless tendency to throw billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors at industry giants while ignoring infrastructure needs in the face of climate change is a country-wide affair. And the wholesale corruption that makes all of this possible continues to be normalized in most press coverage as a growing array of terrible climate catastrophes bear down on a dysfunctional nation.

Filed Under: climate change, electrical grid, legislation, loophiles, texas, weatherizing

Washington Post Falsely Claims Russia Hacked Vermont Utility, Because OMG RUSSIANS!

from the show-your-math dept

When a mainstream press that isn't always good at what it does meets technology it doesn't understand, the end result is often frustrating, if not comedic. Hacking is certainly no exception, given it's a realm where perpetrators are difficult to identify, hard proof is often impossible to come by, and hackers worth their salt either leave false footprints -- or no footprints at all. Throw in a press that's incapable of identifying and avoiding its own nationalism, and often all-too-gullible to intelligence industry influence, and you've got a fairly solid recipe for dysfunction when it comes to hacking-related news coverage.

Some of the resulting coverage has been highly entertaining -- such as CNN using a screen shot from the popular game Fallout 4 in a story about hacking and hoping nobody would notice. Other examples have been decidedly more troubling, such as the Washington Post's epic face plant over the holiday break.

Last Saturday the Post ran a story claiming that Russia was responsible for the hacking of Burlington Electric, a Vermont utility. According to the original Washington Post story, government sources claimed that code "associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe" was detected at the utility. The story was stuffed to the gills with all manner of pearl-clutching and outrage among politicians convinced Putin was actively trying to bring down the grid:

“Vermonters and all Americans should be both alarmed and outraged that one of the world’s leading thugs, Vladimir Putin, has been attempting to hack our electric grid, which we rely upon to support our quality-of-life, economy, health, and safety,” Shumlin said in a statement. “This episode should highlight the urgent need for our federal government to vigorously pursue and put an end to this sort of Russian meddling."

Unsurprisingly, the story quickly gained traction in the media, with numerous reports pouring gasoline on the idea that Russia has escalated its cyber offensives to include targeting sensitive American infrastructure. Many broadly speculated that other utilities had been compromised and that we were at the brink of war.And while it's true that the power grid is vulnerable to hackers (increasingly so courtesy of the internet-of-not-so-smart things), it turns out that Putin had nothing to do with the particular "attack" on the Vermont utility. In fact, in a follow up story and corrections made to the original report, the Post ultimately had to acknowledge that the malware in question was only found on one laptop, had nothing to do with the Russian government, and was never actually in contact with the grid itself:

"An employee at Burlington Electric Department was checking his Yahoo email account Friday and triggered an alert indicating that his computer had connected to a suspicious IP address associated by authorities with the Russian hacking operation that infiltrated the Democratic Party. Officials told the company that traffic with this particular address is found elsewhere in the country and is not unique to Burlington Electric, suggesting the company wasn’t being targeted by the Russians. Indeed, officials say it is possible that the traffic is benign, since this particular IP address is not always connected to malicious activity."

That's obviously a pretty far cry from the hysteria bouncing around the news wires as the new year arrived. Thanks, again, to news outlets that are all too eager to take the breathless claims of a few anonymous officials as gospel without doing the heavy lifting required to first ensure the information is useful, or accurate. As it turns out, the Post hadn't even bothered to contact Burlington Electric, which was forced to issue its own statement to the Burlington Free Press clarifying what happened, and making it clear the laptop was never in contact with any electrical system.

All told, Burlington Electric had simply received a notification from Homeland Security sent to all utilities warning them to keep an eye out for particular malware. The company only found the malware and laptop in question after doing a scan off all of the company's systems. And as it turns out, the "Russian malware" in question could have simply been made by a Russian and purchased by anybody. Needless to say, the Washington Post then spent the lion's share of the next few days editing the story, changing the headline repeatedly, and walking back the story's claims.

But most of the stories regurgitating the Post's original claims were never updated or corrected.

Reporting on hacking isn't easy. Disinformation is everywhere, and many outlets continue to illustrate they're easily manipulated, thanks to a nationalism bias they're somehow still unaware of. But the Washington Post simply failed to do even the basics, inflaming notable tensions between two giant countries because it couldn't bother to pick up the phone. Yes, Russia hacks us (and uses propaganda against us and other countries) constantly. The United States does the same. Proof of either is often impossible to come by, but that still doesn't mean it's not required before jumping to conclusions.

As tensions rise facts matter more than ever, and sloppy reporting only fuels those quite intentionally looking to take these often-dangerous and idiotic cyber-offensive policies to an entirely new level.

Filed Under: electrical grid, hacking, journalism, russia, russians, technology, vermont
Companies: burlington electric, washington post

DailyDirt: Better (Bigger) Batteries

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Battery technology is getting better all the time, but unfortunately not quite at the same pace as Moore's law. While some folks lament the bottleneck of pocket-sized batteries that limit the operation of a phone or laptop to just a few hours (or a couple days on standby), some bigger batteries out there are limiting the growth of renewable energy use. Here are just a few battery projects that could solve some larger scale energy problems.

• One of the world's largest lithium manganese batteries will be tested in the UK. This 6 megawatt battery installation should be ready to produce electricity in 2016, and it'll help make renewable energy more compatible with conventional electricity infrastructure. [url]
• IBM has been working on lithium-air batteries for its Battery 500 project that aims to make an electric car battery capable of driving 500 miles. However, the researchers predict that we won't see a commercial battery based on this technology until after 2020. [url]
• Grid scale batteries are already in use, but newer battery technologies could make it much more economical to use renewable energy sources in existing power stations. Still, it will be a few more years before these new battery designs prove their safety and reliability. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: battery, battery 500 project, electrical grid, energy, energy storage, infrastructure, renewable energy
Companies: ibm