North Sea suffers 4,123 oil spills since 2000; only seven resulted in government fine

by | Oct 25, 2012 | Toxification

By Leo Hickman / The Guardian

Oil companies operating in the North Sea have been fined for oil spills on just seven occasions since 2000, even though 4,123 separate spills were recorded over the same period, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has confirmed.

The disclosure came as Decc said on Thursday that the government had offered a “record-breaking” 167 new licences to oil and gas companies seeking to drill in the North Sea. A further 61 “blocks”, or licences, are under environmental assessment.

Total fines resulting from prosecutions between 2000 and 2011 came to just £74,000 and no single oil company had to pay more than £20,000.

Two companies received fines of £20,000: BP, for causing 28 tonnes of diesel to spill into the sea in 2002 from the Forties Alpha platform, and, a year later, Total E&P, for causing six tonnes of diesel to enter the sea during a transfer between fuel tanks on the Alwyn North platform.

Information about the fines was released by Decc after a freedom of information request and further inquiries by the Guardian.

The smallest fines over this period were those imposed on two companies, Venture North Sea Oil and Knutsen OAS Shipping, of £2,000 each, after 20 tonnes of crude oil was spilt during a tanker transfer on the Kittiwake platform.

In total, 1,226 tonnes of oil were spilt into the North Sea between 2000 and 2011, according to Decc’s archives. Decc said there is no “volume threshold” determining whether a company will be prosecuted over a spill at sea, although a spill of less than five tonnes is unlikely to go to court.

A tonne of crude oil is broadly equivalent to seven barrels, or, more precisely, 1,136 litres.

Decc said its inspectors, all of whom have enforcement powers, judge each case separately to assess the circumstances and the seriousness of the alleged offence.

Slightly different arrangements exist in Scotland from those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, for pursuing a prosecution.

A Decc spokesman said: “The UK has one of the toughest and most successful oil and gas regimes in the world and we work closely with industry to ensure the highest standards of environmental protection are in place and enforced.

“There are a number of enforcement options available to Decc, with court action reserved for serious offences. On the rare occasions legal proceedings have been deemed necessary, it is for the court to decide the level of fines to hand down.”

Environmental campaigners said it was worrying that Decc viewed itself as operating the global gold standard of offshore regulation, especially as oil companies were now pressing for permission to drill in extreme and vulnerable environments such as the Arctic.

Vicky Wyatt, a Greenpeace campaigner, said: “Ministers and oil companies can spout all the carefully crafted quotes they like to tell us how safe drilling at sea is. But while they’re spouting these words, their rigs are all too often spouting oil into our oceans. The government should hit these companies who pollute the oceans in this way with meaningful fines.

“A few grand is not even a slap on the wrist for companies who pocket millions of pounds every hour.

“It’s both staggering and wrong that some of these companies are now also drilling in the fragile and pristine Arctic, where a similar oil leak would be catastrophic.”

Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/25/oil-companies-north-sea-spills

Greenpeace shuts down 74 Shell stations in UK to protest Arctic drilling

by | Jul 16, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Obstruction & Occupation

By Laurie Tuffrey / The Guardian

Greenpeace activists shut down 74 Shell petrol stations in Edinburgh and London in a protest against the company’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic that saw 24 campaigners arrested on Monday.

The campaigners are attempting to shut off petrol to London’s 105 Shell stations and Edinburgh’s 14. Seventy-one have been closed in London and three in Edinburgh.

There have been 24 confirmed arrests, 18 in London and six in Edinburgh. The police in Edinburgh have reportedly parked cars outside all Shell stations across the capital.

Protesters have scaled the roof of the Shell station on Queenstown Road near Battersea Park in London and on Dalry Road in Edinburgh, with police and fire crews attending the scene in Edinburgh.

Activists arrived at the Battersea Park branch at 6.45am and used the station’s barriers to close down the forecourt. They have since covered the Shell sign with a Save the Arctic banner and positioned a life-sized polar bear model on the station’s roof.

The activists are shutting down the stations by using an emergency shut-off switch to stop petrol going to the pumps and then removing a fuse to delay it being switched on again. The organisation has since posted a picture of an activist posting one of the fuses to Shell’s head of Arctic drilling, with the message: “We’re being careful not to destroy property. Even the carefully removed components will go back to Shell.”

The protest is part of Greenpeace’s Save the Arctic campaign, which is aiming to prevent oil drilling and industrial fishing in the Arctic by having the region recognised as a world park. The organisation understands that Shell is going to begin drilling in the Alaskan Arctic in the coming weeks, with the Russian oil company Gazprom also due to work in the region.

The campaign group’s website is running a TV talkshow-style live broadcast covering the protest and showing interviews and videos about the Arctic campaign.

Sara Ayech, a campaigner at the Battersea Park station, said: “It’s time to draw a line in the ice and tell Shell to stop. That’s why today we’re going to shut down all of Shell’s petrol stations in the capital cities of London and Edinburgh. We’ve got dozens of people who will hit over 100 Shell garages throughout the day.”

Graham Thompson is another campaigner who helped shut down the station: “The staff were very pleasant and very reasonable. Obviously they’re not entirely happy about what’s going on but they’ve responded in a very civilised way.

“Obviously, we need to ratchet up the pressure, we need to let Shell know that this isn’t just a publicity campaign, we’re going to put pressure on them until they agree to stop what they’re doing,” said Thompson, commenting on future plans.

Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/16/greenpeace-activists-shell-petrol

Scientists say climate change responsible for recent extreme weather

by | Jul 10, 2012 | Climate Change

By Fiona Harvey / The Guardian

Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet’s climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research.

The findings make it much more likely that we will soon – within the next few years – be able to discern whether the extremely wet and cold summer and spring so far experienced in the UK this year are attributable to human causes rather than luck, according to the researchers.

Last year’s record warm November in the UK – the second hottest since records began in 1659 – was at least 60 times more likely to happen because of climate change than owing to natural variations in the earth’s weather systems, according to the peer-reviewed studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, and the Met Office in the UK. The devastating heatwave that blighted farmers in Texas in the US last year, destroying crop yields in another record “extreme weather event”, was about 20 times more likely to have happened owing to climate change than to natural variation.

Attributing individual weather events, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves, to human-induced climate change – rather than natural variation in the planet’s complex weather systems – has long been a goal of climate change scientists. But the difficulty of separating the causation of events from the background “noise” of the variability in the earth’s climate systems has until now made such attribution an elusive goal.

To attribute recent extreme weather events – rather than events 10 years ago or more – to human-caused climate change is a big advance, and will help researchers to provide better warnings of the likely effects of climate change in the near future. This is likely to have major repercussions on climate change policy and the ongoing efforts to adapt to the probable effects of global warming.

Peter Stott, of the UK’s Met Office, said: “We are much more confident about attributing [weather effects] to climate change. This is all adding up to a stronger and stronger picture of human influence on the climate.”

But the researchers also said that not every extreme weather event could be attributed to climate change. For instance, the extremely cold British winter of 2010-11 – starkly exemplified by the satellite picture of the UK and Ireland covered in white on Christmas Eve, as snow gripped the nations – was owing to variations in the systems of ocean and air circulation. Although such cold winters are now only half as likely as they were several decades ago, owing to a generally warming climate across the world, extremely low temperatures of this type are still possible depending on circulation effects – in this case, a negative North Atlantic Oscillation, the circulation system that is a key determinant of European weather.

Floods in Thailand last year, another example studied in the research, were also not judged to be due to climate change but to other factors such as changes in the management of local river systems.

Following and predicting temperature rises tends to be much less complex than predicting – and attributing the causes of – changes in precipitation patterns.

This year’s weather in the UK is an example. The Met Office has said the record wet conditions, which have brought serious flooding to regions from Yorkshire to the south-west, were owing to “a particularly disturbed jet stream”. That is the weather system across the north Atlantic that normally lies at higher latitudes during the British summer, but has been lower in latitude than usual for several years running, bringing wet and sometimes cold conditions. Some research has suggested that the massive melting of Arctic ice has been responsible for this effect – by changing the patterns of warmer and colder winds in the upper atmosphere.

But the key question – of whether man-made global warming is putting a dampener on British summers – will take several years to solve, according to Stott. “This is an open question in terms of research – it is too early days to be able to say,” he said.

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/10/extreme-weather-manmade-climate-change

Survey finds that 43% of young women in London were sexually harrassed in public last year

by | May 30, 2012 | Rape Culture

By Alexandra Topping / The Guardian

Sexual harassment is a persistent and dangerous problem on Britain’s streets, women’s charities have warned, as a poll reveals that more than four in 10 young women were sexually harassed in the capital over the last year.

A YouGov survey of 1,047 Londoners commissioned by End Violence Against Women Coalition (Evaw) found that 43% of women aged between 18 and 34 had experienced sexual harassment in public spaces in the last year.

Despite a growing intolerance of unwanted sexual attention, harassment was still very common and made women feel unsafe particularly when travelling alone, said Holly Dustin, director of Evaw.

“Sexual harassment is so ingrained that we barely notice it, but when you start talking to women almost every one has a horrible story to tell: it’s time for society to stand up and put a stop to it.”

Schoolchildren as young as 12 were being targeted, she said, with previous research for the group revealing that one in three girls in UK schools had experienced unwanted sexual contact.

Dismissing sexual harassment – from unwanted comments on the street about appearance to groping – as “harmless fun” or complimentary was dangerous, she added.

“Sexual harassment has a real impact on women’s lives, whether it is changing their behaviour or whether they feel safe on the streets,” she said.

“It feeds into a fear of rape and sexual violence and has a harmful effect on broader issues of equality.”

The poll also found 31% of women aged 18 to 24 experienced unwanted sexual attention on public transport and 21% of 25- to 34-year-olds. Overall, 5% of the women surveyed had experienced unwanted sexual contact on public transport.

Fiona Elvines, of South London Rape Crisis, said it was rare to meet a woman who had not suffered street harassment. “Women manage this harassment every day, in their routines and daily decisions – but it has an impact on their self-esteem and body image,” she said. “Women are saying that there are consequences to this, and it’s time to start listening to them.”

In a recent case, Lee Read, 23, was jailed for 28 months after groping four women and an 11-year-old girl. He put his coat over his lap before grabbing women’s legs. In the most serious attack, he grabbed the leg of a woman in her early 20s on the London underground, before forcibly grabbing her between the legs.

Campaigners say women globally are increasingly challenging unwanted sexual attention, using social media to bring harassers to account. Vicky Simister, the founding director of Ash – the UK Anti Street Harassment Campaign, said the issue was not restricted to London and called for a national survey. Authorities could take steps to make a significant difference to women’s safety, she added.

“Local councils and the police need to convey a strong message that this behaviour will not be tolerated by perpetrators. A good example was the ‘Flirt/Harass: Real Men Know the Difference’ poster campaign by Lambeth council in partnership with the Metropolitan police, which conveyed a no-tolerance message.”

Hollaback – a website where women who have received unwanted sexual attention or harassment can share stories or photographs of their harassers – has activists in 50 cities in 17 countries around the world.

“Whether it is unwanted sleazy comments or violent sexual assault, street harassment is an epidemic in London,” said Byrony Beynon, a co-director of Hollaback London. “But there is definitely a groundswell of people saying this is not on, it is not acceptable. Women are taking back the power they felt was taken away from them in that moment of harassment.”

The organisations are calling for a public awareness campaign on transport networks, similar to signs that discourage passengers from eating smelly food or putting feet on seats. “We are asking for training for transport staff to help them deal with these incidents and serious police intervention when it is needed,” said Dustin of Evaw. “But we are also asking for the wider community to recognise this is not acceptable and speak out against it when they see it happening.”

From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/may/25/four-10-women-sexually-harassed

Nuclear waste contaminating hundreds of sites in the UK, investigation reveals

by | May 3, 2012 | Toxification

By Rob Edwards / The Guardian

Hundreds of sites across England and Wales could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, according to a new government report.

Up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are, says a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), released last month, but previously unreported.

This is far higher than previous official estimates, with evidence from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last December suggesting that there were just 15 sites in the UK contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.

The MoD has come under fire from former prime minister Gordon Brown for trying to evade responsibility for cleaning up the contamination it has caused. His constituency in Fife, north of Edinburgh, includes one of the most notorious examples of radioactive pollution at Dalgety Bay.

In the past year, the MoD has realised that there are others areas of radioactive contamination across the country that may need to be cleaned up, Brown said. “They’ve started to use their lawyers to get out of what is, in the first place, I think, a moral responsibility and in the second place, will become a legal responsibility.”

The MoD has begun a year-long investigation of the contamination at Dalgety Bay to try and avoid it becoming the first place in the UK to be legally designated as radioactive contaminated land. More than 2,500 radioactive hotspots have been found on the foreshore in the past 22 years, one-third of them since last September.

Brown has also criticised the failure to act on a 1958 Cabinet report uncovered by BBC Radio 4’s Face the Facts, to be broadcast at 12.30pm on Wednesday. The previously secret report by a group of radiation experts urged ministers to control the disposal of the radium painted on dials of military planes to make them visible in the dark.

“There may be undesirably high levels of radiation near these dumps,” warned the Cabinet report. “Records of burials and of burial sites should be kept and handed on to future users of the land.”

But this was not done at Dalgety Bay, Brown said. “The truth is that, at that point, someone did know that there was a potential problem. Someone should have then passed it to the Ministry of Defence, and urged them to take the appropriate action.”

Former environment minister Michael Meacher MP said he ordered officials to identify and produce clean-up plans for all the contaminated sites in 1997. “I am astonished and deeply concerned that that does not appear to have happened,” he told the BBC.

Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/02/radioactive-waste-contaminating-uk-sites