Tag Archives: pollution

Offshore drilling is bad news, and we should say so

Offshore oil production is a growth industry that has  produced numerous large-scale oil spills destroying  an immense amount habitat and devastating wildlife.  Clearly drilling is not the answer to any of our energy problems. It creates far fewer jobs than clean energy,  it won’t help us become energy independent,  and it definitely won’t help solve the climate change crisis.

This and what follows are what my visitors are discussing as we share our holiday together. Alberta supplies about 1.4m barrels of oil a day to the US, both from the oil sands and conventional wells. The oil sands, which contain the world’s biggest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, are set to grow as several projects come on stream.

Offshore drilling is bad news, and we should say so.

The BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill demonstrates the consequences of offshore drilling can be devastating to the coastal communities that depend on fishing and tourism.  Approximately 640 miles of Gulf Coast shoreline is currently oiled:  100 miles in Florida, 362 miles in Louisiana, 108 miles in Mississippi and 70 miles in Alabama.  About 1.84 million gallons of total dispersant have been applied: 1.07 million on the surface and 771,000 subsea. More than 34.7 million gallons of an oil-water mix have been recovered.

As of July 28, although sporadic sightings of tar balls may continue, Florida’s shoreline is not expected to receive additional impacts over the next 72 hours. Observations by NOAA continue to indicate no significant amounts of oil moving toward the Loop Current.

Offshore drilling is bad news, and we should say so.

Early Tuesday a tugboat was pushing a dredge barge when the dredger hit a wellhead. Since then the wellhead has been spewing a mixture of oil, natural gas, and water into Barataria Bay in southeastern Louisiana. The resulting sheen covers more than six square miles.  Cedyco Corp. of Houston is responsible for the well abandoned in 2008, and the company has hired Wild Well to secure it. –  Read the full article.

EPA: Michigan oil spill may have exceeded 1M gallons

The Environmental Protection Agency says it believes more than a million gallons of oil may have leaked this week into a major southern Michigan waterway that leads to Lake Michigan.

On Monday July 26, 2010, a 30-inch pipeline in Marshall, Mich. belonging to Enbridge Inc. burst. EPA estimates over 1 million gallons of crude oil spilled into Talmadge Creek, a waterway which feeds into the Kalamazoo River.

The site currently includes a 25-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River, which is at higher than average levels due to heavy rainfalls. The site area lies between Marshall and Battle Creek and includes marshlands, residential areas, farmland, and businesses. — Source

Offshore drilling is bad news, and we should say so.

The B.C. government has been lobbing to get Ottawa to lift the offshore drilling and tanker moratoriums for years.   British Columbians are rightly concerned as oil share oil drilling destroys more habitat than the province’s forest companies do.

On June 26 during events on English Bay, in Victoria, in Kelowna, and on Hornby Island and on beaches across B.C.  gathered to oppose offshore drilling in non-political Hands Across the Sand rallies that began in Florida. “There is a message for people to wake up and see the damage that is being done and to say ‘no,’” said Renee Lindstrom, an organizer.

Offshore drilling is bad news, and we should say so.

The moratorium on offshore oil development in B.C. won’t be lifted any time soon, especially in the wake of the environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice. Read the full article.

Federal ban on offshore drilling, oil tankers not legally binding

The Harper government has quietly affirmed that it isn’t legally bound to maintain a moratorium on oil drilling off the coast of British Columbia.

The government has also determined that the ban doesn’t apply to oil-tanker traffic, despite the widely held view that such vessels are prohibited from plying the waters along B.C.’s northern coast.  — Read the full article

Ignatieff supports oil tanker ban off B.C. coast

The federal Liberals want to ban oil supertankers from British Columbia’s northwestern coast, a promise that would halt the building of a proposed $5.5-billion oil sands pipeline from Alberta through northern B.C.

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s announcement that a future Liberal government would legislate a ban on the tankers pits his party against one of Canada’s largest companies, Enbridge Inc. — Read the full article

Tankers in Georgia Strait- the risk is growing

Here in the Strait, an increase in tankers taking crude from the oil sands out through Burrard Inlet means our waters are more at risk from a catastrophic oil spill than ever before. The decision to increase tanker traffic was made without any public consultation and the question has to be asked: are we ready?  The answer is – no we’re not.  Read more about the issue.

Offshore drilling is bad news, and we should say so.

Getting stuffed and decluttering

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packing boxThis winter we inherited even more stuff than the stuff we have eliminated in the last 6 years.  Our ongoing attempts to remain minimalist materialists and assume a lifestyle commensurate with conscious living means constant pruning, purging and donating. But this winter we found ourselves as owners of lots of boxes of second hand stuff, stuff that evoked nostalgia and grief.

At first we simply stored the stuff because opening the boxes would mean looking at familiar stuff, stuff that had belonged to two people we dearly loved who are now gone. Now and then we would open one peek in and pull out a memento that led  to laughter and/or tears and then put it back and close the box.

The space is small and the boxes occupied much of it. Worse still our curiosity drew us to open the boxes more and more frequently renewing the cycle of grief. The boxes of stuff held power over us because we endowed them with the power to draw us near (attachment) or to send us scurrying away (aversion). Continue reading →

Agriculture and food story links

Here are some agriculture/food stories that are worth reading.

  1. Scotts Company fined $500,000 for negligence on engineered bentgrass
  2. Pennsylvania may ban milk labels important to consumers
  3. Agricultural pollution linked to frog deformities
  4. Food and Farm Bill moving in Senate
  5. Locavore is 2007 word of the year

1. Scotts Company fined $500,000 for negligence on engineered bentgrass
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) hit the Scotts Company with the maximum penalty of $500,000 for allowing an experimental turf grass to become established in the wild. Scotts’ negligence allowed the creeping bentgrass, which was genetically engineered to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup), to escape from field trials in Oregon and interbreed with wild relatives. This is the company’s second offense: Scotts was also fined in 2004 for not notifying the USDA on two occasions that winds had blown seeds out of its test plots. The company agreed at that time to take additional steps to control the escaped bentgrass. The transfer and persistence of herbicide-resistant genes in weedy species—and the potential costs to farmers, other landowners, and the environment—is one of UCS’s major concerns about growing these crops. See our pages on risks of genetic engineering and bentgrass, or read the USDA’s press release.

2. Pennsylvania may ban milk labels important to consumers
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture announced earlier this fall that it would ban labels on milk that state the milk is free of antibiotics, pesticides, or synthetic hormones. Read more…

3. Agricultural pollution linked to frog deformities
New experimental evidence from a multi-university study indicates that frogs and other amphibian populations may be at risk from the large amounts of nutrient pollution generated by industrial agriculture. The authors of the study show that increased nutrients in bodies of water leads to excessive algal growth, which supports larger populations of certain snails. The snails carry parasites that cause severe limb deformities and death in frogs—and more snails mean more of the parasites. With the increasing industrialization of agriculture, ever more massive amounts of nutrients flow into waterways around the world each year, both from fields treated with synthetic fertilizers and manure from CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). This new research suggests that the trend may intensify the pressure on amphibians, which are key species in many ecosystems. Read the abstract in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

4. Food and Farm Bill moving in Senate
The federal Food and Farm Bill, which will decide how our nation’s food is produced for the next five years, is finally moving forward in the Senate. Read more…

5. Locavore is 2007 word of the year
The New Oxford American Dictionary chose locavore, a person who seeks out locally produced food, as its word of the year. The local foods movement is gaining momentum as people discover that the best-tasting and most sustainable choices are foods that are fresh, seasonal, and grown close to home. Some locavores draw inspiration from the 100-mile diet or from advocates of local eating like Barbara Kingsolver. Others just follow their taste buds to farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture programs, and community gardens. Check out Local Harvest to find sustainably grown food near you, and make a New Year’s Resolution to be a locavore in 2008!

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