It seems clear to me that Obama decided early on that his administration would go lightly on regulation enforcement, lest we destroy more jobs. Okay, I get it. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. However, I can think of no good reason why he’d let his administration ignore the many, many environmental and social sins of the coal industry when everyone knows it is already dying. In fact, he should have this latest death on his conscience.
Category: Environmental
Corexit made Gulf oil spill 52 times more toxic
Julia Whitty writes for Mother Jones on the environment and she’s written about the dramatic decline in microscopic life on Gulf beaches and also about how using dispersant allowed oil to penetrate much more deeply into beaches, possibly extending lifespan of its toxicity. Now she highlights a new study that finds the addition of Corexit to the Gulf oil explosion made the whole mess much more toxic:
A new study finds that adding Corexit 9500A to Macondo oil—as BP did in the course of trying to disperse its 2010 oilspill disaster—made the mixture 52 times more toxic than oil alone. The results are from toxicology tests in the lab and appear in the scientific journal Environmental Pollution.
Using oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout and Corexit the researchers tested the toxicity of oil, dispersant, and a mixture of oil and dispersant on five strains of rotifers—the lab rats of marine toxicology testing. Among the results:
- The oil-dispersant mixture killed adult rotifers
- As little as 2.6 percent of the mixture inhibited egg hatching by 50 percent
The inhibition of egg hatching in bottom sediments is particularly ominous because rotifer eggs hatch each spring to live as adults in the water column where they are important food sources for larval and juvenile fish, for shrimp, crabs and other marine life in estuarine and shoreline ecosystems—including fisheries humans depend on.
“Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters,” said lead author Roberto-Rico Martinez currently at the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes, Mexico. “But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion.“
Heroes
Two protesters barricaded themselves inside the Keystone XL pipeline today. They were arrested, of course.
‘Enormous’
Oh, you know how men exaggerate about size:
On Monday at the UN climate talks in Doha, the US claimed credit for “enormous” efforts on climate change.
Jonathan Pershing, a senior negotiator for the US, said: “Those who don’t know what the US is doing may not be informed of the scale and extent of the effort, but it’s enormous.”
Whether the US has taken enormous steps on climate change is open to debate. What we do know is that we have a newly re-elected President who in his acceptance speech said “We want our children to live in a world without the destructive power of a warming planet”.
In order to tackle climate change, the US cannot continue on a path of relentless oil and gas drilling, as currently espoused in the President’s Energy plan, known as “All of the Above”, which advocates a mix of oil, gas, nuclear, renewables and the contradiction which is clean coal.
As Steve Kretzmann and I pointed out in the aftermath of Obama’s re-election: “The President cannot simultaneously fight climate change and support an All of the Above/Drill Baby Drill energy strategy. It would be like launching a war on cancer while promoting cheap cigarettes for kids. Leadership on climate requires understanding this.”
Cold and mold in the Rockaways
And Mayor Bloomberg’s stealth visit:
These people are so fucked, and of course the national media doesn’t bother to cover their plight. Anyone who’s waiting for the city government to fix things will have a very long wait. Yet they’re closing down the Occupy Sandy supply hubs, where they’re actually helping people? Fuck them.
California’s other ‘Big One’
Megastorms could drown massive portions of California. [Via Scientific American.]
Denmark solar energy
BP
So they might not really be banned from federal contracts…
Occupy Sandy
BP barred from federal contracts
This is good, but let’s see how long it lasts:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration put a temporary stop to new federal contracts with British oil company BP on Wednesday, citing the company’s “lack of business integrity” and criminal proceedings stemming from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.
The action by the Environmental Protection Administration won’t affect current contracts, but prevents BP and its affiliates from new government contracts “until the company can provide sufficient evidence to EPA demonstrating that it meets federal business standards,” the agency said.
“EPA is taking this action due to BP’s lack of business integrity as demonstrated by the company’s conduct with regard to the Deepwater Horizon blowout, explosion, oil spill, and response,” the agency said in a statement.