tagged w/ unsustainable
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Last week Leland Yee proclaimed that the elimination of shark fin soup as an attack on ancient Chinese culture. The next day he held a conference serving shark fin soup to the media to show how wonderful and delicious it is.
Then apparently, Leland remembered how environmentally friendly the people of San Francisco Bay Area are. He sent out a rather waffly sounding email that says that while he condemns the finning of sharks, he opposes the ban on shark fins.Last week Leland Yee proclaimed that the elimination of shark fin soup as an attack on... more
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Gawain
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added this
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12 months ago
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As Crews are working to sustain the Fourmiles Boulder Co Fire on Tuesday morning, The Boulder Co Fire started at the 7100 block of Fourmile Canyon Road.As Crews are working to sustain the Fourmiles Boulder Co Fire on Tuesday morning, The... more
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Water use and greenhouse gas emissions are major concerns with developing “unconventional” hydrocarbon reserves
The Syncrude Canada Ltd. oil sands mining operation in Alberta, Canada is the largest in the world. For every barrel of oil produced from tar sands mining operations, four to six barrels of fresh water are withdrawn from the Athabasca River, according to experts.
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By Keith Schneider
Circle of Blue
Before July 16, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its 18-page letter directing the State Department to more carefully assess the considerable risks of the $7 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to issue a presidential permit approving construction in the fall.
EPA’s penetrating critique of the State Department’s permit review of the 1,702-mile pipeline, which the environmental agency called “inadequate,” puts that fall schedule on indefinite hold. The question for the oil industry, the governments of Canada and the activists in both countries desperate to tame oil sands development, is what other effects the EPA’s action could have.
The federal environmental agency has good reason to be vigilant. It has been busy since July 26 cleaning up a million-barrel tar sands oil spill from a ruptured pipeline in southern Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, to be built by TransCanada Corp., is the latest of three big oil pipeline construction projects that are at the vanguard of a new era in hydrocarbon development. Instead of drilling deep underground for pools of oil that are getting harder to find and more dangerous to punch open, energy developers are becoming miners, tapping what the energy industry calls “unconventional” reserves contained in oil-saturated sands and oil shales.
Near the northern end of the Keystone XL pipeline lies Alberta’s bitumen-saturated tar sands, a forested region as large as North Carolina that conservatively contains 175 billion barrels of recoverable oil: enough to satisfy U.S. demand at current rates of consumption until 2035. American, Canadian, Chinese, Korean and European oil companies are spending $15 billion a year to manage and expand immense open pit mines, processing plants, as well as toxic tailing ponds in order to boost production from 1.3 million barrels a day to more than three million barrels per day by 2025.
The investment in Alberta is the sharp tip of a long spear of unconventional oil development that reaches into the United States, the primary market. Energy and pipeline companies are spending $31 billion to ship oil in new pipelines from Alberta to U.S. refiners in the heartland, the Great Lakes and the Gulf coast. Refiners are spending more than $20 billion to expand refineries to produce fuels from tar sands oil. In all, the energy industry has said it wants to invest nearly $400 billion on tar sands oil production over the next 15 years.
Contrast that with annual investment in wind and solar energy, which reached $30 billion last year, according to the Department of Energy. Exxon Mobil Corp. paid more than that earlier this year—$41 billion—to purchase XTO Energy, which has big reserves in unconventional tar sands, oil shales, and deep shale natural gas reserves in the United States.
The bottom line is that the race between clean energy alternatives and much dirtier unconventional reserves is an economic mismatch. Last year total investment globally in clean energy was $140 billion, according to solar and wind producers. The fossil fuel industry is spending an estimated three times that amount on developing unconventional oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency.
cont.Water use and greenhouse gas emissions are major concerns with developing... more
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Giant hydroelectric dams being built or planned in remote areas of Brazil, Ethiopia, Malaysia, Peru and Guyana will devastate tribal communities by forcing people off their land or destroying hunting and fishing grounds, according to a report by Survival International today.
The first global assessment of the impact of the dams on tribes suggests more than 300,000 indigenous people could be pushed towards economic ruin and, in the case of some isolated Brazilian groups, to extinction.
The dams are intended to provide much-needed,low-carbon electricity for burgeoning cities, but the report says tribal people living in their vicinity will gain little or nothing. Most of the power generated will be taken by large industries, it concludes.
At least 200,000 people from eight tribes are threatened and a further 200,000 people will be adversely affected by the Gibe III dam on the Omo river in Ethiopia. Ten thousand people in Sarawak, Malaysia, have been displaced by the Bakun dam,which is expected to open next year, and a series of Latin American dams could force many thousands of people off their land.
The authors say enthusiasm for large dams is resurfacing, driven by a powerful international lobby presenting them as a significant solution to climate change. Lyndsay Duffield, said: "The lessons learned [about the human impact of large dams]last century are being ignored, and tribal peoples worldwide are again being sidelined, their rights violated and their lands destroyed."
The report says the World Bank is one of the biggest funders of destructive dams, despite worldwide criticism in the 1990s for supporting such projects. Its portfolio now stands at $11bn, with funding up more than 50% on 1997.
The UN now subsidises dam building via the clean development mechanism (CDM), which allows rich countries to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by investing in clean energy in poor countries. The watchdog group CDM Watch says more than a third of all CDM-registered projects in 2008 were for hydropower, making them the most common type of project vying for carbon credits.
Concern is growing over the role of China, now the world's largest builder and funder of big dams. The Three Gorges Corporation, firm behind the controversial Three Gorges dam, which has displaced more than a million people from around the Yangtze river in the last 20 years, has been contracted to build a dam on the land of the Penan tribe in Sarawak. China's biggest state bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, may fund Gibe III in Ethiopia, to be Africa's tallest. The Chinese government has financed the majority of dams built in China, which account for about half the global total of large dams.
The report says tribes have borne the brunt of the development over the last 30 years. In India, at least 40% of people displaced by dams and other developmentprojects are tribal, though they make up just 8% of the country's population. Almost all of the large dams built or proposed in the Philippines have been on the land of the country's indigenous people.
The report accuses banks and dam builders of consistently underestimating the number of tribal people affected. "There is an endemic tendency within the dam industry to significantly underestimate the number of people to be affected by their projects," it says.
"The World Bank's review of big dam projects over 10 years found that the number of people actually evicted was nearly 50% higher than the planning estimates."
Survival International called for all hydroelectric dams on tribal peoples' land to be halted unless the tribes have given full consent. "In the case of isolated or uncontacted tribes, where consultation is not possible, there should be no development of hydroelectric dams on their territories," it said.Giant hydroelectric dams being built or planned in remote areas of Brazil, Ethiopia,... more
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We hear a lot about the importance of eating organic and eating local, but left out of the conversation are the growing methods of some of our staple foods, and how much forest land has been lost to grow (or raise) products like beef, rice, and palm oil—the latter of which is in more foods than you might realize.
When agricultural land becomes unproductive (usually after about three years), it is often cheaper to clear new land than to fertilize it or replenish nutrients that were drained from the soil. Monocrop agriculture is a major factor in how modern food production has become unsustainable, but coffee and banana production both serve as examples of smooth, successful transitions. They have been drivers of deforestation in the past, but more recently farmers have been using more intercropping and forest cover (ever heard of shade-grown coffee?), which helps to prevent deforestation and preserve biodiversity. This is surely due in no small part to activist campaigns waged in recent years to educate consumers and to generate change in the supply chains.
This is a quick look at common foods contributing the most to deforestation—and as a result, to climate change—around the world.
cont.We hear a lot about the importance of eating organic and eating local, but left out of... more
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The livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans around the world's largest desert lake will be wrecked by an Ethiopian dam on the lake's main tributary, conservationists said Wednesday.
"The Ethiopian dam project is going to bring nothing but tragedy and harm to Kenya," warned renowned archeologist and environmentalist Richard Leakey.
The Gilgel Gibe III dam being built on the Omo river, which supplies 80 percent of the water in Lake Turkana on the Kenya-Ethiopia border, is one-third complete.
During the two years it will take to fill the dam reservoir Lake Turkana will recede, increasing its salinity, damaging the local economy, degrading biodiversity and increasing the risk of cross-border conflicts, the Friends of Lake Turkana conservationist organisation said.
The group called for construction to be halted pending an assessment by Kenya, which has said it will import power generated from Ethiopia, on the impact the dam will have on the locals and the environment.
"What we are asking the Kenya government is to reassess, to rethink about what they are doing before it's too late," said Samia Bwana, a top official of the Kenyan group.
Around 300,000 fishermen and herders depend on Lake Turkana, while hundreds of thousands more, mainly farmers, rely on the Omo's annual flooding for river bank cultivation and grazing of livestock.
"We are depending on a country that is known for drought, known for rainfall failure, to provide expensive power to Kenya," Leakey told reporters.
"There is no future for hydroelectric schemes in arid parts of Africa."
Ironically, Kenya plans to build Africa's biggest wind farm around Lake Turkana, which is expected to produce 300 MW. The Omo dam is projected to have a capacity of 400 MW when it is completed in 2013.
Leakey said the feasibility study for the Ethiopian dam was "so badly done that the dam may never even fill up because of cracks that are already known to exist."
"If it never fills up they will never let the water out and if they never let the water out, Lake Turkana will not only drop some metres it..." will be wiped out, he added with a gesture of despair.The livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans around the world's largest... more
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Is this their answer to getting rid of coal waste? Poisoning our land, food, and water with it? EPA stands for Environmental PROTECTION Agency does it not? What are they thinking? And just how many billions would the toxic coal industry make from selling this toxic waste to farmers to toxify our food? I hope farmers stand up FIRMLY against this. It is outrageous that they would shill for the coal industry like this, but when it comes to truly sustainable and healthy ways to cover crops and protect our soil, not a peep.Is this their answer to getting rid of coal waste? Poisoning our land, food, and water... more
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EXTRACT: Cotton crisis and successive crop failures due to declining soil health goes hand in hand with the imported GM (genetic modification) technology, which is energy and input intensive.
"Bt cotton is a high-cost, energy-intensive technology," said farmers' leader Vijay Jawandhia. In an arid and rain-dependent agriculture region like Vidarbha, he said, this technology comes with huge risks. "Costlier the technology, higher the risk."
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Soil in Wardha district deficient in 18 micronutrients: Study
Jaideep Hardikar
DNA, December 6 2009
http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_soil-in-wardha-district-deficient-in-18-micronutrients-study_1320504
Mumbai: From a corner of his farm in Jhamkola, Daulat Mahure, 45, could see what Laxman Chelpelwar, 55, must have seen on his own field, some miles away in Mukutban village: stunted and wilting cotton plants, leaves red as dried blood, and hardly any cotton bolls. The two farmers were from South Yavatmal villages in the Painganga river basin along the Andhra border.
On November 16, Chelpelwar went out, apparently to inspect what must have looked to him a forlorn six-acre crop-less farm. According to his wife Pochubai, he returned home four hours later, and lay down on his bed without uttering a word. Minutes later he began to convulse violently.
"I was alone, I was frightened, and cried for help," she remembers. By the time her sons and some neighbours arrived, it was over. The post-mortem report revealed that Chelpelwar had consumed Endosulfan, a pesticide.
Five quintals. That was Chelpelwar's cotton yield in the first picking. His income from it: Rs15,000. His expenses: Rs50,000.Back in Jhamkola village, about 45 km from the cotton trading town of Pandharkawda, Mahure's cotton yield stood at one quintal: worth about Rs3,000. "I'm not lying," says his mother Jiblabai, who at 70 must work as a farm labourer, picking cotton, so that the family can eat.
Jiblabai says she came home from work on November 23 to find her son hanging from the ceiling of their two-room hut. He had killed himself when nobody was at home. "Daulat was devastated by the failed crops," says his father Kashinath.
Mahure's death left a trail of unanswered questions. The answers, like in Chelpelwar's case, lie buried in his seven-acre field where the cotton plants are drooping, and many are yet to find roots. The soil, says his farmer friend Datta Upre, has nothing in it to feed the plant.
Lalya, the destroyer
"Lalya wrecked us with the drought," said Upre. Lalya, a local term for the reddening of the cotton plants, has become a regular feature ever since the Bt cotton replaced hybrids, according to a number of farmers The Mag spoke to. The Maharashtra government has been compensating farmers in the region for 'lalya' almost every year since the Bt seeds came in.
Agriculture scientists say 'lalya' points to a lack of micronutrients and moisture content in soils, which are fast degrading. This year's scanty rainfall exposed the soil's deteriorating health. Bad soil health, says a senior soil scientist from the Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR) at Nagpur, mires plant growth and leads to low yields.
A recent study by the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) found, as a sample, the soils in Wardha district heavily deficient in 18 micronutrients that breathe life in plants and dictate the yields.
Farming in the rain-fed areas has become even more intensive after the onset of Bt technology. Intensive agriculture, while increasing productivity, has caused fresh problems in respect of nutrient imbalance, experts say. "No moisture and no nutrition in soil," said a CICR scientist, "is a certain recipe for crop failure." True in both, Mahure and Chelpelwar's cases.
A complex process, lalya unfolds with pest attacks, moisture stress and lack of micronutrients in soil. Temperature variation in the day and night accentuates its gravity.
Finally, the plant's chlorophyll content (which gives leaves its green colour) decreases with nitrogen deficiency, giving birth to another pigment called Anthocynin, which turns the foliage red.
If reddening starts before boll formation, it results in a 25 per cent drop in yield, said the CICR scientist, on condition of anonymity. "lalya," he declared, "is here to stay."
Lalya & Bt Technology
The disease, agriculture scientists say, has its roots in the American Bt technology that India imported on the pretext of improving productivity. Almost all the 500-plus Bt seed varieties sold in India this year are of the same parentage -- the American variety of Coker-3, a top CICR scientist said. "It means every seed has half American blood and half of Indian variety cross-pollinated with it."EXTRACT: Cotton crisis and successive crop failures due to declining soil health goes... more
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"Oil company in Ecuador transforms indigenous community into commercial poachers, threatening wildlife in a protected area
The documentary Crude opened this weekend in New York, while the film shows the direct impact of the oil industry on indigenous groups a new study proves that the presence of oil companies can have subtler, but still major impacts, on indigenous groups and the ecosystems in which they live."
"In Ecuador's Yasuni National Park—comprising 982,000 hectares of what the researchers call "one of the most species diverse forests in the world"—the presence of an oil company has disrupted the lives of the Waorani and the Kichwa peoples, and the rich abundance of wildlife living within the forest. By building a 149 kilometer (92 mile) road through the protected forest and providing subsidies to the local tribes, the oil company Maxus Ecuador Inc. transformed some members of the tribes from semi-nomadic subsistence hunters into commercial poachers."
We’ve found that a road in a forest can bring huge social changes to local groups and the ways in which they utilize wildlife resources," said Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) researcher Esteban Suárez, lead author of the study. "Communities existing inside and around the park are changing their customs to a lifestyle of commercial hunting, the first stage in a potential overexploitation of wildlife."
The article concludes saying:"
"A simple, seemingly inoffensive road can have far-reaching effects on a landscape and its people," said Dr. Avecita Chicchón, Director of WCS’s Latin America and Caribbean Program. "It provides hunters with more access to a wider range of forest while providing a low-cost transportation route to markets. More importantly, it plugs communities more easily into the larger economic world while creating increased demand for numerous species of animals. It is the road to unsustainability."
The picture:Peccary legs. Wild meat fetched prices double that of domestic in the area. Photo by: Julie Larsen Maher © WCS
Not only roads are a big polluter and a natural resource devourer but actually accelerate destruction among nature and people."Oil company in Ecuador transforms indigenous community into commercial poachers,... more
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The fight over land by campesinos because of increased land acquisition to grow GM soya has become violent. Land used to grow feed for animals in Europe and Asia to satisfy their appetite for meat has exacerbated a battle for food sovereignty and the livelihoods of peasant farmers. Industrial agriculture in this area is also poisoning the land and the people, and the deforestation exacerbating climate change. This is a recipe for environmental, economic, and social disaster as companies such as Monsanto expand their reach to satisfy their insatiable greed at the expense of biodiversity.
This must be stopped now.The fight over land by campesinos because of increased land acquisition to grow GM... more
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Native Americans are to join the Climate Camp protests in the City of London this week in an attempt to draw attention to corporate Britain's "criminal" involvement in the tar sands of Canada.
The oil sands extraction process requires top soil to be removed, is highly energy-intensive and releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Five representatives from the Cree First Nations are coming to co-ordinate their campaign against key players in the carbon-heavy energy sector with British environmentalists.
Eriel Tchekwie Deranger, from Fort Chipewyan, a centre of Alberta's tar sands schemes, said: "British companies such as BP and Royal Bank of Scotland in partnership with dozens of other companies are driving this project, which is having such devastating effects on our environment and communities.
"It is destroying the ancient boreal forest, spreading open-pit mining across our territories, contaminating our food and water with toxins, disrupting local wildlife and threatening our way of life," she said.
It showed British companies were complicit in "the biggest environmental crime on the planet" and yet very few people in Britain even knew it was happening, said Deranger. She was speaking ahead of an annual Climate Camp that will be held for one week somewhere in Greater London from this Thursday.
The exact site of the camp has not been revealed as green organisers are worried that the police might move to thwart their plans if they are notified in advance.
BP and Shell are two of the major oil companies extracting oil from the tar sands. The thick and sticky oil can only be removed from the sands by using a lot of water and power as well as producing far heavier CO2 emissions.
RBS, now partly owned by the British government after its financial rescue, is also a target of environmentalists and aboriginals because it is seen as a major funder of such schemes.
The Climate Camp concept started with a protest outside the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire and was followed up by similar protests at Heathrow - against the proposed third runway - and Kingsnorth in Kent, where E.ON wants to construct a new coal-fired power station.
There was also a Climate Camp in April at Bishopsgate inside the City of London, which became linked with bad policing after a bystander died following a clash with a constable.
The tar sands are seen by many as a particularly dangerous project providing enough carbon to be released in total to tip the world into unstoppable climate change. Shell was the first major European oil company to invest in the Canadian-based operations but BP followed under its chief executive, Tony Hayward.
end of excerptNative Americans are to join the Climate Camp protests in the City of London this week... more
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Here’s a great idea: Let's bring into our country a genetically-engineered, non-native tree that is known to be wildly invasive, explosively flammable, and insatiably thirsty for ground water. Then let's clone thousands of these living firecrackers and plant them in forested regions across seven Southern states, allowing them to grow, flower, produce seeds, and spread into native environments.
Yes, this would be irresponsible, dangerous, and stupid – but apparently "Irresponsible, Dangerous, and Stupid" is the unofficial slogan of the U.S. Department Agriculture. In May, with little consideration of the devastating consequences for our native environment, USDA cavalierly rubberstamped a proposal by a profiteering corporation named ArborGen to do all of the above.
Substantially owned by International Paper, ArborGen shipped tissue from Brazilian eucalyptus trees to its New Zealand laboratories, where it was genetically altered to have more cellulose. New Zealand, however, outlaws plantings of genetically-engineered crops, so ArborGen sought out a more corporate-compliant country: Ours. The engineered eucalyptus was waved right into the good ol' USA to be cloned, and it’s now awaiting final approval for outdoor release in our land.
This has happened with practically no media coverage or public participation. It is happening solely because a handful of global speculators hope to profit by making ethanol from cellulose-enhanced eucalyptus – never mind that their self-aggrandizement would put America's native forests in danger of irreversible contamination by these destructive, invasive Frankentrees.
Luckily, several scrappy grassroots groups have mobilized to bring common sense and public pressure to bear on USDA. For updates and action items, visit www.nogetrees.org.
"Public Overwhelmingly Rejects Genetically Engineered Trees," Stop GE Trees Campaign, July 16, 2009.Here’s a great idea: Let's bring into our country a genetically-engineered,... more
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