by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Gáldu
The Phulbari open-pit coal mine in Bangladesh could displace hundreds of thousands of people and lead to the violation of fundamental human rights of entire villages of Santal, Munda, Mahili and Pahan indigenous peoples, a group of United Nations independent experts warned today.
“The Government of Bangladesh must ensure that any policy concerning open-pit coal mining includes robust safeguards to protect human rights. In the interim, the Phulbari coal mine should not be allowed to proceed because of the massive disruptions it is expected to cause,” the UN experts said.
“The Phulbari development would displace vulnerable farming communities, and threaten the livelihoods of thousands more by doing irreversible damage to water sources and ecosystems in the region,” the experts said, noting that an estimated 50,000 to 130,000 people would be immediately displaced by the project, with up to 220,000 potentially affected over time as irrigation channels and wells dry up.
A national coal policy is pending in a parliamentary committee, with early indications suggesting that open-pit coal mining will be permitted and, thus, would allow development of the Phulbari coal mine in north-western Bangladesh. The mine reportedly would extract 572 million tonnes of coal over the next 36 years from a site covering nearly 6,000 hectares and destroy approximately 12,000 hectares of productive agricultural land.
“We welcome Prime Minister Hasina’s acknowledgement that coal extraction in Bangladesh would threaten densely populated areas. Mixed messages, however, are emerging and investors continue to push forward,” warned the independent human rights experts.
Food and water
“Nearly half the Bangladeshi population is food insecure, and nearly one quarter severely food insecure. Local food production should be strengthened, not sacrificed for industrial projects,” said the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter. The land under threat is located in Bangladesh’s most fertile agricultural region where production of staple crops such as rice and wheat allows subsistence farmers to feed their families, and supports the entire country’s food needs.
In addition to the destruction of agricultural land, waterways supporting over 1,000 fisheries and nearly 50,000 fruit trees may be destroyed. The water table may be lowered by 15-25 metres over the life span of the mine. “Access to safe drinking water for some 220,000 people is at stake,” stated Catarina de Albuquerque, the Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation.
Displacement and indigenous rights
Those likely to be affected include entire villages of Santal, Munda, Mahili and Pahan indigenous peoples. “Displacement on this scale, particularly of indigenous peoples, is unacceptable without the indigenous peoples’ free, prior and informed consent, and poses an immediate threat to safety and standards of living,” warned the Special Rapporteurs Raquel Rolnik (adequate housing) and James Anaya (indigenous peoples).
Democratic rights
Concerns have also arisen over repression of human rights defenders peacefully protesting the Phulbari Coal Mine and other energy sector developments. “The legitimacy of the process is highly questionable,” noted the Special Rapporteurs Frank La Rue (freedom of opinion and expression) and Maina Kiai (freedom of peaceful assembly and of association). “People must be informed throughout, and must not be intimidated out of exercising their rights to express their opinions and peacefully assemble.”
“By incorporating human rights principles into the national development strategy and fulfilling their human rights obligations, the Government is more likely to reduce poverty. Human rights and development policies are mutually reinforcing,” noted the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda.
“The Phulbari coal mine may entice developers. But for many Bangladeshis the wholesale environmental degradation of the Phulbari region will exacerbate food insecurity, poverty and vulnerability to climate events for generations to come,” warned the UN independent experts.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2012 | Education, Movement Building & Support
By Dave Cooper / Huffington Post
While combating dirty fossil-fuel energy sources like coal and shale gas, activists can sometimes find themselves so intensely focused on one issue that they lose track of important developments in other related fossil fuel campaigns.
Mountain Justice Spring Break (MJSB), March 21-28 in northern West Virginia, seeks to build bridges between the long-established anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) campaign in Appalachia and the fast-growing anti-fracking campaign.
College students and young people on their spring breaks from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia, New York and other states will attend MJSB for a week of trainings, skill-sharings, workshops, documentary films, speakers from the mountains and the hollows — learning about Appalachian music and culture through bluegrass, folk and old-time music in the evenings. A special emphasis at MJSB is connecting activists in the anti-MTR campaign with the “Fracktivists” in the anti-fracking campaign.
Mountain Justice Spring Break will offer site tours to see mountaintop removal and fracking sites in Wetzel County, West Virginia, plus tours of a coal slurry impoundment and a strip mine near Morgantown, West Virginia.
MJSB participants will also hear from citizens who live close to coal-burning power plants with air pollution and ground water contamination from multiple large power plants and large coal ash impoundments.
Other MJSB workshops will focus on anti-oppression, community grassroots and campus organizing, listening projects, coal slurry impoundments, non-violent direct action, tree-sits, media skills, fundraising, citizen air monitoring, and coal ash.
The MJSB camp location in northern West Virginia is surrounded by drilling sites for oil and natural gas, and large fracking equipment and tanker trucks constantly thunder up and down the main highway.
The dual focus of MJSB 2012 is significant, because while natural gas drilling is booming in places like northern West Virginia, coal continues to decline as a source for America’s electricity: According to the US government’s Energy Information Authority (EIA), from 2007 to 2011 coal declined from 49% to 43% as a share of the nation’s electricity supply. The EIA projects that coal will continue to decline over the next 25 years to 39%.
Yet the Sierra Club’s Bruce Nilles, Senior Director of the club’s Beyond Coal campaign, calls these numbers conservative and predicts that the percentage of electricity supplied by coal will fall even farther. “For many years the EIA has exaggerated coal’s prospects for the future, and every year has had to downgrade its projections,” said Nilles. “We know coal’s future is even darker than EIA is predicting.” For example, in 2010 the EIA predicted it would take 25 years for coal to drop to 44% of the electricity supply — it actually took only two years.
The EIA attributes this decline in coal to “slow growth in electricity demand, continued competition from natural gas and renewable plants, and the need to comply with new environmental regulations.”
While the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has been very successful in opposing new coal plants and helping shut down dirty, older power plants, the club formerly referred to natural gas as a “bridge fuel” — a transitional source of energy until more renewable sources of energy come on line.
A Feb. 2 story in Time magazine’s Eccocentric blog points out that the club had in the past accepted donations from the natural gas industry and notes that “mainstream environmental groups have struggled to find the right line on shale natural gas and the hydraulic fracturing or fracking process.” Since 2010, the Sierra Club has refused any further donations from the natural gas industry, even turning down a promised $30 million donation, but the issue has caused concern among club members in states where fracking is underway. The Sierra Club no longer uses the term “bridge fuel,” and in 2010 launched a Natural Gas Reform priority campaign.
Environmental groups combating fossil fuels are facing titanic energy industries and a congress that is deeply indebted to them for big campaign contributions. There are many difficult choices and difficult decisions. No one has all the answers, but building stronger bridges between the campaigns against coal and fracking — as Mountain Justice Spring Break seeks to do — seems like a good start.
From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/mountaintop-removal-and-f_b_1299580.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 21, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay
Environmental degradation can have major impacts on a community’s quality of life and a new interactive map of mountaintop mining for coal in the U.S. makes this abundantly clear: based on 21 scientific studies, the map highlights how communities near mountaintop mining have lower life expectancy, higher birth defects, worsening poverty, and are more likely to suffer from cancer, as well as heart and respiratory disease. Created by the non-profit Appalachian Voices and posted on ilovemountains.org, the map show that most communities near mountaintop removal sites are in the bottom 1 percent for overall well-being in the U.S.
Mountain top mining begins by clear-cutting forests then employing explosives to destroy mountaintops to access the coal beneath. The resulting waste is buried in nearby valleys. Hundreds of mountains in Appalachia have been destroyed by this type of industrial mining, and thousands of miles of streams impacted. Selenium, a toxic substance, has been discovered in streams fed by filled-in valleys. Once mining is done, companies “reclaim” the site by re-plating vegetation. However it is an open question whether forests, and biodiversity, will return.
A recent study found that the overall hidden environmental and health costs of coal on U.S. society reached $523 billion annually—that’s $1,698 per person in the U.S. every year.
“This is not borne by the coal industry, this is borne by us, in our taxes,” Paul Epstein the study’s lead author, told Reuters at the time. “The public cost is far greater than the cost of the coal itself. The impacts of this industry go way beyond just lighting our lights.”
In addition to impacts on local communities, coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel in the world and thus a major driver of climate change.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 15, 2012 | Direct Action, NEWS, Obstruction & Occupation
By Huffington Post
Protesters from Greenpeace demonstrated against “the destruction and pollution caused by coal” at a North Carolina power plant on Monday, according to a press release.
Activists entered the grounds of the Progress Asheville Power Station in the morning and secured themselves to a coal conveyor belt, according to Greenpeace. They also scaled a 400 foot smoke stack and draped a large protest banner.
WSPA reports that the protesters’ banner, which is visible for several miles, reads “Duke Energy: The Climate Needs Real Progress.”
According to The Charlotte Observer, 16 protestors were arrested at the Asheville plant.
The plant’s owner, Progress Energy, said its goal was to protect the safety of “the trespassers to first responders, as this is large and dangerous equipment,” reported Fox Carolina. Interactions between protesters and local police were reportedly “very cordial.”
Greenpeace activist Robert Gardner said in a press release, “This plant runs on destroyed mountains, it spews out air pollution, it causes climate change and it poisons the water and the earth. If Duke merges with Progress, the new owners have a responsibility to the people of North Carolina to move to clean energy.”
Progress is currently in the process of merging with Duke Energy, although the consolidation has been delayed by federal regulators, according to to The Charlotte Observer.
Reuters reported Monday that the Obama administration is expected to unveil new rules limiting carbon emissions from new coal-fired power plants. An energy policy analyst told Reuters, “The proposed rule is certainly expected to send the message that coal is dead.”
From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/13/greenpeace-progress-asheville-power_n_1274532.html
Photo by Bart van Dijk on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 14, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By iLoveMountains.org
More than 1,200 people are gathering in Frankfort, Ky. on Feb. 14 to celebrate I Love Mountains Day and call for an end to mountaintop removal coal mining—a destructive practice that has shortened lifespans and caused illnesses in Central Appalachia for decades.
The iLoveMountains.org team has just launched an innovative new web tool to illustrate the overwhelming amount of data that shows the high human cost of coal mining, and we invite you to check it out. See it live now by clicking here.
The Human Cost of Coal page maps national data including poverty rates from the 2010 U.S. Census, birth defect rates from the Center for Disease Control, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and life expectancy and population numbers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The site also includes summaries for twenty-one peer-reviewed studies that show human health problems such as heart, respiratory and kidney diseases, cancer, low birth weight and serious birth defects are significantly higher in communities near mountaintop removal mine sites.
Ada Smith, a resident of Letcher County Kentucky explains the significance of The Human Cost of Coal:
“Though many of the (health) studies state the obvious for those of us living in these communities, the scientific facts give us much-needed evidence to make sure our laws are truly enforced for the health of our land and people. If we choose to not pay attention to these recent studies we are deciding to make Appalachia a sacrifice zone. What we do to the land, we do to the people.”
From EcoWatch
