Category: Environmental

Quinoa

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Uh oh. These unintended side effects are why it’s best to just eat local:

Not long ago, quinoa was just an obscure Peruvian grain you could only buy in wholefood shops. We struggled to pronounce it (it’s keen-wa, not qui-no-a), yet it was feted by food lovers as a novel addition to the familiar ranks of couscous and rice. Dieticians clucked over quinoa approvingly because it ticked the low-fat box and fitted in with government healthy eating advice to “base your meals on starchy foods”.


Adventurous eaters liked its slightly bitter taste and the little white curls that formed around the grains. Vegans embraced quinoa as a credibly nutritious substitute for meat. Unusual among grains, quinoa has a high protein content (between 14%-18%), and it contains all those pesky, yet essential, amino acids needed for good health that can prove so elusive to vegetarians who prefer not to pop food supplements.


Sales took off. Quinoa was, in marketing speak, the “miracle grain of the Andes”, a healthy, right-on, ethical addition to the meat avoider’s larder (no dead animals, just a crop that doesn’t feel pain). Consequently, the price shot up – it has tripled since 2006 – with more rarified black, red and “royal” types commanding particularly handsome premiums.


But there is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fuelled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.


In fact, the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there. It’s beginning to look like a cautionary tale of how a focus on exporting premium foods can damage the producer country’s food security. Feeding our apparently insatiable 365-day-a-year hunger for this luxury vegetable, Peru has also cornered the world market in asparagus. Result? In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable has depleted the water resources on which local people depend. NGOs report that asparagus labourers toil in sub-standard conditions and cannot afford to feed their children while fat cat exporters and foreign supermarkets cream off the profits. That’s the pedigree of all those bunches of pricy spears on supermarket shelves.

The selling of Pennsylvania

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

PA Gov. Tom Corbett is an out-and-out whore (and not just for the fracking industry), and no matter which Democrat runs against him, you need to suck up and support them — not just with your vote, but with your time and money. Because this guy is bleeding us dry with his cronyism and corruption:

IT WAS JAN. 18, 2011 – just a day before Gov. Corbett took the oath of office – when, without warning, trucks started rolling one after another into a once-abandoned industrial site in the Susquehanna River town of Sunbury, Pa.


At the end of that day, stunned and angry neighbors counted 27 large dump trucks on their small residential street, filled with the debris from gas-drilling rigs in the Marcellus Shale. Some of the trucks were leaking liquids, said the neighbors, including Cora Campbell, who recalled that “it smelled like a combination of diesel fuel and dirt.”


For months, Campbell and others in the history-rich town of 10,000, an hour north of Harrisburg, and environmental activists pressed the new owner of the site, the logistics firm Moran Industries, and regulators from the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), to find out what was happening at the property and how it could handle so much fracking waste without environmental permits.


But there was something else that Sunbury residents didn’t find out until long after DEP sided with Moran Industries: Its subsidiary’s contract with an interstate railroad, signed three months after the waste-transfer station opened, now meant that it was exempt from Pennsylvania permitting laws.


It turned out that the company’s owner, John Moran Jr., wasn’t just a major political donor who’d given more than $100,000 to Corbett’s gubernatorial campaign, but he also had gifted more than $2,400 for Corbett’s personal travel, including hosting the governor and his wife on a yacht off Rhode Island in July 2011. The trips weren’t revealed until last fall, in an amendment to an earlier Corbett ethics-disclosure form.


Corbett and his aides have strongly denied that his friendship and his personal gifts from the head of Moran Industries had any impact on his policies, or on any actions by regulators in the Corbett administration. Indeed, the GOP governor has made reducing regulations on business a cornerstone of his policies, and he famously urged lawmakers in March 2011: “Let’s make Pennsylvania the Texas of the natural-gas boom.”


Still, Sunbury residents and environmental activists are troubled by the appearances in a tangle of money, politics, friendship and environmental risk in a central Pennsylvania region that Hollywood now might call a “promised land” – pitting fracking jobs and profits against the faded dignity of a small, scenic Rust Belt town.


“The broader issue is that during the period when Moran was traveling with the governor, his company had much to gain from favorable interpretation from the DEP of this facility,” said Mark Szybist, a Wilkes-Barre-based lawyer for the environmental group PennFuture who has been following the saga from the start.

We’re not kidding

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

This time they really, really mean it:

Global warming is already having a major impact on life in America, a report by US government scientists has warned. The draft version of the US National Climate Assessment reveals that increasing storm surges, floods, melting glaciers and permafrost, and intensifying droughts are having a profound effect on the lives of Americans.


“Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington state and maple syrup producers have observed changes in their local climate that are outside of their experience,” states the report.


Health services, water supplies, farming and transport are already being strained, the assessment adds. Months after superstorm Sandy battered the east coast, causing billions of dollars of damage, the report concludes that severe weather disruption is going to be commonplace in coming years. Nor do the authors flinch from naming the culprit. “Global warming is due primarily to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels,” it states.


The uncompromising language of the report, and the stark picture that its authors have painted of the likely effects of global warming, have profound implications for the rest of the world.


If the world’s greatest economy is already feeling the strain of global warming, and is fearful of its future impact, then other nations face a very worrying future as temperatures continue to rise as more and more greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere.


“The report makes for sobering reading,” said Professor Chris Rapley, of University College London. “Most people in the UK and US accept human-induced climate change is happening but respond by focusing attention elsewhere. We dismiss the effects of climate change as ‘not here’, ‘not now’, ‘not me’ and ‘not clear’.


“This compelling new assessment by the US experts challenges all four comforting assumptions. The message is clear: now is the time to act!”


Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, said: “For those outside the US, this report carries a brutal message because it shows that even the world’s leading economy cannot simply adapt to the impacts of climate change. The problem clearly needs concerted international action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to avoid the worst potential consequences.”

Warming up

~ Dr. S.

The credibility of James Inhofe is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

Last year was the hottest year on record for the contiguous 48 states, marked by near-record numbers of extreme weather events such as drought, wildfire, tornadoes and storms, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.


In its annual report, State of the Climate, NOAA reported that the average annual temperature was 55.3 degrees — 3.3 degrees greater than the average temperature for the 20th century. It was also a full degree higher than the previous record-high temperature, set in 1998 — the biggest margin between two record-high temperatures to date.


The report confirmed what many Americans may have suspected over the last year: that extreme weather events are becoming more common. The only year when there were more extreme weather events was 1998, largely because a greater number of tropical cyclones made landfall, NOAA researchers said.


In 2012, the Upper Midwest was hit with floods, the mid-Atlantic with sudden summertime storms, the West with wildfire and the Northeast with Hurricane Sandy, among many other events. Most of the country even now remains in the grip of drought.


For years, climatologists have been reluctant to draw a line from climate change to specific weather events, and the NOAA authors of the report were cautious about making links. But a growing body of research has begun to indicate that climate change creates conditions for the kinds of temperatures and events the United States experienced last year.

Tar sands blockade

~ susie

The real “eco-terrorists” are the oil companies.

Loud construction noises fill Daniel’s forest as we walk through it earlier this month. Daniel leads me to a pond that had been so clean when I visited during the summer that he drank from it in front of me.


“Not going to happen today,” he says. “It’s cloudy, murky, milky, nasty. Wouldn’t drink out of it. Wouldn’t let my dog drink out of it.”


We get to a clearing in his forest the size of a four-lane highway. Earth movers are digging trenches. A green pipe three feet in diameter stretches as far as we can see. Daniel points out two big stacks of enormous tree trunks — what’s left of this swath of his forest.


Daniel winces. “I don’t think anybody would like to see the destruction of their home. That’s what it is,” he says.


But Jaffe, the UC Davis energy expert, says the efforts were not as futile as they may seem. Because of high profile protests against tar sands, companies in Canada are working on technologies to reduce their greenhouse gas footprint.


“The young woman who went up in the trees should feel happy,” Jaffe says. “She might not have been able to stop the pipeline, but she certainly sent the message to Alberta producers.”

U.S. sailors sue TEPCO

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

How awful; I can’t begin to imagine how many other unwitting rescue workers were exposed to dangerous levels. It seemed clear from the start that TEPCO was not telling the truth about the radiation levels:

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501), owner of the power plant which had the world’s biggest nuclear disaster since 1986, was sued by eight U.S. sailors claiming they were exposed to radiation and the utility lied about the dangers.


The sailors aboard the USS Ronald Reagan nuclear-powered aircraft carrier were involved in disaster relief operations following the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan that caused the meltdown, according to the complaint filed in U.S. federal court in San Diego on Dec. 21.


Tepco, as the Japanese utility is known, and the Japanese government conspired to create the false impression radiation leaking from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant didn’t pose a threat to the sailors, according to the complaint. As a result the plaintiffs rushed into areas that were unsafe and too close to the power plant, exposing them to radiation, the sailors’ lawyers said.


The Japanese government was “lying through their teeth about the reactor meltdown” as it reassured the crew of USS Reagan that “everything is under control,” the plaintiffs’ lawyers said in the complaint. “The plaintiffs must now endure a lifetime of radiation poisoning and suffering.”


The sailors each sought $10 million in damages, $30 million in punitive damages and a judgment requiring the creation of a $100 million fund to pay for their medical monitoring and treatments.

A matter of conscience

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

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.

Corexit made Gulf oil spill 52 times more toxic

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

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.“