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Weekly Mulch: Chevron Must Pay; GOP Tries to Gut the EPA

By Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger An Ecuadorian judge ordered Chevron... more

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HTC Inspire 4G Now Available for $60

Looking to get one of AT&T’s new Android smartphones for cheap? Then you... more

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Ecuadoreans seek to pursue Chevron in other countries as they vow to not pay damages

Armed with a $9 billion ruling against Chevron in Ecuador but little chance of... more

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JumpBox Now Offers One-Click Installs On Amazon’s Free Usage Tier

Last October Amazon launched a feature that’s exciting for developers: a free... more

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Chevron Insults and Attacks Indigenous People in Ecuador, Counter-Sues

"Chevron has dumped tons and tons.. and tons.. of water containing numerous... more

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Gallery: The Last Uncontacted People

Photographs released last week of a tribe in southwest Brazil have put public... more

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Uncontacted Amazon Tribe: First ever aerial footage

New film footage released today shows uncontacted Indians on the Brazil-Peru border in... more

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Kindle to be updated with "real" page numbers

Amazons Kindle is being updated with real page numbers along with a few other... more

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Randomness: Religious Porn Style

This week in Randomness: trading porn for Bibles, clevage vs. novacaine, Cuba's... more

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"Alarming" Amazon drought may have global fallout

The world's largest tropical forest, the Amazon, experienced something rare last year —a drought. It wasn't the earth-cracking kind of drought that happens in the American Southwest or the Australian outback, but it did stunt or kill lots of trees.

It was the second such drought in the Amazon in five years, and forest scientists are trying to understand why these droughts are happening, and what their effects will be for the planet.

The 2005 drought in the Amazon was so unusual that scientists called it a "100-year event" — something supposed to happen only once a century.

"This is what's quite alarming — that we've seen these two very unusual events," says Simon Lewis, a forest ecologist at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, who watched both droughts hit the Amazon. Lewis notes that several of the computer models that calculate the effects of climate change do predict that parts of the planet are going to get drier.

"And those two unusual events are consistent with those predictions that suggest that the Amazon may be severely impacted over the next few decades by these droughts," he says.

How Droughts Affect Forests

Writing in the journal Science, Lewis and his scientific team say the droughts are probably caused by the northward movement of especially warm water in the Atlantic Ocean. That shift carries moisture north, robbing big chunks of the Amazon of rain it normally would get.

The droughts can create a different forest — thinner, smaller and with a different mix of tree species. That, in turn, could affect the Earth's climate. As trees grow, they suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it, so a big forest like the Amazon is a carbon "sink."

But drought slows that process down — more carbon remains in the atmosphere, and that could warm the planet.

If the forest gets dry enough, air can get into the vessels that carry water through a tree — kind of like an air bubble in a fuel line — and a tree dies. If enough die, that too could affect the atmosphere.

"As these dead trees rot and release their carbon in their trunks and roots into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, then we see it probably turning into a source of carbon emissions," Lewis says.The world's largest tropical forest, the Amazon, experienced something rare last... more

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One of the last contacted tribes on earth

Peru’s authorities have announced that they will work together with Brazil to... more

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Catastrophic drought in the Amazon

A widespread drought in the Amazon rainforest last year caused the "lungs of the world" to produce more carbon dioxide than they absorbed, potentially leading to a dangerous acceleration of global warming. Scientists have calculated that the 2010 drought was more intense than the "one-in-100-year" drought of 2005.

They are predicting it will result in some eight billion tonnes of carbon dioxide being expelled from the Amazon rainforest, which is more than the total annual carbon emissions of the United States. For the second time in less than a decade, the earth's greatest rainforest released more carbon dioxide than it absorbed because many of its trees dried out and died.

Scientists believe that the highly unusual nature of the two droughts, which occurred in the space of just five years, may be the result of higher sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, which could also be influenced by global warming caused by the release of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The Anglo-Brazilian team of researchers has emphasised that there is as yet no proof that the two highly unusual droughts in the Amazon are the direct result of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but the scientists have warned that the world is gambling with its future if it fails to curb fossil fuel emissions.

Simon Lewis of Leeds University, the lead author of the study, said: "If greenhouse gas emissions contribute to Amazon droughts that in turn cause forests to release carbon, this feedback loop would be extremely concerning. Put more starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest rainforest.

"Two unusual and extreme droughts occurring within a decade may largely offset the carbon absorbed by intact Amazon forests during that time. If events like this happen more often, the Amazon rainforest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change to a major source of greenhouse gases that could speed it up. Having two events of this magnitude in such close succession is extremely unusual, but is unfortunately consistent with those climate models that project a grim future for Amazonia."

cont.A widespread drought in the Amazon rainforest last year caused the "lungs of the... more

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First film footage of remote rainforest tribe

An isolated tribe living in the Amazon rainforest on the Brazil-Peru border has been... more

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Beware This Amazon Security Flaw: Site Accepts Wrong Passwords

You may want to change your Amazon password. A security flaw in the site allows... more

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Plaintiff's Final Arguments In Ecuador Court Show "Overwhelming" Proof of Chevron Contamination in Amazon Disaster

Lawyers for the Amazonian communities suing Chevron have submitted the first part of their final written argument to the Ecuador court, outlining the evidence demonstrating Chevron's liability in the $113 billion environmental damages lawsuit and the fraud behind the company's primary defense of remediation.  The court filing -- called an "alegato" in Ecuador -- details in exacting detail how evidence gathered by independent experts, the plaintiffs, and from Chevron itself proves the case against the oil company. The lawsuit was first filed in U.S. federal court in 1993 but was shifted to Ecuador at Chevron's request. The plaintiffs are tens of thousands of persons who live in area of Ecuador where Chevron operated several large oil fields from 1964 to 1990, reaping excess profits by using substandard practices.

Chevron has long argued, as its primary defenses at trial, that no contamination in Ecuador is linked to its operations, that any contamination that had been present was cleaned up in a “remediation” conducted from 1995-98, and that any contamination remaining in the region was the responsibility of Petroecuador, Ecuador’s state-owned oil company which took over the oilfields after Chevron abandoned them in 1992.
 
Despite Chevron’s claims, a summary of the plaintiff’s alegato concludes the legal release used by Chevron as a result of that remediation is "null and void" because it was based on numerous false and misleading representations by the company. Instead of actually cleaning up the waste in the area, the limited “remediation” was largely accomplished by simply covering a small number of waste pits with dirt and then using an inappropriate laboratory test that counted only a fraction of the actual contamination to “prove” that the remediation had been effective.

"The voluminous scientific evidence in the case is summarized clearly in this historic document," said Karen Hinton, spokesperson for the plaintiffs. "This evidence proves overwhelmingly that Chevron is responsible for what is widely regarded as the world's worst oil-related disaster. We encourage all interested persons to read the alegato and judge for themselves whether Chevron is telling the truth about its deliberate misconduct in Ecuador."
 The document concludes that Chevron is responsible for ongoing contamination that is harming the environment and human health to this day, even though the company fled Ecuador in the early 1990s and stripped its assets out of the country. The document concludes as follows:

♣ Chevron treated the environment "recklessly" and deliberately disposed of billions of gallons of toxic waste into rivers and streams over the 26-year period that it operated a large oil concession in Ecuador's Amazon region. "These lax operational practices have had a devastating impact on the rainforest ecosystem and its inhabitants," according to the document.

♣ Chevron dumped more than 16 billion gallons of chemical-laden "produced water" into streams and rivers over 70 years after the industry had stopped the practice in the United States due to its damaging environmental impacts.

♣ Chevron built and then abandoned more than 900 toxic waste pits filled with oil drilling byproducts such as barium, heavy metals, chloride, and acid -- all of which need extensive remediation.

♣ Chevron polluted the air by flaring gas with no controls, spilled thousands of barrels of oil, had no spill response plan, and ordered the destruction of records documenting oil spills.

The plaintiff’s "alegato" also found that "there is irrefutable evidence of contamination" at every one of Chevron's 45 well and oil production sites inspected by the parties during the trial phase of the case in the affected area, which is 1,500 square miles in size and covers a swath of rainforest roughly the size of Rhode Island. The chemicals and compounds found -- all of which are toxic and some of which are known carcinogens -- include barium, benzene, cadmium, chromium, copper, etheylbenzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, vanadium, xylene, and zinc.Lawyers for the Amazonian communities suing Chevron have submitted the first part of... more