by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 10, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
A new report by the NGO, International Rivers, takes an in-depth look at the role China is playing in building mega-dams worldwide. According to the report, Chinese companies are involved in 308 hydroelectric projects across 70 nations. While dams are often billed as “green energy,” they can have massive ecological impacts on rivers, raise local conflict, and even expel significant levels of greenhouse gases when built in the tropics.
“The Chinese state owned Sinohydro Corporation is now the largest hydropower company in the world. Many Chinese companies involved in the construction of large hydropower projects such as the Three Gorges Dam are now taking the lead role in new hydropower projects around the world,” reads the report which adds that “the China Export-Import Bank (China Exim Bank) has become a major funder of large dams.”
Nearly half of the dams in question are planned for Southeast Asia, while 28 percent are planned for Africa and 8 percent for Latin America. Since 2008, the number of dams that the Chinese are involved in has grown by 300 percent. Yet many of these projects lack any or stringent environmental and social policies.
“Few Chinese dam builders and financiers have adopted environmental policies in line with international standards,” the report notes, adding that Chinese companies have been involved with building notorious dams, such as the Gibe III in Ethiopia, the Bukan Dam in Malaysia, the Myitsone Dam in Myanmar, and the Merowe Dam in Sudan.
For example, over 50,000 people were forcibly moved in order to build the Merowe Dam. According to the report, the Sudan government “brutally oppressed any protests. Several people were killed and many more were injured in crack-downs by the security forces.”
A number of Chinese-financed dams have faced local and global resistance. Progress has been made in some cases: this year the Sinohydro Corporation has adopted its first ever environmental policy.
“Among other provisions, the world’s biggest hydropower company commits to fully comply with applicable laws on all levels, adopt all World Bank safeguard policies, respect ‘no go’ zones including national parks and World heritage sites, conduct an open dialogue with local communities and NGOs, and create complaint mechanisms for all of its projects,” according to the report.
Still International Rivers warns that “environmental policies are only as good as their implementation on the ground. This will be the next great challenge for Sinohydro.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 10, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling
By Mike Ludwig / TruthOut
For residents in Assumption Parish, the boiling, gas-belching bayou, with its expanding toxic sinkhole and quaking earth is no longer a mystery; but there is little comfort in knowing the source of the little-known event that has forced them out of their homes.
Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities across the lowland landscape.
The first sign of the oncoming disaster was the mysterious appearance of bubbles in the bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the residents of a rural community in Assumption Parish wondered why the waters seemed to be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous in their fishing boats.
Then came the earthquakes. The quakes were relatively small, but some residents reported that their houses shifted in position, and the tremors shook a community already desperate for answers. State officials launched an investigation into the earthquakes and bubbling bayous in response to public outcry, but the officials figured the bubbles were caused by a single source of natural gas, such as a pipeline leak. They were wrong.
On a summer night in early August, the earth below the Bayou Corne, located near a small residential community in Assumption, simply opened up and gave way. Several acres of swamp forest were swallowed up and replaced with a gaping sinkhole that filled itself with water, underground brines, oil and natural gas from deep below the surface. Since then, the massive sinkhole at Bayou Corne has grown to 8 acres in size.
On August 3, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a statewide emergency, and local officials in Assumption ordered the mandatory evacuation of about 300 residents of more than 150 homes located about a half-mile from the sinkhole. Four months later, officials continue to tell residents that they do not know when they will be able to return home. A few have chosen to ignore the order and have stayed in their homes, but the neighborhood is now quiet and nearly vacant. Across the road from the residential community, a parking lot near a small boat launch ramp has been converted to a command post for state police and emergency responders.
“This place is no longer fit for human habitation, and will forever be,” shouted one frustrated evacuee at a recent community meeting in Assumption.
The Bayou Corne sinkhole is an unprecedented environmental disaster. Geologists say they have never dealt with anything quite like it before, but the sinkhole has made few headlines beyond the local media. No news may be good news for Texas Brine, a Houston-based drilling and storage firm that for years milked an underground salt cavern on the edge of large salt formation deep below the sinkhole area. From oil and gas drilling, to making chloride and other chemicals needed for plastics and chemical processing, the salty brine produced by such wells is the lifeblood of the petrochemical industry.
Geologists and state officials now believe that Texas Brine’s production cavern below Bayou Corne collapsed from the side and filled with rock, oil and gas from deposits around the salt formation. The pressure in the cavern was too great and caused a “frack out.” Like Mother Nature’s own version of the controversial oil and gas drilling technique known as “fracking,” brine and other liquids were forced vertically out of the salt cavern, fracturing rock toward the surface and causing the ground to give way.
“In the oil field, you’ve heard of hydraulic fracturing; that’s what they’re using to develop gas and oil wells around the country …”What is a frack-out is, is when you get the pressure too high and instead of fracturing where you want, it fractures all the way to the surface,” said Gary Hecox, a geologist with the Shaw Environmental Group, at a recent community meeting in Assumption Parish. Texas Brine brought in the Shaw group to help mitigate the sinkhole.
As the weeks went by, officials determined the unstable salt cavern was to blame for the mysterious tremors and bubbling bayous. Texas Brine publically claimed the failure of the cavern was caused by seismic activity and refused to take responsibility for the sinkhole, but the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has since determined that the collapsing cavern caused the tremors felt in the neighborhood, not the other way around.
According to Hecox and the USGS, the collapsing cavern shifted and weakened underground rock formations, causing the earthquakes and allowing natural gas and oil to migrate upward and contaminate the local groundwater aquifer. Gas continues to force its way up, and now a layer of gas sits on top of the aquifer and leaches through the ground into the bayous, causing the water to bubble up in several spots. Gas moves much faster through water than oil, which explains why the bubbles have not been accompanied by a familiar sheen.
Documents obtained by the Baton Rouge newspaper, The Advocate, revealed that in 2011, Texas Brine sent a letter to the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to alert its director, Joseph Ball, that the cavern had failed a “mechanical integrity test” and would be capped and shut down. The DNR received the letter but did not require any additional monitoring of the well’s integrity.
Despite this letter, regulators apparently did not suspect the brine cavern to be the source of the bubbles until a few days before the sinkhole appeared, The Advocate reported. The letter raised ire among local officials, who did not hear about the failed integrity test until after Bayou Corne became a slurry pit.
Texas Brine spokesmen Sonny Cranch told Truthout the company has not officially taken responsibility for the sinkhole disaster, but has “acknowledged that there is a relationship” between the collapsed cavern and the sinkhole.
Read more from TruthOut: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13136-bayou-frack-out-the-massive-oil-and-gas-disaster-youve-never-heard-of
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 3, 2012 | Climate Change
Global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are set to rise again in 2012, reaching a record high of 35.6 billion tonnes – according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project, co-led by researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
The 2.6 per cent rise projected for 2012 means global emissions from burning fossil fuel are 58 per cent above 1990 levels, the baseline year for the Kyoto Protocol.
By University of East Anglia
This latest analysis by the Global Carbon Project is published today in the journal Nature Climate Change with full data released simultaneously by the journal Earth System Science Data Discussions.
It shows the biggest contributors to global emissions in 2011 were China (28 per cent), the United States (16 per cent), the European Union (11 per cent), and India (7 per cent).
Emissions in China and India grew by 9.9 and 7.5 per cent in 2011, while those of the United States and the European Union decreased by 1.8 and 2.8 per cent.
Emissions per person in China of 6.6 tonnes of CO2 were nearly as high as those of the European Union (7.3), but still below the 17.2 tonnes of carbon used in the United States. Emissions in India were lower at 1.8 tonnes of carbon per person.
Prof Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and professor at UEA, led the publication of the data. She said: “These latest figures come amidst climate talks in Doha. But with emissions continuing to grow, it‟s as if no-one is listening to the entire scientific community.”
The 2012 rise further opens the gap between real-world emissions and those required to keep global warming below the international target of two degrees.
“I am worried that the risks of dangerous climate change are too high on our current emissions trajectory. We need a radical plan,” added Prof Corinne Le Quéré.
The analysis published in Nature Climate Change shows significant emission reductions are needed by 2020 to keep two degrees as a feasible goal.
It shows previous energy transitions in Belgium, Denmark, France, Sweden, and the UK have led to emission reductions as high as 5 per cent each year over decade-long periods, even without climate policy.
Lead author Dr Glen Peters, of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Norway, said: “Scaling up similar energy transitions across more countries can kick-start global mitigation with low costs. To deepen and sustain these energy transitions in a broad range of countries requires aggressive policy drivers.”
Co-author Dr Charlie Wilson, of the Tyndall Centre at UEA, added: “Public policies and institutions have a central role to play in supporting the widespread deployment of low carbon and efficient energy-using technologies, and in supporting innovation efforts”.
Emissions from deforestation and other land-use change added 10 per cent to the emissions from burning fossil fuels. The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere reached 391 parts per million (ppm) at the end of 2011.
These results lends further urgency to recent reports that current emissions pathways are already dangerously high and could lead to serious impacts and high costs on society. These other analyses come from the International Energy Agency, the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Bank, the European Environment Agency, and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
From University of East Anglia: http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2012/December/global-carbon-emissions
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 1, 2012 | Human Supremacy
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
I’ll tell you, if there is one instinct
I just can’t get with at all
It’s the urge to kill something beautiful
Just to hang it on your wall
—Ani DiFranco
Mangled. Squished flat. The sides of roads are littered with the bodies of unexpecting mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, nieces, nephews, lovers, and friends. There is nothing but callous disregard in the speeding hunks of metal that hurl down the highway. Lost forever are the stolen lives of too many raccoons, mice, snakes, birds, opossums, skunks, deer, and lizards. Add to this to the unthinkable toll of bees, moths, caterpillars, ants and others whose small bodies are barely noticed unless they are being scraped from a windshield.
The same callous disregard tortures 9 billion animals every year in factory farms around the world. Can you imagine being locked in a filthy cage with so many other bodies that you can’t even turn around or lie down? Can you imagine having your throat slit while you are still conscious? Can you imagine being plunged into scalding-hot water while your body is skinned or hacked apart while you are still conscious? This is the daily reality for so many cows, calves, pigs, chickens, ducks, and geese whose lives are as important to them as ours are to us.
The same callous disregard tortures tens of millions animals every year in vivisection labs on college campuses and research facilities around the world. Can you imagine being dissected, infected, injected, gassed, burned and blinded by doctors? Can you imagine if this was justified as “important research” for the purpose of testing the safety of make-up and dish soap? This is the daily reality for so many primates, dogs, cats, rabbits, and rodents whose lives are as important to them as ours are to us.
The same callous disregard is responsible for other atrocities: poaching (we’ve all seen the pictures of baby seals being clubbed), deep sea trawling (90% of large fish have been decimated), and the turning of whole habitats into buildings or fields of agriculture (the North American Prairie, once home to millions of bison, is now 2% of its original size).
Most of us in industrial society can go through our days relatively shielded from the real processes of life. And many of us are shielded too from the reality of suffering that this way of life—industrial civilization—forces so many nonhumans to endure. This, combined with the war on empathy perpetrated by the dominant culture, makes it easy for most people to ignore the suffering or dismiss it as something insignificant. How many times have you heard it said that other animals simply cannot feel as much or in the same ways as human beings can? You’ve seen the pain yourself; it was clear in the eyes of the furred and feathered as they slipped away from this world as surely as any human being. But the ruling religion of this culture is human supremacy (however, you may also call it Christianity or Science). And human supremacy demands that you are wrong, that your empathy is but misplaced and silly.
Roadkill is more difficult to ignore. There they lay; not behind the doors of a slaughterhouse or vivisection lab, nor in the remote regions of the oceans and forests. On the sides of the roads, they are murdered, left motionless with a frightened look on a deformed face, guts spilling from the chest. Not so different from you, really. I mean, let’s say it’s you who lives in the forest; the one which roads now slice through like so many knives. You crossed the road for hunting early in the day, but now you want to come home. As you step from the soil onto the pavement, you are swimming in thoughts of your loved ones, your resting place, your life waiting for you just steps ahead. But you never make it there. No. In a flash, your body is torn from its path, destined now only to rot on the road’s shoulder. There you lay.
Within the clumps of mangled fur and feathers is a history, a family, a community, a wisdom, a life more rich and beautiful than most any vehicular passerby cares to pay a thought to.
Industrial capitalism functions by devaluing life. It couldn’t survive any other way. The system is based on production, a euphemism for the transformation of living creatures into dead commodities. Mountaintops become soda cans. Old-growth forests become 2x4s. Alligators become handbags.
If the dominant narrative fails to see, or more likely actively ignores, the sacredness of life, then roadkill isn’t a subject worth a moment’s consideration. It’s just part of having roads and cars, the narrative says, as if roads are more real than living, breathing creatures, as if any human being is entitled to decide the fate of whole other populations. Can we not imagine living without roads and cars, but so easily accelerate towards a future without the two hundred species of plants and animals that go extinct every day?
I want to ask how someone can simply not grieve death. But, then I’d have to ask how a whole culture has been built on the systematic destruction of the place it relies on. There is no rational answer for a phenomenon so insane.
In his book, Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack Forbes argues that the death urge of the dominant culture can only be truly explained as a very real disease, one which he calls the wetiko (or cannibal) psychosis. This disease, Forbes says, is the “greatest epidemic sickness known to [humans].” He goes on, “Imperialists, rapists, and exploiters are not just people who have strayed down a wrong path. They are insane (unclean) in the true sense of that word. They are mentally ill and, tragically, the form of soul-sickness that they carry is catching.” The sadism of torturing nonhumans is a perfect example of the wetiko. Those who run factory farms and vivisection labs carry the disease and spread it throughout the culture until it seems just part of life.
Experiencing the sight of roadkill was a major step in my own reclamation of the empathy that is my birthright as a human animal. It helped to kick-start the decolonization of my heart and mind, the endless process of rooting out the wetiko sickness from my being. The injustice is just too glaring to ignore. I remember distinctly one day when I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car and I spotted up ahead a dead raccoon in the middle of the road. A half-mile up the road were her two children, also dead. My heart burned, instinctively. Were those tears in my eyes?
Since then, I’ve seen the flames of so much life needlessly extinguished. It never ceases to hurt, nor to motivate a spirit of resistance.
Here’s one story, this one from just the other day: I’m walking in the small forest near my home. From ten yards, I see the unmistakable white face of an opossum. She’s lying still on her side in the middle of the trail. I approach and see her glassy eyes looking straight ahead. I’ve heard of opossums “playing dead,” whereby they may feign death for up to four hours when scared. But, I’m pretty sure that this one is truly dead. This is affirmed when I return to the grave site a few days later.
I don’t know how this opossum died. There were no predator marks on the body, and the middle of a highly frequented trail seems a peculiar place to make a death bed. Something forced this situation. Maybe it’s the poisons put on lawns, or the fact that this half-acre of trees is surrounded on all sides by cars and roads and houses. Opossums are indigenous to this land and under assault as surely as indigenous human cultures are. In the native Powhatan language, opossum is derived from the word apasum, which means “white animal.” They’ve long been the largest population of marsupials in the Western Hemisphere. But now, civilization encroaches upon the homes of all nonhumans, and opossums, despite adapting as scavengers, now struggle against a massive decrease in food and habitat.
Inexperienced urbanite that I am, I don’t know what to do with the body. Should I just leave and let someone else deal with it? But, if not me, whoever finds the opossum will call animal control services to dispose of the body, meaning it will ultimately end up in a landfill or incinerator. I know this creature would prefer to stay in the forest. Like all place-based beings, she would want to fulfill her sacred task of giving back her body to the land which has always given her the sustenance of life.
Pressed to move quickly enough to avoid the concern of trail-goers sure to show up at any moment, I contemplate my options. Seeing some large maple leaves on the forest floor, I have an idea. I stop to pick them up and, with a leaf covering each hand like a raggedy glove, I pick up the opossum. With a slight strain, I’m able to move her to the side of the trail. There, I pile leaves on top of her and make a small enclave around the mound with fallen branches. Here is a grave, however feeble my attempt.
After the opossum’s body was sufficiently hidden from human passerby, I was moved to say a few words of respect. In my exasperated state, I thought only to say something simple like, “rest easy, friend.”
The opossum deserved more. The passing of life into death deserves a deep respect and commemoration. There’s nothing so humbling. This is what is missing in the dominant culture, and what we all need to learn once again. If I could go back in time, and if I had the words, this is what I wish I had said.
Your life is not in vain. In all your time of living, you’ve contributed to the health and diversity of this place, and thus, to the health and diversity of the world. There are those of my species who not only fail to give back in this way, but actively destroy the world which gives them life. They are insane. They must be stopped. Your life, and all life, is sacred and infinitely more important than industrial civilization. I’m sorry that you had to live your final moments surrounded by this unnatural and immoral construct. I’m sorry that you did not get to properly say goodbye to this world. Your life is not in vain.
I’d like to extend my humble prayer to all victims of highways, factory farms, vivisection labs, and industrial extraction. Life requires death, but none so ruthless. This culture is a project sustained only by death. It thrives by never allowing the renewal of life. These are sadistic murders caused by human hubris rather than the natural deaths simply part of life.
I’ll say it again: Death is part of life. All beings go through the motions of being first predators, then prey. Everyone has to eat. Death is necessary to complete the cycle that renews life. That is, death in a world in balance. Industrial civilization, by design, ruins that balance. It preys not just on individuals, but on whole landbases, and not for the necessary sustenance required by living beings, but because it is driven by a death urge, by the wetiko psychosis.
And does it require saying that life wants to live? I know the people who think up vivisection and factory farms have become so deadened as to have forgotten this, or believe it true only when applied to humans (but even then, how alive can a human really be when daily life consists of being a torturer?). You, however, should know better. You should know that, as Derrick Jensen eloquently writes, “Life so completely wants to live. And to the degree that we ourselves are alive, and to the degree that we consider ourselves among and allied with the living, our task is clear: to help life live.”
Here’s another story. My friend saw a deer who was hit so hard that he flew into another oncoming car. The impact literally tore his legs from his body. And yet another story: A doe stood on the side of the road mourning the body of her friend who had just been struck. This is their land. The roads and this civilization are ever-expanding—it’s a war, plain and simple. Just look on the side of the road. You’ll see.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 30, 2012 | NEWS, Toxification
By Georgia Institute of Technology
If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill was a ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – 52-times more toxic. That’s according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA), Mexico.
The study found that mixing the dispersant with oil increased toxicity of the mixture up to 52-fold over the oil alone. In toxicity tests in the lab, the mixture’s effects increased mortality of rotifers, a microscopic grazing animal at the base of the Gulf’s food web. The findings are published online by the journal Environmental Pollution and will appear in the February 2013 print edition.
Using oil from the Deep Water Horizon spill and Corexit, the dispersant required by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean up, the researchers tested toxicity of oil, dispersant and mixtures on five strains of rotifers. Rotifers have long been used by ecotoxicologists to assess toxicity in marine waters because of their fast response time, ease of use in tests and sensitivity to toxicants. In addition to causing mortality in adult rotifers, as little as 2.6 percent of the oil-dispersant mixture inhibited rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent. Inhibition of rotifer egg hatching from the sediments is important because these eggs hatch into rotifers each spring, reproduce in the water column, and provide food for baby fish, shrimp and crabs in estuaries.
“Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters,” said UAA’s Roberto-Rico Martinez, who led the study. “But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion.”
Martinez performed the research while he was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgia Tech in the lab of School of Biology Professor Terry Snell. They hope that the study will encourage more scientists to investigate how oil and dispersants impact marine food webs and lead to improved management of future oil spills.
“What remains to be determined is whether the benefits of dispersing the oil by using Corexit are outweighed by the substantial increase in toxicity of the mixture,” said Snell, chair of the School of Biology. “Perhaps we should allow the oil to naturally disperse. It might take longer, but it would have less toxic impact on marine ecosystems.”
From Georgia Institute of Technology
Photo by Kevin Harris on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 28, 2012 | Climate Change
By Institute of Physics
Sea-levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests.
While temperature rises appear to be consistent with the projections made in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4), satellite measurements show that sea-levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report.
These findings, which have been published today, 28 November, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, are timely as delegates from 190 countries descend on Doha, Qatar, for the United Nation’s 18th Climate Change Conference this week.
The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Tempo Analytics and Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, state that the findings are important for keeping track of how well past projections match the accumulating observational data, especially as projections made by the IPCC are increasingly being used in decision making.
The study involved an analysis of global temperatures and sea-level data over the past two decades, comparing them both to projections made in the IPCC’s third and fourth assessment reports.
Results were obtained by taking averages from the five available global land and ocean temperature series.
After removing the three known phenomena that cause short-term variability in global temperatures – solar variations, volcanic aerosols and El Nino/Southern Oscillation – the researchers found that the overall warming trend at the moment is 0.16°C per decade, which closely follows the IPCC’s projections.
Satellite measurements of sea-levels showed a different picture, however, with current rates of increase being 60 per cent faster than the IPCC’s AR4 projections.
Satellites measure sea-level rise by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface and are much more accurate than tide gauges as they have near-global coverage; tide gauges only sample along the coast. Tide gauges also include variability that has nothing to do with changes in global sea level, but rather with how the water moves around in the oceans, such as under the influence of wind.
The study also shows that it is very unlikely that the increased rate is down to internal variability in our climate system and also shows that non-climatic components of sea-level rise, such as water storage in reservoirs and groundwater extraction, do not have an effect on the comparisons made.
Lead author of the study, Stefan Rahmstorf, said: “This study shows once again that the IPCC is far from alarmist, but in fact has under-estimated the problem of climate change. That applies not just for sea-level rise, but also to extreme events and the Arctic sea-ice loss.”
