Archive for ‘Environment’

April 22, 2013

What BP doesn’t want you to know about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico spill

042412_sb_bp_640

By Mark Hertsgaard of Newsweek

“It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.

“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.

April 10, 2013

Daniel McGowan Forbidden From Publishing Articles Without Permission

Daniel_McGowan

By  Nick Pinto of The Village Voice:

After more than seven years, the stack of dehumanizing and seemingly unconstitutional interactions between Daniel McGowan and the American prison system is now piled so high it is teetering over into a recursive mess of bleak and Kafkaesque absurdity.

Last Monday, McGowan published a piece on the Huffington Post that laid out much of his situation to date. After years in prison for his role in environmentally motivated property destruction that was prosecuted as acts of terrorism, he wrote, he was finishing up the remaining months of his sentence in a halfway house in Brooklyn.

April 7, 2013

Activists claim Arkansas oil spill diverted into wetland

oilhandguy-tarsandsblockade

By By Stephen C. Webster of The Raw Story:

Activists with the group Tar Sands Blockade published new videos on Sunday showing oil from the Arkansas pipeline rupture purportedly diverted from a residential neighborhood into a wetland area to keep it out sight and, most importantly, out of the media.

While it’s not clear if the oil was intentionally moved into the wetland, the company says it is cleaning pavement with power washing devices, which could cause some of the oil to be pushed off neighborhood streets and into other areas.

April 1, 2013

‘Major spill’ after Exxon pipe ruptures in US

Handout of men wearing protective clothing survey cleanup efforts from oil spill in Mayflower

From Al Jazeera:

An Exxon Mobil crude oil pipeline ruptured near the town of Mayflower in the US state of Arkansas, spilling thousands of barrels of oil, the company said.

Exxon shut the 50-centimetre Pegasus pipeline, which carries crude oil from Pakota, Illinois, to the Gulf Coast, after the leak was discovered on Friday afternoon.

November 13, 2012

Tar Sands Blockade Calls For Solidarity Actions November 19th

Our message is simple: climate catastrophe is social injustice manifest and nothing less than a slow but sure genocide of the have-nots perpetrated by those with extraordinary privilege. The only way to survive climate chaos is by building community resiliency across all boundaries based on mutual aid and respect. The community that resists together persists together, so join with your neighbors and defend your homes from the onslaught of resource extraction.

November 1, 2012

There’s no such thing as a natural disaster – Neil Smith

Written in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Neil Smith argues ‘natural disasters’ are in every aspect social disasters, reflecting contours of class and race. Originally posted at Understanding Katrina.

It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster – causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction – the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom.

October 3, 2012

The Entire Oil And Gas Industry Is Watching A Tiny Town In Wyoming

A fracking well in Pennsylvania.

By Rob Wile of Business Insider:

Most scientists have long maintained it was highly unlikely that chemicals  pumped into the ground for fracking gas could move all the way up through  bedrock and into the water table.

But that appears to be exactly what has happened underneath Pavilion,  Wyoming, population 213.

May 29, 2012

Low levels of Fukushima cesium found in West Coast tuna

Reposted from CNN

Scientists hope to test new samples of Pacific bluefin tuna after low levels of radioactive cesium from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident turned up in fish caught off California in 2011, researchers reported Monday.

The bluefin spawn off Japan, and many migrate across the Pacific Ocean. Tissue samples taken from 15 bluefin caught in August, five months after the meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi, all contained reactor byproducts cesium-134 and cesium-137 at levels that produced radiation about 3% higher than natural background sources – but well below levels considered dangerous for human consumption, the researchers say.

April 18, 2012

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

By Dahr Jamail 18 Apr., 2012. Al Jazeera

New Orleans, LA - “The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”

Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.

Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.

Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.

January 20, 2012

Keystone Pipeline Fight Is Not Over

By Renee Parsons, from the Huffingtonpost:

As Bill McKibben and his environmental supporters bask in a well-deserved satisfaction of the now-infamous Keystone XL pipeline denial, a close reading of the president’s statement indicates reason for concern.

In what would have otherwise been another slam-dunk for the petroleum industry, McKibben et al. can take credit for bringing the issue and its deleterious impact on American farmers and climate change to the public’s attention.

The case against the pipeline is overwhelming with the Natural Resources Defense Council warning that synthetic crude made from tar sands will generate three times as much CO2 pollution as conventional crude oil production because the extremely heavy, thick viscous bitumen (tar) requires great amounts of water and energy in order to flow through a pipe.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 67 other followers

%d bloggers like this: