Obama administration moves to restore protection of American coasts from dangers of offshore drilling - Defenders of Wildlife

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News that the American President has issued an executive order prohibiting further deep-water oil exploration or development off its Pacific, Atlantic or eastern Gulf of Mexico coasts is a significant and welcome move.

Lessons learned from the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster earlier this year appear to have been learned.

The Obama administration are allowing themselves some wriggle room, however, with plans for oil exploration in the Arctic Ocean. Furthermore, the order is not retrospective. Existing oil platforms will continue to operate in this high-risk open seas.

White House Policy Advisor Richard Charter, announcing the decision, has said that the ban would not apply to the Arctic, yet:

“We are confident that further scientific studies of the impacts of drilling in the Arctic will show that the drilling ban should be extended to this region as well.”

If so, this represents a very positive development from the federal government.

Now, we just need to see that green energy infrastructure and the promised high-speed train networks linking major urban areas in America, announced in the first hundred days of President Obama's term of office.

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Related articles

• In Big Reversal, Obama Takes (Some) Offshore Drilling Off the Table (environment.change.org)
• Obama: No Offshore Drilling in East Coast Waters (abcnews.go.com)
• Environment America Applauds Department of Interior Announcement Protecting Coasts from Expanded Offshore Drilling (yubanet.com)

Peak Oil Entering Political Mainstage

Both the British government (here) and the German military (here) are reported this week to be actively planning towards the possibility of a global spike in the price of oil as the amount of gas and oil continues to decline, and despite environmentally unsustainable exploration in deep oceans and the Arctic.

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• Study Warns of Perilous Oil Crisis (green.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Jeffrey Rubin: Germany and the UK Prepare for Peak Oil (huffingtonpost.com)

Greenpeace Protest Deep Water Drilling off Greenland

The Stena Don oil rig owned by Cairn Energy - off the coast of the Greenland in one of the most fragile environments on Earth.

For more on Greenland as an oil-rich environment, click here.

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Sugar Based Plastics Could Be Composted at Home

Sugar Based Plastics Could Be Composted at Home | Inhabitat


I really hate plastics.

They last for ever, never break down and use up tons of oil in their manufacture.

They're also everywhere.

Which is why this story of a possible breakthrough in plastic production is potentially good news.

Here's hoping.

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A Brief History of Afghanistan

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Greenland: Future Frontline of the Environmental Crisis?

Today, Greenland moves from being a dependency of Denmark to becoming a semi-independent state.

As the world's second largest island (after Australia) begins to exercising a greater amount of self-rule, the quasi-country is likely to become an increasingly important symbol in battles over climate change. What the Amazon basin was in the 1980's and 90's, Greenland may become in the coming decade.

Beneath it, and in its seas, Greenland is believed to contain large amounts of untapped oil and gas. Exact quantities have been difficult to predict because of the vast Greenland Ice Sheet which covers 80% of the island to a depth of 2-3km. On a global scale, The Greenland Ice Sheet is second in area to that of the Antarctic.

Needless to say, many within the oil and gas industries are looking longingly at the prospects of future extraction from Greenland - a prospect which is ironically only now possible as a result of global warming. American Oil giant ConocoPhillips, for instance, has been prospecting in Greenland since at least 2000. (2003 annual report, p. 54). Along with others, ConocoPhilips has been active in oil exploration in Peru's Amazon region, which has resulted in significant conflict with indigenous tribal groups, as previously reported on this blog.

Rising temperatures are resulting in a thaw of the ice sheet and of the seas surrounding Greenland and other Arctic islands. Average year-round temperatures in the Arctic have, over the last 100 years, doubled that of the global average, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Predictions of future temperature changes continue to see the Arctic region becoming warm at twice the rate of the world's average. Sea ice in the region has decreased by between 5 and 8 % since 1979 and some climatologists are predicting an Arctic with virtually ice-free oceans by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Although some are seeing in these predictions the potential for a real estate or tourist boom - the North East Greenland National Park, for instance is the largest in the world - others are taking a longer term view.

Ruth Curry, who has studied the climate of Greenland in detail, explains that the melting of the island's ice sheet is unlikely to be a gentle affair. Melting surface water trends to trickle to the base of the ice through existing fissures and crevices, creating a liquid base to the ice sheet. This in turn destabilises the ice and can result in huge "slip-and-slide" events when vast areas of ice hurtle from the land into the sea.

The ice sheet, says Curry, contains enough water to raise the global sea level by 23 feet - a height similar to that of the Indian Ocean tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004.

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Green News from Cuba

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Cuba has been quietly leading the way in recent years in significantly reducing its consumption of fossil fuels and its overall energy usage. Planned measures by the government have focused on two main areas - reducing consumption and increasing the use of renewables. Measures include:

• replacing, free of charge, the entire nation's supply of incandescent light bulbs (9 million) with compact flourescents over a six month period
• providing subsidies to allow families to purchase 2 million energy-efficient refrigerators, 1 million fans, 182,000 air conditioners and 260,000 water pumps
• changing the pricing structure for electricity to allow households using less than 100 kWh per month to benefit from an extremely low tariff (less than 4 cents per kWh). Prices rise dramatically for households using more than this amount.
• a national education programme through schools, TV and other media to highlight the issues associated with energy reduction and usage
• making moves to partly decentralise the nation's electrical production with the building of over 1800 micro-electrical plants generating supplies for their local town or district.
• a major plan of repair and upgrade to the nation's electrical transmission network - posts, poles and cables.
  

Efforts to reduce consumption have lead to significant reductions in oil consumption, saving over 961,000 tonnes of imported oil between 2006-2007.

On the use of renewables, measures have included:

• building two wind farms
• building a 100 kW solar electric plant - the first to be connected to the national grid
• creating 180 micro-hydro systems
  
• the creation of over 8000 off-grid local solar power systems for use in rural areas
• the construction of 300 biogas plants, converting animal waste to cooking fuel
• sugarcane biogass (using non-edible residue) is adding about 500 MW to the national grid
  
• the formation in 2007 of a National Group tasked with accelerating the implementation of renewable energy sources. The group focuses at present on 14 different renewables and the practicalities of their implementation in Cuba

Source.

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Peru: Is This an Oil War?

In scenes reminiscent of the American frontier during the C19, this week has seen a state of emergency declared and the Peruvian Army ordered into the country's Amazon region to help the police put down a protest by indigenous tribal groups against the granting of oil drilling permits to multi-national companies.

As previously reported on this blog, Anglo-French group Perenco is sending about 1,000 workers into the Peruvian Amazon to drill in lands which contain significant numbers of native Amazonian tribes, including several that have had no contact with outside cultures and are therefore particularly susceptible to imported disease. Canadian petrochemical firm Petrolifera are also active in the region in the Ucayali Basin, and control about 4.5 million acres in Peru.

Perenco's operations are in the Maranon Basin near the boarder with Equador in an area that it claims holds over 300 millions barrels of oil which it hopes to extract at the rate of 100,000 barrels per day. Perenco secured the drilling rights after Perenco President Francois Perrodo met with Peruvian President Alan Garcia Perez and pledged to invest $US 2 billion into energy-related development in the area. Perenco plans on drilling over 100 wells, building local pipelines and central processing facilities in the area, which is home to the Cacataibos, Isconahua, Matsigenka, Mashco-Piro, Mastanahua, Murunahua and Nant tribes.

American energy company ConocoPhillips owns a concession of over 10 million acres in the Peruvian Amazon and has been criticised by NGO Amazon Watch for the risk their operation poses to indigenous people groups who have chosen a policy of non-contact in order to preserve their traditional culture and to protect themselves from disease.

Directives by the Government of Peru passed over the last two years have relaxed restrictions on oil exploration in the Amazon and up to 30,000 people have been holding a month long protest to call for the repeal of these decrees. There have also been blockades of key rivers and roads into the affected areas, as illustrated in the video below.

A British friend and long-time resident in Peru recently told me that the public money pledged to educational and health care improvement among the Amazonian tribes rarely reaches its intended recipients and that corruption in all levels of government is known to be widespread.

Peru Indigenous Mobilization from Amazon Watch on Vimeo.

Up to date news and fuller details about organised campaigns to stop oil and gas exploration in the Peruvian Amazon can be found here.

Possible actions concerned citizens could take include:

• writing to the President of Peru
• contacting your congressman or woman
  
• writing or emailing your local MP or MEP
• contacting your local Peruvian embassy

Alternatively, concerned citizens could always write or pay a visit to the oil company of their choice and have a chat with the managers there about how you feel their company is behaving in northern Peru. Contact details are as follows:


Perenco

Thames House
Thamesfield Way
off Pasteur Road
Great Yarmouth
Norfolk
NR31 0DN

Tel: +44 1 493 414 000
Fax: +44 1 493 414 001

Petrolifera

Suite 900
332 Sixth Avenue SW
Calgary
Alberta
Canada
T2P 0B9

Fax: 403.538.6225


R. A. Gusella
Executive Chairman
(403) 538-6201

or

Gary D. Wine
President and Chief Operating Officer
(403) 539-8450

or

Kristen J. Bibby
Vice President Finance and Chief Financial Officer
(403) 539-8450

ConocoPhillips

Meet the Leadership Team or The Board of Directors and then pay them a visit at

600 North Dairy
Ashford

Houston,

TX 77252-2197

Phone: 281 293 1000

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Heathrow, Human Rights and Peru

Opposition to the third runway at Heathrow is not merely about local traffic and noise pollution or even the flattening of the nearby village of Sipson to make way for the planned expansion.

More fundamental than this is the fact that our culture's "addiction to oil" (President Bush's words, not mine) is being met at an increasing cost not only to the physical environment but also to some of the planet's most vulnerable tribal peoples.

Latest to face the risk of the world's expanding thirst for oil are previously un-contacted tribes living in the remote Peruvian Amazon. Anglo-French oil company Perenco have recently been granted permission by the Peruvian government to drill for oil in the region.

Peru’s national indigenous organization, AIDESEP, is opposed to Perenco’s plans as is Survival International who have several videos on the issue on their site. Perenco itself intends to send in over 1,000 workers to the region and to build 14 oil wells.

When Shell began oil extraction among the Yora people in South East Peru in the 1980s, approximately half of the tribal population died over the coming decade, often as a result of contracting diseases for which they had no immune system.

Perenco officially denies the existence of uncontacted tribes in the area, despite confirmation of their existence by the governments of Peru and Ecuador and by Barrett Resources who formerly carried out exploration work in the area. Survival names some of these groups as the Cacataibos, Isconahua, Matsigenka, Mashco-Piro, Mastanahua, Murunahua and Nanti.

Oil exploration is often a human rights issue and by advocating a way of life, personally and in terms of public policy, that actively moves away from carbon-dependency, we have more chance of reducing the demand for fresh oil exploration of the kind currently being carried out by Perenco.

Building a third runway at Heathrow because "If we don't, someone else will" is a dishonest approach when the need is for far more radical action that significantly reduces air travel globally.

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Crisis, What Crisis?

Interesting to note that, according to the Associated Press, the Exxon Mobil Corporation has today announced quarterly profits of $14.83 billion.

This is a new record for a U.S. Corporation.

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