A call to protest evoked near-total response in the Amona and Navelim village on Monday. (photo from Sezari, with original story)
India – Thousands of villagers from Navelim in Bicholim taluka of Goa today observed a day-long Bandh against the Sesa Corporation’s Goa metallurgical coke plant in the village, with complaints that it is polluting their surroundings. Originally a Hindi word meaning ‘closed’, Bandhis a form of protest used by political activists, during which a political party or a community declares a general strike.
The bandh started at 6 am, with locals blocking the entire stretch connecting Panaji to Bicholim taluka.
Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo gives a thumbs-up as he and other activists board the Arctic oil platform in the Pechora Sea. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/AFP/Getty Images
Six activists with Greenpeace International have occupied a Russian oil rig to protest drilling in the Arctic. The rig belongs to the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom, which is set to become the first company to produce Arctic oil through drilling operations in the Pechora Sea. Democracy Now interviewed Greenpeace’s executive director, Kumi Naidoo, just as he and other activists are being hosed by the rig’s crew in an effort to thwart their protest.
Considered by many to have an intelligence that rivals humankind’s and otherworldly transformative evolution powers, the cuttlefish is among creatures slated for death in a sudden mass extinction of the worlds’ oceans.
But perhaps the most brutal and rapid decline is coming for the world’s oceans, with scientists predicting a cataclysmic period of mass extinction currently upon us, the ramifications for which will in turn be our own demise. From 1900-2010, freshwater fish species in North America went extinct at a rate 877 times faster than the rate found in the fossil record, while estimates indicate the rate may double between now and 2050.
On May 3rd, hundreds of protesters from climate and anti-cuts groups across the country teamed up to block the UK Energy Summit in the City of London. [1] They descended on the conference venue at 11.45 am, saying they intended to remain there to disrupt the UK Energy Summit. At least 300 protesters targeted all of the main entrances to the Summit venue, attempting to push past police to enter the conference. The UK Energy Summit [2] involves CEOs of the Big Six energy companies, who have recently come under widespread criticism for drawing in record profits whilst one quarter of UK households have been pushed into fuel poverty. [3] The event took place at The Grange Hotel, near St Paul’s Cathedral.
The protest congregated at four locations before descending on the summit: Tate Modern, St Paul’s, City Thameslink and Canon St. En route to the summit venue, protesters used “any means necessary” to get their message out by using stickers, chalk and noise to draw attention to the protest. Once they arrived at The Grange Hotel, they attempted to enter the hotel building with banners and giant model dinosaurs as a reference to the outdated “dinosaur technology” of fossil fuels. Reports have been of police violence when at least two people were arrested, with one protester possibly knocked unconscious by police.
Hydraulic Fracturing Comes to Michigan – Auction May 8, 2012
On May 8, 2012, the Michigan DNR will auction mineral and oil rights to 109,000 acres of Michigan public land. This opens public lands to oil and gas drilling and the highly toxic, water-intensive practice of hydraulic fracturing, and other extractive industries.
The May 8 State of Michigan Oil and Gas Lease Auction includes state land from 23 counties with Oakland, Barry, Gladwin, counties and the UP among the biggest losers of public land and health.
Please call the Oil and Gas Lease Management Unit of the DNR at 517-373-7663 to express your concerns.
May 8 Lansing Protest
The May 8 auction will open for bidder registration at 8:00am with the auction beginning at 9:00am at Constitution Hall, 525 West Allegan, Lansing. At 7:30am many concerned Michigan residents are meeting in front of Constitutional Hall, to protest this auction.
If you are interested in this outdoor protest please call Maryann at 269-267-3278
If you are interested in making your voice heard directly in classic EF! style please call Elizabeth at 248-462-0906
If you are interested in purchasing the mineral rights in order to keep your community unpolluted please call Kathy at 248-790-6278
If you want to get involved and live in Northern and Eastern Michigan please call LuAnn at 231-547-2828
More Information
In Barry County alone, the DNR is offering 211 numbered parcels totaling over 23,400 acres, with an average size of 111 acres per offering. With a typical oil and/or gas well requiring 40 acres, the Yankee Springs Recreation area could potentially become home to hundreds of wells, and with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, this means deep, multi-directional drilling and the injection of toxic chemicals under area wetlands, streams, lakes, and recreational land.
The DNR is offering large parcels of land in Thornapple and Irving Townships directly north and west of Middleville, as well as most of Yankee Springs and some portions of Orangeville and Rutledge Townships. Bodies of water contained in these parcels include the eastern shores of Barlow and Gun Lakes as well as all surrounding land and waters of Shaw Lake, Bassett Lake, Baker Lake, Chief Noonday Lake, Payne Lake, Williams and McDonald Lakes, Long Lake, Hall Lake, Turner Lake, Deep Lake, Otis Lake, and all connecting waterways, recreational trails, and land.
Environmental, Public Health, and Water Hazards Involved with Oil / Gas Drilling and Hydro-Fracking or Hydraulic Fracturing:
Drinking Water Contamination (Methane migrating into water supplies)
Site Contamination (Toxic drilling muds buried in on-site pits)
Excessive Water Withdrawals (Wells use hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons of water per day, harvested from on-site water wells drilled alongside oil/gas wells.)
Poisonous Gases (Sour Gas wells emit and sometimes leak poisonous Hydrogen Sulfide.)
Earthquakes (Such as those caused in Ohio, due to deep injection wells where toxic fracking fluids are injected because these toxic chemicals cannot be disposed of above ground.)
The potential for toxic fracking fluids (known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and chemicals that cause neurological damage) to leak during on-site mixing and operations, and/or from deep injection wells used to bury these toxins.
A large fire burns down the Lakeland Mills sawmill in Prince George, B.C., on Tuesday April 24, 2012.
[EF! Newswire note: Seems fishy that industrial logging, climate change and corporate greed is not to blame for destroying its own mills and killing its own employees… In any case, there’s two less mills in the world. For now, we say bravo to the beetle.]
According to Sympatico.ca News:
A tiny insect that has been devouring trees across British Columbia has emerged as the prime suspect in last Monday’s devastating explosion at a Prince George sawmill that killed two workers and left nine others in critical condition.
Investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the fatal blast, but lumber industry and union leaders said the government needs to take a closer look at the consequences of sawing wood ravaged by mountain pine beetles.
A beetle infestation makes timber very dry and brittle. When milled, the wood leaves behind a fine, highly combustible dust.
The explosion at Lakeland comes three months after a similar incident decimated Babine Forest Products sawmill in Burns Lake, killing two other people Continue reading →
Bloomington, IN—Anonymous student activists drop a massive banner in front of IU’s coal-fired heating plant
Early Monday [April 9, 2012] morning, several anonymous IU students concerned about the climate-related death toll of their campus’ coal-fired heating plant dropped a massive 30’x20’ banner over the two-story bridge of the Kelley School of Business on Fee Lane. The banner, which was dropped intentionally within eyeshot of the campus’ coal plant, read as follows: “CLIMATE CHANGE KILLED 315,000 PEOPLE LAST YEAR ALONE. IU HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS.”
The students responsible for the banner cited this alarming figure from a study released in 2009 by the Global Humanitarian Forum, a non-profit foundation presided over by former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. This landmark publication, entitled “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis,” found that every year approximately 315,000 people die prematurely due to weather-related disasters and environmental degradation (such as deterioration of arable land) associated with anthropogenic climate change and what by the year 2030, “the lives of 660 million people are expected to be seriously affected.”
(Washington, D.C. , March 16, 2012) A new 30-minute film, narrated by actor Richard Chamberlain, explores the on-going bird extinction crisis in Hawai’i that has led to about 70 percent of all native bird species in the state becoming extinct.
The film, Endangered Hawai’i, was produced by American Bird Conservancy (ABC), the nation’s leading bird conservation organization, with funding by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. It is being premiered at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital, March 24 (at 12:30 and 2:00 p.m.) at the National Wildlife Visitor Center in Laurel, Maryland.
Van Eck Global, a New York-based money management firm with $35 million in assets from dirty energy, today launched an energy Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) focused on companies that look for and produce “unconventional” sources of oil and gas, such as oil sands. The New York Stock Exchange name chosen for this “Market Vectors Unconventional Oil and Gas ETF” is “NYSEArca: FRAK”.
Van Eck defined unconventional oil and natural gas as oil shales, tight sand, coal-bed methane and shale gas, among other sources. It said such resources may be geographically extensive or deeply embedded in underground rock formations and can be difficult to extract without the “use of developing technologies.”
The “developing technologies” include hydraulic fracturing—often referred to as “fracking”—as well as horizontal drilling. Hydrofracking for gas injects toxic laden fresh water and sand at extremely high pressure into rock layers to shatter the stone and release the gas. In over 30 states, hydrofracking has generated immense environmental problems, including contaminated drinking water, toxic waste ponds, drilling fluid leaks, and flammable tap water.
Shawn Reynolds is a senior analyst with Van Eck Global Hard Assets Fund. “It doesn’t stop with natural gas,” said Reynolds. “That is really where a lot of the excitement is—in using some of those technologies to unlock new oil plays.” What a sick fuck.
Indeed, according to Reynolds, in 2005, oil production in the United States was about 7.3 million barrels a day, and in 2011 averaged about 8.3 million barrels.
Fund Details
The new fund tracks a proprietary Van Eck index of the same name, and will normally invest at least 80 percent of its assets in companies primarily engaged in a variety of activities related to the exploration, development, extraction, production and/or refining of unconventional oil and natural gas, the company said in a recent regulatory filing.
Van Eck’s Senior Management includes Jan F. van Eck, CEO. He is a heavy campaign financer to Randy Altschuler, Republican for Congress, whose platform includes expansion of domestic offshore drilling.
Van Eck headquarters are located at:
335 Madison Avenue, 19th Floor New York, NY 10017 800.826.2333.
Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov, of the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
“Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we’ve found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures, more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It’s amazing,” Dr Semiletov said. “I was most impressed by the sheer scale and high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them.”
Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tonnes of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea-ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.
Dr Semiletov’s team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were about eight million tonnes a year, but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the phenomenon.
In late summer, the Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted an extensive survey of about 10,000 square miles of sea off the East Siberian coast. Scientists deployed four highly sensitive instruments, both seismic and acoustic, to monitor the “fountains” or plumes of methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed.
“In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed,” Dr Semiletov said. “We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before. Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal.”
Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
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