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”
- 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
- http://www.colombiasolidarity.org.uk/events/26-upcoming-events/493-police-assault-bp-oil-workers-in-colombia
- http://espacio.org.uk/bp/CasanareMission2007Report.pdf
- http://espacio.org.uk/bp/PUBLIC_DECLARATION_Glasgow.pdf
‘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).
®
The Bhopal Disaster: an ongoing tragedy
By Saffi Ullah Ahmad | Pulse Media | June 26, 2010
Twenty five years after the world’s biggest industrial disaster, Union Carbide’s old pesticide factory remains untouched, haunting the crowded city of Bhopal, a constant reminder of the region’s darkest night.
On the night of 3 December 1984 the lethal gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) alongside other noxious fumes, engulfed the city of Bhopal and killed thousands. It is thought that the disaster has claimed 25,000 lives thus far, and adversely affected over 500,00. Gross negligence by Union Carbide is widely viewed as the cause of the tragedy.
Earlier last week, after a quarter century of waiting and sloppy, almost reluctant court action, lamentable sentences were passed down to seven Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) officials. Sentences of two years were administered to some of those presiding over the corporation when the tragedy occurred; a small group of incredibly wealthy Indian men, all in their 70’s, one of whom is a billionaire, and none of whom are expected to serve their sentences. In addition to the sentencing, each of the seven men were fined a paltry £1400, an amount which would barely pay for the yearly healthcare of one of the victims, let alone serve as meaningful punishment for this appalling crime.
These convictions are so far the only to have materialized in a case that was opened the day after the tragedy in 1984. Those ultimately responsible for the tragedy, namely the corporation’s CEO and equally negligent Western officials, remain unpunished.
Survivors and campaigners have been outraged, calling last week’s decision an ‘insult’. However, as we are about to see, this is only the most recent of a long history of insults.
‘That night’
In 1969, a pesticide factory was shoddily built by Union Carbide (UC) on the outskirts of Bhopal.
As noted by Indra Sinha, controversially in the late 70s following the acquirement of several licenses, UC executives decided that the First World War gas MIC, an incredibly volatile substance 500 times deadlier than hydrogen cyanide, would be stored on site. MIC was to be used as a cost-effective intermediary for the production of the pesticide Carbaryl, even though other manufacturers had refused to use the substance on the grounds of safety. Although chemical engineers recommended, if absolutely necessary, that the gas remain stored in the smallest quantities, on this particular site the decision was taken to store the substance in a giant tank. Equally alarmingly is the fact that UC had opted to use previously unproven technology in the Bhopal plant’s MIC unit, and decided not to store the gas at an identical installation in West Virginia.
Following a poor start owing to local farmers not being able to afford their products, UC bosses decided to go on a cost cutting spree which involved the reckless enforced redundancy of maintenance staff, the use of cheaper, often defective materials in repair work, and the disengagement of safety systems such as the MIC unit’s refrigerator (the gas remains more stable when cooled). The few maintenance staff that did remain were expected to understand English safety manuals even though very few had a grasp of the language.
A 1982 safety audit by US engineers noted the filthy condition of the plant, including corroding pipelines and faulty valves, and warned of dangerous toxic release. As the situation worsened and minor gas leaks began to occur, often injuring and even killing workers, journalists and factory staff began warning locals of a terrible danger. Notably, Raj Keswani wrote a series of articles in which he claimed Bhopal was ‘about to be annihilated’ and begged the region’s Chief Minister, unsuccessfully, to investigate the factory before it became ‘Hitler’s gas chamber’.
On the night of 2 December 1984, following an explosive reaction with water, a deadly stream of gas began to seep out of the Bhopal plant’s MIC tank, as all six safety systems designed to contain such a leak failed. The density of the gas, accompanied by a gentle breeze, ensured it rolled along the ground and gradually enveloped the city. Across the city people were waking up in agony, water streaming from their eyes and noses, coughing violently as the gas attacked eye and lung tissue, as well as the central nervous system. No one quite knew what was happening, just that they should run, in whatever clothes they were wearing. In total panic, locals ran alongside dogs and even cattle, with several people being trampled to death in the ensuing commotion.
People were vomiting uncontrollably, frothing at the mouth, suffering visual impairment, and losing control of their bowels – passing urine as they ran. Others suffered convulsions, writhing uncontrollably in the moments before their end. Not even the unborn were spared; over half of all pregnant women caught up in the commotion suffered spontaneous abortions. An Indian Doctor on the scene famously stated ‘Tonight, the Bhopalis are going through Hiroshima’.
By morning Bhopal resembled a scene from hell. In all, 40 tons of MIC which wreaks havoc upon the human body in the tiniest of proportions, had escaped and thousands of bodies were scattered across the old city — along narrow alley ways, road sides and on lawns. In the days to come, the leaves of trees within roughly 40 square miles of the factory were to turn yellow, wither and drop off. Depending on religious custom, some bodies were to be buried in mass graves, and others burnt on mass pyres. Although the authorities give more conservative figures (around the 3000 mark), others estimate up to 8,000 people died that night and anywhere between 15- 25,000 since the event.
Survivors overwhelmed hospitals in which bewildered junior doctors had no idea what treatments to administer. Many were rubbing their eyes with sewage water to ease the searing pain.
Exacerbating the situation, the officials at UC refused to release extensive information they had gathered following years of internal research on the effects of MIC on the human body, nor the exact make up of the gas, calling them ‘trade secrets’, and fearing a dip in profits. With doctors having no proper treatment protocols to follow, the number of deaths multiplied and excessive amounts of drugs for temporary relief, such as steroids, antibiotics and psychotic drugs became the mainstay of medical care, each often causing their own severe side effects.
Roughly 500,000 were injured through exposure to the gas, which in the absence of winds, lingered in the city for days. Ailments directly linked to the disaster include blindness, respiratory difficulties, a variety of cancers and gynecological problems. Many survivors today cannot walk a few steps without gasping for breath, and others suffer sensory delusions, hearing voices in their heads. In addition to the multitude of medical conditions experienced by the victims, the situation wasn’t at all helped by the central government’s abrupt and unexplained decision to stop all research into the medical effects of the gas cloud in 1994.
The second wave of casualties
Adil
Today, instead of leaking gas into the skies, the old UC factory leaks deadly chemicals into the soil and ultimately into the water supply of locals.
Approximately 8,000 tons of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals lie abandoned in the old plant, including mercury, due in large part to a lack of political willpower to enforce the financing of a multimillion dollar cleanup operation. Over two decades of monsoons have washed much of these chemicals in to an underground aquifer which feeds into wells and boreholes used by locals to extract drinking water.
Having no other water supply, many of the locals have been forced to effectively poison themselves by drinking this contaminated water over the years since the disaster. The chemicals leaking from the old plant have been directly linked to a shocking variety of conditions including: skin problems, aches and pains, headaches, nausea, dizziness, anxiety, constant exhaustion, kidney failure, diabetes, a range of cancers, and tuberculosis. Not only are the original survivors still being punished, but so is a subsequent generation; prior gas exposure to mothers coupled with the consumption of these chemicals has led to thousands of gruesome birth defects, with many newborns barely recognizably human, and widespread growth retardation in children.
Despite the Supreme Court ordering that affected children be afforded health insurance, over 100,000 remain without any, and with the majority of affected families being of low social status or caste, outsiders are often reluctant to help, treating victims as untouchables.
UC likely knew of the dangers of such contamination from as early as 1980, when cattle mysteriously began dying in nearby fields. A subsequent internal study in 1989 confirmed this and UC chose not to share these findings with locals, lest cries for compensation multiply. […]
As for levels of contamination, a major water and soil study was conducted by Greenpeace in 1999. After testing samples in and around the factory, deadly chemicals were found everywhere, including in hand pumps that gushed out drinking water. In the water, levels of carbon tetrachloride and chloroform were found several hundred times higher than the US Environmental Protection Agency limits. In the soil, levels of mercury were found to be anywhere up to 6 million times higher than those found in uncontaminated soil. Similarly, organochlorides such as the banned pesticide DDT were present throughout the region.
More recent reports include one released in 2009 by the Sambhavna Trust which show a presence of large quantities of the aforementioned chemicals, as well as nickel, chromium, lead and others in vegetables, and even in the breast milk of nursing mothers. As a result of ongoing and horrific birth defects, mothers in the area had become too scared to breast feed their own children.
‘People are ill in the communities. Babies are sick. There are many deformed births. It’s as if they really hate us. As if they’re trying to punish us for protesting when they gassed us before and killed our families.’ These were the words of Sunil Kumar, an orphaned community leader (following the catastrophe), who went on to commit suicide some years ago.
As each monsoon washes more and more chemicals in to the area’s ground water, an ever increasing number of people are becoming sick. According to the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, upwards of 150,000 remain chronically ill and over 50,000 are not able to work.
The court battle
The day after the disaster began one of the longest running prosecutions in India’s history. Within four days of the tragedy, UC’s CEO Warren Anderson was allowed by Indian authorities to fly back — on a government plane — to the US on bail, never to return.
Recognizing a potential easy ride in Indian courts, UC managed to persuade a US court that the case be heard in India. The Manhattan District Court agreed on the provision that UC Corporation agree to abide by the Indian courts’ decision. However, when the Indian courts summoned US executives to answer criminal charges, UC executives were advised by their lawyers to claim Indian courts had no jurisdiction over them. They have been absconding ever since.
In 1989 Rajiv Gandhi’s government came to an out of court settlement with Union Carbide India Limited without consulting survivors, under which $470m — the exact sum UC was afforded by their insurers — would be paid in compensation resolving all outstanding legal issues.
At first glance this figure may appear significant, but after being divided between roughly 550,000 people, and with various administrative problems, it amounted to approximately $500 per victim to cope with a lifetime of misery, or, as Indra Sinha points out, 7p a day. This is the cost of a cup of tea. Prior to this settlement, victims had received $5 per month, and stunningly, even this figure was stingily deducted from the final pay out. Amazingly, UC also failed to take responsibility for the disaster, speaking instead of ‘sabotage’.
Just how derisory this figure was can be seen when we compare it to the pay out after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, where even Alaskan sea otters were afforded more compensation than Bhopal victims, and the recent BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP recently set aside a $20 billion fund for victims along the coastline. Not surprisingly, once news of the UC payout emerged, with investors having expected a much larger sum, their share price went through the roof.
To add to the locals’ problems, this settlement completely ignored environmental damage, despite the ever worsening contamination in the area, and overlooked second and third generation victims. Also, UC’s lawyers saw to it that further court action couldn’t be taken in the US.
In 1994, most probably as a strategy to avoid further liability and in light of threats by Indian courts to seize their assets, UC sold its Indian branch to Eveready Industries India Limited.
UC was then officially purchased by the Dow Chemical Company in 2001, a controversial corporation with a murky history. Whereas Dow was quick to set aside billions for UC asbestos workers in Texas, it immediately denied liability for UC’s doings in Bhopal, stating that the 1989 payment fulfilled their financial responsibility to the disaster.
Having legally acquired all of UC’s assets and liabilities, Dow continues to refuse to clean up the site, administer appropriate compensation or even disclose the composition of the gas leak, despite pleas even by its own shareholders, sending a dangerous message to other corporate giants.
With regard to criminal charges, in 1996 initial charges of culpable homicide were controversially diluted to criminal negligence, reducing potential maximum jail sentences of UC officials from ten years to two, explaining the recently administered sentences.
UC and Dow have been aided along the way not just by the underdeveloped tort law framework in India and the clogged legal system, but also corrupt bureaucrats and potentially even judges. Indian officials and politicians, most notably those from the BJP, are also known to have taken money from Dow, often going on to claim on public platforms that there is no water contamination in Bhopal. The prospect of Dow bringing more business to India has made officials even more reluctant to administer justice to the Bhopalis. With regard to Anderson, the Bhopal Medical Appeal believes that ‘neither the American nor the Indian government seem interested in disturbing him with an extradition.’
In light of the central governments ongoing lack of action, in 2004 campaigners for a clean water supply successfully petitioned the Supreme Court of India, which ordered the piping of safe water into affected communities. When this didn’t happen, several mothers took their damaged children to government offices in protest, only to meet severe hostility including a beating with police sticks. Many police officers wept as they carried out their orders. In a related instance in 2009, survivors chained themselves to railings outside government offices only to receive a similar response… Full article
*Shanu and Adil source site images: http://galleries.bhopal.org/main.php?g2_itemId=30
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).
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
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
ADM’s New Frontiers: Palm Oil Deforestation and Child Labor
By Charlie Cray | CorpWatch | May 18th, 2010
ADM used to be known as the country’s corporate welfare king, and its top executives drew headlines as they perp-walked to prison. That was then, when the company ran elaborate price-fixing schemes in the lysine and other global commodity markets. This is now: For the second year in a row, ADM topped Fortune magazine’s list of most admired food production companies.
But underneath its improved public image, ADM’s major forays into new markets, including cocoa and palm oil, are raising concerns. This time they center on the impacts of the global food conglomerate’s supply chain, and on charges of complicity in forced child labor and massive deforestation.
The Palm Oil Food Chain of Destruction
About 40 million tons of palm oil worth $20 billion is produced each year – 85 percent of it by Indonesia and Malaysia, where giant oil palm plantations account for the highest rates of deforestation in the world. As of 2009, more than seven million hectares of palm oil plantations had been planted where forests super-rich in diversity once stood. Within a couple of decades, the deforestation is projected to triple to more than 20 million hectares.
While most palm oil is processed for cooking oil, biofuels and other uses in China and Southeast Asia, U.S. consumption has tripled in the past five years, making North America the fastest-growing market. Most palm oil exported to the United States – one million tons in 2008/2009 – is extracted from the hard kernel at the center of the fruit, and processed into a variety of ingredients for food products, including vitamins.
U.S. consumers might be shocked to learn that an estimated 10 percent of common grocery goods – including chips and crackers, ice cream, margarine, instant noodles, chocolate, cereals, canned vegetables, soaps, shampoos, cosmetics and detergents – already contain some kind of palm oil ingredient. They might be doubly shocked to learn that palm oil is implicated in the same health problems that are driving trans fats out of the market. Merely replacing trans fatty acids with other artery-clogging saturated vegetable fats not only does little to bring down the incidence of heart attacks and strokes (still the top killers in America for public health), but it is also fueling deforestation and social injustice halfway across the planet.
Rather than replace palm oils and trans fats with healthier soy, corn, sunflower and peanut oils grown closer to home on land long used for agriculture, food producers are destroying virgin habitat while giving consumers no notification and little choice.
Vast areas of Indonesian rainforest have already been lost to palm oil monoculture, which has wiped out the habitats of precious Indonesian species, including orangutans, rhinos, Asian tigers, elephants, the Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing (the largest butterfly in the world), and the slow lori – a primate described as one of the cutest mammals on the planet.
The industry’s rapid expansion has also driven many small landholders and indigenous communities from ancestral lands, leaving them bereft of their traditional livelihoods and food security.
“Oil palm plantations have violated many local communities’ rights,” says Nordin, a leader of the Indonesian NGO Sawit Watch. “Their land has been wrestled away from them, their community members imprisoned, and their environment destroyed.” … Full article
Australia: Save Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary from uranium mining, says Liberal Senator
Arkaroola too precious to mine
Minchin , The Independent Weekly, 14 May, 2010
South Australia’s Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary is too precious to turn over to uranium mining, South Australian Senator Nick Minchin says.
The Liberal Senator says he is appalled that the Australian Workers Union is in favour of opening the sanctuary to the uranium industry. The senator and the Greens want a complete ban on uranium mining in the Arkaroola reserve in SA’s mid-north……
“I am shocked and appalled that the Australian Workers Union is advocating the destruction of the Arkaroola Wilderness Sanctuary,” Senator Minchin said today.
“It is extraordinary that the AWU wants to turn one of Australia’s most precious and valuable natural wonders into a factory for the production of uranium……
SA Greens MP Mark Parnell says although not all of the 450 submissions to the State Government are currently available online, his information is that over 82 per cent of the published submissions want less mining.
The SA Museum, academics, scientists, business operators and even mining companies are saying Arkaroola is too precious to mine, he said in a statement.
Last year the South Australian Government suspended Marathon Resources’ drilling operations at Mt Gee in the sanctuary, after an investigation found the company had inappropriately buried drill cuttings and other waste material there.
Genetically modified crops failing worldwide
Tom Lewis | Environmental News Examiner | May 17, 2010
Weeds like this pigweed, that have become immune to Roundup, are devastating American farms.
Photo by H. Zell via Wikimedia
The Green Revolution — a misleading name applied by PR firms to the onset of globalized, chemical-intensive, industrial agriculture that is anything but friendly to the environment — is coming unraveled around the world, bringing devastation to farmers from the plains of China to the plains of America.
It was revealed last week that China is dealing with an explosive infestation of the formerly inconsequential mirid bug in its orchards and cotton fields. The bug’s population exploded as a result of widespread planting of cotton that had been genetically altered to be resistant to the bollworm, formerly cotton’s worst enemy. Cotton farmers stopped spraying insecticides, since their plants shrugged off the bollworms, and thus allowed other insects, especially the mirid bug, to multiply without interference.
According to a study published last week by Kongming Wu at the State Key Laboratory for Biology of Plant Diseases and Insect Pests in Beijing (reported by Reuters), the mirid bug is now laying waste to orchards and cotton fields in at least six provinces in Northern China, affecting 10 million farmers. Controlling one pest, as chemical companies boast frequently that they have discovered how to do, inevitably unleashes others in a cascade of unintended consequences. The lesson in this case, according to Wu, is that “We have to study the whole ecosystem.” Indeed.
Similar effects are being felt by farmers in the American breadbasket as the result of their reliance on a single chemical. For decades, chemical farming was limited by the fact that pesticides were terribly persistent and toxic, and while they could kill broadleaf weeds without affecting cereal crops with narrow leaves, they could not distinguish between narrow-leafed weeds and those cereal crops, such as corn. Then Monsanto came up with Roundup, a glyphosate killer of weeds both broad- and narrow-leafed, that broke down quickly into inert compounds, and it then introduced genetically engineered seeds that produced crops that were immune to Roundup. (For more details see my book, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age by Sustainable Living.)
Thanks to massive advertising and public-relations campaigns (that shouted down repeated studies by the US Department of Agriculture and United Nations that showed no particular advantages to GM crops) within ten years over half of all American cropland was planted with Roundup-resistant crops.
One inevitable result of drenching large areas with a chemical designed to kill all weeds is that some weeds, by accident, will be immune to that particular chemical. They will reproduce and, finding much less competition around them, will flourish. All this was known by non-chemical farmers and scientists from the beginning of the Roundup debacle. Yet the New York Times was surprised, last week, to find that what could go wrong, had gone wrong. (See Deepwater Horizon, et al.)
Throughout the American heartland, farmers who were persuaded to stop cultivating, stop spraying more toxic weed sprays and give their faith to Roundup are being overcome by resurgent weeds. One of them, pigweed, is a mutant monster that can reach seven feet in height and can ruin a combine. The high costs of the modified seed, the increasing cost of applying more and more Roundup to less and less effect, added to the need to resume tilling and the use of older chemicals, adds up to “…the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” according to Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
In response to the rising emergencies around the world, Monsanto is desperately at work on genetically altering plants so they will be resistant to, of all things, the carcinogen 2,4-D. Perhaps they should take a cue from Mr. Wu, and “study the whole ecosystem.”
Envirocan’s own study undercuts national biodiesel plan
Canadian Trucking Alliance | May 14, 2010
OTTAWA — Another study casts some doubt on the net benefits of biodiesel — this one a government study in Canada — and a group of carriers are using it to question Ottawa’s plan to implement a biodiesel mandate in this country.
According to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, a study conducted in 2009 by EcoRessources Consultants (ERC) for Environment Canada, takes some of the wind out of the national biodiesel proposal.
The study, obtained by the CTA, concludes that the societal costs of a proposed federal two-per cent biodiesel (B2) mandate would outweigh the benefits by a factor of five.
CTA had called for a cost-benefit analysis to raise awareness of the issues confronting the trucking industry should a biodiesel mandate be introduced.
The ERC study, says CTA, adds credence to concerns that such a policy is really a boost to the farming industry masked as an environmental initiative.
Plus, there are still a number of operability issues associated with biodiesel that are unresolved, says the carrier group.
There have been several studies in recent years that show the environmental impact of producing biodiesel — by clearing crop land and forestry and shifting food supply to the fuel market — would undercut most, if not all, of biodiesel’s carbon reduction benefits.
According to ERC, “the total incremental cost to society of the proposed biodiesel regulation for on-road use would be $4.5 billion between 2011 and 2035, whereas the benefits, in the form of reduced GHG emissions, are valued at only a tad over $860 million.”
“On a regional basis, Western Canada would take the biggest cost hit at about $1.8 billion, followed by Ontario at $1.3 billion and Quebec at more than $450 million,” points out CTA.
The trucking industry, the single largest consumer of diesel, would ultimately be burdened with the bulk of the incremental costs.
ERC also said it was “probable” that higher and more volatile fuel prices may be experienced in the first few years after introduction the biodiesel mandate.
David Bradley, CTA’s president and CEO, says “the study only adds to the questions that exist over why the federal government would pursue a biodiesel mandate.”
Interior Department Exempted BP Drilling From Environmental Review
In Rush to Expand Offshore Oil Drilling, Interior Secretary Salazar Abandoned Pledge to Reform
Industry-dominated Mineral Management Service
Center for Biological Diversity | May 5, 2010
TUCSON, Ariz.— Ken Salazar’s first pledge as secretary of the interior was to reform the scandal plagued Mineral Management Service (MMS), which had been found by the U.S. inspector general to have traded sex, drugs, and financial favors with oil-company executives. In a January 29, 2009 press release on the scandal, Salazar stated:
“President Obama’s and my goal is to restore the public’s trust, to enact meaningful reform…to uphold the law, and to ensure that all of us — career public servants and political appointees — do our jobs with the highest level of integrity.”
Yet just three months later, Secretary Salazar allowed the MMS to approve — with no environmental review — the BP drilling operation that exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers and pouring millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The disaster will soon be, if it is not already, the worst oil spill in American history.
BP submitted its drilling plan to the MMS on March 10, 2009. Rather than subject the plan to a detailed environmental review before approving it as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the agency declared the plan to be “categorically excluded” from environmental analysis because it posed virtually no chance of harming the environment. As BP itself pointed out in its April 9, 2010, letter to the Council on Environmental Quality, categorical exclusions are only to be used when a project will have “minimal or nonexistent” environmental impacts.
MMS issued its one-page approval letter to BP on April 6, 2009.
“Secretary Salazar has utterly failed to reform the Mineral Management Service,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Instead of protecting the public interest by conducting environmental reviews, his agency rubber stamped BP’s drilling plan, just as it does hundreds of others every year in the Gulf of Mexico. The Minerals Management Service has gotten worse, not better, under Salazar’s watch.”
As a senator, Salazar sponsored the “Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006,” which opened up large swaths of the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil drilling and criticized the MMS for not issuing enough offshore oil leases. As interior secretary, he has pushed the agency to speed offshore oil drilling and was the architect of the White House’s March, 2010, proposal to expand offshore oil drilling in Alaska, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Florida.
After meeting with Gulf oil executives early this week, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) told the Washington Post: “I’m of the opinion that boosterism breeds complacency and complacency breeds disaster. That, in my opinion, is what happened.” The boosterism started at the top, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Excerpts from the BP drilling plan that was categorically excluded from
environmental review by the Department of the Interior:
“2.7 Blowout Scenario – A scenario for a potential blowout of the well from which BP would expect to have the highest volume of liquid hydrocarbons is not required for the operations proposed in this EP.”
“14.5 Alternatives – No alternatives to the proposed activities were considered to reduce environmental impacts.”
“14.6 Mitigation Measures – No mitigation measures other than those required by regulation and BP policy will be employed to avoid, diminish or eliminate potential impacts on environmental resources.”
“14.7 Consultation – No agencies or persons were consulted regarding potential impacts associated with the proposed activities.”
“14.3 Impacts on Proposed Activities – The site-specific environmental conditions have been taken into account for the proposed activities and no impacts are expected as a result of these conditions.”
“14.2.3.2 Wetlands – An accidental oil spill from the proposed activities could cause impacts to wetlands. However, due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.” (p. 45)
“14.2.2.1 Essential Fish Habitat – …In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill, it is unlikely to have an impact based on the industry wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses, implementation of BP’s Regional Oil Spill Response Plan which address available equipment and removal of the oil spill.”
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Aaron Siri’s Book: Vaccines, Amen
By Maryanne DemasiMaryanne Demasi | Brownstone Institute | June 15, 2026
For decades, vaccines have been treated as the sacred cow of modern medicine. I was taught that they were the holy grail. To question them was heresy. To raise concerns about safety was to risk professional exile.
Aaron Siri makes it clear in Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines that the story we’ve been told about vaccine science rests far more on belief than proof.
“No child should be sacrificed on the altar of the religion of vaccines,” Siri writes, as he turns his focus to America’s overcrowded childhood immunisation schedule.
I assumed little in this book would surprise me. I’ve spent years reporting on drug safety, regulatory capture, and the corruption of science. But Siri showed me how wrong I was.
Siri is not a doctor or a scientist. He is an attorney, and this, he says, is his advantage. In court, rhetoric won’t save you. Evidence does. As he puts it, he doesn’t get to say “trust me” the way many doctors do. “I need to prove claims with real data.”
And he does. … continue
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