Oilsands development in northern Alberta, Canada. CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
Just one week after Al Jazeera discovered that regulatory responsibility for Alberta, Canada’s controversial tar sands would be handed over to a fossil-fuel funded corporation, federal scientists have found that the area’s viscous petroleum deposits are surrounded by a nearly 7,500-square-mile ring of mercury.
Canadian government scientists have found that levels of mercury — a potent neurotoxin which has been found to cause severe birth defects and brain damage — around the region’s vast tar sand operations are up to 16 times higher than regular levels for the region. The findings, presented by Environment Canada researcher Jane Kirk at an international toxicology conference, showed that the 7,500 miles contaminated are “currently impacted by airborne Hg (mercury) emissions originating from oilsands developments.”
The Canadian government touts Alberta’s oil sands as the third-largest proven crude oil reserve in the world, next to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The region’s heavy crude oil is mixed with clay, bitumen, and a good deal of sand — hence the name “oil sands.” This makes for a unique and energy-intensive extraction process that some scientists say produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions of conventionally produced oil. Environment Canadahas said it expects production emissions from tar sands to hit 104 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020 under current expansion plans.
Giant oil companies across the United States are currently investing in Canada’s tar sands as part of their role in the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry tar sands oil from Alberta all the way to Texas. The pipeline would double imports of tar sands oil into the United States and transport it to refineries on the Gulf Coast and ports for international export. The oil sands industry itself is undergoing a major expansion, powered by $19 billion a year in investments, according to Bloomberg News.
Mercury pollution is just the latest contamination-related environmental woe to hit the tar sands. In May of this year, leaks of the oil started popping up in Alberta, and haven’t yet stopped. In September, the company responsible for the leaks was ordered to drain a lake so that contamination on the lake’s bottom could be cleaned up. By September 11, the leaks had spilled more than 403,900 gallons — or about 9,617 barrels — of oily bitumen into the surrounding boreal forest and muskeg, the acidic, marshy soil found in the forest. MORE
*This broadcast was given for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio 1, Science Unit as an Ockham’s Razor talk. The text in its entirety is below.
I dedicate this broadcast to my late friend Dr Robert “Bobby” F. Steinberg - he loved the dolphins and our oceans, and unstintingly believed in my mission: Rest in Peace Dear Bobby!
Dr. Reese Halter
There’s a crisis of epic proportion occurring on our planet 24/7, 365: ‘The War Against Nature‘ has become a prolonged looting spree — plundering terrestrial and oceanic wildlife on a global tear never witnessed before. The fact that the Mafia, Syndicate, Cartel and Triad’s are involved heavily in shark fining, slaughtering bluefin tuna, massacring rhinos, elephants and tigers — as the demand for rhino horns, elephant ivory, fur and animals parts skyrockets — means these incredible beasts and others have no chance whatsoever to continue to live on planet Earth.
Loathsome Japanese poachers in the Great Southern Ocean killing whales within an international whale sanctuary.
What kind of a world are we leaving for our children?
The destruction of nature including illegal harvesting of forests for an unquenchable palm oil market and trafficking of animal parts is valued in excess of $300 billion, annually; it now rivals that of drugs, arms and human trafficking, combined. No wonder organized crime is running this lucrative life-ending business.
The destruction of Indonesia’s exquisite rainforests for palm oil plantations are destroying precious habitat for endangered orangutans, tigers, rhinos and elephants.
And even more infuriatingly Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to hunt whales despite a 1986 worldwide moratorium. Japan harpoons whales in the Great Southern Ocean within an international sanctuary where populations of great whales are no more than three percent of what they were a mere 200 years ago. Japan claims to hunts whales under the auspice of scientific research, which is simply not true.
The ignoble Japanese whale-slaughtering factory-processing ship The Nissan Maru in the Great Southern Ocean International Whale Sanctuary.
Japan’s ‘scientific whale research’ is overtly flawed. If, in fact, they were testing a hypothesis then their factory boat the Nisshin Maru’s reaction to harassment by the Sea Shepherd ships during the 2012-13 whaling season would have ended the research sampling for that season. Instead, the Nisshin Maru fled, followed by one of its catcher boats, to the other side of the Antarctic continent, thousands of kilometers from its designated research area where it resumed killing minke whales. A real research program is based upon systematic, pre-planned sampling in a designated area within a designated time frame. Japan’s ‘lethal research’ of whales in the Antarctic has nothing to do with ‘scientific research.’
Poaching has reached a frenzied level elsewhere. The pictures of magnificent rhinos dehorned while still alive in Kruger National Park, South Africa, are enough to make a grown man cry. These atrocities are crimes against humanity.
A bloody rhino dehorned — one of tens of thousands of brutal examples of bloody thirsty poachers annihilating these exquisite beasts.
Organized gangs, often from neighboring Mozambique, of four to six men are well-armed and carrying devices facilitating constant communications. They infiltrate communities, buy information on rhino whereabouts and then devise two escape routes — while at the same time familiarizing themselves with security structures and movements of park rangers. It’s cold, calculated, ruthless murder!
These depraved poachers shoot the rhinos in their knees, slice their Achilles tendon’s and spine’s thereby immobilizing them whilst sawing and hacking off horns weighing 7 kilograms with a street value of well over 500,000 dollars U.S. These colossal creatures are then left to bleed to death, slowly.
These heartless thugs organize pick-ups, which hide horns and weapons for collection later on. They quickly change into fresh clothes and shoes — as boot prints can link them to the crime scene, when inspected at follow-up roadblocks. Large sums of cash are immediately paid to poachers upon delivery of rhino horns.
Organized crime has established and structured nefarious business models, which operate locally and like the wide base of a pyramid it moves upward from regional to national couriers, buyers and exporters to their international counterparts, supplying international buyers who sell to international nouvelle riche consumers at the top.
The price of the rhino horn varies from 65,000 to 100,000 dollars U.S. a kilogram. At the top end of this range rhino horn per kilogram is about two and a half times more valuable than 24K gold.
This voracious demand for rhino horn is coming from Vietnam, China and Thailand. In 2010, a rumor began circulating that a Vietnamese minister’s relative was cured of cancer by rhino horn powder. In addition, Chinese medicine routinely uses rhino horn powder to purportedly cure a range of ailments from rheumatism to ridding the soul of the devil.
The number of Oriental nouvelle riche is burgeoning. In Vietnam alone, since 2008 the number of millionaires has increased by 150 percent. At the same time, Vietnamese cancer rates are spiking by 30 percent annually — in large part due to horrendous Vietnamese environmental degradation.
Sadly, rhino horn is now seen in the Orient as a status symbol and it has become a magnet for the nouvelle riche. Ground-up rhino horn powder is being touted as a cure for hangovers, common colds and it’s even being used as a party drug.
In fact, scientists have irrefutably shown that rhino horn, which is comprised of keratin, is about as effective at curing cancer, common colds, or hangovers — as eating a human finger nail (which by the way is also made up of keratin). There is nil medicinal value in rhino horn.
Over the past 113 years the human population has soared from 1.6 to 7.1 billion. Rhino numbers, on the other hand, have plummeted from 500,000 to 29,000, a 95 percent decrease. And worse, since 2007 poaching rhinos have increased by 5,000 percent. At this crazed rate, rhinos will be extinct by 2022.
In September of 2013 in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, poachers — the scourge of our planet — annihilated 90 more African elephants by poisoning their watering hole with cyanide. Earlier in September of 2013, in the park, they poisoned 40 elephants in an attempt to feed the insatiable Asian demand for ivory, which now fetches 2,200 dollars U.S. a kilogram.
Ruthless ivory poachers driving these majestic beasts to extinction in the bloody and ruthless ‘War Against Nature.’
To give you some idea of how quickly earthlings are exterminating elephants in 1980 there were about 1.2 million African beasts. Last year the estimate was at most 400,000 remaining. Since 2002, the African forested elephant population has plummeted by 76 percent. In Tanzania alone the population estimate in 2008 was approximately 165,000 — today there are fewer than 23,000 elephants left.
The Obama Administration led by Hillary Clinton has pledged to step-up the fight to save the elephants. In September of 2013, 6 tons of ivory was seized in the U.S. And earlier in 2013, the Philippines announced that it had crushed 15 tons of elephant ivory. There are simply not enough animals remaining on the planet at the current rate of this prolonged pillaging of 21 tons of elephant ivory confiscated within one year. An even more maddening question is: How many more tons are being gobbled up each year on the black market? Unknown, vast quantities.
What has happened to earthlings?
Humans are so unconscious and detached from the natural world that the media headlines now report one heinous act against nature after the next attempting to best one another in brutality and illegal sales of animal parts.
These unimaginable atrocities against nature: killing whales, dolphins, bluefin tuna, sharks, polar bears, grizzly bears, African lions, Sumatran and Indian tigers, South American jaguars to name but a few apex predators — are crimes against humanity! Without predators to keep prey fit and cull the old and weak, diseases will spread, ecosystems will crumble and the human race will perish.
The insatiable Oriental demand for sharkfins used in sharkfin soup is driving sharks to extinction after successfully standing the test of time for 400 million years.
My colleagues have clearly shown that both filter feeding whales like humpbacks and large- and small-toothed whales including the dolphins play an essential role in keeping the web of sealife intact and vibrant. The filter feeders fertilize the ocean with their nitrogen-rich flocculent fecal plumes, stimulating phytoplankton, enriching the marine ecosystem and creating abundant fisheries. Toothed whales cull the old and weak fish and seal populations preventing diseases from reaching epidemics thus ensuring a high level of fitness throughout the seas.
Relentless scouring of the seafloor for the last remaining oil and gas deposits is delivering the coup the grace to whales and dolphins.
In the spring of 2012 over 900 long-beaked common dolphins and black porpoises washed-up in a mass mortality event on Peruvian shores. Government officials stating that the dolphins died of natural causes like morbillivirus did not convince my colleagues and me.
The conservation group Orca Peru undertook 30 necropsies from three separate expeditions. What they discovered was indeed disturbing and contrary to the Peruvian Production Minister Gladys Triveno’s claim on Radio Programas del Peru that ‘the death of the dolphins were not caused by any human activity.’
Off the coast of Peru, oil production from BPZ Energy’s Corvina and Albacora field, in fact, conducted a series of powerful seismic tests during the first half of 2012.
Orca Peru scientists found that the dolphins and porpoises they examined exhibited bleeding in their middle ears as well as fractured skulls. In addition, lungs, livers, stomachs, bladders, skin, spleens and blubber all displayed gas bubbles. Those bubbles caused a mass destruction of tissues. In scientific parlance they revealed acute pulmonary emphysema or what scuba divers know and fear as decompression sickness or the bends. There was no evidence whatsoever of morbillivirus in any of the 30 necropsies.
What happened to those magnificent Peruvian beasts appears to have re-occurred in September 2013, but this time along the West African coast of Ghana.
High tech marine airguns are used offshore for seismic oil and gas exploration. They produce high levels of low frequency sound by releasing high-pressure air into the water creating oscillating bubbles within the bandwidth of 70-140 Hertz. They are deployed as an array to maximize the power and focus the potent low frequency sonar. It is deadly for all whales and dolphins. Multi-beam echo-sounders searching for every last drop of gas and oil in Loza Lagoon, northwest Madagascar shattered the whales ear-drums and caused a fatal mass stranding.
‘The War Against Nature’ specifically the whales and dolphins is set to rage beginning early 2014 as the U.S. Navy will start training exercises including deepsea explosions and sonar testing along the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, Southern California and Hawaii, running them until 2019.
The U.S. Navy announced that computer models predicted hundreds of whales and dolphins would die whilst thousands will suffer serious injuries, and millions will temporarily loose their hearing and suffer major behavioral changes including getting lost.
We know that both baleen or filter feeding and toothed whales are of paramount importance to help maintain Earth’s beleaguered marine ecosystems. Why since the 1986 Moratorium on Whaling has Japan, Iceland, Norway and Danish Faroe Islanders slaughtered almost 32,000 of these exquisite creatures? These countries exhibit a repugnantsense of entitlement to slaughter whales.
We are knowingly leaving our children impoverished oceans, and as Captain Paul Watsonof the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rightfully says: ‘If the whales die, we die!’
The legendary Animal Kingdom protector Bob Barker believes that all wild animals deserve to live free on planet Earth. Make a difference and support Sea Shepherd Australia as they valiantly protect the great whales of the Southern Ocean within an international whale sanctuary.
Humans cannot live without Nature. Nature, on the other hand, can totally exist without us. It’s time to end ‘The War Against Nature’ now — And protect the remaining great whales, dolphins, rhinos, elephants, big cats, polar bears, grizzly bears, gorillas, bluefin tunas, sharks, sea turtles and my favorite the albatross from despicable poachers.
Earth Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning broadcaster, distinguished conservation biologist, educator and co-author of Life, The Wonder of It All.
It’s time to repost this article. It clearly shows why we need The Ecocide Act to control the relatively small number of corporate executives and politicians who are criminally responsible for damaging our planet.
New Study Identifies the Top 90 Producers of Industrial Carbon Emissions
The responsibilities for climate change fall on many shoulders, of course — from individuals through the daily choices we make, to emitting industries, to nations. But some are more responsible than others. Drawing upon several years of painstaking research, Heede shows that nearly two-thirds, 63 percent, of all industrial carbon dioxide and methane released to the atmosphere can be traced to fossil fuel and cement production by just 90 entities — investor-owned companies, such as Chevron and Exxon-Mobil; primarily state-run companies, such as Gazprom and Saudi Aramco; and solely government-run industries, such as in the former Soviet Union and China (for its coal production).
The top 20 entities, shown here, produced 48 percent of all industrial carbon pollution, with 15 percent produced by another 70 entities. Look to the paper and to Heede’s website CarbonMajors.org for more detailed figures, methods, and the underlying data.
Heede, director of the Climate Accountability Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, and formerly at the Rocky Mountain Institute, is a long-standing collaborator. We’ve worked together to explore what lessons for climate accountability might be drawn from understanding how the science of health risks from smoking informed the history of tobacco control. UCS provided funding to ensure that his Climatic Change paper is open-access, available to all readers without charge. And we’re working together with a team of top-notch climate modelers to measure how much of the rise on global average temperature and specific climate change impacts can be attributed to the emissions traced to the major industrial carbon producers Heede identifies. Our first results will be presented at next month’s annual meeting at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco (click on “Fall Meeting Program” at this link and search for “Heede” in “Search Program”).
Public, policy, legal, and investor decisions over the attribution of responsibility for climate change can be informed but not determined by scientific data alone. What kind of dialogue, informed by these data, do we need? Here’s what Heede concludes:
“Most analyses to date, including the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) structure, consider responsibility in terms of nation-states…. However, responsibilities can also be understood in other ways as well, as done in the present analysis tracing emissions to major carbon producers. Shifting the perspective from nation-states to corporate entities—both investor-owned and state-owned companies—opens new opportunities for those entities to become part of the solution rather than passive (and profitable) bystanders to continued climate disruption…..Regulation, litigation, and shareholder actions targeted at the private entities responsible for tobacco-related diseases played a significant role in the history of tobacco control; one could imagine comparable actions aimed at the private entities involved in the production of fossil fuels, particularly insofar as some of the entities included in this analysis have played a role in efforts to impede legislation that might slow the production and sale of carbon fuels.”
Let the conversation begin. And stay tuned here for more science to inform it.
About the author: Peter Frumhoff is a global change ecologist and serves as chief scientist for the UCS climate campaign. Dr. Frumhoff is an internationally-recognized expert on climate change impacts, climate science and policy, tropical forest conservation and management, and biological diversity. He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology. See Peter’s full bio.
Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.
By: Craig Wong The Canadian Press, reposted from The Toronto Star, Dec 27 2013
JORGE SAENZ / AP In this May 23, 2013 photo, mining trucks sit parked on the facilities at the Barrick Gold Corp’s Pascua-Lama project facilities in northern Chile. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)
OTTAWA—After years of riding surging metal prices and spending freely on takeover deals and massive new projects, Canadian miners were forced to tighten their belts in 2013 as the cycle turned against them.
The industry took billions in write downs as companies re-evaluated projects that they believed were worth far more just a couple of years ago and slashed spending as falling commodity prices squeezed margins.
But it wasn’t just financial problems for the miners, as political and environmental issues made headlines around the world for several Canadian mining companies.
The largest company to face problems was Barrick Gold, which suspended nearly all of the work at its massive Pascua-Lama project high in the Andes mountain range.
The halt followed massive cost overruns and protests from an indigenous community living below the project who tried to have Barrick’s licence revoked and force a new environmental impact study
The Supreme Court of Chile stopped short of ordering a new review and upheld the environmental permit, but put construction on hold until Barrick’s environmental commitments and work to protect the water systems is completed.
Jamie Kneen, of industry watchdog group MiningWatch Canada, said technology has made it easier for groups opposing mining projects to organize and disseminate information, even in remote areas around the globe. MORE
Most conventional yield projection models are oblivious to the real world say US researchers
Staple crops like rice are facing unprecedented decline. Photograph: George Osodi
Industrial agriculture could be hitting fundamental limits in its capacity to produce sufficient crops to feed an expanding global population according to new research published in Nature Communications.
The study by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln argues that there have been abrupt declines or plateaus in the rate of production of major crops which undermine optimistic projections of constantly increasing crop yields. As much as “31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production” has experienced “yield plateaus or abrupt decreases in yield gain, including rice in eastern Asia and wheat in northwest Europe.”
The declines and plateaus in production have become prevalent despite increasing investment in agriculture, which could mean that maximum potential yields under the industrial model of agribusiness have already occurred. Crop yields in “major cereal-producing regions have not increased for long periods of time following an earlier period of steady linear increase.”
Apple expects an iPhone 5S to inject 70 kilograms – about 154 pounds — of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere over its lifetime, 11 pounds less than the iPhone 5 that Apple introduced last year. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
It is probably a safe bet that very few Americans unwrapping a brand-new iPhone left under their Christmas tree are thinking about its impact on the global climate.
I have some good news for them, and some bad.
No, Apple hasn’t managed to produce the device without adding heat-trapping carbon to the air. The company expects an iPhone 5s to inject 70 kilograms — about 154 pounds — of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere over its lifetime, 11 pounds less than the iPhone 5 that Apple introduced last year.
The “good” news is that under the standard accounting of carbon emissions bandied about at climate talks, it’s not, mostly, Americans’ fault. About three-quarters of the carbon dioxide is considered the responsibility of other people — in places like China and Taiwan, South Korea and Inner Mongolia — where the phone and its parts were made.
The bad news is not just that the effort to curb global warming is as stuck as ever, but that, whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together.
The obstacles remain significant. Countless summit conferences since the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was adopted more than 15 years ago have failed to budge the fundamental roadblocks standing in the way of collective action: How should the costs be divided? Who did what to whom?
Globalization — which in the process of “exporting” production and jobs from rich to poor countries also “exported” the carbon dioxide emitted to make the products consumed by the rich countries — adds another complex twist to allocating responsibility for the carbon in the air. The disquieting question is this: Are emissions the responsibility of the countries that made them or of the countries for whom the products were made? MORE
by Stephanie McMillan, reposted from The Ecologist, Dec 30, 2013
Environmentalists should support working class struggles, argues Stephanie McMillan. Ecocide is the inevitable outcome of capitalism - and only the working class has the power to bring the system down.
Occupy Berlin protest. Photo: bernard george via Flickr.com.
The problem reaches much farther back than capitalism itself. The combination of an early gendered division of labor with the adoption of agriculture and corresponding formation of permanent settlements set the stage for class divisions and the private accumulation of surplus wealth.
Maintaining this arrangement required the development of states with armies, social oppression and repression to weaken internal opposition, and ideologies to make it all seem normal and pre-ordained.
And as land was degraded and resources used up faster than they naturally replenished themselves, expansion became imperative, leading to conquest and forced unequal trade.
These intertwined and matured over time into an ever-more complex tangle, culminating in late-stage capitalism: the all-encompassing, all-devouring, spectacular horror that is our current global social living arrangement.
The most urgent problem we face - environmental collapse
The environmental crisis, specifically climate change, is the most urgent problem we collectively face. It is a simple fact that if our planet no longer supports life, then all human pursuits, including social justice, will also come to a screaming halt. MORE
