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Benjamin McKeown

Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...wallace-text

HL uncontacted amazon

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - Cached
  • Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
  • The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
  • n the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land. In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
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  • All of it starts with a road. Except
  • nearly every road in the Amazon is unauthorized. There are more than 105,000 miles of these roads, most made illegally by loggers to reach mahogany and other hardwoods for the lucrative export market.
  • In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
  • squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
  • . Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
  • landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.
  • The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It’s predatory because it causes death, it’s not renewable, and it devastates the forest.” The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.
  • Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
  • To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a “phobia” that plagues people who can’t grasp the enormity of the Amazon. “All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon,” he says, “and we’d still have room for two Englands.”
  • “Look around,” he said, “you won’t find a single scrap of plastic here.” Motioning to a barnlike structure that stored herbicides and pesticides, he said, “We keep all our agrotoxins properly ventilated until use.” In a steady rain, our vehicle fishtailing in the mud, we approached a denuded gully straddling a narrow stream; a closer look revealed hundreds of saplings. “When we bought this property,” Maggi said, “this riverbank was totally stripped. Now we’re regenerating the area.”
  • The land here is very poor. If you don’t take the right corrective measures, you couldn’t produce anything. It’s not true that soy degrades the soil. On the contrary, it puts into the soil what naturally isn’t there. Afterward, you can grow anything you want.” R
  • searchers agree that proper management of soy fields can increase soil productivity. But in reality, no one knows for sure how long the thin, highly acidic Amazon soils can be propped up, raising the possibility of an eventual two-headed catastrophe:
  • shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
  • azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
  • between Cuiabá and Guarantã do Norte, there are no fewer than five John Deere dealerships. And at harvest time, fleets of the trademark green-and-yellow combines rumble across the fields flanking the highway, pouring rivers of golden soy into open-bed trucks bound f
  • The new district adds to an expanded mosaic of parks, reserves, and conservation units that, together with indigenous territories, forms the bulwark of defense against the expansion of the frontier in the central Amazon. These measures may be paying off. Deforestation rates fell more than 30 percent in 2005, and preliminary numbers for 2006 are also down. Indian lands in the Xingu watershed are proving an especially effective barrier. There, militant Kayapó and Panará warriors armed with clubs and shotguns patrol their borders using satellite images furnished by international NGOs to pinpoint illegal clearing. As Stephan Schwartzman puts it: “Where Indian land begins is where deforestation ends.” But Brazil’s measures to protect the Amazon must be weighed ag
  • These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
  • he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
  • s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
  • The dams will also flood millions of acres of forest, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases, destroying biodiversity, and forcing indigenous communities to flee ancestral lands.
  • Water cycling
  • carbon sequestering
  • maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
  • It’s far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. “Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure,”
  • “It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
  • Last summer, Cargill and Brazil’s other big soy traders agreed to a two-year moratorium on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. The agreement is sending a signal to soy producers that the environmental impact of their operations is increasingly important in the world marketplace.
Benjamin McKeown

Louisiana five years after BP oil spill: 'It's not going back to normal no time soon' |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...years-not-going-back-to-normal

BP oil hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 20 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • the restaurants are still empty, FOR SALE signs are increasing in store windows, people are still moving away, and this marina on Pointe a la Hache – once packed most afternoons with oystermen bringing in their catch on their small boats, high school kids earning a few bucks unloading the sacks, and 18-wheelers backed up by the dozen to carry them away – is completely devoid of life, save one man, 69-year-old Clarence Duplessis, who cleans his boat to pass the time.
  • While some phenomena in the Gulf – people getting sick, fishing nets coming back empty – are hard to definitively pin on BP – experts say the signs of ecological and economic loss that followed the spill are deeply concerning for the future of the Gulf. Meanwhile, BP has pushed back hard on the notion that the effects of its disaster are much to worry about, spending millions on PR and commercials to convince Gulf residents everything will be OK.
  • the Gulf is recovering faster than expected,” Geoff Morrell, a BP senior vice-president for communications, said in an email.
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  • depleted oyster beds could be due to a variety of factors other than the spill – including the divergence of fresh water from the Mississippi into coastal marshes.
  • Anxiety seems to be the most prevalent emotion in this part of the state. Every cough and every cancer screening, every paltry catch and shrimp missing an eye raises the question – is it BP?
  • oystermen say their catches plummeted after the spill, and have only been getting worse.
  • In total, BP has so far spent $27bn in economic claims, its disaster response efforts, fines to various governments, and cleanup and restoration programs.
  • The company has been sued by dozens of entities since the Deepwater Horizon spill, including state, local and federal governments, and individuals claiming economic loss. It has so far agreed to pay $4.5 billion in fines and plead guilty to a host of criminal charges, including felony manslaughter.
  • total just under $10 billion to businesses suffering because of the spill, but has fought the interpretation of that agreement at every step, claiming it it too easy for businesses without any proof of the spill directly causing damage to their bottom lines to win claims. The Supreme Court recently rejected BP’s bid to hear their challenge to that case.
  • the average claim for his association’s members ranged from a couple thousand to about $25,000. That, he says, is paltry when compared to the years-long recovery he sees ahead of him.
  • “My Facebook feed is filled with my friends’ pictures of crabs with no eyes, shrimp and crawfish with one eye or things missing,” Misty Fisher, 24, said.
  • Southern Louisiana’s economy hasn’t only been ravaged by the spill, but by multiple hurricanes and the ever-encroaching coastline: Louisiana is losing a football field worth of wetlands every 48 minutes thanks to a combination of global warming and a history of oil companies failing to remediate the canals they dredge for pipelines and oil and gas production.
  • Fisher and her fellow waitresses say they all know people who are sick – respiratory infections, breast cancers, constant headaches – which they blame on the spill.
Benjamin McKeown

THE POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXPLAINED - Lawrence Anthony Earth Organization - 0 views

www.earthorganization.org/cs-of-climate-change-explained

climate change kyoto

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 08 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • More than 150 nations signed it back in December 1997 at a meeting in Kyoto.
  • eorge W. Bush was installed as President soon afterwards, and announced that he was pulling the US out of the deal altogether. Since the US is the source of a quarter of emissions of greenhouse gases that was a big blow, but the other nations decided to carry on and they finally reached agreement in Marrakech in November 2001.
  • ndustrialised nations have committed themselves to a range of targets to reduce emissions between 1990
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  • he base year, and 2010.
  • an average 8 per cent cut for most of Europe to a maximum 10 per cent increase for Iceland and an 8 per cent increase for Australia.
  • European Union have agreed to share out their entitlement
  • atification of the treaty in national legislatures.
  • “flexibility mechanisms”
  • meet some targets by encouraging the natural environment to soak up more CO2 rather than by cutting emissions.
  • carbon sinks”
  • qualify for carbon credits by planting forests that soaked up CO2.
  • It was finally agreed that countries will be able to claim some carbon credits for planting forests in developing countries. And they will also be able to allow countries to claim credit for activities such as soil conservation, which will allow more carbon to be soaked up in soils.
  • carbon trading
  • But the fear is that some countries may find themselves with spare credits to sell just because their economies have slowed down, which would undermine the whole purpose of the protocol.
  • hot air”. Japan, Canada and perhaps others would like to buy up Russia’s spare permits.
  • But sceptics still see hot-air trading as a Trojan Horse for undermining the protocol.
  • lean Development Mechanism. This allows industrialised countries to claim credit for various activities in developing countries. It could become a major engine for getting clean energy technologies into poorer countries, so heading them off the dirty path to industrialisation that the rich nations took.
  • And the rules are biased towards small energy projects – solar cell systems, for exampl
  • he protocol allows industrialised countries to plant “carbon sink” forests in the tropics, for instance, where they will grow faster. They can also invest in clean energy technologies in the developing world, and claim carbon credits for doing so.
  • The US has demanded, both before and after Kyoto, that developing countries should accept their own specific emissions targets
  • it was intended to cut emissions by industrialised countries by an average of slightly over 5 per cent by the year 2010
  • hard to police, particularly the clauses on carbon sinks.
  • at perhaps 1.5 per cen
  • Will the Kyoto measures solve the problem of global warming? They will hardly scratch the surface. T
  • say it will buy us 10 years at most
  • . A reasonable target might be twice pre-industrial levels, which works out at 50 per cent above today’s levels.
  • Cutting emissions by 60 per cent is a suggested figure.
  • The Kyoto Protocol was drawn up with the long term as the primary focus. In essence, the protocol assumes that what we really need to worry about is the climate in a century’s time, not today.
  • CO2 sticks around for about a century. Methane, the second most important greenhouse gas, generally lasts in the atmosphere for about a decade. But while it’s there it is many times more potent.
  • This “hundred-year rule” has the effect of downgrading the importance of methane, and giving only small credit to countries that try to cut methane emissions.
  • the protocol gives a country that reduces its methane emissions by a tonne 20 times as much credit as for reducing CO2 emissions by a tonne.
  • Cows can be given less gas-inducing feed. Leaks in gas pipelines can be plugged. And so on.
  • Technically, we are going to have to find many more ways of producing energy without burning fossil fuels – the so-called carbon-free economy. Politically, we are going to have to find a way of doing so which doesn’t affect the growing economies of the developing nations, whose responsibility for the build-up of greenhouse gases so far has been minimal. Some people think this will require moving towards equal pollution rights for every citizen on the planet, a policy endorsed by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution earlier this year.
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