Gagging the Debate on Arctic Drilling

Political pressure from Sweden and the United States has gagged scientific warnings on the perils of oil drilling in the Arctic ocean.

A group of scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Arctic Research division, led by director John Calder, together with 150 scientists with the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP) spent four years compiling a report entitled “Arctic Oil & Gas” in which they laid out the environmental risks unique to the region. From Spiegel Online:

Among other things, Calder’s report warns against the dangers posed by faulty pipes and tanker accidents. “Oil spills are especially dangerous in the Arctic, because its cold and heavily season-dependent ecosystems take a long time to recover. Besides, it is very difficult to remove the damage from oil spills in remote and cold regions, especially in parts of the ocean where there is ice.” Calder also criticizes the destruction of landscapes that comes with building pipelines and describes the way Arctic villages would change once the oil money upends all traditional social structures.

But despite these commendable warnings, there is a significant problem behind the work of Calder and other scientists: it has been devalued by political wrangling. Until recently, the summary ended with more than 60 recommendations the scientists had compiled for politicians. Those recommendations have since disappeared.

The modifications are the result of quarrels within the Arctic Council, which commissioned the AMAP study. Unanimity is required between the permanent members of the Council, which include the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Canada, the United States and Russia — but Sweden and the US were opposed to the document. Sources at the Tromsø meeting said the Americans didn’t even want the term “climate change” to be used in the final report.

John Calder remains perplexed. His report, originally intended as a milestone in the development of the Arctic oil and gas industry, could end up being largely ignored because its most important section, the recommendations for action, is missing.

“Risks cannot be completely ruled out,” the authors write in the penultimate chapter of the AMAP report. It is statements like these that have prompted the environmental organization World Wildlife Fund, which presented its own report in Tromsø on the risks of oil accidents in Arctic environs, to call for an end to exploration for new oil and gas reserves in the Arctic.

“The Arctic has an almost unparalleled level of ecological sensitivity and one of the lowest levels of capacity in terms of cleaning up after an accident,” said James Leaton of WWF’s chapter in the United Kingdom.

 

Making Water The Old Fashioned Way

The good folks of Orange County, California are poised to begin drinking their own water. The county has just put into operation the biggest sewage reclamation plant in the world, one that is expected to generate more than 70-million gallons of pristine drinking water every day.

Since you asked, here’s how it works. Sewage is treated, the effluent purified and then the already “clean” water is injected into the county’s massive acquifer, a process that further cleans it. By the time it’s pumped out of the acquifer it’s so clean that lime has to be added to keep it from dissolving the system’s concrete pipes.

The reclamation plant cost the county just shy of half a million dollars. At capacity, the plant could produce 130-million gallons per day. Although the reclaimed product is a little more expensive than water brought in from northern California, imported water prices are soon expected to close the gap.

Another benefit is that the effluent is no longer being pumped into the ocean after primary treatment.

 

Definitely Not Oprah’s Book Club – "The Weather Makers"

Unless you have a strong science background much of the information you get these days about global warming can be perplexing at best. You’re left in the position of grabbing a few snippets that seem believable and taking the rest of the premise on faith. Big Oil and Big Coal and their media lackeys have exploited that very weakness for years. Just listen to the nonsense that still comes spewing out of the mouths of the denialists – all of it faith based drivel.

But maybe you really want to understand what this is all about if you can find a way to do it without getting lost in indecipherable technical babble. There is a way. Get yourself a copy of “The Weather Makers” by Tim Flannery. Of all the books I’ve read on climate change, The Weather Makers is hands down the best. Flannery, who describes himself not as a “science writer” but a “writer scientist” manages to harvest information, gather it all together and present it in a way that is powerfully understandable. You read it, it makes sense.

For example, have you ever wondered how a kilogram of carbon in your gas tank turns into three kilograms of carbon dioxide at the tailpipe? It’s because a molecule of carbon and a molecule of oxygen have very similar weights. The carbon molecule that emerges from your tail pipe bonds with two molecules of oxygen, creating CO2 that’s about three times as heavy.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the book that I hope will encourage you to get a copy of it:

“The twentieth century opened on a world that was home to little more than a billion people and closed on a world of 6 billion, and every one of those 6 billion is using on average four times as much energy as their forefathers did 100 years before. This helps account for the fact that the burning of fossil fuels has increased sixteen-fold over that period.

Jeffrey Dukes of the University of Utah [observed] …that all the carbon and hydrogen in fossil fuels was gathered together through the power of sunlight, captured by long-ago plants. By calculating the efficiency with which we are able to retrieve that fuel, Dukes has concluded that approximately 100-tonnes of ancient plant life is required to create four litres of petrol.

Given the vast amount of sunlight needed to grow 100-tonnes of plant matter, and the prodigious rate at which we are using petrol, coal and gas, it should come as no surprise that over each year of our industrial age, humans have required several centuries worth of ancient sunlight to keep the economy going. The figure for 1997 – around 422 years of fossil sunlight – was typical. Four hundred and twenty-two years’ worth of blazing light from a Carboniferous sun – and we have burned it in a single year.”

“It makes me realise …that the power and seduction of fossil fuels will be hard to leave behind. If humans were to look to biomass (all living things, but in this case particularly plants) as a replacement, we would need to increase our consumption of all primary production on land by 50 per cent. We’re already using 20 per cent more than the planet can sustainably provide, so this is not an option.

In 1961 there was still room to manoeuvre. In that seemingly distant age there were just 3 billion people, and they were using only half of the total resources that our global ecosystem could sustainably provide. A short twenty-five years later, in 1986, we had reached a watershed, for that year our population topped 5 billion, and such was our collective thirst for resources that we were using all of Earth’s sustainable production.

In effect, 1986 marks the year that humans reached Earth’s carrying capacity, and ever since we have been running the environmental equivalent of a deficit budget, which is only sustained by plundering our capital base. The plundering takes the form of overexploiting fisheries, overgrazing pasture until it becomes desert, destroying forests, and polluting our oceans and atmosphere, which in turn leads to the large number of environmental issues we face.

By 2001 humanity’s deficit had ballooned to 20 per cent, and our population to over 6 billion. By 2050, when the population is expected to level out at around 9 billion, the burden of human existence will be such that we will be using – if they can still be found – nearly two planets’ worth of resources.”

“The Weather Makers” – if you read one book on global warming this year, let it be this one.

 

Saving Indonesia’s Endangered Orangutan

It should have been great news. The orangutan is an endangered species in Indonesian Borneo. The good news was the recent discovery of a colony of 500 of the primates. The bad news is that they were discovered in the course of preparations to clear their tropical forest refuge for a palm oil plantation.

Palm oil is one of the sweetheart crops for the production of biofuels. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Global warming might just save the [orangutans and their] ecosystem. Not only are environmentalists outraged by their possible destruction, but these trees spring from carbon-rich, metres-deep peat – potentially worth millions of dollars under a proposed post-Kyoto Protocol deal to fund the preservation of forests.

Clearing peat forests has made Indonesia the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, sending more than 3000-million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year. It is driven by greed, with palm oil and timber barons lining the pockets of officials from Kalimantan to Jakarta – even the Forestry Minister has blocked prosecution of illegal loggers.

 

Flushing Out Beijing’s Open Sewers

They’re canals actually but they’re stagnant and fetid, just the sort of thing you don’t want to display to Olympic visitors.

The answer? A massive public works project intended to flush’em out before the games. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

To replenish Beijing’s dead waterways, 3 billion cubic metres of water will be pumped 300 kilometres from four dams near the capital of neighbouring Hebei province. It was a mammoth but temporary measure designed to make Beijing sparkle for foreign tourists, said Wang Jian, an official at the Haidian information centre.

“This water diversion will make the water in Beijing’s rivers all clear and clean,” Mr Wang said. “We can’t let foreigners come and look at the water when it is still dark and stinky.”

The engineering feat will help transform one of the world’s driest capitals into an international oasis when the Games begin on August 8.

Beijing residents consume only one-eighth as much water as the average Chinese person and one-thirtieth of the global average.

And after the games? Back to the good old “dark and stinky.” Beijing is now home to 18-million people, four times its population in the 60s.

 

Don’t Lose Sight of the Big Picture

I’ve repeatedly stressed the dangers we invite if we focus on global warming to the exclusion of other environmental issues. Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” identifies twelve, serious environmental problems we need to tackle.

1. Destruction of natural habitat. We’re causing immense damage and loss to our forests, wetlands, coral reefs and ocean floors. Deforestation is accelerating.

2. Wild foods are being depleted. In particular, global fish stocks are reaching the point of exhaustion through over-fishing and related problems such as enormously wasteful by-catches.

3. Species extinction. “Elimination of lots of lousy little species regularly causes big harmful consequences for humans, just as does randomly knocking out many of the lousy little rivets holding together an airplane.”

4. Soil degradation. “Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40-times the rates of soil formation. Other threats included salinization, losses of soil fertility through crop exhaustion, excessive acidification or, alternately, alkalinization.”

5. Fossil fuel depletion. We’re using far too much fossil fuel, particularly oil and natural gas, and the result is not only excessive GHG emissions but an increasing dependency on coal.

6. Freshwater exhaustion. Both surface water and groundwater resources are overstressed in many parts of the world, a problem that is being compounded by precipitation pattern changes.

7. The photosynthetic ceiling. This is one you don’t hear about but it remains an environmental problem. “The first calculation of this photosynthetic ceiling, carried out in 1986, estimated that humans then already used or diverted or wasted about half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity. Given the rate of increase of human population, and especially of population impact, since 1986, we are projected to be utilizing most of the world’s terrestrial photosynthetic capacity by the middle of this century.”

8. Soil and water pollution. “The culprits include not only insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, but also mercury and other metals, fire-retardant chemicals, refrigerator coolants, detergents and components of plastics. We swallow them in our food and water, breathe them in the air and absorb them through our skin.”

9. Alien species. These are lifeforms – animal, vegetable, viral, natural and manmade, “that we transfer, intentionally or inadvertently, from a place where they are native to another place where they are not native.”

10. Human generated greenhouse gas emissions. Finally, there it is, carbon emissions and global warming.

11. Overpopulation. More people need more food, space, water, energy, and other resources. “There is long built-in momentum to human population growth because of what is termed the “demographic bulge” or “population momentum,” i.e. a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people in today’s population, as a result of recent population growth.”

and –

12. Growing per-capita population impact. “…low impact people are becoming high impact people for two reasons: rises in living standards in Third World countries whose inhabitants see and covet First World lifestyles; and immigration, both legal and illegal, of individual Third World inhabitants into the First world. …There are many optimists who argue that the world could support double its human population. But I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12-times its current impact, although an increase of that factor would result from all Third World inhabitants adopting First World living standards.”

After reciting these twelve problems, Diamond points out the obvious – they’re all interwoven. Each is linked to and compounds all the others.

“They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50-years. For example, destruction of accessible lowland tropical rainforest outside national parks is already virtually complete in Peninsular Malaysia, will be complete at current rates within less than a decade in the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, on Sumatra and on Sulawest, and will be complete around the world except perhaps for parts of the Amazon Basin and Congo Basin within 25 years. At current rates, we shall have depleted or destroyed most of the world’s remaining marine fisheries, depleted clean or cheap or readily accessible reserves of oil and natural gas, and approached the photosynthetic ceiling within a few decades. Global warming is projected to have reached a degree Centigrade or more, and a substantial fraction of the world’s wild animal and plant species are projected to be endangered or past the point of no return, within half a century. People often ask, “what is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?” A flip answer would be, “The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem.” …If we solved 11 of the problems, but not the 12th, we would still be in trouble, whichever was the problem that remained unsolved. We have to solve them all.”

“…the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics and collapse of societies.”

 

How The Other "Earth" Went Astray

The other “earth” is Venus and a European probe, called the Venus Express, is shedding light on how that planet, and ours, took differing paths. It all comes down to the “greenhouse gas effect”. From The Guardian:

Scientists had puzzled over Venus’s hellish characteristics. It is roughly the same size as Earth, with a roughly similar orbit. Both planets began life with similar atmospheres, but Venus underwent a ferocious greenhouse effect that left it with an atmosphere made up almost entirely of CO2 and almost no water.

“Earth and Venus were pretty much identical to start with … It really made you think the physics was different, which obviously it couldn’t be,” said Prof Fredric Taylor at Oxford University. Some scientists had thought that Venus’s proximity to the sun was key to its transformation, but the new data suggests a different explanation: “It’s not evil, just unfortunate.” Venus Express’s data appear in a set of paper’s in today’s edition of Nature.

One finding is that the solar wind – a stream of charged particles from the sun – is stripping away water molecules from the atmosphere by breaking them into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen and blasting them into space. That cannot happen on Earth because its rotation creates a magnetic field that diverts the solar wind. Without water, CO2 in the atmosphere could not be laid down in oceans as carbonate rocks. “[On Earth] it’s all in the white cliffs of Dover and places like that,” said Taylor. The CO2-rich atmosphere led to a runaway greenhouse effect.

Venus Express has also found some intriguing features of the atmosphere. One instrument detecting electromagnetic frequencies has observed the tell-tale signature of lightning, something some scientists did not think was possible. “It is like some sort of echo,” said Dr Magda Delva at the space research unit at the Austrian academy of sciences in Graz. “If you have lightning then chemical reactions are possible that would not under normal conditions take place … At least on Earth this was important for the beginning of life.”

 

Our Oceans in Peril

One sign of the troubles facing our oceans is the spread of jellyfish infestations. There seem to be two main causes of this – overfishing of species that normally feed on jellyfish and warming seas that extend their habitat.

A purple jellyfish, known as the “mauve stinger”, has plagued Spanish beaches and swimmers there for some time. Tourist operators now have to sweep the beaches and close in waters to keep them free of the problem.

Last week, the mauve stinger showed up, en masse, where it’s never seen – off the northeast coast of Ireland. An infestation there wiped out Ireland’s only salmon farm. From The Age:

The jellyfish, covering an area of around 26 square kilometres, engulfed the Northern Salmon Company’s cages off the province’s north-eastern coast, suffocating 100,000 fish, the firm’s managing director, John Russell, said.

“It was sheer devastation – I’ve been 30 years in the salmon industry and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr Russell said.

Staff on their way to give the fish their morning feed noticed a “reddish-brown tinge” to the sea and then realised the boats were struggling to make headway through an expanse of jellyfish over 10 metres deep, Mr Russell said.

 

China’s Next Great Revolution?

Usually revolutions are aimed at toppling the very highest authority. In China there’s a call for a revolution against local government.

The head of China’s environmental agency blames public discontent and riots on pollution and has called for a “struggle” against polluters. Sounds straight out of Mao’s Red Book, eh? From The Guardian:

Zhou Shengxian’s comments “underscore the frustration of state mandarins at local government officials who ignore environmental standards in order to attract investment, jobs and bribes.

“Beijing is trying to shift the economy on to a more sustainable development track. But factory owners who violate state guidelines are often protected by local officials. …According to Mr Zhou, the state environmental protection administration chief, many plants build secret pipes to discharge polluting chemicals. Others release toxins when locals are asleep.

“Demonstrations against power and chemical plants have become increasingly common in recent years. In May, thousands took to the streets of Xiamen, in Fujian province, leading to the suspension of a petrochemical plant. In 2005, police killed at least three villagers in Dongzhou, Guangdong province, while quelling a riot over a planned power plant.

“Anger has been fuelled by unfair land grabs and health fears. According to the government, two-thirds of China’s 595 cities now have unhealthy air.

“Pollution scandals are common. Earlier yesterday, state media reported that tap water had been restored to 200,000 residents of Shuyang county in Jiangsu after a chemical spill halted supplies for 40 hours. The environment agency said more than a quarter of the seven main river systems were so polluted that the water was unfit for human contact.”

China today faces a hellish host of critical, environmental threats ranging from air and water pollution to freshwater depletion and desertification. It is really difficult to conceive how China can bring these threats under control and maintain its planned industrial and economic expansion. It is definitely burning the candle at both ends.

 

Is the Answer Right Below Your Feet?

No, I’m not talking about the Tar Sands but about a clean, virtually limitless, nearly free energy source that’s ours for the taking.

Our earth is one giant ball of heat energy. Places like Iceland are already going geothermal, that is using the core heat to create steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. Because combustion is not part of this chain, the energy is clean.

We still haven’t come up with practical windpower systems that can approach our energy needs and tidal power, while fascinating, remains untapped. Geothermal is a much simpler proposition. Drill a hole into a sufficiently hot spot, pump water in to absorb that heat and transform it into steam and that’s it. We know how to harvest steam energy, something we’ve been doing since the days of Robert Fulton and steam powered ships and locomotives.

The question is how to get a steam system up and running. The Massacheusetts Institute of Technology estimates it will take about $800-million to fund the research. The US Department of Energy has budgeted about $23-billion for research into nuclear power, alternative fuels and science studies but nothing for geo-thermal energy research.

Geo-thermal technology has advanced far past the early days of exploiting hot springs and geyser fields. Today much of North America has geo-thermal potential. The MIT study estimates that the US could easily meet 10% of its energy needs by 2050 from geo-thermal development. Research underway around the world could transform it into a much bigger part of the energy supply system.