pollution – praag.org

Landmark case exposes ArcelorMittal pollution

In 1994 a number of people bought property in a farmland area of the Vaal known as Louisrus and Steel Valley, in the south of Johannesburg.

They bought property close to the Iscor steel plant, which has now become part of ArcelorMittal South Africa (Amsa).

Two years later residents noticed oil in their borehole water and a strange, chemical smell.

When residents started to complain, Iscor engaged in a series of tests and studies to determine if their plant was causing any harm.

The reports formed part of Iscor’s environmental master plan, which was completed in 2003 but kept secret from the public until Monday.

Samson Mokoena’s father was one of the people who bought a smallholding in Steel Valley.

He grew up farming with his family, but today he is leading the cause to find out the truth about the pollution as co-ordinator of the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (Veja).

On Monday the alliance released the 8,000-page environmental master plan to the public after a long struggle to get access to the document.

Representing a coalition of community organisations, the alliance fought a 12-year battle to get access to environmental reports about how the steelmaker was polluting their community through wastewater and air pollution.

“The people of Steel Valley believe that Iscor and Amsa held information from the public deliberately. To us it meant that there was something fishy about the document if they were refusing to make it available in a free democratic society,” said Mokoena.

He explains that the community suffered a long time from what they believe was effects of pollution.

“People were sick with cancer, some had kidney failure. People lost their livelihoods, animals were deformed and died, crops didn’t grow properly,” he said.

The Integrated Report of January 2003 included in the plan notes that there was substantial pollution at the Vanderbijlpark plant.

“Groundwater chemistry results obtained from boreholes confirm elevated concentrations of calcium, magnesium, sulphate, chlorine, potassium, sodium, nitrate, fluorine, iron and manganese within both the perched and shallow weathered zone aquifers…” notes the report.

There were also high levels of cadmium noted which are especially harmful to the kidneys.

The alliance says it had met with Amsa for years to try to gain access to the document.

Only in 2011, when the alliance in partnership with the Centre for Environmental Rights requested the document through the Protection of Information Act (Paia), that things started to change.

Amsa refused the Paia request, which resulted in legal action and both the South Gauteng High Court and the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that Amsa should release the report to the alliance last year.

In Amsa’s 2014 consolidated financial statements it stated that they decided not to challenge the matter further and it handed over the information on December 17, last year.

“The company seeks to pursue a path of open and transparent engagement with the Veja and all other stakeholders for that matter,” noted the statement..

The environmental centre’s attorney, Robyn Hugo represented the alliance in legal action against Amsa and said the case will change the way environmental rights are defended in court in future.

“This is a leading case on access to environmental information and we’re going to rely on it. All industries should take note that secrecy is no longer acceptable,” she said.

Dr Victor Munnik, of the Society, Work and Development Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, has been studying pollution in Steel Valley for 15 years.

Source: eNCA

Significant oil discovery in England

There could be up to 100 billion barrels of oil onshore beneath the South of England, says exploration firm UK Oil & Gas Investments (UKOG).

Last year, the firm drilled a well at Horse Hill, near Gatwick airport, and analysis of that well suggests the local area could hold 158 million barrels of oil per square mile.

But only a fraction of the 100 billion total would be recovered, UKOG admits.

The North Sea has produced about 45 billion barrels in 40 years.

“We think we’ve found a very significant discovery here, probably the largest [onshore in the UK] in the last 30 years, and we think it has national significance,” Stephen Sanderson, UKOG’s chief executive told the BBC.

UKOG says that the majority of the oil lies within the Upper Jurassic Kimmeridge formation at a depth of between 2,500ft (762m) and 3,000ft (914m).

Most experts believe fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, will be needed to get commercial quantities of oil from the region.

Concerns over fracking led to large-scale protests when Cuadrilla drilled at Balcombe, West Sussex, in 2013.

Source: BBC

We are losing the oceans

I am an admirer of Dahr Jamail’s reporting. In this article, Oceans In Crisis, Jamail tells us that we are losing the oceans. He reports on the human destruction of the oceans. It is a real destruction with far-reaching consequences.

That fact is indisputable.

From my perspective the human destruction of the oceans is yet more evidence of the ruinous nature of private capitalism. In capitalism there is no thought for the future of the planet and humanity, only for short-term profits and bonuses. Consequently, social costs are ignored.

Capitalism can work if social or external costs can be included in the costs of production. However, the powerful corporations are able to block a socially functioning capitalism with their political campaign contributions.

Consequently, capitalists themselves make the capitalist system dysfunctional. We may have reached the point where the external costs of production are larger than the value of capitalist output. Economist Herman Daly makes a convincing case that this is the fact.

While the powerful capitalists use the environment for themselves as a cost-free dumping ground, the accumulating costs threaten everyone’s life. It appears that nothing can be done, because the oceans are “common property.” No one owns them, so no one can protect them and their contents.

What we are faced with is the most destructive force in history: the short-sightedness of humans. Humans are willing to destroy the environment that sustains them, the law that sustains them, the truth that sustains them. Indeed, humans will destroy everything that sustains life if they can raise their incomes for another quarter or another year.

I have a friend who regales me with stories that humans are aliens on planet earth, exiled here by an intergalactic government that unwittingly disposed of its criminal wastes on a planet teeming with life. The inhumans, not humans, have been busy at work ever since their arrival exterminating one another, other species, and the life of the planet itself.

In the Western World truth is dying. Corporate and government money has purchased many scientists along with the media and politicians. The independent scientists who remain have great difficulty obtaining funds for their research, but the corporate scientists have unlimited funds with which to lie.

Scientists, like journalists, advance their careers by lying for the Establishment.

Truth-tellers and whistleblowers are defined as “domestic extremists,” “terrorists,” and are on watch lists. Some have been arrested on suspicion that they might commit a crime in the future. Here in the US we have Jeremy Bentham’s policy of arresting “suspects” before they commit a crime on the basis that they might in the future commit a crime.

All the while the US and UK, Australian and Canadian, governments are committing heinous crimes against other countries in the world whose peoples, like those of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine don’t count. These peoples are disposable, unexceptional, like the Vietnamese, Laotians, Cherokees, Sioux, Apaches . . .

These peoples don’t matter. It is we Americans who matter. We are “exceptional.” We are “indispensable.”

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

British firms linked to severe human rights abuses

Hundreds of British firms operating abroad may be implicated in severe human rights abuses such as modern slavery, poverty-level wages, beatings, killings and environmental damage, an international NGO warns.

The NGO probed one such British firm, Glencore, regarding its conduct in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

A report released by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre on Wednesday found that British businesses impact heavily on communities and individuals around the globe.

The NGO’s research suggests UK firms are linked to human rights scandals worldwide, many of which occur in developing nations.

This improper conduct is compounded by “critical weaknesses” in UK regulation that leave victims in foreign states defenseless against firms’ “negligent or reckless” practices, the research found.

Out of sight, out of mind?
The Resource Centre monitors the human rights impacts of more than 6,000 firms in over 180 states. When human rights concerns are raised by civilians, it approaches the firms in question and sounds them out.

Since 2005, the Resource Centre has contacted 303 UK-based firms across the world about allegations of human rights violations.

The NGO’s report says the majority of these allegations center on UK firms’ practices abroad, particularly in the Global South. Its research uncovered “critical weaknesses in UK Government policy and action on business and human rights.”

While firms’ conduct in Britain is regulated, improper practices of UK companies operating abroad regularly “go unpunished,” the NGO said.

The Resource Centre warned that victims of “corporate abuse” face diminished access to justice in Britain, particularly since the coalition government introduced the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012.

The NGO’s report said UK firms operating within the extractive industry require particularly “urgent attention.”

“Allegations against extractive companies were 47 percent of the total against UK companies,” it said. The NGO probed Glencore in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“While London has become a global hub for mining and extractive industries, these companies are often implicated in some of the most egregious allegations of human rights abuses, including displacements, killings, and large-scale pollution.”

Among the charges leveled at the firm were claims it had contaminated local communities’ water supplies, and was linked to brutal beatings and killings by police.

Glencore insisted it “is committed to upholding human rights,” and refuted allegations that it “manipulates DRC regulation to suit its interests.”

The Resource Centre’s report also uncovered UK firms’ links to allegations of labor rights abuses, particularly within the fashion industry. Allegations of modern slavery also surfaced in its study.

“UK companies are linked to allegations of labor rights abuses and modern slavery, particularly through complex global supply chains,” the report said.

“Among non-extractive companies, these issues emerged as the key area of concern, particularly for apparel companies.”

“Allegations [also] linked UK companies to forced labor, union busting, poverty wages, and workplace deaths – like the Rana Plaza factory collapse that took the lives of 1,129 workers in 2013,” it added.

The Resource Centre’s report called upon the next government to encourage and compel British companies to respect their staff’s basic human rights, and ensure abuses are met with accountability.

Economic Relations Programme Director Peter Frankental of Amnesty International UK, said the message of the Resource Center’s report is clear.

“When it comes to respecting human rights, businesses need to raise their game and the government needs to hold them accountable when they don’t.”

Phil Bloomer, director of the Resource Centre, said UK businesses severely impact upon communities worldwide.

“As a leading economy our companies should be setting the standard for corporate conduct on human rights, not being implicated in everything from poverty wages to beatings and killings,” he said.

“The next government must encourage and push companies to respect human rights and ensure abuses do not go unpunished.”

Texans ban fracking in its birthplace

Voters approved a ban on hydraulic fracturing in the north Texas town of Denton on Tuesday, making it the first city in the Lone Star State to outlaw the oil and gas extraction technique behind the U.S. energy boom.

The vote in the city of 123,000 was highly symbolic because hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, is widely used in Texas, the top crude producer in the United States.

“Denton, Texas is where hydraulic fracturing was invented,” said Bruce Baizel, Earthworks energy program director. “If this place in the heart of the oil and gas industry can’t live with fracking, then who can?”

Green groups said the result served as a wake-up call to the industry.

Groups like Frack Free Denton won even though they were outspent by a margin of 10 to one, according to organizers and local media reports.

The Texas Oil & Gas Association, the state’s energy lobby, on Wednesday quickly filed for an injunction.

“A ban on hydraulic fracturing is inconsistent with state law,” Thomas Phillips, a former head of the Supreme Court of Texas who now represents the trade group, said.

In a frack job, a mix of pressurized water, sand and chemicals is used to unlock hydrocarbons from rock. Operators claim it is safe but many environmental groups oppose the practice – calling it wasteful, polluting, dirty and noisy.

Fracking was pioneered at the Barnett shale formation where Denton is located. Exxon Mobil’s XTO unit honed its shale expertise in the natural gas-rich Barnett. Most of the crude output in Texas comes, however, from the growing Eagle Ford and Permian fields to the south and west.

The Denton referendum pitted oil and gas operators and mineral rights owners against residents who say their homes and lives are being encroached on by work that can be noisy, soak up scarce water supplies and overwhelm roads with heavy truck traffic.

“It’s essentially a ban on all drilling,” said Ed Ireland, executive director of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, a group aligned with producers. “No one would try to drill a well if they can’t frack it.”

Source: Reuters

Paris as polluted as Beijing

Public transport will be free from Friday until Sunday evening in Paris as the authorities try to encourage drivers to leave their cars at home, as much of France suffers severe air pollution caused by unusually warm weather.

The French capital and 30 other regions of France have been on maximum pollution alert for several days, with conditions set to continue until the end of the weekend.

The European Environment Agency says the pollution is the worst since 2007, and almost three-quarters of France is affected.

The air pollution has also affected neighboring Belgium where authorities have introduced a maximum speed limit to reduce the concentration of polluting particles. Free public transport has also been introduced in Belgium’s southern Wallonia region.

Jean-Paul Huchon, head of the STIF organization that manages Paris’s complex transport network, said that public transport would be free from Friday morning until Sunday evening.

“I am asking all residents in Paris and neighboring areas to favor the use of public transport,” Huchon said.

Subways, buses and trains will be free, as will bike-shares and one-hour sessions in electric cars.

The cities of Caen, Reims and Rouen, all in northern France, are following Paris’s lead and also offering free transport.

As air quality dipped Thursday to the same as Beijing, Ecology Minister Philippe Martin admitted that air quality was “an emergency and a priority for the government.”

A lack of wind and cold nights followed by balmy days have conspired to create conditions where polluting particles, most of them emitted by vehicle exhaust fumes, have been stuck under a warm layer of air.

Monitoring centers have been reporting a particularly strong concentration of so-called PM10 particles, which have a diameter of less than 10 microns.

Pollution alerts in France are issued when these PM10 particles reach 80 micrograms per cubic meter.

These tiny particles are also some of the most dangerous to public health and can cause asthma, allergies and other respiratory ailments.

Source: RT

Beijing watches sun rise… digitally

You know it’s bad when…The smog has become so thick in Beijing that the city’s natural light-starved masses have begun flocking to huge digital commercial television screens across the city to observe virtual sunrises.

Following this week’s practical shutdown of the city of “beyond index” levels of pollution, as The Mail Online reports, residents donned air masks and left their homes to watch the only place where the sun would hail over the horizon that morning…

It’s grim…

The futuristic screens installed in the Chinese capital usually advertise tourist destinations, but as the season’s first wave of extremely dangerous smog hit, ths happened…

The air took on an acrid odor, and many of the city’s commuters wore industrial strength face masks as they hurried to work.

‘I couldn’t see the tall buildings across the street this morning,’ said a traffic coordinator at a busy Beijing intersection who gave only his surname, Zhang. ‘The smog has gotten worse in the last two to three years. I often cough, and my nose is always irritated. But what can you do? I drink more water to help my body discharge the toxins.’

The density of PM2.5 was about 350 to 500 micrograms Thursday midmorning, though the air started to clear in the afternoon. It had reached as high as 671 at 4 a.m. at a monitoring post at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

That is about 26 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organization, and was the highest reading since January 2013.

In the far northeastern city of Harbin, some monitoring sites reported PM 2.5 rates of up to 1,000micrograms in October, when the winter heating season kicked off.

Beijing reported 58 days of serious pollution last year, or one every six to seven days on average, Xinhua quoted Zhang Dawei, director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center, as saying.

China has drawn up dozens of laws and guidelines to improve the environment but has struggled to enforce them in the face of powerful enterprises.

On Wednesday, China’s commercial capital, Shanghai, introduced emergency measures, allowing it to shut schools and order cars off the road in case of severe smog.

Fracking will pollute water, causing cancer

KwaZulu-Natal – SA’s top water research body has warned the government to think carefully about the serious risk of water pollution from cancer-causing chemicals and radioactive compounds from future underground “fracking” operations across huge swathes of the country.

A new report by the state-funded Water Research Commission says shale gas rock-fracturing (fracking) will not only happen in remote sections of the Karoo. In fact, the government had already issued fracking exploration permits in six of the nine provinces, including a massive chunk of southern KwaZulu-Natal stretching almost as far north as Pietermaritzburg.

The scientists note that future fracking, at depths 4km below the earth’s surface, could be over a much wider area of the country – including most of the high-lying areas south of latitude 29°C in KZN (a line which starts at Mtunzini in the east and stretches inland past Estcourt towards Bloemfontein and Kimberley).

The report also identifies a number of risks to human health, water and the natural environment from fracking wells. These risks included:

– Widespread pollution of groundwater, rivers and lakes with dozens of cancer-causing fracking compounds and other “highly toxic” pollutants such as benzene, hydrochloric acid and isopropanol.

– Accidental release of underground uranium and other radioactive elements into the water and soil.

– Underground mini-earthquakes, cave-ins and land subsidence.

– Privatisation of parks and other state land where the public is excluded from fracking land and gas fields for safety reasons.

– Above-ground air pollution from methane and other shale gas wells.

– Lower property values.

However, water pollution is the main emphasis of the 84-page Water Research Commission report by Gideon Steyl (University of the Free State chemistry department), Gerrit van Tonder (University of the Free State Institute for Groundwater Studies) and Luc Chevallier (Council for Geoscience).

The scientists note that gas-drilling companies in the US have been trying to hide the toxic nature of many fracking chemicals.

However, the commission cites a report from the US House of Representatives last year which identified at least 29 commonly used fracking chemicals that were known or probable cancer-causing agents, or were regulated as hazardous to drinking water and air.

These chemicals are mixed with water and pumped underground at very high pressure to fracture and crack the rock formations to release buried pockets of methane and other gas formed millions of years ago from rotting mounds of mud, vegetation, algae and other organic matter.

Some chemicals included benzene (a known cancer-causing chemical) along with a variety of acids and petroleum products.

A study by the University of Buffalo in the US last year also raised concern about the possible release of underground uranium and other radioactive compounds when rocks are cracked up with hydrochloric acid.

Another US study published last year showed that the methane gas level in underground drinking water was generally 17 times higher in fracking areas compared with well water where no fracking took place.

However, Steyl and his colleagues voiced dismay over the difficulty in tracking down truly unbiased international studies on the impacts of fracking, since most were done by industry and private interests.

Even official US government reports claiming no damage to public health or the environment stood in contradiction to numerous adverse reports by US citizens and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The commission researchers note that a single fracking event in a single well used the same amount of water needed to irrigate eight to 10ha of maize during a growing season.

Every time a well was fracked, large volumes of chemicals were added to the water-pressure mixture. Although chemicals only made up between 0.5 and 2 percent of the mixture, the volume of hazardous chemicals in a single fracking event could total between 34 000 and 136 000 litres.

Even if just 1 percent of dangerous fracking chemicals leaked out of the concrete well drillings during a single fracking, Steyl estimated that 490 litres of hazardous chemicals could contaminate underground water. This could pose “serious hazards” to the environment and to underground water drunk by people and livestock.

Despite these concerns, the scientists appear to recognise that fracking is a fait accompli and they have listed a set of 10 recommendations to limit harm. They include compulsory “full disclosure” of every chemical used. Any fracking well should be at least 10km away from residential areas to reduce chemical exposure risks.

All drilling records should be freely available to the public, and a thorough baseline study should be done to measure pre-fracking quality of water, soil and air by an “unbiased” body such as a university.

Legal action should also be taken against any drilling company after a first offence. They should be forced to clean up damage, and be banned from future fracking in SA. However, even in the US, there were fewer than 10 inspectors to monitor more than 3 500 fracking wells in Pennsylvania. – The Mercury