Home/Articles in: Pollution
Articles in: Pollution
Climate & Change, Politics, Pollution, Jul 23rd, 2010,
Europe’s loss-making hard coal mines will be forced to close due to a new tightening of regulations regarding government subsidies. Coal mines deemed uncompetitive will have their subsides diverted from production costs to social and environmental aid for their respective areas. This has been the trend for hard coal mines during the last decade, when overall aid fell by more than 50%. From an article in the Financial Times: New European Union rules that come into force from January will only allow government operating aid to be provided to hard coal mines if closure plans are in place. Those plans…
Tags: aid, coal, EU, Europe, Germany, government, loss-making, mines, Ruhr, subsidies
Climate & Change, Pollution, Sustainable living, Jul 22nd, 2010,
A new study from the UK’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) reports that the state of British seas has improved since the last report in 2005. Coastal waters are getting cleaner, fish stocks are improving and species diversity in estuaries is increasing, according to the most authoritative examination ever carried out of UK seas. –Guardian Yet despite these improvements, climate change is raising sea levels, temperatures and ocean acidity; and British coasts are trashier than ever – and they’re talking about litter, not the tackiness levels of seaside ‘resorts’ like Blackpool. The changing climate, along with European…
Tags: acidity, British, climate, Defra, environment, fish, improving, marine, seas, UK
Pollution, Jul 21st, 2010,
Friday’s oil pipeline explosion in the northern Chinese port of Dalian has resulted in a large oil slick in the Yellow Sea. The oil leaking from the two exploded pipelines has been stopped, but not before oil washed up on the coastline, soiling surrounding beaches and negatively impacting local wildlife and economic activity. Thousands of firefighters, engineers and even a flotilla of 800 fishing boats are involved in cleanup operations which have already reduced the oil slick by a third from its peak of 50 sq km, according to a report in the Guardian. The leak is likely to add…
Tags: China, cleanup, Dalian, firefighter, fishing, Greenpeace, oil, pipeline, slick, spill, Yellow Sea
Pollution, Science & Technology, Jul 19th, 2010,
Though the cap on the damaged oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is reportedly holding, hydrocarbon leakage has been detected on the seabed. The hope has been that the cap – successfully placed over the wellhead last week – would stop the flow of oil into the Gulf until permanent relief wells are in place. US Admiral Thad Allen has written to BP chief of operations Bob Dudley demanding answers. He is quoted in a report in the Guardian: I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging…
Tags: Admiral, Allen, BP, cap, detected, government, Gulf, hydrocarbons, leak, oil, plan, seepage, US, well
Politics, Pollution, Jul 18th, 2010,
As the world’s attention is still focused on the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster the EU’s energy commissioner, Gunther Oettinger, is calling for a moratorium on deep water oil drilling in Europe. The energy commissioner met with oil industry representatives on Wednesday and clearly stated that he is in favor of banning deep sea oil drilling and instituting a freeze on issuing new drilling permits. This would mostly affect drilling in around the UK. From a BBC News report: Mr Oettinger wants the Union’s member states to call a halt to drilling around Europe, including the Mediterranean and Black Sea,…
Tags: ban, BP, commissioner, deep, drilling, energy, EU, Europe, Gulf, Oettinger, oil, sea, water
Pollution, Jul 17th, 2010,
A 15-hour fire raged from Friday night into Saturday after an oil pipeline explosion at a busy port in Dalian, China. It is not known what caused the pipeline – owned by the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. – to explode at the port, but the fire started after a large oil tanker unloaded its cargo. Though the fire has been put out, Chinese environmental protection officials warned that the area is still unsafe due to airborne chemicals. From an Associated Press report: State-run media said the pipeline blew up Friday evening and more than 2,000 firefighters worked overnight to…
Tags: China, Corp., Dalian, explode, explosion, fire, national, oil, petroleum, pipeline, port
Pollution, Videos & Documentaries, Jul 16th, 2010,
Check out this clip from last night’s Rachel Maddow show on the situation in the Gulf of Mexico in light of BP’s successful capping of the oil well leak. Rachel is joined by NBC’s chief environmental affairs correspondent Anne Thompson to discuss possible scenarios such as hurricanes and contingency plans as well as the eventual relief well, which should offer a permanent solution to the leak in the Gulf. What next for the Gulf? Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Keep up to date on the situation in the Gulf via this Associated Press…
Tags: BP, Gulf, leak, Maddow, oil, Rachel, well
Pollution, ,
You thought it might never happen, but yesterday evening BP successfully stopped the flow of oil from the broken well in the Gulf of Mexico. The cap is a temporary fix – with the lasting solution being the drilling of a relief well scheduled to take place in a few weeks time. Both US President Barack Obama and BP’s chief expressed cautious optimism at the news that the oil leak in the Gulf was under control for the first time in 87 days. From a report in the Guardian: Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said engineers would be checking…
Tags: BP, cap, Gulf, leak, Mexico, oil, spill, well
Nature, Pollution, Wildlife & Flora, Jul 14th, 2010,
BP’s crucial test of the new well cap over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been postponed yesterday. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and his team of advisers, who raised concerns that the operation could put damaging pressure on the busted well and make the leak worse, requested the postponement. By closing the source of the spill the pressure increase could cause the oil to start leaking in other places. The drilling of relief wells still remains the only proven way to stop the spill permanently, by intercepting the ruptured one. By the end of this month the…
Tags: BP, BP postponed new cap testing, British Petroleum, disaster, Gulf of Mexico, new cap testing, oil spill
Climate & Change, Pollution, Jul 13th, 2010,
Iraq’s Mesopotamian marshes, drained under the regime of Saddam Hussein during the early 1990s to punish a local uprising, are recovering nicely due to the efforts of Iraqi conservationists and local inhabitants. This former Garden of Eden is believed by some scholars to be the actual Garden of Eden mentioned in the Bible. You know, where Adam and Eve frolicked and had that nasty run-in with the snake. What was nothing but a wasteland nearly a mere 20 years ago is now once again a thriving ecosystem: The story of this once almost impossible restoration is told in an exhibition…
Tags: carbon, Garden of Eden, Gulf War, Iraq, marshes, Mesopotamian, Middle East, Strategic Foresight Group, war
Climate & Change, Pollution, Recycling, ,
Eco-warrior and youngest air to a banking fortune, David de Rothschild set out in April on a well-publicized trip from California to Australia aboard a vessel constructed from recycled plastic bottles. The raft, christened the Plastiki, is set to arrive in Sydney in about two weeks time. The purpose of Rothschild’s journey: To draw attention to marine pollution – particularly from plastics – and the overfishing of the world’s oceans. Oceanographers estimate that there may be as much as 100 million tons of plastic suspended in the waters of the eastern garbage patch, a soup of plastic and other trash…
Tags: australia, climate change, David, fish, marine, ocean, plastic, Plastiki, Pollution, Rothschild, Sydney
Pollution, Videos & Documentaries, Jul 12th, 2010,
In 2000 a massive oil leak from an underwater Petrobras pipeline spilled into Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is considered one of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters ever and was given an estimated recovery time of 10 years. What Al Jazeera English reporter Gabriel Elizondo discovered on a recent trip to Guanabara Bay is that it has anything but recovered during the past 10 years: The mud is thick, black and lifeless. And it stinks. Dead stumps – what used to be thick green mangrove swamps – protrude out from the mud as far as your eyes see….
Tags: 10 years, Al Jazeera, bay, Brazil, ecosystem, Guanabara, Gulf, oil, Pollution, Rio de Janeiro, spill
Pollution, ,
Does deep sea oil drilling amongst Greenland’s icebergs sound a bit dicey to you? Probably any deep sea drilling does these days, what with the ongoing and unprecedented disaster in the Gulf of Mexico still dominating much of the news. So it’s no wonder that Greenpeace and the WWF are concerned about recent developments in the Arctic Ocean, where British oil exploration and extraction firm Cairn Energy has recently begun drilling in waters up to 500 meters deep. From an article in the Guardian: We think it is completely irresponsible for Cairn to proceed with these operations when the US,…
Tags: alley, arctic, British, Cairn, deep, drilling, greenland, Greenpeace, Gulf, iceberg, Mexico, oil, sea
Politics, Pollution, Science & Technology, Jul 10th, 2010,
Just soon as the US sent a hot Russian spy back home, an offer to help stop the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico emerged from the former ‘Evil Empire’. Russian submarine captain Yevgenii Chernyaev has told the BBC that two unique submersibles from Russia, which are capable of diving 6,000 meters deep, would be able to cap the leak. The subs are currently exploring for gas hydrates in Lake Baikal – the deepest lake in the world – in eastern Siberia. Anatoly Sagalevich of Russia’s Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, which owns the vessels, said that he had an…
Tags: Baikal, BP, cap, Gulf, lake, leak, moratorium, oil, Russia, Russian, Siberia, stop, sub, subs
Climate & Change, Health, Pollution, Science & Technology, Jul 9th, 2010,
I’ve assumed that transport via boat, whether shipping goods or people, is less polluting and has a lower carbon footprint than flying or road freight, for example. Not so, according to both scientific research and inside information from the maritime shipping industry. While diesel cars – once known as smelly, noisy polluters – have relatively cleaned up their act to the level of standard petrol or gasoline-fuelled cars, the heavy-duty diesel and low-grade fuel oil engines that power ships are a scourge on the environment and human health. From an article in the Economist: Research by James Corbett of the…
Tags: cargo, cars, Danish, deaths, denmark, diesel, emissions, environment, freight, H2O, Health, industry, nitrogen, ocean, oxide, Pollution, research, ship, shipping, ships, US
Politics, Pollution, Videos & Documentaries, ,
Due in part to the popularity of the environmental documentary film Gasland, the practice of natural gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing, alternately known as ‘fracking’ or ‘fracing’, has been the subject of much debate. The process of hydraulic fracturing involves drilling into shale reservoirs and creating fractures by pumping in water. The principle environmental concerns regarding fracking are the contamination of wells and aquifers with chemicals used in the drilling process, air quality issues and the mismanagement of solid waste. The spread of fracking for shale gas in the United States has already partially revolutionized the natural gas industry there…
Tags: environmental, Europe, European, frack, fracking, fracturing, gas, hydraulic, natural, oil, Poland, shale, United States
Pollution, Videos & Documentaries, Jul 8th, 2010,
An Associated Press investigation has uncovered the shocking fact that over 27,000 abandoned oil wells lie insufficiently guarded or unmonitored in the Gulf of Mexico. 600 of them are BP wells. The oldest of these oil wells was abandoned in the late 1940s and 3,500 of the wells are officially categorized as ‘temporarily abandoned’, raising questions about whether they are properly sealed. From an AP report: Regulations for temporarily abandoned wells require oil companies to present plans to reuse or permanently plug such wells within a year, but the AP found that the rule is routinely circumvented, and that more…
Tags: 27000, abandoned, AP, BP, Gulf, Mexico, oil, temporary, wells
Climate & Change, Pollution, Jul 7th, 2010,
When I was a little kid in the 1970s, my brother had a poster on his wall depicting an artist’s renderings of three possible future environments with the headline, ‘Which future would you choose?’ One showed a future in which man had chosen to live in harmony with nature and developed eco-friendly technology. A thriving green landscape dotted with white globes and pods while happy future-people tended vegetable gardens in the fresh air and had scintillating conversations about what great choices their predecessors had made. Ahhh… The second was a highly urbanized future featuring a glowing red sunset that backlit…
Tags: China, ecocide, future, humanity, industrial, industry, Linfen, primitive, wasteland
Climate & Change, Politics, Pollution, Jul 6th, 2010,
The Nigerian government and Italian oil giant Agip – makers of Hello Kitty motor oil – are reaping huge profits from the Nigeria’s oil reserves while local communities remain in abject poverty. One pesky byproduct of oil extraction is natural gas which, given the facilities, can also be a source of energy and profit. Yet in the Niger Delta there is no requirement for facilities so Agip disposes of the gas by burning it in large gas flares, releasing large amounts of CO2 and resulting in hazardous health conditions for locals. The World Bank estimates that about $30bn worth of…
Tags: Agip, Al Jazeera, delta, flares, gas, Italian, Niger, Nigeria, oil
Conservation, Nature, Politics, Pollution, Wildlife & Flora, Jul 5th, 2010,
I have heard and seen some pretty crazy environmental news lately, but I think this piece is absolutely ridiculous beyond belief. What am I talking about? A Tibetan environmentalist was sentenced to a 5 year jail term because he organized villagers to pick up litter and plant trees. …Yes, you read that correctly. The Chinese court sent an environmentalist to jail for getting people to help the environment in a positive way. Does that make any sense to you? It certainly doesn’t to me. According to the lawyer, the sentencing has more to do with “inciting to split the nation”…
Tags: 5 year jail sentence, Chinese court, cleaning up litter, Conservation, crazy, Dalai Lama, NGO, organizing villagers, positive environmental help, reforestation, ridiculous, Tibet, Tibetan environmentalist
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