What happened of note this week in environmental stories?
While others wondered whether some nut job would add to global warming by burning copies of the Qur’an, I’ve been keeping an eye on the environmental stories for you.
BP reported their findings on the Deepwater Horizon accident
The same week that investigators pulled the 300-ton blowout preventer from one-mile beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, BP issued an internal investigation report of the Deepwater Horizon accident found that:
The cement and shoe track barriers – and in particular the cement slurry that was used – at the bottom of the Macondo well failed to contain hydrocarbons within the reservoir, as they were designed to do, and allowed gas and liquids to flow up the production casing; The results of the negative pressure test were incorrectly accepted by BP and Transocean, although well integrity had not been established; Over a 40-minute period, the Transocean rig crew failed to recognize and act on the influx of hydrocarbons into the well until the hydrocarbons were in the riser and rapidly flowing to the surface; After the well-flow reached the rig it was routed to a mud-gas separator, causing gas to be vented directly on to the rig rather than being diverted overboard; The flow of gas into the engine rooms through the ventilation system created a potential for ignition which the rig’s fire and gas system did not prevent; Even after explosion and fire had disabled its crew-operated controls, the rig’s blow-out preventer on the sea-bed should have activated automatically to seal the well. But it failed to operate, probably because critical components were not working.
Based on its key findings, the investigation team has proposed a total of 25 recommendations designed to prevent a recurrence of such an accident. The recommendations are directed at strengthening assurance on blow-out preventers, well control, pressure-testing for well integrity, emergency systems, cement testing, rig audit and verification, and personnel competence.
The New Scientist summarized the report and listed the eight key findings the report provides.
Given that the Deepwater Horizon’s crew had just received commendation from BP over their exemplary multi-year safety record, the BP report doesn’t pass the sniff test.
An Economist magazine blog notes that the report sprays doubt instead of clarifying.
The stakes here are high. If BP is found to have been grossly negligent in its role as operator the fines it faces would increase by billions, and its chances of recouping money from its junior partners in the project, Anadarko and Mitsui, would be badly damaged. On the basis of this report, hardly the last word, such a finding seems unlikely. The likelihood of protracted suits and countersuits between the companies involved, though, remains high, with damage to the reputations of all of them.
United Nations predicts no food crisis this year.
The United Nations announced that despite Russia’s wheat embargo due to “this year’s cereal harvest was the third highest on record and stocks are high” Hafez Ghanem, Assistant Director-General for Economic and Social Development. “Under these conditions we don’t believe that we are headed for a new food crisis, but we will continue monitoring the situation closely.” According to David Dawe, a senior economist at FAO and interviewed by the UN News Centre, wheat stockpiles are higher than before. “There is uncertainty out there; agriculture markets are always uncertain because of the weather… But it would be premature to think that the situation would get worse.”
Researchers hypothesize an ‘environmental paradox’
In a report published in the September issue of BioScience, “Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade?”, Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, et. al. say, “The [United Nations’] Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite large global declines in most ecosystem services.” According to their media release, “Raudsepp-Hearne and her coauthors accept the findings of the influential Millennium Ecosystem Assessment that the capacity of ecosystems to produce many services for humans is now low. Yet they uncover no fault with the composite Human Development Index, a widely used metric that incorporates measures of literacy, life expectancy, and income, and has improved markedly since the mid-1970s. What is more, the index correlates with other measures of thriving. Although some measures of personal security buck the upward trend, the overall improvement in well-being seems robust.” The researchers put forward four explanations:
(1) We have measured well-being incorrectly;
(2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining;
(3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature;
(4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being.
The media release goes on to say, “The researchers resolve the paradox partly by pointing to evidence that food production (which has increased globally over past decades) is more important for human well-being than are other ecosystem services. They also establish support for two other explanations: that technology and innovation have decoupled human well-being from ecosystem degradation, and that there is a time lag after ecosystem service degradation before human well-being will be affected.
“Raudsepp-Hearne and her colleagues find little reassurance about human well-being in coming decades in these conclusions, because observable effects threaten future gains in food production, and events such as floods and droughts clearly harm people within restricted areas.
“In general, technology provides only limited and local decoupling from ecosystem services, and ‘there is mixed evidence’ on whether humans will become more or less able to adapt to ecosystem degradation”
Bradford Plumer at The New Republic thinks reason #4 sounds most plausible.
“[The] researchers don’t seem to have a very good grasp on the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being. For the moment, human existence keeps improving—in genuine and meaningful ways—even as we do widespread damage to the planet. But that doesn’t mean we can keep on our current path forever.”
Leo Hickman at the Guardian also ponders hypothesis #4,
“Can the environmentalist’s paradox be explained away by the fact that there is a time lag between when we degrade our finite natural resources and when our well-being begins to be negatively affected?…[C]an humans [metaphorically] keep laying the train track in front of them fast enough to avoid a nasty derailment? Can we keep perpetually delaying our fall and decline? The authors of the paper seem to be suggesting that our chances of doing so are diminishing all the time as the world becomes increasingly globalised.”
Oh come off it Leo, says Ben Pile at Climate Resistance, the ‘environmentalists paradox’ doesn’t exist .
“What the environmentalist sees is the consequence of the three things he has presupposed about the world. But all the data and empirical research in the world won’t make the environmentalist examine his preconceptions. Hypothesis 3 [technology has decoupled well-being from nature] is true, but it doesn’t satisfy the environmentalist’s questions about the paradox he witnesses, because he doesn’t see that it is a paradox of his own creation. There was never anything to decouple from: humans simply did not rely on natural processes to the extent he believed. The natural processes that concerned the environmentalist were never as degraded as he understood them to be. What is more, ‘ecosystems’ never existed as some whole network of interdependent sub-systems that can be understood as governed by some force keeping the system ‘balanced’ and in ‘harmony’. The ‘better understanding of the environmentalists paradox’ requires a better understanding of the environmentalist. What he needs is a mirror.”
Matt Ridley agrees and points to a study by Helmut Haberi titled Global human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP),
“[T]he whole paradox is misconceived. Human beings do not just live off ecosystems. They garden and nurture them so that they are more productive — and sometimes so boost their productivity that they support still more wildlife as well…[As an example, a] nuclear power plant places less strain on nature than ten thousand wood cutters gathering fuel…The environmentalist’s paradox has it backwards. The most sustainable societies on the planet are the ones that don’t rely on charcoal for fuel, or wild game for food. The richer we get the more chance we have of saving biodiversity.”
Leaders of Greenpeace, 350.org, and the Rainforest Action Network call for direct action in the climate movement
Bill McKibben, Philip Radford, and Rebecca Tarbotton wrote in Grist.org,
“Global warming is no act of God. We’re up against the most profitable and powerful industries on earth: the companies racking up record profits from fossil fuels. And we’re not going to beat them by asking nicely. We’re going to have to build a movement, a movement much bigger than anything we’ve built before, a movement that can push aback against the financial power of Big Oiland Big Coal…We’re making progress, but not as fast as the physical situation is deteriorating. Time is not on our side, so we’ve concluded that going forward mass direct action must play a bigger role in this movement .”
They got responses though maybe not the kind they were thinking of as Steve Milloy at the Green Hell blog noted, “The leaders of Greenpeace, 350.org and the Rainforest Action Network published an article today on Grist.org entitled, ‘A call for direct action in the climate movement: we need your ideas‘ — and boy did they get one.”
“Less than one week after Discovery Channel gunman James J. Lee went down in a blaze of violent ignominy, one commenter wrote,
… When someone is proud of taking advantage of another human being shoot the bastard. John Brown would have killed everybody who thought slavery was boss, or groovy, well we feel the same way, pollute and die, its that easy especially for Corporations and their laziest of all people CEOs. We declare war on CEOs and corporations that kill our brothers and sisters. Don’t need courts or judges, we got ropes. Scare the crap out of those who pollute, hang a few and our air will improve.” [Emphasis added by Milloy]
Another commenter wasn’t quite so violent.
“I think Karl Marx might be more relevant than Gandhi or MLK. This is essentially a PROPERTY issue. GCC isn’t really about oppression and prejudice; its ultimately about wealth and material things.
“We don’t want to hurt people, or be hurt ourselves. But there are ways to target property that could make a statement.
“Here’s an example: What if we start by throwing green paint on parked Hummers and similarly offensive vehicles? These vehicles are, in and of themselves, a statement. And the public roadway is a public forum vis-a-vis the 1st Amendment.
“Why not make the potential buyer of a high-end SUV consider the fact that their vehicle might be targeted for this kind of political expression?
“We could make it a liability to own these vehicles. It already IS a liability for all of us, and our society.”
Well, for my direct action I’m going to sit in a patio chair and catch the last of summer. Stay cool.
I’m sure I missed other notable environmental stories. What stories would you nominate as worthy of being noted this past week? Leave a comment and let everyone know.
Nullius in Verba 