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Poison gas leak from Sydney nuclear reactor spark cover up claims

By Linda Silmalis | The Sunday Telegraph | August 29, 2010
  • Gases spread from Sydney to Melbourne
  • Public not told for fear of spreading alarm
  • Reactor insists gas was not public threat

POTENTIALLY dangerous radioactive gases have been secretly pumped into the atmosphere from Lucas Heights and have spread hundreds of kilometres from the nuclear reactor – but the public have never been told.

The release of the highly volatile radioxenon over several months last year was so concentrated that the plumes were detected in Melbourne up to two days later.

Other plumes were dragged out to sea by winds before drifting back over Sydney.

The Sunday Telegraph understands the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) decided against releasing a public statement at the time to avoid causing alarm.

Scientists at a nuclear testing station in Melbourne traced the source of the radioactive gases to Sydney after they picked up 10 specific events between November, 2008 and February last year.

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation International Monitoring System site in Melbourne contacted Lucas Heights after detecting the radioxenon isotope Xe-133.

They were told that 36 hours earlier the first “hot commissioning trials” at ANSTO’s Lucas Heights radioisotope facility for Molybdenum-99 had taken place.

Molybdenum-99 is produced by the fission technique – the intense neutron-bombardment of a highly purified uranium-235 – and is used in nuclear medicine.

While the nuclear reactor – and the government body that oversees it – insists the release of the radioxenon by-product were no threat to public safety, no one, including neighbours of the suburban Sydney plant, were informed.

“Xenon gases are highly volatile and, being inert, they are not susceptible to wet or dry atmospheric removal mechanisms,” a scientific report obtained by The Sunday Telegraph says.

“Consequently, once released to the atmosphere they are simply transported down-wind while radioactively decaying away.”

Significant amounts of the main gas detected – Xenon-133 – can be released during a nuclear reaction or a nuclear explosion.

While it is used in medical procedures, specialists are urged not to administer it to pregnant women and children.

Side effects of its use in medical procedures can include allergic reactions such as itching or hives, swelling of the face or hands, swelling or tingling in the mouth or throat, chest tightness, and trouble breathing.

The report into the release from Lucas Heights says the doses were “well below the annual limit for public exposure”.

Officials from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency said it was notified at the time and that the emissions were within public safety guidelines.

In 2006, ANSTO was forced to allay public fears after a leaked memo revealed xenon and krypton were released into the atmosphere following the rupture of a pipe.

August 29, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism | Leave a comment

GATES FOUNDATION INVESTS IN MONSANTO

Both will profit at expense of small-scale African farmers

AGRA Watch | August 25, 2010

Seattle, WA – Farmers and civil society organizations around the world are outraged by the recent discovery of further connections between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and agribusiness titan Monsanto. Last week, a financial website published the Gates Foundation’s investment portfolio, including 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock with an estimated worth of $23.1 million purchased in the second quarter of 2010 (see the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission). This marks a substantial increase from its previous holdings, valued at just over $360,000 (see the Foundation’s 2008 990 Form).

“The Foundation’s direct investment in Monsanto is problematic on two primary levels,” said Dr. Phil Bereano, University of Washington Professor Emeritus and recognized expert on genetic engineering. “First, Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well-being of small farmers around the world, as well as an appalling environmental track record. The strong connections to Monsanto cast serious doubt on the Foundation’s heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa and purported goal of alleviating poverty and hunger among small-scale farmers. Second, this investment represents an enormous conflict of interests.”

Monsanto has already negatively impacted agriculture in African countries. For example, in South Africa in 2009, Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to produce kernels and hundreds of farmers were devastated. According to Mariam Mayet, environmental attorney and director of the Africa Centre for Biosafety in Johannesburg, some farmers suffered up to an 80% crop failure. While Monsanto compensated the large-scale farmers to whom it directly sold the faulty product, it gave nothing to the small-scale farmers to whom it had handed out free sachets of seeds. “When the economic power of Gates is coupled with the irresponsibility of Monsanto, the outlook for African smallholders is not very promising,” said Mayet. Monsanto’s aggressive patenting practices have also monopolized control over seed in ways that deny farmers control over their own harvest, going so far as to sue—and bankrupt—farmers for “patent infringement.”

News of the Foundation’s recent Monsanto investment has confirmed the misgivings of many farmers and sustainable agriculture advocates in Africa, among them the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, who commented, “We have long suspected that the founders of AGRA—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—had a long and more intimate affair with Monsanto.” Indeed, according to Travis English, researcher with AGRA Watch, “The Foundation’s ownership of Monsanto stock is emblematic of a deeper, more long-standing involvement with the corporation, particularly in Africa.” In 2008, AGRA Watch, a project of the Seattle-based organization Community Alliance for Global Justice, uncovered many linkages between the Foundation’s grantees and Monsanto. For example, some grantees (in particular about 70% of grantees in Kenya) of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)—considered by the Foundation to be its “African face”—work directly with Monsanto on agricultural development projects. Other prominent links include high-level Foundation staff members who were once senior officials for Monsanto, such as Rob Horsch, formerly Monsanto Vice President of International Development Partnerships and current Senior Program Officer of the Gates Agricultural Development Program.

Transnational corporations like Monsanto have been key collaborators with the Foundation and AGRA’s grantees in promoting the spread of industrial agriculture on the continent. This model of production relies on expensive inputs such as chemical fertilizers, genetically modified seeds, and herbicides. Though this package represents enticing market development opportunities for the private sector, many civil society organizations contend it will lead to further displacement of farmers from the land, an actual increase in hunger, and migration to already swollen cities unable to provide employment opportunities. In the words of a representative from the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, “AGRA is poison for our farming systems and livelihoods. Under the philanthropic banner of greening agriculture, AGRA will eventually eat away what little is left of sustainable small-scale farming in Africa.”

A 2008 report initiated by the World Bank and the UN, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), promotes alternative solutions to the problems of hunger and poverty that emphasize their social and economic roots. The IAASTD concluded that small-scale agroecological farming is more suitable for the third world than the industrial agricultural model favored by Gates and Monsanto. In a summary of the key findings of IAASTD, the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) emphasizes the report’s warning that “continued reliance on simplistic technological fixes—including transgenic crops—will not reduce persistent hunger and poverty and could exacerbate environmental problems and worsen social inequity.” Furthermore, PANNA explains, “The Assessment’s 21 key findings suggest that small-scale agroecological farming may offer one of the best means to feed the hungry while protecting the planet.”

The Gates Foundation has been challenged in the past for its questionable investments; in 2007, the L.A. Times exposed the Foundation for investing in its own grantees and for its “holdings in many companies that have failed tests of social responsibility because of environmental lapses, employment discrimination, disregard for worker rights, or unethical practices.” The Times chastised the Foundation for what it called “blind-eye investing,” with at least 41% of its assets invested in “companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially-concerned philosophy.”

Although the Foundation announced it would reassess its practices, it decided to retain them. As reported by the L.A. Times, chief executive of the Foundation Patty Stonesifer defended their investments, stating, “It would be naïve…to think that changing the foundation’s investment policy could stop the human suffering blamed on the practices of companies in which it invests billions of dollars.” This decision is in direct contradiction to the Foundation’s official “Investment Philosophy”, which, according to its website, “defined areas in which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that [Bill and Melinda] find egregious. This is why the endowment does not invest in tobacco stocks.”

More recently, the Foundation has come under fire in its own hometown. This week, 250 Seattle residents sent postcards expressing their concern that the Foundation’s approach to agricultural development, rather than reducing hunger as pledged, would instead “increase farmer debt, enrich agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, degrade the environment, and dispossess small farmers.” In addition to demanding that the Foundation instead fund “socially and ecologically appropriate practices determined locally by African farmers and scientists” and support African food sovereignty, they urged the Foundation to cut all ties to Monsanto and the biotechnology industry.

AGRA Watch, a program of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice, supports African initiatives and programs that foster farmers’ self-determination and food sovereignty. AGRA Watch also supports public engagement in fighting genetic engineering and exploitative agricultural policies, and demands transparency and accountability on the part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AGRA.

August 28, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism | 1 Comment

The Sierra Club: How Support for Industrial Wind Technology Subverts Its History, Betrays Its Mission, and Erodes Commitment to the Scientific Method

Jon Boone | April 18, 2010

Between the Gush for Wind and the Hard Place of Reality

The physical nature and enormous size of industrial wind projects has caused a lot of blowback. Between Maryland and West Virginia, for example, there is potential for around 2000 wind turbines, each nearly 500-feet tall; they would be placed atop 400 miles of the Allegheny Mountain ridges. About 20 acres of forest must be cut to support each turbine—4-6 acres to accommodate the free flow of the wind per turbine; one or more large staging areas for each wind project; access road construction; and a variety of substations and transmission lines. Cumulatively, about 40,000 acres of woodlands would be transformed into an industrial energy plant far larger than any conventional facility. Most of this montane terrain contains rare habitat and many vulnerable wildlife species.

How can such a looming industrial presence be reconciled with the goals of maintaining choice natural habitat while reducing the impact of human activity? For the Sierra Club, the answer is: The use of siting guidelines and wildlife assessment studies that would restrict limited liability wind companies from placing their huge machinery in the most sensitive places and away from rare and threatened species of plants and animals. If the war on carbon is to be won, and if skyscraper-sized wind turbines are part of the price for winning that war, then accommodation must be made. In the words of one wind developer, “some will have to sacrifice if we’re to have the clean, green energy from the wind” replacing coal and putting a stop to mountaintop removal coal extraction practices.

More than a few Sierra Club members and local chapters have resisted the national organization’s encyclicals on wind precisely because such hulking intrusion seems inimical to environmental common sense. The chair of the Maryland Chapter’s Conservation Committee, one of the nation’s leading naturalists, resigned in large part because of this concern. In response to such dissidents, the Club’s national leadership insists that it, and not its member chapters, be the final arbiter of what wind projects meet its standards: “It is important for the Club to speak with a unified, clear voice in its reaction to wind energy projects. It will not be good for the Club if one chapter is focusing totally on concerns about impacts on birds while the chapter in the next state is urging the public to support wind projects as a crucial element in reversing the impacts of global warming.” The organization enforces its authority under threat of expulsion, as was the case when its executive chairman, Carl Pope, in the wake of another controversy, excommunicated the entire Florida 35,000-memmber chapter for four years.

To “manage the negative environmental impacts of wind,” the Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, the American Bird Conservancy, Greenpeace, and the Audubon Society all recommend guidelines that, if followed, provide wind projects with their environmental seal of approval. Even on public lands. And with no evident sense of irony for the Sierra Club—since this is a policy taken from Gifford Pinchot’s playbook. John Muir is likely turning in his grave.

Siting guidelines that appear to make the wind industry more environmentally friendly, cognitively dissonant as the prospect seems to be, make sense only if the premise behind the policy is true, only if the technology can back down coal and offset significant amounts of carbon emissions.

Reality Bites

What is the scientific evidence that age-old technologies like wind, dressed up in high couture fashion, can provide clean, reliable, affordable, secure electricity to the masses, as the ruminations of Jacobsen and the optimism of the Department of Energy suggest?

Astonishingly, with 35,000 industrial wind turbines extant on this continent, no coal farms have closed because of the wind technology, and there is no empirical evidence there is less coal or natural gas burned per unit of electricity produced as a specific consequence of it. Contrary to the hopes of the Sierra Club, wind evidently is not an alternate energy source.

When the provisional ideas of ongoing scientific inquiry become politicized and then supported by a concatenation of groups seeking to profit from the ideas, both financially and ideologically—when science meets James Cameron and becomes entertainment for the masses in order to sell soap or sophistry, then we’ll get flying pigs, everywhere. Wind is not progressive, cutting edge, or effective, as the Sierra Club maintains. It is rather antediluvian, uncivil, and dysfunctional.

As a justification for wind promotion, science has become, for the Sierra Club and nearly all prominent environmental groups, not a method of seeking truth, but rather propaganda employed to prosecute its war on carbon. They routinely confuse engineering mechanics with science, and publish all kinds of techno-gismo birth announcements about saving the earth from those badass Big Oil/Big Coal corporations. But rarely do they provide the consequent obituaries. Or demand measurement of actual wind performance, which is the essence of scientific inquiry.

Promoting siting guidelines for such a rude, intrusive, shaggy beast of a technology implies that if wind machines were properly situated—somewhere, just not in the Sierra Club’s neck of the woods—they might actually do some good. This is the thinking behind the movement known as Responsible Windpower—an oxymoron at virtually every descriptive level, for it does little more than give a second-story burglary ring a ladder and an alibi.

Citizen wind opposition to the outsized nature of the technology began as a “not-in-my-backyard” phenomenon, eventually becoming a prod for the Sierra Club’s current wind siting guidelines. Responsible Windpower campaigns gave succor to those who support wind as a credible energy source, allowing them to save face with mainline environmental groups while protecting hearth and home, and vulnerable wildlife, from the worst of wind’s gigantic presence.

The wind industry perversely encourages discussion about wind plant siting and wildlife studies, much in the way cigarette manufactures once encouraged health-warning labels. But debate over set backs, noise levels, proximity to vulnerable flora and fauna, etc, distracts from the central issue: whether the technology provides the benefits claimed for it. Even as this discussion takes place, however, limited liability wind companies routinely ignore siting prescriptions, knowing there’s virtually no enforcement against wrongdoing. Siting guideline discussions and he said/she said bird studies foster a lot of dithering.

At the very least, support for massive wind technology betrays sound environmental and scientific precepts, ideas that many knowledgeable environmentalists hold dear, while putting at risk vulnerable species and valuable habitat and furthering the cause of civil discord. Every environmental group has expressed grave concern about bird mortality and cell towers. Wind projects are much more problematic.

See also:

Toward a Better Understanding of Industrial Wind Technology

Michael Morgan | Allegheny Treasures | October 26, 2009

August 15, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Chernobyl: The Gift That Never Stops Giving

The threats to human health and the environment from Chernobyl fallout, scientists are now finding, will persist for a very long time.

By Robert Alvarez · IPS · August 13, 2010 

It’s been 24 years since the catastrophic explosion and fire occurred at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. The accident required nearly a million emergency responders and cleanup workers. According to a recent report published by the New York Academy of Medicine nearly one million people around the world have died from Chernobyl fallout.

Now we are finding that threats to human health and the environment from the radioactive fallout of this accident that blanketed Europe (and the rest of the world to a lesser extent) will persist for a very long time. There is an exclusionary zone near the reactor, roughly the size of Rhode Island (1000sq kilometers), which because of high levels of contamination, people are ostensibly not allowed to live there  for centuries to come. There are also “hot spots” through out Russia, Poland Greece, Germany, Italy, UK, France, and Scandinavia where contaminated live stock and other foodstuff continue to be removed from human consumption.

My friends tell me that a growing number of Ukrainians are immigrating to Youngstown, OH (where I grew up),Cleveland, Chicago, and other Ukrainian-American enclaves because of Chernobyl contamination threats.

Here are a few recent examples:

  • A  fast-growing number of wild boars in Germany are having to be destroyed and disposed as radioactive wastes.
  • The mammal population in the exclusionary zone near the reactor is declining, despite the absence of humans, indicative of  growing radiation damage to fauna and flora.
  • Wildfires in Russia appear to be spreading high levels of radioactive contamination from Chernobyl.

True to form, governments with major nuclear programs or ambitions are silent and are encouraging the view that it’s time we forget about Chernobyl.

August 13, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Nuclear Power | 1 Comment

Greening the desert; Eritrea’s Manzanar Mangrove miracle

By Thomas C. Mountain | Online Journal | July 6, 2010

ASMARA, Eritrea — Along the nearly barren desert shoreline of the Red Sea there can be found a miracle of green forest stretching over six miles (10 kilometers), the Manzanar Mangrove Project.

Started some 15 years ago on the shoreline of Zula Bay, once home to Africa’s lost civilization of Punt, a lush, green mangrove forest has been reestablished in the middle of thousands of miles of desert and is now providing an estuary for fish and shrimp as well as food for animals. Mangrove leaves and seeds provide almost the complete nutritional needs for goats, sheep and camels, thus providing the people of the area with milk and meat, which along with fish has been their sustenance of life from time immemorial.

All of this is the work of a Japanese American, Dr. Gordon Sato who took his personal fortune obtained through his medical inventions and used it to transform formerly barren sandy silt beaches into an emerald green jungle, 20 feet high, using salt water. That’s right, salt water can be used to reforest arid coastlines. .

All it takes is a little nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer wrapped in plastic with two punctures to allow a time release of the fertilizer. Bury this about two feet under the sand and mangroves can once again grow where they used to flourish, converting a desolate, sand blown coastline into a green miracle of sea life estuary and life sustaining forest.

The lowly mangrove, so often reviled as the source of fetid, insect and disease-ridden swamps, holds the key to fighting drought, coastal desertification, coastal erosion and a host of other problems being experienced by the world’s oceans. Mangroves ordinarily only grow where there is enough nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus not present in salt water that have been brought by fresh water runoff. With the thousands of years long desertification of much of the East and West African as well as West and South Asian coastline, once thriving mangrove forests are now gone, and mangroves are only found in a few isolated spots.

But all of that is changing, though one can only wonder why with all the talk about climate change, Dr. Sato is not the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to help him spread his miracle throughout the world.

Today, with his personal fortune spent, even though he has received environmental awards from the Rolex Foundation and the Asahi Foundation, funding has dried up and Dr. Sato’s work has reached its limit.

And the reason why may be explained by the three contradictory ideas, Manzanar, mangrove and miracle. First is the name, the Manzanar Project, named after the crime against humanity committed in the USA under the signature of two of the most famous “liberals” in 20th century USA history, Franklin Roosevelt and Earl Warren. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese Americans were victims of ethnic cleansing carried out under the orders of President Franklin Roosevelt, and the governor of California, and later chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, at the outbreak of WW2. Arrested, thrown in jail with all their property and possessions stolen from them and eventually imprisoned in concentrations camps, most often in the middle of some pretty nasty deserts, all done by leaders proclaimed as leading lights of liberalism in the USA. One of these camps was named Manzanar and, as a small boy, Dr. Sato found himself and his family imprisoned there, convicted of no crime yet treated as criminals, all for being guilty of having the wrong color skin.

Dr. Sato’s naming his mangrove project after such a crime is sure to anger the powers that be in the USA dominated aid agencies. On top of this mangroves and miracles are two words that are not used together, almost contradictory in concept in the minds of most in the so-called “First World.” Manzanar, mangroves and miracles, three very different concepts to say the least. You put them together inside Eritrea and you have another example of how news of another environmental breakthrough with global importance is being suppressed by those in power in the Western world, both official and non-governmental.

Stay tuned to the Online Journal for more news that the so-called free press in the West refuses to cover.

Thomas C. Mountain was, in a former life, an educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain at yahoo.com.

Copyright © Online Journal

July 6, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

BP Workers face Colombian Army

Fighting for Minimum Social, Environmental and Labour Agreements

By Claire Hall, Espacio Bristol-Colombia | The People’s Voice | July 3rd, 2010

A five month long worker and community mobilisation against BP in the Casanare region of Colombia has escalated after the Colombian army entered the BP installations with force and confronted workers who since the 23rd of May have been peacefully occupying BP installations in protest at BP´s failure to conclude negotiations with the workers and community.

At midday on Wednesday a heavily armed commando group of the National Colombian Army leapt over the security fence of the Tauramena Central Processing Facility and subjected the group of workers to physical and verbal aggression, including threats. Oscar Garcia, of the National Oil Workers Union said “this war-like handling of a group of workers is an excessive use of force and treats a labour conflict as though it were an issue of public order. This shows how BP is bent on war against workers who are only demanding that their fundamental rights be respected.”[i]

The calm response by the striking workers brought the situation temporarily under control but the army remains present and tensions are high. Colombia continues to have the highest level of trade union murders in the world with 17 trade unionists murdered so far this year. Edgar Mojica from the National Oil Workers Union said “It is no secret that since BP arrived in the early nineties we have not been able to organize workers until now due to the presence of paramilitary groups operating in the oil fields”.

At night workers sleep chained to machinery under temporary shelters as a precaution against any further attempts to violently remove them. Ramiro from the Movement for Dignity of Casanare said “BP thinks that we will give up, tired and afraid but we will put up with these conditions as this is a struggle for everyone. We will only leave here when BP signs an agreement on salary increases, more dignified working conditions, security guarantees for all involved in the mobilisations and honours the pre-agreements made in the environmental, human rights, social investment and goods and services commissions.”

They are saddened but not surprised at the measures they are forced to take to try to reach agreements with BP. The mobilisation started in February of this year. Workers were forced to take direct action and block access roads to BP’s installations after the oil corporation refused to recognise the workers rights to a union and to a collective bargaining agreement. The blockades were violently attacked by ESMAD, the notorious Colombian riot police, in an operation to end the protest.[ii]

This is not the first time that civil society movements against BP have been met with violence. In 2003, communities protested against BP, demanding action on ecological, social and labour issues. BP refused to negotiate. In the months following community leaders involved in the mobilisation were assassinated (2004 Oswaldo Vargas, 2005 Parmenio Parra).[iii] Furthermore, a preliminary public hearing held in 2007 in the UK on BP’s activities in Colombia confirmed that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that BP has a case to answer that it is complicit in the extermination of social organisations in Casanare as part of direct strategy to maximise profits.”[iv]

Despite the history of repression, the response to the ESMAD attack in February was overwhelming. Two thousand people marched in support, fifteen more road blockades spontaneously sprung up, community members and local businesses joined the strike and the Movement for the Dignity of Casanare was born. BP were forced to listen and agreed to participate in the five commissions. Popular assemblies where held to decide on the bargaining demands which were later presented to BP on the 23rd March. However, after two months of dialogue, the labour commission had made no advances and the current strike began.

Casanare is a region characterised by extreme levels of poverty, paradoxically considering the oil that flows out of the region for the USA. This poverty has been worsened by the environmental degradation caused by the oil exploration and extraction, primarily contamination and loss of water sources according to local farmers whose livelihoods depend on water.

Oscar Garcia said “We have heard about the BP incident in the USA. We send our condolences to the families and fellow workers of those who died due to the failure of BP to take the necessary measures to ensure safe operations and protect the lives of people working for them. Here in Colombia, BP has also shown their lack of respect for life. They have brought about a war that has left over 9000 people dead.”

He added “We categorically hold BP to blame for this latest catastrophe in the USA and we demand that BP repairs to the extent possible the damage they have caused. We extend our solidarity to the Northamerican people affected and we ask for your solidarity with the Casanarean people and you are welcome to visit and see how things are here.”

BP continues to provide support to the 16th Brigade, which was created in 1991 in order to provide security to the oilfields in Casanare. They have a long and cruel history of human rights violations, including: extrajudicial executions, disappearances, murders, torture, rape and the forced displacement of campesino communities. However the grave humanitarian crisis in Casanare and its relationship to the oil industry – in particular to BP – is not deterring the Movement for the Dignity of Casanare.

Ramiro concludes emphatically “Despite BP´s misinformation campaign we are determined and united and we will keep resisting with dignity. And if we can unite with people from the USA we will be even stronger and achieve much more”

  1. http://usofrenteobrero.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=840:arremetida-del-ejercito-nacional-contra-trabajadores-en-tauramena-casanare&catid=35:nacional&Itemid=143
  2. http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/events/26-upcoming-events/493-police-assault-bp-oil-workers-in-colombia
  3. http://espacio.org.uk/bp/CasanareMission2007Report.pdf
  4. http://espacio.org.uk/bp/PUBLIC_DECLARATION_Glasgow.pdf


July 3, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

‘Biggest thing in farming for 10,000 years on horizon’

Dirtboffins argue for lawn-style perennial grainfields

By Lewis Page • The Register • 25th June 2010

Agro-boffins in America say that mankind could be on the verge of the “biggest agricultural breakthrough in 10,000 years”, as researchers close in on “perennial grains”.

At the moment, most grain grown around the world has to be replanted after every crop. Farming so-called “annual” grain of this sort consumes a lot of resources and is hard on the land, which is especially worrying as half the world’s population lives off farmland which could easily be rendered unproductive by intensive annual grain harvests.

“People talk about food security,” says soil science prof John Reganold. “That’s only half the issue. We need to talk about both food and ecosystem security.”

Reganold and his fellow dirtboffin Jerry Glover argue that perennial grain – in addition to not needing replanting, so saving on passes of farm machinery over the ground, fuel etc – would have a much deeper and more powerful root system than annuals, rather like a well-kept lawn. This would mean that it used water much more efficiently; and water is often a major issue in agriculture and its impact on its surroundings.

Other benefits of a deep perennial root system beneath farmers’ fields would be less erosion and better carbon sequestration. Perhaps most tellingly of all, such a field might need as little as 3 per cent of the fertilisers required by annuals. Not only are nitrate fertilisers energy-intensive to make, they are also prone to washing out of fields to pollute water supplies, kill habitats and cause other eco mischief. Perennial fields would also require much less in the way of herbicides to control weeds.

At the moment, perennial grains capable of matching annuals don’t exist. However, Reganold and Glover argue that they can be bred with sufficient effort: it’s purely a matter of resources put into research. It’s perhaps worth noting that there’s not as much obvious revenue in perennials for major agro firms as there is in some kinds of annuals – there would be no continual requirement for new seed.

The two researchers, and many colleagues in the business, argue that with enough development cash perennial grain could be available in less than 20 years – representing, in their view, as great a step forward in food production as the original shift by the human race out of hunter-gathering and into farming in the first place.

The assembled dirt experts have convinced the editors of hefty boffinry mag Science, where their arguments are presented (subsciption required for full text).

®

June 30, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

EU and Israel collaborate on cleaner, quiter and deadlier aircraft engines

David Cronin | IPS | 22 June 2010

BRUSSELS — European Union subsidies earmarked for reducing air travel’s contribution to climate change may help develop deadlier warplanes than those already found in the world’s arsenals, Brussels officials have admitted.

Some 1.6 billion euros ($2 billion) has been allocated to the EU’s Clean Sky project, which aims to develop aircraft engines that emit half as much carbon dioxide as those now in use. With the funding being divided between industry and the European taxpayer, plane and engine manufacturers have stated that the project underscores their eagerness to be more ecologically responsible.

Yet a closer look at the glossy brochures promoting the scientific research initiative reveals that the list of participants reads like a who’s who of major arms producers from Europe and further afield. These include Dassault, EADS, Safran, Israel Aerospace Industries, Saab and Westland Helicopters.

Under the terms of their involvement, individual companies may apply for patents on innovations realized during the course of their research. The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, says that there will be nothing to stop such firms from using the technology they develop for military purposes.

Rudolf Strohmeier, deputy head of the Commission’s scientific research department, said that having EU-funded engines inserted into warplanes is “something which you can’t really exclude from the outset” as such engines are “easily switched over” from civilian to military aircraft.

“If a military airplane uses this type of technology, then it will be greener,” he told IPS. “But to my knowledge, this [potential military applications] is definitely not the objective.”

The participation of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in the project has drawn criticism from some human rights advocates. This firm supplied many of the weapons used by Israel in its attacks on Gaza during late 2008 and early 2009. Even though it is not a fully-fledged member of the EU, Israel is a participant in its scientific research program and has proven more adept at drawing down grants than most of the Union’s own states.

An EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Israeli firms had recently asked the Commission to support a project explicitly focused on military aircraft but the request was turned down. While the source said that the EU’s research activities are nominally civilian, no guarantees can be given that their fruits will not have military applications. “The Israelis don’t play by the same rules as everybody else,” the source added.

Frank Slijper from the Dutch Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: “It is beyond my comprehension how Israeli arms companies get Brussels money for their research. This really is a very weird situation. As far as I know, IAI does very little civilian business, it is just an arms company. IAI has made a clear and direct contribution in the Middle East against the Palestinians and the Lebanese.”

As well as lowering their emissions of climate-changing gases, Clean Sky’s goals include the introduction of aircraft that consume less fuel and are less noisy. A project of this nature is bound to prove enticing for arms companies, Slijper added. “Mostly, they say it works the other way around: subsidies that go into European military aircraft research have a spin-off effect for civilian aircraft research work. But this could be an example where subsidies for environmental flying ultimately also benefit the military. The more silent aircraft are, the closer they can get to where they can pick their targets to bomb before anyone might notice.”

Eric Dautriat, who directs the team overseeing the implementation of Clean Sky, said “I don’t see what the problem is” with involving arms manufacturers, who will have “the same rules of participation” as the other firms and research institutes involved.

Due to be completed in 2017, Clean Sky is one of the largest research projects ever financed by the EU. Gareth Williams, a representative of Airbus, the French aviation firm, said that air traffic tends to double every 15 years and is likely to double once more in the coming 15 years. “With this growth in the sector, we must address the issues around emissions,” he told a conference held in Brussels 18 June… Full article

All rights reserved, IPS — Inter Press Service (2010).

June 22, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Responsibly Destroying the World’s Peasantry

Turkish Weekly | 11 June 2010

The World Bank, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretariat recently presented seven “Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment.” The principles seek to ensure that large-scale land investments result in “win-win” situations, benefiting investors and directly affected communities alike. But, though well-intended, the principles are woefully inadequate.

It has been several years since private investors and states began buying and leasing millions of hectares of farmland worldwide in order to secure their domestic supply of food, raw commodities, and biofuels, or to get subsidies for carbon storage through plantations. Western investors, including Wall Street banks and hedge funds, now view direct investments in land as a safe haven in an otherwise turbulent financial climate.

The scope of the phenomenon is enormous. Since 2006, between 15 and 20 million hectares of farmland, the equivalent of the total arable surface of France, have been the subject of negotiations by foreign investors.

The risks are considerable. All too often, notions such as “reserve agricultural land,” or “idle land,” are manipulated out of existence, sometimes being used to designate land on which many livelihoods depend, and that is subject to long-standing customary rights. The requirement that evictions take place only for a valid “public purpose,” with fair compensation, and following consultation of those affected, is honored more in the breach than in the observance.

In Africa, rural land is generally considered to be state-owned, and is treated by governments as if it were their own. In Latin America, the gap between large landowners and small peasants is widening. In South Asia, many populations are currently being driven off their ancestral land to make room for large palm-oil plantations, special economic zones, or re-forestation projects.

The set of principles that have been proposed to discipline the phenomenon remain purely voluntary. But what is required is to insist that governments comply fully with their human rights obligations, including the right to food, the right of all peoples to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources, and the right not to be deprived of the means of subsistence. Because the principles ignore human rights, they neglect the essential dimension of accountability.

There is also a clear tension between ceding land to investors for the creation of large plantations, and the objective of redistributing land and ensuring more equitable access to it. Governments have repeatedly committed themselves to these goals, most recently at the 2006 International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.

The underlying problem runs deeper than how the principles have been formulated. The promotion of large-scale land investment is based on the belief that combating hunger requires boosting food production, and that supply has been lagging because of a lack of investment in agriculture. Hence, if investment can be attracted to agriculture, it should be welcomed, and whichever rules are imposed should encourage it, not deter it.

But both the diagnosis and the remedy are incorrect. Hunger and malnutrition are not primarily the result of insufficient food production; they are the result of poverty and inequality, particularly in rural areas, where 75% of the world’s poor still reside.

In the past, agricultural development has prioritized large-scale, capitalized forms of agriculture, neglecting smallholders who feed local communities. And governments have failed to protect agricultural workers from exploitation in an increasingly competitive environment. It should come as no wonder that smallholders and agricultural laborers represent a combined 70% of those who are unable to feed themselves today.

Accelerating the shift towards large-scale, highly mechanized forms of agriculture will not solve the problem. Indeed, it will make it worse. The largest and best-equipped farms are highly competitive, in the sense that they can produce for markets at a lower cost. But they also create a number of social costs that are not accounted for in the market price of their output.

Smallholders, by contrast, produce at a higher cost. They are often very productive by hectare, since they maximize the use of the soil, and achieve the best complementary use of plants and animals. But the form of agriculture that they practice, which relies less on external inputs and mechanization, is highly labor-intensive.

If smallholders compete in the same markets as the large farms, they lose. Yet they render invaluable services, in terms of preservation of agro- and biodiversity, local communities’ resilience to price shocks or weather-related events, and environmental conservation.

The arrival of large-scale investment in agriculture will alter the relationship between these worlds of farming. It will exacerbate highly unequal competition. And it could cause massive social disruptions in the world’s rural areas.

Certainly, agricultural investment should develop responsibly. But, while many have seen the scares provoked by spiking food prices in recent years as an opportunity for investment, opportunities should not be mistaken for solutions.

To re-launch agriculture in the developing world would require an estimated $30 billion per year, representing 0.05% of global GDP. But how much is invested in agriculture matters less than the type of agriculture that we support. By supporting further consolidation of large-scale monocultures in the hands of the most powerful economic actors, we risk widening further the gap with small-scale, family farming, while pushing a model of industrial farming that is already responsible for one-third of man-made greenhouse-gas emissions today.

It is regrettable that, instead of rising to the challenge of developing agriculture in a way that is more socially and environmentally sustainable, we act as if accelerating the destruction of the global peasantry could be accomplished responsibly.

June 12, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | 1 Comment

Weapons dump in Utah west desert is a deadly ‘cache’ 22

U.S. must destroy its known munitions, but how many are there?

By Matthew D. LaPlante – The Salt Lake Tribune – 06/06/2010

In recent self-congratulatory pronouncements, the U.S. Army heralded two “milestones” in its battle to bring an end to a frightening era of warfare.

In April, the Army announced it had destroyed all of the “non-stockpile,” or non-functioning, weapons it had declared nationwide when the United States entered into a treaty known as the Chemical Weapons Convention. Last week, officials at Utah’s Deseret Chemical Depot said they had destroyed the last mustard agent-filled munitions in their arsenal.

But in both cases, the Army left out a big, dirty and dangerous part of the picture: Thousands of munitions — many of which still hold the remnants of deadly chemical agents — have been left, poorly protected and broadly unaccounted for, in Utah’s vast west desert.

The weapons have never been declared to treaty partners. And the Army has no idea when, or if, it will ever do so.

‘An environmental nightmare’

Just to the south of Deseret’s colossal, modern weapons incinerator lies a scene worthy of a post-apocalyptic movie set.

Decades worth of toxic military trash — leaking paint cans and broken fire extinguishers, bulging oil drums and shattered tear gas canisters — fill ditches the size of swimming pools. Grenades, explosive fuses and cluster bombs litter the ground. In some areas, the soil has a green hue; military environmental experts believe that’s where napalm was dumped.

But the pièce de résistance is an artificial mountain of charred mortar shells, many of which are thought to carry the hardened remnants of one of the most vile weapons ever invented. […]

“This is an environmental nightmare,” said Troy Johnson, Deseret’s environmental program manager, during a tour of the dump last fall. […]

‘We can’t say for sure’

Army officials note that the weapons dumped in Utah’s desert couldn’t be dropped into a mortar tube or loaded into a rocket. “Non-stockpile” is the technical term for such discarded munitions.

But that alone doesn’t exempt the weapons from the treaty. Under the terms of the convention, any pieces “recovered” from places like the Deseret dump must be acknowledged and destroyed.

What constitutes a recovered weapon, however, appears to be a matter of semantics, budgets and national priorities.

Only about 1,200 non-stockpile munitions — mostly weapons captured from enemy nations during World War II — were declared to Russia and other treaty partners when the convention went into effect in 1997. Those are the weapons that, 13 years later, the Army is crowing about having destroyed from a small number of sites outside Utah.

About 1,200 more weapons pieces have been recovered since then as the military has cleared land once used for testing, said Chemical Munitions Agency spokeswoman Karen Jolley Drewen. “And we’re working on destroying those now,” she said.

How many weapons have yet to be recovered? “I don’t know,” Drewen said.

No one does.

The Army has identified 224 potential burial sites — including 48 in Utah. But there has been no estimate of how many potential chemical munitions those sites hold.

At the Utah site alone are “hundreds of thousands of rounds,” according to Johnson, the Deseret environmental program manager. In order to declare the weapons safe, under the treaty, “we would have to go through every one to make sure they are empty,” he said.

“Until those pieces are recovered, we can’t assess them and see what they are,” Drewen said. “We may have a real good idea of what they are, but we can’t say for sure.”

And the Army has little incentive to do so.

‘Until they’re dug up’

Under its treaty obligations, the U.S. has until 2012 to complete the destruction of its chemical arsenal, tightly guarded at Deseret and other sites. No one believes it will hit that mark — or even come close. Army officials say it may take another decade or longer to destroy the chemical munitions the U.S. declared under the convention.

And that’s a pretty good incentive not to attempt anything resembling recovery of the munitions at Deseret, said Lenny Siegel, director of the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. “Places like Deseret aren’t covered under the treaty until they’re dug up,” said Siegel, who studies chemical-weapons issues for the center. “So of course there’s a reticence by the military of doing anything.”

But even if they were inclined to do so, Army officials say they don’t know how they would clean up the Utah dump.

“Deseret Chemical Depot is not unique in its past practices for disposal of munitions,” said Deseret’s communications chief, Alain Grieser. “Similar disposal operations were conducted at many military installations around the country over the same time period. However, the unique situation at DCD is that we have a combination of conventional and chemical agent munitions disposed in the same areas.”

The Army made an effort to collect the munitions from the site for destruction in the 1980s, Grieser said, but ultimately abandoned the task when it became clear that the bomb-by-bomb effort was too dangerous to continue, given the tremendous amount of unexploded ordnance littering the ground.

The current thinking is to employ robots — officials acknowledge that Disney’s Wall-E often comes to mind– to sort and collect the weapons. But that effort won’t likely begin for years to come, if it does at all.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie’

Given the years that have passed, and the dangers involved, Siegel said it might be best to just “let sleeping dogs lie” — though with one important caveat: “The argument I would make is that there needs to be an effort made to determine whether there is a pathway to human exposure,” he said.

The Army has done sporadic monitoring of groundwater underneath the dump, which rests at nearly a mile above sea level. From the limited data it has collected, the water appears to be moving away from population centers like Salt Lake City and Tooele, though monitors say they’ll need years of additional data to know for sure.

Pierce, the Healthy Environment Alliance leader from Utah, says she is troubled but not surprised by the Army’s lack of certainty, despite the decades it has had to study the dangers. “It’s not unlike the Army,” she said, “not to have an exit strategy.”

mlaplante@sltrib.com / blogs.sltrib.com

June 8, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism | Leave a comment

Compulsory Armageddon

By JOHN V. WALSH | May 24, 2010

The April 20 Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is a gift from British Petroleum that keeps on giving – 11 human lives lost, 2,940,000 gallons of oil daily a 2,500 square mile oil slick, underwater plumes ten miles across, softball size tar balls washing up on beaches of Louisiana, marshes and wildlife wiped out, the regional economy dealt a body blow and now the oil looping around Florida and up the Atlantic Coast where the Driller in Chief, Barack Obama, outdoing George W. Bush, recently approved new drilling.

Key to the disaster is the malfunction of several devices and procedures designed to prevent a blowout.   Some simply malfunctioned, one perhaps because one its batteries was dead; others were not properly implemented or not implemented at all.  Such fail-safe devices inevitably fail – even when they are put in place.

Days later on May 1 in Boston, my home town, an enormous metal collar, the latest in technology, connecting parts of a water pipeline blew out and washed away, leaving 2 million with no potable water for days.  The collar has yet to be found and the reason for the failure remains a mystery – at least to the public.  Of course aqua disasters are nothing new to Boston, with the Big Dig, another engineering marvel, leaking like a sieve, a malfunction less well known than the ceiling collapse which killed one hapless motorist.

In the interval between those two calamities on April 26, fell the anniversary of the nuclear reactor disaster in1986 in Chernobyl, now a ghost town as are neighboring villages in the “zone of alienation.”  Here again fail-safe measures failed and the impact in terms of lives lost and to be lost numbers in the thousands and perhaps much higher.   Of course such a “zone of alienation” will be radioactive for a long time to come.  That, however, has not deterred the Obama administration from moving forward on nuclear power plants, going again where no Bush dared to go before.

In physics, there is a maxim attributed to Murray Gell-Mann, “Whatever is not forbidden is compulsory, “ which demands a stronger statement of Murphy’s Law, “If anything can go wrong, it must.”

These events all came upon us in the weeks leading up to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference at the UN on May 3 where the United States wasted the opening trying to demonize Iran, a ploy which was foiled in the eyes of most of the world by the tough and wily Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who called for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, much to the horror of the United States and Israel.

On May 4, I contemplated all these events while sitting in on a national board meeting of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), US affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the recipient in 1985 of the Nobel Peace Prize, so recently besmirched by our hawkish Laureate in Chief.   As we discussed the details of the world’s nuclear arsenals, I was reminded again of the 3000 nuclear warheads maintained by the U.S. and Russia in silos and on submarines on hair trigger alert, technically known as “Launch on Warning”.  Should these weapons of mass destruction ever escape control, the result would make the worst of the dubious projections on Global Warming resemble a beach party.  Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of humans would die, and the entire species would be put at risk.

But of course we have fail-safe devices on these criminal instruments, don’t we?   It should be clear that such devices are not subject to failure only on BP drilling platforms or on Boston water mains or Russian nuclear power plants. In fact such mechanisms of control have nearly failed at least five times since the end of the Cold War.  For example on January 25, 1995 the U.S. launch of a weather satellite from Norway to study the Northern Lights was misinterpreted by Russian radar as the beginning of a nuclear attack on Russia.  (Someone forgot to notify the Russians!)  The vodka-soaked Boris Yeltsin was given five minutes to press his wobbly finger to the button.   For whatever reason Yeltsin demurred.  (Famously, Ronald Reagan was not worried about such matters because he believed that the missiles could be recalled, an ignorance as dangerous as any form of dipsomania.)  And then there is the matter of the recent collision of French and British submarines armed with a likely total of more than 100 nuclear warheads on board.

It is certainly a crime of enormous proportions to keep humanity in this state of peril, and IPPNW and PSR call for its termination at once as an urgent first step in de-nuclearization.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies the continuation of this hair-trigger nuclear standoff.  Whatever can go wrong eventually must go wrong.  It is compulsory.

It would be a mistake to believe that the general public is not interested in or frightened by nuclear Armageddon.  Whenever the U.S. Empire wants to go after an inconvenient country, the specter of WMD, most notably nuclear weapons, is raised.  Thus, for Iraq in 2003 and thus now for Iran.   The possibility of taking these weapons off hair trigger alert and removing the great bulk of them is a task to which the public is open.  It cannot be relegated to a time long after Obama has departed this earth, as he has suggested.  The stakes are too high, and we have been lucky for a little too long.

John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

May 28, 2010 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

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