Ecopolitology » Dave Levitan

Coal Mining Deja Vu: Massey Energy’s Latest Safety Violations

Dave Levitan — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 20:17:23 +0000

One would think that after a devastating explosion that cost the lives of 29 miners, coal giant Massey Energy would try and tighten up its safety profile. One would be wrong.

A surprise inspection to the Seng Creek Powellton Mine in Boone County, West Virginia, revealed multiple violations resulting in 11 closure orders and a citation. Miners were apparently making illegal "deep cuts" into the coal seem, which allows for higher production. Because the practice can produce more dangerous coal dust underground, approval from the Mine Safety and Health Administration is required. Mine operators also failed to use proper ventilation equipment and skipped over required tests for gases that could cause explosions.

In a press release, Joseph A. Main, assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health, noted that we are only six months removed from the explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine. "Rather than learn from this tragedy, there are mine operators that continue the 'catch me if you can' tactics, ignoring basic mining laws, and placing their workers at great risk of injury, illness and mine explosions. They know that MSHA cannot be at the mines all the time, and miners pay the ultimate price."

The main problem here is that this is a relatively simple cost-benefit equation for unscrupulous companies like Massey. Read to the end of that press release from the Mine Safety and Health Administration and you'll see what happened next: "The 11 orders and one citation issued last week ultimately were abated through additional training and installation of ventilation controls and roof supports."

So, to recap: skip readings for explosive gases, fail to use ventilation equipment, and make profitable but dangerous deep cuts into the seam... and you'll be closed down for a week or so until you pretend you won't ever do it again. The punishment isn't enough to stop the practices from happening in the first place.

As evidence, one might only examine Massey's safety record. For this mine alone, the MSHA has issued 264 citations, orders and safeguards since January of 2009. In 2009, Massey CEO Don Blankenship said that various mine safety rules were "non-sensical." They care so thoroughly about the bottom line that they even told workers that they couldn't have time off to attend the funerals of the victims of the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion.

So what do we do with a company so callously indifferent to the safety of its workers? We give it safety awards!

A crackdown from the MSHA is progress, but until there is a true deterrent in place, companies like this will continue to skirt the rules in the interest of profits.

Bin Laden the Humanitarian? Global Terrorist Turns to Global Warming in New Tape

Dave Levitan — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 01:13:18 +0000

In a new tape posted to an Islamic forum on Friday, Al Qaeda leader and world public enemy #1 Osama bin Laden departs from his usual calls for death and destruction in order to lament the vast and damaging effects of climate change.

"The number of victims caused by climate change is very big," says bin Laden (though officially the voice has yet to be verified as his). "Bigger than the victims of wars." It may seem like the terrorist is softening in his old age, but analysts have been quick to suggest that this latest recording smacks of desperation: anything to recruit supporters and regain flagging support, and with tens of millions of Pakistanis affected by recent flooding, the timing certainly makes sense.

It is certainly interesting to see such a source talking up the negative effects of climate change, when such non-terrorist luminaries as, say, the U.S. Congress can only continue muddying the conversation with things like Climategate and other bits of smokescreen. And this isn't the first time bin Laden brought up the subject in one of his Dispatches From an Afghani Cave: in January he devoted almost an entire message sent to Al-Jazeera to climate change. "All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," he said. Then too, experts responded with little but sarcasm.

It's true that a message of compassion for children dying in floods and the like sounds about as hollow as it possibly could coming from an indiscriminate mass murderer, but it does bring up a question we raised here earlier regarding Islam and environmental terrorism. If the most infamous terrorist in the world really thinks the world needs to fight climate change and mixes that message with humanitarian messages rather than attack mantras, one could (perhaps naively) see it as, well, progress. The Qu'ran's messages of "reverence toward nature" could start to resonate louder than twisted and obscene recruitment toward violence.

“The huge climate change is affecting our nation and is causing great catastrophes throughout the Islamic world,” bin Laden says on the recording. “[This] calls for generous souls and brave men to take serious and prompt action to provide relief for their Muslim brothers in Pakistan.” In his January recording, bin Laden blamed industrialized nations for their role in global warming, specifically calling out George W. Bush for his role and his apparent pandering to corporate interests.

A less-than-subtle and desperate move to bolster support in bin Laden's backyard? Probably. Valid points, though? Definitely.

Could Saudi-UAE Naval Battle Put a Crimp on Persian Gulf Oil?

Dave Levitan — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 07:01:45 +0000

Twenty percent of the world's oil moves through the Persian Gulf.

Did a United Arab Emirates ship fire on a Saudi patrol boat in the Persian Gulf? How volatile is the world's most important oil waterway?

Last week a brief naval encounter between vessels from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have raised concerns over security and calm in the shipping lane through which 40 percent of all the world's sea-traded oil moves. The UAE won, if you're scoring at home. That is, if the incident happened in the first place.

The Telegraph reported on the story but without official corroboration from any named sources, and follow-up reporting from the Wall Street Journal was unable to uncover any further details. So, allegedly, a UAE ship fired on a smaller Saudi patrol vessel over disputed water boundaries, which apparently isn't so outrageous for the Gulf region. Oil pipelines and deposits on the seabed, along with the ever-increasing threat from Iran to the North, has kept tensions high, and this latest incident certainly can't help. If it happened, that is.

Among those declining to comment on the skirmish are UAE government officials in Abu Dhabi, a spokesperson for the company operating the $3.5 billion gas pipeline that runs through the gulf, and a Saudi embassy official in Abu Dhabi. Someone with the US Navy stationed in nearby Bahrain apparently was unaware of the incident. I'm guessing no one bothered to ask Iran their opinion.

The international black sheep of the region, Iran has said it would mine the straits leading out of the Gulf if provoked, or if their nuclear installations are attacked. For much of the world, this would not be a good thing (well, if you like oil). More than 16 million barrels of oil go through those straits every day, representing 20 percent of all the oil moving around the world. The U.S. Energy Information Administration calls it the "world's most important oil chokepoint." Cut off the multitude of supertankers passing through there each day, and suddenly—just for example—Japan loses 75 percent of its oil supply.

Who knows what actually happened between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but one has to think that there is simply too much money to be made for those countries not to stand down on this. Oil has dictated the geopolitics of the Gulf region for a long time, and until that oil runs out (peak oil, anyone?) it will keep the naval battles to a minimum and the resultant cover-ups/no-comment fests at full throttle.

Follow Dave Levitan on Twitter @davelevitan.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Can the Ethics of Islam Stop Environmental Terrorism?

Dave Levitan — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:02:17 +0000

Environmental terrorism and acts of "ecocide" present catastrophic threats in Iraq and around the world.

The United States spends untold billions of dollars on terrorism preparedness and attempts to prevent loss of life. In war zones around the world, the United Nations and dozens of countries throw money and people at maintaining order, preventing terrorism and diminishing the effects of war and violence. These are, obviously, important things to do, but according to a paper in the journal Global Environmental Politics, we might be dangerously ignoring the potential for an environmental terrorist attack with catastrophic consequences.

According to the paper's authors, Ali Mohamed Al-Damkhi and Rana Abdullah Al-Fares: "The increasing likelihood and potential scope of sudden, politically-motivated acts of environmental destruction creates another layer of concern beyond the already-problematic effects of gradual environmental degradation caused by unsustainable expansion."

In the first Gulf War in 1991, the retreating Iraqi army set almost 700 oil wells on fire, and eventually caused a spill into the Arabian Gulf of more than 20 times the amount of oil spilled from the Exxon-Valdez. It took eight months to put the fires out. In the Vietnam War, the US sprayed millions of gallons of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange on up to 20 percent of the country's jungle, with devastating human health and environmental effects. The history of environmental terrorism is long and brutal.

The current war in Iraq, according to the paper's authors, presents an unprecedented risk of large-scale environmental attacks. Since 2003, more than 500 attacks on oil installations have been carried out, with varying degrees of success; many times these have resulted in incidental spills of oil and contaminants into waterways and soil. Still, there are targets that to this point remain untouched that represent ecological time bombs; oil infrastructure near the Tigris and Euphrates river, in particular, would have devastating impacts if compromised in an attack.

"The complex political situation in Iraq leaves much uncertainty as to who would have the will and resources to orchestrate a response to a sudden environmental catastrophe," wrote the authors, Ali Mohamed Al-Damkhi and Rana Abdullah Al-Fares, both of Kuwait. "For all of these reasons, Iraq stands as one of the most likely and worrisome potential sites for sudden environmental destruction in the world today."

Preventing environmental terrorism

Preventing environmental terrorism, in Iraq and elsewhere, should be more of a priority than it is, they argue. The steps recommended to achieve that goal, though, do seem mildly naive: step one is to not have wars at all. Well, yes. That would help.

Smoke plume from oil field fires in Iraq (Photo: NASA)

They also promote education and environmental ethics, as well as development of international laws, as methods of avoiding terrorist acts against nature. "It should be clear, then, that educational initiatives emphasizing the ethics of Islam can be a valuable way to inhibit any support for actions of environmental terrorism in this region," Al-Damkhi and Al-Fares wrote.

More specifically, they noted that the Qur'an espouses attitudes of "reverence toward nature," and that if such ideas could spread through the region then the potential for decidedly non-reverential terrorist acts might diminish. Again, this seems somewhat naive; generally speaking, religions and cultural traditions don't advocate destruction of nature or people, but that hasn't stopped war and ecological devastation from occurring in the past.

There is some good news, though. First of all, it is notable that in the Iraq war there have been no specific environmentally motivated attacks, like the oil well destruction in 1991 or the Agent Orange "ecocide" of the 1960s and 1970s. Secondly, even al-Qaeda appears to recognize the damage that can be done to nature and those living in it. In 2006 the group circulated a document that actually said the following:

“Harms caused by targeting oil wells in the lands of Muslims outweigh the benefits because of the health and environmental damages.”

Good to see they're engaging in some risk-benefit analysis. Of course, in that same document, they do endorse targeting of tankers and pipelines; but the wells are off limits, okay?

Still, this paper's message is a good one: environmental terrorism might seem to take second place behind all that bloody death and destruction that wars and terrorist attacks can generate, but better to not sleep on it. After all, Agent Orange targeted jungles, but it also killed 400,000 people.

Follow Dave Levitan on Twitter @davelevitan.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Cleaning Up My View in New York: Gowanus Canal Gets Superfund Status

Dave Levitan — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:03:51 +0000

The Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn will get EPA help for its much-needed clean-up.

The EPA has decided to designate the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn a Superfund clean-up site.

The window over my desk stares out at the raised Gowanus Expressway, nicely framing the Statue of Liberty beneath it about three miles off. The statue is obscured, though, when a drawbridge over the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn lifts to allow boats through.

For about a century after the canal's construction in the 1860s, oil, chemical and manufacturing companies along its 1.8-mile length accounted for the bulk of those boats, and the waterway paid the price for hosting such industries: the EPA has decided to designate it a Superfund clean-up site, a move which will hold the polluters financially responsible and theoretically result in its cleanup within a decade or so.

The designation, one of ten sites designated a Superfund National Priority by EPA, was met with disapproval by officials in Mayor Bloomberg's administration, as they had preferred to undertake the cleanup without the EPA's help. Of course, that plan would have involved voluntary financial support of the companies that might have done the polluting, which, for some reason, seems unlikely to have worked particularly well. According to the New York Times, the EPA has already identified seven companies along with the city of New York and the US Navy as being potentially responsible for the canal's contamination.

The EPA says that most industrial and polluting activity has stopped around the canal, but, well, that picture to the right of a scrap heap directly next to the canal was taken yesterday, as I walked across the canal at 9th Street. As dirty as the canal's waters are, though, some life (like oysters) still does thrive there. The Superfund designation could help bring it back even further.

One objection the city had to a Superfund-driven cleanup was the apparent stigma of attaching that word to it, and what that might to do commercial or residential development along the canal. But the EPA administrator to the region, Judith Enck, pointed out that “Banks look at the environmental conditions of the properties. It is not a secret in Brooklyn that the Gowanus is contaminated. The notion that Superfund is going to create a stigma just doesn’t hold up.”

Looking out the window now, the drawbridge refuses to rise, leaving this section of the Gowanus boat-free for at least a little while. And hopefully, soon it might be... wow, let's see what they found there... polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons-free; heavy metals-free; pesticides-free; polychlorinated biphenyls-free; volatile organic compounds-free. Yeah, that would be good.

Follow Dave Levitan on Twitter @davelevitan.
Photo credits: Dave Levitan.

Communicating Climate Change: It’s Okay to Ignore the Crap

Dave Levitan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:01:52 +0000

Climate-related journalism has started to look a lot like this recently.

Don't let the juicy get in the way of the important.

Our “Communicating Climate Change” series will examine the challenges involved with writing on climate issues. It will often feature interviews with communicators, like Joe Romm, Kate Sheppard and Andy Revkin.

I will start this post by assuring you that I am well aware of its irony. I am about to advocate an avoidance of media-friendly scandals, and in so doing, will inevitably discuss them. I can live with it if you can. I will link out only sparingly.

Climate-related journalism has been dominated for the last few months by the scientific community equivalent of trashy romance novel plot twists. Overhyped e-mail scandals, questions of scientist misconduct, retracted studies and, believe it or not, even an actual trashy romance novel (couldn't resist that link; he actually wrote about "voluptuous breasts"!). Mix in all these things with the general failure of Copenhagen, a dead-but-not-really-dead-but-probably-mostly-dead climate or energy bill on Capitol Hill and various other tidbits like UNFCCC chief Yvo de Boer's resignation and you get a journalistic train wreck. And yes, I can't take my eyes off of it.

As most who read thoroughly know, all these setbacks to the climate science community have little or nothing to do with the science itself. But since most of the media and even more of the world don't understand that, the media coverage of the trashiness has an effect on the public's perception of what is still pretty much rock solid science. It truly is amazing how much ink (okay, electrons) have been spilled on some of this stuff—honestly, the Guardian needed a twelve-part series on the hacked e-mails story? It isn't hard to understand why the public's confidence in climate science and the "realness" of global warming are diminishing.

One counterbalance to this terrible type of coverage lies in some of the smarter blogs out there, where writers can spend as much time as they want taking down the misinformation or just setting the record a bit straighter when possible. Joe Romm at Climate Progress does this all the time, and thank God we've got RealClimate.org around to deal with things like that Guardian series. Of course, a lot more people read the Guardian than read RealClimate.

I used to be amazed that a scientific topic—what is the climate doing, how will it impact the planet and us, and what can we do to prevent some of those impacts—is generally discussed in almost entirely political fashion. No other realm of science has ever been dropped into the political arena like this one. But now, I'm more amazed that climate science is treated more like tabloid fodder than politics. I suppose the progression was likely, but it is still hard to get one's head around.

The solution, though, is too simple to ever actually happen on a large scale. Just don't cover these things. Fine, the hacked e-mails were worth a look, but once it was established that it really changes nothing, just let the thing go. Elsewhere, we don't need to write a story every time Senator Inhofe goes on another five minute rant in a committee hearing. This isn't news.

Of all the challenges to writing about climate change and related issues, this seems to me to be the simplest one to overcome. All you have to do is not do something. Just try it. It's more fun than you think.

Follow Dave Levitan on Twitter @davelevitan.
Image via tantrum_dan on Flickr.

Boom Town Troubles: Sexual Predators Drawn to Energy Towns

Dave Levitan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:01:40 +0000

Oil Refinery 10 (Image by Wyatt's Virtual Drifting/flickr)

Research shows number of sex offenders grew at a rate between two and three times faster in areas reliant on energy development.

Mining and energy boom towns have long been known for some degree of lawlessness, or at best a certain rougher edge to life. A new paper published in the journal Conservation Biology, however, quantifies the issue in a number of towns in the Yellowstone area in Wyoming and comes to the conclusion that sexual offenders seem to flock to energy towns.

Biologists Joel Berger and John Beckman, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, compared the increases in registered sexual offenders from 1997 through 2008 in towns in the Greater Yellowstone Area that rely most heavily on energy production and in those that rely on agriculture or recreation for revenue.

Berger and Beckman found that the number of sex offenders grew at a rate between two and three times faster in ares reliant on energy than in the other areas.

The study was limited by a small number of communities involved: only nine in total were studied, with three in Wyoming forming the energy-dependent counties, two in Idaho and one in Montana relying on agrarian production, and one in each of those three states categorized as a recreational community.

As a measure of how the different types of towns might also bring some degree of social good along with the assumed "social ill" of sexual predators, the researchers looked at increases in hospital beds as well. They found no differences in that measure across the three community types.

"The evidence that social ills accrue in energy boom towns has been well chronicled," the authors wrote. "Although Greater Yellowstone offers the world much in terms of large landscapes, stunning scenery, functional predator-prey relationships, and biological diversity, the poorly planned gas fields of the Upper Green River Basin also proffer elements of a seedier nature. These elements involve social dishevelment, including a rise in the frequency of sexual predators, increasing crime, pollution, and habitat conversion."

Presence of 'social ills' not a new phenomenon in oil and gas boom towns

The research calls to mind earlier work by psychologist ElDean V. Kohrs in 1974. In a paper presented [PDF] to the Rocky Mountain American Association of the Advancement of Science meeting, he said the following:

"The history of power production – synonymous with 'boom development' – in Wyoming is a dismal record of human ecosystem wastage. Frontier expansion without adequate planning has left cities crippled by shameful environments which cause human casualties."

Coined the Gillette Syndrome after the town in Wyoming Kohrs described, the boomtown issues have clearly not diminished. A great example can be found in what may be the world's boomingest energy boomtown, Fort McMurray in Alberta. According to an Economist report cited by Andrew Nikiforuk in his book Tar Sands, as many as 40 percent of tar sands workers test positive for cocaine or marijuana. The town also reports five times more drug offenses than the rest of the province, because, according to Nikiforuk, "ordering crack cocaine at a work camp is easier than ordering a pizza."

The increase in registered sex offenders in a few Wyoming energy communities only adds to the evidence that where there is an energy source to be pulled from the ground, the world's "social ills" will soon follow.

Follow Dave Levitan on Twitter @davelevitan.com.
Image Credits: Wyatt's Virtual Drifting; species_snob