Shale Must Fall: Global day of climate actions uniting sites of extraction in the Global South and beyond with their counterparts of consumption in the Global North.
Friday Dec. 11th, on the eve of the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, a diverse group of environmental movements from 20 different countries are mobilizing together to bring visibility to the environmental destruction of fracking.
The movement is mobilizing to highlight the damage caused by European multinationals that do abroad what they are banned from doing at home (in this case, fracking) with the complicity of their governments that subsidize the industry.
The day of action highlight how those government policies completely undermine the Paris Agreement, as Europe is simply “outsourcing” its emissions to the rest of the world.
The actions around the world are focusing on some of Europe’s largest climate criminals which are also shale oil companies—Repsol, Total, Wintershall, Shell, BP—by connecting the dots of their operations around the world.
It is outrageous that Europe is on one hand committing to emissions reductions and the Paris Agreement, yet on the other it is allowing and even subsidizing companies based in their country to frack the rest of the world, causing enormous harm to human health and to the natural world, and dooming future generations—including their own people—to climate chaos.
Local and grassroots movements from the frontlines of extractivism in the Global South are mobilizing against the operations of these multinationals from the Global North demanding climate justice and an end to this international ecocide.
Solidarity is Strength
Each of the environmental resistance struggles at the frontlines in the Global South is usually not strong enough, if isolated, to defeat a threat so disproportionately larger. But as our struggles begin to come together as we are doing today, we can present a united multinational resistance against a threat that is multinational in nature.
The Harms of Fracking
Science has shown fracking to be responsible for more than 50% of all of the increased methane emissions from fossil fuels globally and approximately 1/3 of the total increased emissions from all sources globally over the past decade. Methane is 87 times more harmful than CO2 in its global warming impact on the atmosphere during the first 20 years, and thus the fracking industry is a major cause for accelerating global warming.
This also makes shale gas the fossil fuel with highest greenhouse gas emissions among all fossil fuels.
After having banned or imposed moratoria on fracking in their home countries, European governments are not only allowing their companies to frack the rest of the world, but they are also subsidizing the import of fracked gas with billions of euros of taxpayers’ funds, by building LNG import terminals across the region that will lock the EU into decades of dependency into this fossil fuel.
They are selling the fossil fuel with the worst carbon footprint of all as a clean form of energy that will serve as a bridge to move away from coal. A transition away from coal with something worse than coal? This is insane and we have to stop it. Clean gas is a dirty lie!
This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters.
Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows.
For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore.
While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect.
Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,”
said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”
Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.
While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.
The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.
The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.
“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,”
Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.
Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. . .
This article was written by Cypress Hansen and published on 24 November 2020 in Mongabay. You can read the full, original article here:
This piece is a brief excerpt from Brian Doyle‘s book “The Plover“. Doyle offers the reader a description of the neverending ebb and flow of life in the Pacific Ocean and human hunger for a ‘story’.
Consider, for a moment, the Pacific Ocean not as a vast waterway, not as a capacious basin for liquid salinity and the uncountable beings therein, nor as a scatter of islands still to this day delightfully not fully and accurately counted, but as a country in and of itself, dressed in bluer clothes than the other illusory entities we call countries, that word being mere epithet and label at best, and occasion and excuse for murder at worst; rather consider the Pacific a tidal continent, some ten thousand miles long and ten thousand miles wide, bordered by ice at its head and feet, by streaming Peru and Palau at its waist; on this continent are the deepest caves, the highest mountains, the loneliest prospects, the emptiest aspects, the densest populations, the most unmarked graves, the least imprint of the greedy primary ape; in this continent are dissolved beings beyond count, their shells and ships and fins and grins; so that the continent, ever in motion, drinks the dead as it sprouts new life; the intimacy of this closer and blunt and naked in Pacifica than anywhere else, by volume; volume being an apt and suitable word to apply to that which is finally neither ocean nor continent but story always in flow, narrative that never pauses, endless ebb and flow, wax and wane, a book with no beginning and no end; from it emerged the first fundament and unto it shall return the shatter of the world that was, the stretch between a page or two of the unimaginable story; but while we are on this page we set forth on journeys, on it and in it, steering by the stars, hoping for something we cannot explain; for thousands of years we said gold and food and land and power and freedom and knowledge and none of those were true even as all were true, as shallow waters; we sail on it and in it because we are starving for story, our greatest hunger, our greatest terror; and we love most what we must have but can never have; and so on we go, west and then west.
You can find and/or buy a copy of the book “The Plover” here:
This article was written by Malavika Vyawahare on 1 September 2020 and originally published on Mongabay.
People gathered in the thousands in Mauritius’s capital, Port Louis, to protest the government’s response to a recent oil spill.
The Japanese-owned freighter M.V. Wakashio crashed into the coral reef barrier off the island’s southeastern coast on July 25 and leaked about 1,000 tons of fuel oil into the sea near ecologically sensitive areas, before breaking in half a few weeks later.
The stranding of at least 39 dolphins and whales near the site has sparked an outcry, though a link between the Wakashio shipwreck and the beachings has not yet been established.
In a controversial move, the Mauritian government decided to sink the front half of the ship several kilometers away from the crash site in open waters, which some experts say could have impacted the dolphin and whale populations.
Thousands of people demonstrated in Mauritius on Aug. 29 over the government’s handling of a recent ship grounding that spilled 1,000 tons oil in the seas around the island nation. In what appears to be the latest toll in the incident, dolphins and whales have beached close to where the M.V. Wakashio freighter ran aground and broke up. Thirty-nine of the mammals have beached in the week to Aug. 28. Social media is awash with photos of the stranded animals, including mothers and calves.
At a press conference Sudheer Maudhoo, the Mauritian fisheries, marine resources and shipping minister, called the beachings a “sad coincidence.” Though a link between the deaths and oil contamination has yet to be established, disaffection has swelled in the aftermath of the spill, with protesters taking to the streets of the capital, Port Louis, and wielding an inflatable dolphin with “Inaction” written on it.
The Wakashio struck the coral reef barrier off the country’s southeastern coast on July 25; the damage to its fuel tankers led to a leak on Aug. 6. The fact that the ship lay lodged in the coral reef for more than 10 days before any decisive action by the government has become a sour point for Mauritians demanding answers from the authorities.
“The oil spill became like a culmination of growing frustration in the country. Since we have this new government, there were a series of issues and the Wakashio oil spill was the last straw,” said Mokshanand Sunil Dowarkasing, a former member of parliament who now works with Greenpeace in Mauritius. The vessel lay stranded in the vicinity of at least three sites of ecological significance: Blue Bay Marine Area; Pointe d’Esny, the largest remaining wetland in Mauritius; and the coral isle of Ile aux Aigrettes, which is a nature reserve. Facing mounting pressure from abroad and within the country, the government hastened efforts to pump out the oil that remained on board, even as a ship was at the brink of breaking apart. On Aug. 15, it broke into two, but by then most of the oil on board had been removed. The situation, however, has only grown murkier since.
This article was written by Malavika Vyawahare on 1 September 2020 and originally published on Mongabay. The original article can be accessed here:
In this article Julia Barnes describes the process of seabed mining and calls for organized resistance to this new ecocidal extraction industry. This article was originally published in Counterpunch
For some people, a best-case scenario for the future is that some bacteria will survive around volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean.
Deep sea mining is about to make that an unlikely possibility. It’s being touted as history’s largest mining operation. They have plans to extract metals from deposits concentrated around hydrothermal vents and nodules – potato sized rocks – which are scattered across the sea floor. Sediment will be vacuumed up from the deep sea, processed onboard mining vessels, then the remaining slurry will be dumped back into the ocean. Estimates of the amount of slurry that will be processed by a single mining vessel range from 2 to 6 million cubic feet per day. I’ve seen water go from clear to opaque when an inexperienced diver gives a few kicks to the sea floor.
Now imagine 6 million cubic feet of sediment being dumped into the ocean. To put that in perspective, that’s about 22,000 dump trucks full of sediment – and that’s just one mining vessel operating for one day. Imagine what happens when there are hundreds of them. Thousands of them.
Plumes at the mining site are expected to smother and bury organisms on the sea floor. Light pollution from the mining equipment would disrupt species that depend on bio-luminescence. Sediment plumes released at the surface or in the water column would increase turbidity and reduce light, disrupting the photosynthesis of plankton.
A few environmental groups are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining.
Meanwhile, exploratory mining is already underway. An obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority has been given the responsibility of drafting an underwater mining code, selecting locations for extraction, and issuing licenses to mining companies. Some companies claim that the damage from deep sea mining could be mitigated with proper regulations. For example, instead of dumping slurry at the surface, they would pump it back down and release it somewhere deeper.
Obviously, regulations will not stop the direct harm to the area being mined. But even if the most stringent regulations were put in place, there still exists the near-certainty of human error, pipe breakage, sediment spills, and outright disregard for the rules.
As we’ve seen with fisheries, regulations are essentially meaningless when there is no enforcement. 40% of the total catch comes from illegal fishing. Quotas are routinely ignored and vastly exceeded. On land, we know that corporations will gladly pay a fine when it is cheaper to do so than it is to follow the rules. But all this misses the point which is that some activities are so immoral, they should not be permitted under any circumstances.
Permits and regulations only serve to legalize and legitimize the act of deep sea mining, when a moratorium is the only acceptable response.
Canadian legislation effectively prohibits deep sea mining in Canada’s territorial waters. Ironically, Canadian corporations are leading the effort to mine the oceans elsewhere. A spokesperson from the Vancouver-based company Deep Green Metals attempted to defend deep sea mining from an environmental perspective,
“Mining on land now takes place in some of the most biodiverse places on the planet. The ocean floor, on the other hand, is a food-poor environment with no plant life and an order of magnitude less biomass living in a larger area. We can’t avoid disturbing wildlife, to be clear, but we will be putting fewer organisms at risk than land-based operations mining the same metals.” (as cited in Mining Watch).
This argument centers on a false choice.
It presumes that mining must occur, which is absurd. Then, it paints a picture that the only area affected will be the area that is mined. In reality, the toxic slurry from deep sea mining will poison the surrounding ocean for hundreds of miles, with heavy metals like mercury and lead expected to bio-accumulate in everyone from plankton, to tuna, to sharks, to cetaceans.
A study from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that “A very large area will be blanketed by sediment to such an extent that many animals will not be able to cope with the impact and whole communities will be severely affected by the loss of individuals and species.”
The idea that fewer organisms are at risk from deep sea mining is an egregious lie.
Scientists have known since 1977 that photosynthesis is not the basis of every natural community. There are entire food webs that begin with organic chemicals floating from hydrothermal vents. These communities include giant clams, octopuses, crabs, and 10-foot tube worms, to name a few. Conducting mining in these habitats is bad enough, but the effects go far beyond the mined area.
Deep sea mining literally threatens every level of the ocean from surface to seabed. In doing so, it puts all life on the planet at risk. From smothering the deep sea, to toxifying the food web, to disrupting plankton, the tiny organisms who produce two thirds of the earth’s oxygen, it’s just one environmental disaster after another.
The most common justification for deep sea mining is that it will be necessary to create a bright green future.
A report by the World Bank found that production of minerals such as graphite, lithium, and cobalt would need to increase by nearly 500% by 2050 to meet the growing demand for so-called renewable energy. There is an article from the BBC titled “Electric Car future May Depend on Deep Sea Mining”. What if we switched the variables, and instead said “the future of the ocean depends on stopping car culture” or “the future of the ocean depends on opposing so-called renewable energy”. If we take into account all of the industries that are eviscerating the ocean, it must also be said that “the future of the ocean depends on stopping industrial civilization”.
Evidently this culture does not care whether the ocean has a future. It’s more interested in justifying continued exploitation under the banner of green consumerism. I do not detail the horrors of deep sea mining to make a moral appeal to those who are destroying the ocean. They will not stop voluntarily. Instead, I am appealing to you, the reader, to do whatever is necessary to make it so this industry cannot destroy the ocean.
Julia Barnes is a filmmaker, director of Sea of Life and of the forthcoming film Bright Green Lies.
Featured image: deep-sea coral, Paragorgiaarborea, on the edge of Hendrickson Canyon roughly 1,775 meters or nearly 6000 feet underwater in the Toms Canyon complex in the western Atlantic. NOAA photo.
