by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 21, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Toxification
By Environment News Service
Thousands of Peruvians protesting in the streets of Cajamarca against a proposed gold and copper mine say they will continue their demonstrations every day until the government rejects the development. They fear the surface open pit mine would pollute their water supplies and destroy the region’s environment.
The object of their anger is the Conga Project, located north of the Peruvian Andes 73 km (45 miles) northeast of the city of Cajamarca, at elevations ranging from 3,700 to 4,260 meters (12,140 to 13,980 feet). The mine would straddle two provinces, Cajamarca and Celendin.
The project is proposed by Minera Yanacocha, which already has a giant open pit mine in the area that has polluted water supplies with mercury, among other toxics.
Minera Yanacocha is a joint venture of three partners: Compañía de Minas Buenaventura of Peru, Newmont Mining Corp. of Denver, Colorado and the International Finance Corporation.
The Conga Environmental Impact Study, prepared for the Peruvian government by Knight Piésold Consulting, identifies the resource as 3.1 billion pounds of copper and 11.6 million ounces of gold to be extracted over 19 years. Concentrates would be trucked to Salaverry port on Peru’s north coast for transport to international markets.
After numerous demonstrations throughout April and a regional strike on April 11, organizers of the Cajamarca protests Wednesday declared a “permanent control conference,” with daily demonstrations and vigils, and public forums aimed at convincing the government of President Ollanta Humala to deny a permit for the new mine.
The protests continue despite the presence of police and military forces sent by the government to control demonstrators in the regional capital and other locations affected by the Conga project.
In Cajamarca, a rally in the Plaza de Armas Wednesday drew an estimated 10,000 people. There, Idelso Hernandez, president of the Front for the Defence of the Interests of Cajamarca, said the protests will continue at least until President Humala comes to Cajamarca to talk to the residents.
“The position of Cajamarca is adamant that the Conga project will not go ahead,” he said. “We are tired of the central government making fun of us, we will continue protests in other provinces and brigades until the people of Cajamarca are heard.”
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 20, 2012 | Toxification
By John Vidal / The Guardian
Air pollution is prematurely killing 13,000 people a year in Britain compared with fewer than 2,000 deaths a year from road accidents, a major study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded. Of these, cars and lorries are thought to be responsible for 7,000 deaths, aviation almost 2,000, power plants 1,700 with the rest coming from shipping, factories and domestic emissions.
But the report suggested that environment secretary Caroline Spelman may have been wrong to say earlier this year that the most likely cause of a major air pollution event at the London Olympic games in August would come from dirty air drifting in from the continent. The report calculated that about 60% of the polluted air breathed by Britons comes from domestic sources, the rest coming from air crossing the channel from mainland Europe. The researchers estimated for the first time that air polluted outside Britain may kill 6,000 people a year prematurely, but dirty British air drifting the other way is killing 3,100 people a year in mainland Europe.
“One-third of premature mortalities in the UK caused by combustion emissions are due to emissions from other EU member states, and UK combustion emissions cause one third again as many early deaths in the rest of the EU as they do in the UK,” says the report.
The findings also pinpointed where most of the deaths happen: 2,200 a year in Greater London, 630 in both Greater Manchester and West Midlands and more than 1,000 across all Yorkshire and Humberside.
The study is embarrassing for the government which is coming under the international spotlight this summer ahead of the Olympics and the Queen’s diamond jubilee. Air pollution in London hit record levels last month in the heatwave and Britain already faces EU fines for consistently breaching air pollution laws.
Earlier this year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) claimed that the costs of meeting EU pollution targets may not match the benefits, but the MIT study estimated that air pollution was costing at least £6bn a year and as much as £60bn. Most of it is from the cardiac and respiratory diseases caused by inhaling the minute sooty particles emitted from car exhausts.
Britain has some of the worst air pollution in Europe, but has consistently failed to meet targets and timetables to reduce both the quantity of soot in the London air (known as PM10s) and of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a gas emitted mainly from burning diesel fuel. Faced with draconian European fines, it has argued successfully in Europe that it needs more time to meet deadlines.
The authors proposed that car makers reduce the amount of black carbon emitted in car exhausts and try to reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, but say that investment in public transport, or taking cars off the road altogether – as suggested by Green party mayoral candidate Jenny Jones – would be most effective. They used data provided by the British government for 2005 and simulated temperature and wind fields using a weather research and forecasting model similar to those used to predict short-term weather.
A Defra spokeswoman said: “We want to keep improving air quality and reduce the impact it can have on human health and the environment. Our air quality has improved significantly in recent decades and is now generally very good, and almost all of the UK meets EU air quality limits for all pollutants. There are some limited areas where air pollution remains an issue but that’s being dealt with by the air quality plans, which set out all the important work being done at national, regional and local levels to make sure we meet EU limits as soon as we can.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/20/air-pollution-killing-13000-people-year
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 18, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera
“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.
“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
BP’s chemicals?
“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP’s oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.
Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.
While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: “This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads.”
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.
“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.
“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”
The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.
“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of one percent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”
“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Read more from Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201241682318260912.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 17, 2012 | Toxification
By Environmental Working Group
An independent scientific panel approved by the DuPont company as part of a class action lawsuit has linked an industrial chemical known as C-8 or PFOA to kidney and testicular cancer in humans.
“Widespread pollution by PFOA should be a wake-up call that our chemical regulation system is severely broken,” said Olga V. Naidenko, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group (EWG). “It is particularly urgent for the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a legal limit for drinking water pollution by PFOA, which is currently unregulated and never should have come to market.”
EWG has campaigned for nine years to curb the use of PFOA, a toxic perfluorinated chemical whose full name is perfluorooctanoic acid, and to impose a strict cap on its presence in drinking water. As well, EWG has advocated reforms to the federal Toxic Substances Control Act that would require pre-market safety testing of all chemicals.
Emissions of PFOA, once manufactured by DuPont to produce non-stick coatings, have polluted the water of at least nine states and the District of Columbia. As a result of widespread pollution, PFOA and related chemicals are now found in the bodies of more than 99 percent of Americans. Pollution has been particularly pronounced around Parkersburg, W.Va., where a DuPont plant emitted PFOA into the air and Ohio River from the 1950s until recently. Emissions from the plant have been largely eliminated over the past several years under a phase-out agreement between the Environmental Protection Agency and DuPont.
In 2002, communities whose drinking water was polluted with PFOA emissions from the Parkersburg DuPont plant filed a class action lawsuit against the company for contaminating ground water. Two years later, DuPont agreed to a settlement that created a scientific panel to conduct comprehensive detailed studies on PFOA and human health by analyzing data from nearly 70,000 people who live or have lived in six water districts in Ohio and West Virginia in the vicinity of the DuPont plant.
Read more from Ecowatch
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 15, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Toxification
By Amazon Defense Coalition
A lead Chevron lawyer has made the preposterous claim that the 30,000 Ecuadorian victims of the oil giant’s contamination are “irrelevant” to the court case that led to an $18 billion judgment against the company.
Doak Bishop, a Chevron lawyer from the American firm King & Spalding, said the following before a panel of international investment arbitrators on February 15th:
“The plaintiffs are really irrelevant. They always were irrelevant. There were never any real parties in interest in this case. The plaintiff’s lawyers have no clients… There will be no prejudice to [the rainforest communities] or any individual by holding up enforcement of the judgment.”
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post published over a dozen photos of Ecuadorians who have died or have severe medical problems resulting from Chevron’s contamination. See here for photos, taken by Lou Dematteis.
By arguing that no Ecuadorians had been harmed or were in danger of being harmed, Bishop was trying to convince the panel of arbitrators that they should block the Ecuadorians from enforcing their judgment against Chevron in other countries, a strategy that has failed for multiple reasons. See here.
Chevron has a long history of trying to dehumanize the Ecuadorians by denying their very existence or by belittling their culture, said Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the communities.
In 2010, Chevron tried to claim the signatures of 20 of the 48 named plaintiffs in the lawsuit had been forged by their attorneys. The charge was quickly rebutted after the plaintiffs appeared before a public notary to affirm their signatures were legitimate. See here. Chevron engineers also belittled Ecuadorian indigenous leaders by making them wear Western clothes and suggesting that oil-laden streams were actually full of vitamins, according to published reports.
The existence and relevance of the Ecuadorians has been affirmed by multiple independent journalists, including those working for 60 Minutes, The Sunday Night Show in Australia, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The $18 billion damage award, levied by an Ecuador court, will be used to clean up Chevron’s deliberate contamination of the rainforest and provide clean drinking water and health care to the residents of the company’s former concession area. The damage decimated indigenous groups and caused an outbreak of cancer, according to evidence relied on by the court in issuing the judgment. See this video for more information.
Chevron, under the Texaco brand, operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. Chevron admitted dumping 16 billion gallons of toxic drilling fluids directly into waterways and streams relied on by local residents for their drinking water.
From PR Newswire: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chevron-lawyer-claims-that-victims-of-rainforest-contamination-are-irrelevant—-amazon-defense-coalition-147441865.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 15, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification, Worker Exploitation
By John Sweeney / The Guardian
Glencore, the commodity and mining firm worth £27bn, stands accused in the Democratic Republic of Congo of dumping raw acid and profiting from children working 150ft underground.
The revelations come as the notoriously secretive Swiss-based company, which floated on the London Stock Exchange last year, seeks to merge with mining firm Xstrata in a £50bn-plus deal. When Glencore floated in London, five of its partners became billionaires, but the biggest winner was Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, whose stake is worth £4bn. The company was founded in 1974 by Marc Rich, once one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, but now pardoned and outside Glencore.
In his first television interview, Glasenberg said that Glencore took corporate responsibility seriously, saying: “We care about the environment. We care about the local communities.”
But an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama has found Glencore dumping acid into a river and it discovered children as young as 10 working in the Tilwezembe mine, which was officially closed by Glencore in 2008. International law prohibits anyone under 18 working in a mine. Undercover researchers at Tilwezembe found under-18s who climbed down hand-dug mineshafts 150ft deep without safety or breathing equipment to dig copper and cobalt.
Glencore’s flotation prospectus says it stopped operating at the mine in 2008 because of a fall in the price of copper. The metal has since bounced back to record highs. In the meantime, the mine has been taken over by a local firm that pays artisanal or freelance miners, including under-18s, fixed prices for copper-ore nuggets. Glencore still owns the concession and plans to restart mining.
The number of accidents at Tilwezembe is extraordinarily high: Panorama was told that 60 miners died there last year, making the mine one of the most dangerous in the world.
Glasenberg said: “We definitely do not profit from child labour in any part of the world. This is adhered to strictly.” The child miners were part of a group of artisanal miners whom Glasenberg said “raided our land in 2010 against all of our authorisation. We are pleading with the government to remove the artisanal miners from our concession”.
But there is strong evidence that Glencore receives copper indirectly from the child labour mine. Panorama tracked a lorry laden with copper from Tilwezembe for 27 hours to a plant run by a major Glencore partner in Congo, Groupe Bazano. Copper from the Bazano plant has then been sent to Glencore’s smelter in Zambia, according to documents obtained by the programme.
Glencore denies buying the metal from Bazano. On the issue of whether copper from Tilwezembe goes to the Bazano plant, Glasenberg said: “I don’t know what the Bazano plant does. We don’t buy copper from Groupe Bazano.”
Asked if Glencore had taken copper in the past from Groupe Bazano, Glasenberg replied: “No, we don’t buy copper from Groupe Bazano.” Told by Panorama there was documentary evidence to the contrary, he said: “It cannot be.” Glasenberg said the company operated a strict policy whereby all copper was mined correctly, placed in bags with numbered seals and then sent to the smelter.
For its part, Groupe Bazano said it did not profit from child labour and had not taken copper ore from Tilwezembe since the mine was closed by Glencore.
Glencore is also facing criticism for damaging the environment in Congo. For three years it has run a large copper refinery at Luilu in Katanga province. Ore containing minerals is burnt with acid to free up the copper but the heavily polluted waste has been pumped straight into the Luilu river.
Glencore’s acid waterfall stank of toxic fumes when I visited it a few weeks ago. Upstream, the river used by local people to wash and fish was clear; downstream of the Glencore pipe, there was brown sludge. One local complained: “Fish can’t survive the acid. Glencore lacks any respect for people. No one would do that to another human being. It’s shocking.”
A Swiss NGO tested the acidity of the wastewater and found a pH value of 1.9, where 1 is pure acid and 7 neutral.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/apr/14/glencore-child-labour-acid-dumping-row
