Peru and Ecuador auctioning off indigenous land in Amazon to oil industry

Peru and Ecuador auctioning off indigenous land in Amazon to oil industry

By Darrin Mortenson / Alianza Arkana

Even as indigenous people struggle to cope with current levels of contamination and illness caused by years of oil production in the Amazon, the governments of Peru and Ecuador are preparing to sell off even more Amazonian territory to the oil industry in coming months.

Starting in November, Peru’s state-run leasing agency Petroperu plans to start auctioning licenses to 36 new oil blocks for exploration, 19 of them in the northern region of Loreto. Just across the border, Ecuador is set to lease at least 13 blocks on or near waterways that eventually flow south into Peru and join the Amazon River.

Many of the blocks overlap or abut protected areas and indigenous territories and threaten the forests and rivers that indigenous people and other river people depend on for their lives.

Indigenous groups are rallying to stop their governments’ plans, and some talk of making a stand for a total moratorium on all exploration until both countries come up with a regional environmental plan.

“Oil production is an activity that definitely alters our territory, our environment, our health and our culture,” said Alfonso Lopez Tejada, leader of the federation of 57 indigenous Kukama communities along the Maranon river region in Peru, where three new lots overlap Kukama communities and threaten the famous Pacaya Samiria National Reserve.

“Again they impose these lots on us just as they did not consult us when they leased our territories before,” Lopez said.

In Ecuador, indigenous groups are planning demonstrations and marches to protest the new round of concessions begin on November 28.

“We are defending our land. We won’t allow oil activity,” said Franco Viteri, president of a Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorean Amazon (Confeniae), according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

Ecuadorian indigenous leaders say they will make an appeal to the country’s Constitutional Court.

From Alianza Arkana

Activists in UK lock down in chimneys of gas-fired power plant

Activists in UK lock down in chimneys of gas-fired power plant

By Martin Wainwright / The Guardian

Around 20 climate change protesters have seriously disrupted operations at one of the UK’s new generation of gas-fired power stations at West Burton in Nottinghamshire.

Police have made five arrests but overnight eleven protesters from the campaign group No Dash for Gas successfully scaled the middle of the plant’s 91m (300ft) metal chimneys – the plant’s water cooling towers – and another six have occupied a second one which was not yet in use, securing themselves on ledges.

One of the group tweeted exuberantly with accompanying pictures: “Guess where we woke up this morning! Dawn sun shining on other chimney where friends are perched on the ledge.”

Speaking from the group’s makeshift but sophisticated camp slung on the central chimney shortly before 1pm, one of them said: “we are settling in nicely. At the moment some of us are setting up a solar panel and there’s a group fixing our portable loo. We’ve got a portable ledge lowered a short way down the flue with plenty of room for people to sleep on. EDF [the plant’s operator] have assured us that the chimney had been shut down but we’re still a but worried about gases being around. But the plan is to stay up here with some of us in the flue to stop the furnace starting again.”

Ben Healey of No Dash For Gas said that the middle of the plant’s three cooling towers had been working but had now shut down, with steam no longer pouring from its brim. He said: “There are nine activists up there and they have started abseiling down into the flue to prevent the furnaces being relit. That means we are in for the long haul.

“The six people on the other chimney, which is not yet fully built, have barricaded themselves in place and will be very difficult to dislodge.”

The protesters said they had spent a busy night climbing the chimney and hauling up their equipment and food supplies to last at least a week.

The plant’s owners and operators EDF confirmed that the middle tower had been closed down.

No Dash for Gas said that the action was aimed at stopping operations at the £600m power station that is one of a cluster of plants built around the site of the deserted medieval village of West Burton in the valley of the River Trent.

The group said: “West Burton power station is being targeted because it’s one of the first in a new generation of highly polluting gas plants planned for the UK. The coalition government recently announced that it intends to give the green light to as many as 20 new gas plants – a move that would crash Britain’s carbon targets, contribute to the climate crisis and push up bills.”

Nottinghamshire police said that access had been gained to the site by protesters at about 1.20am. A police spokesman said: “Around 10 are thought to have climbed the water towers and have secured themselves to restrict their removal. Searches are ongoing to find a number of other people who are also believed to have gained access to the site.”

Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/29/climate-activists-west-burton-gas

North Sea suffers 4,123 oil spills since 2000; only seven resulted in government fine

By Leo Hickman / The Guardian

Oil companies operating in the North Sea have been fined for oil spills on just seven occasions since 2000, even though 4,123 separate spills were recorded over the same period, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has confirmed.

The disclosure came as Decc said on Thursday that the government had offered a “record-breaking” 167 new licences to oil and gas companies seeking to drill in the North Sea. A further 61 “blocks”, or licences, are under environmental assessment.

Total fines resulting from prosecutions between 2000 and 2011 came to just £74,000 and no single oil company had to pay more than £20,000.

Two companies received fines of £20,000: BP, for causing 28 tonnes of diesel to spill into the sea in 2002 from the Forties Alpha platform, and, a year later, Total E&P, for causing six tonnes of diesel to enter the sea during a transfer between fuel tanks on the Alwyn North platform.

Information about the fines was released by Decc after a freedom of information request and further inquiries by the Guardian.

The smallest fines over this period were those imposed on two companies, Venture North Sea Oil and Knutsen OAS Shipping, of £2,000 each, after 20 tonnes of crude oil was spilt during a tanker transfer on the Kittiwake platform.

In total, 1,226 tonnes of oil were spilt into the North Sea between 2000 and 2011, according to Decc’s archives. Decc said there is no “volume threshold” determining whether a company will be prosecuted over a spill at sea, although a spill of less than five tonnes is unlikely to go to court.

A tonne of crude oil is broadly equivalent to seven barrels, or, more precisely, 1,136 litres.

Decc said its inspectors, all of whom have enforcement powers, judge each case separately to assess the circumstances and the seriousness of the alleged offence.

Slightly different arrangements exist in Scotland from those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, for pursuing a prosecution.

A Decc spokesman said: “The UK has one of the toughest and most successful oil and gas regimes in the world and we work closely with industry to ensure the highest standards of environmental protection are in place and enforced.

“There are a number of enforcement options available to Decc, with court action reserved for serious offences. On the rare occasions legal proceedings have been deemed necessary, it is for the court to decide the level of fines to hand down.”

Environmental campaigners said it was worrying that Decc viewed itself as operating the global gold standard of offshore regulation, especially as oil companies were now pressing for permission to drill in extreme and vulnerable environments such as the Arctic.

Vicky Wyatt, a Greenpeace campaigner, said: “Ministers and oil companies can spout all the carefully crafted quotes they like to tell us how safe drilling at sea is. But while they’re spouting these words, their rigs are all too often spouting oil into our oceans. The government should hit these companies who pollute the oceans in this way with meaningful fines.

“A few grand is not even a slap on the wrist for companies who pocket millions of pounds every hour.

“It’s both staggering and wrong that some of these companies are now also drilling in the fragile and pristine Arctic, where a similar oil leak would be catastrophic.”

Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/25/oil-companies-north-sea-spills

Utah government gives final approval to first US tar sands project

By Paul Foy / Associated Press

Utah gave its final approval Wednesday for the first commercial tar sands project in the U.S., handing a victory to a Canadian company that aims to start producing 2,000 barrels of oil next year in the start of what could grow into a larger operation.

The Utah Water Quality Board upheld the decision of state regulators and turned back an appeal from a Moab-based environmental group that vows to take up its fight in the state courts.

Living Rivers has fought the project every step of the way, arguing that tar sands mining will contaminate groundwater in a largely undeveloped area of Utah’s Book Cliffs region that drains into the Colorado River.

State regulators and the company insist the eastern Utah desert is so dry there is no significant groundwater to pollute. An administrative law judge agreed, sending a recommendation for approval to the Water Quality Board, which held hours of arguments before upholding a crucial state permit Wednesday by a vote of 9-2.

U.S. Oil Sands Inc. has said it was raising the money it needs to start digging after working since 2005 to obtain or defend its state approvals. Executives said they planned to produce oil from a 62-acre mountaintop pit starting in late 2013. The Calgary, Alberta-based company holds leases on 50 square miles of Utah trust lands sprinkled with gooey bitumen, a tar-like form of petroleum.

Read more from The San Francisco Chronicle:

Time is Short: Systems Disruption and Strategic Militancy

The industrial machine dismantling the planet is incredibly vast, made as it is of the activity of hundreds of millions—billions—of people. Chainsaws and feller-bunchers topple forests, dams and canals drain wetlands and kill rivers, excavators tear apart mountains, dragnets scrape the ocean(s) sterile, the prairies plowed and paved over, and everything everywhere poisoned as we erase the genetic code of nature.

As civilization pushes the planet towards complete biotic collapse—speeding at the murderous pace of two hundred species a day—resistance becomes a mandate. Having seen the depressing failure of traditional & legal courses of action at slowing, never mind stopping, this death march, we are left with militant underground resistance as our only real hope for success.

While such resistance has been gaining speed worldwide in recent decades, much of the underground action taken thus far in defense of earth (at least in industrialized countries) has not been aimed or designed to cripple or stop industrial civilization. Actions have largely been defensive and reactive, with strikes against targets that—while primary causes of ecocide—aren’t critical to the larger function of industrialism or civilization.

While the courage of anyone who puts themselves on the line, risking their life and freedom in defense life, is undeniable and praiseworthy, we need more than piecemeal resistance: we need to prevent the function of industrial civilization. We don’t need to strike at the most obvious targets; we need to disable the critical support systems, to crumble the foundation of industrial civilization.

Because for all its awful horror, and despite its gargantuan sprawl, it is incredibly fragile. It is dependent on several very brittle systems (specifically electricity and oil) to sustain itself on even a daily level. These systems underlie all other industrial activity, at one level or another, and without their undisrupted operation, nothing else could function.

By disrupting these systems, that machine of industrial civilization can be brought to a screeching (and with preservation, irreversible) halt. By striking at critical nodes within the systems that sustain and enable industrial civilization, a serious militant resistance movement could seriously disrupt these systems. With some coordination, it could collapse them entirely, leveling the foundation of the oppressive & murderous social structure itself.

This process of strategically selecting and attacking targets and coordinating strikes to sabotage entire global systems is known as ‘systems disruption’. The idea is to leverage the structure and dynamics of the system against itself; identifying and attacking structural weak points, nodes that are critical to functionality, specific bottlenecks in the industrial process without which the larger system cannot function. Striking at these points yields the maximum impact of any attack on a system, and by coordinating attacks to strike at multiple, interconnected and interdependent nodes, a small force can disrupt or disable entire industrial superstructures, such as a national electric grid or international oil extraction/transportation/refining/distribution system.

Done correctly, this process is similar to that of explosive demolition, wherein massive, multi-story buildings are brought tumbling down in several seconds by carefully placed explosives. The idea is not to blow the building to dust, which would not only require countless explosives, but would also endanger everything around it. Instead, by analyzing the construction and structure of the building, workers identify specific locations at which to place explosives, and carefully time the blasts to collapse the structure in on itself.

Continuing the metaphor, by strategically selecting appropriate nodes in the system, success can be achieved with the minimal resources necessary. Consider the amount of explosives necessary to blast apart a building entirely versus the amount needed to destroy key foundational supports. The same is true of dismantling the superstructure of civilization as compared to disabling the key support systems that prop it up: refined liquid fossil fuels for transportation and electricity to power industrial activity. By allowing a small force with limited resources to topple disproportionately large and complex systems through precise attacks, systems disruption is a perfect offensive doctrine for asymmetric forces, and must be part of any smart anti-civilization underground resistance.

Also, in the same way that a proper building demolition collapses the structure in on itself without damaging anything around it, by attacking properly selected nodes, an underground resistance could collapse civilization in on itself, minimizing damage done to the planet (and oppressed humans). Rather than a protracted bloody struggle of attrition (whose success would be dubious), coordinated and decisive systems disruption would effectively pull the plug.

The doctrine of systems disruption has been used around the world in countless conflicts for the very simple (and very compelling) reason that it is incredibly effective.

In the Niger Delta, militants from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta used effective systems disruption to cripple the oil industry. By coordinating strikes against specific pipelines, pumping stations, and oil platforms, the resisters in the Delta shut down 40 percent of oil output, and in one series of attacks, this margin was increased to 80 percent of production.

Using the same doctrine, resistance forces in Iraq limited oil production by 70 percent. By carefully selecting vulnerable and vitally important nodes within the oil infrastructure system, a small force has been able to disable a national oil production system.

It’s time earth defense movements adopted similar convictions of strategic rigor. The electrical and oil systems are not only crucial to the hourly function of civilization; they are incredibly vulnerable to systems disruption. Both of these systems are designed for efficiency, a design constraint that yields configurations that are ripe for coordinated disruption.

For example, one report estimated that a loss of only 10-20 electrical substations could shut down 60 percent of power distribution, potentially for weeks.

These systems are very inflexible, and if struck with the right force in the right place, they would cease to function entirely. Often, these systemic fulcrums aren’t the places or nodes we might expect. In general, these bottlenecks—whose disruption or disabling yields the maximum impact on the rest of the system—fall into one or more of several categories: they are highly connected or cluster-connection nodes; they are high-load nodes, meaning they experience a lot of traffic, relative to other nodes in the system; or are sources of systemic flow, such as a power plant.

In systems as complex as those that sustain industrial civilization, there won’t be a single keystone piece of infrastructure the disabling of which would collapse the whole system. Rather, there will be a number of such bottlenecks. Striking any of them would be beneficial, but coordinating decisive attacks against multiple such nodes will have an exponential effect, and can cause cascading failures within the system.

These sort of strategic attacks—those that coordinate strikes against weak points and manipulate system dynamics to turn small attacks into large events, disrupting and disabling key industrial systems—are what give those standing against planetary murder the best chance of success. All smart strategic planning starts from the basis of what people, resources, and time is available, and then formulates a strategy within those constraints.

As a movement, radical earth-defense doesn’t have the resources or the numbers of people necessary to engage in open battles with those in power, nor the time to wait for civilization to collapse on its own. By operating along principles of asymmetric struggle, and using coordinated attacks against bottlenecks, an underground resistance could destroy civilization’s ability to function. In no uncertain terms, a relatively small number of people, placing the charges in just the right spots, could bring down civilization, just like a ten-story office building.

Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org