[Biofuel] Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleaned up naturally: scientists
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Gulf+Mexico+spill+cleaned+naturally+scientists/8214333/story.html Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleaned up naturally: scientists Bacteria in deep water devoured spill aftermath By TOM SPEARS, Postmedia News April 9, 2013 Three years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, scientists gathered by the Gulf of Mexico are making a surprising claim: The massive spill wasn't a long-term disaster at all. The Gulf and its shores recovered much faster than expected thanks to an amazing "self-cleaning" ability, they have revealed: An explosion of natural, oil-eating microbes quickly destroyed most of the oil. Nature is better than anything humans have dreamed up to fight the spill. The microbes don't need help from our technology to do their job. In fact, airplanes that sprayed chemicals to break up oil slicks may have poisoned the sea creatures and even made the oil stay around longer. BP's oil spill in 2010, while destructive in the short term because of its size, appears to have broken down through a system established by nature. Oil deposits under the ocean bottom release from 560,000 to 1.4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf each year, like oily springs, according to the U.S. National Research Council. There's even better news: The bacteria aren't unique to the Gulf. Coldwater bacteria chew up oil even in the Arctic. Monday's meeting comes as Canadians are debating whether a possible oil spill off the British Columbia coast would foul the beaches and poison the sea for generations. In the days that followed the blowout in the Gulf, Terry Hazen of the University of Tennessee investigated the scene first-hand. Hazen, a biologist, published results in the journal Science weeks later. "It was surprising how fast they consumed the oil. In some locations, it took only one day for them to reduce a gallon of oil to a half gallon. In others, the half-life for a given quantity of spilled oil was six days," he wrote. (Half-life means the time needed to eliminate half of it.) Though the blowout released 58,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea water, his team found that "the dispersed oil plume was gone within weeks after the wellhead was capped - degraded and diluted to undetectable levels." "It's a little bit surprising to some people that the Gulf is so clean given all of that oil that's going into the Gulf, and the other toxic chemicals from the Mississippi River," Hazen said. But the bacteria destroyed most of it quickly. In the deep water, where the temperature is a steady 4 C, bacteria were drawn to it "like little oil-seeking missiles." The explosion of oil-eating bacteria actually multiplied the biomass of the deep ocean - the total mass of all living things down there - by 10 to 100 times. The bad news is that these bacteria don't survive if someone grows them in a lab and transfers them to other oceans to fight oil spills. And other scientists warn it isn't all rosy. The University of Alberta's David Schindler says waste from Canadian oilsands is causing "sub-lethal" harm to wildlife - not killing animals, but deforming them. He says the Deepwater spill did the same. But somehow, many oceans clean themselves better than humans can. When the tanker Amoco Cadiz split up on the coast of northern France in 1978, fisheries and beaches that were treated with chemicals to break up the oil often took 15 to 20 years to recover, Hazen noted. But those that weren't treated recovered within five years. "Petroleum degraders are found anywhere. ... And that's logical because (oil) is a natural product. Basically it's fossilized algae that have been compressed under extreme heat." Hazen isn't alone in playing down the danger of oil. In Houston this past February, at a dinner honouring a local oceanographer, a member of the audience asked Larry McKinney about the biggest threat to the Gulf. The marine biologist from Texas A&M University has spent three years studying the Deepwater spill. His answer: "Ethanol." McKinney said he is worried about the flood of fertilizer from Midwestern corn fields washing down the Mississippi River. Fertilizer causes runaway algae growth and creates Gulf "dead zones" when the algae die, rot and use up the oxygen. Hazen's work is one of a cluster of new studies presented Monday, all showing that parts of the environment can recover from spilled oil naturally. Among the other findings: - The Gulf 's salt marshes that trapped oil like sponges are also recovering faster than expected. The worst-hit sites should recover completely "within three years." - As well, microbes native to Arctic sea water "are able to biodegrade oil at very low, environmentally relevant temperatures" - i.e., realistic Arctic conditions. - Arguments still swirl around the toxicity of Corexit, the "dispersant" chemical that breaks up oil blobs into little droplets. By combining with oil, the manufa
[Biofuel] Ex-Regulator Says Reactors Are Flawed
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/us/ex-regulator-says-nuclear-reactors-in-united-states-are-flawed.html Ex-Regulator Says Reactors Are Flawed By MATTHEW L. WALD Published: April 8, 2013 WASHINGTON — All 104 nuclear power reactors now in operation in the United States have a safety problem that cannot be fixed and they should be replaced with newer technology, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Monday. Shutting them all down at once is not practical, he said, but he supports phasing them out rather than trying to extend their lives. The position of the former chairman, Gregory B. Jaczko, is not unusual in that various anti-nuclear groups take the same stance. But it is highly unusual for a former head of the nuclear commission to so bluntly criticize an industry whose safety he was previously in charge of ensuring. Asked why he did not make these points when he was chairman, Dr. Jaczko said in an interview after his remarks, “I didn’t really come to it until recently.” “I was just thinking about the issues more, and watching as the industry and the regulators and the whole nuclear safety community continues to try to figure out how to address these very, very difficult problems,” which were made more evident by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, he said. “Continuing to put Band-Aid on Band-Aid is not going to fix the problem.” Dr. Jaczko made his remarks at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference in Washington in a session about the Fukushima accident. Dr. Jaczko said that many American reactors that had received permission from the nuclear commission to operate for 20 years beyond their initial 40-year licenses probably would not last that long. He also rejected as unfeasible changes proposed by the commission that would allow reactor owners to apply for a second 20-year extension, meaning that some reactors would run for a total of 80 years. Dr. Jaczko cited a well-known characteristic of nuclear reactor fuel to continue to generate copious amounts of heat after a chain reaction is shut down. That “decay heat” is what led to the Fukushima meltdowns. The solution, he said, was probably smaller reactors in which the heat could not push the temperature to the fuel’s melting point. The nuclear industry disagreed with Dr. Jaczko’s assessment. “U.S. nuclear energy facilities are operating safely,” said Marvin S. Fertel, the president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association. “That was the case prior to Greg Jaczko’s tenure as Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman. It was the case during his tenure as N.R.C. chairman, as acknowledged by the N.R.C.’s special Fukushima response task force and evidenced by a multitude of safety and performance indicators. It is still the case today.” Dr. Jaczko resigned as chairman last summer after months of conflict with his four colleagues on the commission. He often voted in the minority on various safety questions, advocated more vigorous safety improvements, and was regarded with deep suspicion by the nuclear industry. A former aide to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, he was appointed at Mr. Reid’s instigation and was instrumental in slowing progress on a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles from Las Vegas. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] Judge rules administration overlooked fracking risks in California mineral leases
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/09/us-usa-fracking-california-idUSBRE93803720130409 Judge rules administration overlooked fracking risks in California mineral leases By Rory Carroll SAN FRANCISCO | Tue Apr 9, 2013 3:34am EDT (Reuters) - A federal judge has ruled the Obama administration broke the law when it issued oil leases in central California without fully weighing the environmental impact of "fracking," a setback for companies seeking to exploit the region's enormous energy resources. The decision, made public on Monday, effectively bars for the time being any drilling on two tracts of land comprising 2,500 acres leased for oil and gas development in 2011 by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management in Monterey County. The tracts lie atop a massive bed of sedimentary rock known as the Monterey Shale Formation, estimated by the Energy Department to contain more than 15 billion barrels of oil, equal to 64 percent of the total U.S. shale oil reserves. Most of that oil is not economically retrievable except by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a production-boosting technique in which large amounts of water, sand and chemicals are injected into shale formations to force hydrocarbon fuels to the surface. Fracking itself is not a new technology but its widespread use in combination with advances in horizontal drilling to extract oil and gas from underground shale beds has fueled a new onshore U.S. energy boom. It also has sparked concerns about impacts on the environment, including questions raised about the potential effects of fracking on groundwater. Environmental groups also criticize oil shale production as at odds with efforts to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion that scientists blame for global climate change. California is implementing a host of policies to cut its greenhouse emissions, including a carbon cap-and-trade program that it bills as a potential model for other states. The issue came into sharp focus in California last month when Governor Jerry Brown, who has long touted his record as an environmentalist, said the state should consider fracking technology to develop its shale reserves as a way of reducing reliance on imported oil. U.S. District Judge Paul Grewal in San Jose ruled that the federal government erred, and violated U.S. environmental law, in declining to conduct a full-fledged environmental impact study of its oil leasing for the Monterey Formation. JUDGE FINDS RISKS 'COMPLETELY IGNORED' Grewal held that BLM's analysis was flawed because it "did not adequately consider the development impact of hydraulic fracturing techniques ... when used in combination with technologies such as horizontal drilling." "The potential risk for contamination from fracking, while unknown, is not so remote or speculative to be completely ignored," Grewal wrote. But the judge stopped short of ordering the leases canceled, as sought by environmental groups. Instead, he ordered the parties to confer and either submit a joint plan of action if they can agree or prepare to argue their respective cases for a remedy if they cannot. "In any event, it is clear from the order and the general requirements of the law that BLM cannot allow drilling on the leases until and unless it completes a more thorough environmental review," said Brendan Cummings, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, which brought the suit with the Sierra Club. He hailed the decision as a milestone in efforts to seek greater scrutiny and regulation of fracking. "It's the first federal court opinion we're aware of that explicitly holds that federal agencies have to analyze the environmental impacts of fracking when carrying out an oil and gas leasing program," Cummings told Reuters. But oil company representatives played down the ruling's significance, saying the judge took issue only with the BLM process, not fracking as a method of recovering oil. "There are many hurdles that producers have to go through, and oftentimes they add delay and cost to energy production," said Tupper Hull, a spokesman for the refinery group Western States Petroleum Association. "Hopefully the court will ultimately allow the lease to go forward and production to take place," he said. Cumming said the outcome would likely have implications for a more recent and much larger lease sale of 18,000 acres for oil and gas development in the same general region, which the BLM approved under the same "flawed analysis." He said the BLM should rescind those leases and "conduct the proper environmental review" or face more court challenges. ___ Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
[Biofuel] The Anti-Empire Report #115
http://williamblum.org/aer/read/115 The Anti-Empire Report #115 By William Blum - Published April 8th, 2013 Would you believe that the United States tried to do something that was not nice against Hugo Chávez? Wikileaks has done it again. I guess the US will really have to get tough now with Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. In a secret US cable to the State Department, dated November 9, 2006, and recently published online by WikiLeaks, former US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, outlines a comprehensive plan to destabilize the government of the late President Hugo Chávez. The cable begins with a Summary: During his 8 years in power, President Chavez has systematically dismantled the institutions of democracy and governance. The USAID/OTI program objectives in Venezuela focus on strengthening democratic institutions and spaces through non-partisan cooperation with many sectors of Venezuelan society. USAID/OTI = United States Agency for International Development/Office of Transition Initiatives. The latter is one of the many euphemisms that American diplomats use with each other and the world - They say it means a transition to "democracy". What it actually means is a transition from the target country adamantly refusing to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs to a country gladly willing (or acceding under pressure) to cooperate with American imperialist grand designs. OTI supports the Freedom House (FH) "Right to Defend Human Rights" program with $1.1 million. Simultaneously through Development Alternatives Inc. (DAI), OTI has also provided 22 grants to human rights organizations. Freedom House is one of the oldest US government conduits for transitioning to "democracy"; to a significant extent it equates "democracy" and "human rights" with free enterprise. Development Alternatives Inc. is the organization that sent Alan Gross to Cuba on a mission to help implement the US government's operation of regime change. OTI speaks of working to improve "the deteriorating human rights situation in" Venezuela. Does anyone know of a foreign government with several millions of dollars to throw around who would like to improve the seriously deteriorating human rights situation in the United States? They can start with the round-the-clock surveillance and the unconscionable entrapment of numerous young "terrorists" guilty of thought crimes. "OTI partners are training NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to be activists and become more involved in advocacy." Now how's that for a self-given license to fund and get involved in any social, economic or political activity that can sabotage any program of the Chávez government and/or make it look bad? The US ambassador's cable points out that: OTI has directly reached approximately 238,000 adults through over 3000 forums, workshops and training sessions delivering alternative values and providing opportunities for opposition activists to interact with hard-core Chavistas, with the desired effect of pulling them slowly away from Chavismo. We have supported this initiative with 50 grants totaling over $1.1 million. "Another key Chavez strategy," the cable continues, "is his attempt to divide and polarize Venezuelan society using rhetoric of hate and violence. OTI supports local NGOs who work in Chavista strongholds and with Chavista leaders, using those spaces to counter this rhetoric and promote alliances through working together on issues of importance to the entire community." This is the classical neo-liberal argument against any attempt to transform a capitalist society - The revolutionaries are creating class conflict. But of course, the class conflict was already there, and nowhere more embedded and distasteful than in Latin America. OTI funded 54 social projects all over the country, at over $1.2 million, allowing [the] Ambassador to visit poor areas of Venezuela and demonstrate US concern for the Venezuelan people. This program fosters confusion within the Bolivarian ranks, and pushes back at the attempt of Chavez to use the United States as a 'unifying enemy.' One has to wonder if the good ambassador (now an Assistant Secretary of State) placed any weight or value at all on the election and re-election by decisive margins of Chávez and the huge masses of people who repeatedly filled the large open squares to passionately cheer him. When did such things last happen in the ambassador's own country? Where was his country's "concern for the Venezuelan people" during the decades of highly corrupt and dictatorial regimes? His country'a embassy in Venezuela in that period was not plotting anything remotely like what is outlined in this cable. The cable summarizes the focus of the embassy's strategy's as: "1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez' Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolatin
[Biofuel] Why Trees Matter
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opinion/why-trees-matter.html?_r=0 Why Trees Matter By JIM ROBBINS Published: April 11, 2012 Helena, Mont. TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention. North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more. The common factor has been hotter, drier weather. We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes. For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes. Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me. What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma. In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment. Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows. Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth. Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures. A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says. Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.” Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Planted Trees.” This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: April 21, 2012 An earlier version of this essay referred incorrectly to one of th
