Also - Judge Who Struck Down Moratorium Has Owned Transocean Stock
----
From the New York Times:
A federal judge in New Orleans on Tuesday blocked a six-month moratorium on deep-water drilling projects that the Obama administration imposed after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The White House swiftly vowed to appeal the ruling.
In a 22-page opinion, the judge, Martin L. C. Feldman of United States District Court, issued a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of a late May order halting all offshore exploratory drilling in more than 500 feet of water.
Citing potential economic harm to businesses and workers, Judge Feldman wrote that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium” on deep-water oil and gas drilling.
“The blanket moratorium, with no parameters, seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger,” wrote Judge Feldman, a 1983 appointee of President Ronald Reagan. The administration’s order halted 33 exploratory drilling projects and suspended new permits, but did not affect platforms that were already in production.
In a statement on Tuesday evening, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that within days he would issue a new order imposing a moratorium on deep-water drilling that would contain additional information showing why it was necessary.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said the administration “will immediately appeal” the judge’s ruling to a federal appeals court in New Orleans. He said it made sense to suspend exploratory deep-water drilling until the completion of the investigation into the April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP and the still-flowing leak from the underwater well.
President Obama “strongly believes,” Mr. Gibbs said, “that continuing to drill at these depths without knowing what happened does not make any sense” and would jeopardize “the safety of those on the rigs and safety of the environment in the gulf.” ....
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
House Minority Whip Cantor (R-VA) "bets against U.S. Treasury bonds"
From ThinkProgress:
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) has often expressed concern for how Obama administration policies are supposedly a “grave danger to America’s prosperity.” Now, the Wall Street Journal finds that Cantor actually invests in an exchange-traded fund that “takes a short position in long-dated government bonds” — effectively betting against the U.S. Treasury bonds that the government uses to fund its operations:
If Cantor truly cares about “America’s prosperity,” one would have to wonder why he is literally betting against its financial future. The Washington Independent’s Annie Lowrey adds that “Cantor is not a very canny investor. The fund is down 31 percent this year.”
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) has often expressed concern for how Obama administration policies are supposedly a “grave danger to America’s prosperity.” Now, the Wall Street Journal finds that Cantor actually invests in an exchange-traded fund that “takes a short position in long-dated government bonds” — effectively betting against the U.S. Treasury bonds that the government uses to fund its operations:
[Cantor], the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, bought up to $15,000 in shares of ProShares Trust Ultrashort 20+ Year Treasury ETF last December, according to his 2009 financial disclosure statement. The exchange-traded fund takes a short position in long-dated government bonds. In effect, it is a bet against U.S. government bonds — and perhaps on inflation in the future.
If Cantor truly cares about “America’s prosperity,” one would have to wonder why he is literally betting against its financial future. The Washington Independent’s Annie Lowrey adds that “Cantor is not a very canny investor. The fund is down 31 percent this year.”
"Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world"
By Naomi Klein @ guardian.co.uk:
...."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.
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...
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".
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."
...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." ...
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."
...."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.
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...
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".
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."
...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." ...
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."
Monday, June 14, 2010
"U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan"
From the New York Times
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.
“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines....
Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.
“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.
Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.”
...the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.
So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.
Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.
For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.
“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”
The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.
“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines....
Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.
“No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,” observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.
Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. “The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?” Mr. Brinkley said. “No one knows how this will work.”
...the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.
So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.
Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.
For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.
“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”
"In Indiana, power is growin' in the wind"
From the IndyStar.com:
For the second year, hundreds of wind turbines have been built in rural Indiana, placing the state among the fastest growing in the renewable power industry.
This year, construction of about 300 megawatts of new wind power electricity -- mostly expansions of the Meadow Lake and Fowler Ridge wind farms in White and Benton counties -- has been approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
However, looking beyond 2010, the IURC has just one application for a wind farm under review. If approved, the Spartan Wind Farm phase 1 by Duke Energy Generation Services would generate 101 megawatts of power on a Newton County site due to open in early 2011.
One megawatt of power is enough electricity for 225 to 300 households for a year.
The national recession and uncertain state policies concerning alternative power sources have caused the slowdown, said Horizon Wind project manager Ryan Brown. Horizon Wind is building Meadow Lake wind farm in White County, a large site visible to travelers along I-65 in Northern Indiana.
"We have seen a $2 billion investment by the industry in Indiana, and that is a great start for the state, which could continue if there are some strategic moves on the policy front," Brown said.
The wind industry nationwide has sought either a national or state-by-state requirement for a percentage of electric power to be produced by wind and other renewable alternatives to coal and natural gas.
According to the American Wind Energy Association, developers of Indiana wind farms feeding power to the multistate electric grid added about 905 megawatts of wind power in 2009.
That put Indiana second only to Texas in construction of new generating capacity from wind turbines last year, according to AWEA, which held its annual national convention in Dallas last week, with more than 23,000 in attendance. In 2008, the association said Indiana had the fastest increase in wind-generated power in the country.
For the second year, hundreds of wind turbines have been built in rural Indiana, placing the state among the fastest growing in the renewable power industry.
This year, construction of about 300 megawatts of new wind power electricity -- mostly expansions of the Meadow Lake and Fowler Ridge wind farms in White and Benton counties -- has been approved by the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission.
However, looking beyond 2010, the IURC has just one application for a wind farm under review. If approved, the Spartan Wind Farm phase 1 by Duke Energy Generation Services would generate 101 megawatts of power on a Newton County site due to open in early 2011.
One megawatt of power is enough electricity for 225 to 300 households for a year.
The national recession and uncertain state policies concerning alternative power sources have caused the slowdown, said Horizon Wind project manager Ryan Brown. Horizon Wind is building Meadow Lake wind farm in White County, a large site visible to travelers along I-65 in Northern Indiana.
"We have seen a $2 billion investment by the industry in Indiana, and that is a great start for the state, which could continue if there are some strategic moves on the policy front," Brown said.
The wind industry nationwide has sought either a national or state-by-state requirement for a percentage of electric power to be produced by wind and other renewable alternatives to coal and natural gas.
According to the American Wind Energy Association, developers of Indiana wind farms feeding power to the multistate electric grid added about 905 megawatts of wind power in 2009.
That put Indiana second only to Texas in construction of new generating capacity from wind turbines last year, according to AWEA, which held its annual national convention in Dallas last week, with more than 23,000 in attendance. In 2008, the association said Indiana had the fastest increase in wind-generated power in the country.
Wind Turbines in Sweden's Northern Region
From AFP:
While community opposition often blocks or hampers new wind power projects, Sweden has managed to break ground for Europe's largest wind park counting more than 1,000 giant turbines, with barely a whisper of protest.
The secret? The giant Markbygden wind farm -- covering more than 500 square kilometres, or the equivalent of five times the size of Paris -- is being built in a virtually uninhabited, desolate stretch of Sweden's great north.
"If I were to try the same thing in Germany, it would take me 20 years to get everyone's agreement," Wolfgang Kropp, the German head of the project, told AFP.
Standing on the shores of the Baltic Sea at the Piteaa harbour near the wind park site, he added: "For the same area, you would have 10,000 land owners. Here there are three.
"That's why we came here to Sweden in search of a good location," he said.
"In the south of the country, it is very difficult. There are farms, and vacation homes. Here in the north, there is no one," he said.
Kropp's company Svevind, a client of German wind power giant Enercon, is leading the construction of the park, with 1,101 wind turbines scheduled to be built by 2022.
They should then produce energy equivalent to the production of two nuclear reactors.
The site stretches across a vast area covered with dense pine forests interspersed with scattered villages of just a handful of brightly painted wooden houses.
They are surrounded by silence broken only by the occasional car or a fighter jet from a neighbouring base screaming past on a training mission. The giant wind park is widely popular here.
The main forestry, paper and metals industries in the region are facing new environmental and climate regulations requiring them to significantly shrink their carbon footprints by 2020.
That is something a change in energy dependence should help with.
"We want to turn this region into a new centre of green energy production," said Robert Bergman of Solander Science Park, a scientific laboratory in Piteaa studying among other things the potential of wood and paper-based fuels...
Despite the sparse population around the park site, there are nevertheless some dissenting voices.
Most opposition comes from the indigenous Samis, who fear the towering turbines will heavily encroach on their reindeer grazing areas, already significantly hit by forestry and tourism in the area.
In late April, the local Sami council refused a compensation package of 5,000 kronor (520 euros, 630 dollars) per turbine and per year, or a total of more than five million kronor each year after the entire park has been built.
"We say no. The amount does not correspond to the problems that this will cause and the threat it poses to our herds," Anders Ruth, who heads up the local council in Oestra Kikkejaure, said...
Svevind says it understands the reindeer owners concerns, but that there is no better alternative location for the park.
"It's true, the paper industry has already taken their forests, the dams have already taken their rivers, the mines have taken what's underground. And now it's the wind turbine," said Mikael Kyrk, a Swedish Svevind executive.
"But at the same time, that's the way development works."
While community opposition often blocks or hampers new wind power projects, Sweden has managed to break ground for Europe's largest wind park counting more than 1,000 giant turbines, with barely a whisper of protest.
The secret? The giant Markbygden wind farm -- covering more than 500 square kilometres, or the equivalent of five times the size of Paris -- is being built in a virtually uninhabited, desolate stretch of Sweden's great north.
"If I were to try the same thing in Germany, it would take me 20 years to get everyone's agreement," Wolfgang Kropp, the German head of the project, told AFP.
Standing on the shores of the Baltic Sea at the Piteaa harbour near the wind park site, he added: "For the same area, you would have 10,000 land owners. Here there are three.
"That's why we came here to Sweden in search of a good location," he said.
"In the south of the country, it is very difficult. There are farms, and vacation homes. Here in the north, there is no one," he said.
Kropp's company Svevind, a client of German wind power giant Enercon, is leading the construction of the park, with 1,101 wind turbines scheduled to be built by 2022.
They should then produce energy equivalent to the production of two nuclear reactors.
The site stretches across a vast area covered with dense pine forests interspersed with scattered villages of just a handful of brightly painted wooden houses.
They are surrounded by silence broken only by the occasional car or a fighter jet from a neighbouring base screaming past on a training mission. The giant wind park is widely popular here.
The main forestry, paper and metals industries in the region are facing new environmental and climate regulations requiring them to significantly shrink their carbon footprints by 2020.
That is something a change in energy dependence should help with.
"We want to turn this region into a new centre of green energy production," said Robert Bergman of Solander Science Park, a scientific laboratory in Piteaa studying among other things the potential of wood and paper-based fuels...
Despite the sparse population around the park site, there are nevertheless some dissenting voices.
Most opposition comes from the indigenous Samis, who fear the towering turbines will heavily encroach on their reindeer grazing areas, already significantly hit by forestry and tourism in the area.
In late April, the local Sami council refused a compensation package of 5,000 kronor (520 euros, 630 dollars) per turbine and per year, or a total of more than five million kronor each year after the entire park has been built.
"We say no. The amount does not correspond to the problems that this will cause and the threat it poses to our herds," Anders Ruth, who heads up the local council in Oestra Kikkejaure, said...
Svevind says it understands the reindeer owners concerns, but that there is no better alternative location for the park.
"It's true, the paper industry has already taken their forests, the dams have already taken their rivers, the mines have taken what's underground. And now it's the wind turbine," said Mikael Kyrk, a Swedish Svevind executive.
"But at the same time, that's the way development works."
Thursday, June 10, 2010
"Snakes in mysterious global decline"
From the BBC:
Snakes may be declining across the world, according to a global study. Researchers examined records for 17 snake populations covering eight species over the last few decades, and found most had declined markedly.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, some populations shrank in number abruptly around 1998.
Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers describe the findings as "alarming" but say much more work is needed to understand the causes. "This is the first time that data has been analysed in this way, and what we've shown is that in different parts of the world we seem to have this steep decline in a short period," said project leader Chris Reading. Reading's team at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology ran the study with institutions in Australia, France, Italy and Nigeria.
The main problem for anyone wanting to conduct a global survey such as this is simply lack of data. Monitoring snake populations means marking the individuals in some way - typically by snipping a pattern into their scales, or implanting a microchip. Field seasons can last for many months, and have to be repeated annually.
The researchers believe they amassed most, if not all, long-term datasets for this study - although "long-term" in this context means going back more than one decade, in some cases more than two. Nevertheless, within this relatively short timeframe, eight of the 17 populations were seen to fall markedly in size - some by more than 90% - with only one showing any sign of a rise. Species in decline include the asp and the smooth snake from Europe, the Gabon viper and rhinoceros viper of West Africa, and the royal python...
Populations shrank even in protected areas, suggesting that the progressive loss of habitat for wild animals being seen all over the world is not the only cause. Similar steep declines observed in frogs and newts in an earlier period were eventually found to be caused by the fungal disease chytridiomycosis. The year when many of the snake declines began - 1998 - raises the question of whether climatic factors might be involved, as very strong El Nino conditions contributed to making it the hottest year recorded in modern times.
"...I think that with so many populations in different places showing decline, it's more than co-incidence."
Snakes may be declining across the world, according to a global study. Researchers examined records for 17 snake populations covering eight species over the last few decades, and found most had declined markedly.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, some populations shrank in number abruptly around 1998.
Writing in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers describe the findings as "alarming" but say much more work is needed to understand the causes. "This is the first time that data has been analysed in this way, and what we've shown is that in different parts of the world we seem to have this steep decline in a short period," said project leader Chris Reading. Reading's team at the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology ran the study with institutions in Australia, France, Italy and Nigeria.
The main problem for anyone wanting to conduct a global survey such as this is simply lack of data. Monitoring snake populations means marking the individuals in some way - typically by snipping a pattern into their scales, or implanting a microchip. Field seasons can last for many months, and have to be repeated annually.
The researchers believe they amassed most, if not all, long-term datasets for this study - although "long-term" in this context means going back more than one decade, in some cases more than two. Nevertheless, within this relatively short timeframe, eight of the 17 populations were seen to fall markedly in size - some by more than 90% - with only one showing any sign of a rise. Species in decline include the asp and the smooth snake from Europe, the Gabon viper and rhinoceros viper of West Africa, and the royal python...
Populations shrank even in protected areas, suggesting that the progressive loss of habitat for wild animals being seen all over the world is not the only cause. Similar steep declines observed in frogs and newts in an earlier period were eventually found to be caused by the fungal disease chytridiomycosis. The year when many of the snake declines began - 1998 - raises the question of whether climatic factors might be involved, as very strong El Nino conditions contributed to making it the hottest year recorded in modern times.
"...I think that with so many populations in different places showing decline, it's more than co-incidence."
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
The Dispersant Used on the Oil Gushing in the Gulf
From WarOnYou.com:
The Amount Of Neurotoxin Pesticide Corexit Sprayed By BP Tops 1 Million Gallons
BP’s latest oil spill response update for June 4th says the total amount of the dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1,021,000 gallons.
But what most people don’t know is that the active ingredient of the toxic chemical dispersant, which is up to 60% by volume, being sprayed by BP to fight the Gulf oil spill is a is a neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and aquatic life, causes cancer, causes damage to internal organs such as the liver and kidneys simply by absorbing it through the skin and may cause reproductive side effects.
In fact the neurotoxin pesticide that is lethal to 50% of life in concentrations as little as 2.6 parts per million has been banned for use in the UK since 1998 because it failed the UK “Rocky shore test” which assures that the dispersant does not cause a “significant deleterious ecological change” – meaning it can delete an ecology or more specifically delete the entire food chain.
Corexit has also earned the highest EPA warning label for toxicity which means the effects of the toxic chemicals to the eye are corrosive resulting in irreversible destruction of ocular tissue and other tissue with corneal involvement along with an burning that can persist for more than 21 days and effects to human skin are corrosive resulting in tissue destruction into the dermis and/or scarring.
Corexit was widely used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and according to a literature review performed by the group the Alaska Community Action on Toxics was later linked with widespread long lasting health impacts in people including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders.
The “Human Health Hazards” are said to be “Chronic” for Corexit EC9527A according to the EPA.
So What Are These Dispersants Made Of That Makes Them Such a Powerful Neurotoxin Pesticide?
The main ingredients of Corexit is 2-Butoxyethanol which can make up to 60% of the dispersant and is known to be toxic to blood, kidneys, liver, and the central nervous system (CNS).
2-Butoxyethanol is also known to cause cancer, birth defects and has been found to cause genetic mutations and is a delayed chronic health hazard as well as an environmental hazardous material
Corexit also contains Arsenic, Cadmium, Chromium, Mercury, and Cyanide.
• Why allow the use of these toxic dispersants?
Well the EPA has ordered BP to stop using the dispersants but BP has refused.
The EPA justifies the use of dispersants because they are less toxic than oil and the cause less of an environment impact that oil along the coastline.
However the choice of using Corexit contradicts both of those justifications.
Corexit is lethal in as little as 2.6 parts per million where oil is lethal in 11 parts per million meaning that Corexit is over 4 times more toxic than oil.
Furthermore scientific studies show that oil dispersed with Corexit is 11 times more lethal than oil alone.
In fact the study referenced showed that crude oil was lethal at 4250 parts per million to killifish but combination of oil mixed with Corexit was lethal in as little as 317.7 ppm.
“Dispersed oils were more toxic than crude oils,” noted the report....
CAS Registry Number Chemical Name
57-55-6
1,2-Propanediol
111-76-2
2-butoxy-Ethanol
577-11-7
Butanedioic acid, 2-sulfo-, 1,4-bis(2-ethylhexyl) ester, sodium salt (1:1)
1338-43-8
Sorbitan, mono-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate
9005-65-6
Sorbitan, mono-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate, poly(oxy-1,2-ethanediyl) derivs.
9005-70-3
Sorbitan, tri-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate, poly(oxy-1,2-ethanediyl) derivs
29911-28-2
2-Propanol, 1-(2-butoxy-1-methylethoxy)-
64742-47-8
Distillates (petroleum), hydrotreated light
The have also been found to contain Arsenic, Cadmium, Chromium, Mercury, and Cyanide among other heavy metals
What are the Chronic Health effects of Corexit?
Here are some of the highlights from the MSDS for the active ingredient (2-butoxyethanol) – of Corexit (up to 60% by volume)
Severe over-exposure can result in death.
MUTAGENIC EFFECTS: Mutagenic for bacteria and/or yeast.
The substance may be toxic to blood, kidneys, liver, central nervous system (CNS).
Repeated or prolonged exposure to the substance can produce target organs damage.
Repeated exposure to highly (this) toxic material may produce general deterioration of health by an accumulation in one or many human organs.
Hazardous in case of skin contact (permeator), of ingestion, of inhalation.
May cause adverse reproductive effects (maternal and paternal fertility, fetoxicity)
May cause birth defects (teratogenic)
May cause cancer (tumorigenic)
Penetrates intact skin easily and can cause systemic effects and central nervous system depression
Inhalation: May cause irritation of the respiratory tract. May affect behavior (analgesia), behavior/central nervous system (headache, drowsiness, dizzness, stuttering, coma, weakness, ataxia, slurred speech, loss of coordination and judgement, personality changes, analgesia, blurred vision, tremor, excitement, somnolence), sense organs, the gastrointestinal tract (nausea, vomiting), metabolism (metabolic acidosis), respiration (dyspnea), urinary system (kidneys – hematuria, albuminuria, polyuria, oliguria, renal failure), liver (liver damage).
Exposure to high vapor concentration may also cause corneal or lens opacity of the eyes.
Ingestion: Causes gastrointestinal tract irritation with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. May affect behavior/central
nervous system (see inhalation), respiration (dyspnea), metabolism, cardiovascular system.
Chronic Potential Health Effects: Inhalation and Ingestion: Prolonged or repeated inhalation or ingestion may affect the liver, blood (changes in red blood cell count, pigmented or nucleated red blood cells, microcytosis with or without anemia, erythropenia, reticulocytosis, granulocytosis, leukocytosis), urinary system (kidneys -hematuria), metabolism (weight loss), endocrine system (spleen, thymus, pancreas). Prolonged or repeated inhalation of high concentrations may also cause lung hemmorrhage, congestion, bronchopneumonia.
Classified in Canada as CLASS D-1A: Material causing immediate and serious toxic effects (VERY TOXIC).
Classified in Canada as CLASS D-2B: Material causing other toxic effects (TOXIC)
The EPA warning about human health affects says:
People working with dispersants are strongly advised to use a half face filter mask or an air-supplied breathing apparatus to protect their noses, throats, and lungs, and they should wear nitrile or PVC gloves, coveralls, boots, and chemical splash goggles to keep dispersants off skin and out of their eyes.
The Amount Of Neurotoxin Pesticide Corexit Sprayed By BP Tops 1 Million Gallons
BP’s latest oil spill response update for June 4th says the total amount of the dispersant used in the Gulf of Mexico more than 1,021,000 gallons.
But what most people don’t know is that the active ingredient of the toxic chemical dispersant, which is up to 60% by volume, being sprayed by BP to fight the Gulf oil spill is a is a neurotoxin pesticide that is acutely toxic to both human and aquatic life, causes cancer, causes damage to internal organs such as the liver and kidneys simply by absorbing it through the skin and may cause reproductive side effects.
In fact the neurotoxin pesticide that is lethal to 50% of life in concentrations as little as 2.6 parts per million has been banned for use in the UK since 1998 because it failed the UK “Rocky shore test” which assures that the dispersant does not cause a “significant deleterious ecological change” – meaning it can delete an ecology or more specifically delete the entire food chain.
Corexit has also earned the highest EPA warning label for toxicity which means the effects of the toxic chemicals to the eye are corrosive resulting in irreversible destruction of ocular tissue and other tissue with corneal involvement along with an burning that can persist for more than 21 days and effects to human skin are corrosive resulting in tissue destruction into the dermis and/or scarring.
Corexit was widely used after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill and according to a literature review performed by the group the Alaska Community Action on Toxics was later linked with widespread long lasting health impacts in people including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders.
The “Human Health Hazards” are said to be “Chronic” for Corexit EC9527A according to the EPA.
So What Are These Dispersants Made Of That Makes Them Such a Powerful Neurotoxin Pesticide?
The main ingredients of Corexit is 2-Butoxyethanol which can make up to 60% of the dispersant and is known to be toxic to blood, kidneys, liver, and the central nervous system (CNS).
2-Butoxyethanol is also known to cause cancer, birth defects and has been found to cause genetic mutations and is a delayed chronic health hazard as well as an environmental hazardous material
Corexit also contains Arsenic, Cadmium, Chromium, Mercury, and Cyanide.
• Why allow the use of these toxic dispersants?
Well the EPA has ordered BP to stop using the dispersants but BP has refused.
The EPA justifies the use of dispersants because they are less toxic than oil and the cause less of an environment impact that oil along the coastline.
However the choice of using Corexit contradicts both of those justifications.
Corexit is lethal in as little as 2.6 parts per million where oil is lethal in 11 parts per million meaning that Corexit is over 4 times more toxic than oil.
Furthermore scientific studies show that oil dispersed with Corexit is 11 times more lethal than oil alone.
In fact the study referenced showed that crude oil was lethal at 4250 parts per million to killifish but combination of oil mixed with Corexit was lethal in as little as 317.7 ppm.
“Dispersed oils were more toxic than crude oils,” noted the report....
CAS Registry Number Chemical Name
57-55-6
1,2-Propanediol
111-76-2
2-butoxy-Ethanol
577-11-7
Butanedioic acid, 2-sulfo-, 1,4-bis(2-ethylhexyl) ester, sodium salt (1:1)
1338-43-8
Sorbitan, mono-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate
9005-65-6
Sorbitan, mono-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate, poly(oxy-1,2-ethanediyl) derivs.
9005-70-3
Sorbitan, tri-(9Z)-9-octadecenoate, poly(oxy-1,2-ethanediyl) derivs
29911-28-2
2-Propanol, 1-(2-butoxy-1-methylethoxy)-
64742-47-8
Distillates (petroleum), hydrotreated light
The have also been found to contain Arsenic, Cadmium, Chromium, Mercury, and Cyanide among other heavy metals
What are the Chronic Health effects of Corexit?
Here are some of the highlights from the MSDS for the active ingredient (2-butoxyethanol) – of Corexit (up to 60% by volume)
Severe over-exposure can result in death.
MUTAGENIC EFFECTS: Mutagenic for bacteria and/or yeast.
The substance may be toxic to blood, kidneys, liver, central nervous system (CNS).
Repeated or prolonged exposure to the substance can produce target organs damage.
Repeated exposure to highly (this) toxic material may produce general deterioration of health by an accumulation in one or many human organs.
Hazardous in case of skin contact (permeator), of ingestion, of inhalation.
May cause adverse reproductive effects (maternal and paternal fertility, fetoxicity)
May cause birth defects (teratogenic)
May cause cancer (tumorigenic)
Penetrates intact skin easily and can cause systemic effects and central nervous system depression
Inhalation: May cause irritation of the respiratory tract. May affect behavior (analgesia), behavior/central nervous system (headache, drowsiness, dizzness, stuttering, coma, weakness, ataxia, slurred speech, loss of coordination and judgement, personality changes, analgesia, blurred vision, tremor, excitement, somnolence), sense organs, the gastrointestinal tract (nausea, vomiting), metabolism (metabolic acidosis), respiration (dyspnea), urinary system (kidneys – hematuria, albuminuria, polyuria, oliguria, renal failure), liver (liver damage).
Exposure to high vapor concentration may also cause corneal or lens opacity of the eyes.
Ingestion: Causes gastrointestinal tract irritation with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. May affect behavior/central
nervous system (see inhalation), respiration (dyspnea), metabolism, cardiovascular system.
Chronic Potential Health Effects: Inhalation and Ingestion: Prolonged or repeated inhalation or ingestion may affect the liver, blood (changes in red blood cell count, pigmented or nucleated red blood cells, microcytosis with or without anemia, erythropenia, reticulocytosis, granulocytosis, leukocytosis), urinary system (kidneys -hematuria), metabolism (weight loss), endocrine system (spleen, thymus, pancreas). Prolonged or repeated inhalation of high concentrations may also cause lung hemmorrhage, congestion, bronchopneumonia.
Classified in Canada as CLASS D-1A: Material causing immediate and serious toxic effects (VERY TOXIC).
Classified in Canada as CLASS D-2B: Material causing other toxic effects (TOXIC)
The EPA warning about human health affects says:
People working with dispersants are strongly advised to use a half face filter mask or an air-supplied breathing apparatus to protect their noses, throats, and lungs, and they should wear nitrile or PVC gloves, coveralls, boots, and chemical splash goggles to keep dispersants off skin and out of their eyes.
"Comet in the June Dawn"
photo by John Chumack
photo by Michael Jaegerby Greg Bryant - Skyandtelescope.com:
We rarely see a good comet when it's at its best. Most comets are brightest when nearest the Sun — just when they’re most likely to be hidden in the Sun’s glare or below the sunrise or sunset horizon.
That's the situation this spring with Comet C/2009 R1 (McNaught). Even so, observers in the Northern Hemisphere should be able to pick it up with binoculars just before dawn for at least part of June, during its runup in brightness.
And in fact, the comet is turning out to be 1 or 2 magnitudes brighter that we predicted in the June Sky & Telescope (page 60). Let's hope this behavior keeps up!
...Mid-June is when Comet McNaught should be most interesting, offering the best compromise between its increasing brightness and its decreasing altitude at the start of dawn. Moreover, the sky will be free of moonlight.
__________________The helpful conjunctions continue as the comet passes about 1° north of the open cluster M34 in Perseus on the morning of June 10th, and 3° south of 1.8-magnitude Mirfak (Alpha Persei) on the 13th. It’s still about 15° high in the northeast as the sky starts to grow light on June 15th, but it appears roughly 1° lower every day after that. The comet passes zero-magnitude Capella on the 21st, and it’s very low by the 24th, when it passes 2nd-magnitude Beta Aurigae. By now Comet McNaught may be as bright as 4th or 5th magnitude, but moonlight is returning.
The comet will be lost to view by June’s end — just before it reaches perihelion on July 2nd, 0.405 astronomical unit from the Sun. It remains far from Earth throughout this apparition, never venturing closer than 1.135 a.u. (in mid-June). After perihelion it will fade rapidly as it heads to the far-southern sky.
Tuesday, June 08, 2010
"on the Threat of [Rich] Elites"
By Fred Branfman From TruthDig:
Noam Chomsky’s description of the dangers posed by U.S. elites’ “Imperial Mentality” was recently given a boost in credibility by a surprising source—Bill Clinton. As America’s economy, foreign policy and politics continue to unravel, it is clear that this mentality and the system it has created will produce an increasing number of victims in the years to come. Clinton startlingly testified to that effect on March 10 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
Clinton is to be praised for being the first U.S. president to take personal responsibility for impoverishing an entire nation rather than ignoring his misdeeds or falsely blaming local U.S.-imposed regimes. But his confession also means that his embrace of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA “neo-liberalization” destroyed the lives of many more millions well beyond Haiti, as U.S. support for heavily subsidized U.S. agribusiness damaged local agricultural economies throughout Latin America and beyond. This led to mass migration into urban slums and destitution, as well as increased emigration to the U.S.—which then led Clinton to militarize the border in 1994—and thus accelerated the “illegal immigration” issue that so poisons U.S. politics today.
Clinton might also have added that he and other U.S. leaders imposed such policies by force, installing military dictators and vicious police and paramilitary forces. Chomsky reports in “Hopes and Prospects” that in Haiti, semiofficial thugs empowered by a U.S.-supported coup murdered 8,000 people and raped 35,000 women in 2004 and 2005 alone, while a tiny local elite reaps most of the benefits from U.S. policies.
Clinton’s testimony reminded me of one of my visits with Chomsky, back in 1988, when, after talking for an hour or so, he smiled and said he had to stop to get back to writing about the children of Haiti.
I was struck both by his concern for forgotten Haitians and because his comment so recalled my experience with him in 1970 as he spent a week researching U.S. war-making in Laos. I had taken dozens of journalists, peace activists, diplomats, experts and others out to camps of refugees who had fled U.S. saturation bombing. Chomsky was one of only two who wept openly upon learning how these innocent villagers had seen their beloved grandmothers burned alive, their children slowly suffocated, their spouses cut to ribbons, during five years of merciless, pitiless and illegal U.S. bombing for which U.S. leaders would have been executed had international law protecting civilians in wartime been applied to their actions. It was obvious that he was above all driven by a deep feeling for the world’s victims, those he calls the “unpeople” in his new book. No U.S. policymakers I knew in Laos, nor the many I have met since, have shared such concerns.
Bill Clinton’s testimony also reminded me of the accuracy of Chomsky writings on Haiti—before, during and after Clinton’s reign—as summed up in “Hopes and Prospects”:
Clinton would have a cleaner conscience today had he listened to Chomsky then. Many more Americans may also benefit by heeding Chomsky today, as U.S. elites’ callousness toward unpeople abroad is now affecting increasing numbers of their fellow citizens back home. Nothing symbolizes this more than investment bankers tricking countless Americans out of their life savings by luring them into buying homes they could not afford that were then foreclosed on.
In doing so, Wall Streeters exhibited what Chomsky describes as a Western elite imperial mentality, dating back to 1491 (his first chapter is entitled “Year 514: Globalization for Whom?”). Only this time instead of impoverishing Haitians or Chileans, it was Americans who were afflicted by a “system” of “fuck the poor” (in the words of successful Wall Street trader Steve Eisman). [See Branfman’s review of “The Big Short” in Truthdig.]
The many Americans whose lives have been damaged by financiers’ single-minded focus on short-term profits at the expense of everyone else are only a harbinger of what is to come. Financial elites remain in charge, as evidenced by recent “financial reform” legislation that does not even reinstate the Glass-Steagall law separating investment and commercial banking. New York magazine has described how Obama officials blocked even inadequate reforms, let alone the stronger proposals from Nouriel Roubini, one of the few major economists to foresee the economic crash. Former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson tells us “our banking structure remains—and the incentive and belief system that lies behind reckless risk-taking has only become more dangerous,” thus setting the stage for an even worse crash than that of 2008. And, as U.S. competitiveness continues to decline and it cannot afford its endless wars without drastically cutting social spending, countless more Americans will find themselves paying the price for U.S. elites’ imperial mentality.
This mentality described by Chomsky includes the following elements: (1) a single-minded focus on maximizing short-term elite economic and military interests; (2) a refusal to let other societies follow their own paths if perceived to conflict with these interests; (3) continual and massive violations of international law; (4) indifference to human life, particularly in the Third World; (5) massive violation of the U.S. Constitution, especially through the executive branch’s seizure of the power to wage unilateral and unaccountable war in every corner of the globe; (6) indifference to U.S. and international public opinion, which is often more progressive and humane than that of the elites; (7) a remarkable ability to “manufacture consent,” aided by the mass media and intellectuals, that has blinded most Americans to the truth of what their leaders actually do in their names....
In today’s system, Chomsky explains, to “stay in the game,” CEOs must maximize their own short-term profits while treating the costs of doing so as “externalities” to be paid by the taxpayer. In the case of climate change, however, “externalities happen to be the fate of the species.” An imperial mentality which has primarily threatened the Third World in the past, in other words, has now become a threat to the survival of not only America but all civilization as we know it....
Chomsky’s explanation of the American system’s imperial mentality also illuminates a seeming mystery: How could decent people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama commit so much evil? Our concept of evil is shaped by such paranoid psychotics as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who all hated their victims and openly lusted for power. We do not yet understand that in today’s American system the problem we face is not so much inhumanity from the mad and evil as “ahumanity” from the sane and decent.....
At the moment, Chomsky’s proposed solutions are politically unthinkable. As the American economy and polity continues to unravel and suffering mounts at home and abroad, however, a mass movement may arise that is capable of saving America and the world. If so, such a movement is likely to attempt solutions of the sort Chomsky proposes. Here are two out of a far larger number:
State capitalism for the many: The American Enterprise Institute’s chief declared in a May 23 Washington Post Op-Ed that “America faces a new culture war,” between “free enterprise” offering “rewards determined by market forces” and “European-style statism.” “Hopes and Prospects” explains at some length, however, why this formulation is absurd. America’s “free enterprise” system has always been based on massive government aid, from the Army building 19th century railroads, to the Pentagon’s post-World War II role in building the Internet and Silicon Valley, to today’s “rewards” to Wall Street and oil companies determined not by market forces, but those companies’ political clout. America has been practicing “state capitalism” since the founding of the Republic, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future no matter which party is in office.
The real choice, Chomsky makes clear, is not free enterprise versus statism, but state capitalism for (A) the few or (B) the many. The latter would include breaking up the banks, a focus on job creation and safety net expansion where needed, single-payer health insurance, higher taxes on the wealthy, far lower military spending, public members on corporate boards, greater employee workplace control and, above all, a new public-private partnership to see America become a leader in a clean energy economic revolution.
A Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone and Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Chomsky proposes that rather than continuing to engage in senseless fighting and confronting Iran over nuclear weapons, U.S., Israeli, Arab and Iranian interests would be far better served by the U.S. using its enormous military and economic clout to create a Mideast nuclear weapons-free zone that Iran says it is willing to accept, and a comprehensive and fair Israeli-Palestinian settlement including Hamas’ promised recognition of Israel and cessation of rocket attacks. A major benefit to the U.S. would be to reduce the threat of domestic terrorism. For only a comprehensive new policy that addresses the source of anti-U.S. hatred—U.S. war-making on civilians and support of corrupt and vicious local regimes—can reduce it....
Noam Chomsky’s description of the dangers posed by U.S. elites’ “Imperial Mentality” was recently given a boost in credibility by a surprising source—Bill Clinton. As America’s economy, foreign policy and politics continue to unravel, it is clear that this mentality and the system it has created will produce an increasing number of victims in the years to come. Clinton startlingly testified to that effect on March 10 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
Since 1981 the United States has followed a policy until the last year or so, when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so thank goodness they can lead directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did, nobody else.
Clinton is to be praised for being the first U.S. president to take personal responsibility for impoverishing an entire nation rather than ignoring his misdeeds or falsely blaming local U.S.-imposed regimes. But his confession also means that his embrace of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA “neo-liberalization” destroyed the lives of many more millions well beyond Haiti, as U.S. support for heavily subsidized U.S. agribusiness damaged local agricultural economies throughout Latin America and beyond. This led to mass migration into urban slums and destitution, as well as increased emigration to the U.S.—which then led Clinton to militarize the border in 1994—and thus accelerated the “illegal immigration” issue that so poisons U.S. politics today.
Clinton might also have added that he and other U.S. leaders imposed such policies by force, installing military dictators and vicious police and paramilitary forces. Chomsky reports in “Hopes and Prospects” that in Haiti, semiofficial thugs empowered by a U.S.-supported coup murdered 8,000 people and raped 35,000 women in 2004 and 2005 alone, while a tiny local elite reaps most of the benefits from U.S. policies.
Clinton’s testimony reminded me of one of my visits with Chomsky, back in 1988, when, after talking for an hour or so, he smiled and said he had to stop to get back to writing about the children of Haiti.
I was struck both by his concern for forgotten Haitians and because his comment so recalled my experience with him in 1970 as he spent a week researching U.S. war-making in Laos. I had taken dozens of journalists, peace activists, diplomats, experts and others out to camps of refugees who had fled U.S. saturation bombing. Chomsky was one of only two who wept openly upon learning how these innocent villagers had seen their beloved grandmothers burned alive, their children slowly suffocated, their spouses cut to ribbons, during five years of merciless, pitiless and illegal U.S. bombing for which U.S. leaders would have been executed had international law protecting civilians in wartime been applied to their actions. It was obvious that he was above all driven by a deep feeling for the world’s victims, those he calls the “unpeople” in his new book. No U.S. policymakers I knew in Laos, nor the many I have met since, have shared such concerns.
Bill Clinton’s testimony also reminded me of the accuracy of Chomsky writings on Haiti—before, during and after Clinton’s reign—as summed up in “Hopes and Prospects”:
The Clinton doctrine, presented to Congress, was that the US is entitled to resort to “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources.” In Haiti, Clinton [imposed] harsh neoliberal rules that were guaranteed to crush what remained of the economy, as they did.
Clinton would have a cleaner conscience today had he listened to Chomsky then. Many more Americans may also benefit by heeding Chomsky today, as U.S. elites’ callousness toward unpeople abroad is now affecting increasing numbers of their fellow citizens back home. Nothing symbolizes this more than investment bankers tricking countless Americans out of their life savings by luring them into buying homes they could not afford that were then foreclosed on.
In doing so, Wall Streeters exhibited what Chomsky describes as a Western elite imperial mentality, dating back to 1491 (his first chapter is entitled “Year 514: Globalization for Whom?”). Only this time instead of impoverishing Haitians or Chileans, it was Americans who were afflicted by a “system” of “fuck the poor” (in the words of successful Wall Street trader Steve Eisman). [See Branfman’s review of “The Big Short” in Truthdig.]
The many Americans whose lives have been damaged by financiers’ single-minded focus on short-term profits at the expense of everyone else are only a harbinger of what is to come. Financial elites remain in charge, as evidenced by recent “financial reform” legislation that does not even reinstate the Glass-Steagall law separating investment and commercial banking. New York magazine has described how Obama officials blocked even inadequate reforms, let alone the stronger proposals from Nouriel Roubini, one of the few major economists to foresee the economic crash. Former International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson tells us “our banking structure remains—and the incentive and belief system that lies behind reckless risk-taking has only become more dangerous,” thus setting the stage for an even worse crash than that of 2008. And, as U.S. competitiveness continues to decline and it cannot afford its endless wars without drastically cutting social spending, countless more Americans will find themselves paying the price for U.S. elites’ imperial mentality.
This mentality described by Chomsky includes the following elements: (1) a single-minded focus on maximizing short-term elite economic and military interests; (2) a refusal to let other societies follow their own paths if perceived to conflict with these interests; (3) continual and massive violations of international law; (4) indifference to human life, particularly in the Third World; (5) massive violation of the U.S. Constitution, especially through the executive branch’s seizure of the power to wage unilateral and unaccountable war in every corner of the globe; (6) indifference to U.S. and international public opinion, which is often more progressive and humane than that of the elites; (7) a remarkable ability to “manufacture consent,” aided by the mass media and intellectuals, that has blinded most Americans to the truth of what their leaders actually do in their names....
In today’s system, Chomsky explains, to “stay in the game,” CEOs must maximize their own short-term profits while treating the costs of doing so as “externalities” to be paid by the taxpayer. In the case of climate change, however, “externalities happen to be the fate of the species.” An imperial mentality which has primarily threatened the Third World in the past, in other words, has now become a threat to the survival of not only America but all civilization as we know it....
Chomsky’s explanation of the American system’s imperial mentality also illuminates a seeming mystery: How could decent people like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama commit so much evil? Our concept of evil is shaped by such paranoid psychotics as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, who all hated their victims and openly lusted for power. We do not yet understand that in today’s American system the problem we face is not so much inhumanity from the mad and evil as “ahumanity” from the sane and decent.....
At the moment, Chomsky’s proposed solutions are politically unthinkable. As the American economy and polity continues to unravel and suffering mounts at home and abroad, however, a mass movement may arise that is capable of saving America and the world. If so, such a movement is likely to attempt solutions of the sort Chomsky proposes. Here are two out of a far larger number:
State capitalism for the many: The American Enterprise Institute’s chief declared in a May 23 Washington Post Op-Ed that “America faces a new culture war,” between “free enterprise” offering “rewards determined by market forces” and “European-style statism.” “Hopes and Prospects” explains at some length, however, why this formulation is absurd. America’s “free enterprise” system has always been based on massive government aid, from the Army building 19th century railroads, to the Pentagon’s post-World War II role in building the Internet and Silicon Valley, to today’s “rewards” to Wall Street and oil companies determined not by market forces, but those companies’ political clout. America has been practicing “state capitalism” since the founding of the Republic, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future no matter which party is in office.
The real choice, Chomsky makes clear, is not free enterprise versus statism, but state capitalism for (A) the few or (B) the many. The latter would include breaking up the banks, a focus on job creation and safety net expansion where needed, single-payer health insurance, higher taxes on the wealthy, far lower military spending, public members on corporate boards, greater employee workplace control and, above all, a new public-private partnership to see America become a leader in a clean energy economic revolution.
A Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone and Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Chomsky proposes that rather than continuing to engage in senseless fighting and confronting Iran over nuclear weapons, U.S., Israeli, Arab and Iranian interests would be far better served by the U.S. using its enormous military and economic clout to create a Mideast nuclear weapons-free zone that Iran says it is willing to accept, and a comprehensive and fair Israeli-Palestinian settlement including Hamas’ promised recognition of Israel and cessation of rocket attacks. A major benefit to the U.S. would be to reduce the threat of domestic terrorism. For only a comprehensive new policy that addresses the source of anti-U.S. hatred—U.S. war-making on civilians and support of corrupt and vicious local regimes—can reduce it....
Saturday, June 05, 2010
49 Fruits and Veggies
From Foodnews.org
Fruits and Veggies listed as more free from pesticides to those with more pesticides
Rank Fruit or Veggie
1 (Best) Onions
2 Avocado
3 Sweet Corn (Frozen)
4 Pineapples
5 Mango (Subtropical and Tropical)
6 Sweet Peas (Frozen)
7 Asparagus
8 Kiwi Fruit (Subtropical and Tropical)
9 Cabbage
10 Eggplant
11 Cantaloupe (Domestic)
12 Watermelon
13 Grapefruit
14 Sweet Potatoes
15 Honeydew Melon
16 Plums (Domestic)
17 Cranberries
18 Winter Squash
19 Broccoli
20 Bananas
21 Tomatoes
22 Cauliflower
23 Cucumbers (Domestic)
24 Cantaloupe (Imported)
25 Grapes (Domestic)
26 Oranges
27 Red Raspberries
28 Hot Peppers
29 Green Beans (Imported)
30 Cucumbers (Imported)
31 Summer Squash
32 Plums (Imported)
33 Pears
34 Green Beans (Domestic)
35 Carrots
36 Blueberries (Imported)
37 Lettuce
38 Grapes (Imported)
39 Potatoes
40 Cherries
41 Kale / Collard Greens
42 Spinach
43 Sweet Bell Peppers
44 Nectarines
45 Blueberries (Domestic)
46 Apples
47 Strawberries
48 Peaches
49 (Worst) Celery
Fruits and Veggies listed as more free from pesticides to those with more pesticides
Rank Fruit or Veggie
1 (Best) Onions
2 Avocado
3 Sweet Corn (Frozen)
4 Pineapples
5 Mango (Subtropical and Tropical)
6 Sweet Peas (Frozen)
7 Asparagus
8 Kiwi Fruit (Subtropical and Tropical)
9 Cabbage
10 Eggplant
11 Cantaloupe (Domestic)
12 Watermelon
13 Grapefruit
14 Sweet Potatoes
15 Honeydew Melon
16 Plums (Domestic)
17 Cranberries
18 Winter Squash
19 Broccoli
20 Bananas
21 Tomatoes
22 Cauliflower
23 Cucumbers (Domestic)
24 Cantaloupe (Imported)
25 Grapes (Domestic)
26 Oranges
27 Red Raspberries
28 Hot Peppers
29 Green Beans (Imported)
30 Cucumbers (Imported)
31 Summer Squash
32 Plums (Imported)
33 Pears
34 Green Beans (Domestic)
35 Carrots
36 Blueberries (Imported)
37 Lettuce
38 Grapes (Imported)
39 Potatoes
40 Cherries
41 Kale / Collard Greens
42 Spinach
43 Sweet Bell Peppers
44 Nectarines
45 Blueberries (Domestic)
46 Apples
47 Strawberries
48 Peaches
49 (Worst) Celery
Thursday, June 03, 2010
"Masters of the Uterus"
— By Elizabeth Gettelman in MotherJones.com
A timeline of controlling birth ...
c. 1500 BC Genesis describes how God kills Onan after he "wasted his seed on the ground" during coitus interruptus. (See "Thou Shalt Not Spill.")
c. 1500 BC Egyptian experts suggest mixing ground dates, acacia bark, and honey as a spermicide and crocodile dung as an anti-pregnancy suppository.
100 Greek gynecologist Soranus recommends that women hold their breath and jump backward seven times after sex to prevent pregnancy. Sneezing also advised.
c. 700 Muhammad endorses withdrawal during sex.
1000 Contraception gets medieval: European women wear bones from the right sides of black cats around their necks to avoid pregnancy.
1554 John Calvin calls masturbation "monstrous" and withdrawal "doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring."
1727 In "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom," Daniel Defoe compares contraception to infanticide.
1789 In his memoirs, Casanova describes prophylactics known as "English riding coats" and a lemon-rind diaphragm.
1798 The Reverend Thomas Malthus advocates the "temporary unhappiness" of abstinence to slow down population growth.
1832 Dr. Charles Knowlton is arrested in Massachusetts for publishing information about contraception. His defense: "Mankind ought not to abstain."
1839 Barrier-method contraceptives like condoms and diaphragms are revolutionized by Charles Goodyear's invention of vulcanized rubber.
1861 First condom ad (for Dr. Powers' French Preventative) in the New York Times: "Those who have used them are never without them."
1869 Pope Pius IX (right) bans abortion, saying the soul is born at conception.
1870s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminists promote "voluntary motherhood," advocating abstinence as the best form of birth control.
1873 Postal inspector Anthony Comstock crusades against "obscenity" such as birth control. The Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing contraceptives or information about them, remains in effect until 1965.
1914 Margaret Sanger's pro-contraception tract The Woman Rebel is banned as obscene under the Comstock Act. Sanger (left) coins the term "birth control" later that year. In the 1930s, she becomes a eugenicist.
1917-18 18,000 STD-ridden doughboys take sick; US military distributes condoms.
1920s Contraceptives sold as "feminine hygiene" products. Douching with Lysol promoted as a way "to help protect your married happiness."
1930 Anglican Church becomes the first to approve of birth control that is "in the light of Christian principles." Six months later, Pope Pius XI deems birth control a "grave sin."
1933 Nazi Germany outlaws abortion and bans contraceptive ads. 400,000 Germans labeled "inferior" undergo forced sterilization.
1936 A federal appeals court rules that doctors can send contraceptives through the mail.
1937 The American Medical Association recognizes birth control as a legitimate part of a doctor's practice.
1952 John D. Rockefeller III, father of four, founds the Population Council: "Our concern is for the quality of human life, not the quantity of human life."
1959 President Eisenhower says promoting birth control "is not a proper political or governmental activity." He changes his mind 9 years later: "Governments must act...Failure would limit the expectations of future generations to abject poverty and suffering."
1960 FDA approves the pill.
1965 The Supreme Court rules in Griswold v. Connecticut that contraceptive bans violate the "right to marital privacy." Unmarried peoples' right to privacy isn't recognized until 1972.
1966 Papal commission on birth control votes to allow contraception, but Pope Paul VI keeps ban in place.
1967 Black Power Conference denounces the birth control pill as "black genocide."
1973 Contraceptive use in the US peaks, with 70% of married women 15 to 44 using some form.
1973 Building off privacy right affirmed by Griswold, Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion. Helms Amendment (still in effect) bans US funding of abortion abroad.
1974 Henry Kissinger advocates restricting food aid to poor nations to curb their growth.
1976 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi forces millions of poor men to be sterilized.
1979 China introduces its "one child" policy, leading to compulsory birth control and abortions.
1988 China is the first country to license mifepristone as an abortion pill. In 2000, the FDA approves it as RU-486.
1991 Ten days after Magic Johnson says he has HIV, Fox airs the nation's first condom ad.
1993 Female condom fails to catch on, in part because it's too noisy. Quieter version released in 2009.
1993 The Netherlands requires sex ed and promotes going "Double Dutch"—using both the pill and condoms.
1999 FDA approves prescription emergency contraceptive Plan B.
2008 Federal funding for abstinence-only sex ed hits $214 million. Teen pregnancy rate rises after a 15-year decline.
The Pill's 50th Birthday Party
A timeline of controlling birth ...
c. 1500 BC Genesis describes how God kills Onan after he "wasted his seed on the ground" during coitus interruptus. (See "Thou Shalt Not Spill.")
c. 1500 BC Egyptian experts suggest mixing ground dates, acacia bark, and honey as a spermicide and crocodile dung as an anti-pregnancy suppository.
100 Greek gynecologist Soranus recommends that women hold their breath and jump backward seven times after sex to prevent pregnancy. Sneezing also advised.
c. 700 Muhammad endorses withdrawal during sex.
1000 Contraception gets medieval: European women wear bones from the right sides of black cats around their necks to avoid pregnancy.
1554 John Calvin calls masturbation "monstrous" and withdrawal "doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring."
1727 In "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom," Daniel Defoe compares contraception to infanticide.
1789 In his memoirs, Casanova describes prophylactics known as "English riding coats" and a lemon-rind diaphragm.
1798 The Reverend Thomas Malthus advocates the "temporary unhappiness" of abstinence to slow down population growth.
1832 Dr. Charles Knowlton is arrested in Massachusetts for publishing information about contraception. His defense: "Mankind ought not to abstain."
1839 Barrier-method contraceptives like condoms and diaphragms are revolutionized by Charles Goodyear's invention of vulcanized rubber.
1861 First condom ad (for Dr. Powers' French Preventative) in the New York Times: "Those who have used them are never without them."
1869 Pope Pius IX (right) bans abortion, saying the soul is born at conception.
1870s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other feminists promote "voluntary motherhood," advocating abstinence as the best form of birth control.
1873 Postal inspector Anthony Comstock crusades against "obscenity" such as birth control. The Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing contraceptives or information about them, remains in effect until 1965.
1914 Margaret Sanger's pro-contraception tract The Woman Rebel is banned as obscene under the Comstock Act. Sanger (left) coins the term "birth control" later that year. In the 1930s, she becomes a eugenicist.
1917-18 18,000 STD-ridden doughboys take sick; US military distributes condoms.
1920s Contraceptives sold as "feminine hygiene" products. Douching with Lysol promoted as a way "to help protect your married happiness."
1930 Anglican Church becomes the first to approve of birth control that is "in the light of Christian principles." Six months later, Pope Pius XI deems birth control a "grave sin."
1933 Nazi Germany outlaws abortion and bans contraceptive ads. 400,000 Germans labeled "inferior" undergo forced sterilization.
1936 A federal appeals court rules that doctors can send contraceptives through the mail.
1937 The American Medical Association recognizes birth control as a legitimate part of a doctor's practice.
1952 John D. Rockefeller III, father of four, founds the Population Council: "Our concern is for the quality of human life, not the quantity of human life."
1959 President Eisenhower says promoting birth control "is not a proper political or governmental activity." He changes his mind 9 years later: "Governments must act...Failure would limit the expectations of future generations to abject poverty and suffering."
1960 FDA approves the pill.
1965 The Supreme Court rules in Griswold v. Connecticut that contraceptive bans violate the "right to marital privacy." Unmarried peoples' right to privacy isn't recognized until 1972.
1966 Papal commission on birth control votes to allow contraception, but Pope Paul VI keeps ban in place.
1967 Black Power Conference denounces the birth control pill as "black genocide."
1973 Contraceptive use in the US peaks, with 70% of married women 15 to 44 using some form.
1973 Building off privacy right affirmed by Griswold, Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion. Helms Amendment (still in effect) bans US funding of abortion abroad.
1974 Henry Kissinger advocates restricting food aid to poor nations to curb their growth.
1976 Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi forces millions of poor men to be sterilized.
1979 China introduces its "one child" policy, leading to compulsory birth control and abortions.
1988 China is the first country to license mifepristone as an abortion pill. In 2000, the FDA approves it as RU-486.
1991 Ten days after Magic Johnson says he has HIV, Fox airs the nation's first condom ad.
1993 Female condom fails to catch on, in part because it's too noisy. Quieter version released in 2009.
1993 The Netherlands requires sex ed and promotes going "Double Dutch"—using both the pill and condoms.
1999 FDA approves prescription emergency contraceptive Plan B.
2008 Federal funding for abstinence-only sex ed hits $214 million. Teen pregnancy rate rises after a 15-year decline.
The Pill's 50th Birthday Party
Ocean currents likely to carry oil to Atlantic
From National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
BOULDER—A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer. The modeling results are captured in a series of dramatic animations produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and collaborators.
This animation shows one scenario of how oil released at the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20 in the Gulf of Mexico may move in the upper 65 feet of the ocean. This is not a forecast, but rather, it illustrates a likely dispersal pathway of the oil for roughly four months following the spill. It assumes oil spilling continuously from April 20 to June 20. The colors represent a dilution factor ranging from red (most concentrated) to beige (most diluted). The dilution factor does not attempt to estimate the actual barrels of oil at any spot; rather, it depicts how much of the total oil from the source that will be carried elsewhere by ocean currents. For example, areas showing a dilution factor of 0.01 would have one-hundredth the concentration of oil present at the spill site.
The animation is based on a computer model simulation, using a virtual dye, that assumes weather and current conditions similar to those that occur in a typical year. It is one of a set of six scenarios released today that simulate possible pathways the oil might take under a variety of oceanic conditions. Each of the six scenarios shows the same overall movement of oil through the Gulf to the Atlantic and up the East Coast. However, the timing and fine-scale details differ, depending on the details of the ocean currents in the Gulf. The full set of six simulations can be found here. (Visualization by Tim Scheitlin and Mary Haley, NCAR; based on model simulations.)
"Things... To Know About the BP Oil Spill"
From Alternet:
It's been 37 days since BP's offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem -- unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.
Though BP officially admits to only a few thousand barrels spilled each day, expert estimates peg the damage at 60,000 barrels or over 2.5 million gallons daily. (Perhaps we'd know more if BP hadn't barred independent engineers from inspecting the breach.) Measures to quell the gusher have proved lackluster at best, and unlike the country's last big oil spill -- Exxon-Valdez in 1989 -- the oil is coming from the ground, not a tanker, so we have no idea how much more oil could continue to pollute the Gulf's waters.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us what can happen -- and will continue to happen -- when corporate malfeasance and neglect meet governmental regulatory failure...In no particular order, here are [9] things about the BP spill you may not know and may not want to know -- but you should.
1. Oil rig owner has made $270 million off the oil leak
Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world's largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it's no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped... nine months later.
This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean's decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It's not hard to bet on failure when you know it's somewhat assured.
2. BP has a terrible safety record
BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP's Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's history. (Is it any surprise that BP played a central, though greatly under-reported, role in the failure to contain the Exxon-Valdez spill years earlier?)
With Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't break its dismal trend. In addition to choosing a cheaper -- and less safe -- casing to outfit the well that eventually burst, the company chose not to equip Deepwater Horizon with an acoustic trigger, a last-resort option that could have shut down the well even if it was damaged badly, and which is required in most developed countries that allow offshore drilling. In fact, BP employs these devices in its rigs located near England, but because the United States recommends rather than requires them, BP had no incentive to buy one -- even though they only cost $500,000.
SeizeBP.org estimates that BP makes $500,000 in under eight minutes.
3. Oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP
According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Compare this number -- which doesn't include the immeasurable environmental damages -- to the current cap on BP's liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profits BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.
BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, has solemnly promised that the company will cover more than the required $75 million. On May 10, BP announced it had already spent $350 million. How fantastically generous of a company valued at $152.6 billion, and which makes $93 million each day.
The reality of the matter is that BP will not be deterred by the liability cap and pity payments doled out to a handful of victims of this disaster because they pale in comparison to its ghastly profits. Indeed, oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP.
This is especially evident in a recent Citigroup analyst report prepared for BP investors: "Reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a buying opportunity."
4. The Interior Department was at best, neglectful, and at worst, complicit
It's no surprise BP is always looking out for its bottom line -- but it's at least slightly more surprising that the Interior Department, the executive department charged with regulating the oil industry, has done such a shoddy job of preventing this from happening.
Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a "safety alert" but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: "[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant."
The Interior Department's Louisiana branch may have been particularly confused because it appears it was closely fraternizing with the oil industry. The Minerals Management Service, the agency within the department that oversees offshore drilling, routinely accepted gifts from oil companies and even considered itself a part of the oil industry, rather than part of a governmental regulatory agency. Flying on oil executives' private planes was not rare for MMS inspectors in Louisiana, a federal report released Tuesday says. "Skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties" were also common.
Is it any wonder that Deepwater Horizon was given a regulatory exclusion by MMS?
It gets worse. Since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the Interior Department has approved 27 new permits for offshore drilling sites. Here's the kicker: Two of these permits are for BP.
But it gets better still: 26 of the 27 new drilling sites have been granted regulatory exemptions, including those issued to BP.
5. Clean-up prospects are dismal
The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the "top kill" method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well.
But here's the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let's be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.
Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.
6. BP has no real cleanup plan
Perhaps because it knows the possibility of remedying the situation is practically impossible, BP has made publicly available its laughable "Oil Spill Response Plan" which is, in fact, no plan at all.
Most emblematic of this farcical plan, BP mentions protecting Arctic wildlife like sea lions, otters and walruses (perhaps executives simply lifted the language from Exxon's plan for its oil spill off the coast of Alaska?). The plan does not include any disease-preventing measures, oceanic or meteorological data, and is comprised mostly of phone numbers and blank forms. Most importantly, it includes no directions for how to deal with a deep-water explosion such as the one that took place last month.
The whole thing totals 600 pages -- a waste of paper that only adds insult to the environmental injury BP is inflicting upon the world with Deepwater Horizon.
7. Both Transocean and BP are trying to take away survivors' right to sue
With each hour, the economic damage caused by Deepwater Horizon continues to grow. And BP knows this.
So while it outwardly is putting on a nice face, even pledging $500 million to assess the impacts of the spill, it has all the while been trying to ensure that it won't be held liable for those same impacts.
Just after the Deepwater explosion, surviving employees were held in solitary confinement, while Transocean flacks made them waive their rights to sue. BP then did the same with fishermen it contracted to help clean up the spill though the company now says that was nothing more than a legal mix-up.
If there's anything to learn from this disaster, it's that companies like BP don't make mistakes at the expense of others. They are exceedingly deliberate.
8. BP bets on risk to employees to save money -- and doesn't care if they get sick
When BP unleashed its "Beyond Petroleum" re-branding/greenwashing campaign, the snazzy ads featured smiley oil rig workers. But the truth of the matter is that BP consistently and knowingly puts its employees at risk.
An internal BP document shows that just before the prior fatal disaster -- the 2005 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 -- when BP had to choose between cost-savings and greater safety, it went with its bottom line.
A BP Risk Management memo showed that although steel trailers would be safer in the case of an explosion, the company went with less expensive options that offered protection but were not "blast resistant." In the Texas City blast, all of the fatalities and most of the injuries occurred in or around these trailers.
Although BP has responded to this memo by saying the company culture has changed since Texas City, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up. Perhaps a similar memo went out regarding safety and cost-cutting measures?
Reports this week stated that fishermen hired by BP for oil cleanup weren't provided protective equipment and have now fallen ill. Hopefully they didn't sign waivers.
9. Environmental damage could even include a climatological catastrophe
It's hard to know where to start discussing the environmental damage caused by Deepwater Horizon. Each day will give us a clearer picture of the short-term ecological destruction, but environmental experts believe the damage to the Gulf of Mexico will be long-term.
In the short-term, environmentalists are up in arms about the dispersants being used to clean up the oil slick in the Gulf. Apparently, the types BP is using aren't all that effective in dispersing oil, and are pretty high in toxicity to marine fauna such as fish and shrimp. The fear is that what BP may be using to clean up the mess could, in the long-term, make it worse.
On the longer-term side of things, there are signs that this largest oil drilling catastrophe could also become the worst natural gas and climate disaster. The explosion has released tremendous amounts of methane from deep in the ocean, and research shows that methane, when mixed with air, is the most powerful (read: terrible) greenhouse gas -- 26 times worse than carbon-dioxide.
Our warming planet just got a lot hotter.
It's been 37 days since BP's offshore oil rig, Deepwater Horizon, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, crude oil has been hemorrhaging into ocean waters and wreaking unknown havoc on our ecosystem -- unknown because there is no accurate estimate of how many barrels of oil are contaminating the Gulf.
Though BP officially admits to only a few thousand barrels spilled each day, expert estimates peg the damage at 60,000 barrels or over 2.5 million gallons daily. (Perhaps we'd know more if BP hadn't barred independent engineers from inspecting the breach.) Measures to quell the gusher have proved lackluster at best, and unlike the country's last big oil spill -- Exxon-Valdez in 1989 -- the oil is coming from the ground, not a tanker, so we have no idea how much more oil could continue to pollute the Gulf's waters.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us what can happen -- and will continue to happen -- when corporate malfeasance and neglect meet governmental regulatory failure...In no particular order, here are [9] things about the BP spill you may not know and may not want to know -- but you should.
1. Oil rig owner has made $270 million off the oil leak
Transocean Ltd., the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig leased by BP, has been flying under the radar in the mainstream blame game. The world's largest offshore drilling contractor, the company is conveniently headquartered in corporate-friendly Switzerland, and it's no stranger to oil disasters. In 1979, an oil well it was drilling in the very same Gulf of Mexico ignited, sending the drill platform into the sea and causing one of the largest oil spills by the time it was capped... nine months later.
This experience undoubtedly influenced Transocean's decision to insure the Deepwater Horizon rig for about twice what it was worth. In a conference call to analysts earlier this month, Transocean reported making a $270 million profit from insurance payouts after the disaster. It's not hard to bet on failure when you know it's somewhat assured.
2. BP has a terrible safety record
BP has a long record of oil-related disasters in the United States. In 2005, BP's Texas City refinery exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring another 170. The next year, one of its Alaska pipelines leaked 200,000 gallons of crude oil. According to Public Citizen, BP has paid $550 million in fines. BP seems to particularly enjoy violating the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and has paid the two largest fines in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's history. (Is it any surprise that BP played a central, though greatly under-reported, role in the failure to contain the Exxon-Valdez spill years earlier?)
With Deepwater Horizon, BP didn't break its dismal trend. In addition to choosing a cheaper -- and less safe -- casing to outfit the well that eventually burst, the company chose not to equip Deepwater Horizon with an acoustic trigger, a last-resort option that could have shut down the well even if it was damaged badly, and which is required in most developed countries that allow offshore drilling. In fact, BP employs these devices in its rigs located near England, but because the United States recommends rather than requires them, BP had no incentive to buy one -- even though they only cost $500,000.
SeizeBP.org estimates that BP makes $500,000 in under eight minutes.
3. Oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP
According to the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies, approximately $1.6 billion in annual economic activity and services are at risk as a result of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Compare this number -- which doesn't include the immeasurable environmental damages -- to the current cap on BP's liability for economic damages like lost wages and tourist dollars, which is $75 million. And compare that further to the first-quarter profits BP posted just one week after the explosion: $6 billion.
BP's chief executive, Tony Hayward, has solemnly promised that the company will cover more than the required $75 million. On May 10, BP announced it had already spent $350 million. How fantastically generous of a company valued at $152.6 billion, and which makes $93 million each day.
The reality of the matter is that BP will not be deterred by the liability cap and pity payments doled out to a handful of victims of this disaster because they pale in comparison to its ghastly profits. Indeed, oil spills are just a cost of doing business for BP.
This is especially evident in a recent Citigroup analyst report prepared for BP investors: "Reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil leak is a buying opportunity."
4. The Interior Department was at best, neglectful, and at worst, complicit
It's no surprise BP is always looking out for its bottom line -- but it's at least slightly more surprising that the Interior Department, the executive department charged with regulating the oil industry, has done such a shoddy job of preventing this from happening.
Ten years ago, there were already warnings that the backup systems on oil rigs that failed on Deepwater Horizon would be a problem. The Interior Department issued a "safety alert" but then left it up to oil companies to decide what kind of backup system to use. And in 2007, a government regulator from the same department downplayed the chances and impact of a spill like the one that occurred last month: "[B]lowouts are rare events and of short duration, potential impact to marine water quality are not expected to be significant."
The Interior Department's Louisiana branch may have been particularly confused because it appears it was closely fraternizing with the oil industry. The Minerals Management Service, the agency within the department that oversees offshore drilling, routinely accepted gifts from oil companies and even considered itself a part of the oil industry, rather than part of a governmental regulatory agency. Flying on oil executives' private planes was not rare for MMS inspectors in Louisiana, a federal report released Tuesday says. "Skeet-shooting contests, hunting and fishing trips, golf tournaments, crawfish boils, and Christmas parties" were also common.
Is it any wonder that Deepwater Horizon was given a regulatory exclusion by MMS?
It gets worse. Since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, the Interior Department has approved 27 new permits for offshore drilling sites. Here's the kicker: Two of these permits are for BP.
But it gets better still: 26 of the 27 new drilling sites have been granted regulatory exemptions, including those issued to BP.
5. Clean-up prospects are dismal
The media makes a lot of noise about all the different methods BP is using to clean up the oil spill. Massive steel containment domes were popular a few weeks ago. Now everyone is touting the "top kill" method, which involves injecting heavy drilling fluids into the damaged well.
But here's the reality. Even if BP eventually finds a method that works, experts say the best cleanup scenario is to recover 20 percent of the spilled oil. And let's be realistic: only 8 percent of the crude oil deposited in the ocean and coastlines off Alaska was recovered in the Exxon-Valdez cleanup.
Millions of gallons of oil will remain in the ocean, ravaging the underwater ecosystem, and 100 miles of Louisiana coastline will never be the same.
6. BP has no real cleanup plan
Perhaps because it knows the possibility of remedying the situation is practically impossible, BP has made publicly available its laughable "Oil Spill Response Plan" which is, in fact, no plan at all.
Most emblematic of this farcical plan, BP mentions protecting Arctic wildlife like sea lions, otters and walruses (perhaps executives simply lifted the language from Exxon's plan for its oil spill off the coast of Alaska?). The plan does not include any disease-preventing measures, oceanic or meteorological data, and is comprised mostly of phone numbers and blank forms. Most importantly, it includes no directions for how to deal with a deep-water explosion such as the one that took place last month.
The whole thing totals 600 pages -- a waste of paper that only adds insult to the environmental injury BP is inflicting upon the world with Deepwater Horizon.
7. Both Transocean and BP are trying to take away survivors' right to sue
With each hour, the economic damage caused by Deepwater Horizon continues to grow. And BP knows this.
So while it outwardly is putting on a nice face, even pledging $500 million to assess the impacts of the spill, it has all the while been trying to ensure that it won't be held liable for those same impacts.
Just after the Deepwater explosion, surviving employees were held in solitary confinement, while Transocean flacks made them waive their rights to sue. BP then did the same with fishermen it contracted to help clean up the spill though the company now says that was nothing more than a legal mix-up.
If there's anything to learn from this disaster, it's that companies like BP don't make mistakes at the expense of others. They are exceedingly deliberate.
8. BP bets on risk to employees to save money -- and doesn't care if they get sick
When BP unleashed its "Beyond Petroleum" re-branding/greenwashing campaign, the snazzy ads featured smiley oil rig workers. But the truth of the matter is that BP consistently and knowingly puts its employees at risk.
An internal BP document shows that just before the prior fatal disaster -- the 2005 Texas City explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 -- when BP had to choose between cost-savings and greater safety, it went with its bottom line.
A BP Risk Management memo showed that although steel trailers would be safer in the case of an explosion, the company went with less expensive options that offered protection but were not "blast resistant." In the Texas City blast, all of the fatalities and most of the injuries occurred in or around these trailers.
Although BP has responded to this memo by saying the company culture has changed since Texas City, 11 people died on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up. Perhaps a similar memo went out regarding safety and cost-cutting measures?
Reports this week stated that fishermen hired by BP for oil cleanup weren't provided protective equipment and have now fallen ill. Hopefully they didn't sign waivers.
9. Environmental damage could even include a climatological catastrophe
It's hard to know where to start discussing the environmental damage caused by Deepwater Horizon. Each day will give us a clearer picture of the short-term ecological destruction, but environmental experts believe the damage to the Gulf of Mexico will be long-term.
In the short-term, environmentalists are up in arms about the dispersants being used to clean up the oil slick in the Gulf. Apparently, the types BP is using aren't all that effective in dispersing oil, and are pretty high in toxicity to marine fauna such as fish and shrimp. The fear is that what BP may be using to clean up the mess could, in the long-term, make it worse.
On the longer-term side of things, there are signs that this largest oil drilling catastrophe could also become the worst natural gas and climate disaster. The explosion has released tremendous amounts of methane from deep in the ocean, and research shows that methane, when mixed with air, is the most powerful (read: terrible) greenhouse gas -- 26 times worse than carbon-dioxide.
Our warming planet just got a lot hotter.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
A couple of blogs dedicated to the BP Oil Spill
Gulf Oil Blog - By Samantha Joye - The University of Georgia | Department of Marine Sciences
The Science of the Oil Spill - from ScienceMag.org
The Science of the Oil Spill - from ScienceMag.org
"BP CEO disputes claims of underwater oil plumes"
This is ludicrous:
VENICE, La. [AP} — BP PLC CEO Tony Hayward is disputing claims by scientists that there are large undersea plumes from the Gulf oil spill.
Hayward said Sunday the oil is on the water's surface, and that BP's sampling showed "no evidence" of oil in the water column.
Scientists from several universities have reported plumes of what appears to be oil suspended in clouds that stretched for miles and reached hundreds of feet beneath the Gulf's surface.
Hayward also says the company is narrowing its response to the oil spill to the Louisiana coast and bulking up cleanup forces there for a fight that could last months.
_____
Meanwhile - the slick is heading toward Florida:
THE OIL'S SPREAD
Thick, brown oil is starting to spread along the coast and now appears to be a day away from hitting Florida. Red-brown oil made its first appearance on Dauphin Island near the mouth of Alabama's Mobile Bay, three weeks after tar balls were found there. A two-mile long, three-feet wide strand of caramel-colored oil was found on Petit Bois Island, a barrier island near the Mississippi-Alabama border. And an oil sheen was seen about nine miles off the Florida coast and is expected to hit the white sands of Pensacola Beach as soon as Wednesday (6-2-10).
VENICE, La. [AP} — BP PLC CEO Tony Hayward is disputing claims by scientists that there are large undersea plumes from the Gulf oil spill.
Hayward said Sunday the oil is on the water's surface, and that BP's sampling showed "no evidence" of oil in the water column.
Scientists from several universities have reported plumes of what appears to be oil suspended in clouds that stretched for miles and reached hundreds of feet beneath the Gulf's surface.
Hayward also says the company is narrowing its response to the oil spill to the Louisiana coast and bulking up cleanup forces there for a fight that could last months.
_____
Meanwhile - the slick is heading toward Florida:
THE OIL'S SPREAD
Thick, brown oil is starting to spread along the coast and now appears to be a day away from hitting Florida. Red-brown oil made its first appearance on Dauphin Island near the mouth of Alabama's Mobile Bay, three weeks after tar balls were found there. A two-mile long, three-feet wide strand of caramel-colored oil was found on Petit Bois Island, a barrier island near the Mississippi-Alabama border. And an oil sheen was seen about nine miles off the Florida coast and is expected to hit the white sands of Pensacola Beach as soon as Wednesday (6-2-10).
"BP Criminal Investigation Launched By Feds"
NEW ORLEANS [AP] — BP's stock plummeted and took much of the market down with it Tuesday as the federal government announced criminal and civil investigations into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. BP engineers, meanwhile, tried to recover from a failed attempt to stop the gusher with an effort that will initially make the leak worse.
Attorney General Eric Holder, who was visiting the Gulf to survey the fragile coastline and meet with state and federal prosecutors, would not say who might be targeted in the probes into the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
"We will closely examine the actions of those involved in the spill. If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be extremely forceful in our response," Holder said in New Orleans.
BP's stock nose-dived on Tuesday, losing nearly 15 percent of its value on the first trading day since the previous best option – the so-called "top kill" – failed and was aborted at the government's direction. It dipped steeply with Holder's late-afternoon announcement, which also sent other energy stocks tumbling, ultimately causing the Dow Jones industrial average to tumble 112.
After six weeks of failures to block the well or divert the oil, BP was using robotic machines to carve into the twisted appendages of the crippled well. The latest attempt involved using tools resembling an oversized deli slicer and garden shears to break away the broken riser pipe so engineers can then position a cap over the well's opening.
Even if it succeeds, it will temporarily increase the flow of an already massive leak by 20 percent – at least 100,000 gallons more a day. And it is far from certain that BP will be able to cap a well that one expert compared to an out-of-control fire hydrant.
"It is an engineer's nightmare," said Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental sciences. "They're trying to fit a 21-inch cap over a 20-inch pipe a mile away. That's just horrendously hard to do. It's not like you and I standing on the ground pushing – they're using little robots to do this."
The operation has never been performed in such deep water, and is similar to an earlier failed attempt that used a larger cap that quickly froze up. BP PLC officials said they were applying lessons learned from the earlier effort, and plan to pump warm water through pipes into the smaller dome to prevent any icing problems.
"If all goes as planned, within about 24 hours we could have this contained," BP's Doug Suttles said Tuesday after touring a temporary housing facility set up for cleanup workers in Grand Isle. "But we can't guarantee success."...
President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered the co-chairmen of an independent commission investigating the spill to thoroughly examine the disaster, "to follow the facts wherever they lead, without fear or favor." The commission is led by Bob Graham, a former Florida governor and U.S. senator, and William K. Reilly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Holder said the laws under review for the criminal and civil probes include the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act. He said the government would pursue criminal charges "if warranted," a caveat he did not include for civil action.
"We will ensure that every cent, every cent of taxpayer money, will be repaid and that damage to the environment and wildlife will be reimbursed," he said.
Washington lawyer Stan Brand said that two likely criminal law theories the Justice Department would pursue are false statements to the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service and obstruction by failing to produce evidence to investigators.
But Brand and longtime Washington lawyer Stephen Ryan, a former federal prosecutor and ex-congressional investigator, predicted it will be difficult to prove criminality.
"Bad business judgment isn't a crime," said Ryan...
The government would have a lower burden of proof in a civil case. In the Valdez spill, thousands of fishermen, cannery workers, landowners and Native Americans were initially awarded $5 billion in punitive damages, but the amount was eventually reduced to $507.5 million.
BP engineers began putting underwater robots and equipment in place this week after an attempt to plug the well by force-feeding it heavy mud and cement – called a "top kill" – was aborted over the weekend. Crews pumped thousands of gallons of the mud into the well but were unable to overcome the pressure of the oil.
The next plan has BP engineers placing a cap-like containment valve over the well. Not all the gushing oil will be captured through the "cut and cap" method, but the company said it could siphon most of the crude to a vessel on the surface.
Eric Smith, an associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, likened the procedure to trying to place a tiny cap on a fire hydrant that's blowing straight up...
BP's best chance to actually plug the leak rests with a pair of relief wells that likely won't be completed until August.
Attorney General Eric Holder, who was visiting the Gulf to survey the fragile coastline and meet with state and federal prosecutors, would not say who might be targeted in the probes into the largest oil spill in U.S. history.
"We will closely examine the actions of those involved in the spill. If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be extremely forceful in our response," Holder said in New Orleans.
BP's stock nose-dived on Tuesday, losing nearly 15 percent of its value on the first trading day since the previous best option – the so-called "top kill" – failed and was aborted at the government's direction. It dipped steeply with Holder's late-afternoon announcement, which also sent other energy stocks tumbling, ultimately causing the Dow Jones industrial average to tumble 112.
After six weeks of failures to block the well or divert the oil, BP was using robotic machines to carve into the twisted appendages of the crippled well. The latest attempt involved using tools resembling an oversized deli slicer and garden shears to break away the broken riser pipe so engineers can then position a cap over the well's opening.
Even if it succeeds, it will temporarily increase the flow of an already massive leak by 20 percent – at least 100,000 gallons more a day. And it is far from certain that BP will be able to cap a well that one expert compared to an out-of-control fire hydrant.
"It is an engineer's nightmare," said Ed Overton, a Louisiana State University professor of environmental sciences. "They're trying to fit a 21-inch cap over a 20-inch pipe a mile away. That's just horrendously hard to do. It's not like you and I standing on the ground pushing – they're using little robots to do this."
The operation has never been performed in such deep water, and is similar to an earlier failed attempt that used a larger cap that quickly froze up. BP PLC officials said they were applying lessons learned from the earlier effort, and plan to pump warm water through pipes into the smaller dome to prevent any icing problems.
"If all goes as planned, within about 24 hours we could have this contained," BP's Doug Suttles said Tuesday after touring a temporary housing facility set up for cleanup workers in Grand Isle. "But we can't guarantee success."...
President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered the co-chairmen of an independent commission investigating the spill to thoroughly examine the disaster, "to follow the facts wherever they lead, without fear or favor." The commission is led by Bob Graham, a former Florida governor and U.S. senator, and William K. Reilly, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Holder said the laws under review for the criminal and civil probes include the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act. He said the government would pursue criminal charges "if warranted," a caveat he did not include for civil action.
"We will ensure that every cent, every cent of taxpayer money, will be repaid and that damage to the environment and wildlife will be reimbursed," he said.
Washington lawyer Stan Brand said that two likely criminal law theories the Justice Department would pursue are false statements to the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service and obstruction by failing to produce evidence to investigators.
But Brand and longtime Washington lawyer Stephen Ryan, a former federal prosecutor and ex-congressional investigator, predicted it will be difficult to prove criminality.
"Bad business judgment isn't a crime," said Ryan...
The government would have a lower burden of proof in a civil case. In the Valdez spill, thousands of fishermen, cannery workers, landowners and Native Americans were initially awarded $5 billion in punitive damages, but the amount was eventually reduced to $507.5 million.
BP engineers began putting underwater robots and equipment in place this week after an attempt to plug the well by force-feeding it heavy mud and cement – called a "top kill" – was aborted over the weekend. Crews pumped thousands of gallons of the mud into the well but were unable to overcome the pressure of the oil.
The next plan has BP engineers placing a cap-like containment valve over the well. Not all the gushing oil will be captured through the "cut and cap" method, but the company said it could siphon most of the crude to a vessel on the surface.
Eric Smith, an associate director of the Tulane Energy Institute, likened the procedure to trying to place a tiny cap on a fire hydrant that's blowing straight up...
BP's best chance to actually plug the leak rests with a pair of relief wells that likely won't be completed until August.
Flying
I like this piece by Christie Aschwanden about the environmental cost of flying and "green" people who like to deny it or ignore it. (Of course "non-green" people wouldn't even think about it).
Jet Blues
ONE LATE-WINTER evening in 2008, I opened up Google Earth, drew a 100-mile circle around my house in western Colorado, and vowed to stay within that minihabitat for a full year.
This unusual experiment began with a plane ticket. My grandmother was turning 90, and her birthday shindig was in Kansas, 750 miles away. I could jet in for two quality days and be home within 48 hours. Or I could spend two grueling days on the road. It was a no-brainer—and probably more so for me than for the average American. As the daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, my childhood revolved around planes; Dad's second career as an American Airlines captain made jumbo jets the equivalent of the family car. With free family passes in hand, I grew accustomed to flying wherever and whenever I liked.
But then I stumbled across some figures that led me to question my ways. Grandma's party left me on the hook for 1,058 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of driving my fuel-efficient car 2,600 miles—almost twice the round-trip distance to Kansas. In fact, all of my green bragging rights—the recycling, the composting, the buying local, drying laundry on a clothesline—were obliterated by flying. In 2008, I took four round-trip flights, including cross-country jaunts to New York and Washington, DC. My flight-related carbon footprint dwarfed the average Indian citizen's total annual footprint by a factor of four.
Naive as this may sound, I'd always considered flying relatively benign—there were a couple hundred people on each plane, right? In reality, airplanes not only spew far more greenhouse gases per passenger than any other mode of transport, but they do so high in the atmosphere, magnifying the ill effects.
I wasn't alone in my denial. A recent study by Stewart Barr, a geographer at the UK's University of Exeter, found that people who identified as committed environmentalists actually flew more than those who didn't. Some of these "bleeding-heart jet setters" insisted they'd earned their flights through green behavior at home. "People tell themselves they can justify a flight of 5,000 miles because they've recycled all year," Barr told me.
Yes, that was me in a nutshell: happy to pedal to the grocery store or buy an energy-efficient gadget, but if I had to sacrifice something important to me (like visiting Grandma, my final trip), I balked. America's social and geographical sprawl following three decades of discount travel—thanks, People Express!—further complicates the equation. I thought my vow might provoke some guilt, or maybe even inspire a few friends to join in. What I got was a collective shrug. Love miles were nonnegotiable. Ditto pleasure trips.
My mother all but disowned me. "You can't do that!" she screamed when I unveiled my plan. I might as well have told my parents I'd converted to Scientology. They fly nearly once a month; jetting off to international destinations makes my mom feel worldly and adventurous, traits she has prized ever since she and Dad left their tiny hometown on the Kansas plains...
At the end of my year at home, friends congratulated me and asked where I planned to fly off to first. The answer surprised even me: nowhere. Somehow, in my absence from elsewhere, I'd laid down roots. I finally climbed that funny-shaped peak I'd long eyed from the front porch, and even bothered to check out my sleepy town museum. (Old West saloon replica!) Limited choices, it turned out, were a potent form of stress relief: I no longer agonized about whether to take this trip or that—or had to hassle with the logistics.
From 398 consecutive days in my home habitat, I concluded that a lot of my essential travel simply wasn't...
Jet Blues
ONE LATE-WINTER evening in 2008, I opened up Google Earth, drew a 100-mile circle around my house in western Colorado, and vowed to stay within that minihabitat for a full year.
This unusual experiment began with a plane ticket. My grandmother was turning 90, and her birthday shindig was in Kansas, 750 miles away. I could jet in for two quality days and be home within 48 hours. Or I could spend two grueling days on the road. It was a no-brainer—and probably more so for me than for the average American. As the daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, my childhood revolved around planes; Dad's second career as an American Airlines captain made jumbo jets the equivalent of the family car. With free family passes in hand, I grew accustomed to flying wherever and whenever I liked.
But then I stumbled across some figures that led me to question my ways. Grandma's party left me on the hook for 1,058 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, the equivalent of driving my fuel-efficient car 2,600 miles—almost twice the round-trip distance to Kansas. In fact, all of my green bragging rights—the recycling, the composting, the buying local, drying laundry on a clothesline—were obliterated by flying. In 2008, I took four round-trip flights, including cross-country jaunts to New York and Washington, DC. My flight-related carbon footprint dwarfed the average Indian citizen's total annual footprint by a factor of four.
Naive as this may sound, I'd always considered flying relatively benign—there were a couple hundred people on each plane, right? In reality, airplanes not only spew far more greenhouse gases per passenger than any other mode of transport, but they do so high in the atmosphere, magnifying the ill effects.
I wasn't alone in my denial. A recent study by Stewart Barr, a geographer at the UK's University of Exeter, found that people who identified as committed environmentalists actually flew more than those who didn't. Some of these "bleeding-heart jet setters" insisted they'd earned their flights through green behavior at home. "People tell themselves they can justify a flight of 5,000 miles because they've recycled all year," Barr told me.
Yes, that was me in a nutshell: happy to pedal to the grocery store or buy an energy-efficient gadget, but if I had to sacrifice something important to me (like visiting Grandma, my final trip), I balked. America's social and geographical sprawl following three decades of discount travel—thanks, People Express!—further complicates the equation. I thought my vow might provoke some guilt, or maybe even inspire a few friends to join in. What I got was a collective shrug. Love miles were nonnegotiable. Ditto pleasure trips.
My mother all but disowned me. "You can't do that!" she screamed when I unveiled my plan. I might as well have told my parents I'd converted to Scientology. They fly nearly once a month; jetting off to international destinations makes my mom feel worldly and adventurous, traits she has prized ever since she and Dad left their tiny hometown on the Kansas plains...
At the end of my year at home, friends congratulated me and asked where I planned to fly off to first. The answer surprised even me: nowhere. Somehow, in my absence from elsewhere, I'd laid down roots. I finally climbed that funny-shaped peak I'd long eyed from the front porch, and even bothered to check out my sleepy town museum. (Old West saloon replica!) Limited choices, it turned out, were a potent form of stress relief: I no longer agonized about whether to take this trip or that—or had to hassle with the logistics.
From 398 consecutive days in my home habitat, I concluded that a lot of my essential travel simply wasn't...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)