by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 17, 2012 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By Ken Ward, Jr. / West Virginia Gazette Mail
Patriot Coal has agreed to phase out mountaintop removal and other forms of strip mining, in a move Patriot officials say is in the best interests of their company, its employees and the communities where it operates.
In a deal with citizen groups and environmentalists, Patriot said it would never seek new permits for large-scale surface mining operations, according to details of the settlement that were made public in federal court Thursday afternoon.
St. Louis-based Patriot can continue some existing and smaller mining projects, but must also implement a cap on surface production and eventually stop all strip mining when existing coal leases expire.
Ben Hatfield, president and CEO of Patriot, said the plan should help his company emerge from bankruptcy, focus on underground mining, and curb mountaintop removal’s effects on coalfield communities.
“Patriot Coal recognizes that our mining operations impact the communities in which we operate in significant ways,” Hatfield told U.S. District Judge Robert C. Chambers. “We believe the proposed settlement will result in a reduction of our environmental footprint.”
The deal does not require Patriot to immediately close any mines or lay off any workers. The company must cut corporate-wide surface production starting in 2014, and gradually reduce it to no more than 3 million tons annually — less than half of 2011 surface output — by 2018.
Patriot, the second largest producer of surface-mined coal in West Virginia, becomes the first U.S. coal operator to announce plans to abandon mountaintop removal, a controversial practice linked to serious environmental damage and coalfield public health problems.
“Patriot’s decision that mountaintop removal and other large surface mines are not in its best interests is the inevitable conclusion for any mining company that actually has to pay the costs of the environmental harm it creates,” said Joe Lovett, an Appalachian Mountain Advocates lawyer who negotiated the deal with Patriot on behalf of the Sierra Club, the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.
Lawyers for both sides unveiled the settlement — which has quietly been in the works for months — during a surprisingly low-key hearing in U.S. District Court in Huntington.
Unlike most developments involving West Virginia’s coal industry, elected officials and other government leaders did not rush Thursday to issue public statements offering their views on the Patriot settlement.
From The West Virginia Gazette Mail
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 14, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Daniela Pastrana / Inter Press Service
“What do we stand to lose because of the dam? We will lose everything!” said Maria Abigail Agredani, a member of the committee for this indigenous community in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, reporting the damage that will be caused by the hydroelectric complex being built nearby.
“We will lose the right to life, our culture, traditions, peace, happiness and freedom, our burial sites and our dead, the square, the Christ of Temaca that we love so much, the Agave temacapulinensis plant, the Verde river and 14 centuries of our people’s history,” said Agredani.
She is a member of the movement to “Save Temacapulín, Acasico and Palmarejo,” small towns that will be completely submerged if the El Zapotillo dam is completed.
Temacapulín, a town of 1,500 people in a kind of bowl surrounded by four hills, hosted a pre-hearing this week about dams by the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT), which has held sessions in this country since October 2011.
After listening to the testimonies of people from nine communities that have fought the construction of hydropower complexes in five of the country’s provinces, the members of the PPT issued their verdict Wednesday Nov. 8, condemning the Mexican government and demanding the definitive cancellation of all the hydroelectric megaprojects.
“In no case has the right to consulting with and providing information to the affected communities been respected,” said one of the tribunal judges, Monti Aguirre, as she read out the verdict, which maintains that the procedures have been characterised by “systematic and continued violation of individual and collective economic, social and cultural rights of individuals and communities under threat.”
The PPT was founded in 1979 in the Italian city of Bologna, inspired by Lellio Basso, a lawyer and political leader. It is an international ethical tribunal that seeks to try cases in which crimes against humanity are denounced. Although its rulings are non-binding, they carry moral weight.
The Mexican PPT will conclude its work in 2014, at a final hearing which will review the verdicts of all the pre-hearings held during three years of trials of the Mexican state, on issues such as the dirty war and human rights, migration and forced displacement, femicide (gender-related murder) and gender violence, and workers’ rights.
Its work also includes matters related to attacks on maize and food sovereignty, environmental destruction, disinformation, censorship and violence against journalists.
At this pre-hearing about dams, which is included in the panel on environmental destruction, Miloon Kothari of India, a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, and Professor Carlos Bernardo Vainer of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, were invited to act as international judges.
Maude Barlow, a Canadian activist for the right to water, and Monti Aguirre, the Latin America programme coordinator for International Rivers, were also invited.
Local experts Francisco López Bárcenas, an indigenous rights lawyer, Luis Daniel Vázquez, coordinator of the doctoral programme in social sciences at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, and Patricia Ávila of the Ecosystems Research Centre at the National Autonomous University of Mexico also served on the PPT.
In an interview with IPS, Vainer emphasised that a constant feature of complaints from these communities is the lack of information and consultation, and indeed even disinformation that appears to be premeditated on the part of the federal government.
“People are not given adequate, timely information. This seems to be a general complaint,” he said.
The problem, he said, is how each of these cases is connected with the global market. He noted that the links between the dam-building industry and large energy-consuming industries with the financial sector result in emerging economies importing technologically obsolete projects in their efforts to develop.
“To supply people’s energy needs, large dams are not needed, because megaprojects do not serve local development but industrial centres. But how much is energy worth, and what is the value of a nation, a culture or a people? There is no possible comparison,” he said.
In the view of López Bárcenas, the pre-hearing clearly established that the outgoing Mexican government of conservative President Felipe Calderón is “plundering communities” and granting concessions for exploiting natural resources to powerful groups.
“Public policies are promoting the stripping of resources, not the development of communities, and those resources are passed on to other sectors, like mining, hydropower, wind farms and tourism,” he said.
One of the most worrying cases presented at the pre-hearing was that of the Arcediano dam, also in Jalisco. The project is meant to supply water to Guadalajara, the state capital.
If the plan had gone ahead, the village of Arcediano would have ended up entirely underwater. However, in 2009 it was cancelled before completion. But the former residents had to move to small houses in resettlement communities on the outskirts of the state capital.
Guadalupe Lara, who was the last person to leave her home, is now about to publish a book about her struggle titled “Yo vi a mi pueblo morir” (I saw my village die). She told IPS it is “very sad and frustrating to see how those who ought to look after us are robbing us instead.”
Read more from Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/11/peoples-tribunal-defends-native-villages-from-dams/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 13, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Property & Material Destruction, Reclamation & Expropriation, Worker Exploitation
By Agence France-Presse
Work on Brazil’s controversial $13 billion Belo Monte mega-dam ground to a halt Monday after protesters torched buildings at three dam construction sites over the weekend, the developer said.
Saturday, “a group of 30 people set fire to prefab structures at the Pimental site. They went into the cafeteria, destroyed everything and robbed the till” before setting it ablaze, said Fernando Santana, spokesman for builders Consorcio Constructor Belo Monte (CCBM).
And late Sunday, groups of 20 people set structures ablaze at Canais and Diques, two other dam construction sites, said Santana.
“On Monday, as a precautionary security measure, all activities were suspended at the construction site,” said Santana, suggesting that “vandals” might be trying to derail salary renegotiation under way.
The state-owned Norte Energia hired CCBM to build the dam, which is set to be the world’s third largest when it has been completed. Between 12,000 and 13,000 workers would be employed at the site on two shifts, Santana said.
The incidents broke out after CCBM proposed a seven percent wage hike to the workers in an area where the inflation rate is at 30 percent, said Xingu Vivo, a non-governmental group opposing the dam.
On October 9 protesters — 150 natives and local fishermen — interrupted dam construction, accusing Norte Energia of backtracking on accords signed in June when people occupied the Pimental area for three weeks.
Indigenous groups fear the dam across the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, will harm their way of life. Environmentalists have warned of deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and irreparable damage to the ecosystem.
The dam is expected to flood some 500 square kilometers (200 square miles) along the Xingu and displace 16,000 people, according to the government, although some NGOs put the number at 40,000 displaced.
The natives want their lands demarcated and non-indigenous people removed from them, as well as a better healthcare system and access to drinking water.
Expected to produce 11,000 megawatts of electricity, the dam would be the third biggest in the world, after China’s Three Gorges facility and Brazil’s Itaipu Dam in the south.
It is one of several hydroelectric projects billed by Brazil as providing clean energy for a fast-growing economy.
“Avatar” director James Cameron and actress Sigourney Weaver support dam opponents, drawing parallels with the natives-versus-exploiters storyline of their blockbuster Hollywood movie.
From Bangkok Post: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/320956/trouble-at-brazil-mega-dam-stops-construction-for-now
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 10, 2012 | Climate Change
By Juli Berwald / National Geographic News
In the wake of superstorm Sandy, climate change is on a lot of people’s radar. By some accounts, warmer ocean temperatures intensified the hurricane as it plowed up the Gulf Stream, and rising seas may have exacerbated flooding.
Now, a new climate-change study in the journal Science says warming is here to stay. And future warming will likely be on the high side of predictions, the researchers conclude.
Atmospheric scientists John Fasullo and Kevin Trenberth studied global humidity patterns to get at an elusive question: When atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels double—as is expected by late this century—how much warmer will it become?
Estimates of this temperature increase, called equilibrium climate sensitivity, hover around 5 degrees F (2.8 degrees Celsius) by about 2100. But predictions vary more than twofold, from 3 to 8 degrees F (1.7 to 4.4 degrees Celsius).
The difference matters because higher temperatures mean larger problems with sea level rise and extreme weather, as well as large-scale changes in ocean circulation—which could in turn mean big changes on the ground.
With a 3 degree F increase, for example, New York City would feel more like Richmond, Virginia. With an 8 degree F increase, New Yorkers would experience temperatures like those in Atlanta, Georgia.
(Opinion: “Climate Change Wins Big in 2012 Elections.”)
Clouds May Hold Climate-Change Key
Since the first report on climate sensitivity in 1979, no one has been able to narrow down its range. To try to solve the mystery, Fasullo and Trenberth—both of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado—looked to the skies.
Clouds are key in pinpointing the level of temperature rise expected, Fasullo said. They exert a major influence on Earth’s energy budget. Since they’re white, clouds reflect sunlight, cooling Earth. Depending on how high they are in the atmosphere, they can also act like a blanket, holding in heat.
Yet clouds change shape, size, and brightness quickly, making modeling them difficult. Satellite observations of clouds are sketchy, and contain errors.
To sidestep these problems, Fasullo and Trenberth decided to look instead at how clouds are made. They form from water vapor in environments of high relative humidity. Conveniently, high-quality relative humidity data is readily available from satellites. (Related: “Global Warming Supercharged by Water Vapor?”)
Eye of the Coming Storm?
The team’s research focused on areas in the atmosphere called dry zones.
Hovering several thousand feet above Earth’s surface, in the troposphere—the part of the atmosphere where clouds can form—dry zones play a primary role in the future climate.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the dry zone occupies latitudes between 10 and 30 degrees, on the level of Venezuela and Florida, respectively.
The scientists compared the observed relative humidity in the dry zones to 16 different climate models used in the most recent study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Fasullo and Trenberth found that the three models that best matched the humidity observations were the same ones that predict the hottest future, with temperatures increasing 8 degrees F before century’s end. The least accurate models overpredicted relative humidity and projected lower increases in temperature.
Fasullo used the analogy of an eye: “The dry zones are like the iris of the climate system. With warming, the iris dilates, decreasing cloud cover and allowing in more heat.” Models that don’t provide for that expansion of the dry zone fail to accurately depict observed data, he explained.
Karen Shell, a climate scientist from Oregon State University who was not involved in the research, agreed that Fasullo and Trenberth’s workaround made sense. “It’s a promising technique. It’s one study, but if this relationship holds up, it implies the climate sensitivity is on the higher end of the range.”
Meaning hotter …
From National Geographic Daily News: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/11/121108-climate-change-clouds-science-model-relative-humidity/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 7, 2012 | Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
Civilization is not a static force. It has metastasized across the world by accelerating its own development, by transforming the blood and corpses of its victims into new weapons with which to wage its relentless war against all life
Grasslands become grain monocultures feeding armies, conquering forests and mountains that become ships and swords that kill other cultures, conquering more forests and mountains, whose trees and minerals are turned into timber mills and trains, going forth to dam rivers, turning the relentless fluidity of their being to electricity to smelt iron and steel and aluminum, which in turn become guns and ocean tankers, which expand this superstructure ever further, tirelessly taking in what little wild remains, absorbing everything and everyone into this accelerating death march.
And yet, as the world is tied and bound tighter into this brutal arrangement, civilization (and especially industrialism) becomes more and more vulnerable, more open and fragile to disruption and destruction.
This brittleness is exemplified by the near-total dependence of the industrial economy on “advanced” technology, and the internet. This dependency upon a decentralized and accessible system that is poorly regulated and controlled—at least compared to other physical structures, like the offices of the same corporations— presents a potential point of powerful leverage against the operation of civilization.
Activists and resisters around the world are beginning to realize this, and seize the opportunity it presents to groups engaged in asymmetric forces against destruction.
Such as in Saudi Arabia; from a recent article in the New York Times;
“On Aug. 15, more than 55,000 Saudi Aramco [described as the world’s most valuable company] employees stayed home from work to prepare for one of Islam’s holiest nights of the year — Lailat al Qadr, or the Night of Power — celebrating the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad.
That morning, at 11:08, a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with an image of a burning American flag.”
This attack presents a good example of targeting a systemic weak point within the infrastructure of Saudi Aramco and maximizing impact through effective use of systems disruption: destroying three-fourths of corporate data will have impacts that last for weeks, and inhibit the company’s operation for some time. In fact, the attack leveraged the company’s response against itself:
“Immediately after the attack, Aramco was forced to shut down the company’s internal corporate network, disabling employees’ e-mail and Internet access, to stop the virus from spreading.”
The cyber-sabotage also highlights the importance of careful planning and timing.
“The hackers picked the one day of the year they knew they could inflict the most damage…”
This smart and strategic approach to action planning is something that is too often overlooked, ignored, or dismissed entirely. Yet for resistance to be effective, it must follow the same principles. Rather than striking at weak points to cripple the operation or function of industrial activity, attacks are typically made against symbolic or superficial targets, leaving the operation of the brutal industrial machine unscathed. We cannot continue to stumble with strategic blindness, lashing out all but randomly, and no more than hoping to hit the mark.
Again, civilization is not a static force: every hour, more forests, prairies, mountains and species are destroyed and extirpated. Every hour, civilization is pulled further into biotic collapse. We are out of time. With everything at stake, we are not only justified in using any means necessary to bring down civilization; it is our moral mandate as living beings to do so. But for that resistance to truly be meaningful and effective, it must also be smart. It cannot be reactive and sporadic, but strategic and coordinated; designed not just to inflict damage or dent profit margins, but to disable the fundamental support-systems that sustain industrial civilization and bring it all to a screeching halt.
This is one reason why cyber-sabotage has such potential as a tactic to be used in dismantling industrial civilization. Most, if not all, of the critical systems that sustain it are by now reliant upon computer networks, which as the Saudi Aramco attack demonstrates, are very vulnerable to disruption.
Online attacks also lend themselves as a tactic to asymmetric forces, and allow a very small group of people to carry out decisive, coordinated strikes from a distance, rather than requiring people on the ground to coordinate across the country to achieve a similar effect.
Civilization’s relentless growth and accelerating technology-spiral has rendered murder and death across the planet on a scale that would be unimaginable if it weren’t the horrific reality we now find ourselves in. But this process of unceasing centralization and control has also become its weakness, and for all its imposing gigantism, the tower of civilization is incredibly unstable, and now begins to sway precariously. It’s time to push with all our might, and topple it once and for all.
Learning to leverage key systems against themselves is crucial to the success of a militant resistance movement, and ultimately is at the core of any effective strategy to disable the function of industrial civilization and ultimately to dismantle it. Cyber-sabotage presents a vital opportunity to use the dynamics of industrial operations—such as the complete dependency of the electric grid or oil refineries upon complex computer systems—to accomplish that most fundamental and necessary goal.
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
