by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 12, 2013 | Toxification
By Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS)
BATTLE CREEK, Noon, on December 13th:
After activist and Kalamazoo resident Chris Wahmhoff’s felony pretrial, Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands (MI-CATS) will hold a press conference to raise awareness about chemical oil dispersants found in the Kalamazoo River. Earlier this year Chris protested Enbridge Energy by skateboarding into their pipeline and stopping construction. He was charged with resisting and obstructing an officer and faces 2 years in prison.
Scientists and residents are questioning how chemicals shockingly similar to those used in the BP Deepwater Horizon gulf oil spill, and Exxon Valdez tanker spill disasters, would end up in the Kalamazoo River from Marshall, Michigan to more than 40 miles downriver. In the aftermath of the 2010 Kalamazoo oil spill Enbridge was fined for each gallon of oil recovered. Chemical dispersant breaks up oil into unrecoverable particles. Both Enbridge and the EPA have denied that any dispersants were used.
However, since August, samples collected from the Kalamazoo River have been analyzed and found to contain chemical signatures similar to Corexit 9527, Corexit 9727A, and Corexit 9500. Corexit 9527, 9727A, 9500 are rare and are ingredients in a group of chemical oil dispersants marketed as Corexit. Corexit was used in the BP oil spill and has had carcinogenic, respiratory, and hemorrhaging effects on residents, clean-up workers, and wildlife. Calhoun County residents are experiencing these same toxicity
issues. Senior Policy analyst at the EPA, Hugh Kaufman has found effects of Corexit to be worse than the oil spill itself. Studies by a group of local and national scientists and doctors are confirming our suspicions- that chemicals dispersants or surfactants were used to hide the severity
of the 2010 tar sands oil spill.
Resident Michelle Barlond Smith, who conducted health surveys along the spill area, along with several residents along the river, reported that dump trucks would drive up to the river and dump truck loads of material into the water. We are questioning the safety of the river and the water due to these chemicals. We are concerned about human and animal health, and demanding a health study contrary to Michigan Department of Community Health’s and Calhoun County Health Officials and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Join us. S River Rd, Battle Creek, MI 49014. 12:00 Noon, December 13th.
Question and answer session with scientists & activists to follow, at 4785
Beckley Rd, Battle Creek, MI 49015
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 3, 2013 | Climate Change
By Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian
The limit of 2C of global warming agreed by the world’s governments is a “dangerous target”, “foolhardy” and will not avoid the most disastrous consequences of climate change, new research from a panel of eminent climate scientists warned on Tuesday.
In a new paper, the climate scientist Professor James Hansen and a team of international experts found the most dangerous effects of a warming climate – sea level rise, Arctic ice melt, extreme weather – would begin kicking in with a global temperature rise of 1C.
Allowing warming to reach 2C would be simply too late, Hansen said. “The case we make is that 2C itself is a very dangerous target to be aiming for,” he told the Guardian. “Society should reassess what are dangers levels, given the impacts that we have already seen.”
The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS One, represents Hansen’s most public intervention so far into the world of climate policy, following his retirement earlier in 2013 from Nasa’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies.
Hansen, who left Nasa to be more free to act as a climate advocate, set up a new climate policy programme at the Earth Institute in September. In a separate action, he intervened in November in support of a law suit demanding the federal government act to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The new study, however, was aimed at marshalling the expertise of 17 other climate and policy experts from the UK, Australia, France, Sweden and Switzerland as well as the US, to outline the dangerous consequences of sticking to the 2C warming target endorsed by the United Nations and world leaders.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in its major in October that the world had only about 30 years left before it exhausted the rest of the 1,000 gigaton carbon emission budget estimated to lead to 2C warming. But Hansen and his colleagues warned that the UN target would not avoid dangerous consequences, even if it kept within that carbon budget.
“Fossil fuel emissions of 1,000 gigaton, sometimes associated with a 2C global warming target, would be expected to cause large climate change with disastrous consequences. The eventual warming from one gigaton fossil fuel emissions likely would reach well over 2C, for several reasons. With such emissions and temperature tendency, other trace greenhouse gases including methane and nitrous oxide would be expected to increase, adding to the effect of CO2,” the researchers said.
The paper draws on multiple strands of evidence to make its case, including the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, mountain glaciers, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the expansion of hot, dry subtropical zones, the increase in drought and wildfires, and the loss of coral reefs because of ocean acidification.
“The main point is that the 2C target – which is almost out of reach now, or quickly becoming out of reach – is itself a dangerous target because it leads to a world that is greatly destabilised by rising sea levels and massive changes of climate patterns in different parts of the world,” said Professor Jeff Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, one of the PLoS paper’s authors.
An even bigger problem however was that the international community was far from even reaching that inadequate target, Sachs said. “Right now we are completely off track globally,” he said. “We are certainly not even in the same world as a 1C world. We are not even in a 2C world.”
The paper goes on to urge immediate cuts in global emissions of 6% a year as well as ambitious reforestation efforts to try to keep temperatures in check. The paper acknowledges such actions would be “exceedingly difficult” to achieve, but says it is urgent to begin reductions now, rather than wait until future decades.
It warns that the targets will remain far out of reach so long with continued exploitation of fossil fuels, such as coal burning for electricity and continued exploitation of unconventional oil and gas.
The paper also offers prescriptions, urging the adoption of a direct carbon tax at point of production and entry. “Our policy implication is that we have to have a carbon fee and some of the major countries need to agree on that and if that were done it would be possible to actually get global emissions to begin to come down rapidly I think,” Hansen said.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/03/un-2c-global-warming-climate-change
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 25, 2013 | Climate Change, NEWS
By Suzanne Goldenberg / The Guardian
The climate crisis of the 21st century has been caused largely by just 90 companies, which between them produced nearly two-thirds of the greenhouse gas emissions generated since the dawning of the industrial age, new research suggests.
The companies range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon and BP – to state-owned and government-run firms.
The analysis, which was welcomed by the former vice-president Al Gore as a “crucial step forward” found that the vast majority of the firms were in the business of producing oil, gas or coal, found the analysis, which has been published in the journal Climatic Change.
“There are thousands of oil, gas and coal producers in the world,” climate researcher and author Richard Heede at the Climate Accountability Institute in Colorado said. “But the decision makers, the CEOs, or the ministers of coal and oil if you narrow it down to just one person, they could all fit on a Greyhound bus or two.”
Half of the estimated emissions were produced just in the past 25 years – well past the date when governments and corporations became aware that rising greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal and oil were causing dangerous climate change.
Many of the same companies are also sitting on substantial reserves of fossil fuel which – if they are burned – puts the world at even greater risk of dangerous climate change.
Climate change experts said the data set was the most ambitious effort so far to hold individual carbon producers, rather than governments, to account.
The United Nations climate change panel, the IPCC, warned in September that at current rates the world stood within 30 years of exhausting its “carbon budget” – the amount of carbon dioxide it could emit without going into the danger zone above 2C warming. The former US vice-president and environmental champion, Al Gore, said the new carbon accounting could re-set the debate about allocating blame for the climate crisis.
Leaders meeting in Warsaw for the UN climate talks this week clashed repeatedly over which countries bore the burden for solving the climate crisis – historic emitters such as America or Europe or the rising economies of India and China.
Gore in his comments said the analysis underlined that it should not fall to governments alone to act on climate change.
“This study is a crucial step forward in our understanding of the evolution of the climate crisis. The public and private sectors alike must do what is necessary to stop global warming,” Gore told the Guardian. “Those who are historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere have a clear obligation to be part of the solution.”
Between them, the 90 companies on the list of top emitters produced 63% of the cumulative global emissions of industrial carbon dioxide and methane between 1751 to 2010, amounting to about 914 gigatonne CO2 emissions, according to the research. All but seven of the 90 were energy companies producing oil, gas and coal. The remaining seven were cement manufacturers.
The list of 90 companies included 50 investor-owned firms – mainly oil companies with widely recognised names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP , and Royal Dutch Shell and coal producers such as British Coal Corp, Peabody Energy and BHP Billiton.
Some 31 of the companies that made the list were state-owned companies such as Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom and Norway’s Statoil.
Nine were government run industries, producing mainly coal in countries such as China, the former Soviet Union, North Korea and Poland, the host of this week’s talks.
Experts familiar with Heede’s research and the politics of climate change said they hoped the analysis could help break the deadlock in international climate talks.
“It seemed like maybe this could break the logjam,” said Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard. “There are all kinds of countries that have produced a tremendous amount of historical emissions that we do not normally talk about. We do not normally talk about Mexico or Poland or Venezuela. So then it’s not just rich v poor, it is also producers v consumers, and resource rich v resource poor.”
Michael Mann, the climate scientist, said he hoped the list would bring greater scrutiny to oil and coal companies’ deployment of their remaining reserves. “What I think could be a game changer here is the potential for clearly fingerprinting the sources of those future emissions,” he said. “It increases the accountability for fossil fuel burning. You can’t burn fossil fuels without the rest of the world knowing about it.”
Others were less optimistic that a more comprehensive accounting of the sources of greenhouse gas emissions would make it easier to achieve the emissions reductions needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
John Ashton, who served as UK’s chief climate change negotiator for six years, suggested that the findings reaffirmed the central role of fossil fuel producing entities in the economy.
“The challenge we face is to move in the space of not much more than a generation from a carbon-intensive energy system to a carbonneutral energy system. If we don’t do that we stand no chance of keeping climate change within the 2C threshold,” Ashton said.
“By highlighting the way in which a relatively small number of large companies are at the heart of the current carbon-intensive growth model, this report highlights that fundamental challenge.”
Meanwhile, Oreskes, who has written extensively about corporate-funded climate denial, noted that several of the top companies on the list had funded the climate denial movement.
“For me one of the most interesting things to think about was the overlap of large scale producers and the funding of disinformation campaigns, and how that has delayed action,” she said.
The data represents eight years of exhaustive research into carbon emissions over time, as well as the ownership history of the major emitters.
The companies’ operations spanned the globe, with company headquarters in 43 different countries. “These entities extract resources from every oil, natural gas and coal province in the world, and process the fuels into marketable products that are sold to consumers on every nation on Earth,” Heede writes in the paper.
The largest of the investor-owned companies were responsible for an outsized share of emissions. Nearly 30% of emissions were produced just by the top 20 companies, the research found.
By Heede’s calculation, government-run oil and coal companies in the former Soviet Union produced more greenhouse gas emissions than any other entity – just under 8.9% of the total produced over time. China came a close second with its government-run entities accounting for 8.6% of total global emissions.
ChevronTexaco was the leading emitter among investor-owned companies, causing 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions to date, with Exxon not far behind at 3.2%. In third place, BP caused 2.5% of global emissions to date.
The historic emissions record was constructed using public records and data from the US department of energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre, and took account of emissions all along the supply chain.
The centre put global industrial emissions since 1751 at 1,450 gigatonnes.
From The Guardian
Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 24, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Ron Corben / DW
A new report on minorities and indigenous people warns that the global ‘intensification’ in the exploitation of natural resources is leading to mounting conflicts for the world’s 370 million indigenous people.
The report for 2012 by the London-based human rights group, Minority Rights Group International (MRG), says indigenous peoples “in every region of the world” face the risk of being “driven from their land and natural resources.”
The land and resources are all “vital for their livelihoods, their culture and often their identity as a people,” Vital Bambanze, chair of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, said in the report.
From the Batwa of the Great Lakes region in Central Africa, and the Endorois and Ogiek in Kenya, to hill tribes in northern Thailand, Bedouin in the Middle East and Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province – all “struggle to maintain their cultural integrity against their respective governments’ desire to put national development first,” Bambanze said.
Unprecedented demand for resources in Asia
The report says the unprecedented demand for natural resources across Asia is “feeding ethnic conflict and displacement and is a severe threat to the lands, livelihoods and the way of life of minorities and indigenous people.”
Carl Soderbergh, an MRG spokesperson, warns the situation faced by indigenous groups is deteriorating world-wide.
“In terms of the trends globally what has been happening over the last decade is that there’s been an intensification of the exploitation of natural resources pushing into areas populated by minorities and indigenous peoples,” Soderbergh told DW.
In regions such as Latin America, the issues faced by communities centered on mining and logging, in North America on tar-sands mining, there were conflicts over wind farms and iron ore mining in the Arctic, while in Africa, indigenous communities faced the leasing of thousands of hectares of land for corporations or foreign governments.
“All governments are chasing a dominant development paradigm in which today minorities and indigenous peoples don’t really have a place and that is a problem,” he said.
In China, investment in mining has forced herders off traditional grazing lands and ancestral villages in regions such as Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, as well as in Tibet.
In Vietnam, over 90,000 people, mostly ethnic Thai, were relocated to make way for the Son La hydropower plant with Vietnamese scientists saying many were left without access to agricultural land.
Meanwhile, in Cambodia’s Prey Lang Forest region, home to the Kuy indigenous people, official land grants of tens of thousands of hectares of forest for mineral extraction, timber and rubber plantations have forced many people to give up their traditional livelihoods.
Conflict has also been evident in Indonesia in areas of increased palm oil plantation development and the mining industry in Papua.
Investment from China seen as a driver for economic growth
Nicole Girard, the rights group’s Asia Program Director, says levels of conflict over land is increasing in South East Asia, driven by foreign investment, including from China.
“It’s definitely increasing, the resource exploitation in indigenous people’s territories; in Southeast Asia, the economies of Laos and Vietnam are opening to more foreign investment, including lots of Chinese investment and including Burma,” Girard said.
Girard says the increased fighting in Myanmar’s ethnic controlled Kachin State over the past year is directly linked to conflict over resource investment largely by Chinese businesses.
Myanmar, led by the military-backed civilian government of President Thein Sein, has been undergoing reforms over the past year to improve its human rights situation. But Naw San, General Secretary of the Students and Youth Congress Burma (Myanmar) says despite steps to peace talks with ethnic groups in Myanmar, the development process is still not inclusive.
“We are still worried that, like in the past, investment and development projects will be dealt with by the central government and that there will be (no real) engagement or consultations with the process on the ground,” Naw San told DW.
“What the ethnic (communities) need now is national equality,” he said.
Two thirds of Indigenous People live in Asia
The Asia Indigenous People’s Pact (AIPP) Foundation, in a separate report, noted that two thirds of the world’s 370 million self-identified indigenous peoples live in Asia.
And those people, according to the AIPP Foundation, “are currently marginalized and subordinated economically, politically and culturally.”
They are “overrepresented among the poor, illiterate, malnourished and stunted,” it said.
AIPP’s report says for many in the region “militarization, (the) plundering of resources, forced relocation, cultural genocide and discrimination in everyday life are common experiences.”
The report pointed to the construction of dams in Asia, which since the 1960s, has led to “massive displacements, loss of livelihoods, and food insecurity of indigenous peoples in India, the Philippines, Laos and Malaysia.”
Bernice See, an AIPP coordinator, said governments give priority to economic ventures and investments over people’s rights.
See called on Asia’s governments to respect the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous peoples and the provisions calling for the “free prior of informed consent from any development that comes into their territory.”
“These governments should have the moral obligation to respect these agreements. The declaration should be used as a framework for dealing with indigenous people,” she said.
From DW: http://www.dw.de/indigenous-peoples-threatened-by-resource-exploitation/a-16065981
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 18, 2013 | Toxification
By Justin McCurry and Simon Tisdall / The Guardian
Workers have begun the delicate task of removing spent fuel rods from a damaged reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, more than two-and-a-half years after the facility suffered a triple meltdown.
The operation to remove more than 1,331 used fuel assemblies, and 202 unused assemblies, began on Monday and is expected to take just over a year. Decommissioning the entire site is expected to take at least 30 years.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], said the fuel removal was an important step in decommissioning the plant, which experienced multiple meltdowns and explosions after Japan’s north-east coast was hit by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
Tepco brushed off fears that removing the spent fuel rods from a storage pool near the roof of reactor No4 could cause a serious accident. Some experts have warned that a collision involving the fuel assemblies, a sudden loss of coolant water or another big earthquake could cause a chain reaction and the release of huge quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.
Reactor No4 was closed for routine maintenance at the time of the disaster and so did not suffer a meltdown. But a hydrogen explosion on 15 March 2011 blew the walls and roof off the reactor building, leaving it vulnerable to further damage from earthquakes.
The utility has since reinforced the building with a huge steel canopy and insists the structure can withstand seismic events of the same intensity that shook the plant in March 2011.
But it conceded that the fuel assemblies needed to be moved to a safer storage site as soon as possible.
“After the explosion, one big challenge was to deal with the spent fuel pool because if the water evaporated it would cause a radioactive cloud stretching all the way to Tokyo, which would have to be evacuated,” Yuichi Okamura, deputy manager of the water treatment department at Fukushima Daiichi, told the Guardian on Monday.
“It was a big challenge, so today is a big success for the cleanup teams.”
Yoshimi Hitosugi, a Tepco spokesman, said: “This is an important moment. It is one big step towards decommissioning the reactor.” He added that three fuel assemblies had been discovered that were damaged prior to the tsunami and measures were being taken to deal with them.
Hitosugi said the firm was confident that the workers would be able to cope with any debris caused by the explosion that remained in the spent fuel pool, adding that it would not compromise the fuel removal operation.
Tepco’s president, Naomi Hirose, said the fuel extraction “represents the beginning of a new and important chapter in our work”, and thanked plant workers for the “ingenuity, diligence, and courage that made this achievement possible”.
The utility believes that a specially chosen team of 36 men will need until late 2014 to remove all of the fuel assemblies from the pool, located 130 feet above ground, and place them in submerged protective casks. The casks will then be taken to ground level and transported to a more stable storage pool nearby.
Each cask can hold up 22 assemblies comprising between 60 and 80 fuel rods. Workers will remove the fresh fuel assemblies first because they are easier to handle.
“The extraction work started at 3:18pm and the first fuel completed its extraction from the fuel rack to the cask placed inside the pool at 3:57pm as planned, following thorough safety preparations with the co-operation of many partner companies and individual workers,” Tepco said in a statement.
But anti-nuclear campaigners have voiced concern over Tepco’s ability to complete the work without incident following revelations that up to 300 tonnes of radioactive water are leaking from the site into the sea every day.
The utility also came under fire this summer for installing poorly designed tanks that leaked toxic water.
“We are concerned that Tepco may not be capable of conducting this risky operation safely, and that there are significant risks involved in this operation,” said Kazue Suzuki, a nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace Japan.
“Tepco’s inability to solve the problems with leaking tanks that store contaminated water, and the continued flow of contaminated water from the site to the ocean adds to our concerns about its ability to handle this dangerous operation to remove spent fuel.
“If Tepco makes mistakes again and can’t handle this task, workers could be exposed to excessive levels of radiation and in a worst-case scenario there could be a massive new release of radiation to the atmosphere.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/18/fukushima-nuclear-power-workers-spent-fuel-rod-removal
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 13, 2013 | Lobbying, Toxification
By Amazon Watch
In a major setback for Chevron, the Ecuadorian National Court issued its long-awaited decision in favor of a $9 billion pollution judgment against Chevron upholding and affirming lower court rulings. The court’s decision is final.
In its 222-page opinion, the supreme court affirmed earlier decisions by a Lago Agrio court and the appellate court for $9 billion but rejected the additional $9 billion in punitive damages previously imposed for not apologizing, given that provision is not explicitly permitted in Ecuadorian law. The supreme court also lamented the plaintiffs waiting 20 years for justice and attributed this largely to delaying tactics by Chevron. This ruling constitutes a landmark case for corporate responsibility.
“This is an extraordinary, unprecedented triumph for indigenous and local communities over one of the world’s worst polluters,” said Donald Moncayo, a representative from the Amazon Defense Coalition for 30,000 Ecuadorian rainforest villagers and plaintiffs, who was in New York to testify in a retaliatory lawsuit filed by Chevron against lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Ecuador case.
Meanwhile, at the trial in New York, Judge Kaplan repeatedly assisted Chevron in intimidating and attacking key Ecuadorian witnesses and the defendant’s legal team.
In the retaliatory RICO lawsuit, Moncayo was subjected to a lengthy cross-examination by Chevron, after which Judge Kaplan ordered him to turn over a copy of his hard drive to the court.
Christopher Gowen, a legal ethics professor at American University Washington College of Law, was present in court and commented, “Watching an American judge threaten a foreigner in an American court with criminal penalties without the advice of counsel on a highly questionable court order defies everything our justice system stands for.”
“Ecuador’s supreme court has given careful consideration to each of Chevron’s conspiratorial claims, and has rejected them one-by-one,” said Han Shan, spokesperson for legal team representing the Ecuadorian Villagers. “While the company’s complaints have found a sympathetic ear in Judge Kaplan’s courtroom, the fact remains that Chevron has been found liable by the court it fought to have the case heard by, and that decision has now been upheld at the highest level.”
“We witnessed outrageous abuse of power by the very pro-Chevron Judge Kaplan and there was nearly no mainstream media and no cameras to capture it,” said Atossa Soltani of Amazon Watch. “This can only have a chilling effect on the willingness of witnesses in human rights cases to come forth to provide facts and pertinent information in an impartial setting where they are not going to feel threatened.”
The Ecuadorians and their supporters have called for an end to Chevron’s retaliatory lawsuit and the ongoing “rigged show trial” before Judge Kaplan, who has displayed outright hostility to the Ecuadorians’ legal efforts to demand a cleanup. Judge Kaplan has also made repeated disparaging on the record comments about Ecuador’s judicial system.
Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, forcing the communities to pursue the oil giant’s assets around the world through enforcement actions currently underway in Brazil, Argentina and Canada.
Texaco operated in Ecuador until 1992, and Chevron absorbed the company in 2001, assuming all of its predecessor’s assets and liabilities. Chevron has admitted to dumping nearly 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and streams relied upon by thousands of people for drinking, bathing, and fishing. The company also abandoned hundreds of unlined, open waste pits filled with crude, sludge, and oil drilling chemicals throughout the inhabited rainforest region. Multiple independent health studies have shown an epidemic of oil-related birth defects, cancers, and other illness.
From Amazon Watch: http://amazonwatch.org/news/2013/1113-ecuadorian-court-upholds-9-billion-judgment-against-chevron
