Springtime in Paris

March 18, 2014 by Leave a Comment

An aerial picture taken aboard an helicopter on July 20, 2010 shows a smoggy view of the Eiffel tower (L) and the Tour Maine-Montparnasse in Paris. (BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images)

An aerial picture taken aboard an helicopter on July 20, 2010 shows a smoggy view of the Eiffel tower (L) and the Tour Maine-Montparnasse in Paris. (BORIS HORVAT/AFP/Getty Images)

On March 17th, for the first time in 17 years, the government enforced new rules allowing only motorists driving cars with odd-numbered registration plates to enter the French capital and use the roads in the surrounding departments.  The Economist

The spike in Paris, in which the air quality index rose to 185, would constitute a fairly humdrum day in Beijing and many other Chinese cities. Last month, pollution levels in the Chinese capital were close to the scale’s maximum of 500.

The Parisian smog sparked a debate about the tax breaks for diesel, which have so dramatically influenced the profile of the French car industry. Cheap diesel has been a reality in France for 30 years. This will be a real problem for the French because diesel has now been shown to be seriously carcinogenic. The Guardian

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Why Civilizations Collapse and How Close Are We?

March 17, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Big study by major researchers on why civilizations in the past have collapsed:

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity“; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.”

Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to overconsumption of resources, with “Elites” based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both:

“… accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.”

The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:

“Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the increased efficiency of resource use.”

Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two centuries has come from “increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput,” despite dramatic efficiency gains over the same period.

Wow: Read All

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Drought and Desalinization

March 4, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Even as we bask in a Northern California smirr, not quite a rain, the multi-year drought that threatens to turn the Central Valley from a fruit basket to archeological site continues.  Desperate minds turn to the ocean: there’s an awful lot of water there! How to get and use it?  Desalinization has been used on naval ships for decades – potable,barely, but certainly good for showers and washing down decks.  What’s the situation of large-scale terrestrial projects?  Here’s a brief, recent, report from Grist.

Enter the ongoing construction of 17 desalination plants across the state. A $1 billion plant being built in Carlsbad, Calif., expected to be ready by 2016, will pump 50 million gallons of drinkable water out of the ocean daily — making it the largest such facility in the Western Hemisphere. Another project underway near San Francisco (a discount at only $150 million) could supply 20 million of the 750 million gallons of water guzzled daily in the Bay Area by 2020.

Desalination involves sucking up seawater and pushing it at high pressure through a series of very thin membranes, to strip away the salt and ocean gunk. Water purists (ha) know it as reverse osmosis. It’s not an ideal process, since it uses an enormous amount of energy to turn about two gallons of seawater into one gallon of potable water, plus there are the aforementioned ocean gunk leftovers, but it does keep working rain or shine.

I didn’t know so many were in progress, albeit with delays and frustrations.  Given the increase in population, even with lots of water savings, many more plants would be needed if the drought continues.

Weaning So Cal off water imported from other areas would mean building a Carlsbad-scale plant every four miles along the coast, which adds up to 25 plants just between San Diego and L.A.

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When the Deregulation Chickens Come Home to Roost in North Carolina

February 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Wet coal ash from the Dan River earlier this month. The spill coated the river bottom 70 miles downstream and threatened drinking water and aquatic life. Credit Gerry Broome/Associated Press

Wet coal ash from the Dan River earlier this month. The spill coated the river bottom 70 miles downstream and threatened drinking water and aquatic life. Credit Gerry Broome/Associated Press

Last June, state employees in charge of stopping water pollution were given updated marching orders on behalf of North Carolina’s new Republican governor and conservative lawmakers.

“The General Assembly doesn’t like you,” an official in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources told supervisors, who had been called from across the state to a drab meeting room here. “They cut your budget, but you didn’t get the message. And they cut your budget again, and you still didn’t get the message.”

From now on, regulators were told, they must focus on customer service, meaning issuing environmental permits for businesses as quickly as possible. Big changes are coming, the official said, according to three people in the meeting, two of whom took notes. “If you don’t like change, you’ll be gone.”

Read All

We hope, when all the tallies are done, it will be the folks who hate regulation so much, who ‘will be gone.”

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Bakken Crude Railed Through Albany

February 28, 2014 by Leave a Comment

For most of us, most of the time, the underpinnings of American industrialism — from oil extraction to chicken farming– is out of site and out of mind.  When disasters happen, or dissatisfied voices join in protest, we begin to see — this Best of All Possible Worlds has its netherworlds.  The good folks of Albany, New York — that would be the state capital– are the latest to have the bright lights turned on.

Albany has become a major hub for trains carrying oil from the Bakken Formation to the East Coast. Oil leaves Albany for points south via train or tanker down the Hudson River.

Albany has become a major hub for trains carrying oil from the Bakken Formation to the East Coast. Oil leaves Albany for points south via train or tanker down the Hudson River.

Hidden in plain sight, Albany’s oil boom has taken local officials and residents by surprise. Many became aware of the dangers of oil trains after a recent series of derailments and explosions, including one that killed 47 people in Quebec last July, which have generated concerns about growing rail traffic into the city. Trains rumble through the heart of Albany every day and often idle along the busy Interstate 787 highway while waiting to get into the port’s rail yards.

“This has caught everyone off guard,” said Roger Downs, a conservation director at the Sierra Club in Albany.

About 75 percent of Bakken oil production travels by rail and as much as 400,000 barrels a day heads to the East Coast, said Trisha Curtis, an analyst at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. Albany gets 20 to 25 percent of the Bakken’s rail exports, according to various analyst estimates.

“Albany has become a big hub,” Ms. Curtis said.

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Life on Mekong Faces Threats As Major Dams Begin to Rise

February 22, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Anyone who has been to South East Asia has been impressed with the mighty Mekong.  It is THE artery of life for millions.  Watch out!  Modernity is on its way.

With a massive dam under construction in Laos and other dams on the way, the Mekong River is facing a wave of hydroelectric projects that could profoundly alter the river’s ecology and disrupt the food supplies of millions of people in Southeast Asia.

… Seven dams built upstream in China and the blasting of rapids to improve navigation have already altered flows, reduced fish populations, and affected communities along portions of the Lower Mekong, which flows through Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. But the impacts may soon get much worse as a new era of hydroelectric dam-building begins in the Lower Mekong Basin. Eleven major hydroelectric dams — mostly within Laos — and dozens of dams on tributary streams that feed into the Mekong have been proposed or are under construction.

at Yale e360

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Deforestation Mapping — in Real Time, Coming on Line

February 22, 2014 by Leave a Comment

“A new global monitoring system has been launched that promises “near real time” information on deforestation around the world.

Global Forest Watch (GFW) is backed by Google and over 40 business and campaigning groups.

It uses information from hundreds of millions of satellite images as well as data from people on the ground.” BBC

Net loss of 1.5 million sq km - 2000-2012

Net loss of 1.5 million sq km – 2000-2012

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Poisoning the Children

January 30, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Not only does the Mafia shoot, strangle or dump into river those who cross them, they sow the land with worse than Roman salt in Carthage, millions and millions of tons of toxic waste, reaping dumping fees and sowing death by cancer for their own children and those of their neighbors.

It’s not that it hasn’t been known, but knowing is finally finding its feet.

A group of 13 women who claim their children died of cancer after being poisoned by tons of toxic waste dumped in their region by the local mafia met with Italy’s president Wednesday.

They traveled to Rome from their towns around Naples as representatives of some 150,000 mothers who sent Italian President Giorgio Napolitano postcards with photos of their dead or cancer-stricken children in the hope that he might put an end to the environmental crimes that have been perpetrated in their region for decades.

“We are want truth and justice,” said one of the mothers, Pina Leana, at the presidential palace Wednesday. “We want facts, not empty words.

WorldNews

mafia-dump-waste

In 1997 a hearing was held about the dumping, taking testimony from a one-time member of the Casalesi clan near Naples. It was so detailed and implicated so many in the government it has been sealed until October of 2013.

“We are talking about millions of tons,” Schiavone, formerly head of administration for the Mafia organization, told the parliamentarians. “I also know that trucks came from Germany carrying nuclear waste.” The operations took place under the protection of darkness and were guarded by Mafiosi in military police uniforms, he said. He showed Italian justice officials the location of many of the dumpsites because, as he put it in 1997, the people in those areas are at risk of “dying of cancer within 20 years.”

numerous officials at all levels must have known about Schiavone’s warnings since the mid-1990s — and ignored them.

The pressure is particularly great on the following players:

  • Giorgio Napolitano was Italy’s interior minister at the time and thus ultimately in charge of the investigation. Today, he is the country’s president.
  • Gennaro Capoluongo was, according to Schiavone, in a helicopter that went on a tour of some of the toxic waste dumps. Today, he is Italy’s Interpol head.
  • Alessandro Pansa was head of mobile units for the Italian police force at the time. Now he is head of the Italian State Police.
  • Nicola Cavaliere was with the criminal police at the time and was involved in the case, according to Schiavone. Today is the deputy head of Italy’s domestic intelligence service.

Der Spiegel

and more at the NY Times

Filed under Corruption, Environment Tagged with , , ,

That West Virginia Spill? Try Formaldehyde

January 29, 2014 by Leave a Comment

“A West Virginia state official told a legislative panel on Wednesday that he “can guarantee” residents are breathing in formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, nearly three weeks after a massive chemical spill contaminated the water supply for more than 300,000 residents.

Scott Simonton, a Marshall University environmental scientist and member of the state Environmental Quality Board, told the panel that he had found formaldehyde in local water samples and was alarmed by the lack of information regarding the lingering impacts of the spill on public health, the Charleston Gazette reported.

“It’s frightening, it really is frightening,” Simonton said. “What we know scares us, and we know there’s a lot more we don’t know.””

Think Progress/Climate

 

Filed under Environment, Water Tagged with ,

Saving Laotian Elephants

January 25, 2014 by Leave a Comment

I was in Laos a year ago, with friends.  I don’t believe I ever heard the word elephant — though we did have a city-park ride on one in Bangkok.  Seems like a change worth talking about…

Laos was once called the ‘land of a million elephants’ but today elephant population has been reduced to several hundreds because of poaching and illegal ivory trade. Some are dying because of overwork in logging areas.

It is estimated that wild elephants number around 300 to 600…

Global Voices

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