Red, Green, and Blue

Speaking at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, U.S. President Barack Obama threw strong support behind clean energy and technology, touting America’s history of innovation and not shying away from the problems it faces.

“We have always been about innovation, we have always been about discovery. That’s in our DNA. The truth is we also face more complex challenges than generations past,” said Mr. Obama to a packed room of MIT students, faculty and other Massachusetts dignitaries. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll show you my business card if you show me yours…

The Yes Men were up to their usual tricks yesterday, impersonating an official from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and supposedly reversing the dogged stance the Chamber has taken on climate change. A call from the Chamber last summer to conduct a “Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st century” on climate change science (their own characterization) led to an exodus of several prominent members wanting nothing to do with such shenanigans.

It seems that the Chamber didn’t find the prank so terribly amusing. Pity.

Yesterday the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons… Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.” Read the rest of this entry »

In April of 1994 CEO’s from the leading tobacco companies appeared before Congress and said, one by one and under oath, that nicotine was not addictive. That may have been the last dying gasp of organized denial of the dangers inherent in smoking.

What the tobacco industry learned from the early days of “doctor recommended” cigarettes through to that hearing in ‘94, was that all it took to sell the idea that smoking was good for you - or at least not that bad - was a dose of misinformation combined with a perception of scientific legitimacy in questioning established research. By tossing out a reasonable sounding tidbit of information you can keep uncertainty alive in the public’s mind and thwart progress.

Which leads to the obvious conclusion that if plants need CO2 to grow, then more CO2, not less, is what the world needs now.

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Protests from the tiny and good-tempered to the large and tragic this week, starting with the small and apparently ineffectual.

Ineffective Canadian protest

On Wednesday Royal Dutch Shell claimed that the oilsands mine that it operates at Muskeg River in northern Vancouver, Canada, was still running at full speed, despite the second day of environmental protest by Greenpeace activists who had arrived at the mine on Tuesday and prevented the operation of a super-sized dumper truck and a hydraulic mining shovel.  The protest is intended to show that the utilisation of Canada’s oilsands desposits is a contributor to worsening climate change.

Fatal Peruvian protest

In Peru, the government has acted on the financially troubled and environmentally challenged Doe Run Peru smelter. Their response to the closure of the site has been to give the operators a 30-month extension on their previous environmental clean-up deadline.  Production was halted in June, when banks cut off finance to the operating company: U.S.-based Renco Group. Now Renco says that it expects to obtain new loans and restart production now that 30 months have been added to the October deadline. If the plant reopens, around 20,000 jobs could be saved, but La Oroya will remain one of the most polluted towns on the planet for some time to come as spokesman has said Renco requires three years to undertake the clean-up. In unrest at the plant this week, one policeman died and at least three others were injured as protesters demanded the government reopen the smelter.

Polite Scottish Highlands protest

In the Scottish Highlands, a village of 270 persons has managed to obtain a 283 signature petition against proposed quarrying at Muir of Ord. Ord is famous for its distillery which produces whisky and several local businesses have lodged protests on environmental grounds. The entire 140-member Conon Fishings Syndicate has demanded safeguards for salmon fishing, and the Glen Orrin fish farm fears it could be at risk from flooding and reduced water quality. A local fruit farm has said the quarrying will have a detrimental effect on its business and adversely impact local wildlife. These protestors say this adverse effect on local business would counteract potential economic gains from the quarry which will extract sand and gravel from a 22-acre site over a 15 year licence period. Local wildlife like otters, ospreys and red kites may also be affected as their habitats are damaged, especially round local rivers.

Highlands photograph author’s own

San Francisco based power utility Pacific Gas & Electric has announced it will leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the organization’s “extreme” position on climate change.

Last month the Chamber of Commerce called for a “trial” on climate science as a means to thwart efforts in Congress to pass climate legislation, stymie the EPA’s endangerment finding regarding CO2 emissions, and needlessly continue to sow discord and confusion over the issue. It is an extremist position with which PG&E apparently wants no association. On a company blog post yesterday entitled Irreconcilable Differences, their position was made clear.

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The UK is undergoing a small crisis of parenting at present. The reason is that there has been an outbreak of E.coli, in one of its most virulent forms: 0157, which causes kidney damage in a small proportion of people contracting it, and the outbreaks have been linked to two city farms visited by children with their parents or as part of school groups.

City Zoos linked to disease outbreak

Forty-nine cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone Farm in Surrey which has been closed, and its fellow site Horton Park Children’s Farm in Epsom, Surrey has closed voluntarily.  Other sites have closed in Nottingham and Devon. In Exmouth, Devon, a petting farm has closed after three children became ill, although there hasn’t been a direct link from their illness to a visit to the site.

However, in responding to the concerns, there appears to be a division of opinion in the governmental ranks. Professor Hugh Pennington who was chair of the Pennington Group enquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales, says parents should not allow under-fives to touch animals on farms. But the Department of Health (DoH) is maintaining that its current advice still stands: contact with animals is okay if good hand hygiene is undertaken.

Youngsters most at risk of harm

The concern is partly that very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults.  But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.

One solution could be to provide better systems of hygiene, such as nail brushes that would allow people to ensure that they removed every lurking trace of the bacterium from their hands.  It is impossible to remove E.coli risk entirely from animals or their environment, even though most strains of the disease are very short lived outside the gut which is their natural habitat. So parents must decide whether to give their children the chance to get to meet animals, to improve their knowledge and development and to boost their immune systems through contact with the wider environment, or to reduce the risk of exposure to E.coli by avoiding such experiences as city zoos and agricultural or wild animals, altogether.

City Farm photograph author’s own

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled on Monday that five of the largest power utilities can be called upon to defend themselves in court against allegations that their greenhouse gas emissions create a public nuisance by contributing to global warming.

Siding with a coalition of eight states, three land trusts, and the city of New York, the court made its long awaited ruling, reinstating the lawsuit State of Connecticut v. American Electric Power Co (pdf) brought under federal common law. The suit was rejected by a lower court judge in 2004.

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Recently the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) of the UN reported that millions more people may find themselves facing long term hunger and even starvation, in east Africa.

Climate change affects Africa

El Nino is blamed for changing rainfall patterns, and that, combined with inadequate harvests and increasing conflict has led to a drop in cereal production already affecting Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This could lead to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid.

Already more than 20 million people are receiving food assistance in the Horn of Africa region and their numbers are only likely to increase further towards the end of the year as El Nino drives heavy rains across the region, leading to mudslides on tree-denuded hillsides and the destruction of crops close to harvest time. The same rains often destroy roads and other infrastructure required to bring food aid and medicine into the region and can kill livestock or cause epidemic diseases in animals or human populations, all of which add to the complexity of managing food security in a region where conflict is endemic and border raids and ‘tribal’ disagreements are a standard response to poverty.

Horn of Africa countries badly hit

The worst hit country at present is Somalia, where the FAO claims that around half the population already need some form of aid; either food or medical supplies or both. Ethiopia is also expected to tip into reliance on emergency aid, as the second harvest of the year has failed and that means that food aid reliance could rise from 1.3 million to over six million people.

Kenya and Uganda are both expecting poor harvests, and Uganda has an even more disastrous prognosis as the ongoing unrest between government forces and rebels has forced people off their land or led them to stay barricaded in their compounds, resulting in less cultivation and a probably halving of the harvest of staple food crops. The current violence has left more than a million people in Uganda struggling with food security and the number is expected to rise steadily throughout the next twelve months, according to FAO experts.

Somali roadside wreckage courtesy of Carl Montgomery at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Thursday this week seems to have been a key day for environmental protest.

Chinese pollution protest

In Fujian Province, eastern China, villagers blockaded a road to protest against high levels of lead in the blood of their children. Local residents are convinced that the children’s excessive lead levels are the result of pollution from the  Huaqiang Battery Factory. Authorities have ordered China’s environmental protection bureau to increase oversight of the plant. The protest comes in the wake of several similar protests against industrial plants that have succeeded in getting polluting factories closed down.

Manure message

And in the UK, journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson found his own bit of global warming, on his doorstep! Seven members of group Climate Rush visited his home and left steaming piles of horse manure on his drive, along with a message reading ‘This is what you’re landing us in’. The protestors, all women, chose Clarkson because he has a sceptical attitude to climate change. Clarkson is the presenter of Top Gear, a car programme, and has recently driven to the Arctic. In the past he has made inflammatory remarks about the effects of climate change, describing walkers who demand access to land as ‘urban communists’ and cyclists as ‘Lycra Nazis’.

New Zealand animal foods protest

And finally on the same day, 17 September, a New Zealand protest against palm kernel imports ended inconclusively.  The company, Fonterra, is a dairy supplies specialist and also a cooperative with over 11,000 dairy farming members in New Zealand.  Greenpeace claims there is both local and international concern about the nature of the palm oil industry globally and protestors chained themselves to the cranes of the ship delivering the imports.  Feed imports for livestock are an increasing contentious issue – Greenpeace says that corn and grain farmers in New Zealand have supported their action because their own products have been outpriced by cheap imported livestock foods and that endangered species are being further threatened by land clearance fuelled by the palm oil export industry. 14 protesters, charged with unlawful boarding of a ship, will be appearing in court next week.
New Zealand sheep courtesy of PhillipC at Flickr under a creative commons licence