by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 27, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Claudia Adrien / University of Florida
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill temporarily worsened existing manmade problems in Louisiana’s salt marshes such as erosion, but there may be cause for optimism, according to a new study.
A study appearing online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the 2010 spill killed off salt marsh plants 15 to 30 feet from the shoreline and this plant die off resulted in a more-than-doubled rate of erosion along the marsh edge and subsequent permanent marsh habitat loss. Vegetation farther from shore was relatively untouched by the incoming oil.
“Louisiana is already losing about a football field worth of wetlands every hour, and that was before the spill,” said Brian Silliman, a University of Florida biologist and lead author of the study. “When grasses die from heavy oiling, their roots, that hold the marsh sediment together, also often die. By killing grasses on the marsh shoreline, the spill pushed erosion rates on the marsh edge to more than double what they were before. Because Louisiana was already experiencing significant erosive marsh loss due to the channelization of the Mississippi, this is a big example of how multiple human stressors can have additive effects.”
Marshes are the life’s blood of coastal Louisiana because they act as critical nurseries for the shrimp, oysters and fish produced in these waters while helping to sequester significant amounts of carbon. They also protect coastlines from flooding and guard estuarine waters from nutrient pollution.
But the marshes have been suffering for decades as a result of the channelization of the Mississippi River, which has starved them from needed sediments to deter erosion.
Then came the oil spill.
Researchers observed minimal oil on the surfaces of grasses located more than 45 feet from the shoreline, indicating that significant amounts of oil did not move into interior marshes.
Instead, the researchers found that the tall grasses along the marsh edge acted as wall-like trap to incoming oil slicks, concentrating oil on the marsh edge. This concentration of oil on the shoreline protected interior marshes from oiling but worsened already extreme erosion on the shoreline. As oiled plants died, their roots that hold tight to the sediment perished as well. Already eroding sediment was now exposed to wave action without the effect of the gripping plant roots.
The result: elevated erosion rates for 1.5 years that averaged more than 10 feet of shoreline loss per year — double the natural rate for this area.
The encouraging results, Silliman said, included significant declines in the oil concentration on the marsh surface over 1.5 years and that unaffected, healthy marsh plants in the marsh interior quickly grew back into marsh die-off areas that had not yet been lost due to heightened erosion.
When the new marsh plant growth grew into the erosive edge of the marsh, Silliman said, the recolonization of the area by the gripping plant roots shut down the oil-elevated erosion rates and returned them to those seen at marsh sites where oil coverage did not occur.
The researchers also found that polyaromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, a carcinogenic byproduct of oil, was 100 percent greater at the Barateria Bay testing site than in reference marshes. This finding provides chemical evidence to support their visual observations that marshes in the affected areas were laden with oil while those in reference areas did not receive significant oiling.
By adding Biochar, a charcoal-based substance, to marshlands, Silliman’s team is also using new bioremediation tactics to try to break down PAHs into organic material. If this method is successful, he said, it could be used to supplement naturally occurring microbes in the marsh mud that already oxidize the oil carcinogen. The team is soon to publish those findings.
“This is a new idea applied toward cleaning up PAHs,” said UF chemistry professor Andrew R. Zimmerman, a co-author on the paper. “It’s possible there’s a bunch lurking at the bottom of the bay.”
From University of Florida News
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 26, 2012 | Human Supremacy, Movement Building & Support, Worker Solidarity
By Stephanie McMillan
Global capitalism is killing the planet. It is turning the living world into dead commodities by exploiting the many for the profit of a few.
Ecocide is the most urgent and immediate problem we face. If we don’t solve it, nothing else will matter. Economic troubles (not to mention our personal issues) will seem trivial. The ability of the planet to sustain life of any kind is becoming increasingly threatened.
It may already be too late to avoid runaway global warming; and it’s certainly too late to avoid radioactive rain, shrimp without eyes in the Gulf of Mexico, and tap water that can be lit on fire. It’s too late to save 78 percent of the world’s old-growth forests or bring back the 200 species of plants and animals that went extinct today. The situation is extremely dire.
But we can’t give up – not without a fight. Precisely as the economic and ecological crises converge, the possibility of liberation and social transformation also opens up. But only if we organize to make that happen.
Ecocide is accelerating because of capitalism’s constant need to expand into new areas. Capitalists have entered a period of extreme extraction, even in areas that were previously off-limits geographically and politically. They’re now ripping up North America as wantonly as they’ve already wrecked other parts of the world, with fracking, oil from tar sands and deep-sea drilling, and mountaintop removal.
Because of competition between capitalists, which leads to a falling rate of profit, capitalism is structurally compelled to expand. It can never economically catch up with itself and must constantly break through its limits in a vain attempt to resolve its own inherent internal contradiction.
Feudalism and all forms of class society have also had internal contradictions that drove them to expand. But capitalism has taken this to a new level, because instead of just requiring more resources to continue existing (to feed an expanding agrarian population, for example), it requires the constant growth of production to expand for its own sake. The needs of the population aren’t the point, and commodities aren’t even the point – accumulating surplus value to expand capital itself is the entire point. This is what pushes it to exceed limits on a scale previously unimaginable.
But we live on a finite planet with physical limits, which are being reached. This is a difference from earlier economic crises. Capitalism is driven to consume everything external to itself, converting it to commodities, and it won’t stop doing so on its own until it kills all life on the planet. Capitalism is fundamentally in contradiction with life itself.
The system won’t stop unless we stop it.
The system has many methods of dealing with dissent. One is open repression.
Before they resort to that, they try everything else, including co-opting dissent. They draw it into dead ends created for this purpose. As long as we don’t threaten the actual relationship of power, we have many ineffective means of dissent that we’re permitted to exercise.
But capitalism can’t be reasoned with, escaped, reformed, redeemed, cajoled, abandoned, or rejected. It does not care what we want or how persuasively (or how nicely, or how rudely) we request it.
Elections won’t change this. “Less evil” politicians still serve and represent capitalist interests. It’s their job.
Personal lifestyle changes, though nice, will not make it stop. Protests and demonstrations won’t make it stop.
A better-regulated or reformed capitalism would still kill the planet. So-called “green” capitalism and technotopianism are lies to make us believe an expansionist economy could be sustainable. We can’t buy our way out of it.
If we are to liberate ourselves from this horror – if we are even to survive – we must work together to fight global capitalism and its crimes, toward the ultimate goal of bringing it down.
The system has been built on land theft, war, and slavery. It steals the means of subsistence from indigenous populations and small farmers, putting everyone in a situation of dependency, forced to sell our labor to get food and shelter.
A system based on the pursuit of profit and perpetual expansion can never be fair or sustainable. We need to study and analyze its mechanisms and motion, and identify its weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
We can attack it on many fronts, but at the center of it is the conversion of raw materials (life) into commodities through the capitalist exploitation of labor. The point is the creation of surplus value (profit) by the worker, which the capitalist appropriates – in other words, steals. There is no other reason for commodities to be produced.
To end this nightmare, workers will have to organize to liberate themselves. They are the only ones who can break the social relation of class domination, a relation that is at the core of a mode of production that requires the extraction of resources and the exploitation of workers, and results in the destruction of the environment.
In addition, we must build organizations of various types that bring to bear the energy and interests of all the popular classes and social groupings to weaken capitalism. As the crises become more acute and affect people more immediately, increasing numbers of people will come into motion to oppose it. We need to find ways of uniting all those who are antagonistic to capitalism, from various perspectives, and work together to defeat and dismantle it.
Movements for social liberation must ally with movements to defend the natural world, or we won’t be able to achieve either goal. We need a diverse, non-sectarian mass movement that can increase our chances for victory against our common enemy.
If we want to win, we must organize and align our efforts. Individually we’re weak and ineffective; together we are strong.
Let’s build a broad and autonomous movement to fight capitalism, before it destroys us!
From saltyeggs:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 26, 2012 | Climate Change, Obstruction & Occupation
By Candice Bernd / TruthOut
The deadline for the review of TransCanada’s permits for the Gulf Coast portion of the Keystone XL pipeline was Monday, June 25, 2012. At the Texas Army Corp of Engineers Galveston office and without any finalization of review, those permits will be automatically granted to the corporation – thanks to President Obama’s announcement that he would expedite the southern leg of the pipeline in Cushing, Oklahoma, back in March.
That’s why Texas climate justice activists, including myself, are officially announcing the Tar Sands Blockade, an epic action that we have been organizing since the beginning of the year. We’re mostly associated with Rising Tide North Texas, and we’re 100 percent prepared to use nonviolent, direct action to block the pipeline’s construction to protect our home.
Bring it, TransCanada
The Tar Sands Blockade will be coordinating nonviolent, direct actions along the pipeline route to stop this zombie pipeline once and for all. We are working with national allies as well as local communities to coordinate a road show that will travel throughout Texas and Oklahoma as well as a regional training effort for activists interested in getting involved in the blockade movement against the Keystone XL.
“Our action is giving a new meaning to ‘Don’t Mess with Texas,'” said Tar Sands Blockade Collective member Benjamin Kessler. Kessler is also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
The permits for the pipeline’s construction are being automatically granted under the Nationwide Permit 12 protocol, or NWP 12. The permits do not need an environmental impact statement to accompany them, according to this process. That very fact alone endangers more than 631 streams and wetlands that the pipeline will cross in our state. Not only that, but the entire Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which supplies drinking water for ten to 12 million homes across 60 counties in East Texas, along the pipeline’s path, is threatened with contamination.
The Keystone XL remains key to the expansion of the Alberta tar sands and leading NASA climate scientist James Hansen has called the pipeline “a fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.” According to Hansen, if the carbon stored in the tar sands is released into the atmosphere, it would mean “game over for the climate.”
350.org founder Bill McKibben has worked hard to get Hansen’s message out to the public and to lawmakers in Washington. After more than 1,200 were arrested during the onset of the Tar Sands Action last fall, another 12,000 turned out to surround the White House to tell President Obama that the Keystone XL is not in the nation’s best interest.
McKibben was elated to hear that the Tar Sands Blockade is continuing to foster the spirit of resistance against the pipeline in the South with the use of nonviolent, direct action.
“Let’s be clear what the drama is here: human bodies and spirits up against the unlimited cash and political influence of the fossil fuel industry. We all should be grateful for this peaceful witness,” McKibben said.
Landowners living along the pipeline’s path say they have been intimidated by TransCanada to sign away the rights to their land, and it’s not just landowners that will lose. The pipeline is expected to destroy indigenous archeological and historical sites – including grave sites – in Oklahoma and Texas.
Read more from TruthOut: http://truth-out.org/news/item/9997-its-time-for-a-texas-tar-sands-blockade
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 25, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Daan Bauwens / Inter Press Service
Despite growing evidence that biofuel production is causing food insecurity around the world, the new European Union policy blueprint on renewable energy ignores the social effects of biofuels. Last week, Guatemalan victims of the food crisis came to Brussels to make European policy makers aware of the problem.
In a bid to reduce the of amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the European Union decided three years ago to increase biofuel use in transport. With the 2009 directive on renewable energy, the Union set a mandatory target of a ten percent share of agrofuels in transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.
But even before the directive had been approved, NGOs around the world had already pointed out a series of problems with agrofuels.
The British NGO ActionAid calculated that reaching Europe’s target would require converting up to 69,000 square kilometres of natural ecosystems into cropland, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Furthermore, because of the conversion of forests, grasslands and peat lands into crop fields for biofuel, total net greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 56 million tonnes of extra CO2 per year, the equivalent of an extra 12 to 26 million cars on Europe’s roads by 2020.
ActionAid estimated that the extra biofuels entering the EU market would be, on average, 81 to 167 percent worse for the climate than fossil fuels.
NGOs also found that the EU’s planned increase in biofuel use would push oilseed, maize and sugar prices up. According to a study by the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the 10 percent target would put an extra 140 million people at risk of hunger, with the poor urban populations, subsistence farmers and the landless in developing countries particularly vulnerable. Finally, the Rome-based International Land Coalition recently stated that the demand for biofuels is driving more than 50 percent of large-scale land acquisitions globally.
Earlier this month the European Commission published its post-2020 communication on renewable energy. Despite the relentless campaigning of several international NGOs to cancel out the 2020 target, the new communication remains completely silent on the effects of biofuels on food security in developing nations, leaving a similar target for 2030 open.
“The European Commission wants to decide on the 2030 policy without having considered the impacts of the 2020 policy first,” Marc-Olivier Herman, Oxfam’s EU biofuels expert, told IPS. “The new communication specifies hard criteria to measure environmental impact, but stays mute on the social impact of biofuels. The word ‘food’ is not even mentioned in the document, let alone food security.”
According to Herman, the Commission is moving too fast because of industry demands. “Investors in biofuel want security,” he added.
“Ever since the first target was set in 2009, the biofuel industry has been growing rapidly. This industry now wants to know what will happen after 2020. And it is an industry with lots of lobby power here in Brussels.”
In the meantime, the social effects of the growing demand for biofuels are aggravating. For instance, a large percentage of Guatemala’s indigenous population is facing a new hunger crisis because of land grabbing, forced evictions and water diversion to create large-scale monoculture plantations of palm oil trees and sugar cane for biofuel.
In one such case in March last year, Guatemalan police and soldiers evicted more than 3000 indigenous people from their homes in Guatemala’s Polochic valley to make room for a large-scale plantation. Banned from their land, these 700 families are now facing severe malnutrition and high child mortality as a consequence of diarrhoea or fever.
Read more from Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/biofuels-and-hunger-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 24, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica
Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground.
No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.
There are growing signs they were mistaken.
Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation’s drinking water.
In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation’s most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami’s drinking water.
There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.
Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.
But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn’t always work.
“In 10 to 100 years we are going to find out that most of our groundwater is polluted,” said Mario Salazar, an engineer who worked for 25 years as a technical expert with the EPA’s underground injection program in Washington. “A lot of people are going to get sick, and a lot of people may die.”
The boom in oil and natural gas drilling is deepening the uncertainties, geologists acknowledge. Drilling produces copious amounts of waste, burdening regulators and demanding hundreds of additional disposal wells. Those wells — more holes punched in the ground — are changing the earth’s geology, adding man-made fractures that allow water and waste to flow more freely.
“There is no certainty at all in any of this, and whoever tells you the opposite is not telling you the truth,” said Stefan Finsterle, a leading hydrogeologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who specializes in understanding the properties of rock layers and modeling how fluid flows through them. “You have changed the system with pressure and temperature and fracturing, so you don’t know how it will behave.”
A ProPublica review of well records, case histories and government summaries of more than 220,000 well inspections found that structural failures inside injection wells are routine. From late 2007 to late 2010, one well integrity violation was issued for every six deep injection wells examined — more than 17,000 violations nationally. More than 7,000 wells showed signs that their walls were leaking. Records also show wells are frequently operated in violation of safety regulations and under conditions that greatly increase the risk of fluid leakage and the threat of water contamination.
Structurally, a disposal well is the same as an oil or gas well. Tubes of concrete and steel extend anywhere from a few hundred feet to two miles into the earth. At the bottom, the well opens into a natural rock formation. There is no container. Waste simply seeps out, filling tiny spaces left between the grains in the rock like the gaps between stacked marbles.
Many scientists and regulators say the alternatives to the injection process — burning waste, treating wastewater, recycling, or disposing of waste on the surface — are far more expensive or bring additional environmental risks.
Subterranean waste disposal, they point out, is a cornerstone of the nation’s economy, relied on by the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. It’s also critical to a future less dependent on foreign oil: Hydraulic fracturing, “clean coal” technologies, nuclear fuel production and carbon storage (the keystone of the strategy to address climate change) all count on pushing waste into rock formations below the earth’s surface.
Read more from ProPublica: http://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us
