Oil wars

 

Demonstrators from the 2010 G8 Summit

Ellen Cantarow

 

If you live on the Gulf Coast, welcome to the real world of oil — and just know that you’re not alone.  In the Niger Delta and the Ecuadorian Amazon, among other places, your emerging hell has been the living hell of local populations for decades.

Even as I was visiting those distant and exotic spill locales via book, article, and YouTube, you were going through your very public nightmare.  Three federal appeals court judges with financial and other ties to big oil were rejecting the Obama administration’s proposed drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico.  Pollution from the BP spill there was seeping into Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans. Clean-up crews were discovering that a once-over of beaches isn’t nearly enough: somehow, the oil just keeps reappearing. Endangered sea turtles and other creatures were being burnt alive in swaths of ocean (“burn fields”) ignited by BP to “contain” its catastrophe.  The lives and livelihoods of fishermen and oyster-shuckers were being destroyed.  Disease warnings were being issued to Gulf residents and alarming toxin levels were beginning to be found in clean-up workers.

None of this would surprise inhabitants of either the Niger Delta or the Amazon rain forest.  Despite the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 and the Exxon Valdez in 1989, Americans are only now starting to wake up to the fate that, for half a century, has befallen the Delta and the Amazon, both ecosystems at least as rich and varied as the Gulf of Mexico.

The Niger Delta region, which faces the Atlantic in southern Nigeria, is the world’s third largest wetland.  As with shrimp and oysters in the Gulf, so its mangrove forests, described as “rain forests by the sea,” shelter all sorts of crustaceans.  The Amazon rain forest, the Earth’s greatest nurturer of biodiversity, covers more than two billion square miles and provides this planet with about 20% of its oxygen.  We are, in other words, talking about the despolation-by-oil not of bleak backlands, but of some of this planet’s greatest natural treasures. Read more

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UPDATE FROM THE GULF

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BP Fall Fashion

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Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Green For All

As Senators enter the final rounds of negotiations on the climate and energy bill,
big utility companies are apparently making unconscionable demands that threaten the
health and safety of all Americans.

From trading carbon limits for relaxing smog, mercury and acid rain pollutants to
bargaining away Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to protect America from
dirty air and water, *these demands are unacceptable*.

Please take action now:

And, if the bill limits the ability of the EPA to enforce greenhouse gas regulation,
or worse limits its ability to enforce regulation of mercury and ozone, the American
people will suffer immediate and long-term health consequences, from asthma to early
death.

The American people deserve a climate and energy bill that not only improves air
quality, but also creates jobs that will help pull the economy out of recession.
This bill is in danger of doing neither.

Please take action and tell your Senators not to shortchange the American people:

If the Senate can get this right, this historic climate and energy bill will
maintain our clean air protections, while opening the door to a new era: one in
which our nation is no longer addicted to dirty, dangerous fuels; no longer
dependent on overseas supplies of oil; and finally able to put millions to work in
clean, new industries.

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