THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE NEWS
Wednesday, 17 February, 2016
UNEP and the Executive Director in the News
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Guardian (UK): Saving global fish stocks would cost 20 million jobs, says UN
AFP: Ocean fish could disappear in 40 years: UN
Canadian Press (Canada): UN warns of empty oceans, water shortages unless nations
adopt green economies
Voxy (New Zealand): Turning The Tide On Falling Fish Stocks - UNEP-Led Green
Economy Charts Sustainable Investment Path
Epoch Times (US):Commercial Fishing Under Threat, UN Report
Metro News (Canada):UN warns of empty oceans, water shortages unless nations adopt
green economies
International Rivers (Blog): Can We Save the Sturgeon – and the Planet?
Just Means (Blog):Clean tech depends on recycling performance, says UN
Independent (UK): Record heat recorded for Africa's greatest lake
NY Times(US): Corruption, Mismanagement Strangle Vital Kenyan Watershed
Ecoticias (Spain):Achim presenta los avances del reporte sobre la Economía Verde
Cronica de Aragon (Spain):PNUMA adopta un acuerdo para mejorar el transporte de
desechos peligrosos
Other Environment News
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AFP:Costa Rican named UN climate chief
AP:UN names Costa Rican to head climate change body
Reuters: U.N. picks Costa Rican Figueres as new climate chief
BBC News: UN picks new climate change chief
Telegraph (UK): Christiana Figueres named UN's new climate chief
Independent (UK): Small nations given voice on climate
Reuters: U.S. lags China on climate change: Europe climate chief
Reuters:U.S. to probe spill, containment efforts in high gear
BBC News:iPhone app to help DR Congo mountain gorillas
Environmental News from the UNEP Regions
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RONA
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UNEP and the Executive Director in the News
Guardian (UK): Saving global fish stocks would cost 20 million jobs, says UN
17th May 2010
More than 20 million people employed in the fishing industry may need to be taken out of
service and retrained for other work over the next 40 years if the final collapse of fish
stocks in oceans around the globe is to be avoided, the UN warned today.
The UN's environment branch, UNEP, gave a sneak preview of its green economy report
that will be published in October. It said that if the world remained on its current path of
over-fishing, by 2050 all fish stocks could have become uneconomic to exploit or actually
extinct.
Pavan Sukhdev, who heads UNEP's green economy initiative, said: "That is not as absurd
as it sounds, as already 30% of the ocean fisheries have collapsed and are producing less
than 10% of their original ability."
At the heart of the UN's analysis is the $27bn of subsidies it estimates is being injected
into fishing every year, mainly by developing countries. The UN says the subsidies are
huge in terms of the scale of the industry – amounting to almost a third of the $85bn total
value of fish caught.
Among those subsidies, the UN defines just $8bn-worth as "good" in the sense of
encouraging sustainable fishing of healthy stocks.
Most of the subsidies are "bad", meaning they lead to overcapacity and exploitation, and
about $3bn of the subsidies are "ugly", actively leading to the depletion of fish populations.
Among the most egregious practices targeted by the report are inducements to increase
the size of massive trawler fleets that are among the main culprits of overfishing, and fuel
subsidies on fuel for fleets.
"We are paying ourselves to destroy the very resource on which the whole fishing industry
is dependant. We are in the process of eroding the natural capital that underpins our
economies," said Achim Steiner, UNEP's director.
At stake is not just the biodiversity of the oceans, but a substantial chunk of the global
economy and the livelihoods that depend on it.
The UN estimates there are about 35 million people directly employed in fishing, which
translates to about 120 million including their households and 500 million – or about 8% of
global population – taking into account indirect businesses such as packaging, freezing
and transport.
It is also a huge health issue, as fish provides the main source of animal protein for 1
billion of the world's poorest people.
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The paradox is that there is so much overfishing going on that the industry has become
increasingly inefficient.
The UN believes that by switching from large trawler fleets to more sustainable local or
"artisanal" fishing, fish stocks will recover and the total size of catch will grow.
It is proposing an investment of $8bn a year over the next 40 years to help fish stocks
recover. That would involve taking up to 13 million of the 20 million boats now actively
fishing out of service, and retraining up to 22 million fishers for other work.
Subsidies would be redirected from trawler fleets and fuel towards setting up marineprotected areas or no-go zones where fish could spawn in safety. Studies have shown that
an adult fish allowed double in size can produce up to 100 times more eggs.
The green economy report is being prepared ahead of the Rio+20 summit, to be held in
Brazil in 2012. The UN hopes that governments will come under mounting pressure over
the next two years over the fish crisis.
UNEP refuses to name and shame the worst offenders in overfishing, though it says its
final report will contain tables and statistics that will "enable any reader to figure out where
the problem is".
The Spanish and Japanese governments and the EU, which have been singled out by
environmentalists for criticism, have been sent draft chapters of the report, alongside other
leading fishing nations. "We are getting the message out that this will not remain
unnoticed," Sukhdev said.
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AFP: Ocean fish could disappear in 40 years: UN
17th May 2010
The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 unless fishing fleets
are slashed and stocks allowed to recover, UN experts warned.
"If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where
40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN
Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York.
A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this
disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given
protected zones -- ultimately resulting in a thriving industry.
The report, which was opened to preview Monday, also assesses how surging global
demand in other key areas including energy and fresh water can be met while preventing
ecological destruction around the planet.
UNEP director Achim Steiner said the world was "drawing down to the very capital" on
which it relies.
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However, "our institutions, our governments are perfectly capable of changing course, as
we have seen with the extraordinary uptake of interest.
Around, I think it is almost 30 countries now have engaged with us directly, and there are
many others revising the policies on the green economy," he said.
Environmental experts are mindful of the failure this March to push through a worldwide
ban on trade in bluefin tuna, one of the many species said to be headed for extinction.
Powerful lobbying from Japan and other tuna-consuming countries defeated the proposal
at the CITES conference on endangered species in Doha.
But UNEP's warning Monday was that tuna only symbolizes a much vaster catastrophe,
threatening economic, as well as environmental upheaval.
One billion people, mostly from poorer countries, rely on fish as their main animal protein
source, according to the UN.
The Green Economy report estimates there are 35 million people fishing around the world
on 20 million boats.
About 170 million jobs depend directly or indirectly on the sector, bringing the total web of
people financially linked to 520 million.
According to the UN, 30 percent of fish stocks have already collapsed, meaning they yield
less than 10 percent of their former potential, while virtually all fisheries risk running out of
commercially viable catches by 2050.
Currently only a quarter of fish stocks -- mostly the cheaper, less desirable species -- are
considered to be in healthy numbers.
The main scourge, the UNEP report says, are government subsidies encouraging ever
bigger fishing fleets chasing ever fewer fish, with little attempt made to allow the fish
populations to recover.
The annual 27 billion dollars in government subsidies to fishing, mostly in rich countries, is
"perverse," Sukhdev said, since the entire value of fish caught is only 85 billion dollars.
As a result, fishing fleet capacity is "50 to 60 percent" higher than it should be, Sukhdev
said.
Creating marine preservation areas to allow female fish to grow to full size, thereby hugely
increasing their fertility, is one vital solution, the report says.
Another is restructuring the fishing fleets to favor smaller boats that -- once fish stocks
recover -- would be able to land bigger catches.
"What is scarce here is fish," Sukhdev said, "not the stock of fishing capacity."
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Canadian Press (Canada): UN warns of empty oceans, water shortages unless
nations adopt green economies
17th May 2010
U.N. environment officials say nations must build "greener economies" or risk emptying
oceans of fish and creating water shortages for two-fifths of the planet in coming decades.
A new report previewed by United Nations environment chief Achim Steiner says virtually
all commercial fisheries could collapse by 2050 unless the world scales back $27 billion a
year in fishing subsidies down to $8 billion a year.
It says water supplies could be 40 per cent less than what are needed by 2030 if no
improvements are made in water use — one of 11 areas the U.N. targets for improvement.
Scientists last year revised a 2006 study warning of a collapse in the world's seafood
stocks by 2048, saying the news isn't quite as bad as predicted.
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Voxy (New Zealand): Turning The Tide On Falling Fish Stocks - UNEP-Led Green
Economy Charts Sustainable Investment Path
18th May 2010
Investing around US$8 billion a year in rebuilding and greening the world's fisheries could
raise catches to 112 million tonnes annually while triggering benefits to industry,
consumers and the global economy totalling US$1.7 trillion over the next 40 years.
These are among the findings of a new, landmark report being compiled by the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and economists entitled the Green Economy-part of which was previewed today in New York.
The investment, some of which can be covered by phasing down or phasing out some of
the US$27 billion-worth of fishing subsides currently in place, is needed to dramatically
reduce the excess capacity of the world's fishing fleets while supporting workers in
alternative livelihoods.
Funding is also required to reform and re-focus fisheries management, including through
policies such as tradable quotas and the establishment of Marine Protected Areas, in
order to allow depleted stocks to recover and grow.
Such measures, backed up by bold and forward-looking investments, would not only
generate important economic and environmental returns. They would also assist in fighting
poverty by securing a primary source of protein for close to one billion people.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said today:
"Fisheries across the world are being plundered, or exploited at unsustainable rates. It is a
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failure of management of what will prove to be monumental proportions unless
addressed."
"The lives and livelihoods of over half a billion people, linked with the health of this
industry, will depend on the tough but also transformational choices Governments make
now and over the years to come," he added.
"The Green Economy preview report presented today offers a way of maximizing the
economic, social and environmental returns from rebuilding, reforming and sustaining
fisheries for current and future generations.
The scenarios recognize that millions of fishers will need support in retraining and that
fishing fleets must shrink.
But this needs to be set against a rise in catches, an overall climb in incomes for coastal
communities and companies, improvements in the health of the marine environment and
ultimately hundreds of millions of people whose incomes and livelihoods are linked to
fishing," he added.
The final Green Economy report, which will cover 11 sectors from agriculture and waste to
cities and tourism, will be published in late 2010.
Today's preview, launched during the meeting of the Preparatory Committee for the
Rio+20 meeting in Brazil in 2012, covers marine fisheries, water and transport.
FisheriesFacts and Figures
* It is estimated that there are currently 35 million fishers and more than 20 million boats
actively engaged in fishing.
* Fisheries directly and indirectly support 170 million jobs and US$35 billion in incomes to
fishing households annually.
* If post-fishing activities are factored in, along with an assumption that one fisher has
three dependents, then about 520 million people or eight per cent of the global population
are supported by fisheries. Mismanagement, lack of enforcement and subsidies totalling
over US$27 billion annually have left close to 30 per cent of fish stocks classed as
"collapsed"in other words yielding less than 10 per cent of their former potential.
* Only around 25 per cent of commercial stocksmostly of low-priced speciesare
considered to be in a healthy or reasonably healthy state.
* On current trends, some researchers estimate that virtually all commercial fisheries will
have collapsed by 2050 unless urgent action is taken to bring far more intelligent
management to fisheries north and south. The report estimates that of the US$27 billionworth of subsidies, only around US$8 billion can be classed as 'good' with the rest classed
as 'bad' and 'ugly' as they contribute to over-exploitation of stocks.
FisheriesA Green Economy Strategy Under a Green Economy response, aimed at
reducing the global fishing effort to a 'maximum sustainable yield', an estimated reduction
of excess capacity is required, because current capacity is 1.8 to 2.8 times what is
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needed. These reductions could be achieved through careful targeting of the most
ecologically damaging surplus capacity, so that of the estimated 20 million vessels and 35
million fishers deployed in this sector, the livelihoods of those that are artisanal and poor
are treated equitably.
The report estimates that an investment of between US$220 to US$320 billion world-wide
is required and equal to around US$8 billion a year but that this investment would:* Raise total income of fishing households, including those engaged in artisanal fishing,
from US$35 billion to around US$44 billion a year;
* Increase annual profits for fishing enterprises from US$8 billion to US$11 billion annually;
* Increase the marine fisheries catch from about 80 million tonnes to 112 million tonnes a
year worth US$119 billion annually versus the current US$85 billion.
"Discounting this flow of benefit over time at three per cent and five per cent real discount
rates, gives a present value of benefit from greening the fishing sector of US$1.05 trillion
and US$1.76 trillion, which is three to five times the high-end estimate of US$320 billion as
the cost of greening global fisheries," says the preview report.
WaterFacts and Figures 'Global water stocks are in decline and demands on them are
growing. Water scarcity is becoming a global phenomenon that will challenge the security
of nations. Addressing this gap provides an opportunity for investments and for water to
become a major economic sector in a Green Economy," says the preview report.
Water supply is expected to be 40 per cent less than what will be needed in terms of
demand by 2030 if there are no improvements in the efficiency of water use.
It argues that attaining the Millennium Development Goals as they relate to water and
sanitation would lead to global economic gains of nearly US$750 million a year as a result
of less working days lost to illness among adults.
Improved access to water and sanitation would also lead to global gains of US$64 billion
linked to less time spent accessing such services.
Investments are needed in not only increasing supply through low cost measures such as
rainwater harvesting but also through reforms of the sector and investments in ecological
infrastructure including forests and wetlands that perform important hydrological functions.
* The report cites an innovative policy and 'micro-infrastructure' development in Western
Jakarta, Indonesia. Here, a private utility called Palyja is providing water to informal homes
via community-based organizations with water connection support from the NGO
MercyCorps and USAID's Environmental Service Programme.
The community signs a supply contract with the water company which in turn supplies
water to multiple households via a single community metre at discount prices.
"The community gets reliable access to an affordable water supply, while Palyja supplies a
large number of houses with water at much lower overhead and administrative costs,"
says the Green Economy preview report.
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Green EconomyTransport The environmental, social and economic impacts of transport
can amount to around 10 per cent of a country's GDP, according to the preview report.
* Transport currently consumes more than half of global liquid fossil fuels;
* Transport emits nearly a quarter of the world's energy related CO2 and generates more
than 80 per cent of developing country cities' local air pollutants;
* More than 127 million fatal traffic accidents, mainly in developing countries, are linked
with transport;
* Chronic congestion is resulting in time and productivity losses. Unless urgent action is
taken to seize a different development and investment path, these costs will grow as the
global vehicle fleet climbs from around 800 million to between two and three billion by
2050.
The report cites multiple choices countries and cities can make, including investment in
public and non-motorized transport; alternative fuels and a substitution of physical
transportation with telecommunications technology.
The Green Economy report says the stimulus packages, triggered by the financial crisis of
2008-2009, have begun a shift towards green transport.
Transport is one of the major recipients of this extra spending amounting to roughly 12 per
cent of the just under US$3.2 trillion spent by all surveyed Governments.
Of this, rail and public transport represent 45 per cent; low carbon vehicles, five per cent;
roads 33 per cent and airports, 14 per centin other words 50 per cent of the global
transport stimulus spending could be termed 'green'.
"Funding for non-motorized transport such as sidewalks and bicycles is explicitly
mentioned in the stimulus packages of the Republic of Korea and Norway," says the
preview report.
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Epoch Times (US):Commercial Fishing Under Threat, UN Report
17th May 2010
Commercial fishing activities could end by 2050 without action, said a Green Economy
preview report published Monday by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
"Fisheries across the world are being plundered, or exploited at unsustainable rates,”
Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director, said in a press release.
The UNEP reports 30 percent of fish stocks are at less than 10 percent of former potential.
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At this rate the fishing sector would disappear in 40 years, the report said. Current
government subsidies increase fishing fleets to a 50 to 60 percent overcapacity, leaving no
room for fish to recover.
The report notes that investing US$8 billion a year could help the sector recover. Marine
preservation areas allowing female fish to grow to full size is necessary, along with
restructuring the fleet to emphasize smaller boats.
Over half a billion people depend on the fishing industry. "We believe solutions are on
hand, but we believe political will and clear economics are required," Pavan Sukhdev,
head of the Green Economy initiative, told reporters.
The U.N.’s final report will cover 11 sectors from agriculture to tourism providing the clear
economics to eventually test the political will at the Rio+20 meeting in Brazil 2012.
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Metro News (Canada):UN warns of empty oceans, water shortages unless nations
adopt green economies
17th May 2010
U.N. environment officials say nations must build "greener economies" or risk emptying
oceans of fish and creating water shortages for two-fifths of the planet in coming decades.
A new report previewed by United Nations environment chief Achim Steiner says virtually
all commercial fisheries could collapse by 2050 unless the world scales back $27 billion a
year in fishing subsidies down to $8 billion a year.
It says water supplies could be 40 per cent less than what are needed by 2030 if no
improvements are made in water use — one of 11 areas the U.N. targets for improvement.
Scientists last year revised a 2006 study warning of a collapse in the world's seafood
stocks by 2048, saying the news isn't quite as bad as predicted.
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International Rivers (Blog): Can We Save the Sturgeon – and the Planet?
17th May 2010
Sturgeons can live for up to 100 years, and grow to 5 meters in length. The majestic fish
have been around for 250 million years, and are one of the oldest inhabitants of our rivers
and lakes. Because sturgeons migrate, dams cut them off from much of their spawning
grounds.
After they have adapted to dramatic upheavals through the ages, sturgeons are now
driven to extinction by a few decades of human intervention.
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The Chinese Paddlefish has for example most likely been extinct by dam building in the
last few years.
Overall, sturgeons are the most threatened group of animals on IUCN’s Red List of
Threatened Species.
Eighty-five percent of them are at risk of extinction, with 63 percent of species listed as
critically endangered.
The new Global Biodiversity Outlook, an in-depth review of the planet’s biodiversity, shows
that sturgeons stand for a global trend.
We continue to lose biodiversity at a rate which is up to 1000 times higher than historical
rates. “Natural systems that support economies, lives and livelihoods across the planet are
at risk of rapid degradation and collapse,” the new report finds.
According to the IUCN’s Red List, 17,291 out of the 47,677 assessed species are
threatened with extinction. Seventy percent of plants, 37 percent of freshwater fishes, 30
percent of all known amphibians, 28 percent of reptiles, 21 percent of all known mammals,
and 12 percent of all known birds are under threat.
The five principle pressures driving the loss of biodiversity are habitat change (for example
through dam building), overexploitation (through over-fishing), pollution (such as pesticide
run-off), invasive alien species and climate change.
The report warns that if these factors are not addressed immediately, ecosystems will
reach “tipping points” with massive, irreversible loss of biodiversity and their related
services to human society.
“The arrogance of humanity is that somehow we imagine that we can get by without
biodiversity,” says Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP).
Yet biodiversity is the foundation of our agriculture, our health, our safety and our
economy. Losses due to deforestation alone may already amount to $4.5 trillion per year.
Rivers and lakes are close to my heart. The new report finds that “rivers and their
floodplains, lakes and wetlands have undergone more dramatic changes than any other
type of ecosystem, due to a combination of human activities.”
The reasons include pollution, drainage of wetlands and water abstraction for agriculture
and industrial development, and dam construction.
Two thirds of the world’s large river systems have become fragmented by reservoirs and
dams. The new biodiversity report warns:
“A single freshwater ecosystem can often provide multiple benefits such as purification of
water, protection from natural disasters, food and materials for local livelihoods and
income from tourism. (…) More than 40% of the global river discharge is now intercepted
by large dams and one-third of sediment destined for the coastal zones no longer arrives.
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These large-scale disruptions have had a major impact on fish migration, freshwater
biodiversity more generally and the services it provides. They also have a significant
influence on biodiversity in terrestrial, coastal and marine ecosystems.”
The Global Biodiversity Outlook was prepared by the Convention on Biological Diversity
and UNEP, as one of the milestones of the International Year of Biodiversity.
The report includes a strategic plan, which will be discussed by the UN General Assembly
in September and the annual meeting of the Biodiversity Convention in October 2010.
The plan proposes measures such as expanding and strengthening protected areas,
preventing pollution, restoring ecosystems, and improving the efficiency in the use of land,
energy, freshwater and materials.
The new report argues that for a fraction of the money mobilized immediately by
governments to avoid an economic meltdown, we can avoid a much more serious and
fundamental breakdown in the Earth’s life support system.
Will governments muster the political will to take the necessary actions? We owe it to the
majestic sturgeon – and quite possibly to ourselves.
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Just Means (Blog):Clean tech depends on recycling performance, says UN
17th May 2010
A recent UN Environment Programme release looks to specialty metals recycling as the
key to a performance boom in the clean tech sector. Maybe full cycle manufacturing and
refining is the key to getting more performance out of our specialty metals.
According to UNEP, "Moving the global economy towards environmentally-friendly, clean
technologies will increasingly hinge on rapid improvements in the recycling rates of so
called "high-tech" specialty metals like lithium, neodymium and gallium.
Such metals, needed to make key components for wind turbines and photovoltaics to the
battery packs of hybrid cars, fuel cells and energy efficient lighting systems, exist in nature
in relatively small supplies or in discreet geographical locations.
Yet despite concern among the clean tech industry over scarcity and high prices, only
around one per cent of these crucial high-tech metals are recycled, with the rest discarded
and thrown away at the end of a product's life.
Unless future end-of-life recycling rates are dramatically stepped up these critical,
specialty and rare earth metals could become "essentially unavailable for use in modern
technology", warn experts.
These are among the preliminary findings of a new report entitled Metals Recycling Rates
to be issued by the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management hosted by
the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). "
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UNEP also takes a look at precious metals like Palladium. Palladium, used in autoexhaust catalyst, petroleum refining and other industrial catalysts, dentistry and jewelry
has recycling rates up to 90% in some industrial applications, approximately 55% in auto
catalyst and less than 10% in electronics applications.
What can we learn from Palladium that will help improve performance on recycling rates in
specialty metals? First, vertical integration is a plus.
Take petroleum catalyst. One company (say BASF) will sell the catalyst to the company
operating the petroleum refinery (say Exxon), accept spent catalyst back for refining in its
own metals refineries and credit the amount of Palladium recovered from the spent
catalyst back to Exxon.
Exxon gets full cycle service, doesn't need to repeatedly sell and repurchase platinum at
gyrating market prices. Recycling is incentivized and made easy.
Not every battery company will want to go into the lithium recovery business, but
contractual "partnerships" can be used to achieve some of the same benefits.
Now consider auto catalyst. Vertical integration still applies, BASF will supply Ford with
both catalyst and refining, but recycling rates are only 50-55%. Why? Partly because the
retail customer enters the picture.
Exxon's catalyst never leaves its refinery, but Ford's catalytic convertors are going out the
showroom door with the cars and some never make it back to the refinery, despite
extensive collection networks.
Part of the difference is also becauseloss in service and refiningprocessing losses are
generally greater in auto catalyst than petroleum catalyst.. So, performance here is not
perfect, but 55% is a lot better than we are doing with the specialty metals, and
improvement is going to depend on getting more of those used catalytic convertors to the
refinery.
In Palladium's electronic applications, the recycling rate drops to 10%, a performance that
is still an order of magnitude better than the specialty metals, but this rate says much
about our throwaway approach to cell phones.
Perhaps customers should pay a "recycling" deposit, like bottles, on purchase of a cell
phone.
The overall lesson: Get the product manufacturers involved in the metals recovery, with
contractual arrangements that mimic Palladium'sfull cycle product sale/refining service.
The battery maker who can avoid buying lithium in the open market because it's looking to
refining recoveries that are cycled right back into production gets real financial benefits the kind of benefits that will cause manufacturerstodrive some creative, high performance
approaches to getting end users committed to recycling.
Side benefit - improved specialty metals and rare earths recycling will reduce sole source
reliance on China for many items.
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Independent (UK): Record heat recorded for Africa's greatest lake
18th May 2010
Africa's deepest lake is warming at an "unprecedented" rate thanks to man-made climate
change, scientists have warned. Lake Tanganyika, which stretches from Burundi and DR
Congo on its northern shores to southern Tanzania and Zambia, is the second largest lake
in the world by volume.
The 420-mile-long finger of water in south-central Africa is now warmer than at any point in
the last 1,500 years, according to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience,
and the consequences could be dire for the 10 million people who live around it and
depend on its fisheries.
"Our records indicate that changes in the temperature of Lake Tanganyika in the past few
decades exceed previous natural variability," the paper found. "We conclude that these
unprecedented temperatures and a corresponding decrease in productivity can be
attributed to anthropogenic global warming."
Geologists from Rhode Island's Brown University and the University of Arizona took
samples from the lake floor. By carbon dating these "lake cores", taken from depths of up
4,700 feet, and testing fossilised micro-organisms, they were able to create an accurate
picture of temperature changes since AD500.
What they found was a gradual warming that accelerated alarmingly in recent decades as
heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere have driven global climate change.
The scientists were also able for the first time to link the warming to lower productivity in
the lake, concluding that higher temperatures were killing life.
The study found that the warmer the surface of the lake has become, the harder it is for
cold currents to rise from the bottom and penetrate and recharge warmer layers.
A less productive lake means fewer fish and therefore less food and income in one of the
poorest regions on earth.
"The people throughout south-central Africa depend on the fish from Lake Tanganyika as
a crucial source of protein," said Andrew Cohen, professor of geological sciences at the
University of Arizona.
"This resource is likely threatened by the lake's unprecedented warming since the late
19th century and the associated loss of lake productivity."
The surface temperature of the lake has risen by slightly less than one degree in the last
90 years to 26C, while the levels of algae that indicate the productivity of the lake have
dropped.
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The vast body of water, which at some points is more than 45 miles across, produces
some 200,000 tonnes of fish annually, mainly sardines. It is also the region's main source
of freshwater.
While scientists have previously focused on the Earth's atmosphere to understand the
extent and consequences of climate change, they are increasingly looking to its lakes and
seas, which absorb tremendous amounts of heat.
Jessica Tierney, from Brown University and the lead scientist on the paper, said: "We're
showing that the trend of warming that we've seen is also affecting these remote places in
the tropics in a very severe way."
The Great Lakes region of Africa – Lake Malawi, Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika –
were formed after Eurasia and Africa collided some 25 million years ago, creating the
Great Rift Valley stretching from Syria to Mozambique.
Officials from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya, have warned
that Tanganyika is not alone among Africa's Great Lakes in being threatened by climate
change.
Lake Victoria, the continent's largest by surface area but shallow in comparison with
Tanganyika, has registered record temperature rises since the 1960s, which have added
further stress to an ecosystem already under attack from human waste, agricultural run-off
and invasive species.
With the fastest-growing population of any lake basin in the world, Victoria is offering what
some scientists are calling "an accelerated preview of the great environmental challenges"
of the coming century.
More than 30 million people already live around "Victoria Nyanza", as it is known in Kenya,
and that figure is projected to double by 2025, according to UNEP.
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NY Times(US): Corruption, Mismanagement Strangle Vital Kenyan Watershed
17th May 2010
The wooded ridge rising to the west of this bustling provincial capital is the home of one of
Kenya's greatest natural resources and one of Africa's biggest environmental crises.
The Mau Forest Complex encompasses almost 1 million acres of wilderness, interspersed
with small farms and sprawling tea plantations.
The watershed feeds 12 rivers and hydroelectric dams downstream and replenishes some
of Africa's most famous lakes and wildlife preserves, including the Serengeti in Tanzania.
Kenya can ill afford to lose the Mau, but that is what's happening. A legacy of corruption,
cronyism and inept management threatens to derail a fresh government effort to replant
the forests and protect the water table.
14
In the nearly 50 years since Kenya won its independence from Great Britain, huge swaths
of the Mau have been cleared to expand the tea plantations and make way for new ones
on land handed over to a chosen elite.
Add to this roughly 600,000 settlers staking their own claims to the Mau, most illegally.
They continue to tear down forests for cropland today. Activists warn of illegal logging
activities on government lands, carried out under cover of darkness as officials willfully
look the other way. It is the same in other forested parts of the country, notably the
Aberdare Range and around Mount Kenya.
The encroachments have reduced Kenya's forest cover from 12 percent to 1.2 percent
today, according to the United Nations.
Rivers and lakes have shrunk, and last year's record drought led to a rationing of power
and water. Government officials are eager to reverse the trend and rehabilitate the Mau
and Kenya's four other highland "water towers."
"We cannot let the rivers that feed Lake Victoria, Lake Nakuru, Lake Naivasha and Lake
Turkana die," Deputy Prime Minister Musalia Mudavadi declared at a recent U.N. water
conference here. "Restoring the Mau complex is therefore a matter of protecting
humanity."
Late last year, Prime Minister Raila Odinga launched a special commission tasked with
restoring the Mau. Staffed with public- and private-sector officials, that team must find a
way to relocate illegal settlers and replant trees in their wake.
Powerful political and economic interests and an inert bureaucratic machine stand in the
way.
Something must be done, and soon. Land degradation costs Kenya about $390 million
annually -- about 3 percent of gross domestic product, according to the government.
"It has become one of the top political issues in Kenyan society, the Mau Forest," said
United Nations Environmental Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner.
BIG AMBITIONS, MAJOR HURDLES
The Mau has lost about 490,000 acres during the past 15 years, according to Odinga,
including more than 61,000 acres from government-backed excisions in 2001.
Satellite data show that the complex's southwestern Maasai Mau area lost about a third of
its tree cover between 1986 and 2003; the eastern Mau area has lost almost half of its tree
cover since 1973.
Kenyan authorities say they aim to plant more than 7.6 billion trees by 2030, mostly in the
Mau complex. That would boost Kenya's forest cover to 10 percent, effectively reversing
50 years of forest loss in less than two decades.
15
From July to October of last year, the Kenya Forest Service replanted almost 3,500 acres
of the Mau, according to the prime minister's task force, dubbed the Interim Coordinating
Secretariat (ICS).
In December, KFS officials completed the repossession of about 47,000 acres in the
South Western Mau Forest Reserve and removed about 1,700 families who lacked title
deeds. By March, the secretariat was wrapping up the repossession of more than 11,000
acres of the eastern Mau complex.
Government-led replanting efforts have slowed considerably in recent months, however.
At a March meeting of the secretariat in Nairobi, all that was achieved was a doubling of its
members. Frederick Oweno, an adviser to the secretariat and managing director at Forest
Resources International, said the move was necessary even though it complicates the
effort further.
"We don't want a situation where some major stakeholders will feel that they have been
left out of this," Oweno explained.
The Kenya Forest Service (KFS), which manages 70 percent of the Mau, is seen by critics
as one of the chief impediments to progress.
During the March gathering, KFS asked that all further work be delayed by one year. That
proposal was rejected, but little government-led replanting has occurred since.
The project's current phase entails the recovery of titled land in the 113,000-acre Maasai
Mau section of the forest complex. About 43 percent of the area had been allocated to
individuals and companies, mainly through illegal means, during the past decade.
KFS and its partners aim to replant and rehabilitate about 12,300 acres during the long
rains, which typically continue through the end of this month.
Officials are also conducting a census of settlers in the Maasai Mau and demarcating its
boundary, but less than 75 acres had been replanted through the first half of May, said
Christian Lambrechts, a UNEP analyst and technical adviser to the Mau secretariat.
"We can only plant trees once a forest is vacated," Lambrechts explained.
MURKY POLITICS
John Spears, former Kenya resident and consultant to the World Bank, said the Mau's
current problems are rooted in Kenya's suspect political history.
"The Mau is politically difficult because some politicians allowed small farmers to encroach
into the Mau," Spears explained. "Some of them started farming and got titles. How they
got it, God knows."
Tree harvesting and tea planting began with the British but continued under the new
guard.
16
Family and friends of former Kenyan Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel Arap Moi were
given title to government lands to expand tea operations.
They brought with them tens of thousands of farmers who were bribed with offers of small
plots in exchange for support at election times, making it even more difficult for later
administrations to remove tea barons from their illegally gotten land.
"People have destroyed the forest for two reasons -- one, for commercial purposes, and
two, for individual livelihood," ICS Chairman Hassan Noor Hassan said. "Many Kenyans
want to see the forest replanted with trees again."
But Kenyans are also wary of political deals cut to get farmers to return their land. Rumors
abound that wealthy landowners will simply be bought off to hand in titles.
One form of protest is a popular car bumper sticker created by the local office of
Transparency International. The sticker's message: "Compensate illegal Mau land
tycoons? Not with my money!"
At the March ICS meeting, Essau Omello, deputy director for conservation at the Kenya
Forest Service, insisted that his agency was committed to restoring the Mau quickly and
fairly, despite his request to postpone activity.
Omello said his agency was working with the Kenya Tourist Board to organize a replanting
drive in the Maasai Mau region.
"We want to open up the Mau for tourism," Omello explained.
KFS critics charge that agency officials have been skipping subsequent meetings of the
secretariat or have otherwise been made unavailable.
Of greatest concern, critics say, is a draft memorandum of understanding KFS distributed
recently. The MOU must be signed by any parties interested in organizing replanting
drives, but the terms are controversial.
The forest agency mandates that all money for the effort go through a steering committee
it controls. KFS also wants its officials to be consulted for technical advice before any
project is approved.
Some Mau advocates object, saying that the agency has little to no expertise in forest
restoration. They also charge that the structure is ripe for abuse, and as a consequence,
private-sector donors have been slow to come forward.
"We have advised potential donors not to put any money in until they are satisfied how
and by whom it will be used," said Richard Muir, an official active in commercial forestry on
private lands and chairman of the group Friends of the Mau Watershed. "That stage has
not been reached."
Omello and other Kenyan government officials did not return requests for comment
regarding charges of delays, absences, unfavorable terms in the MOU and other red tape.
HOPES EMERGE
17
Though the larger effort appears troubled, there are smaller signs of momentum.
In March, President Mwai Kibaki commissioned a 250-mile electric fence, built around
Aberdare National Park at a cost of about $9.6 million. The goal of the fence is to reduce
illegal logging, encroachments and wildlife poaching in the forest, which supplies water to
30 percent of Kenya's population.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Odinga announced that foreign aid donors had pledged
$10 million to restore the Mau.
The U.S. Agency for International Development committed the lion's share -- $7 million to
a replanting drive aimed at restoring the Mara River's water catchments. The Kenyan
government is seeking a total of $99 million.
Private-sector organizations hoping to burnish their green credentials are also getting into
the tree-planting business.
Equity Bank Ltd., East African Breweries Ltd., Nation Media Group and other partners
have committed about $640,000 to plant trees amid the Maasai Mau.
They are keen to adopt almost 20,000 acres of the Eburru Forest near Lake Naivasha,
Lambrechts said.
Separately, private entrepreneurs recently gained KFS permission to move ahead with an
experimental biomass project using fast-growing bamboo as the fuel source. The 1,200acre pilot project also won't be happening in the Mau, but in the Aberdares.
Led by a group called the Bamboo Trading Co., the project aims to demonstrate how
replanting cleared areas with bamboo could restore watersheds in the Mau and elsewhere
while providing valuable fuel wood for generating electricity, to either feed the national grid
or to power local agriculture operations.
The native bamboo takes three to four months to reach full height and matures into
hardwood in only three years, potentially replenishing much of the river catchments in a
very short time. Liam O'Meara, an executive with the Bamboo Trading Co., hopes that
proving the concept in the Aberdares will encourage private landowners in the Mau to
follow suit.
"The Bamboo Trading Company intends to share its technical and financial information
with the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Forestry & Wildlife so that the government
can encourage other private companies to copy the initiative," O'Meara said.
RESTORATION INCENTIVES
There is a chance others might be persuaded to join the restoration effort.
For one, the Kenya Tea Development Agency, which represents 54 tea factories and
hundreds of thousands of small-scale farm operations, is constructing power plants as
falling water levels at existing hydropower dams make electricity more scarce and
expensive.
18
KTDA launched its own power company last year and completed a 1-megawatt run-of-theriver hydroelectric project to supply the Imenti tea factory near Mount Kenya, about 80
miles east of the Mau complex.
The organization is mulling 10 more hydropower projects that would generate a total of 22
MW.
KTDA is not involved in the Mau reforestation efforts, but the cooperative's need for cheap
and reliable electricity could see it following O'Meara's lead.
The tea cooperative, which spent a record $19.4 million on electricity last year, is exploring
ways to generate power from sugarcane biomass.
"Without the Mau, our tea industry cannot be sustainable," underscored KTDA spokesman
Fred Gori, who noted that electricity constitutes roughly a third of the cost of producing a
kilogram of tea.
None of KTDA's farmers have had land repossessed as part of the Mau restoration efforts,
Gori said.
The Kenyan government continues to insist it is committed to restoring the Mau quickly,
despite the delays and charges that bureaucrats are equally committed to protecting
vested interests that are largely to blame for the forest's destruction.
The ICS is working with a newly formed Ogiek council of elders to develop forest
restoration proposals and a registry of families --- many of whom lack title deeds but
consider the Mau their ancestral home.
Other people who encroached upon the forest illegally will not be compensated for
handing back their land, Prime Minister Odinga and his top aides underscore. To date,
more than 40 title deeds have been surrendered without demand for compensation,
officials claim.
"Despite all the noise that you hear," ICS Chairman Hassan said, "there is a lot of
commitment from the government at the highest level to restore the Mau, to remove
people from the forest and settle them elsewhere."
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_________________________________________________________________
Ecoticias (Spain):Achim presenta los avances del reporte sobre la Economía Verde
17 May 2010
Revertir la tendencia en la caída de las poblaciones de peces — Iniciativa sobre
Economía Verde, liderada por PNUMA, marca la ruta para inversiones sostenibles
Avances del reporte el cual también vislumbra oportunidades para transformar los
sectores de agua y transporte al momento que los gobiernos se reúnen para el Comité
Preparatorio de Río +20
19
La inversión en la recuperación y enverdecimiento de las pesquerías del mundo por
alrededor de 8 mil millones anuales, podrían resultar en el incremento de las capturas a
112 millones de toneladas anuales, a la vez que impulsar beneficios para la industria, los
consumidores y la economía global por un monto total de 1,7 trillones de dólares en los
próximos 40 años.
Estas son algunas de las conclusiones de un nuevo reporte compilado por el Programa
de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Ambiente (PNUMA) y los economistas participantes en la
iniciativa de la Economía Verde – cuyos avances fueron presentados el día de hoy en
Nueva York.
Esta inversión, que podría cubrirse a partir de la reducción progresiva o eliminación de
los 27 mil millones de dólares dedicados a subsidios a la actividad pesquera, es necesaria
para reducir drásticamente el exceso de la capacidad de las flotas pesqueras del mundo y
apoyar a los trabajadores para encontrar alternativas para su sustento.
El financiamiento también es requerido para reformar y re-orientar el manejo pesquero,
incluyendo a través de políticas tales como cuotas mercadeables y el establecimiento de
áreas marinas protegidas, con objeto de permitir que las poblaciones de peces agotadas
se recuperen y crezcan.
Tales medidas, respaldadas por inversiones sólidas y previsoras, no sólo generarían
importantes rendimientos económicos y ambientales, sino que apoyarían en el combate a
la pobreza al asegurar la fuente primaria de proteína para cerca de mil millones de
personas.
Achim Steiner, Subsecretario General de la ONU y Director Ejecutivo de PNUMA, dijo
hoy: "Pesquerías a través del mundo son saqueadas o explotadas a tasas insostenibles.
Es un fracaso de gestión que será de proporciones monumentales a menos que sea
atendido".
"Las vidas y los sustentos de más de 500 millones de personas, vinculados a la salud de
esta industria, dependerán de las elecciones difíciles pero transformacionales que los
gobiernos realicen ahora y en los próximos años," agregó.
"Los avances sobre el reporte de la Economía Verde presentados hoy, contemplan una
manera de maximizar los rendimientos económicos, sociales y ambientales de
reconstruir, reformar y sostener las pesquerías para las generaciones presentes y futuras.
Los escenarios reconocen que millones de pescadores necesitarán apoyo para
reentrenamiento y que las flotas pesqueras deben reducirse.
Pero esto debe hacerse teniendo como contraparte un incremento en las capturas, un
aumento general en los ingresos de las comunidades costeras y las compañías, la mejora
en la salud del medio ambiente marino y finalmente, y en la calidad de vida de cientos de
millones de personas cuyos ingresos y sustentos están ligados a la pesca," agregó.
El reporte final cubrirá 11 sectores, desde la agricultura y los residuos hasta las ciudades
y el turismo, y será publicado hacia fines de 2010. La presentación de hoy, realizada
durante la reunión del Comité Preparatorio para Rio + 20 en Brasil en 2012, contempla
las pesquerías marinas, el agua y el transporte.
20
Pesca – Hechos y datos
•
Se estima que actualmente hay 35 millones de pescadores y más de 20 millones de
botes activos en la pesca
•
La pesca, directa e indirectamente, genera 170 millones de empleos y 35 mil
millones de dólares en ingresos anuales para las familias de pescadores
•
Si las actividades post-captura son consideradas, suponiendo que cada pescador
tiene tres dependientes, entonces 520 millones de personas u ocho por ciento de la
población mundial depende de la pesca
El manejo inadecuado, la falta de aplicación de las normas y los subsidios por 27 mil
millones de dólares anuales, han provocado que cerca del 30% de las poblaciones de
peces se clasifiquen como “colapsadas” – en otras palabras, rindiendo menos del 10 por
ciento de su potencial anterior.
•
Solo cerca del 25 por ciento de las poblaciones comerciales – casi todas especies de
bajo precio – se considera que esté en un estado saludable o razonablemente saludable
•
Bajo las tendencias actuales, algunos investigadores estiman que virtualmente todas
las pesquerías comerciales colapsarán a más tardar en 2050, a menos que acciones
urgentes sean implementadas para lograr una gestión aún más inteligente de las
pesquerías en el norte y en el sur
El informe estima que de los 27 mil millones de dólares de subsidios, solamente el
equivalente a 8 mil millones podrían calificarse como “buenos”, mientras que el resto
serían “malos” y “feos” al contribuir a la sobre-explotación de las poblaciones de peces.
Pesca – Una estrategia de Economía Verde
Bajo una respuesta de Economía Verde, orientada a reducir el esfuerzo pesquero global a
su “rendimiento máximo sostenible”, se estima que se requiere una reducción del exceso
de capacidad, debido a que la capacidad actual es entre 1.8 y 2.8 veces de lo que se
requiere.
Estas reducciones podrían alcanzarse orientándose cuidadosamente al exceso de
capacidad ecológicamente más dañina, de tal forma que del estimado de 20 millones de
embarcaciones y 35 millones de pescadores en el sector, el sustento de aquellos que son
artesanales y pobres son tratados equitativamente.
El reporte estima que se requiere de una inversión de entre 220 y 320 mil millones de
dólares a nivel mundial equivalente a alrededor de 8 mil millones de dólares anuales.
Esta inversión provocaría:
•
Un incremento en el ingreso total de las familias de pescadores, incluyendo aquellas
dedicadas a la pesca artesanal, de 35 a 44 mil millones de dólares al año
•
Incremento en las utilidades anuales de las compañías pesqueras de 8 a 11 mil
millones de dólares anuales
21
•
Aumento de las capturas de las pesquerías marinas de 80 a 112 millones de
toneladas anuales, con un valor de 119 mil millones anuales contra los actuales 85 mil
millones
“Descontando este flujo de beneficios a lo largo del tiempo a una tasa de descuento del
3% y del 5% en términos reales, implica un valor presente del beneficio por enverdecer el
sector pesquero de 1.05 trillones y 1.76 trillones de dólares, lo que es entre tres y cinco
veces mayor al costo estimado de enverdecer la actividad de máximo de 320 mil millones
de dólares”, establecen los avances del reporte.
AGUA – HECHOS Y DATOS
‘Los inventarios globales de agua se están reduciendo y la demanda por ésta crece. La
escasez de agua se está convirtiendo en un fenómeno global que amenaza la seguridad
de las naciones.
Atender este rezago provee oportunidades para las inversiones y para que el agua se
convierta en un sector principal en una Economía Verde”, indica el avance del reporte.
Se espera que la oferta de agua sea 40 por ciento menos que la requerida en términos de
demanda para 2030 si no existen mejoras en la eficiencia en el uso del agua.
Argumenta que el logro de los Objetivos de Desarrollo del Milenio relativos a agua y
saneamiento, resultarán en ganancias económicas a nivel mundial, de cerca de 750
millones de dólares anuales, como resultado de menos días de trabajo perdidos por
enfermedad entre los adultos.
El acceso mejorado al agua y al saneamiento también resultará en ganancias globales
por 64 mil millones de dólares vinculados a menor tiempo dedicado a acceder a dichos
servicios.
Las inversiones son necesarias no solo para incrementar la oferta a través de medidas de
bajo costo como la recolección de agua de lluvia, sino también mediante reformas del
sector ye inversiones en infraestructura ecológica incluyendo los bosques y los
humedales que desempeñan importantes funciones hidrológicas.
•
El informe cita una política innovadora y un desarrollo de “micro-infraestructura” en
Yakarta Occidental, Indonesia.
Aquí, una instalación privada llamada Palyja provee agua a casas informales a través de
organizaciones basadas en la comunidad, con el apoyo para la conexión al agua por
parte de la ONG MercyCorps y el Programa de Servicio Ambiental de la USAID.
La comunidad firma un contrato de oferta con la compañía de agua que a cambio provee
de agua a múltiples casas a través de un solo medidor comunitario a precios
descontados.
“La comunidad tiene acceso confiable a agua accesible, mientras que Palyja provee a un
gran número de casas con agua con una menor comisión y costos administrativos”, se
indica en el avance del reporte.
22
Economía Verde -Transporte
Los impactos ambientales, sociales y económicos del transporte pueden alcanzar
alrededor del 10% del PIB, de acuerdo al avance del reporte.
•
El transporte actualmente consume más de la mitad de los combustibles fósiles
líquidos a nivel mundial
•
El transporte emite cerca de la cuarta parte de dióxido de carbono generado por la
energía en el mundo y genera más del 80 por ciento de los contaminantes locales en las
ciudades de países en desarrollo
•
Más de 127 millones de accidentes de tránsito fatales están vinculados con el
transporte, principalmente en los países en desarrollo
•
La congestión crónica resulta en pérdidas de tiempo y productividad
A menos que acciones urgentes se lleven a cabo para adoptar un modelo diferente de
desarrollo e inversión, estos costos crecerán conforme la flota global pasa de cerca de
800 millones a entre 2 y 3 mil millones en 2050.
El avance del reporte cita múltiples opciones que los países y ciudades pueden
implementar, incluyendo inversiones en transporte público y no motorizado; combustibles
alternativos y sustitución del transporte físico con tecnologías de telecomunicaciones.
El avance del informe de Economía Verde indica que paquetes de estímulos, aplicados a
partir de la crisis 2008-2009, han comenzado a promover transporte verde.
•
El transporte es uno de los principales receptores de este gasto adicional en cerca
del 12 por ciento de casi 3.2 trillones de dólares gastados por los gobiernos encuestados
•
De esto, el transporte ferroviario y público representa el 45 por ciento; vehículos
bajos en carbono, 5 por ciento; caminos, 33 por ciento, y aeropuertos, 14 por ciento – en
otras palabras 50 por ciento del estimulo global para el gasto en transporte puede
denominarse como “verde”.
“Financiar el transporte no motorizado tales como senderos y ciclovías, está
explícitamente mencionado en los paquetes de estímulos de la República de Corea y
Noruega”, dice el reporte de avance.
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Cronica de Aragon (Spain):PNUMA adopta un acuerdo para mejorar el transporte de
desechos peligrosos
17th May 2010
Más de cien países adoptaron una serie de recomendaciones para implementar la
Convención de Basilea sobre el transporte internacional de desechos peligrosos.
23
En una reunión que concluyó en Ginebra, los delegados destacaron la necesidad de
reforzar los controles del desmantelamiento de barcos y el manejo de basura electrónica,
como las computadoras y teléfonos móviles descartados.
La portavoz del Programa de la ONU para el Medio Ambiente (PNUMA), Julie Marks,
afirmó que la conferencia logró progresos importantes en la elaboración del borrador de
una Convención sobre el Reciclaje de Barcos que será adoptada por la Organización
Marítima Internacional (OMI).
Por otra parte, agregó que en el foro se analizó la prohibición de la exportación de
desechos peligrosos provenientes de los países industrializados a las naciones en
desarrollo.
También se anunciaron proyectos piloto que implican la realización de encuestas sobre
desechos electrónicos en nueve países, entre otros El Salvador, Brasil, Sri Lanka y
Samoa.
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Other Environment News
AFP:Costa Rican named UN climate chief
17th May 2010
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has named Costa Rica's Christiana Figueres to be
the organization's top official on climate change, his spokesman announced Monday.
UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the 53-year-old Costa Rican, currently San Jose's
climate change negotiator, would succeed Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands as the
executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCC).
"Ms Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and
brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders, and
valuable hands-on experience from the non-profit sector and the private sector," the
spokesman said.
De Boer tendered his resignation after last year's Copenhagen climate change talks,
which ended in widespread disappointment with only vague promises by nations to cut
emissions.
Figueres is to assume her post on July 1, five months before the next round of scheduled
climate change talks in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.
She has been a negotiator of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol since 1995 and has played
a role in designing key climate change instruments, US media reports said.
24
Chief US climate negotiator Todd Stern welcomed Figueres' appointment, calling her
"well-qualified with a deep background in UN climate change negotiations."
"The United States looks forward to working with Ms. Figueres and partners around the
world to build on the progress made in Copenhagen to meet the climate change
challenge," Stern said in a statement.
Environmental group Greenpeace noted that Costa Rica has set an ambitious goal of
becoming carbon-neutral by 2021, "the type of attitude we need on the global stage."
"We hope she can really engage all countries in a fast-moving dialogue to get agreement
on a global deal that will save the world from dangerous climate change," said Wendel
Trio, Greenpeace's climate policy coordinator.
Figueres's family has a long history of work in government and international affairs. Her
father Jose Figueres Ferrer was a three-time president of Costa Rica who abolished Costa
Rica's military in 1948.
Her mother Karen Olsen Beck who was born in the United States to Danish immigrants,
later adopted Costa Rican nationality.
Figueres's older brother, Jose Maria Figueres Olsen was elected President of Costa Rica
for four years at the age of 39, the nation's youngest president in the 20th century.
Figueres completed her university studies at the prestigious Swarthmore College in
Pennsylvania and at the London School of Economics and Georgetown University in
Washington, DC.
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AP:UN names Costa Rican to head climate change body
17th May 2010
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica
as the new U.N. climate chief. She is an expert on climate negotiations and the daughter
of the country's former president.
Figueres, who has been a member of Costa Rica's negotiating team on climate change
since 1995, will replace Yvo de Boer as executive secretary of the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change.
"I come to the secretariat with great respect for the institution and a deep commitment to
(the) UNFCCC process," Figueres said in a statement issued by the U.N. "There is no task
that is more urgent, more compelling or more sacred than that of protecting the climate of
our planet for our children and grandchildren."
De Boer, who has shephered troubled climate talks for nearly four years, announced his
resignation in February, saying he will step down July 1 to work in business and academia.
25
Ban expressed gratitude to de Boer, who is from the Netherlands, "for his dedicated
service and tireless efforts on behalf of the climate change agenda," U.N. spokesman
Martin Nesirky said.
Nesirky said Monday the appointment was made after consultations with parties to the
convention.
"(Ms.) Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change
and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders,
and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, nonprofit sector and private
sector," he said.
De Boer announced his departure two months after a disappointing climate summit in
Copenhagen that ended with a nonbinding accord brokered by President Barack Obama
promising emissions cuts and immediate financing for poor countries — but even that
failed to win consensus agreement.
Figueres, 53, will take the helm just five months before 193 nations reconvene in Cancun,
Mexico, in December for another attempt to reach a worldwide legal agreement on
controlling greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for the gradual heating of the Earth that
scientists predict will worsen weather-related disasters.
De Boer, European Union officials and others are cautioning that the Cancun conference
probably will yield only a first answer on curbing greenhouse gases, and a legally binding
climate change treaty isn't likely until next year at the earliest.
Figueres has a long history with the climate change convention: From 2007 to 2009 she
was vice president of its bureau, representing Latin America and the Caribbean, and over
the years she has chaired numerous international negotiations.
Her father, Jose Figueres, who led the 1948 revolution and founded modern democracy in
Costa Rica, was president of the country three times. Her mother, Karen Olsen Beck,
served as Costa Rican ambassador to Israel in 1982 and was elected a member of
Congress from 1990-1994.
Figueres graduated from Swarthmore College in 1979 and received a master's degree
from the London School of Economics.
In 1994, she became the director of the technical secretariat of the Renewable Energy in
the Americas program, today housed at the Organization of the American States. The
following year she founded and became executive director of the Center for Sustainable
Development in the Americas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the
participation of Latin American countries in the Climate Change Convention.
She is married, has two daughters and is based in the United States, outside Washington,
D.C.
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Reuters: U.N. picks Costa Rican Figueres as new climate chief
26
17th May 2010
The United Nations appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica on Monday to be its
climate chief to head stalled international talks on how to contain the world's greenhouse
gas emissions.
Figueres, 53, the choice of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, is the first leader of the
U.N. climate change secretariat to come from a developing country. She will take over
from Dutchman Yvo de Boer from July 1.
She beat fellow short-listed candidate Marthinus van Schalkwyk, a former South African
environment minister, for a position meant to rally global accord on a successor to the
Kyoto Protocol after a disappointing summit in Copenhagen last December.
Announcing the appointment, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Figueres "brings to this
position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable handson experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector."
The scale of Figueres' task is underscored by a Copenhagen summit where 120 world
leaders failed to reach a binding deal, pledging instead to mobilize $30 billion from 20102012 to help poor countries deal with droughts and floods, and to try to limit warming to
less than 2 degrees Celsius.
This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to
a meeting in Cancun, Mexico, that begins in late November.
Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting to fall short of a binding deal, looking to
2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto, whose provisions expire in 2012.
Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting
instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.
GOOD FOR BUSINESS
In an interview with Reuters after her appointment, Figueres said the world can salvage a
new deal to combat global warming but this was not a priority for 2010. Rich countries
must first fulfill their pledges on climate aid, she said.
"Parties need to prove to themselves that issues already on the table, such as fasttracking financing, that's not just on paper but can also be delivered. That's the focus of
Cancun," she said.
The appointment of a U.N. climate chief from the South was widely forecast after a richpoor rift in Copenhagen, where developing countries said the industrialized world was
shirking its historical responsibility for causing climate change.
Figueres has been a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team since 1995 and
has held many senior posts in the U.N. climate process. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer,
was president of Costa Rica three times.
27
Danish Climate and Energy Minister Lykke Friis said Figueres won unanimous support on
Monday from key nations at a meeting of the U.N. climate bureau in Bonn, Germany.
"She is highly experienced, she is well connected, she knows all the negotiators. She
knows the dossiers," Friis said.
U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern called her "well qualified."
One source close to the matter said: "If they wanted a technical bureaucrat, she's probably
as good as you'll get."
Business and those involved in the carbon market would welcome Figueres, said Andrei
Marcu, head of regulatory and policy affairs at oil trading firm Mercuria. "From a business
point of view, she has been willing to listen in the past and we hope she will continue to do
so," he said.
Figueres has chaired talks to increase transparency in the global carbon offset market
under Kyoto, which delivers about $6.5 billion finance annually to help developing
countries cut greenhouse gas emissions.
One source said the small island developing states -- among those most at risk from
climate change -- argued strongly for Figueres, saying they wanted someone from a
smaller nation.
Costa Rica has one of the world's most environmentally friendly policies, including a strong
focus on ecotourism and a long-term goal of becoming "carbon neutral," under which
industrial emissions would be soaked up by forests.
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BBC News: UN picks new climate change chief
17th May 2010
Costa Rica's Christiana Figueres is to be the new head of the UN climate convention, BBC
News understands.
The UN is expected to confirm her appointment to take over from outgoing chief Yvo de
Boer later in the week.
Sources close to the UN said she emerged as front-runner after an intervention from small
island states.
The US-based diplomat, daughter of former Costa Rican president Jose Figueres Ferrer,
has taken part in UN climate negotiations since 1995.
She emerged as the undisputed front runner only in the last few days.
28
A number of small island developing nations told UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that
they preferred someone from a smaller developing country to the other leading candidate,
South African tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk.
Although respected personally, small island states that feel threatened by climate change
are understood to have resisted the appointment of someone from the BASIC bloc of
countries (Brazil, China, India and South Africa), which argued against swingeing carbon
curbs at December's UN summit in Copenhagen.
Bali to Copenhagen
Ms Figueres has chaired many working groups and committees within the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and is regarded as having a deep
understanding of its processes and its outstanding issues.
Following her confirmation, her immediate task will be to rebuild confidence in the UN
negotiations in the lead-up to this year's major summit in Mexico at the end of the year.
"There is this misguided view that the UN system doesn't work," said Martin Khor,
executive director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation of developing
countries.
"What happened [in Copenhagen] was deviation from the UN process with the selection
and elevation of a small group of countries.
"So if you're the new UNFCCC head, the first task would be to project the correct view that
the UN processes, its practices and principles, are respected," he told BBC News.
Mr de Boer announced in February that he would step down in the middle of this year to
take up a position with global accountancy firm KPMG as a consultant on climate and
sustainability issues, and to work with several universities.
The Dutch official steered the UNFCCC through the most tortuous phase of its existence,
spanning the Bali summit of 2007 that promised a new comprehensive global agreement
within two years and the Copenhagen summit of 2009 that failed to deliver such an
agreement.
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Telegraph (UK): Christiana Figueres named UN's new climate chief
17th May 2010
UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the 53-year-old Costa Rican, currently San Jose's
climate change negotiator, would succeed Mr de Boer of the Netherlands as the executive
secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
"Ms Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and
brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders, and
valuable hands-on experience from the non-profit sector and the private sector," the
spokesman said.
29
Mr De Boer tendered his resignation after last year's Copenhagen climate change talks,
which ended in widespread disappointment with only vague promises by nations to cut
emissions.
Ms Figueres is to assume her post on July 1, five months before the next round of
scheduled climate change talks in the Mexican resort city of Cancun.
She has been a negotiator of the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol since 1995 and has played
a role in designing key climate change instruments, US media reports said.
Chief US climate negotiator Todd Stern welcomed her appointment, calling her "wellqualified with a deep background in UN climate change negotiations."
"The United States looks forward to working with Ms Figueres and partners around the
world to build on the progress made in Copenhagen to meet the climate change
challenge," Stern said in a statement.
Environmental group Greenpeace noted that Costa Rica has set an ambitious goal of
becoming carbon-neutral by 2021, "the type of attitude we need on the global stage."
"We hope she can really engage all countries in a fast-moving dialogue to get agreement
on a global deal that will save the world from dangerous climate change," said Wendel
Trio, Greenpeace's climate policy coordinator.
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Independent (UK): Small nations given voice on climate
18th May 2010
The United Nations has appointed a Costa Rican diplomat as its new climate change chief
after small island nations intervened to press for a choice who would represent their
concerns about the risks of global warming.
Christiana Figueres, a climate change expert, has been a negotiator for her country at
international emissions reduction meetings since 1995, and regularly chairs UN meetings.
Ms Figueres only emerged as secretary general Ban Ki-moon's choice after a late
intervention from small island nations put her ahead of a South African minister, Marthinus
van Schalkwyk.
South Africa argued against strict emission limits at the Copenhagen summit in December,
after which the current UN climate chief, Yvo de Boer, said he would step down. Another
major summit is due to be held in Mexico later this year.
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Reuters: U.S. lags China on climate change: Europe climate chief
30
17th May 2010
The United States' future as a global economic power depends on what it does to fight
global warming and it is lagging behind other countries like China, Europe's climate chief
said on Wednesday.
European Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard told Reuters it was a
positive step for the United States to have "finally" unveiled legislation to combat climate
change on Wednesday.
"This is one of the crucial battlefields over who is going to be the economic leaders of our
century," Hedegaard said of the fight against global warming.
Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman presented a
long-awaited climate bill on Wednesday, which aims to cut planet-warming emissions by a
17 percent in the next decade.
While President Barack Obama supports the legislation, it has slim chances of passing
unless Kerry and Lieberman win over a group of moderate Democrats and Republicans.
"It's not something an ordinary European citizen would say 'Wow, that's really ambitious,'"
Hedegaard said. "On the other hand, we know that the United States has been among the
later starters, so the important thing now is to get started."
The 27-nation European Union has long claimed to be a world leader in the fight against
climate change.
While the United States and China bicker in negotiations for a new global deal to combat
climate change, Hedegaard said Beijing was making great strides against global warming.
"The irony is that in the real world outside the negotiation rooms they are just moving," she
said of China's efforts to fight global warming. "They are just doing it and they are doing it
big scale."
Hedegaard praised the United States for including a cap and trade system for reducing
carbon pollution by electric utilities and factories in the new climate bill. She said such a
system had worked in Europe and China was also considering such a move.
Negotiators from 194 nations will gather in Cancun at the end of the year to try to build on
the Copenhagen accord signed last December with the ultimate aim of reaching a legallybinding treaty that would set the tempo for global CO2 cuts over the next decade.
"There is this feeling now that there is something to build upon," Hedegaard said.
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Reuters:U.S. to probe spill, containment efforts in high gear
18th May 2010
31
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will be in the political spotlight in Washington Tuesday as
energy giant BP scrambled to contain crude spewing from its ruptured deep-water well.
President Barack Obama will create a presidential commission to probe the disaster as the
oil industry and its practices come under sharp scrutiny in the face of a looming economic
and ecological calamity in the Gulf.
"Whether it's a nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island or an oil blowout one mile deep,
appointing an independent review panel is critical to reduce the risks of future accidents,"
said Edward Markey, chairman of a House of Representatives committee on global
warming and energy independence.
The presidential commission will investigate issues related to the spill and its aftermath,
including rig safety and regulatory regimes at the local, state and federal levels.
The federal government's oversight role, environmental protections, and the "structure and
functions" of the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency that has
been heavily criticized for regulatory lapses, also will be on the panel's agenda.
With a shakeup of the agency imminent, Chris Oynes, the top official overseeing its
offshore oil and gas drilling, announced he would retire at the end of the month.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is due to face questions from the Senate Energy and
Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday about the agency's failings on issues
surrounding the oil spill and how the Interior Department will be reformed.
A Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the oil spill is also due to question BP
America President Lamar McKay and Steven Newman, president of Transocean, which
owned the rig that exploded and was working on behalf of BP Plc.
SOME PROGRESS
London-based BP said its latest "quick fix" -- a mile-long siphon tube deployed by
undersea robots down to the leaking well-- was capturing about a fifth of the oil leaking
from the ruptured well. Officials cautioned that the tube is helping contain the oil but will
not stop the flow.
"I do feel that we have, for the first time, turned the corner in this challenge," BP Chief
Executive Tony Hayward said in Florida. BP's stock rose more than 2 percent in London
on the news but later shed its gains.
Investors have knocked $30 billion off BP's value over the spill, which followed the April 20
rig explosion that killed 11 workers and the fallout it faces is ramping up.
The disaster has hurt BP's image, already tarnished in the United States from a 2006 spill
in Alaska from a BP-owned pipeline and 2005 fire at the company's Texas City refinery
that killed 15 workers and injured 180.
Battling to salvage its reputation, BP said Monday it was providing grants to Gulf coast
states to help them promote tourism.
32
Tourism and fishing are two of the economic mainstays in a region known for its beaches,
wildlife and mild climate.
While the U.S. Gulf Coast has so far been spared a massive landfall of heavy oil, small
amounts in the form of surface sheen and tar balls, have come ashore in outlying parts of
the coastline of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
"People are freaking out. They see the news and think oil is everywhere, but it is not," said
Michael Dorie, co-owner of Wild Native and Five Rivers Delta Safaris, which takes people
on eco-tours of Alabama's Mobile Tensaw Delta.
"If it all dries up and disappears, well the highlight of my tours is wildlife and pretty flowers.
Take that away and my tour becomes just a boat ride. If people see oil slicked birds, how
many more will not come?"
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BBC News:iPhone app to help DR Congo mountain gorillas
17th May 2010
A mobile phone application has been launched to help protect the critically endangered
mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The app, called iGorilla, allows users of iPhones and iPads to follow the lives of gorilla
families in the remote forests of the Virunga National Park.
Each app costs $4 (£3), with most of the money going to the park.
The mountain gorilla population has been reduced by poaching, civil conflict, deforestation
and disease.
But conservation work is helping to secure the remaining 720 animals, with an estimated
211 of the great apes living in the park.
The new app, launched by the Virunga National Park, allows users to choose a gorilla
family, find out about individual members and follow their lives through reports,
photographs and videos.
The park straddles the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, covering
7,800 sq km (3,000 sq miles).
It was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1979.
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33
RONA MEDIA UPDATE
THE ENVIRONMENT IN THE NEWS
Thursday, April 15, 2010
UNEP or UN in the News
U.S. coverage:
WPXI-PIT (NBC)- Our Region's Business: World Environment Day
Nature.com (blog): Costa Rican to become new UN climate chief
Canada coverage:
Reuters Canada: U.N. to pick Costa Rican as new climate chief: sources
The National Post: Getting lectured by Ban Ki-moon
U.S. coverage:
World Environment Day
WPXI-PIT (NBC) - Our Region's Business, 16 May 2010
This segment reports on ‘Paddle at the Point,’ one of the “signature events” of World
Environment Day activities in Pittsburgh. WPXI is contributing its helicopter to get aerial
shots of the event, which will attempt to showcase the world’s largest flotilla of canoes
and kayaks.
Click here to see the story:
http://mms.tveyes.com/Transcript.asp?StationID=1825&DateTime=5%2F16%2F2010+1
1%3A27%3A23+AM&Term=%22United+Nations%22+%2BEnvironment&PlayClip=TRU
E
Costa Rican to become new UN climate chief - May 17, 2010
Nature.com, 17 May 2010
Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican climate diplomacy expert, is to become the new
head of the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention of Climate Change. UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to confirm her appointment later in the
week, the BBC reports.
Figueres, daughter of former Costa Rican president Jose Figueres Ferrer, has been
involved in the international climate negotiation process since 1995. The UN’s outgoing
climate chief, Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands, announced in February to step down on
July 1 after nearly four years in office.
34
The run-off has been between Figueres and the South African tourism minister
Marthinus van Schalkwyk, who had the support of several key countries and was widely
considered front-runner to replace de Boer. But in the last few days a number of small
island states have successfully lobbied in favour of Figueres, according to BBC.
Canada:
U.N. to pick Costa Rican as new climate chief: sources
Reuters Canada, 17 May 2010, By Alister Doyle and Gerard Wynn
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE64G1UV20100517
OSLO/LONDON (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has chosen Costa
Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres as the new U.N. climate chief to head stalled,
international talks, sources close to the matter said on Monday.
Figueres, 53, beat fellow short-listed candidate former South African environment
minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, to a role meant to rally global agreement on a
successor to the Kyoto Protocol after a disappointing summit in Copenhagen in
December.
U.N. officials would present Ban's decision to a high-level meeting of climate negotiators
in Bonn on Monday. Figueres was Ban's only recommendation to replace Dutchman Yvo
de Boer as head of the U.N. climate secretariat from July, sources said.
"The Secretary-General has basically made a decision and it's just a courtesy (to
present it on Monday)," a source said.
Ban may make a public announcement this week on a surprise choice over van
Schalkwyk, now minister for tourism in the South African government.
The scale of Figueres' task is underscored by a Copenhagen summit where 120 world
leaders failed to unblock a binding deal, pledging instead to mobilize $30 billion from
2010-2012 to help poor countries deal with droughts and floods, and to try to limit
warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.
This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up
to a meeting in Mexico that begins in late November.
Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting also to fall short of a binding deal,
looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto whose present round expires in
2012.
Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting
instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.
GOOD FOR BUSINESS
35
Figueres has been a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team since 1995
and has held many senior posts in the U.N. climate process. Her father, Jose Figueres
Ferrer, was president of Costa Rica three times.
"If they wanted a technical bureaucrat, she's probably as good as you'll get," a source
said.
Business and those involved in the carbon market would welcome Figueres, said Andrei
Marcu, head of regulatory and policy affairs at oil trading firm Mercuria, and an
established business advocate at the U.N. talks.
"If true, this is a great challenge for her, and from a business point of view she has been
willing to listen in the past and we hope she will continue to do so."
Figueres has chaired talks to increase transparency in the global carbon offset market
under Kyoto, which delivers about $6.5 billion finance annually to help developing
countries cut greenhouse gas emissions.
One source said that the small island developing states -- among those most at risk from
climate change -- argued strongly for Figueres, saying they wanted someone from a
smaller nation.
Costa Rica has one of the world's most environmentally friendly policies including a
strong focus on eco-tourism and a long-term goal of becoming "carbon neutral," under
which industrial emissions would be soaked up by forests.
"She has been negotiator for a country that aims to become carbon-neutral by 2021.
This is what we need on the global stage," said Wendel Trio, Greenpeace International
climate policy coordinator.
(Additional reporting by David Fogarty in Singapore; Editing by Ralph Boulton)
Getting lectured by Ban Ki-moon
The National Post, 15 May 2010, By Rex Murphy
http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/05/15/rex-murphygetting-lectured-by-ban-ki-moon.aspx#ixzz0oCN03Nnu
His Eminence, Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, seems like a
nice guy. This week, he was in Ottawa, and apparently chastised the Canadian
government, more particularly Stephen Harper, for Canada’s shameless failure to meet
its carbon-reduction obligations under the Kyoto protocol.
Then again, this is what we expect Mr. Ban to do. He is, after all, the highest functionary
of the world’s most useless transnational organization, and sermonizing is mainly what
its Secretary-General does. But I surely hope — within the bounds of diplomatic
courtesy, of course — that Mr. Harper paid no attention to him. Or rather, since an air of
36
candour seems to have prevailed at their tète-a-tète, Mr. Harper, as it were, returned
serve.
For example, did Mr. Harper press him on the matter of Climategate and the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? Did he call to the SecretaryGeneral’s attention the serial distortions, errors, non-peer-reviewed citations, the
wholesale liftings from WWF and Greenpeace propaganda that made their way into the
most recent IPCC report?
Little matters such as false claims on the melting of the Himalayan glaciers?
Did he bring up the serial mischiefs of the Climate Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia, as revealed by their leaked emails? The CRU is the very Nicene Council of
the Church of Global Warming, where the high priests of dendrology meld graphs with
the cardinals of atmospheric physics. What a knotty tale their intramural communications
revealed — of jealousy that “their” science was being confuted and challenged by
annoying outsiders; and, most of all, of attempts to keep the Holy of Holies — the
process of peer review — within the closed circuit of their colleagues and admirers.
Did he take Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to task for the bristling ardency — so alien
to any genuine scientific project — that now pervades the “global warming community”?
Or, for the spiteful defiance of Dr. R.K. Pachauri, the UN’s IPCC Chairman, toward those
who reported errors in his venerated report, or to the hints of potential conflicts of
interest between Mr. Pachauri’s business enterprises and his position as the voice of the
“international community” on the “greatest moral issue of our time”?
For if Mr. Ban chastised Stephen Harper for Canada’s failings on Kyoto, it is but cricket
for Mr. Harper to chastise Ban Ki-moon for the sloppiness, evasion and propagandistic
aggressiveness of his functionaries on their most beloved file.
Did the conversation ever get round, I wonder, to our Prime Minister telling the UN’s
Secretary-General that perhaps, since Kyoto, confidence in the UN’s version of the
science, and in the ferocious, nay apocalyptic, projections from that science, has
considerably declined? I would surely hope so.
For Canada signed Kyoto in a more innocent day, when few, or none, had either
occasion or evidence to question the impartiality of those who were pushing a carbon
Doomsday on the rest of us. Since that innocent day, much has changed. Advocacy has
seduced science, and the loud voices of all-too-interested parties are crying up cap-andtrade schemes and “reparations” to developing countries from “climate criminals.”
Western governments are being harried to vest vast sums into “alternate technologies”
of little proven efficacy but of prodigiously proven cost. The West is being asked to
handcuff its own growth and development, in the midst of a global recession, all under
the banner of global warming.
Did either of them, Mr. Harper or Ban Ki-moon — this is Canada, after all — mention the
infamous “hockey stick” global temperature graph — the emblematic, erroneous logo of
this whole desperate enterprise?
Mr. Harper will have done all of us, and the world, a great service if he raised these
points, and suggested that the UN’s ability to issue reprimands to anyone on this file has
been greatly corroded in the last year.
37
The science of global warming needs a wholesale outside review. In fact, it needs to be
taken out from under the umbrella of the United Nations and its “process” altogether. If
some of this message was given by Mr. Harper to the UN’s chief, the meeting will have
been productive and, indeed, something of a joy to truth.
National Post
General Environment News
U.S. coverage:
The Washington Post: Lawyers lining up for class-action suits over oil spill
The Washington Post: BP installs insertion tube, begins siphoning oil from leaking pipe
Reuters: Anatomy Of The Gulf Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen
Environment and Energy Daily: Researchers ponder a hurricane hitting the oil-slicked Gulf of
Mexico
ClimateWire: U.S. pledges $575 million for developing nations' climate aid
Los Angeles Times: Signs of oil spill pollution might be hiding underwater
Environment and Energy Daily: Government approves GM trees; company plans for biofuel use
The New York Times: BP Reports Some Success in Capturing Leaking Oil
Los Angeles Times: Signs of oil spill pollution might be hiding underwater
The New York Times: Gap in Rules on Oil Spills From Wells
The New York Times: Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
Canada:
The Globe and Mail: Ottawa begins funding push for hybrid R&D
The National Post: EPA says emission rule will shield small businesses
The National Post: Unapologetic oil
The Gazette: BP marks first success in containing oil spill
U.S. coverage:
Lawyers lining up for class-action suits over oil spill
The Washington Post, 17 May 2010, By Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/05/16/AR2010051603254.html?hpid=topnews
On April 21, with the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig still in flames, John W. Degravelles
and a group of other lawyers sued for damages. In the first of at least 88 suits filed since
the disaster, they were seeking compensation for the widow of a Transocean worker
who went missing and is presumed dead.
38
It marked the beginning of legal action that is spreading as inexorably as the oil that
threatens the wildlife and economy of five states along the Gulf of Mexico.
"On Thursday, I could smell the oil and, being a toxic tort lawyer, I realized that the fact
that you're smelling something means that you're inhaling something," Stuart Smith, a
New Orleans lawyer, said this month when breezes were carrying the scent of the oil
slick toward the city. Smith, who has sued major oil companies before, immediately
contacted toxicologists and air monitors to start doing tests that could be used as
evidence.
The law firms now assembling are members of the all-star team of plaintiffs' attorneys.
They have experience suing big companies over asbestos, tobacco, oil company waste,
breast implants and Chinese drywall. They have represented Ecuadoran shrimp farmers
and New York lobstermen, patients who have swallowed Vioxx and investors who lost
money on shares of Enron. And their ranks include the likes of Erin Brockovich, Robert
F. Kennedy Jr. and former partners of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.
"When we put together the team for tobacco . . . it was the A-team of lawyers, and this is
the same thing developing here," said Mike Papantonio, who cut his teeth on asbestos
litigation and is a partner in Florida-based Levin, Papantonio, Thomas, Mitchell, Echsner
& Proctor. The firm says it has won $2.5 billion in jury verdicts, including a dozen of more
than $10 million each.
The prospects of getting big dollars in this case are good, too, lawyers say. They are
eyeing BP, one of the five biggest publicly owned companies in the world; Transocean,
the largest offshore driller in the world; Halliburton, the big oil services firm; and
Cameron, maker of the well's failed blowout preventer. Anadarko Petroleum and Mitsui,
BP's partners in the offshore lease, also are liable.
Unlike the Exxon Valdez tanker accident, which happened in Alaska's remote Prince
William Sound, the current spill could have a much bigger economic impact because the
Gulf of Mexico is a busy home to valuable fisheries, tourism and shipping.
Smith, suing on behalf of fishermen, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and
four large hotels, alleges that BP and others were "grossly negligent" in allowing the
blowout to occur. Damage includes removal costs, property damage and the loss of
income and profits for people and businesses. Because the spill has been lingering
offshore, the plaintiffs who can claim damages so far are mostly out-of-work fishermen
and tourist resorts that are getting cancellations.
As rich as BP is, "if this well keeps leaking for three or four months, it's Katie bar the
door," Smith said. "I don't think they have enough money." He said fishing beds might
need one or two generations to recover.
Some lawyers say the case also offers a chance to take on the oil industry's political ties.
Papantonio wants to depose the person who ran the Minerals Management Service
under President George W. Bush to find out why the agency did not require certain types
of safety devices.
39
"I want to talk about the mindset of this company, because that becomes probative for a
company that was so reckless that it becomes manslaughter, and that affects whether
there should be punitive damages," Papantonio said.
The first legal battle will be over the location of the trial. A panel will consolidate all the
suits in one court for efficiency and to avoid discrepancies in rulings. The plaintiffs'
attorneys will choose an executive committee. This approach has been used in 30 to 40
large class-action suits.
BP and Transocean want the case to be heard in Houston, seen as friendly to the oil
business. Some plaintiffs want the case heard in Louisiana, while others prefer
Mississippi or Florida.
"I've been suing oil companies for pollution almost exclusively for 23 years," Smith said.
"And oil companies are the meanest, nastiest defendants in the country. They just don't
care; they have so much money."
The plaintiffs' attorneys have a good bit of money, too. In a West Virginia lawsuit against
DuPont, plaintiffs' attorneys spent $12 million to prepare and present their case. The
initial jury verdict awarded the plaintiffs $500 million; the lawyers typically get about 30
percent.
One firm gearing up to fight BP is Weitz & Luxenberg, which has handled Vioxx and
asbestos cases as well as medical malpractice and automobile accidents. Brockovich,
whose battle against Pacific Gas & Electric over toxic chromium leaks was dramatized in
the 2000 film starring Julia Roberts, is helping drum up clients by headlining events
sponsored by the firm in Pensacola, Fla., on Thursday and in Bayou La Batre, La., on
Friday.
Many of the firms have sued oil companies for years. Smith successfully sued Chevron
two decades ago for not warning workers that they were cleaning pipes clogged with
radioactive materials sucked from reservoirs. His firm, Smith Stag, was co-lead counsel
in a case that won $300 million from Exxon for damages from radioactive contamination.
Lawyers recruited by Smith to fight BP include Robert McKee, a partner with Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.-based Krupnick Campbell Malone Buser Slama Hancock Liberman &
McKee.
McKee has a unique résumé: He has spent 16 years litigating over the toxic effect of
organic molecules on Ecuadoran farmed shrimp. McKee has sued large banana growers
for damage to shrimp farms caused by pesticide runoff from Ecuadoran farms; all but
two of the cases have been resolved, with two trials pending against DuPont in South
Florida.
One unusual aspect of the case is that the federal government could pay damages, too,
especially if plaintiffs show that its oversight was lax. An Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund,
established by the 1990 Oil Pollution Act, can pay out as much as $1 billion for each
spill.
40
Although the Oil Pollution Act says that damaged parties must first seek payment from
"the responsible party" in a spill, they need to decide within 90 days whether they would
rather seek money from the federal trust fund.
Each choice carries a risk. BP's liability is capped at $75 million under the law unless a
court finds it guilty of gross negligence, willful misconduct or failure to comply with
federal safety standards. BP chief executive Tony Hayward has indicated that his
company is willing to pay more than $75 million for "legitimate" claims, and Congress
might lift that cap retroactively.
On Saturday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano wrote to Hayward saying they expect BP to fully pay claimants without a cap
and without seeking reimbursement from U.S. taxpayers or the spill trust fund.
Donald A. Carr, a partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman who practices
environmental law, said state governments also are going to be aggressive in seeking
financial compensation, particularly because they are struggling with tight budgets.
"This is an opportunity. You don't have to be cynical to see that," Carr said.
And the case will be a marathon. Papantonio, 56, said he expects to be retired by the
time it is over. This might not be the biggest spill ever, but he said the location means
that "this will dwarf anything we've seen."
BP installs insertion tube, begins siphoning oil from leaking pipe
The Washington Post, 17 May 2010, By Steven Mufson and Joel Achenbach
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/05/16/AR2010051603481_3.html?sid=ST2010051603491
In the first progress in containing the oil gushing from a blown-out well at the bottom of
the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers on Sunday inserted a tube into a leaking pipe and
began siphoning some of the oil to a drilling rig at the surface.
The deep-sea plumbing did not do anything to close the well, and a substantial amount
of oil continues to leak at the bottom of the gulf, but the day's efforts were a rare bulletin
of good news about 3 1/2 weeks into the crisis.
On Sunday, a four-inch-wide pipe was inserted into the broken section known as the
riser, from which the majority of the oil has been leaking. If it works, the inserted pipe
could keep a substantial amount of the oil out of the sea by siphoning it up a mile-long
pipe to the Discoverer Enterprise drillship and then to nearby barges.
"So far it's working extremely well," said Kent Wells, senior vice president for exploration
and production at BP.
But the race against time continued. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration warned over the weekend that plumes of oil already spilled and
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suspended beneath the water surface might, as soon as Tuesday night, start to get
picked up by the powerful "loop current." The current could carry the oil to the Florida
Keys and beyond, scientists fear.
Moreover, BP said that to completely stop the oil from flowing into the gulf, it would have
to plug the damaged well at the top. The company said it will try to do this in the next 10
days or wait weeks for a relief well to be complete.
Wells called the insertion tube, which functions like a straw, a "positive step forward." He
said the company has been able to flare, or burn, some of the natural gas at the surface,
an indication that the insertion pipe is working.
But he said it would not be clear for another day or two how much of the oil can be
captured. At least some oil will continue to leak into the water, adding to a slick that
stretches more than 80 miles wide and more than 140 miles long.
"As of now there are still reasonably substantial amounts of oil coming out" of the
damaged pipeline into the ocean, said Andrew Gowers, an executive vice president at
BP. "That is, in part, a factor of the pressure we are bringing to bear in producing the oil."
He added that the amount of oil brought up the new line would "be steadily increased."
He cautioned that "this is a gradual, carefully calibrated process aimed at steadily
reducing the leak rather than a magic bullet."
BP's efforts to stop the flow of oil into the gulf come as the slick has begun to touch
shorelines and come closer to currents that could carry plumes of oil suspended beneath
the surface out of the gulf to areas much farther away.
A feeling of imminent calamity continues to pervade Louisiana's coastal towns, where tar
balls have been washing up intermittently on beaches and watermen are dreading what
they think is the inevitable arrival of the huge oil slick and its penetration into marshes
rich in fish, shrimp and crabs.
In Grand Isle, just west of, and tucked underneath, the lengthy claw of the Mississippi
River delta, shrimper Harry "Chu Chu" Cheramie, 59, said fishermen are encountering
oil not far to the west in Timbalier Bay.
"That's going to kill our fishing grounds. We won't be able to drag that area for a long
time to come," Cheramie said.
His wife, Josie, the tourism commissioner of Grand Isle, said people come to the island
only for three reasons: "Play on the beach. Fish. Eat the seafood."
Fish market manager Juanita Cheramie -- no relation -- was fearful on a gloomy and
rainy Sunday afternoon.
"We're going to get it. It's only a matter of time. We're just on a wing and a prayer right
now," she said. When the oil hits, she said, "it's over. You can lock the gate in Leeville" -a town up the road toward New Orleans.
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In the town of Golden Meadow, along Bayou Lafourche, crabber Thomas Barrios said he
felt "devastated" and "helpless."
"I've worked for this my whole life. Something my grandparents did," he said. He recently
opened a fish market and a restaurant. His crabbing grounds are still open, but he
doesn't know how long that will last.
"I never know when I wake up in the morning if they're going to shut the gates on me,"
he said.
BP said it was doing everything it can. While it tries to siphon oil up the insertion pipe, it
was also making preparations to "kill" the damaged well at the sea surface by pumping
drilling mud at higher pressure and weight than the oil. The mud would be pumped at
more than 30,000 horsepower through three-inch hoses and through "choke" valves at
the bottom of the blowout preventer near the seafloor. Wells said the valves could shoot
as much as 40 barrels of mud a minute into the well.
"We'll be able to pump much faster than the well can flow," he said. "It's about us
outrunning the well."
Wells said the company had brought 50,000 barrels of the mud, a mixture of clay and
other substances, for the effort, which he said should be far more than needed. He said
that the much-ridiculed "junk shot," in which golf balls and shredded tires would be fired
into the blowout preventer, would be used only if the drilling mud were being forced
upward and needed to be blocked.
Wells said it would take a week to 10 days before preparations for what the company
has called the "top kill" effort would be complete.
In the meantime, BP pressed ahead with its insertion pipe, which has rubber
components to seal itself off as much as possible from seawater while letting oil and gas
push their way into the new pipe.
BP is also pumping 120-degree water and methanol into the long pipe to prevent the
formation of crystals of gas hydrates. Those hydrates -- combinations of natural gas and
sea water at high pressures and low temperatures -- form slushlike crystals that can
block pipelines or even lift heavy objects off the seafloor. They were one reason for the
failure of an earlier effort to lower a 98-ton steel cofferdam over the main leak site.
Once the mixture of oil, gas and water reaches ships on the surface, it will be processed
and separated into different components. The insertion Sunday was BP's second effort.
Late Saturday, after the new tube was inserted, it was yanked out after the umbilical
cord of a remotely operated vehicle got entangled with the tube's line to the surface,
according to sources familiar with the project.
Meanwhile, questions continued to be raised about the cause of the drill rig accident. On
CBS News's "60 Minutes," Mike Williams, the chief electronics technician for the rig's
computers and electrical systems, alleged that rig operator Transocean was under
pressure from BP to hurry up and finish the well, which had taken weeks longer than
expected.
43
Williams also said that there were problems with the blowout preventer before the
accident. He said one of the control pods wasn't functioning as it should have weeks
earlier. BP said in congressional testimony last week that it found one of the pods had a
dead battery.
Williams also said that a crew member accidentally lowered steel pipe into a closed
blowout preventer and that bits of rubber from a gasket were found later in the drilling
fluid. That rubber gasket might have helped seal the space around the pipe in an
accident.
Achenbach reported from Grand Isle, La.
Anatomy Of The Gulf Oil Spill: An Accident Waiting to Happen
Reuters, 17 May 2010, By John McQuaid
http://www.planetark.com/enviro-news/item/58039
The oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico has shattered the notion that offshore
drilling had become safe. A close look at the accident shows that lax federal oversight,
complacency by BP and the other companies involved, and the complexities of drilling a
mile deep all combined to create the perfect environmental storm.
It's hard to believe now, as oil from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon well encroaches on
the Louisiana marshes. But it was only six weeks ago that President Obama announced
a major push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. Obama's commitment to lift a
moratorium on offshore drilling reflected the widely-held belief that offshore oil
operations, once perceived as dirty and dangerous, were now so safe and
technologically advanced that the risks of a major disaster were infinitesimal, and
managing them a matter of technocratic skill.
But in the space of two weeks, both the politics and the practice of offshore drilling have
been turned upside down. Today, the notion that offshore drilling is safe seems absurd.
The Gulf spill harks back to drilling disasters from decades past - including one off the
coast of Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1969 that dumped three million barrels into coastal
waters and led to the current moratorium. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is a classic
"low probability, high impact event" - the kind we've seen more than our share of
recently, including space shuttle disasters, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. And if there's a
single lesson from those disparate catastrophes, it's that pre-disaster assumptions tend
to be dramatically off-base, and the worst-case scenarios downplayed or ignored. The
Gulf spill is no exception.
The post-mortems are only beginning, so the precise causes of the initial explosion on
the drilling platform and the failure of a "blowout preventer" to deploy on the sea floor
probably won't be established for weeks or months. But the outlines of serious systemic
problems have already emerged, indicating just how illusory the notion of risk-free
drilling really was, while pointing to some possible areas for reform. These blunders
include weak government oversight of the complex technical challenge of drilling deep
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wells many miles under the ocean surface and BP's failure to evaluate - or even
consider - worst-case scenarios.
A "blowout" on an oil rig occurs when some combination of pressurized natural gas, oil,
mud, and water escapes from a well, shoots up the drill pipe to the surface, expands and
ignites. Wells are equipped with structures called blowout preventers that sit on the
wellhead and are supposed to shut off that flow and tamp the well. Deepwater Horizon's
blowout preventer failed. Two switches - one manual and an automatic backup - failed to
start it.
When such catastrophic mechanical failures happen, they're almost always traced to
flaws in the broader system: the workers on the platform, the corporate hierarchies they
work for, and the government bureaucracies that oversee what they do. For instance, a
study of 600 major equipment failures in offshore drilling structures done by Robert Bea,
an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that 80 percent
were due to "human and organizational factors," and 50 percent of those due to flaws in
the engineering design of equipment or processes.
Bea has worked as an engineer on offshore drilling operations and was also one of the
leaders of an independent engineering study of the New Orleans levee failures during
Hurricane Katrina. And the Gulf spill has some similarities to the 2005 flood, which was
caused in large part by faulty floodwalls approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. The
common threads between Katrina and the current oil spill, Bea wrote in an email, are
"hubris, arrogance, ignorance... combined with a natural hazard."
With near-shore and shallow reserves of fossil fuels largely depleted, drilling has moved
farther offshore, into deeper waters and deeper underground. The technology for
locating oil and gas reserves and for drilling has improved, but the conditions are
extreme and the challenges more formidable. "This is a pretty frigging complex system,"
Bea said in an interview. "You've got equipment and steel strung out over a long piece of
geography starting at surface and terminating at 18,000 feet below the sea floor. So it
has many potential weak points. Just as Katrina's storm surge found weaknesses in
those piles of dirt - the levees - gas likes to find weakness in anything we connect to that
source."
He questions whether energy companies and government agencies have fully adapted
to the new realities. "The danger has escalated exponentially," he said. "We've pushed it
to the bloody edge in this very, very unforgiving environment, and we don't have a lot of
experience."
Finally, there's a problem with fragmentation of responsibility: Deepwater Horizon was
BP's operation. But BP leased the platform from Transocean, and Halliburton was doing
the deepwater work when the blowout occurred. "Each of these organizations has
fundamentally different goals," Bea said. "BP wants access to hydrocarbon resources
that feed their refinery and distribution network. Halliburton provides oil field services.
Transocean drives drill rigs, kind of like taxicabs. Each has different operating
processes."
Andrew Hopkins, a sociology professor at the Australian National University and an
expert on industrial accidents, wrote a book called Failure to Learn about a massive
45
explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City in 2005 that killed 15 people. He says that
disaster has several possible insights for the oil spill: one was that BP and other
corporations sometimes marginalize their health, safety, and environmental
departments. "The crucial voice for safety in Texas City was shielded from the site
manager, and the very senior agency people in the BP corporate head office in London
had no role in ensuring safety at the site level," he said. "The organizational structures
disempowered the voices for safety and I think you've got the same thing here" in the
Gulf spill.
But the more profound problem is a failure to put risks in perspective. BP and other
companies tend to measure safety and environmental compliance on a day-to-day,
checklist basis, to the point of basing executive bonuses on those metrics. But even if
worker accident rates fall to zero, that may reveal nothing about the risk of a major
disaster. "These things we are talking about are risks that won't show up this year, next
year - it may be 10 years down the road before you see one of these big blowouts or
refinery accidents," Hopkins said. "This same thing happened in the global financial
crisis. Bankers were paid big bonuses for risks taken this year or next year, but the real
risks came home to roost years later."
That assumption - that catastrophic risks were so unlikely they were unworthy of serious
attention - appears to have driven a lot of the government decision-making on drilling as
well. The Minerals Management Service, a division of the Interior Department, oversees
drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf. Since the 1980s, the MMS has routinely granted
a blanket exemption from doing a comprehensive environmental impact statement to
individual drilling operations, according to Holly Doremus, a professor of environmental
law at Berkeley. The Washington Post and the Associated Press reported last week that
BP's Deepwater Horizon lease received that exemption (called a "categorical exclusion")
last year. It was based on several analyses that downplayed the risks of a major oil spill.
One, published in 2007, estimated the "most likely size" of an offshore spill at 4,600
barrels. NOAA's current, conservative estimate of the Gulf spill put its total at more than
80,000 barrels, increasing at a rate of 5,000 per day.
Energy companies have aggressively lobbied to avoid formally analyzing worst-case
scenarios since the Carter administration first required them in instances where there
was uncertainty about the risk of disaster.
"They thought it would lead to irrational public resistance to projects," Doremus said.
"But to me this Deepwater Horizon thing is an example where a worst-case analysis
would have been useful. If they had done a worst case analysis they'd have to consider,
well, 'What if our blowout preventer didn't work? And what if it happened during a bout of
bad weather when the spill might reach the shore?'" Instead, BP officials admitted they
were stunned by the disaster, and they and the government have largely improvised
their response.
The evidence shows MMS has not taken an aggressive stance policing offshore drilling.
Based on experience with malfunctioning blowout preventers, for instance, the MMS did
suggest that energy companies install backup devices for triggering them. But it was
only a suggestion, not a requirement, and U.S. drilling operators have declined to do so.
46
MMS has also been plagued by scandals in recent years, including one in which eight
employees were disciplined for partying, having sex with, and receiving expensive gifts
from their energy industry counterparts. Critics question whether the agency possesses
the independence or the power to effectively tackle these issues post-spill. One sign of
trouble: The MMS is a major player in investigating the spill and in the Outer Continental
Shelf Oversight Board set up by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to examine the broader
safety issues the accident raises.
"MMS is the regulator, and regulatory failure is a part of this," Hopkins said. "It's going to
be investigating itself. It's totally inappropriate."
Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360
BP makes headway in containing oil leak
Los Angeles Times, 17 May 2010 By Jim Tankersley, Raja Abdulrahim and Richard
Fausset,
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill20100517,0,1038311.story?page=2
Engineers hoping to contain oil gushing from the mangled pipe beneath the Gulf of
Mexico appeared to make important headway Sunday, as robot submarines jammed a
suction tube into the pipe in an attempt to coax the oil to a ship on the surface.
Officials for the oil company BP said they could not estimate how much oil and gas was
flowing through the tube, nor what percentage of the leak was being contained, until
Monday or Tuesday at earliest. They originally said the plan might suck up as much as
75% of the leaking oil.
Without the number of gallons retrieved, it remained unclear Sunday whether the
nation's brightest minds would be capable of solving an engineering conundrum that is
spewing 210,000 gallons of oil a day, and perhaps more, into the gulf waters from a
canyon 5,000 feet below the sea.
Although relatively little oil has washed up on land so far, scientists are growing worried
about the effects of massive plumes of oil hovering below the surface in areas teeming
with life, including plankton, turtles, dolphins and whales.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
warned in a statement Sunday that the latest in a series of short-term attempts at
stopping the leak was "not a solution, and it is not clear how successful it may be."
In recent days, the Obama administration has assembled a "dream team" of scientists to
deal with the leak, including experts in robotics, physics, X-ray technology and the
hydrogen bomb. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a physicist who won the Nobel Prize,
met with BP engineers in Houston last week and promised that the "intellectual
horsepower of the country is engaged in solving this problem."
47
But unlike many science and engineering problems that can be worked out in a lab or on
a blackboard, this one is unfolding far from the reach of a human hand, in real time, with
a potentially high penalty for failure.
"It's not just theory. It's reality that has to be dealt with," said Henry Petroski, a Duke
University professor of civil engineers and history. "This is a really tough problem."
The leak was triggered April 20 by a blowout of a BP well that caused an explosion on
the Deepwater Horizon, a mobile oil rig that had just finished drilling an 18,000-foot hole
about 48 miles off Louisiana. The accident killed 11 workers, and the $600-million rig
now lies at the bottom of the sea.
BP's engineers first focused on using robot submarines to shut off the blowout preventer,
an apparatus that had failed to sever or plug the well pipe. More recently, a 100-ton box
lowered over the leak in an attempt to siphon it to the surface failed when icy gas
crystals, hydrates, clogged it.
This weekend's plan involved running a long suction tube from a ship to the damaged
riser pipe on the ocean floor. A 4-inch-wide insertion tube was guided into the 21-inchwide riser, which also was plugged with rubber diaphragms.
If all goes as planned, a flow of nitrogen in the tube will lift the oil to the ship. Methanol
will be added to help prevent the formation of hydrates, and heated seawater will
promote the flow of oil.
At a Houston news conference, company leaders said they first inserted the tube about
midnight Saturday. It operated for four hours and was just beginning to bring oil to the
surface ship when an undersea robot knocked the tube loose. Engineers reinstalled the
tube a few hours later.
BP officials said the flow rate was slowly increasing. But they couldn't say how much
they had collected. "I don't have any idea at this point," said Kent Wells, BP's senior vice
president for exploration and production.
Even if successful, BP must also contain a second leak on the ocean floor.
The huge and growing stain of oil continues to hover in and around the shores and inlets
of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. The latest oil landfall was reported at Grand Isle,
La., where a number of tar balls washed ashore, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Erik
Swanson.
At the same time, scientists have begun measuring the vast quantities of oil hidden to
the human eye. Vernon Asper, an oceanographer and marine professor at the University
of Southern Mississippi, was part of a group that landed at Cocodrie, La., on Sunday,
after completing a two-week research trip in the gulf. Asper said they documented
plumes of oil 2,000 to 6,000 feet below the water's surface, covering an area 4 miles
wide and 15 miles long.
Bacteria in the water naturally break down oil, but that process sucks up large amounts
of oxygen. Such a scenario could cause dead zones similar to a seasonal one caused
by nitrogen-rich runoff down the Mississippi River.
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"We're concerned about that, because everything that lives down there at these depths
in the water needs oxygen, so if you use up all the oxygen they're going to be impacted,"
said Ralph Portier, an environmental science professor at Louisiana State University.
Portier said he also feared that the deep oil plumes could emerge years or even
decades from now, potentially threatening coastlines for generations.
But Portier emphasized that researchers were dealing with a novel situation riddled with
unknowns. "This is a scenario where reality is ahead of the science," he said.
In Washington on Sunday, Senate leaders disagreed on whether to raise a $75-million
congressionally mandated cap on oil company liability.
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, the third-ranking
Democrat in the Senate, said it was time to lift the cap, but Senate Republican leader
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky countered that caps could keep energy exploration
competitive.
"The danger in taking the cap too high is that you end up with only massive, very large
oil producers able to meet that cap and produce in the gulf," McConnell said.
BP Chief Executive Anthony Hayward and other company officials have said they are
taking full responsibility for cleaning up the spill and will pay what they call "legitimate"
claims.
Wells, the BP vice president, emphasized that engineers continued to pursue "multiple
options" to contain the spill, including a second-generation insertion tube; a smaller
version of the failed containment box; and a "hot tap," in which robots would bore a hole
into the riser pipe and attach a new pipe to carry oil to the surface.
A "top kill" procedure could begin in seven to 10 days, Wells said. Engineers may
attempt to pump thousands of barrels of fluid into the well to overcome the well's natural
release pressure and stem the flow, before entombing the opening with cement.
If the pumping alone does not suffice, Wells said, the company would probably proceed
with a plan to attempt to block the well pressure with a mixture that would include rubber
and golf balls.
In New Orleans, meanwhile, the Gulf Aid concert got underway an hour late because of
rain, but it attracted a crowd one promoter described as "defiant."
"You know, in Katrina, we waited for the insurance companies, we waited for the
government, we waited for FEMA, we waited and waited and waited," said David
Freedman, an organizer and general manager of WWOZ radio station. "The reality is we
don't wait anymore."
With beads of sweat on her face, concertgoer Elizabeth Fredrickson danced and twirled
to tunes by local musicians inside Mardi Gras World, overlooking the Mississippi River.
"It's all about culture," Fredrickson said. "But here's the thing: We're going to lose our
49
culture because seafood is a big part of our culture."
BP Reports Some Success in Capturing Leaking Oil
The New York Times, 16 May 2010, By Shaila Dewan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/us/17spill.html?hp
NEW ORLEANS — After more than three weeks of efforts to stop a gushing oil leak in
the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers achieved some success on Sunday when they used a
milelong pipe to capture some of the oil and divert it to a drill ship on the surface some
5,000 feet above the wellhead, company officials said.
After two false starts, engineers successfully inserted a narrow tube into the damaged
pipe from which most of the oil is leaking.
“It’s working as planned,” Kent Wells, a senior executive vice president of BP, said at a
briefing in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship
now, we do have a flare burning off the gas, and we have the oil that’s coming to the
ship going to our surge tank.”
Mr. Wells said he could not yet say how much oil had been captured or what percentage
of the oil leaking from a 21-inch riser pipe was now flowing into the 4-inch-wide insertion
tube. “We want to slowly optimize it to try to capture as much of the oil and gas as we
can without taking in a large amount of seawater,” he said.
So far, the spill has not spoiled beaches or delicate wetlands, in part because of
favorable winds and tides and in part because of the use of booms to corral the oil and
chemical dispersants.
The capture operation on Sunday was the first successful effort to stem the flow from the
damaged well, which has been spewing oil since a rig exploded on April 20 and sank.
The announcement by BP came on the heels of reports that the spill might be might
much worse than estimated. Scientists said they had found giant plumes of oil in the
deep waters of the gulf, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300
feet thick.
BP officials pointed out that even if the tube was successful, it was only a stopgap
measure. The real goal, they said, is to seal the well permanently.
Preparations continued on Sunday on a plan to pump heavy drilling mud into the well
through the blowout preventer, the safety device at the wellhead that failed during the
accident.
In the procedure, called a top kill, the mud would be used to overcome the pressure of
the rising oil, stopping the flow. The mud would be followed by cement, which would
permanently seal the well.
Mr. Wells said Sunday that BP was a week to 10 days away from trying the maneuver.
50
The mud would be pumped from a drill ship, the Q4000, that is in place on the surface.
Mr. Wells said the ship had more than 2 million gallons of mud on board — far more than
needed — to pump into the well, which had reached about 13,000 feet below the seabed
when the accident occurred.
In a brief interview, Mr. Wells said that a “junk shot,” an effort to clog the blowout
preventer with golf balls and other objects before the mud is used, was still a possibility.
But in an apparent indication of the tube’s success, BP was already building a backup
version.
The tube is basically a five-foot-long section of pipe outfitted with rubber seals designed
to keep out seawater, attached in turn to a milelong section of pipe leading from the drill
ship to the seafloor.
It was one of several proposed methods of stanching the flow of at least 210,000 gallons
of oil a day that has been threatening marine life and sensitive coastal areas in
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. BP officials have emphasized that none of
the methods have been tried before at the depth of this leak.
At the briefing, Mr. Wells was asked about reports from a research vessel that
discovered the huge plumes of oil. He said that he did not know anything about them,
but that the Unified Area Command, the cooperative effort involving BP and state and
local agencies, was seeking more information.
The plume reports added to the many questions that have been raised about the amount
of leaking oil, which many scientists have said is far higher than the official estimate of
5,000 barrels, or 210,000 gallons, a day. That estimate was reached using satellite
imagery, flyovers and visual observation, company officials have said.
The reports also raised concerns about the use of oil dispersants underwater, which the
Environmental Protection Agency approved on Friday after several tests. Normally,
dispersants are used on the surface, and scientists have said that the effects of using
them underwater are largely unknown.
Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the
Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, criticized BP, saying it had failed to
respond substantively to his requests for more information about how it had reached its
estimate of how much oil is leaking. He also said the company had refused to engage
independent scientists who might offer a better assessment of the amount.
“BP is burying its head in the sand on these underwater threats,” Mr. Markey said in a
written statement on Sunday. “These huge plumes of oil are like hidden mushroom
clouds that indicate a larger spill than originally thought and portend more dangerous
long-term fallout for the Gulf of Mexico’s wildlife and economy.”
BP began trying to insert the tube on Friday, but an effort to connect the pipe leading
from the drill ship to the tube failed and the device had to be brought back to the surface
for adjustments.
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“This is all part of reinventing technology,” Tom Mueller, a BP spokesman, said on
Saturday. “It’s not what I’d call a problem — it’s what I’d call learning, reconfiguring,
doing it again.”
Around midnight Saturday, the tube was reinserted and worked for about four hours
before it was dislodged after being mishandled by the submersibles, Mr. Wells said.
“At that time, we were just starting to get oil to the surface,” Mr. Wells said.
The oil was going to the Discoverer Enterprise, a drill ship, which has equipment for
separating water from oil and can hold about 5 million gallons of oil.
Though that attempt failed, it was important because it demonstrated that features
designed to keep hydrates from forming were working, Mr. Wells said. Hydrates, icelike
structures of methane and water molecules that form in the presence of seawater at low
temperatures and high pressures, forced BP to abandon an earlier effort to corral the
leak with a 98-ton containment dome.
Henry Fountain contributed reporting from New York.
Researchers ponder a hurricane hitting the oil-slicked Gulf of Mexico
Environment and Energy Daily, 17 May 2010, By Lauren Morello
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2010/05/17/1/
The Atlantic Ocean hurricane season begins June 1, and scientists tracking the Gulf of
Mexico oil spill are beginning to think about what would happen if a storm hit the growing
slick.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration won't release its initial hurricane
season forecast until Thursday, but experts said it would only take one storm in the Gulf
to complicate the ongoing effort to stanch the gushing oil and limit its environmental
impact.
NOAA talking points list a number of open questions, such as whether the oil plume
could affect storm formation by suppressing evaporation of Gulf water and how a
hurricane could change the size and location of the oil slick. There's no record of a
hurricane hitting a major oil spill, experts said.
Still, several scientists are worried that a hurricane could drive oil inland, soiling beaches
and wetlands and pushing polluted water up river estuaries.
"My 'oh, no' thought is that a hurricane would pick up that oil and move it, along with salt,
up into interior regions of the state that I am convinced the oil will not reach otherwise,"
said Robert Twilley, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University.
"The bottom line is, how much oil are we going to get into our wetlands? We don't know,"
he said. "This thing is gushing out in these huge numbers."
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That's a question that Florida State University researchers Steven Morey and Dmitry
Dukhovskoy are trying to answer with computer models of storm surge and ocean
currents.
A somewhat mixed picture
"The storm could potentially transport the oil over some distance, we're not sure how
far," said Morey, a physical oceanographer. "It could maybe break up the masses of the
oil, through mixing. And it could also cause oil to wash over the land in a storm surge."
He and Dukhovskoy hope to have initial results by the time the storm season begins in
roughly two weeks. But first they must tweak their computer models to take oil's physical
properties into account.
"Oil on water changes the stress on the water from the winds," Morey said. "Oil will
essentially slide over the water and change the roughness of the water. That's why we
call it an oil slick. ... The waves present a technical challenge, as well."
But Dukhovskoy said he believes the hardest problem might be predicting the size and
location of the slick at the beginning of hurricane season, so the scientists can feed it
into their computer models.
While the government hasn't released its initial predictions for this year's hurricane
season, other experts expect an active year.
Last month, Colorado State University forecasters Bill Gray and Phil Klotzbach said they
"continue to see above-average activity for the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season." The pair
are betting that warm ocean temperatures and a weakening El Niño will produce 15
named storms, including eight hurricanes. Half of those, they say, will be major
hurricanes -- classified as Category 4 or 5.
An above-average hurricane year
Another hurricane watcher, AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi, puts that number
even higher. He foresees 16 to 18 named storms, and believes this year's hurricane
season is in line with those of 1998, 2008 and the record-setting 2005 season, which
produced hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Emily and Dennis, among others.
Back in Louisiana, Robert Twilley is thinking about the worst-case scenario and hoping
that if Louisiana's wetlands are hit, they'll continue their remarkable recent streak of
recovering from natural disasters.
In 2000, a drought in the southeastern United States turned 100,000 acres of
Louisiana's wetlands into mud flats, or "brown marsh." In 2005, hurricanes Katrina and
Rita carried Gulf water deep into the wetlands. Slow to drain out, the salty water dried
out the marshes, Twilley said.
In both cases, scientists saw signs of recovery within a year. But there's no formula for
predicting how resilient the Gulf Coast's beaches and wetlands might be in the face of an
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oil spill-hurricane one-two punch. And any recovery would come in the face of the
ongoing wetlands loss from human intervention like canals and other earthworks that
prevent silt from replenishing the coastal marshes. Louisiana now loses approximately
15 square miles of wetlands each year.
"These systems will recover," Twilley said. "It's going to be the length of time that's
uncertain. And the important thing is, what happens in the meantime? What services do
the wetlands provide the state of Louisiana? Fisheries, flood control, nutrient removal,
habitat for ducks and nesting birds."
U.S. pledges $575 mllion for developing nations' climate aid
ClimateWire, 17 May 2010, By Lisa Friedman
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2010/05/17/4/
The Obama administration has pledged $575 million to an environmental funding
organization to help pay for a range of climate change mitigation and adaptation
projects.
The money is part of $4.25 billion in funding countries dedicated to the Global
Environment Facility over the next four years, a record increase for the grant-giving
agency. Officials said the promised dollars will allow wealthy nations to begin to make
good on promises made at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen last year to help vulnerable
nations cope with the impacts of climate change.
"It is now the GEF's responsibility to transform these resources into concrete results on
the ground," GEF President Monique Barbut said in a statement.
Under the so-called Copenhagen Accord, wealthy nations agreed to deliver $30 billion
annually in "fast start" funding over the next three years, and to mobilize $100 billion
annually by 2020. While nations are still scrambling to come up with ways to raise the
big money, U.S. and GEF officials said the funding replenishment will help vulnerable
countries meet some immediate needs.
The money is expected to go toward a range of projects, including lowering carbon
emissions, expanding sustainable management of protected areas, water management,
reduction of both pollution and mercury emissions, and the protection of tropical forests.
She also pledged to enact policy reforms to ensure "greater responsiveness and
accountability" to both recipient countries and the United Nations. The GEF, which is an
independent agency but is supported by the World Bank and United Nations, has long
faced criticism that its resources are inadequate and it works too slowly to convert its
money into concrete projects.
Natalie Wyeth, spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury Department, said in an e-mail that
29 percent of the U.S. funding will likely be directed toward clean energy, 15 percent
toward forestry, and 9 percent toward building resilience to climate change impacts.
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"These are preliminary numbers and will depend on country demand for specific types of
climate projects over the next four years," she wrote, and noted that the funding is
subject to annual congressional approval. The Obama administration requested $175
million in the fiscal 2011 budget, and Wyeth said the overall U.S. pledge represents an
80 percent increase over the last GEF replenishment.
It remains unclear whether Congress will sign off on the increase. Environmental groups,
meanwhile, said that while the funding was significant, it was lower than activists had
hoped for.
Signs of oil spill pollution might be hiding underwater
Los Angeles Times, 16 May 2010, By Bettina Boxall and Alana Semuels
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oil-spill-water-column20100516,0,2284559.story
Biologist Dennis Takahashi-Kelso peered into the cobalt waters of the Gulf of Mexico 20
miles off the Louisiana coast. The only sign of pollution was a plastic bag floating
beneath the surface.
More than three weeks after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, resulting in a leak
spewing 210,000 gallons of crude per day into the gulf, the fouled beaches and dead
seabirds that are the hallmarks of catastrophic spills have yet to materialize.
But Takahashi-Kelso, who was Alaska's commissioner of Environmental Conservation at
the time of the Exxon Valdez disaster, warned: "It's going to be bad."
» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.
Even as the spill breaks into separate strands, a nasty environmental storm is brewing
below the surface, in deep columns of water teeming with life, from shrimp and fish eggs
to dolphins and whales.
Last week, researchers from the National Institute for Undersea Science and
Technology reported on their website that they had found what they believe are large
plumes of oil far beneath the surface.
Experts don't know what the oil is doing to the complex web of offshore life. Most of their
experience is with shallow-water spills that quickly bleed black goo onto beaches that
are cleaned up relatively quickly.
The BP well blowout, 48 miles off the Louisiana coast, is different. Oil is gushing from a
tangled, broken pipe lying on the seafloor nearly a mile beneath the surface. The leak
will be a month old this week, and if it is not stanched by then, it will have spilled about
6.3 million gallons.
"We have no idea where the oil that isn't reaching the surface is going," said James
Cowan Jr., an oceanography professor at Louisiana State University. "It could go
everywhere."
Tar balls have washed ashore in three Gulf Coast states, strips of slick ribboned
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Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands, and the whiff of petroleum has permeated the morning
breeze. But most fishermen and residents haven't seen any signs of the spill, aside from
the media trucks parked in marinas and military helicopters whirring overhead.
They sit in dark bars and talk about possible solutions to the disaster, or fix parts of their
boats, waiting for oil to reach land or go away.
"Everybody's just waiting," said Daniel Camargo, who was hanging out with friends on
his boat, the Christian Louis, moored on a canal in St. Bernard Parish, La. Red and
yellow crab traps were stacked nearby, unused.
The rust-tinted light crude, meanwhile, sloshes around a part of the gulf that is a major
pathway for marine life, where the nutrient-filled waters of the Mississippi River mix with
the ocean.
"It's a significant ecosystem that goes from the bottom to the top waters," said Roger
Zimmerman, a marine biologist who directs the Galveston Laboratory, part of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service. "This is a rich
area in terms of biological productivity and diversity of animals. There's a lot of
reproduction."
Red snapper, red drum, gulf menhaden and other fish use offshore waters east and west
of the Mississippi Delta as nursery and spawning areas.
A big part of the country's commercial shrimp catch comes from the waters on either
side of the undersea Mississippi Canyon, the site of the BP blowout. The canyon, which
cuts through the continental shelf, harbors deep sea coral.
Pelicans and other seabirds that dive into the slick to catch prey will bathe in the oil and
carry it back to their nests, where eggs can absorb it, possibly killing the chick
developing inside. Sea turtles and dolphins, which surface twice a minute to breathe, will
inhale harmful fumes as they swim through the slick.
"This is such sticky oil in its emulsified and dispersed form that there are mechanisms of
harm that we don't usually look at," said Charles Peterson, a professor of marine
sciences at the University of North Carolina who studied the effects of the 1989 Exxon
Valdez spill on Alaska's Prince William Sound. The oil might clog the feeding organs of
species such as jellyfish, he speculated.
What happens on the surface also affects the deep-sea creatures living far below, where
they are nourished by the rain of plankton particles from above. "If that productivity is
eliminated or if it's contaminated, all of that will go to the seafloor," said Gilbert Rowe, a
professor of oceanography and marine biology at Texas A&M.
The light nature of the crude spouting from the leak is both good and bad. Rather than
the thick, viscous pancake of oil that Takahashi-Kelso remembers floating on the ocean
in the Exxon Valdez spill, the BP oil is rising to the surface as a mousse.
That means it could decompose more quickly. But it also floats through the water in
snow-like bits that increase exposure to the oil's toxins. "That's all suspended in the
water column where the organisms are found," Peterson said.
56
"You have real potential for long-term exposure to organisms, and that induces a very
different mode of toxicity, which…can be very serious indeed," he added. "These chronic
exposures affect the fitness of the organisms that are exposed. They don't necessarily
kill outright but create organisms that are slow to react, often slow to grow."
The widespread spraying of chemical dispersants on the surface slick may be
compounding exposure and speeding oil uptake into the food chain, scientists warned.
The problem, said George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, is
that it is easier for particle-munching microorganisms to ingest the broken-up bits of oil.
"They're not very discerning about what they're eating. They were less likely to chew on
a big glob than if it was broken down to a particle size."
Crozier described the marine community just below the surface as "remarkable" in
variety. It includes plankton, small animals and floating fish eggs and larvae — including
those of commercially valuable red snapper and grouper.
Federal officials say the dispersants are a tradeoff. More than 500,000 gallons have
been sprayed on the gulf so far, more than has ever been used in U.S. waters. And on
Saturday, BP began releasing dispersants deep underwater, near the leak, after
receiving Coast Guard approval. "We didn't cross this threshold lightly," said U.S. Coast
Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry. "This is a tool that will be analyzed and monitored."
It's not just the depth of the leak that distinguishes the Deepwater Horizon accident, but
the size and duration.
"The first few days I was willing to look at it as an episodic event, which ecosystems are
pretty good at dealing with," said Cowan of Louisiana State University. "But the longer it
goes, it's quickly approaching a chronic stressor, which can be much more deleterious.
"A chronic stressor keeps pushing and pushing the system until it reaches a tipping
point," he explained. "It may never recover to a state like it was previously."
No one knows for sure how much crude the mangled riser pipe is disgorging into the
gulf. Government and BP officials have estimated the daily flow at 210,000 gallons.
But officials and outside experts agree that estimating the flow rate is an inexact science.
A Purdue University engineer who analyzed a video of the leak last week said the rate
appeared to be in the range of 2.9 million gallons a day. That would mean more than 75
million gallons of oil have poured into gulf waters since the April 20 rig explosion, which
left 11 workers missing and presumed dead.
The June 1979 Ixtoc I spill in Mexico's Bay of Campeche was bigger. By the time a
blown-out well was capped nearly 10 months later, it had emptied 140 million gallons of
oil into the gulf, according to the U.S. Interior Department. Within a couple of months
after the blowout, a band of crude 30 to 50 feet wide coated South Texas beaches 700
miles north of the leak.
John "Wes" Tunnell, associate director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico
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Studies, studied the impacts of the Ixtoc I spill on the South Texas coast. Populations of
worms and small crustaceans, food for shorebirds and small fish, plummeted by 80% in
the intertidal zone and 55% in the surf zone.
"The good news is that it recovered fairly quickly," Tunnell said. "The Gulf of Mexico is a
very resilient place to have an oil spill," he added, noting that every year the equivalent
of one or two supertankers of oil leaks into gulf waters from natural seeps.
But the Ixtoc I blowout was in relatively shallow water, about 200 feet. Tunnell said little
of the research on impacts closer to the wellhead was released by Mexico's state-owned
petroleum company, Pemex. "So we really don't know much about the studies they did."
The flow of water through the gulf is so huge that the swirling BP spill mixture will
eventually be replaced by clean water, said Rowe, of Texas A&M. In the meantime, a
risky, unplanned experiment is underway.
"You go back to the word 'unprecedented,' " he said. "We're in a situation where the
volume of the material, the concentration of the material, are in places where we've
never experienced them before. So we don't know what the effect is going to be."
Government approves GM trees; company plans for biofuel use
Environment and Energy Daily, 17 May 2010, By Gayathri Vaidyanathan
http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2010/05/17/3/
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved planting of the first genetically
modified forest trees in a large field test in the Southern timber belt.
Nearly 260,000 eucalyptus trees, engineered to be cold-tolerant, will be planted and
allowed to flower in field trials by a South Carolina-based company, ArborGen. The
plantings will occupy more than 300 acres in seven states. Earlier trials had allowed
planting of the trees without flowering.
Future genetic modifications, including reduction of a tree-bark compound called lignin,
should make the trees a good feedstock option for second-generation cellulosic ethanol
production, according to Barbara Wells, CEO of the company.
It may also help revitalize the timber industry in the South, which has faced stiff
competition from the paper and pulp industries in Brazil and other countries. Traditional
pine plantations could be converted to eucalyptus, a tree that can be used for both pulp
and, if the technology matures, production of cellulosic ethanol.
"This is about opportunities to produce a biomass crop that can revitalize rural
communities in the southeastern U.S.," said Wells.
USDA found that the trees would have minimal environmental impact if released in a
controlled and regulated manner. The eucalyptus is the first forest tree to get this close
to commercial approval, which ArborGen is already seeking. Two genetically engineered
fruit trees, including papaya and plum, are already on the commercial markets.
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Environmental groups object
Environmental groups have called for a ban on the release of genetically modified trees,
citing environmental impacts and potential for cross-pollination and takeover of native
populations.
"They are different than annual crops," said Anne Patermann, executive director of the
Global Justice Ecology Project. "They are perennial tree species. Contamination threats
are much more serious."
The groups have been resisting the filing since the beginning of the year, and they will
be reconvening next week to figure out their options, according to Patermann.
Her Stop GE Trees Campaign, which accumulated nearly 12,000 signatories against the
trees during the public comment period, attacked the USDA's tendency to rely on
industry-funded tests for proving safety.
"It is very unfortunate but not surprising, because the USDA traditionally is accepting of
most GE applications," said Patermann. "The USDA doesn't do independent tests
themselves."
The environmentalists and ArborGen intersect at their projections of demand for wood,
which they say will increase with time. While ArborGen says that its technology will help
cope with the demand, the Stop GE Trees Campaign says that wood plantations will
compete for agricultural land and promote deforestation.
Trees are 'terrific' CO2 sinks
"As population increases, there will be a greater demand for wood and wood products,"
said Wells at a Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) convention in Chicago last
week. "Looking at climate change, trees are terrific sinks. The more trees we plant, the
better off we are."
The company is a joint venture by two paper and pulp giants, International Paper Co.
and MeadWestvaco Corp., to create eucalyptus plantations in the timber belt.
Conventional varieties of eucalyptus have already transformed the paper and pulp
industries in tropical countries, allowing them corner the market using this fast-growing
variety (Greenwire, Jan. 29).
The ArborGen genetically modified eucalyptus trees are cold-tolerant. Among other traits
in their portfolio is one for altering the content of a tree bark compound called lignin. This
should make the trees easier to process during biofuel refining and make them a
desirable feedstock, according to ArborGen. This trait will not be tested in the current
trials, although the company has applied for deregulation.
Compared to using switch grass, another popular cellulosic biofuel option, which
produces about 7 to 10 tons of biomass per acre per year, hardwoods, including
eucalyptus, can produce between 12 and 33 tons, said Wells.
59
The renewable fuel standards program of U.S. EPA requires that 36 billion gallons of
renewable fuels be blended into gasoline by 2022. It expects that nearly 21 billion
gallons of this will come from advanced biofuels.
If at least 33 percent of these gallons comes from woody biomass, this would require
about 500 million to 700 million seedlings to be planted annually starting next year for
harvesting in about seven years time, said Wells at the BIO conference.
The technology for producing cellulosic biofuels is still being developed and may take
years before it becomes a reality. Studies by agencies including the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory have shown that the water footprint of biofuels may be high in the
refining and irrigation stages.
Gap in Rules on Oil Spills From Wells
The New York Times, 16 May 2010, By Kate Galbraith
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/business/energy-environment/17green.html?ref=us
The catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill began off the coast of Louisiana —
hundreds of miles from Mexico and far from any other country.
But many oil spills, almost by definition, become international events. Oil slicks can
easily be carried to distant shores by the sea currents. A huge Australian oil spill last
year in the Timor Sea caused angst in Indonesia and East Timor.
There has even been concern that the crude gushing into the Gulf of Mexico could make
its way to the Atlantic Ocean, tugged along by powerful currents.
In the event of a spill that affects multiple countries, a number of global conventions
devised through the International Maritime Organization govern prevention and clean-up
efforts. There are also regional agreements — the United States, for example, maintains
agreements with Canada, Mexico, Panama, Russia and the British Virgin Islands,
according to the State Department.
But experts say there are large gaps in what the international agreements cover.
“There is a tremendous body of international law addressing oil pollution, dealing with
matters including construction and seaworthiness of ships, safety of navigation, pollution
response, and liability,” said Tim Stephens, a senior lecturer on the law faculty at the
University of Sydney and the co-author of a forthcoming textbook on the law of the sea.
However, the international maritime conventions apply “primarily or exclusively” to
accidents involving tankers — the devastating 1999 Erika spill off the coast of Brittany,
France, was from a tanker, for example, he said in an e-mail message.
They do not apply to accidents involving oil platforms, like the Deepwater Horizon spill.
“It is definitely an omission,” Mr. Stephens said, adding that only “tentative” steps have
been taken so far to make the maritime agency’s rules applicable to platform spills.
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The regulatory discrepancy has a simple explanation: tankers move across international
boundaries all the time, whereas platforms remain fixed in place. But as oil companies
push their exploration farther offshore with the help of new technology, spills like
Deepwater pose an increasing risk — and could galvanize new action.
A key area for exploration and production-related spills is liability.
“There is no global convention governing this issue,” said Sergei Vinogradov, a senior
lecturer at the Center for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy at the
University of Dundee, in Scotland.
By contrast, liability from tanker spills is covered by two 1992 conventions, one dealing
with civil liability and the other with an oil-pollution compensation fund, he said in an email message.
A different area in which more international coordination on spills is needed is the Arctic.
That region is widely regarded as the next frontier for petroleum production. It holds
perhaps 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil, according to a 2008 assessment by
the U.S. Geological Survey, but it is also among the most fragile environments on Earth.
An international oil-spill conference next year in Portland, Oregon, is supposed to focus
on Arctic issues, said Robin Rorick of the American Petroleum Institute, which is one of
the conference sponsors, along with several U.S. agencies.
In the aftermath of the Deepwater spill, the conference agenda is certain to change, but
Mr. Rorick said that the Arctic would remain a point of emphasis. The issue is growing
more pressing as companies prepare to drill there — Shell Oil plans to drill several
exploratory wells off northern Alaska this summer.
Even outside of formal agreements, international advice and assistance is often a key
feature of oil-spill response.
In the Deepwater case, a number of countries — including Norway, Britain, France and
Germany — have offered equipment and assistance to the United States in dealing with
the spill.
And the administration of President Barack Obama plans important changes to the
Minerals Management Service, the U.S. agency that regulates the offshore oil industry,
somewhat along the lines of restructuring that previously took place in Australia, Britain
and Norway.
The U.S. agency enforces safety and environmental requirements for oil rigs. It also
collects money from oil and gas leases on U.S. government land as well as mineralextraction royalties.
This is a conflict of interest, and the Obama administration plans to split the agency,
which is part of the Department of the Interior, into two parts in order to address the
problem.
As Tom Zeller Jr. reported last week in the New York Times (of which the International
Herald Tribune is the global edition), Australia created a special offshore safety agency
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in 2005, called the National Petroleum Safety Authority, to minimize conflicts of interest.
Norway created its Petroleum Safety Authority in 2004, for similar reasons.
Britain also walled off the functions of safety and revenue-collection following a deadly
1988 explosion of the Piper Alfa rig in the North Sea. It moved safety oversight from the
Department of Energy to the Health and Safety Executive.
The United States will also undoubtedly look to other countries as it tries to understand
how to strengthen safety requirements to prevent another oil spill.
One technology that could have been useful in the Deepwater case is an acoustic valve
to shut off the well by remote control in an emergency.
Such devices are required by Brazil and Norway, but not by the United States, where the
oil industry successfully resisted a proposal years ago to require its use, according to
Oystein Noreng, who heads the petroleum studies unit at the Norwegian School of
Management.
“In Norway, for more than 40 years, we have had a fairly harmonious coexistence
between a large offshore oil industry and some of the world’s largest fishing industries,”
Mr. Noreng said in an e-mail message.
“Nobody can say that a disaster like the one in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico could not happen
in Norway, but we have invested in the additional line of defense, thanks to political
wisdom.”
Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf
The New York Times, 15 May 2010, By Justin Gillis
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html?ref=us
Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico,
including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The
discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be
substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the
surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is
involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in
the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five
layers deep in the water column.”
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear
that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near
the plumes.
Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in
the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up,
you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a
couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
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The plumes were discovered by scientists from several universities working aboard the
research vessel Pelican, which sailed from Cocodrie, La., on May 3 and has gathered
extensive samples and information about the disaster in the gulf.
Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could
be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be
3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean
surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated
instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much
oil is really gushing from the well.
“The answer is no to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. “We’re not
going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to
the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”
The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between
the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be
lingering far below the sea surface.
The scientists on the Pelican mission, which is backed by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that monitors the health of the oceans,
are not certain why that would be.
They say they suspect the heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP has injected
into the stream of oil emerging from the well, may have broken the oil up into droplets
too small to rise rapidly.
BP said Saturday at a briefing in Robert, La., that it had resumed undersea application of
dispersants, after winning Environmental Protection Agency approval the day before.
“It appears that the application of the subsea dispersant is actually working,” Doug
Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production, said Saturday. “The
oil in the immediate vicinity of the well and the ships and rigs working in the area is
diminished from previous observations.”
Many scientists had hoped the dispersants would cause oil droplets to spread so widely
that they would be less of a problem in any one place. If it turns out that is not
happening, the strategy could come under greater scrutiny.
Dispersants have never been used in an oil leak of this size a mile under the ocean, and
their effects at such depth are largely unknown.
Much about the situation below the water is unclear, and the scientists stressed that their
results were preliminary. After the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon, they
altered a previously scheduled research mission to focus on the effects of the leak.
Interviewed on Saturday by satellite phone, one researcher aboard the Pelican, Vernon
Asper of the University of Southern Mississippi, said the shallowest oil plume the group
63
had detected was at about 2,300 feet, while the deepest was near the seafloor at about
4,200 feet.
“We’re trying to map them, but it’s a tedious process,” Dr. Asper said. “Right now it looks
like the oil is moving southwest, not all that rapidly.”
He said they had taken water samples from areas that oil had not yet reached, and
would compare those with later samples to judge the impact on the chemistry and
biology of the ocean.
While they have detected the plumes and their effects with several types of instruments,
the researchers are still not sure about their density, nor do they have a very good fix on
the dimensions.
Given their size, the plumes cannot possibly be made of pure oil, but more likely consist
of fine droplets of oil suspended in a far greater quantity of water, Dr. Joye said. She
added that in places, at least, the plumes might be the consistency of a thin salad
dressing.
Dr. Joye is serving as a coordinator of the mission from her laboratory in Athens, Ga.
Researchers from the University of Mississippi and the University of Southern
Mississippi are aboard the boat taking samples and running instruments.
Dr. Joye said the findings about declining oxygen levels were especially worrisome,
since oxygen is so slow to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom. She
suspects that oil-eating bacteria are consuming the oxygen at a feverish clip as they
work to break down the plumes.
While the oxygen depletion so far is not enough to kill off sea life, the possibility looms
that oxygen levels could fall so low as to create large dead zones, especially at the
seafloor. “That’s the big worry,” said Ray Highsmith, head of the Mississippi center that
sponsored the mission, known as the National Institute for Undersea Science and
Technology.
The Pelican mission is due to end Sunday, but the scientists are seeking federal support
to resume it soon.
“This is a new type of event, and it’s critically important that we really understand it,
because of the incredible number of oil platforms not only in the Gulf of Mexico but all
over the world now,” Dr. Highsmith said. “We need to know what these events are like,
and what their outcomes can be, and what can be done to deal with the next one.”
Shaila Dewan contributed reporting from Robert, La.
Canada:
Ottawa begins funding push for hybrid R&D
The Globe and Mail, 17 May 2010, By Greg Keenan
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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/ottawa-begins-funding-push-forhybrid-rd/article1570964/
The federal governmentwill announce a $10-million initiative Monday to finance a
McMaster University project that is doing research into hybrid vehicles, a tiny step
toward Canada boosting its efforts to participate in he electric vehicle research and
investment boom.
The establishment of a chair in hybrid powertrain research is the first of its kind in
Canada and part of a $190-million, seven-year federal endowment that will finance 19
research chairs at several universities across the country and has allowed the
institutions to attract top research scientists from around the world.
“The next decade will bring dramatic changes in hybrid powertrain design and
production, triggering unprecedented technology investment by the auto industry,”
McMaster said in its submission to the Canada Excellence Research Chairs program.
But a growing chorus of voices from the auto industry is urging the federal and Ontario
governments to be more aggressive if they want the country's largest manufacturing
industry to climb to a position of leadership in the production of hybrids.
Companies need help too or Canada risks watching jobs and private investment dollars
flow to other countries that are spending tens of billions of dollars to support their vehicle
industries.
“Canadian companies are no longer on a level playing field,” warned the Electric Vehicle
Technology Roadmap for Canada, whose steering committee consisted of several
senior executives from the electric vehicle industry.
The report pointed to a $25-billion (U.S.) program that Washington has earmarked to
help U.S. auto makers and their rivals doing research and development in the United
States into hybrid, plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles.
The Detroit Three auto makers are expected to spend more than $50-billion in this area
during the next several years.
“The industry is presently underfunded in terms of the research and commercialization
capital needed to produce EV components,” the Roadmap report said. “It is hardpressed to compete with well-funded competitors in the U.S. and elsewhere. Significant
financial support is required to retain this expertise and to support jobs within Canada.”
A boom in sales of plug-in hybrid and battery-powered vehicles is not expected in the
next few years, but auto makers are working furiously on such new technologies to meet
stringent new fuel economy rules that come into place in the United States and Canada
in 2016.
They will start arriving later this year with the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid that will
travel about 60 kilometres on electric power and possesses a small, gasoline-powered
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backup engine to extend its range. Toyota Motor Corp. will test plug-in hybrids in North
America this year.
Ford Motor Co. plans to have 10,000 fully electric versions of its Focus compact car on
the road next year, while Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. wants to sell 500,000 Leaf batterypowered cars globally by 2012.
Ontario has already lost out on one opportunity, however. Azure Dynamics Ltd., a TSXlisted company, has chosen Michigan as the place where it will assemble batterypowered versions of Ford's Transit Connect utility.
“My heart was: Do it in Ontario,” said Mike Elwood, vice-president of marketing for Azure
Dynamics and chairman of the steering committee for the Roadmap report. “Buy
America and other things precluded that, unfortunately.”
The report says there should be 500,000 plug-in vehicles on Canada's roads by 2018.
Given that projection, Mr. Elwood said incentives to manufacture such vehicles in
Canada and to Canadian drivers to purchase are necessary as are leadership and
education.
“We haven't had anybody federally step up and say: ‘Not only do we want to see
500,000 [electric vehicles] we want to see one million.' “
Governments could reward people who buy electric vehicles with non-monetary
incentives, he said, such as preferred parking spots.
Magna International Inc. chairman Frank Stronach has urged the federal and Ontario
governments to develop policies that will encourage assembly of electric vehicle
components in Canada.
“We're in a race for two things: knowledge investment and manufacturing investment,”
said one industry source.
“This is like the NBA draft. We want the A-team. What is Canada doing to draft the Ateam in electric vehicles?”
EPA says emission rule will shield small businesses
The National Post, 17 May 2010
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/environment/story.html?id=3036308#ixzz0oCD
CBsp5
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said final rules for greenhouse-gas
emissions will shield small companies from permitting requirements aimed at power
plants and oil refineries. Initially, the EPA will regulate greenhouse gases from existing
66
power plants and oil refineries that increase emissions by more than 75,000 tons per
year, and from new plants that emit more than 100,000 tons per year, under rules
announced last week.
Legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate on Thursday would halt EPA's proposed rules
under the Clean Air Act and substitute legal restrictions on greenhouse gases, Steve
Schleimer, a New York-based director of energy and environmental regulation for
Barclays Capital, said Friday on a conference call with reporters.
Unapologetic oil
The National Post, 15 May 2010, By Alistair Sweeny
http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=3030908
Canada's oil sands are now the major whipping boy of European and American green
groups fighting the Great Climate War.
Canada is an easy target. It's a breeze to beat up on America's little brother and the
world's boy scout.
In the past few years, the mass media, perhaps whipped by President Barack Obama's
call for the U.S. to end its reliance on foreign oil, has focused its spotlight increasingly on
the Sands, smelling blood. Members of the new profession of "environmental journalism"
have become climate-change cheerleaders, going after the Sands using their very best
schoolyard taunts.
Holding their noses at the stink coming from Canada's majestically ugly strip mines, they
happily dub them "the biggest environmental crime on the planet" and "the worst
environmental disaster in history."
Even Canadians such as Simon Dyer of Alberta's Pembina Institute haven't been able to
resist joining the fun, calling the Sands "the worst project in the world." Toronto's
Environmental Defence has also chimed in, producing a report called "Canada's Toxic
Tar Sands: The Most Destructive Project on Earth."
"With the tar sands," says Environmental Defence, "Canada has become the world's
dirty energy superpower."
Calgary journalist, Andrew Nikiforiuk, backed by the Suzuki Foundation and
Greenpeace, bluntly called his book Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent,
and Montreal writer William Marsden taunted Albertans, calling his book Stupid to the
Last Drop.
So, what's going on here? Why are these enviro-journalists so obsessed by trashing the
tar patch and calling it the "biggest environment crime" on the planet when there are so
many more worthy offenders?
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Several genuine environmental crimes come to mind, for example, Saddam Hussein's
draining of the Iraqi marshes or the Soviet Union's use of the Aral Sea to grow cotton,
which turned the whole region into a desert.
But the Sands pale before the new China model for growth, which builds another coalfired power station every three days. And let's not forget the U.S. electric-power
generating industry that pumps out 44 times the carbon emitted by Athabasca oil sands
plants.
The single top emitter in the U.S., the Scherer plant in Juliet, Ga., spews out 25.3 million
tons a year of carbon dioxide (CO2) compared with total emissions from all the
Athabasca Sands of 40 million tons of relatively clean CO2, primarily from the burning of
natural gas to make steam, electricity and hydrogen.
Note these enviro scribblers carefully use the word "tar" and scornfully demonize it as
"dirty oil," as if it were some kind of devil's brew and not that sweet golden syrup coming
from the Middle East that we lovingly refine and pump into our Priuses.
OK, granted, bitumen's a few hydrogen atoms short of sweet, but Canada's bituminous
sands are not "tar sands"-- tar is a substance made from coal -- they are properly oil
sands. But in the battle for ratings and journalistic standing, "tar" is a dirtier word and the
Sands make better copy. Who cares about China? Blame Canada.
Yet, Canada is a fairly benign culprit, emitting a mere 1.9% of total greenhouse gas
emissions (2006 data), whereas the European Union, often touted as achieving its
greenhouse gas (GHG) targets, emits 13.8% despite its 196 nuclear power plants which
emit no CO2. Meanwhile, China produces 21.5% and the United States 20.2%. Canada
comes in at number 12 in the 2008 Environmental Performance Index, ahead of
countries like Denmark at 26, Ireland at 35, the United States at 39 and Australia at 46.
According to oil-expert Daniel Yergin, Canada's oil sands represent the future of North
American energy. In the next five years, production should double and the producers are
counting on the U.S. market to absorb it all, says Greg Stringham, a vice-president at the
Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
I had a talk about the potential of Sands development with Neil Camarta, vice-president
of gas at Suncor, in his Calgary office.
Camarta was in charge of building the Shell Albian Sands mine from scratch, and he
explained the true value of the Sands in an era of declining discoveries. "Oil sands are
not the same as oil," said Camarta. "With oil drilling, the time of discovery is the best
time, when pressure and flow are high. The oil sands do not act this way, and never
deplete like oil wells."
Unlike most deposits in the world that have to be hunted down, the Sands are just lying
there for the taking, some of them up to 140-feet thick.
All you have to do is build a giant washing machine or underground pressure cooker,
pay the friendly government a royalty and promise to clean up when you leave. You
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don't have to explore for the oil. You know the deposits have a very long life -- Suncor,
for example, has access to oil that could support its current production for 100 years.
All you have to do is steam the bitumen off the sand or melt it underground, and then
thin it with solvents so it flows to your up-grader or refinery.
But many critics feel that is the problem. They say that making light synthetic crude oil
from heavy bitumen costs money, up to 10 times more money than pumping sweet
crude up from pools under the Saudi desert. It's so big a problem that the
"unconventional" oil sands are regarded by the International Energy Agency as merely a
"fallback" energy source. Some fallback.
A closer look at the facts tells a different story. To take oil from the Athabasca Sands,
you don't have astronomical drilling costs -- such as BP's $100-million-plus offshore well
in the Gulf of Mexico that is as deep as Mount Everest is high.
You don't have to pay the danger premium or subsidize local potentates. Canada is
stable, and you could say Alberta is even more stable. After capital costs, you can
extract a barrel of bitumen from the Sands today for about $35, far less than it cost back
in the 1960s.
For oil companies interested in a stable business model, the Sands deliver. And that's
why the world's major energy companies are getting deep into the Athabasca. Onethird
of multinational giant Shell's reserves are now there. Until the 2008 downturn,
institutional investors were flocking to buy a piece of the action, and all of this action
made Alberta second only to China in its growth rate.
The growth will continue.
BP marks first success in containing oil spill
Montreal Gazette, 16 May 2010, By Chris Baltimore and Steve Gorman
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/marks+first+success+containing+spill/3035191/st
ory.html#ixzz0oCFqnyNr
HOUSTON/GALLIANO, La. - Energy giant BP on Sunday marked its first success at
containing oil that is gushing unabated into the Gulf of Mexico and said it may be able to
stop the flow permanently in about a week.
But reports of huge oil plumes in the Gulf — including one as large as 10 miles long,
three miles wide and 300 feet thick — underscored the spill’s environmental impact as
the crisis moved into its 24th day.
Crude oil has been gushing unchecked into the sea from a ruptured well about a mile
under the ocean’s surface, threatening an ecological and economic calamity along the
U.S. Gulf Coast.
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After other attempts to contain the spill failed, BP Plc succeeded in inserting a tube into
the leaking well and capturing some oil and gas.
The underwater operation involved guiding robots to insert a small tube into a 21-inch
pipe, known as a riser, to funnel the oil to a ship at the surface.
“It’s working as planned and we are very slowly increasing the rate that is coming from
the riser tool up to the surface,” BP senior executive vice president Kent Wells told
reporters at BP’s U.S. headquarters in Houston.
“So we do have oil and gas coming to the ship now,” he said.
Not all of the oil was being trapped, however. Wells said it was too early to say how
much had been siphoned.
Preparations for a maneuver to inject mud into the well to stop the leak for good were
ongoing and would be completed in seven to 10 days, he said.
The spill began after an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11
workers. It threatens to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska as the worst U.S.
ecological disaster.
The success on Sunday followed a previous setback, when a cord taking the oil to the
surface became entangled.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Officials have stressed the spill has had minimal impact on the shoreline and wildlife, but
oil debris and tar balls were washing up on barrier islands and outlying beaches in at
least a dozen places in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi.
“As nasty as they are, they are more manageable than a slick. They can be collected.
They can be cleaned and we have crews doing that,” Coast Guard Petty Officer Luke
Pinneo said, referring to the latest discovery of tar balls on Grand Isle, Louisiana.
Scientists and residents of the Gulf Coast say a greater concern is the anticipated
encroachment of oil into the environmentally fragile bayous and marshes teeming with
shrimp, oysters, crabs, fish, birds and other wildlife.
The New York Times and other media reported scientists had detected huge oil plumes
— large columns of concentrated oil moving beneath the ocean surface — in the Gulf,
indicating the leak could be worse than estimates by BP and the government.
Estimates of the rate of escaping oil range widely from the official BP figure of 5,000
barrels per day (210,000 gallons) , adopted by the government, to 100,000 barrels (4.2
million gallons) per day.
BP officials said they did not have confirmation of such plumes and spokesman Andrew
Gowers appeared to dismiss the reports as scientifically unlikely.
70
“It is my observation as a layman that oil is lighter than water and tends to go up,”
Gowers told reporters.
BP is facing growing political pressure to prove it will pay for all of the costs related to
the spill.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
demanded in a letter to BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward that the company make clear
its commitment to “redress all of the damage that has occurred or that will occur in the
future as a result of the oil spill.”
The letter was released Saturday and amid concerns about the implications of current
U.S. law, which limits energy companies’ liability for lost business and local tax revenues
from oil spills to $75 million.
BP spokesman David Nicholas said Sunday: “What they are requesting in the letter is
absolutely consistent with all our public statements on the matter.”
President Barack Obama’s administration would like to raise the cap retroactively.
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