by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 11, 2013 | Climate Change
By Associated Press
The world’s energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose 1.4 percent in 2012 to a record high of 31.6 billion tons, even though the U.S. posted its lowest emissions since the mid-1990s, the International Energy Agency said Monday.
In its annual World Energy Outlook report, the Paris-based IEA said top carbon polluter China had the largest emissions growth last year, up 300 million tons, or 3.8 percent, from 2011. Still, the increase was among the lowest seen in a decade as China continues to invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
U.S. emissions dropped 200 million tons, or 3.8 percent, in part due to a switch in power generation from coal to gas, while Europe’s emissions declined by 50 million tons, or 1.4 percent, the IEA said.
The agency said the energy sector accounts for about two-thirds of global emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, which scientists say are fueling climate change.
Global climate talks are aimed at keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) compared with pre-industrial levels. The IEA found the world’s on track for an increase of 3.6-5.3 C (6.5-9.5 F).
“Climate change has quite frankly slipped to the back burner of policy priorities. But the problem is not going away – quite the opposite,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven.
Climate scientists have warned that the global temperature rise could have catastrophic consequences such as flooding of coastal cities and island nations, disruptions to agriculture and drinking water, and the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.
Read more from The Kansas City Star:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 12, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By University of East Anglia
More than half of common plants and one third of the animals could see a dramatic decline this century due to climate change – according to research from the University of East Anglia.
Research published today in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at 50,000 globally widespread and common species and found that more than one half of the plants and one third of the animals will lose more than half of their climatic range by 2080 if nothing is done to reduce the amount of global warming and slow it down.
This means that geographic ranges of common plants and animals will shrink globally and biodiversity will decline almost everywhere.
Plants, reptiles and particularly amphibians are expected to be at highest risk. Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, Amazonia and Australia would lose the most species of plants and animals. And a major loss of plant species is projected for North Africa, Central Asia and South-eastern Europe.
But acting quickly to mitigate climate change could reduce losses by 60 per cent and buy an additional 40 years for species to adapt. This is because this mitigation would slow and then stop global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial times (1765). Without this mitigation, global temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100.
The study was led by Dr Rachel Warren from theTyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA. Collaborators include Dr Jeremy VanDerWal at James Cook University in Australia and Dr Jeff Price, from UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences and the Tyndall Centre. The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Dr Warren said: “While there has been much research on the effect of climate change on rare and endangered species, little has been known about how an increase in global temperature will affect more common species.
“This broader issue of potential range loss in widespread species is a serious concern as even small declines in these species can significantly disrupt ecosystems.
“Our research predicts that climate change will greatly reduce the diversity of even very common species found in most parts of the world. This loss of global-scale biodiversity would significantly impoverish the biosphere and the ecosystem services it provides.
“We looked at the effect of rising global temperatures, but other symptoms of climate change such as extreme weather events, pests, and diseases mean that our estimates are probably conservative. Animals in particular may decline more as our predictions will be compounded by a loss of food from plants.
“There will also be a knock-on effect for humans because these species are important for things like water and air purification, flood control, nutrient cycling, and eco-tourism.
“The good news is that our research provides crucial new evidence of how swift action to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gases can prevent the biodiversity loss by reducing the amount of global warming to 2 degrees Celsius rather than 4 degrees. This would also buy time – up to four decades – for plants and animals to adapt to the remaining 2 degrees of climate change.”
The research team quantified the benefits of acting now to mitigate climate change and found that up to 60 per cent of the projected climatic range loss for biodiversity can be avoided.
Dr Warren said: “Prompt and stringent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally would reduce these biodiversity losses by 60 per cent if global emissions peak in 2016, or by 40 per cent if emissions peak in 2030, showing that early action is very beneficial. This will both reduce the amount of climate change and also slow climate change down, making it easier for species and humans to adapt.”
Information on the current distributions of the species used in this research came from the datasets shared online by hundreds of volunteers, scientists and natural history collections through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Co-author Dr Jeff Price, also from UEA’s school of Environmental Studies, said: “Without free and open access to massive amounts of data such as those made available online through GBIF, no individual researcher is able to contact every country, every museum, every scientist holding the data and pull it all together. So this research would not be possible without GBIF and its global community of researchers and volunteers who make their data freely available.”
From University of East Anglia: http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2013/May/climate-change-warren-common-species
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 12, 2013 | Agriculture, Building Alternatives, Climate Change
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York
In no other industry today is it more obvious to see the culmination of affects of social, political, economic, and ecological instability than in the global production of food. As a defining characteristic of civilization itself, it is no wonder why scientists today are closely monitoring the industrial agricultural system and its ability (or lack thereof) to meet the demands of an expanding global population.
Amidst soil degradation, resource depletion, rising global temperatures, severe climate disruptions such as floods and droughts, ocean acidification, rapidly decreasing biodiversity, and the threat of irreversible climatic change, food production is perhaps more vulnerable today than ever in our history. Currently, as many as 2 billion people are estimated to be living in hunger – but that number is set to dramatically escalate, creating a reality in which massive starvation, on an inconceivable scale, is inevitable.
With these converging crises, we can readily see within agriculture and food production that our global industrial civilization is experiencing a decline in complexity that it cannot adequately remediate, thus increasing our vulnerability to collapse. Industrial agriculture has reached the point of declining marginal returns – there may be years of fluctuation in global food production but we are unlikely to ever reach peak levels again in the foreseeable future.
While often articulated that technological innovation could present near-term solutions, advocates of this thought tend to forget almost completely the various contributing factors to declining returns that cannot be resolved in such a manner. There is also much evidence, within agriculture’s own history, that a given technology that has the potential to increase yields and production (such as the advent of the plow or discovery of oil) tends to, over time, actually reduce that potential and significantly escalate the problem.
Peak Soil
A largely overlooked problem is soil fertility. [1] A civilization dependent on agriculture can only “sustain” itself and “progress,” for as long as the landbase and soil on which it depends can continue to thrive.
The landscape of the world today should act as a blatant reminder of this fact. What comes to mind when you think of Iraq? Cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? “The Fertile Crescent,” as this region is also known, is the cradle of civilization and if we take a look at it today we can quickly deduce that overexploitation of the land and soil is inherent to this way of life. The Sahara Desert also serves as a pressing example – a region once used by the Roman Empire for food cultivation and production.
But this problem has not escaped our modern industrial civilization either, even despite some technological advances that have been successful at concealing it. The only thing we have genuinely been “successful” at is postponing the inevitable.
Currently, industrial agriculture depletes the soil about a millimeter per year, which is ten times greater than the rate of soil formation. Over the last century, we have solved this problem by increasing the amount of land under cultivation and by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and crop varieties.
Industrial civilization has expanded so greatly, however, that we currently already use most of the world’s arable land for agriculture. To solve the problems of peak soil today, as we have previously, would require doubling the land currently used for cultivation at the cost of some of the worlds last remaining forests and grasslands – most notably the Amazon and the Sahel. Not only is this option impractical, given the current state of the climate, it is wholly insane.
Another problem we face today is that more than a half-century of reliance on fertilizers and pesticides has severely reduced the level of organic matter in the soil. An advance in chemical fertilizers and/or genetic engineering of crops, while promising boosted yields in the near-term, will only further delay the problem while at the same time possibly introducing even greater health risks and other unforeseen consequences.
Decreasing Yields & Reserve Stocks
According to an Earth Policy Institute report in January, global grain harvests and stocks fell dangerously low in 2012 with total grain production down 75 million tons from the record year before. [2] Most of this decrease in production occurred as a result of the devastating drought that affected nearly every major agricultural region in the world. The United States – the largest producer of corn (the world’s largest crop) – has yet to fully recover from the drought last year and this is a cause for major concern.
Overall, global grain consumption last year exceeded global production requiring a large dependence on the world’s diminishing reserve stocks. And this isn’t the first time it has happened – 8 out of the last 13 years have seen consumption exceed production. In an escalating ecological crisis this is likely to be the new “normal.” This fact, in itself, is a strong indication that industrial civilization is dangerously vulnerable to collapse.
The issue here is two-fold: resource scarcity (industrial agriculture requires fossil fuels in every step of the process), soil degradation, and climate disruptions (droughts, floods, etc.) are severely reducing the yields of industrial agriculture; at the same time (and precisely because of those facts), we are becoming increasingly reliant on carryover reserve stocks of grains to meet current demands thus creating a situation in which we have little to no capacity to rebuild those stocks.
As Joseph Tainter describes in The Collapse of Complex Societies, a society becomes vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a declining marginal return. Stress and perturbation are common (and constant) features of all complex societies and they are precisely organized at high levels of complexity in order to deal with those problems. However, major, unexpected stress surges (which do occur given enough time) require the society to have some kind of net reserve, such as excess productive capacities or hoarded surpluses – without such a reserve, massive perturbations cannot be accommodated. He continues:
“Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, often ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.” [3]
Current global reserve stocks of grains stand at approximately 423 million tons, enough to cover 68 days of consumption. As population and consumption levels continue to rise while productive capacities fall, we will be more and more dependent on these shrinking reserves making our ability to address future stresses to the system significantly low.
Disappearance of the Arctic Sea Ice
One such “insurmountable calamity,” may be quickly on the horizon. This week, senior US government officials were briefed at the White House on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. One of the leading scientists advising the officials is marine scientist Professor Carlos Duante, who warned in early April:
“The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train.” [4]
Over the last few years, the excessive melting occurring in the Arctic region due to rising global temperatures has altered the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia leading to the very unprecedented heat waves and droughts responsible for most of the declining returns in agricultural production in recent years. As the warming and melting continue, these extreme weather events will exponentially get worse. In addition, the melting of the sea ice will significantly raise sea level with the potential to displace more than 400 million people.
The UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group recently released a public statement also indicating:
“The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue.” [5]
Social, Political, and Economic Instability
No civilization can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population, largely because continued pressures on the system will result in the disintegration of central control as global conflicts arise over scarce necessities. [6] This process can occur rapidly and/or through a gradual breakdown. A likely scenario of rapid collapse would be the breakout of a small regional nuclear war – such as between Pakistan and India – which would create a “nuclear winter” with massive global consequences. If that could be avoided, then the threat of collapse will likely be more gradual through the continued decrease of marginal returns on food and essential services.
As these crises continue to increase in frequency and severity, their convergences will usher in a period of prolonged global unrest. [7] This was directly seen as a result of the 2007-08 grain crisis in which many countries restricted exports, prices skyrocketed, and food riots broke out in dozens of countries. Many of those countries were located within the Middle East and are credited as the fundamental circumstances that gave way to the Arab Spring in 2011.
This year the food price index is currently at 210 – a level believed to be the threshold beyond which civil unrest is probable. Further, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is already reporting record high prices for dairy, meat, sugar and cereals and also warns – due to the reduced grain stocks from last year’s droughts – that prices can be expected to increase later this year as well.
Another factor driving up the costs of food is the price of oil. Because the entire industrial agriculture process requires the use of fossil fuels, the high price of oil results in a corresponding rise in the price of food. The future of oil production and whether we have reached “peak oil” may still be a matter of contention for some, but the increasing reliance on extreme energy processes (tar sands, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, etc.) is a blatant indication that the days of cheap petroleum are over. This implies that costs for energy extraction, and therefore the price of oil and food, will only continue to rise dramatically in the foreseeable future.
As the struggle for resources and security escalates, governments around the world will rely more heavily upon totalitarian forms of control and reinforcement of order, especially as civil unrest becomes more common and outside threats with other countries intensify. However, this is also likely to be matched by an increase in resistance to the demands of the socio-political-economic hierarchies.
Emerging Alternatives
As system disruptions continue to occur and food and other essential resources become scarcer, remaining populations will have to become locally self-sufficient to a degree not seen for several generations. The need for restructuring the way in which our communities have access to food and water is greater now than perhaps ever before – and there are more than a few examples being built around the world right now.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of hearing a presentation at the Ecosocialist Conference in NYC on precisely these alternatives. Speaking on a panel entitled “Agriculture and Food: Sustainable or Profitable?” was David Barkin, a Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, who has been collaborating with thousands of communities in Mexico and Latin America involved in constructing post-capitalist societies. [8]
In his presentation he spoke greatly about local groups – comprising of 30,000-50,000 people each, together being more than 130 million people – throughout Mexico and Latin America that are rebuilding their societies based on five principles that were written by the communities themselves and then systematized.
- Self-management; through a process of participatory democracy
- Solidarity; through rejecting the notion of wage-labor and re-organizing the entire work process
- Self-sufficiency; which includes contacts and exchanges between many organizations so that you are not limited to the resource or climate-base of a single community but a development of trade networks
- Diversification
- Sustainable regional resource management; most communities in Mexico and Latin American define a region based on the natural definition of watersheds, although that may not be the most applicable natural definition in other parts of the world
He also spoke of groups such as the EZLN as examples of groups building alternative models – not models that are working at a super-structural level to change government policy, but models that give power and control directly to the community for the purposes of self-sufficiency and sustainability.
In Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador there is a phrase “El Buen Vivir” or “Sumak Kawsay,” – a cosmology that is said to come from indigenous cultures – that is actually informing how communities are rebuilding. It is proposed to promote sustainable relationships with nature and for communities to be less consumerist.
In addition to radically rebuilding our communities so that they exist not only wholly independent from industrial agriculture but also in harmony with the natural world, we need to build a greater resistance movement against industrial infrastructure that continues to threaten the very possibility of people all over the world from taking these steps.
Mining and its infrastructure, which is required for the development of solar panels and wind turbines, uses gigantic volumes of water for it to work. Because of this, in many parts of Mexico (where North American mining companies currently have concessions on 40% of the country’s land area) and Latin America, mining is a question of taking water away from agriculture. The struggle against mining is not just a struggle against environmental destruction, but it is a struggle for food.
The same can be said of foreign investments in wind turbine farms in Mexico and Puerto Rico, where local communities actually oppose these “renewable energy” infrastructures because they not only degrade the environment but also because it steals land that might otherwise be used for the direct needs of the locality.
Those of us in the most developed and industrialized nations need to radically alter our conceptions of sustainability and what is possible – a process that should be guided and influenced by those currently most vulnerable. Many well-meaning activists in the West tend to take perspectives that never really question our own standard of living – a standard of living David Barkin so rightfully articulated as an abomination.
We tend to favor “green energy” projects and the further development and industrialization of the “Global South” so that we don’t fundamentally have to make any sacrifices ourselves. Embedded in these perspectives are the racist and colonialist ideas that less developed countries in the world either don’t know what they want or don’t have the ability to create what they want themselves and thus need the technology and advances of the West to save them.
David Barkin’s presentation was a blatant reminder that this is far from the truth. Right now, in Mexico and Latin America, there are communities directly involved in building their own alternatives. And these aren’t communities of just a few hundred people; these aren’t small, insignificant projects. These are communities as large as 50,000 people each – an entire network of more than 130 million people – directly struggling and fighting for a radically different future.
We have much to learn and our time is running out. As industrial agriculture’s ability to produce food for the global population continues to decline, our resistance and our alternatives must escalate in lockstep – and there’s no reason for us to continue to ignore the alternative models and successes of our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world.
References
[1] Peak Soil
http://newint.org/features/2008/12/01/soil-depletion/
[2] Earth Policy Institute, Grain Harvest
http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C54/grain_2013
[3] Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
[4] White House Warned on Imminent Arctic Ice Death Spiral
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/may/02/white-house-arctic-ice-death-spiral
[5] Governments must put two and two together, and pull out all stops to save the Arctic sea ice or we will starve
http://www.ameg.me/index.php/2-ameg/49-announcement-governments-must-put-two-and-two-together-and-pull-out-all-stops-to-save-the-arctic-sea-ice-or-we-will-starve
[6] Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full#sec-4
[7] Why Food Riots are Likely to Become the New Normal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal
[8] David Barkin – Ecosocialist Conference
http://youtu.be/6nJesyB5bdI?t=23m35s
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2013 | Climate Change
By John Vidal / The Guardian
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 399.72 parts per million (ppm) and is likely to pass the symbolically important 400ppm level for the first time in the next few days.
Readings at the US government’s Earth Systems Research laboratory in Hawaii, are not expected to reach their 2013 peak until mid May, but were recorded at a daily average of 399.72ppm on 25 April. The weekly average stood at 398.5 on Monday.
Hourly readings above 400ppm have been recorded six times in the last week, and on occasion, at observatories in the high Arctic. But the Mauna Loa station, sited at 3,400m and far away from major pollution sources in the Pacific Ocean, has been monitoring levels for more than 50 years and is considered the gold standard.
“I wish it weren’t true but it looks like the world is going to blow through the 400ppm level without losing a beat. At this pace we’ll hit 450ppm within a few decades,” said Ralph Keeling, a geologist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography which operates the Hawaiian observatory.
“Each year, the concentration of CO2 at Mauna Loa rises and falls in a sawtooth fashion, with the next year higher than the year before. The peak of the sawtooth typically comes in May. If CO2 levels don’t top 400ppm in May 2013, they almost certainly will next year,” Keeling said.
CO2 atmospheric levels have been steadily rising for 200 years, registering around 280ppm at the start of the industrial revolution and 316ppm in 1958 when the Mauna Loa observatory started measurements. The increase in the global burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of the increase.
The approaching record level comes as countries resumed deadlocked UN climate talks in Bonn. No global agreement to reduce emissions is expected to be reached until 2015.
“The 400ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it’s too late for our children and grandchildren,” said Tim Lueker, an oceanographer and carbon cycle researcher with Scripps CO2 Group.
The last time CO2 levels were so high was probably in the Pliocene epoch, between 3.2m and 5m years ago, when Earth’s climate was much warmer than today.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/29/global-carbon-dioxide-levels
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 25, 2013 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
On April 19th, myself and other organizers from the Salt Lake City community attended the Morning Energy Update, a meeting hosted by the Utah State Office of Energy Development. The meeting was held in a small conference room at the World Trade Center Utah building.
The room was full – us five or six activists mixed in with energy industry businesspeople, State and County officials, and one or two journalists. I sat next to Cody Stewart, the energy advisor to Gary Herbert, the Governor of the State of Utah.
The main topic of the meeting was the development of Oil Shale in eastern Utah, in Uintah and Grand Counties – areas already hard hit by oil and gas extraction and threatened with Tar Sands extraction.
Rikki Hrenko, the CEO of Enefit American Oil (an Estonian shale oil corporation) was the keynote. She presented about the “economic sustainability” and moderate environmental impact of the project.
I responded with the following statement:
http://picosong.com/FkPw/
Any claims about oil shale having a low impact are simply ridiculous – we are talking about strip mining a vast area of wild lands in the watershed of the Colorado, whose water is already so taxed by cities and agriculture that the river never reaches the ocean. Instead, it simply turns into a stream, then a trickle, then cracked mud for the last 50 miles.
The WorldWatch Institute states that oil shale is simply an awful idea:
“Studies conducted so far suggest that oil shale extraction would adversely affect the air, water, and land around proposed projects. The distillation process would release toxic pollutants into the air—including sulfur dioxide, lead, and nitrogen oxides. Existing BLM analysis indicates that current oil shale research projects would reduce visibility by more than 10 percent for several weeks a year. And NRDC states that in a well-to-wheel comparison, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from oil shale are close to double those from conventional crude, with most of them occurring during production. According to the Rand Corporation, producing 100,000 barrels of oil shale per day would emit some 10 million tons of GHGs.
The BLM reports that mining and distilling oil shale would require an estimated 2.1 to 5.2 barrels of water for each barrel of oil produced—inputs that could reduce the annual flow of Colorado’s White River by as much as 8.2 percent. Residues that remain from an in-situ extraction process could also threaten water tables in the Green River Basin, the agency says.
NRDC notes that the infrastructure needed to develop oil shale would impose equally serious demands on local landscapes. The group warns that impressive arrays of wildlife would be displaced as land is set aside for oil shale development. And it says that while open pit mining would scar the land, in-situ extraction would require leveling the land and removing all vegetation.
In addition to the environmental impacts of oil shale, vast amounts of energy are required to support production. In Driving it Home, NRDC cites Rand Corporation estimates that generating 100,000 barrels of shale oil would require 1,200 megawatts of power—or the equivalent of a new power plant capable of serving a city of 500,000 people. Proponents of oil shale have a stated goal of producing one million barrels of the resource per day.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 6, 2013 | Climate Change, Mining & Drilling
By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
While global warming is a topic of conversation and news coverage every day around the world, the basic raw materials that drive the global economy are rarely discussed as being involved. But these materials play a key role in global environmental issues.
Where do plastics come from? How is paint made? How do simple electronics, like land line telephones, come to be? How does the electric grid itself come to be? And in a world that is being wracked by warming, how do these basic industrial technologies impact the climate?
This will be the first article in a series exploring these questions and more. This inaugural piece will focus on steel: a material so ubiquitous it is nearly invisible, a material that was the foundation of the industrial revolution, a material that even today is used a measure for the health of the global economy.
The foundation of an economy
Steel, alongside oil, is the basic raw material of the global industrial economy. The material is widely used in construction and almost all other industries. The amount of steel being consumed per capita is often used as a measure of economic progress: financial firms like the World Bank consider 700 pounds of steel consumption per person per year a basic measure of the economic development of a nation.
More than 1.3 billion tons of steel is produced every year.
What is steel made of?
Steel is an alloy composed mainly of iron mixed with smaller portions other material, most often carbon, but sometimes manganese, chromium, vanadium, or tungsten. These other substances act as hardening agents to strengthen the steel.
The first step in our journey along the path of steel production is the extraction of the basic materials. The largest iron ore mine in the world is the Carajás Mine in Northern Brazil. The facility produces more than 90 million tons of iron ore every year. The ore is transported nearly 900km (in the largest train in the world) along a single train track to the port city of Sao Luis.
The train line, called EFC, was shut down in October of 2012 by indigenous inhabitants of the region protesting a planned expansion of the mine.
The environmental impacts of the mine are numerous. Firstly, to reach the ore, the rainforest must be cleared. More than 6,000 square kilometers of forest around the Carajas mine are clearcut every year for charcoal alone. More forest is removed for direct mining operations. Mercury is used in the mining process, and contaminates 90 percent of fish downstream of the mine.
In addition to the environmental impacts, iron ore mining in the Amazon has displaced tens of thousands of indigenous people, decimated newly-contacted tribes through the spread of infectious diseases, and flooded remote areas with thousands of workers, networks of roads, and all the associated impacts.
Poverty, social conflict, and environmental devastation have been the wages of mining. As the World Wildlife Federation has noted, “Mining is one of the dirtiest industrial activities on the planet, in terms of both its immediate environmental impacts and its CO2 emissions.”
Smelting and steel production
Once the raw materials for steel production are gathered, they must be combined. The first step is the smelting of iron ore in a blast furnace. The heat to melt iron ore usually comes from burning natural gas, coal or, more often coke.
“Coke is the most important raw material fed into the blast furnace in terms of its effect on blast furnace operation and hot metal quality,” writes Hardarshan S. Valia, a scientist at Inland Steel (now ArcelorMittal).
Coking coal is a fuel and heat source that is essential to the production of steel. Coke, also known as metallurgical coal, is produced by baking coal in an airtight furnace at 2,000-3,000 °F. Generally, two tons of coal are baked to create one ton of coke. The process of creating coke toxifies large amounts of water, releases copious greenhouse gases and other toxic fumes, and requires large amounts of electricity.
“Air emissions such as coke oven gas, naphthalene, ammonium compounds, crude light oil, sulfur and coke dust are released from coke ovens,” notes the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, “[and] quenching water becomes contaminated with coke breezes and other compounds.”
At this stage of the process, ground up limestone or other carbon-rich rock is added to the molten iron ore to balance the acidity of coke and coal. This is called reduction. While a small portion of the carbon content of the limestone and coal or coke is adsorbed into the molten metal and adds strength to the steel, the bulk of this carbon is released to the atmosphere as CO2.
At current rates, around 1.9 metric tons of CO2 are released for every metric ton of steel production. Overall, the International Energy Agency estimates that 4-5% of global CO2 emissions come from the iron and steel industry.
Once the smelting process in the blast furnace is complete, the result is an intermediate stage in steel production called pig iron. This molten pig iron is now prepared for the next step, which involves processing in a basic oxygen furnace.
In the basic oxygen furnace, molten pig iron is poured into a large ladle and scraps of recycled steel are added. Impurities of silicon, phosphorous, and sulfur are removed by means of a chemical reaction, and high purities of oxygen are blown into the vessel at velocities greater than the speed of sound. This superheats the mixture and removes further impurities. The molten metal is now steel.
The basic oxygen furnace is only the most common method of steel production, used for 60% of global production with the process described above. This is called “primary steel production”. Secondary steel, which requires less energy input but is a lower quality product, is made entirely from scrap steel using an electric arc furnace. Steel production from recycled scrap accounts for nearly half of all steel production in developed countries.
What is steel used for?
As noted above, steel is critical to the global economy. It is considered one of the basic raw materials for industrial development, and is used for the production of cranes, ships, trucks, trailers, cars, jacking platforms, underwater cables, electrical transmission towers and lines, rail cars, girders for buildings and bridges, home appliances, pots and pans, bicycles, guard rails, scaffolding - the list goes on endlessly.
While the role of steel and other polluting substances in many of these products and industries has been examined thoroughly, the same rigor has generally not been applied to alternative energy technologies. Wind turbines, for example, use a great deal of steel. As has been noted by the World Steel Association, the global trade group for the industry: “every part of a wind turbine depends on iron and steel.”
Can steel be sustainable?
One of the most common wind turbines in the world today is a 1.5 megawatt design produced by General Electric. The nacelle - the portion of the turbine on top of the tower - weighs 56 tons, while the tower weighs in at 71 tons and the blades at 36 tons. A single turbine, at over 60 percent steel, requires over 100 tons of the material.
This 1.5 megawatt model is a smaller design by modern standards - the latest industrial turbines can require more than twice as much steel.
The production and installation of wind turbines also requires large amounts of concrete (more than 1,000 tons for a standard wind turbine anchor platform) and other materials such as copper, which is used for electrical cables and makes up some 35% of the generator. About half of all copper mined worldwide is used for electrical wires and transmission cables.
Copper production is a large source of pollution and waste, starting with the exploration and development process, where roads and facilities are built, and ending with the toxic byproducts of copper refining.
Impacts of copper mining mirror steel production, and include land clearance, soil removal, erosion of soil and mine waste, toxic tailings, acid mine drainage, contaminant leaching, water extraction and contamination, the release of dust and particulate matter, air pollution from vehicles and machinery, mercury and other heavy metal contamination, habitat loss and fragmentation, soil and groundwater contamination, and greenhouse gas emissions.
The Bingham Canyon Copper Mine near Salt Lake City, Utah, is the largest man-made excavation in the world, and a good example of the toxic nature of extraction and refining – the Salt Lake Valley periodically registers the worst air quality in the United States. The mine is visible from space with the naked eye.
Global Trade
Beyond the direct impacts of steel production, the process of creating wind turbines must be assessed in context; in this case, the context of global trade. Creating a wind turbine is a worldwide manufacturing operation, explains Brian Doughty of Puget Sound Energy, who manages a wind power installation in eastern Washington state.
“For this particular project,” Doughty notes, “these tower sections came from Vietnam, the nacelles and blades came from Denmark, everything was brought into the port of Vancouver WA, and brought up here [to eastern Washington] by truck.”
This global arrangement of shipping and transportation tangles wind turbines further in a vast, deadly net of fossil fuels, pollution, devastated ecosystems, “free trade” agreements, and decimated communities.
Steel: the past, not the future?
The World Steel Association and other global entities are convinced that steel is a key material for the future of civilization. But as should be clear from the information presented above, steel is an industrial material for an industrial world – dirty, polluting, energy intensive.
There are many options for the human species moving forward. Steel lies along the industrial path that we have trodden before, dirty and littered with the bodies of the collaterally damaged. Which path is taken remains to be seen, but one thing is sure: before we can make the right decisions, we must have the facts. And with steel, the facts are grim.
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