The front page of USA Today tells us (6/8/10)::
Oil Spills Escalated in This Decade
Experts: Red flag wasn’t heeded
By Alan Levin
USATODAYThe number of spills from offshore oil rigs and pipelines in U.S. waters more than quadrupled this decade, according to government data. The trend could have served as a warning for the massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico, safety experts say.
This would have come in handy when the White House was announcing plans to encourage more offshore drilling. Instead we got assurances like this from USA Today‘s editorial page:
Some of the most ironic objections come from those who say offshore exploration will destroy beaches and coastlines, citing the devastating 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska as an example. The last serious spill from a drilling accident in U.S. waters was in 1969, off Santa Barbara, California.
—USA Today editorial (4/2/10)
Is it possible that BP’s technical expertise, disaster reponse capbility and all the rest are about par for the industry as a whole? If technically superior cil companies exist, why haven’t they stepped up and ended this disaster? If they are all as inept as BP, and they probably are, and they are out there drilling all over our oceans, more of these megadisasters are just waiting for us. Spills of this magnitude are every bit as deadly as nukes. Anything that swims through it dies. And there are people who, even after this, want to keep drilling.
I doubt if BP/the oil industry is the only one unprepared for this kind of low-probability disaster. That’s why I will never support nuclear as a clean energy alternative. “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. The process of applying the precautionary principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.” – Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle, Jan. 1998
These selected “facts” were part of a well-orchestrated campaign by oil industry lobbyists to lull the public into thinking offshore drilling isn’t dangerous. We see the corrosive influence of money everywhere. it’s how politics is done. Anyone who shouted “Drill, Baby, Drill” is complicit in this crime.
We make a big mistake by focusing on the Gulf of Mexico and ignoring the larger issue of how much harm the fossil fuel industry does globally from global warming to massive harm to other countries from Nigeria to Ecuador, etc.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell
Nigeria’s agony dwarfs the Gulf oil spill. The US and Europe ignore it
The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades
http://www.tropical-rainforest-animals.com/Ecuador-Rainforest.htmEcuador Rainforest
Home to One of the Worst Cases of Oil Pollution Ever
Study Links Air Pollution, Lung Cancer
By LINDSEY TANNER
.c The Associated Press
CHICAGO (March 5) – Long-term exposure to the air pollution in some of America’s biggest metropolitan areas significantly raises the risk of dying from lung cancer and is about as dangerous as living with a smoker, a study of a half-million people found.
The study echoes previous research and provides the strongest evidence yet of the health dangers of the pollution levels found in many big cities and even some smaller ones, according to the researchers from Brigham Young University and New York University.
The risk is from what scientists call combustion-related fine particulate matter – soot emitted by cars and trucks, coal-fired power plants and factories.
The study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.
It involved 500,000 adults who enrolled in 1982 in an American Cancer Society survey on cancer prevention. The researchers examined participants’ health records through 1998 and analyzed data on annual air pollution averages in the more than 100 cities in which participants lived.
Consider this:
§ As a result of oil leaks and inefficiencies, America leaks more oil each year than the entire country of Australia consumes.
§ There is one spill a day in the United States just from leaking pipelines, many of which are 30 to 50 years old. The network of oil pipelines underlying America is more than four times the size of its interstate highway system.
§ According to the Environmental Protection Agency, oil and gas wastes alone exceed the combined total of all other categories of municipal, agricultural, mining, and industrial wastes. Nearly 170 million tons on oily wastes generated annually by oil refineries are buried at refinery sites; another 18,000 tons make their way into community landfills. As much as 57 million tons of oil field wastes are disposed of in landfills annually.
§ There are 700,000 oil storage tanks in America; the size of the pool of leaked oil under them is unknown. Among tanks known to be leaking, some have each released more than was lost from the Exxon Valdez â┚¬“ and the waste under one California tank is so large that the company estimates that it will be pumping out contamination for 20 years.
§ Deferred maintenance and repair as well as gross cutbacks in the numbers of trained employees have taken a heavy toll on people and property. Between 1984 and 1991, a series of fires and explosions at U.S. oil refineries and related facilities killed mort than 80 workers and injured 651. Residents of refinery communities have been evacuated on numerous occasions by fires, explosions, or toxic clouds. In California, injuries to oil refinery workers which resulted in at least one day of lost work increased 32 percent between 1989 and 1990.
§ The cost of plugging and cleaning up after the industry’s 1.2 million abandoned oil wells is still unknown. However, the state of New York estimates it will spend $100 million just on this aspect of the oil mess, and Texas estimates it will spend $300 million.
§ According to the General Accounting Office, 16,000 oil spills occurred in navigable waters in 1988, amounting to more than 46 million gallons of oil, amounting to more than 46 million gallons of oil. Further, the routine release of oil and grease in â┚¬Ã…“operational dischargesâ┚¬Ã‚ from barges and tankers may exceed the annual amount of oil spilled each year.
A Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) study on mobility notes that in the larger U.S. urban communities, time spent sitting in traffic jams increased from 11 hours per person in 1982 to 36 hours in 1999.TTI calculates the congestion bill for the 68 areas analyzed in 1999 at $78 billion a year â┚¬“ nearly $300 for every American. This includes the value of 4.5 billion hours wasted in traffic and nearly 7 billion gallons of excessive gasoline consumption. It does not, however, include any of the costs associated with the worsening air pollution from the millions of idling engines or the effects of additional carbon emissions on the earth’s climate.
From Unborn Victims of Pollution
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 25 March 2004
“Take as just one example, the problem of bioaccumulating toxins. These toxins, including mercury, dioxins, PCBs and lead, do not break down in the environment. Instead they build up in organisms, including fish, wildlife and humans. These toxins can have adverse effects on pregnant women, fetuses and babies. More than 8% of women of childbearing age have blood mercury concentrations higher than the level considered safe. EPA scientists estimate that as many as 630,000 babies each year may be exposed to mercury levels in the womb high enough to cause permanent brain damage.
The primary source of mercury pollution is coal burning power plants. Mercury in the air ends up in rivers, lakes and oceans and accumulates in the flesh of fish. For this reason, both the U.S. EPA and the European Union recently issued advisories that pregnant women should limit consumption of fish. Canned albacore tuna is especially high in mercury and pregnant women should not eat more than six ounces a week.”
When Eric Schafer resigned from the EPA in 1992 to protest the Bush administration’s attempts to
weaken federal clean air policy he wrote this in his resignation letter:
As the scale of pollution from these coal-fired smokestacks is immense,
so is the damage to public health. Data supplied to the Senate
Environment Committee by EPA last year estimate the annual health bill
from 7 million tons of SO2 and NO2: more than 10,800 premature deaths; at
least 5,400 incidents of chronic bronchitis; more than 5,100 hospital
emergency visits; and over 1.5 million lost work days. Add to that severe
damage to our natural resources, as acid rain attacks soils and plants
and deposits nitrogen in the Chesapeake Bay and other critical bodies of
water.
The anger we feel and the urgency we should feel regarding the critical necessity to get off of fossil fuels REQUIRES us to PUSH for a NATIONAL ENERGY policy based on wind, solar, energy efficiency, smart growth city planning where we design our cities to be car free where our communities can be designed so that we live, a NATIONAL priority to develop electric vehicles, work and play locally without the need of an automobile and where we can enjoy all the things that people commute to the suburbs for (open spaces, greenery, etc.) (See Carfree Cities Carfree cities past, present, and future. Presents solutions to the problem of the urban automobile.) From a paper I wrote recently:
Automobile Impacts on Our Society
Consider just some of the impacts of the automobile on our lives and the environment:
In 1953 automobile fatality totals reached one million, 2 million in 1975, and total fatalities surpassed 3 million deaths in 1998. (Based on historical National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) data).
These figures do not include, of course, those who are maimed and live lives permanently altered as a result of a car injury.
American Farmland Trust reports that we are losing a million acres a year to suburban sprawl.
The impacts of sprawl include:
1) increase in traffic
2) increase in taxes
3) loss of time
4) segregation of social classes
5) overcrowding of schools
6) health impacts such as obesity due to sprawl lifestyles
7) loss of revenue for older towns
8) loss sense of neighborhood/community cohesion
9) greater response times for emergency services
In New Jersey: According to geospatial analysis utilizing remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) conducted at the Rowan University Department of Geography as well as Rutgers University Center for Remote Sensing and Spatial Analysis, New Jersey is developing at the rate of 16,600 acres per year. This is the equivalent of 41 football fields of new growth every day. At the same time the Garden State is losing 6,395 acres of farmland, 1,220 acres of wetlands and 7,456 acres of forest annually to development. If New Jersey continues to grow at 16,000 acres per year it will be the first state to run out of developable land within the next several decades.
A 2004 Associated Press article reports that according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s annual Urban Mobility Report snarled traffic is costing travelers in the 85 biggest U.S. cities a whopping 3.5 billion hours a year, up from 700 million two decades ago. According to the report:
The average urban traveler was stuck in road traffic 46 hours a year in 2002, a 187 percent increase over the 16 hours lost in 1982.
Even more startling is the decline of free-flowing traffic during rush hour. In 1982, 30 percent of urban highways and arteries were congested.
Twenty years later, drivers were delayed on 67 percent of those roads.
Can we eliminate or mitigate these deleterious impacts of the automobile on our lives? Some examples of how we might address some of the issues include:
Smart Growth. John Hasse, Ph.D., Rowan University defines smart growth as:
Smart Growth is a term coined to describe patterns of development that avoid the negative characteristics of sprawl. Smart Growth development strives to intelligently design new buildings and guide new growth to occur in a manner that results in high-quality communities and substantial open space preservation. One of the key goals of smart growth is revitalizing and redeveloping existing communities. Many older failing towns are ripe for economic revival and smart growth promotes redevelopment of older areas over development of open space.
Dr. Hasse goes on to describe the characteristics of smart growth as they are applied in New Jersey:
The New Jersey Office of Smart Growth characterizes smart growth as accomplishing the following:
Smart Growth Principles (from NJ Office of Smart Growth website)
o mixed land uses
o compact, clustered community design
o range of housing choice and opportunity
o walkable neighborhoods
o distinctive, attractive communities offering a sense of place
o open space, farmland, and scenic resource preservation
o future development strengthened and directed to existing communities using existing infrastructure
o transportation option variety
o predictable, fair and cost-effective development decisions
o community and stakeholder collaboration in development decision-making
One of the contributing authors to Sustainable Cities: Concepts and Strategies for Eco-City Development is Joseph Smyth, President of Joseph Smyth Company who discusses the concept of the American Dream and how it has evolved over time:
â┚¬Ã…“In summary, low-density single-use suburban tract housing builds in massive losses of farmland and open space, increased automobile dependency, growing operation and maintenance costs resulting in unsustainable economics, pollution, and a spreading sense of physical and social isolationâ┚¬Ã‚¦Ãƒ¢Ã¢”š¬Ã‚¦
Recently a city councilwoman asked me: â┚¬Ã…“If we give up the single-family tract home, what will happen to the American Dream?â┚¬Ã‚Â
The single-family tract house is not the essence of the American Dream. It is only the current form, which can change without altering or compromising the essence of The Dream. In fact, a change in form can be for the better in bringing forward more of the important qualities of The Dream. The essence of The American Dream has never changed: open space, freedom, opportunity for personal expression and a place we can call out own. The form, on the other hand, has changed and is currently changing again.
As mentioned, an early form of the American Dream was the family farm, which changed over time. As the desire for social interaction, specialization and creative personal expression grew, and as cities were formed, new forms of The Dream were called for. As we now know, the most popular new form was suburbia and the single-family tract house. Built into this form, however was a whole series of problems, such as high infrastructure and maintenance costs, loss of open space, and massive pollution, traffic congestion, and the breakdown of community and the sense of place. It’s time we take a new look to re-evaluate what is truly important to us as individuals, as families and as communities. It’s time once again to look beyond the present form of The Dream to its essence, and draw out a new, more complete and satisfying form.
Part of the answer to the councilwoman’s question is to ask another question: How can we create a lifestyle that offers more of what is important to us? The answer is manifold: clean air; beautiful views of permanently protected open space; clean and ample water; fresh food produce provided from local sources; safe, friendly and beautiful surroundings; safe places to walk and bicycle; places to get to know our neighbors once again; a lifestyle that offers more opportunity for a larger percentage of the population to pursue personal, professional and business interests; a lifestyle where people of different income levels have a choice of owning their own living spaces, and where these living spaces are conveniently located within a short distance of work, school, shopping, services and recreation.â┚¬Ã‚Â
In his chapter Joseph Smyth has a design for how you can convert Anaheim Mall in California into an urban village where residents live, work, shop and play without a car. Design features include:
1,438 residential units surrounding a large, 16-acre central park. Perimeter structures, 3-5 stories high, create a sound dam and visual boundary.
A central quad features a resort hotel on its northern side. A three-story complex with a food store, cinema and roof-top tennis stadium sits in the northwest corner. The northeast corner holds a health spa with Olympic sized pool.
In the northern end of the central park lies a three-story fine arts museum with central atrium and rooftop sculpture garden. Also in the northern section of the park is a formal, walled Japanese garden.
Office and residential units line the west side with a central-town square, university extension facility, and chapel.
A residential hotel with potential retirement and convalescent center is situated on the eastern side.
Aviary and children’s amusement areas lie in southern end of the village complex contains a three story covered shopping mall, an open 1/2 circle of outdoor shopping and 2,000-seat amphitheater. Moving sidewalks within a covered bridge span the freeway, and connect to a circular light rail station, southernmost in the plan.
The Anaheim Mall proposal is an exquisite design that can be replicated in already existing cities across the U.S.
Another fabulous resource on how we might reduce or eliminate the adverse impact of the automobile on society can be found on the website http://www.carfree.com/. This website is devoted to providing information on how we can design our cities to be car free (or partially car free) and maximize our city planning to make cities great places for pedestrians without sacrificing our ability to move people and material quickly and efficiently.
I went on vacation to Costa Rica a year or so ago. On the way back I flew back by way of Miami, Florida, and on the way as I looked down over the ocean I saw what looked like oil all over the place. I don’t know that it was, but there was virtually none of the sea we all see in the movies where the water is clear blue or green, almost all the water I flew over had what looked like round blobs of something beaded up on it, and lots of crud floating on top. I wonder if anyone has done a survey of this and what they report?
BP has Has NEVER been seriously punished for any of it’s previous law breaking or probation violations. No one at BP (or ANY other oil corp. for that matter) ever went to jail for the swath of human death economic and environmental destruction they have wreaked on this planet. WHY! Their actions are those of a Terrorest Organization, by any description! There will be no need of energy of any kind in a world ravaged and left uninhabitable by the terror of the fosil fuel empire. “STOP IT HERE, STOP IT NOW!