View full sizeA wheat field in Moro, Ore.Beth Nakamura, The Oregonian, 2012
WICHITA, Kan. — A Kansas farmer has sued seed giant Monsanto over last week’s discovery of genetically engineered experimental wheat in an 80-acre field in Oregon, claiming the company’s gross negligence hurt U.S. growers by driving down wheat prices and causing some international markets to suspend certain imports.
The federal civil lawsuit, filed Monday by Ernest Barnes, who farms 1,000 acres near Elkhart in southwest Kansas, seeks unspecified damages to be determined at trial.
U.S. Agriculture Department officials said last Wednesday that the modified wheat was the same strain as one designed by Monsanto to be herbicide-resistance that was tested in Oregon and several other states through 2005 but never approved. The USDA has said the Oregon wheat is safe to eat and there is no evidence that modified wheat entered the marketplace.
It’s believed to be the first lawsuit stemming from the discovery. Similar lawsuits are in the works, Barnes’ attorney said, and the cases will likely be consolidated for the purposes of discovery, a process where evidence is investigated and shared among parties.
No genetically engineered wheat has been approved for U.S. farming. Many countries will not accept imports of genetically modified foods, and the United States exports about half of its wheat crop. Since the announcement, Japan — one of the largest export markets for U.S. wheat growers — suspended some imports. South Korea said it would increase its inspections of U.S. wheat imports.
Barnes referred all calls to his attorneys. One of them, Warren Burns, said that the scope of the damage is potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He said the lawsuit seeks to make sure their client is compensated for his losses.
“These types of suits serve the purpose of helping police the agricultural system we have in place and make sure farmers are protected,” Burns said in a phone interview Tuesday from Dallas.
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
(NaturalNews) The next wave of farmer backlash against Monsanto has just been unleashed by Ernest Barnes, a wheat farmer in Morton County, Kansas. He filed suit this week in the U.S. District Court in Wichita, Kansas, alleging that Monsanto’s genetic pollution has financially damaged himself and other farmers.
Barnes’ case appears to be well supported by the facts: Last week the USDA announced the shock discovery that genetically engineered wheat strains from Monsanto’s open-field experiments had escaped and spread into commercial wheat farms. Almost immediately, Japan and South Korea cancelled wheat purchase contracts from the United States, and more cancellations are expected to follow. The more countries reject U.S. wheat due to GMO contamination (genetic pollution), the lower wheat prices will plunge and the more economic damage will be felt by U.S. farmers.
Monsanto now a confirmed genetic polluter
GMO wheat (i.e. “GE wheat”) has never been commercially grown in the United States… at least not on purpose. Experimental fields were approved by the USDA and planted across 16 U.S. states. Until now, it was not known that these GE wheat experiments escaped their designated field plots and began to spread as a form of self-replicating genetic pollution.
Humanity has reached a tipping point of developing technology so profound that it can destroy the human race; yet this rise of “science” has in no way been matched by a rise in consciousness or ethics. Today, science operates with total disregard for the future of life on Earth, and it scoffs at the idea of balancing scientific “progress” with caution, ethics or reasonable safeguards. Unbridled experiments like GMOs have unleashed self-replicating genetic pollution that now threatens the integrity of food crops around the world, potentially threatening the global food supply.
Those words, it turns out, were prophetic. We are now faced with precisely this situation in the U.S. agricultural sector, and farmers are starting to feel the economic losses. GMOs are just one of several areas where so-called “science” actually threatens humanity with total destruction.
The petition filed by Barnes claims Monsanto knew there was a high risk the genetically modified wheat it was testing could contaminate other varieties of wheat, and the company failed to follow proper procedures to keep the wheat contained.
Monsanto tested the wheat in many states, including Kansas, the top U.S. wheat-producing state, but did not disclose to farmers in those states that it was testing the controversial wheat there, the petition states.
Monsanto to sue the farmers?
Monsanto claims it will mount a “vigorous defense” against the lawsuit, expressing that it takes no responsibility whatsoever for all the genetic pollution it spews across America’s farm lands. If Monsanto’s genetically modified, toxin-producing crops just happen to infect your commercial crops, then that’s your fault!
In fact, I’m surprised Monsanto hasn’t announced plans to sue all these farmers for “stealing” its “intellectual property.” That’s what the company has done before, of course: sued farmers whose fields were contaminated by Monsanto’s genetic pollutants.
Is this not the height of corporate evil? When British Petroleum spills billions of gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, it at least pretends to be sorry about it. But when Monsanto spews its genetic pollution all over the planet, it blames the farmers! It would be like if BP drove an oil tanker right into your front yard, dumped a thousand gallons of oil on your lawn, then sued you for stealing their oil.
That’s the Monsanto model. And it’s yet another example of the total runaway criminality of this evil corporation that frankly should have its corporate charter yanked. This is one business that deserves to be permanently put out of business and never allowed to operate again. When corporations become such arrogant, destructive and threatening monsters that stomp on our farmers and spew their genetic jizz all across the planet like a bunch of sicko ag perverts, something has gone terribly wrong and needs to be stopped.
The recent March Against Monsanto was only the beginning. I even foresee a day when millions of citizens from around the world engage in a far more aggressive march on the Monsanto headquarters and literally tear the place apart brick by brick until this corporate demon is permanently excised from our planet.
We are winning the war against Monsanto
I also predict — but do not condone this violence — that if Monsanto continues to engage in its crimes against farmers, nature and humanity, we are going to start seeing well-planned “acts of justice” against Monsanto executives, employees and scientists. I literally had a bizarre, disturbing dream the other night where a band of activists had kidnapped a Monsanto executive, tied him to a chair, and forced him to admit to all the crimes Monsanto has committed while being filmed on camera. The videos were then released on the internet. I realize this sounds a lot like the plot of a major motion picture, but I believe this could become reality if Monsanto continues on its current path.
Again, for the record, I do not condone the kidnapping of Monsanto executives. Kidnappings and executions are no way to resolve problems in a civilized society. If such an act actually takes place, it would actually hurt the anti-GMO movement and allow the government to paint all GMO protesters as “potential terrorists.” So if anyone out there is actually thinking of doing this, please redirect your energy and focus into non-violent protests and other similar actions that are already making tremendous progress. As I said recently on Natural News, I believe we have reached a tipping point of success against Monsanto. Let’s continue to pressure Monsanto in a grassroots, non-violent way, okay?
After all, we are winning this war against Monsanto and GMOs. They are in full retreat and completely surrounded… by the truth.
A clean environment is important to us all. We have an obligation to maintain our resources and sustain our environment for future generations. Sustaining our environment has led us down the road to environmentalism. Then a strange thing happened. Environmentalism came to a fork in the road. While the rhetoric took one route, the agenda took another. Explore this topic and discover how Agenda 21 will affect you.
This classic video produced by George W. Hunt exposes how the progenitors of the hijacked environmental movement, people like Maurice Strong, the Rothschild family and David Rockefeller, always intended the scam to achieve global population reduction along with a global carbon tax based on a cap and trade system controlled by them.
Pelosi introduces a bill to follow the 1992 RIO Earth Summit and conform to Agenda 21 and local agenda 21 sustainable community practices and follow international law.
Taken from C-SPAN archives, filmed on Oct. 2, 1992
Private property rights in California are being subjected to Agenda 21, a United Nation’s declaration on the collective society’s right to control private property.
Environmentalists and TreeHuggers rejoiced today with the joint announcement from Barack Obama of the USA, Stephen Harper of Canada and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico announce the agreement to fully implement Agenda 21 throughout the three countries. The multi-trillion Amero project will ensure a greener, healthier, fairer and more equally distributed future for the 99%.
Glenn Beck/Screen capture
Readers may remember that Agenda 21 started in Rio in 1992 and has been spreading ’round the globe ever since, as Treehugger types push the idea of living a low impact life with a small carbon footprint, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and saving the planet for all species. As one agender put it,
The objective of sustainable development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity.
protecting biodiversity means giving the land back to the animals./Screen capture
In order to preserve that biodiversity and habitat, President Obama has announced the implementation of the wildlife reserve and corridor system across the USA, that will return most of the nation to its natural habitat.
Library of Congress/Public Domain
The Hoover Dam and others on major rivers will be deconstructed so that they can be returned to their natural state. This will cause some problems for cities like Phoenix and others in California that depend on the river’s water; the people will have to be relocated as there won’t be any water for drinking or lawns.
Fortunately, there are thousands of empty houses in Detroit and Buffalo and other northern cities that will be made available for occupation by the transplanted Phoenicians, who will be welcomed back, and given jobs on urban farms.
Since production of fertilizer requires fossil fuels and these contribute to climate change, all farming will be organic and done mainly by hand. This will provide a huge number of jobs for millenials now looking for work; a hundred and fifty years ago 80% of the population of North America worked in agriculture; now it is 3%. This is a great opportunity to put people back to work in productive jobs with lots of fresh air, exercise and sunshine.
Apartments produced in the LifeEdited Industries factories will accommodate families of all sizes and incomes; to keep consumption of materials and energy down, space will be rationed to 200 square feet per person, with a maximum unit size of 600 square feet. This will help control population growth, a major source of environmental problems. After all, Agenda 21 style living has been described as:
a future in which people would be forced to live with five others in 20-by-20 living spaces with push-button furniture in high-rises across major cities. The complexes would serve three vegetarian meals a day, feature mosques and have a 24-7 on-call doctor to discuss taking one’s own life.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressing higher education sustainability leaders at the September 20-21Sustainability Education Summit: “Citizenship and Pathways for a Green Economy.” He says his department is late to sustainability and education, but it’s getting underway.
William F. Jasper, investigative reporter for The New American magazine, uncovers the real objective behind the Earth Charter. Many U.S. city and educational officials have already been persuaded to endorse this pro-UN manifesto. Learn why this campaign, masquerading as a plan to protect the environment, is potentially lethal to family, faith, and freedom. A must-see video presentation!
Step by step, piece by piece, the Wildlands Project is coming to fruition. The Project, foundational to the U.N.Biodiversity Treaty which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, calls for approximately 50 percent of the United States to be set aside as “wildlands”, where no human can enter. Much has been accomplished over the past 10 years toward that goal, and the pace is stepping up, with the help of the federal agencies first under Clinton/Gore and now under Obama/Biden.
What, you may ask, is the Wildlands Project? It is a grandiose plan to transform at least half of the continental United States into an area free of modern industry and human habitation.
The father of this radical vision for a new green America is none other than Dave Foreman , principal founder of the eco-terrorist group EarthFirst!, and until 1997, a director of the Sierra Club . Carl Pope took the reign in 2002.
A vast network of powerful and influential environmental groups are taking great strides toward reaching the Wildlands’ goals. They are working toward the resurrection of a pre-industrial North America — the continent once known to Native Americans as “Turtle Island.” Foreman, in his own words, summarizes the Wildlands Project as a “bold attempt to grope our way back to 1492.” What kind of progressive notion is that, you might ask.
The deep ecology movement operates behind a sham of new age language and pseudoscience. Idealistic neo-pagans were courted and seduced by a pseudo spiritual rhetoric that masquerades the hidden agenda for power, money and control. They fell in love with the idea of this socially engineered, new earth religion “Gia”. This relationship came with weighty strings attached and they, lost in their beautiful delusions, danced at the puppet masters’ command.
Even so, these people consider themselves to be enlightened and always right, while they consider those with differing views to be ignorant and unenlightened. These eco-centrics have created their own vocabulary and terminology and this green “newspeak” has grown deep and extensive roots within our popular and political culture.
Wildlife Corridor Conservation Act Introduced
Politicians and other agents of Agenda 21 are inundating us with overlapping schemes that quietly and deliberately drown our property rights and freedom. For surefire evidence, take a look at U.S. Congress – H.R. 5101 Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2010. This bill includes transboundary tax-payer funded projects for wild animal bridges and tunnels, increasing roadless areas and other means to capture more natural resources and private property for government and its partners.
H.R. 5101 states that “The Secretary, in cooperation with the States and Indian tribes, shall develop a Habitat and Corridors Information System, that shall include maps and descriptions of projected shifts in habitats and corridors of fish and wildlife species in response to climate change; and to assess the impacts of existing development on habitats and corridors.” The System is charged with identifying, prioritizing and describing “key parcels of non-Federal land (i.e. state lands and private property) located within the boundaries of units of the National Park System, National Wildlife Refuge System, National Forest System, or National Grassland System that are critical to maintenance of wildlife habitat and migration corridors.” This is way over and above what the federal government has already swallowed up under other guises.
Congress and other elites are desperately clinging to the fraud of man-made global warming in an attempt to illegitimately wrest control of private property. Many people still nominally own and pay taxes on their private property but if their property is even slightly proximate to the imagined wildlife corridors, then animals rule as “new habitat” is created for them in response to “climate change” and other “threats” (meaning people). It doesn’t matter that grandma’s house has been there for 100 years and she and the animals get along fine. Not anymore, with this bill government will determine what if any use might be made of land that falls in or near corridors invented ostensibly to protect animals (in truth this is done to take private property and to control the human population).
The difference between this bill and previous wildland’s programs is that this one doesn’t just have teeth, it has fangs. Not only does it have “strong language calling on agencies to actually take steps to protect corridors” but it also calls for a funding mechanism (more taxes) to support “such protective action.” In short, we will be footing the bill for the global elite to further control our property and diminish our freedom under the guise of habitat protection. And “the Secretary of the Interior may transfer funds to the Foundation under this subsection in advance, without regard to when expenses are incurred.” How many of us can get paid whenever we want, even if we haven’t yet done the work?
Here are a few examples of Wildlife Corridor Program across the United States. Once again they are bad programs hiding behind pretty pictures and phony words. Rim of the Valley Los Angeles Basin, California, Buffalo Commons Plains States, USA and Yellowstone to Yukon or “Y to Y” plus there are many more.
Norman MacLeod of Washington explains that HR 5101 incorporates the legislative provisions of Section 481 of HR 2454 (the House version of the climate bill) and Section 6009 of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill draft. These sections authorize a wildlife corridors information system. HR 5101 builds on this with implementation programs, mostly to be housed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Funding mechanisms and public-private structures are included. The bill has been referred to the House Natural Resources Committee.
This bill is intended to lead to the formal creation of several continental-scale wildlife corridor systems that include core habitat, connectivity, and buffer systems that will impact livelihoods, homes, ranches, farms, access to resources, outdoor recreation and more.
Buzzwords for a New Millennium
Biological diversity is a broad term which crops up in many environmental documents. It is used to define any kind of life form and its interrelation(s) to all the other life forms within any particular ecosystem a/k/a biome.
Bioregions, also known as biosphere reserves, are geo-political regions formed from land areas constituting similar ecosystems. The United Nations prefers the term “eco-regions,” and the Department of the Interior refers to them as Ecosystem Management Areas.
Under such a plan, areas that are now defined by state boundaries in the U.S., would be reorganized to follow similar landscape features. For example, the mountainous regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky and West Virginia would constitute the Southern Appalachian Bioregion.
According to the enviro¬gurus, all human activity is damaging to a biosphere. Following that reasoning, they believe that people must be heavily regulated or removed in order to protect the balance of biodiversity within eco-regions.
First, a core area is established where no human activity is allowed. Core areas are the central component of the Wildlands Reserve program. Core areas are large and are taken mostly from National Forest and Park lands and adjacent private lands. Around the core is a buffer zone, consisting primarily of private land. Buffer zones may contain some housing development and human activity. According to the “grand plan,” however, no new development must be permitted. A transition area will surround the buffer zone. Human activity, such as tourism, or even some human settlement will be allowed. The transition area boundaries can be flexible. A corridor is an area of land that connects core areas with other core areas. Corridors generally follow rivers, streams and wildlife migration routes. Corridors consist of both public and private lands.
According to the Wildlands Project, no commercial development, housing or communities would be allowed within such a corridor. Imagine a national park that was 2,500 miles long, two counties wide and which passed through ten states from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. This is the Mississippi River Corridor, as designated by Congress. Numerous and costly studies will be made in this region in order to develop a unified federal program to control this ten-state area. Are you beginning to see how this plan will work?
There are sixty-eight other designated Heritage Areas and Corridors across our country in nearly every state of the Union. (this was true in 1999 – there may be more at this time)
THE ROAD RIP: Road Removal and Implementation Project
A common characteristic of core wilderness areas and interconnecting corridors is the absence of roads. Road RIP is an NGO dedicated to removing existing roads and preventing the construction of new roads. Since this paper was first written, many “road removal” projects have been implemented.
The original Road RIP radicals prepared handbooks for local activists that describe step-by-step procedures for challenging road construction and “Six Steps to Close a Road.” Sample letters, a comprehensive flow chart of the procedure and sample forms are provided to the organization’s chapters. The author of the work, Keith Hammer, is credited with forcing the Forest Service to remove or commit to remove more than 1,000 miles of roads in the Flathead National Forest.
The group is not content to close only roads in the national forests. Their ambitions run much higher. According to their literature:
“The best road density goal for maintaining and restoring ecological and evolutionary processes is ZERO—NO ROADS AT ALL. And what we call a road includes everything from interstate highways to two-track logging roads, off-road vehicle trails, and snowmobile routes. They are all swaths of ecological destruction.” And back to 1492 we go.
PRIVATE PROPERTY
In order for the Wildlands Project to be successful, thousands upon thousands of acres of private property need to be incorporated into biosphere reserves. Landowners were once free to use their land as they saw fit, as long as their actions did not harm other people. That changed with a 1972 decision by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. In Just v. Marinette County, the Court ruled that:
“An owner of land has no absolute and unlimited right to change the essential natural character of his land so as to use it for a purpose for which it was unsuited in its natural state. ”
Simply put, the Wisconsin ruling set a legal precedence that a property owner could not “harm” the land itself. Fortunately, following cases favored landowners although the legal definition of “harm” was expanded and modified.
The Wildlands Project and other environmental organizations now campaign to “educate” the courts and public what they consider to be inappropriate land uses that “harms” others. The arguments which the eco-activists have dreamed up are convoluted and complex. They claim that when wetlands are filled, others are harmed by excessive run off and by the loss of the run off to the aquifer. When private property is clear cut others are harmed by the loss of biodiversity and so on, ad nauseum. They know the legal game and play it well. If they don’t want you to have it (property), they will find a way to take (legally steal) it from you.
The Sweet Home decision is an excellent example of how the Supreme Court is expanding the definition of harm. It was based on the notion that landowners can harm the land itself, which in turn, would affect and harm people.
“Others” that are affected are often unidentified souls that may be indirectly impacted by the loss of some imagined benefit. This case has left the door wide open for government restrictions upon private property owners. A favorite scheme used to implement the Wildlands Project, is for the federal government to offer a variety of flexible conservation easements to property owners. The owner retains title to the property and continues to pay taxes on it even though specific uses of the property are relinquished to the easement holder. Further, they often receive a pittance for the rights they gave up and future generations are robbed of the property uses which were forfeited.
The Nature Conservancy and other land trusts have led the way in exploiting this technique of separating resource utilization from the bundle of rights which traditionally have been considered private property rights and other non-profits have learned those techniques.
From the Global to the National to the Local
It is no coincidence that an article about the Wildlands Project first appeared in the 1992 special issue of Wild Earth, * an EarthFirst! publication. After all, the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity also took place that very same year, and come to think about it, so did the release of Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance.
Not surprisingly, one of Al Gore’s first acts as Vice President was to establish an Ecosystem Management Policy. This directive was implemented via various resource management agencies within our federal government. (It should be noted that the Sierra Club published a map of the new America, broken down into 18 bioregions. )
Codex Alimentarius Lecture by Ian R. Crane – 1 thru 9
Uploaded on Jun 20, 2008
1 of 9
Taken from ConCen:
Never heard of Codex Alimentarius? That’s exactly what they want!
The UN plan to eradicate organic farming & to destroy the Natural Health Industry.
With biting political analysis, Ian R. Crane probes the track record of those who openly crave the introduction of a One World hierarchical Government. He exposes the agenda of those who have presided over events leading directly to the launching of the illegal wars in Afghanistan & Iraq and who continually demonstrate their desire to perpetuate a state of permanent global conflict; whilst systematically eroding personal freedom, through the process of gradualism.
24-year-old New York anarchist Jerry Koch is jailed for invoking his 5th Amendment rights after being recalled 4 years later to be questioned once again in a case where he initially testified that he knew nothing of what had transpired in the bicycle bombing being investigated.
Lois Lerner of the IRS is called to testify she invokes her 5th Amendment right and goes on to claim that she did nothing wrong or illegal. However, she is still free.
I suppose it was helpful that she defied Legislators and not a Judge , huh ?
24-year-old New York anarchist Jerry Koch gets jailed for up to 18 months for refusing to testify as a witness in the Times Square bicycle bombing case of 2008 at a federal grand jury hearing. RT’s Anastasia Churkina reports from the federal court house in the Big Apple.
A song I wrote when I visited the site after 9/11; always thought a little heavy, but it is time to get it out there. All photos taken from the web, if there is any infringement, please contact me, I will include credits. Included on my CD “Renegade of the Light Brigade” during the remix and urging of the late, great Steve Burgh.
Ariel Castro charged with kidnapping, rape of three Cleveland women
Ariel Castro will be charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape in the case of the three women in Cleveland, Ohio. Onil and Pedro Castro do not face charges at this time.
By Yamiche Alcindor, Donna Leinwand Leger and Gary Strauss, USA TODAY6:07 p.m. EDT May 8, 2013
CLEVELAND — The man at whose home three women were found after a decade of captivity was charged Wednesday with multiple counts of kidnapping and rape.
Ariel Castro, 52, faces three counts of rape and four counts of kidnapping involving victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. The three vanished between 2002 and 2004. Castro was also charged with kidnapping in connection with Berry’s six-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, who was also found at the home Monday and is believed to be Castro’s child.
Authorities revealed little about their investigation into the case, which is on-going, but said they had gathered hundreds of pieces of evidence. The felony charges against Castro came 48 hours after Berry – now 27 – made a frantic flight from Castro’s Seymour Avenue home early Monday evening. Authorities say that may have been the first opportunity any of the victims had to escape captivity.
Castro is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Additional charges could be filed at a later date. Police reports say Castro allegedly lured all three into his car on three separate occasions.
Castro’s brothers, Pedro and Onil, were also arrested Monday. But Victor Perez, chief deputy prosecutor for Cleveland, said there is no evidence that either – who did not live at the Seymour Ave. home – had any involvement in the crimes against the three women or Berry’s daughter. Both face Thursday court hearings on outstanding misdemeanor warrants, Perez said.
Earlier Wednesday, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus returned to their Cleveland homes, where they were surrounded by family and friends. Knight was still in a Cleveland hospital Wednesday.
DeJesus, wearing a lime green hoodie, stepped from a car, and gave a thumbs up as the crowd chanted “Gina! Gina!” A woman then pulled her into a tight embrace and hustled her inside through a forest of flowers and balloons.
Nancy Ruiz, DeJesus’ mother, thanked those who had helped the family over the past nine years. “Even the ones that doubted, I want to thank them the most,” she said. “They’re the ones that made me stronger, the ones that made me feel the most that my daughter was out there.”
Gina’s aunt, Sandra Ruiz, called on friends, relatives and the media “to give us time and privacy to heal.”
“There are not enough words to say or express the joy that we feel with the return of our family member, Gina,” she said. “And now Amanda Berry, the daughter, and Michelle Knight, who is our family also.”
Ruiz also called on the community to help search for Ashley Summers, another young woman from the area who went missing at the age of 14 in 2007.
Pope Francis looks on after his weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican on May 1, 2013. Pope Francis urged political leaders to make every effort to create jobs and said unemployment was caused by economic thinking “outside the bounds of social justice.”.
By Philip Pullella, Reuters
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned the conditions of workers who died in the Bangladesh factory collapse as “slave labor,” saying unjust salaries and the unbridled quest for profits were “against God.”
His words were his toughest yet on workers’ rights since his election on March 13, and another indication that the former archbishop of Buenos Aires was intent on making social justice a major plank of his pontificate.
“Living on 38 euros ($50) a month – that was the pay of these people who died. That is called slave labor,” Francis said in a private impromptu sermon at his personal morning Mass in his residence, Vatican Radio reported.
The death toll from the collapse last week of the illegally built Rana Plaza in Dhaka’s commercial suburb of Savar rose to 411 on Wednesday and about 40 unidentified victims were buried.
The pope, speaking on May Day, the international labor day, said: “Not paying a just wage, not giving work, only because one is looking at the bottom line, at the budget of the company, seeking only profit – that is against God”.
Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, said there were many people in the world living in conditions of slave labor.
“Today in the world there is this slavery that is perpetrated with the most beautiful thing that God has given man: the capacity to create, to work, to make his own dignity,” he said.
“How many brothers and sisters in the world are in this situation because of these economic, social and political policies?”
Khurshed Rinku / Khurshed Rinku / Reuters
A view of rescue workers attempting to find survivors from the rubble of the collapsed Rana Plaza building in Savar, around 19 miles outside Dhaka April 30.
In his native Argentina, Francis was often on the side of the poor, the downtrodden and the unemployed, clashing with the government on economic policy and defending the dignity of the weakest members of society.
On March 24, 1989, shortly after midnight, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling more than 11 million gallons of crude oil. The spill was the largest in U.S. history and tested the abilities of local, national, and industrial organizations to prepare for, and respond to, a disaster of such magnitude. Many factors complicated the cleanup efforts following the spill. The size of the spill and its remote location, accessible only by helicopter and boat, made government and industry efforts difficult and tested existing plans for dealing with such an event.
The spill posed threats to the delicate food chain that supports Prince William Sound’s commercial fishing industry. Also in danger were ten million migratory shore birds and waterfowl, hundreds of sea otters, dozens of other species, such as harbor porpoises and sea lions, and several varieties of whales.
Since the incident occurred in open navigable waters, the U.S. Coast Guard’s On-Scene Coordinator had authority for all activities related to the cleanup effort. His first action was to immediately close the Port of Valdez to all traffic. A U.S. Coast Guard at USCG investigator, along with a representative from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, visited the scene of the incident to assess the damage. By noon on Friday, March 25, the Alaska Regional Response Team was brought together by teleconference, and the National Response Team was activated soon thereafter.
Three methods were tried in the effort to clean up the spill:
Burning
Mechanical Cleanup
Chemical Dispersants
In the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez incident, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which required the Coast Guard to strengthen its regulations on oil tank vessels and oil tank owners and operators. Today, tank hulls provide better protection against spills resulting from a similar accident, and communications between vessel captains and vessel traffic centers have improved to make for safer sailing.
When the Exxon Valdez ran ashore off Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, it wasn’t the first tanker to founder at sea. It was, however, the first tanker to deposit its load — 11 million gallons of crude oil, eventually covering 11,000 square miles of ocean — in such an economically and environmentally important ecosystem, and thus squarely in the public eye.
To this day, images of oil-choked birds and oil-fouled shorelines are burned into the memories of a generation. Local and national outrage forced Exxon into paying billions of dollars to clean the mess. Some of this money went to scientists who monitored the region’s recovery. For the first time, researchers had the resources necessary to thoroughly study an oil spill’s effects. These proved even uglier than they first appeared.
Researchers expected the oil to break up in a few years. Instead, it will take more than a century. They found that oil’s compounds, especially polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — carcinogenic molecules that attach to fat, and refuse to break down in water — are toxic at levels hundreds, even thousands of times lower than was previously believed.
The Valdez pollution set off a cascade of environmental effects that have yet to be fully understood, but have at least been measured. Few of the region’s fish, bird and marine mammal populations have recovered. To the naked eye, Prince William Sound is beautiful and wild — but beneath the surface, it is profoundly damaged. As the Exxon Valdez Oil
Spill Trustee Council recently reported, oil in many areas “is nearly as toxic as it was the first few weeks after the spill.”
The federal economic stimulus package passed in January contains roughly $4 billion for clean water, of which $1.2 billion is earmarked for “green infrastructure” — green roofs, porous concretes, and other technologies that can at least reduce the surges that cause sewage plants to overflow.
It’s a welcome investment, said Baer, but the EPA estimates that $390 billion is needed to upgrade water systems nationwide, and Gann called the stimulus figure “a down payment” on what’s needed. Moreover, said Baer, “Global warming is going to be one more added stress on our infrastructure. Storms will be more intense, and you’re going to see more intense runoffs and overflows.”
The effects of all this oil have yet to be quantified. Unlike Prince William Sound, researchers haven’t spent decades looking for damage caused by chronic oil exposures in
America’s waters. It’s not inconceivable that a state of permanent toxicity has come to seem natural.
If oil “kills all these organisms through long-term exposures in
Prince William Sound,” said Peterson, “think what it’s doing in Boston
Harbor and San Pedro and every other place where this is going on.”
…
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
Administrator Bill Reilly at the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup site, August 1989
Exxon has not yet recovered a responsible reputation to this day, even if it has slowly introduced green energy and renewable energy resources in the market. The name Exxon, to this day, is still synonymous to the concept of man-made disaster. After all, the damage caused by the oil spill was massive and affected sea and water creatures, as well as ruined the livelihood of thousands of people dependent on fishery resources off the coast of Alaska.
After the billions of dollars spent on restoring the Exxon image, the company has failed to restore its reputation after the oil spill incident. Exxon still has one of the dirtiest company images on earth. The accident is touted to be one of the worst ways to handle a crisis. Exxon has gotten one of the most damaging portrayals in mass media, due entirely to the company’s fault of not communicating properly with the publics right after the incident.
In a time of environmental consciousness, Exxon has remained in the minds of people as a company that is environmentally damaging and irresponsible. The perception of the public is the cause behind the fact that Exxon has never survived the crisis.
To eradicate its irresponsible image, Exxon has to do the opposite: be environmentally responsible. This is a tall order to overturn public perception that has festered through two decades. While it has already put technological measures in place so as not to repeat the disaster, the issue has always been one of public image and reputation.
No matter how Exxon passed a good part of the blame after the spill to other groups such as the Coast Guard and
It can be concluded that Exxon’s long delay in responding publicly to the problems, in the many ways and means that it could have had, caused the company’s irreparable reputational damage.
To this day, the Exxon Valdez incident remains one of the most glaring examples of how not to handle a crisis.
Twenty years after the oil spill disaster on March 24, 1989 that released 10.8 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, Exxon has spent more than $2 billion in massive clean-up campaigns. However, oil still remains and some wildlife habitats will still take a long time to recover.
The Exxon Valdez incident is one of the worst environmental disasters in recent times. It is also a classic case of how a massive crisis was poorly handled. The management did not act quickly nor on time, making the damage bigger than it even was in the perception of the public.
By 1992 or so, the 37,000-ton spill in Prince William Sound had been washed (at Exxon’s expense) off the rocks and beaches, or simply weathered away. Now, 13 years after the Exxon Valdez spill, a casual observer won’t see oil.
Oil does remain in sheltered locations – immune to wind and wave – mainly on about 20 acres of rocky shore, according to an extensive 2001 survey. Although that’s a lot less than the 149 kilometers of shoreline that were heavily oiled during the spill, “In terms of critical habitat for wildlife, that is a significant amount, because there is not a large amount of suitable habitat, you have sheer rock, or rocky transition zones,” says Phil Mundy, science director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which administers a research and restoration program in the sound, funded by a bank-ful of Exxon settlement money.
Valdez oil moved from Prince William Sound to the Gulf of Alaska. Courtesy David Page
Totally toxic? Oil loses some of its toxic components through exposure to the weather, but the deep pockets left in the sound are still surprisingly toxic. The report from the 2001 survey said:
“Twenty subsurface pits [of 6,775 dug in Prince William Sound] were classified as heavily oiled. Oil saturated all of the interstitial spaces and was extremely repugnant. These ‘worst case’ pits exhibited an oil mixture that resembled oil encountered in 1989 a few weeks after the spill — highly odiferous, lightly weathered, and very fluid.”
Mundy finds this surprising. “If you’d asked in ’89, would we still have oil around in 2002? I’d have said it’s highly unlikely. One thing we have learned, contrary to what you find in the literature, especially in literature sponsored by the oil companies … is that oil that’s not exposed to the atmosphere … can surface time and again, to do damage at local scales.”
In general, says Robert Spies, a marine biologist and former chief scientist for the trustee council, “Oil tends to clean itself up, it’s a curve. You get rapid loss in one to two years, then the rate begins to fall off. Where there was protection from the physical energy of the ocean, it can take a long time to break down.”
Before we exonerate Exxon in the Valdez spill, let’s focus on the oil remaining under the rocks. “You can go to Prince William Sound and dig down in the rocky cobble beaches, and find oil as toxic as the day it was spilled,” says Richard Charter, a marine conservation advocate with the non-profit Environmental Defense. (Full disclosure: the author is a member of Environmental Defense.)
The 1989 picture shows pools of oil on an exposed boulder beach. In 1992, the same beach shows no oil. A combination of natural and human processes removed most of the oil by 1992. Courtesy David Page
Some studies, Charter says, show that tiny concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (a group of toxic hydrocarbons ) from crude oil cause mutations in pink salmon eggs. “That means that components of oil, the fractions with the most toxicity, have mutagenic properties at levels much lower than we thought, and are much more persistent in the food chain than we ever believed possible.”
In a report cited by a 2002 National Research Council book Oil in the Sea III), researchers from the Alaska Fisheries Science Center tried to sum up the effect of oil on pink salmon, the big commercial fish in Prince William Sound before the spill:
“Laboratory studies designed to emulate post-spill conditions in [Prince William Sound] verified that embryos are sensitive to long-term exposures to weathered oil in the low part per billion (ppb) range of PAH [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons ]. Mortalities, abnormalities, histopathological damage, and other biological effects increased with embryo exposure to ppb concentrations of PAH. …Sensitivity of salmon embryos to weathered crude oil at ppb concentrations is unprecedented…”
Another indication that spilled oil does not just disappear comes from researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who found fuel oil 30 years after a spill on Cape Cod. Woods Hole couldn’t bother talking with us, but their press release said samples from 2 to 11 inches deep in the marsh “contained petroleum hydrocarbons in similar concentrations to those observed shortly after the1969 spill. … the team found that compounds consistent with No. 2 fuel oil were still present in the sediments and may remain there indefinitely.”
At approximately 11 p.m. Friday, July 1, 2011, a break occurred in a 12-inch pipeline under the Yellowstone River 20 miles upstream from Billings, Montana. The ruptured pipeline is owned by ExxonMobil Pipeline Company. According to the company, an estimated 1,000 barrels of oil entered the river before the pipeline was closed. EPA is leading the response in close coordination with the state of Montana and other federal agencies. EPA’s primary concern is protecting people’s health and the environment and will remain on-site to ensure cleanup and restoration efforts do just that. EPA continues to hold ExxonMobil, the responsible party, accountable for assessment and cleanup.
Caution was required as flood waters rise possibly endangering the 20 year old pipeline. Exxon claims to have taken this into consideration decided after consideration of t heir safety record that the pipeline would again be opened in spite of concerns to its continued integrity as flood waters rise in the Yellowstone River in Montana . Speculation is that the rupture in the pipeline was indeed caused by debris damage below the water line. One stops to wonder how these safety decisions were determined and by whom. As it is obvious Exxon’s safety record is less than satisfactory, in light of only a few of the oil leaks and spills in which it has been directly involved over the last decade or so.
Nearly a year after an Exxon Mobile pipeline leaked 60,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River, Montana environmental officials are looking for remaining contamination on the stream after workers recently spotted sheens on the water downstream from the leak site, according to a report from the Associated Press.
The July 1 accident spilled an estimated 1,500 barrels of crude, or 63,000 gallons, into the Yellowstone River near Laurel.
In recent weeks, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks workers have found sheens or other evidence of oil at several sites downstream of the spill, said agency spokesman Bob Gibson.
Department of Environmental Quality scientist Laura Alvey said that includes a sheen she saw last week on an island east of Laurel. She said there was “no question” the sheen came from oil.
Homeowner Jim Swanson had contacted the DEQ after seeing sheens along the river. His property suffered extensive contamination last year, which Exxon workers attempted to remove as part of an estimated $135 million in cleanup and pipeline repair work.
The company recovered an estimated 1 percent of the oil spilled.
The verdict stemmed from the contamination of drinking water supplied to 160 homeowners due to a gasoline leak, Bloomberg noted. The oil giant argued that the 2011 jury award was excessive. A state appeals court agreed and ordered a new trial in Baltimore County Circuit Court.
Additionally, the appeals court reverse the jury’s finding of fraud against Exxon Mobil. That, too, will be a question in the new trial.
The leak, which lasted 37 days, caused 26,000 gallons of gasoline to seep into groundwater in the rural Maryland community. The jury awarded residents $495 million in compensatory damages in addition to the punitive award
The dirty energy giant is hoping to withdraw up to 250,000 gallons per day of surface water from Oquaga Creek near the Farnham Road bridge crossing on Route 41 in Sanford, New York. Roughly 300 residents showed up to comment on the proposal, which has stirred public anger and concern over the potential impacts on the local environment and water supplies.
The Exxon subsidiary’s draft docket stipulates that the surface water will be used for unconventional gas drilling via hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. fracking). XTO says the clean water will be used to mix cement and create a “drilling mud/fluid” cocktail. No waste problem, of course.
Beneath the Exxon PR spin, the true costs of withdrawing a quarter million gallons of water per day are estimated at around $17,700 - for a tiny patch of land.
Consider the fact that the fracking rush is exacting these very same direct costs on many North Americans.
Recently, ExxonMobil has continued with its misleading media blitz to pacify the public’s real concerns around the dangers of unconventional gas exploration. Exxon’s misdirection appeared this month on TV and in full-page ads [pdf] in The New York Times and Washington Post. The ads falsely presented fracking for unconventional gas as a time-tested way to unlock “cleaner-burning” fuel from shale rock. The problem with Exxon’s efforts to greenwash unconventional gas is that according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [pdf] as well as a recent Cornell study, unlocking this dirty energy is perhaps just as polluting if not moreso than coal. Unconventional gas, despite what Exxon would have us believe, is just another polluting fossil fuel.
Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is a means of natural gas extraction employed in deep natural gas well drilling. Once a well is drilled, millions of gallons of water, sand and proprietary chemicals are injected, under high pressure, into a well. The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable natural gas to flow more freely out of the well.
What is horizontal hydraulic fracturing?
Horizontal hydrofracking is a means of tapping shale deposits containing natural gas that were previously inaccessible by conventional drilling. Vertical hydrofracking is used to extend the life of an existing well once its productivity starts to run out, sort of a last resort. Horizontal fracking differs in that it uses a mixture of 596 chemicals, many of them proprietary, and millions of gallons of water per frack. This water then becomes contaminated and must be cleaned and disposed of.
What is the Halliburton Loophole?
In 2005, the Bush/ Cheney Energy Bill exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act. It exempts companies from disclosing the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing. Essentially, the provision took the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) off the job. It is now commonly referred to as the Halliburton Loophole.
What is the Safe Drinking Water Act?
In 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) was passed by Congress to ensure clean drinking water free from both natural and man-made contaminates.
What is the FRAC Act?
The FRAC Act (Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness to Chemical Act) is a House bill intended to repeal the Halliburton Loophole and to require the natural gas industry to disclose the chemicals they use.
How deep do natural gas wells go?
The average well is up to 8,000 feet deep. The depth of drinking water aquifers is about 1,000 feet. The problems typically stem from poor cement well casings that leak natural gas as well as fracking fluid into water wells.
How much water is used during the fracking process?
Generally 1-8 million gallons of water may be used to frack a well. A well may be fracked up to 18 times.
What fluids are used in the fracking process?
For each frack, 80-300 tons of chemicals may be used. Presently, the natural gas industry does not have to disclose the chemicals used, but scientists have identified volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.
In what form does the natural gas come out of the well?
The gas comes up wet in produced water and has to be separated from the wastewater on the surface. Only 30-50% of the water is typically recovered from a well. This wastewater can be highly toxic.
What is done with the wastewater?
Evaporators evaporate off VOCs and condensate tanks steam off VOCs, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The wastewater is then trucked to water treatment facilities.
What is a well’s potential to cause air pollution?
As the VOCs are evaporated and come into contact with diesel exhaust from trucks and generators at the well site, ground level ozone is produced. Ozone plumes can travel up to 250 miles.
The Democratic Committee staff analyzed the data provided by the companies about their practices, finding that:
The 14 leading oil and gas service companies used more than 780 million gallons of hydraulic fracturing products, not including water added at the well site. Overall, the companies used more than 2,500 hydraulic fracturing products containing 750 different chemicals and other components.
The components used in the hydraulic fracturing products ranged from generally harmless and common substances, such as salt and citric acid, to extremely toxic substances, such as benzene and lead. Some companies even used instant coffee and walnut hulls in their fracturing fluids.
Between 2005 and 2009, the oil and gas service companies used hydraulic fracturing products containing 29 chemicals that are known or possible human carcinogens, regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) for their risks to human health, or listed as hazardous air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
The BTEX compounds – benzene, toluene, xylene, and ethylbenzene – are SDWA contaminants and hazardous air pollutants. Benzene also is a known human carcinogen. The hydraulic fracturing companies injected 11.4 million gallons of products containing at least one BTEX chemical over the five-year period.
Methanol, which was used in 342 hydraulic fracturing products, was the most widely used chemical between 2005 and 2009. The substance is a hazardous air pollutant and is on the candidate list for potential regulation under SDWA. Isopropyl alcohol, 2-butoxyethanol, and ethylene glycol were the other most widely used chemicals.
Many of the hydraulic fracturing fluids contain chemical components that are listed as “proprietary” or “trade secret.” The companies used 94 million gallons of 279 products that contained at least one chemical or component that the manufacturers deemed proprietary or a trade secret. In many instances, the oil and gas service companies were unable to identify these “proprietary” chemicals, suggesting that the companies are injecting fluids containing chemicals that they themselves cannot identify.
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Weird and Frightening Effects of Fracking You May Not Know About
What happens if you’re a land owner who lives on a profitable mineral site, but doesn’t want corporations fracking on your land? Well, apparently, they will maneuver a way to frack your land anyway.
In a new report published last week, Reuters explored oil and gas companies’ nationwide land grab. The report focused on Chesapeake Energy Corporation, which has become the leader in petitioning state agencies when land owners refuse to sign over their land to fracking or oil drilling companies. In Texas, since 2005, Chesapeake had made 1,628 requests to drill on land that owners refuse to lease— nearly twice as many sought by its rival Exxon Mobil — and the state has only rejected five of them.
Chesapeake has made land-leasing one of its top priorities, controlling 15 million acres and spending more than $31 billion to acquire drilling rights. Playing the land grab game allows corporations to attain prospective drilling locations while locking out competition. With such a profitable opportunity, Chesapeake is making sure it’s getting its way by any means necessary. One employee was even caught saying on tape: “If properties don’t want to sign, if we have 90 percent secured of the well that we need, we have the power to put these people in the lease without their permission. …We can do whatever we want.”
When it comes to profit, property rights just don’t seem to matter. And a mix of money in politics, as well as a desire for profit, has weakened regulation.
“I don’t think the state should be able to take a landowner’s rights to generate a profit for a private company,” said David Conrad, an Ohio resident who opposes fracking, but will soon have a Chesapeake well under his home.
However, as Reuters reported:
In its petition, Chesapeake told regulators its proposed drilling unit could produce 4.5 million barrels of oil and 3.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas — if the plots of the 49 land owners who didn’t lease their property to Chesapeake were included.
If not, Chesapeake said, the unit would be 75 percent less productive and would miss out on an additional $71 million in revenue, according to its application. That math carried the day.
Waste-Filled Wine
If you don’t hate fracking already, what if you learned that it can affect wine? Furious? Me too.
Vineyard owners in California are growing increasingly wary of fracking as gas companies begin preliminary operations. Venoco has started exploring Monterey Shale for both oil and gas drilling. Last year, the company filed an application for drilling permits in Monterey County, according to Simon Salinas, a member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, and it already holds hundreds of thousands of acres in the formation, has drilled more than 20 wells and has invested $100 million in oil exploration.
With vineyards and farmlands covering 200,000 acres of Monterey that help make up an $8 billion agricultural business, Salinas told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “Anything that can taint our water and food supply could be devastating to our economy.”
Paula Getzelman, a grape-grower in Monterey, said, “If you don’t have a good water supply, your land is worthless.”
Besides fears of contaminated water, Salinas also mentioned that when residents realize the fracking process uses millions of gallons of water that they need for their crops, they will be quite upset.
But even if these threats don’t come to fruition, residents are still concerned that fracking will have a negative effect on their marketability. After all, with cities like Napa and Sonoma not too far away, who’s going to want Monterey’s fracking wine?
Across the country, in Brooklyn, NY, a winery with similar fears about fracking in the Marcellus shale, recently hosted an anti-fracking benefit.
The potential for fracking affects Brooklyn Winery, as we source grapes for our wine from a number of vineyards in New York state and many of our wine bar’s seasonal menu items include ingredients grown on upstate farms.
Dairy Cows At Risk
Got milk? Maybe not for long. According to research from Penn State University, fracking has been found to reduce dairy production.
The university researchers set out to uncover how fracking in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region is affecting dairy farming, the state’s top agricultural sector. The researchers examined dairy cow numbers, milk production and fracking activity among various counties in Pennsylvania between 2007 and 2010. They found that counties with 150 or more Marcellus Shale wells saw a 19 percent decrease in dairy cows, while counties with no wells saw only a 1.2 percent decrease. In a similar fashion, milk production in these counties with 150 or more wells declined by an average of 18.5 percent, while counties with no wells had about a 1 percent decline.
This research seems to challenge the popular narrative that farmers use the money they receive from fracking companies through leasing their land to improve their farms. The researchers note that additional research is needed to figure out the exact cause of the decrease of dairy production. One researcher wondered whether farmers were taking the money they received from their leases and going into a new occupation, or if they are being forced out of farming due to fracking’s environmental effects or a decrease in their farm’s marketability.
Contaminated Food, Stillborn Calves and Poisoned Animals
Imagine fracking fluid seeping out of your next burger — not appetizing? It may be a reality as more and more livestock are raised near fracking sites. Hundreds of animals have already been affected after coming into contact with fracking fluid. Last year, 28 beef cattle in Pennsylvania were exposed to the fluid. Only three of the 11 calves these cattle gave birth to survived. In Louisiana a few years ago, 16 cows dropped dead after drinking fracking fluid.
As New York Governor Cuomo soon decides whether or not to frack in the state’s economically struggling areas, Rita Yelda of Food & Water Watch recently wrote a commentary urging him to consider fracking’s detrimental effects on food.
She wrote:
New York is a national leader in a variety of agricultural products, and about 25 percent of the state’s land area is used for food production. This space may end up being shared with thousands of air polluting drill rigs, and could also be affected by soil contamination from leaks, flares, explosions, fires and experimental waste disposal methods.
According to Energy Tomorrow, a site sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, of the 2,000+ wells drilled since 2008, there has been $2.8 million in direct economic benefits spending on wages, payments on capital, and taxes; $1.2 million in indirect (business-to-business) benefits; and $1.5 million in induced (business-to-consumer and consumer-to-business) benefits—per well! The regional economic impact in 2010 alone was $11.2 billion. And two million dollars was paid—per well—in federal, state, and local taxes.
With the current rhetoric around the economy, job creation, and the need to build national and state revenue, these numbers are difficult to ignore as well as what this money has brought to Pennsylvania and New York during, and since, the 2007 recession.
However, after a company asked for drilling rights to his land, Josh Fox began to research the mining process, a project that eventually developed into his controversial documentary Gasland. In one dramatic sequence in the film, drinking water from a kitchen faucet burst into flames due to its high methane content. Several residents testified that natural gas mining practices caused their subsequent health problems, as methane and a mixture of 596 chemicals used in the drilling process contaminated well water supplies. In doing so, the contamination also destroyed the homeowners’ property and resale values, rendering these residents no recourse to sell and move elsewhere.
Lower 48 States Shale Plays. Plays refers to geologic areas targeted by drilling companies. Image from here.
Now the true costs of withdrawing a quarter million gallons of water per day are estimated at around $17,700 in Maryland for a tiny patch of land. Factor in the supposed gains from leasing their land and then deduct the livestock lost. Plus the medical bills incurred later on in life for long term illnesses, lost wages, devastation of crops and / or livestock and what do these land owners get? The privilege to have these oil companies loot and pillage their land, livelihood, water and lives for gas. With , of course the knowledge and assistance of the government. All over the Nation. That isn;t even including the oils companies penchant for lying , misleading and cutting corners to increase profit at the expense of water , land , animal and human safety. Getting the picture yet ?
Spilled crude oil is seen in a drainage ditch near evacuated homes in Mayflower, Arkansas, on Sunday, March 31. An Exxon Mobil pipeline carrying Canadian crude oil ruptured on March 29 causing the evacuation of about two dozen homes. Mayflower residents have filed a class-action lawsuit against the company. / http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/08/us/arkansas-oil-spill/index.html?sr=sharebar_twitter
Thank You Exxon: Mayflower, Arkansas’ New Oil Lake
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Exxon Mobil Corp. was found liable Tuesday in a long-running lawsuit over groundwater contamination caused by the gasoline additive MTBE, and the jury ordered the oil giant to pay $236 million to New Hampshire to clean it up.
The jurors reached their verdicts in less than 90 minutes, after sitting through nearly three months of testimony. Lawyers on both sides were stunned by the speed with which they reached the verdict on liability and even more stunned when the jurors took barely 20 minutes more to fill out the damages verdict.
Juror Dawn Booker of Pembroke told The Associated Press that all 12 felt ‘‘very, very confident about our decision.’’
Attorney General Michael Delaney said he anticipates an appeal and doesn’t expect to see the money ‘‘anytime soon.’’ He said the case and the verdict are historic.
The verdict is more than twice the $105 million jurors awarded the New York City Water District in 2009 in its case against Exxon Mobil over MTBE contamination. That case is on appeal.
Jessica Grant, the state’s lead lawyer, said it was the largest verdict ever in an MTBE case, though a financial analyst noted that the award represents about two days’ worth of profit for the company.
Jurors found that Exxon Mobil was negligent in adding MTBE to its gasoline and that it was a defective product. They also found Exxon Mobil liable for failing to warn distributors and consumers about its contaminating characteristics.
The jury determined that the hazards of using MTBE gasoline were not obvious to state officials, who opted into the reformulated gasoline program in 1991 to help reduce smog in the state’s four southernmost counties.
Jurors also rejected Exxon Mobil’s defense that more than 300 junkyard and gas station owners not named in the lawsuit were responsible for much of the contamination. They also absolved the state of responsibility for the contamination.
‘‘Exxon will probably make close to a $40 billion profit this year, Gheit said. ‘‘That’s (the award) two days’ work.’’
He said it’s no surprise that Exxon Mobil would take the 10-year-old lawsuit to trial, saying the company ‘‘will make you sweat for every dollar you think you’re going to get.’’ Company leaders view it as a matter of principle, he said.
New Hampshire filed its product liability lawsuit a decade ago against 26 oil companies and distributers, claiming that MTBE — methyl tertiary butyl ether — is a defective product because of its propensity to travel farther and faster and contaminate larger quantities of water than gasoline without additives. The state is seeking more than $700 million to test and monitor 250,000 private wells and clean up an estimated 5,600 contaminated sites, and so far has collected more than $120 million in settlement money.
Lawyers for Exxon Mobil, the only defendant that has not settled with the state, argue that MTBE did exactly what it was supposed to do — replace lead in gasoline and cut smog in compliance with the 1990 Clean Air Act. They opened their case by attempting to cast doubt on state witnesses who claimed to be surprised by memos Mickelson wrote describing environmental concerns about MTBE. Former Department of Environmental Services Commissioner Robert Varney testified earlier that he was shocked Exxon Mobil did not share Mickelson’s findings with the state, but Mickelson said the information was widely available at the time.
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Bloomberg News
MTBE Still a Water Risk, Witness Says at ExxonMobil Trial
By Don Jeffrey and Sarah Earle on January 16, 2013
Fogg testified the additive can zigzag through fractured bedrock in unpredictable patterns and remain in groundwater longer than other compounds. Fogg said the additive poses unique risks to drinking water when leaked from underground storage tanks, based on its chemical properties and the state’s geology.
“The contaminant will tend to move along fractures that are open and connected,” he told jurors. “Those fractures can be quite complex.”
Creates Hazard
As a result, MTBE creates a hazard that is difficult to detect and equally difficult to clean up, Fogg said, showing jurors slides that demonstrated the way MTBE can bleed into water supplies. The state sought to counter claims by the oil companies that MTBE has largely disappeared from the water supply, as well as claims that the additive is safer than some of the chemicals it displaces when mixed with gasoline.
Chemicals such as benzene “don’t move very fast or very far, Fogg said. ‘‘They tend to stabilize because of biodegradation.’’
The state claimed in opening arguments that the oil companies knew that if they added MTBE to gasoline it would increase the risk and costs associated with contamination.
‘‘Exxon decided to disregard the recommendation of its own employees and put MTBE in gasoline,’’ Jessica Grant, a lawyer for the state, told jurors Jan. 14. ‘‘In 1984, Exxon anticipated that if it added MTBE to its gasoline, the number of contamination incidents would triple. These incidents would take longer to clean up and cost five times as much.’’
Dugan says Exxon Mobil delayed using MTBE as a gasoline additive to study its health and environmental impacts. He said some company executives criticized his study committee for taking so long and reducing Exxon Mobil’s competitive edge in the marketplace.
Dugan said the study committee in June 1985 recommended using MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, saying the environmental risks were manageable. He testified that the committee’s final report included concerns raised by former Exxon Mobil engineer Barbara Mickelson, including that MTBE would move farther and faster if leaked into water supplies and be more costly and difficult to remediate.
“We wanted management to be fully aware of all the concerns raised,” Dugan said.
Dugan said they rejected using methanol as being too hazardous, with as little as a teaspoonful capable of causing blindness. Ethanol was ruled out, he said, because it could cause vapor lock in car engines and some auto manufacturers were warning consumers that they would not honor warranties if the car owner used gasoline with ethanol.
The state claims MTBE is a defective product and that Exxon Mobil failed to warn state officials about potential adverse effects.
Over the state’s objections, Dugan testified Tuesday that Mickelson shared her concerns with EPA officials.
Attorney Jessica Grant, representing the state, told Superior Court Judge Peter Fauver that Exxon Mobil’s lawyers “are trying to mislead this jury into thinking they were candid with the EPA when they weren’t.” Fauver allowed defense attorney David Lender to ask whether Mickelson shared her findings with the EPA but would not permit Dugan to elaborate.
Caution was required as flood waters rise possibly endangering the 20 year old pipeline. Exxon claims to have taken this into consideration decided after consideration of t heir safety record that the pipeline would again be opened in spite of concerns to its continued integrity as flood waters rise in the Yellowstone River in Montana . Speculation is that the rupture in the pipeline was indeed caused by debris damage below the water line. One stops to wonder how these safety decisions were determined and by whom. As it is obvious Exxon’s safety record is less than satisfactory, in light of only a few of the oil leaks and spills in which it has been directly involved over the last decade or so.
The Ixtoc I exploratory well blew out in June, 1979, in the Bay of Campeche, Mexico. The well spilled an estimated 140 million gallons of oil, the second-largest spill in history.NOAA
More people + more industry = more oil floating on water At any rate, more oil will be moving across the ocean in the future, as a rising standard of living and growing population feed an overwhelming thirst for fossil fuels.
To Charter, these factors are central to the oil-spill equation. “We have been ignoring for quite a few decades the fact that oil consumption, which we take for granted in industrial societies, has an environmental cost that is paid by living resources. Things die in nature so we can get this oil. … Somewhere, some part of the environment is being poisoned for every gallon of gasoline that arrives in a filling station.”
And it’s not just tankers that spill oil, Charter adds. The largest peacetime oil spill in history, the Ixtoc I well, spewed 140 million gallons in the Gulf of Campeche, in the southern Gulf of Mexico.
That was a shallow well. As offshore drills work in the Arctic ice, and in deeper water in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, “You can create accidents you can’t fix,” says Charter.
1997
As of 1997, Fucus had not yet fully recovered in the upper intertidal zone on shores oriented towards direct sunlight, but in many locations, recovery of intertidal communities had been substantial. In other habitat types, such as estuaries and cobble beaches, many species did not show signs of recovery when they were last surveyed in 1991. Studies on the effects of clean-up activities on oiled and washed beaches showed some invertebrates, like molluscs and annelid worms were still much less abundant than on comparable unoiled beaches through 1997. It is undetermined how much recovery has occurred in these locations since 1997, because further work has not been conducted.
Lingering oil is still present in some intertidal areas within the spill zone. Recent studies indicate that at beaches with pockets of buried lingering oil, high amphipod mortality is associated with elevated hydrocarbon concentrations. Moreover, the recovery objective states that the intertidal zone must provide uncontaminated food to top predators, including human subsistence users. As recently as 2009, some bird species which rely exclusively on the intertidal zone (harlequin ducks) were still being exposed to hydrocarbons. Although the route of oil exposure has not been established, it is possible they are consuming contaminated prey during feeding. In addition, the slow recovery of some soft-sediment intertidal invertebrates, the presence of lingering, bio-available oil, the continuing oil exposure of obligate intertidal foragers that are known to eat bivalves, and the lack of recent data characterizing the intertidal community indicate that this resource has not fully recovered from the effects of the oil spill.
Taking into account what we know today and all we have seen is it a wonder that people are up in arms and extremely concerned with the prospect of the XL Pipeline. These companies have displayed nothing but contempt for the environment and the welfare of the people affected by their spills.
The Mayflower, Arkansas, spill is nothing compared to the Gulf disaster, of course. Fourteen ducks, two turtles and one muskrat were oiled as a result of the Friday spill, according to ExxonMobil. Two ducks died. About two-dozen homes were evacuated. The full toll of the Gulf Coast Oil Disaster (the news media started calling it that because “spill” wasn’t big enough to be accurate) is still being tabulated, but the numbers are of another magnitude: 210 million gallons of oil, as well as 464 oiled sea turtles and 8,567 affected birds, many of them dead, according to an April 2012 report compiled by two federal agencies and five states.
Both incidents, however, are pieces in a bigger puzzle.
They highlight, once again, that America is addicted to fossil fuels and needs to invest more seriously and urgently in alternatives like wind, solar and nuclear.
These events never seem to really stick in our collective memory.
But they should
If they did, they would inform our decision-making.
The way things work now, oil spills are seen by some politicians as expected — as externalities of our condition, like lung cancer to a smoker.
U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, an Arkansas Republican, reportedly told a local radio station on Wednesday that we have oil pipeline accidents “just like we have car accidents” and that he supports further development of the system that caused the spill in his state.
How silly, right?
Rivers of oil in Arkansas town
Imagine this much oil in your driveway
We shouldn’t expect oil spills to be part of modern reality.
There are much better ways forward.
Environmental groups are right to use the Arkansas spill as a cautionary tale — as one of many reasons that the Obama administration should reject a proposed pipeline, called the Keystone XL, which would carry this risky type of crude from Canada to the Gulf Coast of the United States for processing.
The groups contend this thicker “oil sands” material is more corrosive to pipelines and therefore more dangerous to transport across the United States.
The National Resource Defense Council, in a recent blog post, says oil sands crude also is transported at higher temperatures, putting additional stress on pipelines; and it’s thicker and harder to clean up than conventional crude.
….
It is truly sad that the collective memory for disasters that destroy live s and eco system is barely a tear at most two. Politicians have an even shorter memory span as they will turn around and justify the risks of a mess such as this by comparing it to an auto accident. Since when does an auto accident take decades to clean up . Since when does an auto accident devastate entire eco systems. Families , yes , individual lives yes. However , it is disingenuous at best and a downright lie to claim that transporting this filthy tar sand can be compared to something as common place as driving a car.
For all their big talk about pollution and climate change, I am hard pressed to believe that any of the rhetoric being spewed has much of anything to do with pollution or the impact o the planet. Rather it has more to do with the ability to impose more taxes, provide more special interest opportunities to lobbyists of the Energy Companies and of course fill their own money hungry never ending need for more. More power, more money , more clout , more connections to make that money once time is up on the Hill.
What is it about Americans today ?
Why are we asleep at the helm?
Why do we care so little until it affects us in our own back yard?
Do we not understand that the idea of “Drill baby , drill” has consequences?
What is it about weaning ourselves off of fossil fuel that escapes us ?
Exactly what is it going to take to make us wake the hell up and understand that we are poisoning our world, our children and ourselves!!
I understand why it is in the best interest of the politicians to look the other way. They have lost of money to make if they help these criminals get away with their plans.
But what’s in it for you ?
What do you get out of looking the other way?
How much money do you stand t make?
But more importantly …..if you do nothing and continue towing the line and following the lead of the enablers. What do you stand t o lose? One wonders how many have reflected on that thought , honestly and thoroughly.
The most frustrating aspect of all of t his is that you are assisting the enablers by unlocking the doors to your homes so t hat they can lead the thieves in to steal from you .
Does that make any kind of sense to any of you who have taken the we need oil at all costs approach?
Are you starting to get just how you and yours will be paying for this oil addiction we suffer from?
Aside fro those who actually stand to make money off of the oil sales what do you get from it ?
Convenience?
Not having to deal with new technology or having to pay for it ?
I have no idea what is going through those heads. I cannot even fathom the rationalization that might be taking place. But in case you missed it let me break it down for you ……
The Oil companies could care less about you , your children , your land or your water. All they care about is the loads of money they stand to make by selling you the oil they polluted you land and water and poisoned your children to obtain
The politicians claim they care but in actuality the only thing they care about is keeping their benefactors in the oil companies happy so they can continue making all that money and ensuring their future posts in the oil companies when they retire from public service. All thanks to t heir having helped poison your land your water and your children.
And please spare me the speech about the politicians being on the take personal speculation on my part. Because the only thing i need do is remind you that it was Bush/Cheney who gave Halliburton and every other oil company on the face of this earth the green light to be able to peddle their poisons with impunity. Just like it was Obama who gave Big Pharma the green light to peddle their poisons with impunity.
When a company that holds their money more dear than their responsibility to the communities where they function and thereby the people who live in those communities. One cannot with a clear conscience believe nor expect that said company will do the right thing. They can be and will be expected to do what is best for their bottom line , but not much else. Truly the way I see it this country is headed for a precipice that opens up over a dark and deep abyss and most f us will fall in never to be seen from or heard from again.
My question is will the rest of us allow ourselves to be sucked in after them?
Or are we going to stand up for what is right , what is just and fight back?
To Add insult to injury we have this little jewel……
Crews work to clean up from an oil pipeline spill in a Mayflower, Ark., neighborhood Wednesday, April 3, 2013. An ExxonMobil pipeline ruptured last week and spewed thousands of barrels of crude oil. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)
The ExxonMobil Corp. has been honored with a “Green Cross of Safety” medal, bestowed as the oil giant was cleaning up thousands of barrels of heavy Canadian oil spilled by a pipeline rupture onto the streets and backyards of a small town in Arkansas.
ExxonMobil was hit with a $5 million lawsuit Monday by residents of Mayflower, Ark., who said in their filing: “This Arkansas class action lawsuit involves the worst crude oil and tar sands spill in Arkansas history.” The suit estimates that up to 20,000 barrels spilled: ExxonMobil has estimated the spill at 3,500 to 5,000 barrels.
Rex Tillerson, Chairman/CEO of ExxonMobil, accepts “Green Cross of Safety” medal while crews from the oil company clean up a pipeline spill in Arkansas.
The mess in Arkansas didn’t stop ExxonMobil Chairman/CEO Rex W. Tillertson from accepting accolades from the National Safety Council. “It is an honor to receive this medal on behalf of the men and women of ExxonMobil,” said a proud Tillertson. “We hold this award in high esteem because it recognizes the deep commitment of our company and our people to a culture of safety.”
ExxonMobil is a sensitive oil giant. It waged a 15-year battle against a $5 billion punitive damages award from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, eventually reducing the award to $500 million. Lawyers from the Los Angeles firm of O’Melveny & Myers argued at a federal appellate court hearing in Seattle that Exxon had suffered enough and paid out enough already.
The National Safety Council, on whose board sits an ExxonMobil vice president, commended the oil giant for its “leadership and comprehensive commitment to safety excellence. In bestowing the Green Cross of Safety, it said:
“ExxonMobil distinguished itself over a period of years for outstanding achievements in workplace safety, community service, environmental stewardship and responsible citizenship.”
The recent Arkansas rupture, a 2-3″ gash in the 65-year-old Pegasus Pipeline, hit a town of 2,200 about 20 miles north of Little Rock. It forced evacuation of homes. ExxonMobil put a lid — literally — on news coverage. A no-fly zone was established over the spill. Journalists were barred from the school where ExxonMobil and state officials were meeting with local residents.
Exxon Mobil is sure doing its best to prevent journalists from covering the recent oil spill from its Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower, Ark. Some reporters say the oil giant has even threatened to have them arrested for merely entering the spill site.
Unfortunately for journalists, a pliant county sheriff’s office has shown it’s all too willing to help Exxon out.
One would have to ask oneself when these Oil Companies became police officers and since when do they police themselves. It seems to me that doing so would be allowing the fox to guard the hen-house.
So then how exactly is this serving the public good?
Where exactly is the government in all this?
Will this be another Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill Exxon will do what it please when it pleases and the people suffering will just have to shut up and take it ?
What in the Hell is going on here ?
How much worse will this get with the proposed pipeline?
If this continues we might as well put up a warning sign for all who enter..........
~Desert Rose~
This is my eighth year as a full time Internet activist. The longer I’m fighting this “War on Evil”, the more I’m concerned with the effectiveness of resistance. No matter what our cause, liberty, false-flag terrorism, free Palestine, debt-free currency, New World Order, Illuminati, chemtrails, vaccination, cancer cures, drug prohibition, or historic revisionism, we must first and foremost make a conscience decision about what’s more important to us, being right or resisting effectively.
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View full sizeA wheat field in Moro, Ore.
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A duck from Mayflower is washed at The HAWK Center, a wildlife rehabilitation center. / 
