This blog is entitled "Save the planet movement" because it is - as it says. All the contents of this blogsite is intended to serve the needed knowledge required by anyone concerned in doing his part in saving the planet.
Reports say black-clad demonstrators broke off from a crowd of peaceful protesters at the G20 summit in Toronto, torching a police cruiser in the financial district and smashing windows with baseball bats and hammers.
Around 10 thousand people took part in the protests against those summits - more than six hundred of them were arrested after rallies turned violent. The demonstators accuse the leaders of the world's largest economies of turning a blind eye to the problems of those who are in need. And many of the protestors say the local security crackdown was a violation of their rights.
A project based on a fallacious assumption about biofuels. Patrick Noble
The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) has just published what seems its definitive Zero Carbon Britain Report [1].
The report is based on the following assumption: If biomass is burned, the chemistry is more or less reversed, and the original energy and raw material (C02 and water) are released. There is then no net gain or loss of CO2, which is why biological fuels are considered to be “Carbon neutral”.
Unfortunately, this assumption is true only if no fossil fuel energy is expended in growing the biomass, in producing the fertilizers, pesticides and other chemical inputs, does not involve destroying natural carbon sinks and creating huge carbon sources by cutting down forests and turning other natural ecosystems into agricultural land, and so on; not to mention the displacement of indigenous peoples and decimation of biodiversity (see [2, 3] Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits, SiS 33, ‘Land Rush’ as Threats to Food Security Intensify, SiS 46; and many other ISIS articles dealing with the topic).
But someone must have said this at a Beautiful Person’s party, so now it is generally accepted, and by most of my friends. More to the point, The Centre for Alternative Land Use, the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, and even the IPCC assume it is true. (The Institute of Science in Society is one notable exception (see its comprehensive reports [4. 5] Green Energies - 100% Renewable by 2050 and Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free .)
Consequently, every chart, graph and conclusion of the CAT report is suspect. CAT’s “sequestration sink” will actually empty a little more at each harvest, creating annual losses of CO2 to the atmosphere. CAT’s “biological fields” are emphatically not “carbon neutral”.
The terrifying thought is that the Welsh Assembly is adopting Zero Carbon Britain as a blue print for Zero Carbon Wales. That has galvanised me to speak out and sound a warning that we could well end up instead with a Dust Bowl Britain.
I wrote about this a couple of years ago, immediately after CAT’s first Zero Carbon Britain report was released [6], and sent it to the authors, but got no acknowledgement. Nothing has changed in principle, although the details have become more sophisticated. I use the old report for analysis here, as it deals more specifically with acreage, rotation and exposes the fallacy of CAT’s underlying assumption more clearly.
The old report says that there are 18m hectares of agricultural land in Britain, and proposes what many may agree to be necessary: a reduction of livestock numbers, an increase in arable and intensive horticultural land and an increase in woodland, at the expense of permanent pastures (6 m ha down to 1 m ha) and rough grazing (6 m ha down to 2 m ha).
However, the report also suggests that 4m ha of short and longer rotation woodland be burnt for energy and that a third of the arable rotation (Rape and Miscanthus) should also be burnt. That means the output of 40.5 percent of the agricultural land of Britain is to be combusted. There is no suggestion as to what would replace the combusted nutrients and minerals lost to the land, though it mentions that “organic methods” will increase carbon sequestration. Under the CAT agricultural regime, British agricultural land will move inexorably towards desert and life in the soils will be annually reduced, so less and less carbon is sequestered.
Read the rest of this report at the ISIS website: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/zeroCarbonBritainOrDustBowlBritain.php
Or read other reports about energy generation http://www.i-sis.org.uk/scienergy.php
It was treated as an oddball twist in the otherwise wrenching saga of the BP oil spill when Kevin Costner stepped forward to promote a device he said could work wonders in containing the spill's damage. But as Henry Fountain explains in the New York Times, the gadget in question — an oil-separating centrifuge — marks a major breakthrough in spill cleanup technology. And BP, after trial runs with the device, is ordering 32 more of the Costner-endorsed centrifuges to aid the Gulf cleanup.
The "Waterworld" actor has invested some $20 million and spent the past 15 years in developing the centrifuges. He helped found a manufacturing company, Ocean Therapy Solutions, to advance his brother's research in spill cleanup technology. In testimony before Congress this month, Costner walked through the device's operation—explaining how it spins oil-contaminated water at a rapid speed, so as to separate out the oil and capture it in a containment tank:
"Doug Suttles was the first guy to step up in the oil industry," Costner said at the presser, "and I'm really happy to say when he ordered 32 machines, it's a signal to the world, to the industry, where we need to be."
Suttles said the additional machines will be used to build four new deep-water systems: on two barges and two 280-foot supply boats.
"We tested it in some of the toughest environments we could find, and actually what it's done — it's quite robust," Suttles said. "This is real technology with real science behind it, and it's passed all of those tests." He added that Costner's device has proved effective at processing 128,000 barrels of water a day, which "can make a real difference to our spill response efforts."
In his congressional testimony, Costner recounted his struggle to effectively market the centrifuge. He explained that although the machines are quite effective, they can still leave trace amounts of oil in the treated water that exceeds current environmental regulations. Because of that regulatory hurdle, he said, he had great difficulty getting oil industry giants interested without first having the approval of the federal government.
It's true, as Fountain notes in the Times, that innovation on spill technology has been hobbled in part by the reach of federal regulation — though Fountain also notes that oil companies have elected to devote comparatively little money for researching cleanup devices in the intensely competitive industry.
Costner said that after the device was patented in 1993, he sought to overcome oil-company jitters by offering to allow U.S. oil concerns to use it on a trial basis. He'd extended the same offer to the Japanese government in 1997, he said, but got no takers there either.
— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.
Please Spread This Video across the Internet! Our Future depends on it! The Most Revealing Video to date! MUST SEE! "History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance." -- James Madison
The first person to distill gasoline from crude oil was Benjamin Sillman Jr., a chemist from the prestigious Yale University, who is credited with developing much of the Oil industry. Sillman, who later became a professor of chemistry at Yale was also a member of the Skull and Bones Fraternity. Secret Societies like Skull and Bones are breeding grounds for the concentration of wealth and power. They represent an Ivy League consolidation of bankers, politicians, intelligence agents, CEOs, and scientists who are generally willing to endorse policy favorable for the elite, including the control and mass use of oil as well as the suppression of alternative energies. The elites would love for people to focus on the bazaar rituals, since the occult provides the perfect distraction while networks of people are tapped and put into positions of power.
A perfect example of this would be the 2004 elections where George Bush and John Kerry, both members of Skull and Bones, were the only choices given to the American people. Even Obama has proven with the bailouts that he works for the interests of Wall Street and the international bankers and NOT the American people. Drill baby Drill is now Spill baby spill... Now that you understand a bit better about how things got the way they are, you should also understand that they don't have to be this way. There are solutions they've just been carefully hidden from the public view along with the root problems explained thus far.
And why not, we're talking about a system that makes these people $Billions and keeps them in control. On the one hand we could audit the Federal Reserve and try to get our system back to using sound money again. But that does nothing to fix the so called "energy crisis". On the other hand we could start the Clean Renewable Energy revolution and undermine the entire system from the inside out while saving the planet in the process. By taking out the foundation their entire house of cards is built upon... This is why Monopoly man J.P. Morgan told Nikola Tesla that he wouldn't fund anything he couldn't put a meter on." And this is also why alternative energy technologies and even the electric car have been violently suppressed by the establishment.
With your help, we can blow this case wide open... and the revolution can begin.
But it's going to take more than sending this video to everyone you know and simply exposing the fraud and manipulation we are under...
The real solutions can only come through new energy technologies. We're surrounded by a sea of energy. There's no energy crisis... If anything it's a crisis of ingenuity or creativity or imagination...
Books: "The Case Against the Fed" - Murray Rothbard "The best way to rob a bank is to own one" - William Black "Syndrome of Control" - Lindsay Williams "The Creature from Jekyll Island" - G. Edward Griffin "Tragedy and Hope" - Carol Quigley "Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of American Empire at the end of the Age of Oil" - Michael C. Ruppert "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" - Daniel Yergin
Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant on the film
The Deepwater Horizon disaster is not just an industrial accident – it is a violent wound inflicted on the Earth itself. In this special report from the Gulf coast, a leading author and activist shows how it lays bare the hubris at the heart of capitalism.
By Naomi Klein
June 19, 2010 "The Guardian" -- Everyone gathered for the town hall meeting had been repeatedly instructed to show civility to the gentlemen from BPand the federal government. These fine folks had made time in their busy schedules to come to a high school gymnasium on a Tuesday night in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, one of many coastal communities where brown poison was slithering through the marshes, part of what has come to be described as the largest environmental disaster in US history.
"Speak to others the way you would want to be spoken to," the chair of the meeting pleaded one last time before opening the floor for questions.
And for a while the crowd, mostly made up of fishing families, showed remarkable restraint. They listened patiently to Larry Thomas, a genial BP public relations flack, as he told them that he was committed to "doing better" to process their claims for lost revenue – then passed all the details off to a markedly less friendly subcontractor. They heard out the suit from the Environmental Protection Agency as he informed them that, contrary to what they have read about the lack of testing and the product being banned in Britain, the chemical dispersant being sprayed on the oil in massive quantities was really perfectly safe.
But patience started running out by the third time Ed Stanton, a coast guard captain, took to the podium to reassure them that "the coast guard intends to make sure that BP cleans it up".
"Put it in writing!" someone shouted out. By now the air conditioning had shut itself off and the coolers of Budweiser were running low. A shrimper named Matt O'Brien approached the mic. "We don't need to hear this anymore," he declared, hands on hips. It didn't matter what assurances they were offered because, he explained, "we just don't trust you guys!" And with that, such a loud cheer rose up from the floor you'd have thought the Oilers (the unfortunately named school football team) had scored a touchdown.
The showdown was cathartic, if nothing else. For weeks residents had been subjected to a barrage of pep talks and extravagant promises coming from Washington, Houston and London. Every time they turned on their TVs, there was the BP boss, Tony Hayward, offering his solemn word that he would "make it right". Or else it was President Barack Obama expressing his absolute confidence that his administration would "leave the Gulf coast in better shape than it was before", that he was "making sure" it "comes back even stronger than it was before this crisis".
It all sounded great. But for people whose livelihoods put them in intimate contact with the delicate chemistry of the wetlands, it also sounded completely ridiculous, painfully so. Once the oil coats the base of the marsh grass, as it had already done just a few miles from here, no miracle machine or chemical concoction could safely get it out. You can skim oil off the surface of open water, and you can rake it off a sandy beach, but an oiled marsh just sits there, slowly dying. The larvae of countless species for which the marsh is a spawning ground – shrimp, crab, oysters and fin fish – will be poisoned.
It was already happening. Earlier that day, I travelled through nearby marshes in a shallow water boat. Fish were jumping in waters encircled by white boom, the strips of thick cotton and mesh BP is using to soak up the oil. The circle of fouled material seemed to be tightening around the fish like a noose. Nearby, a red-winged blackbird perched atop a 2 metre (7ft) blade of oil-contaminated marsh grass. Death was creeping up the cane; the small bird may as well have been standing on a lit stick of dynamite.
And then there is the grass itself, or the Roseau cane, as the tall sharp blades are called. If oil seeps deeply enough into the marsh, it will not only kill the grass above ground but also the roots. Those roots are what hold the marsh together, keeping bright green land from collapsing into the Mississippi River delta and the Gulf of Mexico. So not only do places like Plaquemines Parish stand to lose their fisheries, but also much of the physical barrier that lessens the intensity of fierce storms like hurricane Katrina. Which could mean losing everything.
How long will it take for an ecosystem this ravaged to be "restored and made whole" as Obama's interior secretary has pledged to do? It's not at all clear that such a thing is remotely possible, at least not in a time frame we can easily wrap our heads around. The Alaskan fisheries have yet to fully recover from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and some species of fish never returned. Government scientists now estimate that as much as a Valdez-worth of oil may be entering the Gulf coastal waters every four days. An even worse prognosis emerges from the 1991 Gulf war spill, when an estimated 11m barrels of oil were dumped into the Persian Gulf – the largest spill ever. That oil entered the marshland and stayed there, burrowing deeper and deeper thanks to holes dug by crabs. It's not a perfect comparison, since so little clean-up was done, but according to a study conducted 12 years after the disaster, nearly 90% of the impacted muddy salt marshes and mangroves were still profoundly damaged.
We do know this. Far from being "made whole," the Gulf coast, more than likely, will be diminished. Its rich waters and crowded skies will be less alive than they are today. The physical space many communities occupy on the map will also shrink, thanks to erosion. And the coast's legendary culture will contract and wither. The fishing families up and down the coast do not just gather food, after all. They hold up an intricate network that includes family tradition, cuisine, music, art and endangered languages – much like the roots of grass holding up the land in the marsh. Without fishing, these unique cultures lose their root system, the very ground on which they stand. (BP, for its part, is well aware of the limits of recovery. The company's Gulf of Mexico regional oil spill response plan specifically instructs officials not to make "promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal". Which is no doubt why its officials consistently favour folksy terms like "make it right".)
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks). No amount of money – not BP's recently pledged $20bn (£13.5bn), not $100bn – can replace a culture that has lost its roots. And while our politicians and corporate leaders have yet to come to terms with these humbling truths, the people whose air, water and livelihoods have been contaminated are losing their illusions fast.
"Everything is dying," a woman said as the town hall meeting was finally coming to a close. "How can you honestly tell us that our Gulf is resilient and will bounce back? Because not one of you up here has a hint as to what is going to happen to our Gulf. You sit up here with a straight face and act like you know when you don't know."
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us. But as the BP disaster has revealed, nature is always more unpredictable than the most sophisticated mathematical and geological models imagine. During Thursday's congressional testimony, Hayward said: "The best minds and the deepest expertise are being brought to bear" on the crisis, and that, "with the possible exception of the space programme in the 1960s, it is difficult to imagine the gathering of a larger, more technically proficient team in one place in peacetime." And yet, in the face of what the geologist Jill Schneiderman has described as "Pandora's well", they are like the men at the front of that gymnasium: they act like they know, but they don't know.
BP's mission statement
In the arc of human history, the notion that nature is a machine for us to re-engineer at will is a relatively recent conceit. In her ground-breaking 1980 book The Death of Nature, the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant reminded readers that up until the 1600s, the Earth was alive, usually taking the form of a mother. Europeans – like indigenous people the world over – believed the planet to be a living organism, full of life-giving powers but also wrathful tempers. There were, for this reason, strong taboos against actions that would deform and desecrate "the mother", including mining.
The metaphor changed with the unlocking of some (but by no means all) of nature's mysteries during the scientific revolution of the 1600s. With nature now cast as a machine, devoid of mystery or divinity, its component parts could be dammed, extracted and remade with impunity. Nature still sometimes appeared as a woman, but one easily dominated and subdued. Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in the 1623 De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum that nature is to be "put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man".
Those words may as well have been BP's corporate mission statement. Boldly inhabiting what the company called "the energy frontier", it dabbled in synthesising methane-producing microbes and announced that "a new area of investigation" would be geoengineering. And of course it bragged that, at its Tiber prospect in the Gulf of Mexico, it now had "the deepest well ever drilled by the oil and gas industry" – as deep under the ocean floor as jets fly overhead.
Imagining and preparing for what would happen if these experiments in altering the building blocks of life and geology went wrong occupied precious little space in the corporate imagination. As we have all discovered, after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the company had no systems in place to effectively respond to this scenario. Explaining why it did not have even the ultimately unsuccessful containment dome waiting to be activated on shore, a BP spokesman, Steve Rinehart, said: "I don't think anybody foresaw the circumstance that we're faced with now." Apparently, it "seemed inconceivable" that the blowout preventer would ever fail – so why prepare?
This refusal to contemplate failure clearly came straight from the top. A year ago, Hayward told a group of graduate students at Stanford University that he has a plaque on his desk that reads: "If you knew you could not fail, what would you try?" Far from being a benign inspirational slogan, this was actually an accurate description of how BP and its competitors behaved in the real world. In recent hearings on Capitol Hill, congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled representatives from the top oil and gas companies on the revealing ways in which they had allocated resources. Over three years, they had spent "$39bn to explore for new oil and gas. Yet, the average investment in research and development for safety, accident prevention and spill response was a paltry $20m a year."
These priorities go a long way towards explaining why the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the federal government for the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well reads like a Greek tragedy about human hubris. The phrase "little risk" appears five times. Even if there is a spill, BP confidently predicts that, thanks to "proven equipment and technology", adverse affects will be minimal. Presenting nature as a predictable and agreeable junior partner (or perhaps subcontractor), the report cheerfully explains that should a spill occur, "Currents and microbial degradation would remove the oil from the water column or dilute the constituents to background levels". The effects on fish, meanwhile, "would likely be sublethal" because of "the capability of adult fish and shellfish to avoid a spill [and] to metabolise hydrocarbons". (In BP's telling, rather than a dire threat, a spill emerges as an all-you-can-eat buffet for aquatic life.)
Best of all, should a major spill occur, there is, apparently, "little risk of contact or impact to the coastline" because of the company's projected speedy response (!) and "due to the distance [of the rig] to shore" – about 48 miles (77km). This is the most astonishing claim of all. In a gulf that often sees winds of more than 70km an hour, not to mention hurricanes, BP had so little respect for the ocean's capacity to ebb and flow, surge and heave, that it did not think oil could make a paltry 77km trip. (Last week, a shard of the exploded Deepwater Horizon showed up on a beach in Florida, 306km away.)
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry's four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. "It's better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way," she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, "in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty". By the time the infamous "Drill Baby Drill" Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.
Obama, eventually, gave in, as he invariably does. With cosmic bad timing, just three weeks before the Deepwater Horizon blew up, the president announced he would open up previously protected parts of the country to offshore drilling. The practice was not as risky as he had thought, he explained. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." That wasn't enough for Sarah Palin, however, who sneered at the Obama administration's plans to conduct more studies before drilling in some areas. "My goodness, folks, these areas have been studied to death," she told the Southern Republican leadership conference in New Orleans, now just 11 days before the blowout. "Let's drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall!" And there was much rejoicing.
In his congressional testimony, Hayward said: "We and the entire industry will learn from this terrible event." And one might well imagine that a catastrophe of this magnitude would indeed instil BP executives and the "Drill Now" crowd with a new sense of humility. There are, however, no signs that this is the case. The response to the disaster – at the corporate and governmental levels – has been rife with the precise brand of arrogance and overly sunny predictions that created the disaster in the first place.
The ocean is big, she can take it, we heard from Hayward in the early days. While spokesman John Curry insisted that hungry microbes would consume whatever oil was in the water system, because "nature has a way of helping the situation". But nature has not been playing along. The deep-sea gusher has bust out of all BP's top hats, containment domes, and junk shots. The ocean's winds and currents have made a mockery of the lightweight booms BP has laid out to absorb the oil. "We told them," said Byron Encalade, the president of the Louisiana Oysters Association. "The oil's gonna go over the booms or underneath the bottom." Indeed it did. The marine biologist Rick Steiner, who has been following the clean up closely, estimates that "70% or 80% of the booms are doing absolutely nothing at all".
And then there are the controversial chemical dispersants: more than 1.3m gallons dumped with the company's trademark "what could go wrong?" attitude. As the angry residents at the Plaquemines Parish town hall rightly point out, few tests had been conducted, and there is scant research about what this unprecedented amount of dispersed oil will do to marine life. Nor is there a way to clean up the toxic mixture of oil and chemicals below the surface. Yes, fast multiplying microbes do devour underwater oil – but in the process they also absorb the water's oxygen, creating a whole new threat to marine life.
BP had even dared to imagine that it could prevent unflattering images of oil-covered beaches and birds from escaping the disaster zone. When I was on the water with a TV crew, for instance, we were approached by another boat whose captain asked, ""Y'all work for BP?" When we said no, the response – in the open ocean – was "You can't be here then". But of course these heavy-handed tactics, like all the others, have failed. There is simply too much oil in too many places. "You cannot tell God's air where to flow and go, and you can't tell water where to flow and go," I was told by Debra Ramirez. It was a lesson she had learned from living in Mossville, Louisiana, surrounded by 14 emission-spewing petrochemical plants, and watching illness spread from neighbour to neighbour.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop. The company's claim that it will complete relief wells by the end of August – repeated by Obama in his Oval Office address – is seen by many scientists as a bluff. The procedure is risky and could fail, and there is a real possibility that the oil could continue to leak for years.
The flow of denial shows no sign of abating either. Louisiana politicians indignantly oppose Obama's temporary freeze on deepwater drilling, accusing him of killing the one big industry left standing now that fishing and tourism are in crisis. Palin mused on Facebook that "no human endeavour is ever without risk", while Texas Republican congressman John Culberson described the disaster as a "statistical anomaly". By far the most sociopathic reaction, however, comes from veteran Washington commentator Llewellyn King: rather than turning away from big engineering risks, we should pause in "wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld".
Make the bleeding stop
Thankfully, many are taking a very different lesson from the disaster, standing not in wonder at humanity's power to reshape nature, but at our powerlessness to cope with the fierce natural forces we unleash. There is something else too. It is the feeling that the hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us. And thanks to BP's live camera feed, we can all watch the Earth's guts gush forth, in real time, 24 hours a day.
John Wathen, a conservationist with the Waterkeeper Alliance, was one of the few independent observers to fly over the spill in the early days of the disaster. After filming the thick red streaks of oil that the coast guard politely refers to as "rainbow sheen", he observed what many had felt: "The Gulf seems to be bleeding." This imagery comes up again and again in conversations and interviews. Monique Harden, an environmental rights lawyer in New Orleans, refuses to call the disaster an "oil spill" and instead says, "we are haemorrhaging". Others speak of the need to "make the bleeding stop". And I was personally struck, flying over the stretch of ocean where the Deepwater Horizon sank with the US Coast Guard, that the swirling shapes the oil made in the ocean waves looked remarkably like cave drawings: a feathery lung gasping for air, eyes staring upwards, a prehistoric bird. Messages from the deep.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
The experience of following the oil's progress through the ecosystem is a kind of crash course in deep ecology. Every day we learn more about how what seems to be a terrible problem in one isolated part of the world actually radiates out in ways most of us could never have imagined. One day we learn that the oil could reach Cuba – then Europe. Next we hear that fishermen all the way up the Atlantic in Prince Edward Island, Canada, are worried because the Bluefin tuna they catch off their shores are born thousands of miles away in those oil-stained Gulf waters. And we learn, too, that for birds, the Gulf coast wetlands are the equivalent of a busy airport hub – everyone seems to have a stopover: 110 species of migratory songbirds and 75% of all migratory US waterfowl.
It's one thing to be told by an incomprehensible chaos theorist that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It's another to watch chaos theory unfold before your eyes. Carolyn Merchant puts the lesson like this: "The problem as BP has tragically and belatedly discovered is that nature as an active force cannot be so confined." Predictable outcomes are unusual within ecological systems, while "unpredictable, chaotic events [are] usual". And just in case we still didn't get it, a few days ago, a bolt of lightning struck a BP ship like an exclamation mark, forcing it to suspend its containment efforts. And don't even mention what a hurricane would do to BP's toxic soup.
There is, it must be stressed, something uniquely twisted about this particular path to enlightenment. They say that Americans learn where foreign countries are by bombing them. Now it seems we are all learning about nature's circulatory systems by poisoning them.
In the late 90s, an isolated indigenous group in Colombia captured world headlines with an almost Avatar-esque conflict. From their remote home in the Andean cloud forests, the U'wa let it be known that if Occidental Petroleum carried out plans to drill for oil on their territory, they would commit mass ritual suicide by jumping off a cliff. Their elders explained that oil is part of ruiria, "the blood of Mother Earth". They believe that all life, including their own, flows from ruiria, so pulling out the oil would bring on their destruction. (Oxy eventually withdrew from the region, saying there wasn't as much oil as it had previously thought.)
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth "sacred" is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend. When something is sacred, it demands that we proceed with caution. Even awe.
If we are absorbing this lesson at long last, the implications could be profound. Public support for increased offshore drilling is dropping precipitously, down 22% from the peak of the "Drill Now" frenzy. The issue is not dead, however. It is only a matter of time before the Obama administration announces that, thanks to ingenious new technology and tough new regulations, it is now perfectly safe to drill in the deep sea, even in the Arctic, where an under-ice clean up would be infinitely more complex than the one underway in the Gulf. But perhaps this time we won't be so easily reassured, so quick to gamble with the few remaining protected havens.
Same goes for geoengineering. As climate change negotiations wear on, we should be ready to hear more from Dr Steven Koonin, Obama's undersecretary of energy for science. He is one of the leading proponents of the idea that climate change can be combated with techno tricks like releasing sulphate and aluminium particles into the atmosphere – and of course it's all perfectly safe, just like Disneyland! He also happens to be BP's former chief scientist, the man who just 15 months ago was still overseeing the technology behind BP's supposedly safe charge into deepwater drilling. Maybe this time we will opt not to let the good doctor experiment with the physics and chemistry of the Earth, and choose instead to reduce our consumption and shift to renewable energies that have the virtue that, when they fail, they fail small. As US comedian Bill Maher put it, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash."
The most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward's "If you knew you could not fail" credo, the precautionary principle holds that "when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health" we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely. Perhaps we can even get Hayward a new desk plaque to contemplate as he signs compensation cheques. "You act like you know, but you don't know."
Naomi Klein visited the Gulf coast with a film-crew from Fault Lines, a documentary programme hosted by Avi Lewis on al-Jazeera English Television. She was a consultant on the film
Mudslides swept away shacks in Rio's hillside slums, turning the city's main lake and the sea brown during the round-the-clock heavy rains. Morning flights in and out of the city of six million people - which will host the 2014 soccer World Cup and the 2016 Olympics - were canceled or seriously delayed and many neighborhoods were cut off from power and transport.
Most victims died in more than 180 mudslides, authorities said. A spokesman for Rio's fire service said at least 40 injured people were taken to hospitals as the search went on for others reported missing.
"The situation is critical. Roads are flooded and blocked," Mayor Eduardo Paes said. "We recommend people stay at home."
Paes told reporters at least 26 people had died in the Rio metropolitan area. The fire service said a total of 89 people were killed across the state.
The mayor said 10,000 houses remained at risk, mostly in the slums where about a fifth of Rio's people live, often in precarious shacks that are highly vulnerable to heavy rains.
The downpour, which began late on Monday, is the worst Rio has recorded in 30 years.
The southern hemisphere summer has been particularly hot and rainy in Rio this year.
In January, at least 76 people died in flooding and mudslides in Brazil's most-populous states of Rio, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. Then, dozens of people were killed in a landslide at a beach resort between Rio and the port city of Santos.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva canceled an event on Tuesday where he was due to inaugurate public works projects.
"No one could cope with the rain that we are seeing, which is the worst in Rio's history," he said.
AFP – Myanmar students cross a river on a wooden bridge on their way to school in Insein township, Yangon. … 1 hr 27 mins ago
YANGON, Myanmar – The military and humanitarian groups are aiding people in northwestern Myanmar, where days of flooding and landslides killed more than 60 people and affected 15,000 families, state media and the United Nations reported Monday.
In Rakhine state, the torrential rains triggered floods and mudslides that washed away homes, damaged schools and bridges and caused 63 deaths, according to Monday's official count.
The death toll could rise because villagers were returning to homes on steep hills that still are vulnerable to landslides, said a U.N. official, who declined to be named since he was not authorized to speak with the media.
The New Light of Myanmar newspaper said local military commanders in the junta-ruled nation and authorities aided victims and inspected repair and recovery efforts in the state's seriously hit Buthidaung and Maungdaw regions.
The government, United Nations and other humanitarian organizations have provided clothing, medicine, household utensils, food and cash for the victims, state media and a U.N. press release said.
Many of the flood victims were housed at schools and temporary shelters since the rains began June 13 and did not end until midweek.
The U.N. said up to 15,000 families were affected, while state media said only more than 2,000 people suffered from the flooding.
Flooding is common in Asia during the monsoon season that typically starts in late May.
Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar in May 2008, leaving more than 140,000 people dead or missing.
In the long forgotten past... before Petrol and Crude Oil dominancy... there were already Hydrogen Power Carriages as well as Electric Vehicles.
But for some reason, the Petrol and Oil Barrons somewhat manage to have establish control and a cartel to monopolize the world with their lot.
http://l.yimg.com/g/images/spaceball.gif
The first Gasoline powered car was introduced a century later during the introduction of steam powered/ hydrogen powered and electric powered vehicles.
The existence of these vehicles were somewhat suppressed from the automotive history books. They just resurfaced lately after the HHO buzz came into the public in the early 90's but more significantly in 2006 onwards.
If we examine History.... there was a disaster in the past involving hydrogen. "The Hindenburg Disaster"
I personally think it was a very unsafe way to use hydrogen...
At any rate, this disaster was magnified and was also capitalized by the - elites... to push petrol economy and shove it into the throat of each and every country in the world.
Eventually, every mechanical device using or producing hydrogen or steam gradually died off into the abyss of human memory.
If you are aware of how the big corporations are making a hype about Electric Vehicles and Plug in Hybrids for the past 3 years... you may be able to connect the dots...
9/11... War on Oil rich Middle Eastern Countries?... now BP Oil disaster?.... hmmmm....
If my radars are correct, we will be seeing a move to replace the total automotive infrastructure globally.
Even if we are able to build a very efficient internal combustion engine that can already run with water and plant based oil... the Big Elites will kill this concept and push a new world infrastructure with computer based electric vehicles.
RFID chips on each and every person, device and vehicle... Every thing connected to the grid of the GREED!
While the focus has been on the BP oil rig explosion and crude oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP’s other spill of more than 100,000 gallons of oil in Alaska has been completely overshadowed.
The Alaska Pipeline is owned by BP and is dangerously corroded and unmaintained. This neglect caused the pipe to burst and spill gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska.
“No one is watching,” said investigative journalist Greg Palast.
BP is not the worst in the oil business said Palast, citing Chevron's issues in the Amazon and Shell’s past spills in the Niger Delta. However, BP has a long history of neglect.
“They [BP] were greatly involved and greatly compliable in the spill of the Exxon Valdez. It had Exxon’s name on the ship, but it was British Petroleum that was in charge of preventing that oil from hitting shore. They didn’t do it. They were in charge of having the emergency spill equipment around the Exxon Valdez, they didn’t have it. Just like in the Gulf, they said they could handle a spill. They couldn’t," said Palast.
Palast said BP operates under a “culture of neglect driven by penny pinching” where a desire for increased production and lower costs has driven the company to cut corners where safety is concerned.
“They [BP] have gone after whistleblowers they don’t like,” said Palast.
BP targets those who recommend and encourage spending on safety. Palast said they have continually used political pressure to fire government regulators whom they see as a threat. BP has even gone to the extreme, using ex-CIA agents to tap phones and search houses.
“A US judge who heard about this activity said that British Petroleum was acting like Nazis,” said Palast.
Palast said that if BP listened to the whistleblowers, these type of incidents would not happen.
“But of course if they listened they would have to spend some money to fix things,” said Palast.
Palast continued, “We have a big problem with oil companies. They are worth so much that they feel they have immunity and impunity. […] And baby, in politics it’s money that talks!”
Tony Hayward AP – BP CEO Tony Hayward is sworn in on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 17, 2010, prior to before … By CALVIN WOODWARD and FREDERIC J. FROMMER, Associated Press Writers Calvin Woodward And Frederic J. Frommer, Associated Press Writers – 2 hrs 16 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Channeling the nation's anger, lawmakers pilloried BP's boss in a withering day of judgment Thursday for the oil company at the center of the Gulf calamity. Unflinching, BP chief executive Tony Hayward said he was out of the loop on decisions at the well and coolly asserted, "I'm not stonewalling."
That infuriated members of Congress even more, Democrats and Republicans alike.
Testifying as oil still surged into the Gulf of Mexico and coated ever more coastal land and marshes, Hayward declared "I am so devastated with this accident," "deeply sorry" and "so distraught."
Yet the oil man disclaimed knowledge of any of the myriad problems on and under the Deepwater Horizon rig before the deadly explosion, telling a congressional hearing he had only heard about the well earlier in April, the month of the accident, when the BP drilling team told him it had found oil.
"With respect, sir, we drill hundreds of wells a year around the world," Hayward told Republican Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas.
"Yes, I know," Burgess shot back. "That's what scaring me right now."
Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., told the CEO: "I think you're copping out. You're the captain of the ship." Democrats were similarly, if more predictably, livid.
"BP blew it," said Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., chairman of the House investigations panel that held the hearing. "You cut corners to save money and time."
The verbal onslaught had been anticipated for days and unfolded at a nearly relentless pace. Hayward had one seemingly sympathetic listener, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, who apologized for the pressure President Barack Obama had put on BP to create a compensation fund. Hours later, after criticism from Republicans and Democrats as well as the White House, Barton backed off and apologized for his apology.
With multiple investigations continuing and primary efforts in the Gulf focused on stopping the leak, there was little chance the nation would learn much from Hayward's appearance about what caused the disaster. Yet even modest expectations were not met as the CEO told lawmakers at every turn that he was not tuned in to operations at the well.
He said his underlings made the decisions and federal regulators were responsible for vetting them.
Hayward spoke slowly and calmly in his clipped British accent as he sought to deflect accusations — based on internal BP documents obtained by congressional investigators — that BP chose a particular well design that was riskier but cheaper by at least $7 million.
"I wasn't involved in any of that decision-making," he said.
Were bad decisions made about the cement?
"I wasn't part of the decision-making process," he said. "I'm not a cement engineer, I'm afraid."
Also, "I am not a drilling engineer" and "I'm not an oceanographic scientist."
What about those reports that BP had been experiencing a variety of problems and delays at the well?
"I had no prior knowledge."
At one point a frustrated Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, interrupted the CEO. "You're kicking the can down the road and acting as if you had nothing to do with this company and nothing to do with the decisions. I find that irresponsible."
Hayward quietly insisted: "I'm not stonewalling. I simply was not involved in the decision-making process."
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., voiced the committee's frustrations as the afternoon wore on. "You're really insulting our intelligence," he said. "I am thoroughly disgusted."
Waxman told the BP executive that in his committee's review of 30,000 items, there was "not a single e-mail or document that you paid even the slightest attention to the dangers at this well."
Burgess slammed both the CEO and the government regulators for a risky drilling plan that he said never should have been brought forward.
"Shame on you, Mr. Hayward, for submitting it," Burgess said, "but shame on us for accepting it, which is simply a rubber stamp."
In a jarring departure that caught fellow Republicans by surprise, Barton, the top GOP member of the panel, used his opening statement to apologize — twice — for the pressure put on the company by President Barack Obama to contribute to a compensation fund for people in the afflicted Gulf of Mexico states.
Barton said the U.S. has "a due process system" to assess such damages, and he decried the $20 billion fund that BP agreed to Wednesday at the White House as a "shakedown" and "slush fund." He told Hayward, "I'm not speaking for anybody else. But I apologize."
He later retracted his apologies to BP, then apologized anew — this time for calling the fund a "shakedown." "BP should bear the full financial responsibility for the accident," he said, and "fully compensate those families and businesses that have been hurt by this accident."
Barton's earlier remarks were clearly an embarrassment for the party. House Republican leaders John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mike Pence issued a statement asserting: "Congressman Barton's statements this morning were wrong. BP itself has acknowledged that responsibility for the economic damages lies with them and has offered an initial pledge of $20 billion dollars for that purpose."
Since 1990, oil and gas industry political action committees and employees have given more than $1.4 million to Barton's campaigns, the most of any House member during that period, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
As Hayward began to testify, a protester disrupted the hearing and was forcibly removed from the room by Capitol police. The woman was identified as Diane Wilson, 61, a shrimper from Seadrift, Texas, near the Gulf Coast. Her hands stained black, she shouted to Hayward from the back of the room: "You need to be charged with a crime."
Stupak, the subcommittee chairman and a former Michigan state trooper, noted that over the past five years, 26 people have died and 700 have been injured in BP accidents — including the Gulf spill, a pipeline spill in Alaska and a refinery explosion in Texas.
Hayward argued that safety had always been his top priority and "that is why I am so devastated with this accident." When he became CEO in 2007, Hayward said he would focus "like a laser" on safety, a phrase he repeated on Thursday.
Rep. John Sullivan, R-Okla., questioned BP's commitment to safety.
BP had 760 safety violations in the past five years and paid $373 million in fines, Sullivan said. By contrast, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips each had eight safety violations and ExxonMobil just one, Sullivan said.
"How in the heck do you explain that?" he asked Hayward. Hayward said most of those violations predated his tenure as CEO. "We have made major changes in the company over the last three to four years," he said.
An estimated 73.5 million to 126 million gallons of oil has come out of the breached wellhead, whether into the water or captured.
The reservoir that feeds the well still holds about 2 billion gallons of oil, according to the first public estimate Hayward has given of the size of the undersea oil field.
That means the reservoir is believed to still hold 94 percent to 97 percent of its oil. At the current flow rate, it would take from two years to nearly four years for all the oil to be drained from it.
___
Associated Press writers Tom Raum, Matthew Daly, H. Josef Hebert, Seth Borenstein, Matt Apuzzo, Eileen Sullivan and Ben Feller in Washington and Harry Weber in Houston contributed to this report.
By JAY REEVES, JOHN FLESHER and TAMARA LUSH, Associated Press Writers –Wed Jun 16, 3:49 pm ET
GULF SHORES, Ala. – Dolphins and sharks are showing up in surprisingly shallow water just off the Florida coast. Mullets, crabs, rays and small fish congregate by the thousands off an Alabama pier. Birds covered in oil are crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.
Marine scientists studying the effects of the BP disaster are seeing some strange — and troubling — phenomena.
Fish and other wildlife are fleeing the oil out in the Gulf and clustering in cleaner waters along the coast. But that is not the hopeful sign it might appear to be, researchers say.
The animals' presence close to shore means their usual habitat is badly polluted, and the crowding could result in mass die-offs as fish run out of oxygen. Also, the animals could easily get devoured by predators.
"A parallel would be: Why are the wildlife running to the edge of a forest on fire? There will be a lot of fish, sharks, turtles trying to get out of this water they detect is not suitable," said Larry Crowder, a Duke University marine biologist.
The nearly two-month-old oil spill has created an environmental catastrophe unparalleled in U.S. history as tens of millions of gallons of have spewed into the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Scientists are seeing some unusual things as they try to understand the effects on thousands of species of marine life.
Day by day, scientists in boats tally up dead birds, sea turtles and other animals, but the toll is surprisingly small given the size of the disaster. The latest figures show that 783 birds, 353 turtles and 41 mammals have died — numbers that pale in comparison to what happened after the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989, when 250,000 birds and 2,800 otters are believed to have died.
Researchers say there are several reasons for the relatively small death toll: The vast nature of the spill means scientists are able to locate only a small fraction of the dead animals. Many will never be found after sinking to the bottom of the sea or getting scavenged by other marine life. And large numbers of birds are meeting their deaths deep in the Louisiana marshes where they seek refuge from the onslaught of oil.
"That is their understanding of how to protect themselves," said Doug Zimmer, spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
For nearly four hours Monday, a three-person crew with Greenpeace cruised past delicate islands and mangrove-dotted inlets in Barataria Bay off southern Louisiana. They saw dolphins by the dozen frolicking in the oily sheen and oil-tinged pelicans feeding their young. But they spotted no dead animals.
"I think part of the reason why we're not seeing more yet is that the impacts of this crisis are really just beginning," Greenpeace marine biologist John Hocevar said.
As for the fish, locals are seeing large schools hanging around piers where fishing has been banned; apparently the fish feel safer now that they are not being disturbed by fishermen.
Also, researchers believe fish are swimming closer to shore because the water is cleaner and more abundant in oxygen. Father out in the Gulf, researchers say, the spill is not only tainting the water with oil but also depleting oxygen levels.
A similar scenario occurs during "dead zone" periods — the time during summer months when oxygen becomes so depleted that fish race toward shore in large numbers. Sometimes, so many fish gather close to the shoreline off Mobile that locals rush to the beach with tubs and nets to reap the harvest.
But this latest shore migration could prove deadly.
First, more oil could eventually wash ashore and overwhelm the fish. They could also become trapped between the slick and the beach, leading to increased competition for oxygen in the water and causing them to die as they run out of air.
"Their ability to avoid it may be limited in the long term, especially if in near-shore refuges they're crowding inclose to shore, and oil continues to come in. At some point they'll get trapped," Crowder said. "It could lead to die-offs."
The fish could also fall victim to predators such as sharks and seabirds. Already there have been increased shark sightings in shallow waters along the Gulf Coast.
The counting of dead wildlife in the Gulf is more than an academic exercise; the deaths will help determine how much BP pays in damages.
Roger Helm, chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service's contaminants division, said the government expects a battle with BP over the extent of the damage and has every incentive to be scientifically credible.
"Both sides go to their own corner and interpret the data the way they want," Helm said. "This is a legal process, and if we can't get an agreement we'll end up in court."
___
Lush contributed from Barataria Bay, La., Flesher from Traverse City, Mich.
Based
on EPA and Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) Values
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