The pilot of an Alitalia pilot flying into New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport told controllers Monday afternoon that he had spotted “a drone aircraft” 1,500 feet high in the sky and approximately 5 miles west of the airport.
In a statement sent to CNN, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown says the pilot reported seeing “a small, unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft while on final approach to Runway 31 Right.” The news network says that “puts the aircraft somewhere over Brooklyn.”
Who was controlling the drone — if that is indeed what the pilot saw — isn’t yet known.
“Unmanned aerial systems, sometimes called drones, and other remote-controlled planes could pose a risk to larger passenger aircraft if they collided or were sucked into an engine.
“For recreational hobbyists, flying remote-controlled planes is only allowed by the FAA up to 400 feet in the air, and within sight of the operator. If they are going to fly within three miles of an airport, they have to let air traffic controllers know.
“Flying unmanned aerial vehicles is illegal for most business purposes; however, governments and public entities such as police departments can apply for permission to operate them.”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Ernest Moniz is introduced by President Obama as the nominee to run the Energy Department, Monday at the White House. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
With President Obama naming Ernest Moniz to be the nation’s next energy secretary, he continued a relatively recent trend of putting scientists atop a part of the federal bureaucracy once overseen by political types.
If confirmed by the Senate, Moniz, an MIT physicist, will follow Nobel laureate Steven Chu, a University of California physicist who served as Obama’s first-term energy secretary.
And Chu came after President George W. Bush appointee Samuel Bodman, who was no slacker in the field of science either. He held a doctorate in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also taught as an associate professor.
All right, it might be a stretch to include Bodman, since by the time Bush named him to the Energy Department post, he had long before traded academia for big gigs in corporate America. Still, he did have that engineering doctorate.
It might seem like a no-brainer to have an individual with a strong science background at the helm of a federal department that oversees a lot of complex science projects, like maintaining the nation’s nuclear weapons labs and researching new energy technologies.
But Washington isn’t a city that necessarily does no-brainers well.
Which helps explain the heavy dose of political figures — a former senator (under President George W. Bush); a former governor (under President Reagan); a former House member (under President Clinton); a former big city mayor (also under Clinton) — who dominate a list of previous energy secretaries, a list that also includes lawyers, businessmen and a retired admiral.
Obama has clearly broken away from the pattern by naming two highly regarded scientists to lead a department that in the past has had a reputation for dysfunction. And some might be inclined to give George W. Bush credit for, at the very least, naming a secretary with a STEM doctorate.
Of course, Obama’s choices at Energy can be read as something of a rebuke to that same Bush, whose officials were known to question scientific consensus, such as humans contributing to climate change. Obama has repeatedly promised to “restore science to its rightful place.”
If it’s a trend, it may be too soon to know if it will take hold.
When I asked Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, how we got from Hazel O’Leary (an energy secretary under President Clinton) and Spencer Abraham (who served Under President George W. Bush) to Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz, he told me:
“It’s a trend that’s well worth replicating elsewhere. … We do pay attention to it in places like the CDC and other scientifically oriented agencies. but it would be nice if the first thing you asked as a president, or as a candidate was, ‘Can they do the job and do they know anything about it?’
“That’s actually a good thing. We like politicals. For whatever reason, Energy is breaking out of it. That’s terrific. It sets a higher bar and maybe we’ll get that in other key posts. It is an interesting trend, I’ll give you that one.”
People wait in a security line at John F. Kennedy Airport on February 28, 2013 in New York City. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the across-the-board spending cuts that went into effect on Friday are already causing headaches at the nation’s airports.
“Now that we are having to reduce or eliminate basically overtime both for TSA and for customs, now that we have instituted a hiring freeze… we will begin today sending out furlough notices,” Napolitano said, according to Politico.
Lines at some Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, Napolitano added at the event sponsored by Politico, are already “150 to 200 percent as long as we would normally expect.”
On the weekend shows, the Obama administration was hammered for what some said was their exaggeration of the effects of the sequester.
Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, was a chief critic.
“There’s easy ways to cut this money that the American people will never feel … not cutting spending is going to be disastrous for our country,” Coburn told Fox News Sunday.
We reached out to the TSA asking for details of the delays Napolitano was talking about.
They sent us a broad statement saying that security lines at airports will worsen as sequestration takes hold, causing the government to cut overtime and put off filling vacant positions.
The statement went on:
“While wait times can vary on a number of factors, due to the reductions mandated by sequestration, TSA will put in place a hiring freeze, which will result in up to an additional 1,000 TSO vacancies by Memorial Day Weekend and up to 2,600 vacancies by the end of the fiscal year. With TSA staffing levels decreasing over time, we expect that during busy travel periods wait times exceeding 30-40 minutes could double at nearly all of the largest airports. In addition, passengers who schedule their travel outside of peak flight schedules and plan to arrive close to their scheduled flight time may see their wait times now reach 30 minutes or more.”
TSA’s hiring freeze is expected to go into effect in April.
Update at 2:30 p.m. ET. Long Lines In Salt Lake City:
Fox 13 in Salt Lake City reports that 12 TSA employees who were working overtime at the Salt Lake City International Airport were sent home, today, causing longer lines.
“In one terminal, travelers waited in a line that stretched from the second-floor checkpoint, down the escalator and to the first floor,” Fox 13 reports.
It was never supposed to happen, but now it has. With President Obama’s signing of the order to commence the sequester spending cuts of $85 billion from this fiscal year’s federal budget, what was once unthinkable is now hard reality.
The indiscriminate, across-the-board spending cuts to the Defense Department and domestic programs were supposed to be so odious and harebrained that, of course, the president and Congress would agree on a more reasonable path to deficit reduction.
In this, the parties obviously underestimated just how dysfunctional Washington is.
Unfortunately, the use of the sequester appears to have been a major miscalculation. Certainly, this hasn’t played out how the president would have preferred.
Obama had counted on Republicans to be as protective of military spending as Democrats are of federal spending on the rest of government.
But Republicans, who initially seemed unwilling to allow the defense cuts, gradually warmed to the idea that the sequester would, at the very least, get them $1.2 trillion in overall federal spending cuts over 10 years that they might not otherwise see.
This was especially powerful for Republicans who have felt burned in the past by the history of Washington deficit-reduction deals, which raised taxes but failed to produce the agreed-on spending reductions.
In the end, Obama and other Democrats had less leverage than Republicans because of a fundamental asymmetry: Large federal spending cuts alarmed Democrats; Republicans, not so much.
And that was true not only because the GOP would get spending cuts that conform to its smaller government/lower tax identity. Republicans also gambled that they wouldn’t face a massive public backlash from the sequester.
Most Americans would barely notice, if at all, much of the reduced federal spending, the GOP has calculated. They may be right. As David Dayen wrote in a piece for the Pacific Standard, there are a number of reasons to believe that the impact of the sequester cuts will seem muted, if even noticed, by most Americans.
Given how much the Obama administration warned of the potential disruptions to federal and private-sector workers, as well as programs reliant on federal money, in the run-up to the sequester, it would be surprising if the White House failed to highlight in coming days actual sequester horror stories.
If anything seems safe to say at this point, it’s that it will be a long time before another president agrees to a budget sequester on autopilot as a way to force Democrats and Republicans to compromise.
Now that the sequester has happened, attention shifts to the next key battle in Washington’s ongoing, partisan fiscal war. At the end of March, Democrats and Republicans must agree on how to continue funding the overall government if it’s not to shut down.
Unlike the sequester, a government shutdown would likely be much more disruptive and noticeable to the average American — and politically damaging, especially to Republicans.
So the talk on both sides now is that a shutdown is out of the question. Which sounds a lot like what they once said about the sequester.
Calling them “three outstanding individuals” who will help him tackle some tough problems, President Obama on Monday morning nominated:
— Gina McCarthy, currently an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, to lead that agency. She would succeed the departed Lisa Jackson.
— Ernest Moniz to be the next secretary of energy, replacing Steven Chu, who like Jackson decided not to stay for Obama’s second term. Moniz is director of MIT’s Energy Initiative and is a former undersecretary at the department.
— Sylvia Matthews Burwell, to head the Office of Management and Budget. She is president of the Walmart Foundation and served as deputy director at OMB in the late 1990s. She would replace Acting OMB Director Jeffrey Zients.
“The new EPA Administrator could be the biggest lightning rod, given that agency’s high profile in administration efforts to combat climate change. While the president has said he would prefer to attack greenhouse gases through legislation, the odds of passing a bill appear slim. A comprehensive climate bill failed in 2010, even though Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress.”
Demonstrators carry a mock pipeline as they pass the White House to protest the Keystone Pipeline, in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2012. Rod Lamkey Jr. /The Washington Times /Landov
Environmentalists have a hope.
If they can block the Keystone XL pipeline, they can keep Canada from developing more of its dirty tar sands oil. It takes a lot of energy to get it out of the ground and turn it into gasoline, so it has a bigger greenhouse gas footprint than conventional oil.
But the State Department report, which was released Friday, says Keystone won’t have much of an impact on the development of that oil from Alberta.
Industry analyst Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners says the report’s finding will make it easier for the Obama administration to say the project wouldn’t affect climate change.
“The State Department said, ‘We agree with industry.’ They’re saying this oil would have gone to market anyway,” Book says. “The facts are the oil in the ground in Canada isn’t going to stay there if there’s a buyer. And there is a buyer. The buyer’s here in the U.S., right now, and the oil is coming here by train, by truck and in some cases by barge.”
It’s also already flowing to the U.S. through existing pipelines.
Industry experts do say in the short-term, Keystone could get oil flowing faster.
Canadian investment researcher Chris Damas says the industry wants to increase production dramatically. And it’s hard to see how trains could keep up, especially since there’s already a big backlog for new tanker cars.
“Unless you can find a pipeline that can cross the border without presidential approval, I think that the Canadians … and I’m a proud Canadian, we have a problem,” Damas says. “We have landlocked oil, so there’s no easy fix to this problem.”
Already, transportation constraints have driven down the price of Canadian oil.
Damas says, if that continues, producing this oil just won’t be profitable any more.
“If the price goes too low, these projects will slow down,” he says.
Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, says he fears the State Department’s analysis will push the Obama administration to approve the project.
“This makes the president’s job to follow through on his commitment to be tough on climate change, it makes that job much more difficult,” Brune says.
Of course, the impact on climate isn’t the only thing the Obama administration will consider. While the pipeline is being built, it will support 42,000 jobs bringing $2 billion in wages.
But Brune says it’s not over yet.
“We are going to fight,” he says. “We will use all of the resources that the Sierra Club has to offer. Our law department, our organizers, our lobbyists, the 2.1 million members and supporters across the country, 170 groups who joined together at the climate rally in Washington, D.C., to make sure that the pipeline is rejected and that we go all-in on clean energy instead.”
Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at the University of California, Davis, says the only way to keep the oil from Canada under the ground is to change the way we live.
“Really, truly, it’s a lifestyle issue. We use 18 to 19 million barrels a day of oil in this country,” Jaffe says.
That’s more than 20 percent of oil consumed in the whole world.
“We’re only 5 percent of the population,” Jaffe says. “And we need to look in the mirror.”
Jaffe says once we reduce our consumption, we can have the luxury of rejecting Canada’s oil.
