Egypt gas pipeline blown up again: state media

By Agence France-Presse

Masked gunmen on Friday blew up a gas pipeline which supplies Egyptian gas to Israel, the official MENA news agency reported, in the eighth such attack this year.

The saboteurs planted explosives under the pipeline, around 60 kilometres (40 miles) west of the town of El-Arish in the north of the Sinai peninsula, before fleeing, witnesses said.

No one was injured and, due to maintenance operations at the time of the blast following recent attacks, there was no gas in the pipeline, MENA reported.

The pipeline, which carries gas through the Sinai and on to Jordan and Israel, has already been attacked seven times this year, the first during the mass uprisings that drove president Hosni Mubarak from power in February.

The last attack was carried out two weeks ago, when two explosions struck the same section of the pipeline. The army was deployed in the region since the blasts.

Gas deliveries to Israel, agreed under Mubarak, have come under heavy criticism in Egypt.

Israel generates 40 percent of its electricity using natural gas, and Egypt provides 43 percent of its gas supplies.

Egyptian authorities have on several occasions announced measures to step up protection of the pipeline and try to arrest those behind the attacks.

Egyptian gas also covers 80 percent of Jordan’s electricity production demand — 6.8 million cubic metres a day.

Egypt’s Sinai region is particularly security sensitive due to tensions with the Bedouin community living there.

Many goods are smuggled to the Palestinian enclave of Gaza through the Sinai, which the Israelis also charge is a rear base for militant attacks against its territory.

 

 

 

From The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/25/egypt-gas-pipeline-blown-up-again-state-media/

Do indigenous peoples benefit from ‘development’?

by Stephen Corry

What’s “development” for? That may be straightforward to people who don’t have water or food, or sewerage in urban areas (faecal contamination is the biggest, easily preventable, manmade killer). But, although millions still lack such basics, they form only a tiny part of what passes for development these days. The duplicity of politics and business ensures much else – arms, for example – is shoehorned into the same category.

What should development mean for those who are largely self-sufficient, getting their own food and building their dwellings where the water is still clean – like many of the world’s 150 million tribal people? Has development got anything helpful for them, or has it simply got it in for them?

It’s easy to see where it has led. Leaving aside the millions who succumbed to the colonial invasion, in some of the world’s most “developed” countries (Australia, Canada and the US) development has turned most of the survivors into dispossessed paupers. Take any measure of what it ought to mean: high income, longevity, employment, health; low rates of addiction, suicide, imprisonment and domestic violence, and you find that indigenous people in the US, Canada and Australia are by far the worst off on every count – but no one seems to heed the lesson.

These are the consequences of a dispossession more total in North America and Australia than almost anywhere on Earth. The colonists were determined to steal tribal lands, and unquestioning about their own superiority. They espoused politico-economic models in which workers produced for distant markets, and had to pay for the privilege. The natives, using no money, paying no taxes, contributing little to the marketplace until forced to, were “backward”. At best, they were to be integrated to serve colonist society.

Colonialism set out to take away their self-sufficiency, on their own territory, and lead them to glorious productivity, as menials, on someone else’s. There’s little point in calling for retroactive apologies for this because it’s not confined to the past: most development schemes foisted on tribal peoples today point in exactly the same direction.

Two of its main themes are housing and education. Traditional housing has many benefits – not least the fact that it’s free – but development decrees it must be replaced by modern dwellings. In West Papua, the tribespeople put their pigs in the new houses and live in the old. Rwanda recently outlawed thatch altogether; everyone must use metal sheets, by law.

So what about modern education? In Australia, mixed-race children were forced into distant boarding schools to “breed out” their “Aboriginalness” and turn them into an underclass. From frozen Siberia to sunlit Botswana, boarding schools remain a main plank in integrationist policies, which destroy more than educate. It’s no hidden conspiracy: it’s openly designed to be about turning people into workers, scornful of their own tribal heritage.

Many indigenous people have observed that even the modern medical attention they might receive from the wealthiest governments doesn’t begin to solve the illnesses the same government’s policies have inflicted on them. It isn’t “backwardness” that makes many tribal peoples reject development projects, it’s rational anxiety about the future.

As for largescale infrastructure development – dams and mines, even irrigation – its real effect on the ground is invariably to enrich the elites while impoverishing the locals.

So is it possible to offer tribal peoples any truly beneficial development? Yes, if we accept their right to reject what we, with our “advanced” wisdom, can give; we have to stop thinking them childish when they make decisions we wouldn’t. Everyone wants control over their future, and not everyone wants the same things out of life, but such truisms are hardly ever applied.

Development, at least for most tribal peoples, isn’t really about lifting people out of poverty, it’s about masking the takeover of their territories. The deception works because the conviction “we know best” is more deeply ingrained even than it was a generation ago; Victorian-era levels of narrow-mindedness are returning. As a Botswana Bushman told me: “First they make us destitute by taking away our land, our hunting and our way of life. Then they say we are nothing because we are destitute.”

In a 21st century of expensive water, food, housing, education, healthcare and power, self-sufficiency has its attraction. It may not boost GDP figures, but there are many tribal peoples in the world who live longer and healthier lives than millions in nearby slums. Who’s to say they’ve made a bad choice?

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/indigenous-peoples-benefit-development-tribal

Power lines a major risk for migratory birds

By Pierre-Henry Deshayes

When flamingos, storks, pelicans and other migratory birds undertake their long seasonal flights, they risk their lives winging their way through the endless power grids that cover the world.

There are some 70 million kilometres (43 million miles) of power lines on the planet. In Africa and Eurasia alone, tens of millions of birds die each year in collisions and hundreds of thousands of others are electrocuted, a study published at this week’s Convention on Migratory Species in Bergen, Norway showed.

Alongside hunting, “collision and electrocution are among the most important human-related causes for bird mortality,” Dutch ornithologist Hein Prinsen, the rapporteur of the study, told AFP.

Migratory birds have in many cases already seen their habitats destroyed by mankind and global warming. These accidents are pushing their numbers down further, and in some places even putting birds at risk of becoming locally extinct.

Each death is a heavy blow for the bigger species who have relatively slow reproduction patterns. For cranes and storks, the death of an adult bird can lead to the death of its young, who depend on their two parents for survival.

“Today, Eastern Europe is a hot spot for problems, for great bustards and birds of prey for example,” said John O’Sullivan, a former member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

A man mounts a stop for birds on a power grid in this undated picture taken in Germany. In Africa and Eurasia alone, tens of millions of birds die each year in collisions and hundreds of thousands of others are electrocuted, a study published in November 2011 at Convention on Migratory Species in Bergen showed.

“But the worst situation may well be soon to be found in India and Africa where vast amounts of power lines are being built and where there are very large populations of birds,” he added.

In South Africa, 12 percent of blue cranes — the national bird — die each year in collisions with electricity wires.

Collisions are more likely to occur in areas where birds congregate, such as near their watering holes and in flight corridors, while electrocutions are more common in areas with little vegetation where there are few natural places for the birds to perch.

“There’s definitely a high cost for society in the form of power cuts which generate costs for the industry and all kinds of costs such as accidents” caused by blackouts, O’Sullivan said.

“So from a financial point of view it completely makes sense to solve this problem,” he said.

Such accidents can have unexpected consequences.

“Especially in dry areas in the US and Eastern Europe, it has happened that the bird which gets burnt falls down in flames and starts a wild fire,” Prinsen explained.

In order to prevent accidents, the authors of the study listed a series of steps that can be taken.

The most obvious is to have electricity cables buried underground, a solution already in place in parts of the Netherlands, Britain and Denmark though it is the costliest of remedies.

Given the current economic crisis, other simpler solutions that have been proven to work include making the cables more visible with markers, equipping the poles with perches, or reinforcing the wires’ insulation to prevent electrocutions.

The study showed that such modifications to Hungary’s 46,000 kilometers (28,580 miles) of electricity cables would cost around 220 million euros ($291 million), 10 times less than the cost of burying the wires underground.

 

From Physorg: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-power-lines-major-migratory-birds.html

U.N. Food And Agriculture Organization Warns 25 Percent Of Land Highly Degraded

ROME — The United Nations has completed the first-ever global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources, finding in a report Monday that a quarter of all land is highly degraded and warning the trend must be reversed if the world’s growing population is to be fed.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that farmers will have to produce 70 percent more food by 2050 to meet the needs of the world’s expected 9 billion-strong population. That amounts to 1 billion tons more wheat, rice and other cereals and 200 million more tons of beef and other livestock.

But as it is, most available land is already being farmed, and in ways that often decrease its productivity through practices that lead to soil erosion and wasting of water.

That means that to meet the world’s future food needs, a major “sustainable intensification” of agricultural productivity on existing farmland will be necessary, the FAO said in “State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture.”

FAO’s director-general Jacques Diouf said increased competition over land for growing biofuels, coupled with climate change and poor farming practices, had left key food-producing systems at risk of being unable to meet human needs in 2050.

“The consequences in terms of hunger and poverty are unacceptable,” he told reporters at FAO’s Rome headquarters. “Remedial actions need to be taken now. We simply cannot continue on a course of business as usual.”

The report was released Monday, as delegates from around the world meet in Durban, South Africa, for a two-week U.N. climate change conference aimed at breaking the deadlock on how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

The report found that climate change coupled with poor farming practices had contributed to a decrease in productivity of the world’s farmland following the boon years of the Green Revolution, when crop yields soared thanks to new technologies, pesticides and the introduction of high-yield crops.

Thanks to the Green Revolution, the world’s cropland grew by just 12 percent between 1961 and 2009, but food productivity increased by 150 percent.

But the U.N. report found that rates of growth have been slowing down in many areas and today are only half of what they were at the peak of the Green Revolution.

It found that 25 percent of the world’s land is now “highly degraded,” with soil erosion, water degradation and biodiversity loss. Another 8 percent is moderately degraded, while 36 percent is stable or slightly degraded and 10 percent is ranked as “improving.”

The rest of the Earth’s surface is either bare or covered by inland water bodies.

Some examples of areas at risk: Western Europe, where highly intensive agriculture has led to pollution of soil and aquifers and a resulting loss of biodiversity; In the highlands of the Himalayas, the Andes, the Ethiopian plateau and southern Africa, soil erosion has been coupled with an increased intensity of floods; In southeast and eastern Asia’s rice-based food systems, land has been abandoned thanks in part to a loss of the cultural value of it.

The report found that water around the world is becoming ever more scarce and salinated, while groundwater is becoming more polluted by agricultural runoff and other toxins.

In order to meet the world’s water needs in 2050, more efficient irrigation will be necessary since currently most irrigation systems perform well below their capacity, FAO said.

The agency called for new farming practices like integrated irrigation and fish-farm systems to meet those demands, as well as overall investment in agricultural development.

The price tag deemed necessary for investments through 2050: $1 trillion in irrigation water management alone for developing countries, with another $160 billion for soil conservation and flood control.

From the Huffington Post

How fracking affects a community in Pennsylvania

As controversial drilling for shale gas continues in Lancashire, Peter Marshall travels to the United States to see first hand how life has changed for people who have spent years living with fracking.

Bradford County, Pennsylvania, is one of the most fracked places on the planet.

Its gas-rush, which began in earnest in 2008, has seen around 600 wells drilled deep into the Marcellus Shale.

The county seat is the town of Towanda. If you want to know what a gas-rush does to an area there is no better place to look for answers.

First impressions? It is busy. It seems every other truck is carrying water or sand to serve the fracking industry.

Hair falling out

Locals complain their predominantly rural life style has been industrialised by the gas industry. Some call it an occupation. Regulars chatting at a local club accept it has brought jobs – but at a price.

I asked one woman: “What’s fracking doing to this community?”

“Raping it,” was her stark reply. “Tearing our roads apart – not to mention what it’s doing to the countryside. Have you seen it?”

I had. Huge clearings cut through hillside forests to allow for pipelines – well pads dotted around the landscape. And traffic. So much traffic.

Down in the village of Dimock, I met Bill Ely whose party piece is setting fire to his water supply. He said it has been contaminated with methane ever since he leased his land to a drilling company.

They now truck in his drinking water – but deny their operations have caused the contamination. They say there is a history of naturally occurring methane in the area.

Hair dresser Crystal Stroud claimed that within days of drilling starting near her home her hair started falling out and she became seriously ill.

Tests showed her water was contaminated with barium, but a department of environmental protection investigation decided drilling was not to blame and that the contamination was pre-existing.

‘Christmas every day’

Like others whose wells have become undrinkable she believes it is too much of a coincidence.

The industry said opponents are a vocal minority, and it is true that fracking has created fortunes.

“It’s like Christmas every day,” said hotelier Gregg Murrelle. His hotels became so busy with gas workers that he had to build a new one.

It is block-booked for two years by a single company.

The county has the lowest unemployment rate in Pennsylvania. Even jewellers are making money by creating diamond encrusted derricks.

It brings jobs and money and to some extent it has recession-proofed the economy.

It could do the same in Lancashire where latest forecasts are that anything between 200 and 800 wells could be drilled in the next two decades.

But it will not do it without changing the face of areas that are affected.

Advice from the good folk of Pennsylvania is split. Some said do not do it. Others said welcome it with open arms.

One thing they all agree on, life after drilling will not be the same as life before it.

From BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-15919248