News

Cell Phone Service, But No Toilets or Drinking Water for the Poor

Stephen Africa, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, economics, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, water , ,

By Stephen Leahy

[Why are there mobile phone networks and not sanitation networks?]

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 20 (IPS) – It is a fact of the 21st century that some of the poorest regions of the world have good mobile phone coverage but no toilets or safe drinking water.

Simply installing toilets where needed and ensuring safe water supplies would do more to end crippling poverty and improve world health than any other possible measure, according to an analysis released Monday by the United Nations University (UNU).

“Water problems, caused largely by an appalling absence of adequate toilets in many places, contribute tremendously to some of the world’s most punishing problems, foremost among them the inter-related afflictions of poor health and chronic poverty,” said Zafar Adeel, director of the U.N. University’s Canadian-based International Network on Water, Environment and Health. Continue reading →

‘Bailout’ for Oil Companies $20-40 Billion (and maybe more) every year

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, economics, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, News , , , , ,


By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 30 ’08 (IPS)

Why do U.S. oil companies — some of the most profitable corporations on the planet — receive 20 to 40 billion dollars a year in subsidies from the U.S. government?

And, in a time of skyrocketing oil prices and profits, why did the George W. Bush administration in 2005 authorise an additional 32.9 billion dollars in new subsidies over a five-year period?

“Those are very good questions,” said Doug Koplow of Earth Track, Inc., an independent energy information research organisation in Boston, Massachusetts.

“I don’t have a good answer other than to say we’ve been subsidising American oil companies since 1918,” Koplow told IPS.

Koplow’s 2007 report to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development puts the annual U.S. subsidy at an average of 39 billion dollars a year, when the costs of guarding oil lanes in the Persian/Arab Gulf, and the Alaska Pipeline are included. This does not include any costs from the Iraq war.

Official U.S. government statistics from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) offer a different picture, stating that the oil and gas industry only received 2.15 billion dollars in 2007.

“The EIA has a very narrow definition of what constitutes a subsidy,” said Koplow.econ-v-envir-franke1

Like many industrialised countries, the U.S. subsidises oil production, not oil consumption. Consumption subsidies reduce the cost of buying fuel to the public while production subsidies reduce the cost of finding and producing oil for oil companies.

Experts agree that both forms of subsidies encourage consumption and thus increase the price of oil.

Estimating U.S. oil and gas subsidies is very challenging. Subsidies rarely involve cash payments. Instead scores of U.S. government agencies and departments create hundreds of programmes to support the U.S. energy sector. And there is no requirement for the federal government to keep track of all this.

Among the most common subsidies are construction bonds and research-and-development programmes at low interest rates or tax-free, assuming the legal risks of exploration and development in a company’s stead and income tax breaks. Despite record high prices at the pump, the federal sales tax on petroleum products is lower than average sales tax rates for other goods. And on it goes.

Originally these production subsidies were intended to help the nascent industry meet a growing nation’s energy needs. Despite record-high prices, that rationale remains firmly in place. In 2007, U.S. oil giant Exxon corporation made history with 40.7 billion dollars in profits, the most any U.S. company has ever achieved in a single year.

And subsidy programmes from 1918 are still in place.

“I’m not aware of any oil and gas subsidy that has ever been phased out,” said Koplow, the leading expert on U.S. energy subsidies.

Energy subsidies are often simply hidden from public scrutiny. It’s only recently been revealed that 40 companies granted leases between 1996 and 2000 for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico do not have to pay royalties for the publicly-owned resource. This is worth nearly a billion dollars a year in lost revenue to the federal government, according to a 2008 study by Friends of the Earth (FOE), a U.S. environmental NGO, and may ultimately total 50 billion dollars.

That study also revealed that the Energy Policy Act of 2005 would generate an additional 32.9 billion dollars in new subsidies in the form of tax breaks, reduced royalty payments, and accounting gimmicks over a five-year period.

“The report only includes the explicit subsidies we could find,” said Erich Pica, an energy analyst at FOE.

For complete article see US: Great Place for the Oil Business

It gets better — June 09: New Story: New Way to Give Money to Oil Companies – Economic Stimulus Packages

Canada, Home of the World’s Dirtiest Oil

Stephen CANADA, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, News

A new multi-million government PR campaign claims Canada is a “clean energy superpower“. Meanwhile oil production from Canada’s oil sands — the world’s dirtiest oil — is ramping up from 1.2 million barrels a day to 3.5 million. Sadly yet another example of a government resorting to the “big lie”.

By the way virtually all of this oil goes to the US market.

I wrote a series of investigative articles for IPS on the enormous environmental impacts of Canada’s oil sands in 2006. That series has been updated and collected into an e-Book format (download for free).

Here’s an excerpt from Oil Stains in the Boreal Forest: The Environmental Cost of Canada’s Oil Sands

THE ‘RECIPE’ TO MAKE A TANK (75 litres/20 gallons) OF OIL SANDS GASOLINE :

* Dig up two tonnes of earth and rock
* Burn up to 1500 cubic feet of natural gas to boil approx 700 litres of fresh water to process the dirt
* Throw away 950 litres of toxic mine tailings and emit 480 kilograms of CO2, the main greenhouse gas causing global warming

REPEAT 1.2 million times a day (one barrel of oil makes about 75 litres of gasoline)

Note: this analysis does not include local air pollution, impacts on wildlife and local people from oil sands operations and pipelines.

Oil Stains in the Boreal Forest

FREE eBook!! Reveals environmental impacts of Canada’s oil sands industry – the world’s largest industrial project.

Extinction Crisis Serious Threat to Our Health – says Harvard Doc

Stephen Biodiversity, ECOLOGY, Health, News, OCEAN, WILDLIFE

“Few people realize our health is directly tied to the health of the natural world,” — Dr. Aaron Bernstein, Harvard Medical School

Bernstein and colleagues reveal the latest scientific evidence to make a persuasive case that the current extinction crisis, with species vanishing every day, is a serious threat to humanity equal to, if not greater than, climate change.

Their findings are documented in a new book “Sustaining Life“, see here for complete article.

“When we harm nature, we are harming ourselves,” says Bernstein.

Lose Corals and We Will be Fighting for Our Own Survival

Stephen Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Mexico, News, OCEAN , , , , ,

Interview with Marine Scientist Roberto Iglesias-Prieto

By Stephen Leahy

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida, U.S., Jul 31 (Tierramérica)

“There would be no white sands on the beaches of Cancún without the Mesoamerican reef,” Professor Roberto Iglesias-Prieto, a marine ecophysiologist working at the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Tierramérica.

Tourism is Mexico’s third leading source of revenue, and the country needs to invest much more in protecting its valuable coral systems, says the expert. But to explain the problems that coral reefs face “it is not enough to be an ecologist; one has to be an economist and political scientist as well,” he adds.

The Mesoamerican reef, which is off the Yucatán Peninsula and is shared by Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras, extends 1,100 kilometres, making it the largest in the Atlantic Ocean and the second largest in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef east of Australia.

Corals are crucial for the health of oceans and are home to 25 to 33 percent of marine life. The livelihoods of one billion people rely on coral reefs, directly or indirectly.

But the reefs are dying as a result of excessive fishing, pollution and climate change, which is heating up the water and causing acidification.

Few coral reefs will be healthy beyond 2050 if significant reductions in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels do not occur in the near term, most experts in this field agree.

Tierramérica’s Stephen Leahy spoke with Iglesias-Prieto during the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in July in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Is this article of interest? It exists thanks to contributions from readers. Please click here to learn more about Community Supported Journalism.

Continue reading →

Humans Have Halted The Next Ice Age

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News

Interview with climate expert Sir David King:

Humanity is now the primary driver of our climate

BARCELONA, Spain, Jul 22 (IPS) – Humanity faces enormous challenges at the start of the 21st century, says Sir David King, Britain’s former chief scientific advisor and now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University in England.

The crises surrounding climate change, population growth, water, food and land are deeply interconnected, Sir David said at the opening of the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Friday. 

The Forum, known as ESOF, is a biannual gathering of scientists, researchers, policy makers and journalists that has become Europe’s largest scientific showcase. This year, 4,700 people registered for the five-day conference in Barcelona from Jul. 18- 22. 

In his role as chief scientific advisor, Sir David was outspoken in his warnings to political leaders that climate change is a far greater threat than terrorism and that the failure to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels would make terrorism far worse and create millions of environmental refugees. 

IPS environmental correspondent Stephen Leahy spoke to Sir David at the symposium in Barcelona. 

IPS: Population growth rates are slowing, what is your concern? 

DK: Growth rates are beginning to slow. There are 6.8 billion people now and that will rise to 8 billion in 2028 and then peak at 9 billion in 2050, according to recent projections. However, that number of people will exert an impossible strain on the Earth’s natural resources. 

For example, there isn’t enough fresh water for more than 8.5 billion people at our current average usage. Food production is limited by water availability and the only way forward will be to use genetic modification to create drought-tolerant crops. We here in Europe need to change our minds on GM crops. Those anti-GM attitudes probably crippled research and are responsible for a large number of hunger fatalities in Africa.

IPS: What about the current global food crisis? Continue reading →

Wetlands Loss Fuelling CO2 Feedback Loop

Stephen Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, News , ,

By Stephen Leahy

Uxbridge, CANADA, Jul 21 (IPS) – Wetlands are dangerous, scientists say, in the sense that they are ticking carbon bombs best left alone. To help stave off extreme climate change, existing wetlands should be enhanced and new wetlands created so they could capture more carbon.

“Wetlands hold massive stores of carbon — about 20 percent of all terrestrial carbon stocks,” said Eugene Turner, a leading wetlands expert at Louisiana State University’s Coastal Ecology Institute. 

However, wetlands, including peatlands, continue to be converted to other uses around the world, resulting in large emissions of carbon and methane, a potent greenhouse gas that has 21 times the warming impact of carbon dioxide. 

By itself, climate change is already degrading wetlands, especially in the Arctic and near Arctic regions where the once permanently frozen peatlands are thawing, Turner told IPS prior to the opening of the Eighth INTECOL International Wetlands Conference in Cuiaba, Brazil on Monday. 

“Researchers have been measuring huge releases of carbon and methane up there,” he said. “It’s crazy to add to that by draining or mismanaging other wetlands.” Continue reading →

Cutting CO2 Only Way to Save Dying Corals

Stephen 1 Must Read, Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Food, global warming, News, OCEAN , , , , , ,

By Stephen Leahy

FORT LAUDERDALE, U.S., July 12 2008 (IPS)

The rapid decline of coral reefs around the world offers a potent warning that entire ecosystems can collapse due to human activities, although there is hope for reefs if immediate action is taken, coral experts agreed at the conclusion of a five-day international meeting Friday.

“Reefs are in serious trouble, but don’t write them off,” Terry Hughes, a marine ecologist at Australia’s James Cook University told 3,000 scientists, conservationists and policy makers attending at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

“We can save reefs if we take immediate action,” Hughes said.

More than 20 percent of the world’s reefs have died, and large areas are failing due to a combination of climate change, overfishing, pollution and sea level rise. Most of the fabulous corals that attract tourists to the Caribbean are gone and half of remaining reefs in the U.S. are in serious decline.

[Update 08/10 – Here’s a list of Stephen Leahy’s latest articles on corals Coral Reefs and Acid Oceans Series]

“We may be facing ocean deserts in the future,” said Guillermo Dias-Pulido of Australia’s University of Queensland.

Continue reading →

A Third of Corals Face Extinction

Stephen Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, News, OCEAN , ,

By Stephen Leahy
FORT LAUDERDALE, U.S., Jul 10 (IPS) – One third of reef-building corals already face extinction because of climate change, the first-ever global assessment has found.

Reefs are made up of hundreds of coral species, and a two-year study to determine the current status of corals has discovered that 231 of the 704 species assessed will be “red-listed” Thursday. This means these 231 species meet the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List Criteria for species at risk of extinction in the near future.

Previously, only 10 species of corals had been red-listed, mainly because no proper assessment had been done before.

“We were not expecting the numbers to be that high,” said Suzanne Livingstone of the IUCN’s Global Marine Species Assessment (GMSA) in Norfolk, Virginia. The paper was published Thursday in Science.

If the same assessment of corals had been done 20 years ago, only 13 of the 704 species would have been red-listed, Livingstone told IPS at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. However, in that short time span, climate change has warmed the oceans and begun to make them more acidic and corals are suffering.

“It’s frightening when you think about it,” she said.

Continue reading →

Global Fish Catches Vastly Underestimated

Stephen ECOLOGY, ENVIRONMENT, Global Issues and Perspectives, News, OCEAN ,

By Stephen Leahy

FORT LAUDERDALE, U.S., Jul 8 (IPS) – Fish catches in tropical island nations may be as much as 17 times higher than officially reported, according to a new study released Tuesday.

“The underreporting of fish catches is of such a magnitude it boggles the mind,” said Daniel Pauly, a renowned fisheries expert at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

All of the 20 small Pacific island countries in the study underreported catches, mainly because they did not count the catch by small-scale local fishers. This is not unique — even the U.S. does not report local and recreational fishing statistics, Pauly told IPS at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Tuesday.

A different study also released Tuesday estimates that the unreported recreational fish catch in the Hawaiian Islands doubles the size of the official catch. It also concluded that 75 percent of reef fishes in the main Hawaiian Islands are depleted or in critical condition because of overfishing. Continue reading →