Environment
Monday, May 7, 2012
Greenpeace releases photos of BP oil spill damage
Posted by Will Coviello on Mon, May 7, 2012 at 1:57 PM
Greenpeace filed many Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for information, including photos, related to the 2010 BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Today, it published photos related to an endangered species of turtle. It also published government aerial shots of oil in the Gulf and marshes.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Report: Louisiana dolphins "severely ill"
Posted by Alex Woodward on Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:20 PM
- NOAA
- Dolphins jump over strands of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in July 2010.
In Barataria Bay, scientists and researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association have been studying bottlenose dolphins in the wake of the BP oil disaster.
The NOAA performed physicals on 32 dolphins in 2011, and today, the early results are dramatic: many are "underweight, anemic, have low blood sugar and/or some symptoms of liver and lung disease," and "nearly half also have abnormally low levels of the hormones that help with stress response, metabolism and immune function." One of those dolphins died in early 2012.
An "Unusual Mortality Event" was declared by NOAA following a spike in dolphins entering (and dying in) the northern Gulf of Mexico — since February 2010, NOAA said, more than 675 dolphins have been stranded there (atypical of an average 74 per year). Most have died, but 33 were stranded alive, and seven were put into rehabilitation, according to NOAA.
NOAA told Baton Rouge's Advocate that though a link can't be made between the 2010 oil disaster and the plunge in dolphin health, it's been seen before.
The study was performed under the Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a requirement under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
"Jungleland": This Sunday's New York Times Magazine cover story
Posted by Kevin Allman on Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:36 AM
Part of the story is about all the new fauna living in the abandoned houses and overgrown lots in the Ninth Ward (a topic we covered last year in our own cover story), part of it is about the Sisyphean task of keeping the neighborhoods clean and the growth cut back ("In the Lower Ninth, a property remains cleared for only three to six months. A Chinese tallow tree, for instance, will grow from seed to two-foot-high sapling in a summer and six feet within a year.") ... and part of it focuses on the ongoing "Katrina tours" of the Ninth Ward, which remain a sore subject with people who are just trying to live their lives.
A moment from one of those tours is under the cut ...
The Washington Post: "As climate changes, Louisiana seeks to lift a highway"
Posted by Kevin Allman on Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:09 AM
The Washington Post has a report on the dilemma facing the state and the feds regarding the elevation of Highway 1, which connects Port Fourchon with a country that hasn't lost its appetite for oil and gas:
Ten miles of the highway is now standing 22 feet above sea level on cement piles. But another seven miles is not, and if less than half a mile of this highway succumbs to the 14-foot storm surges expected in the future, the highway will need to be shut down, cutting off the port.Local residents and business leaders are demanding that the federal government help pay to rebuild and elevate the remaining section of Highway 1, adding two miles to span the levees. Federal officials have provided scientific and technical expertise but will not contribute funding unless the state pledges to complete the road.
Louisiana says it doesn’t have the money.
Which leads Rolling Stone's Jared Bernstein to this not-inaccurate summation of Louisiana's position:
Officials in a state with an aggressive tax-cutting governor — Bobby Jindal can boast of having pushed through the largest tax cuts in the state’s history — one who consistently inveighs against government spending, are "demanding" the Feds send money.
The Post comments on the story come in three flavors: 1) Climate change is real! 2) No, it's not! 3) Louisiana sucks; let 'em drown. And yet it's more discussion than I've heard on the subject of Highway 1's inundation than I remember hearing from either Washington D.C. or the presidential political trail this year.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Marsh fire: one down, two to go
Posted by Alex Woodward on Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:15 PM
The New Orleans Fire Department announced this afternoon it extinguished a chunk of the marsh fire that has smoldered in eastern New Orleans since last August. The now-extinguished 4.27 square mile plot leaves two other still-smoldering hotspots of undetermined sizes that the NOFD will continue to battle, and they're not likely to go anywhere any time soon. NOFD is "reluctant to set a timetable for extinguishment."
The fire has proved difficult to control, as it's not a "fire" fire but a smoky, below-surface burning amid a 2,000 acre plot that's plaguing the East and neighbors. Joseph Matthews, NOFD's Deputy Superintendent of Special Operations, said the NOFD performed visual inspections and temperature readings on a hotspot near Highway 90 and Michoud Boulevard, and he's "99.5 percent sure" that spot is kaput. The other hotspots are north of I-10 and will be accessed via a bridge, installed with the help of the property's owner. NOFD will perform another flyover within the next couple of weeks — NOFD Superintendent Charles Parent said in a statement that “the NOFD will continue to explore every traditional and innovative firefighting technique possible in mitigating this incident”.
Until then, let us once again contemplate the fire's theme song. The Neville Brothers' "Fiyo on the Bayou" is an obvious choice, but I'll submit this jingle — replacing "cross" with "marsh."
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Buddy Roemer to appear on Real Time With Bill Maher
Posted by Kevin Allman on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 2:07 PM
For someone who can't get in any of the GOP debates (though there's certainly room on the stage these days), Buddy Roemer sure knows how to get TV time. He's appeared on The Colbert Report several times with Stephen Colbert and once on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Now he's completing a comedy-pundit trifecta with a scheduled appearance on Friday's Real Time With Bill Maher. From HBO:
Real Time with Bill Maher continues its tenth season Friday, January 20th (10:00-11:00 p.m. live ET/tape-delayed PT), exclusively on HBO, with an instant replay at 11:00 p.m. following the live presentation. Allowing Maher to offer his unique perspective on contemporary issues, the show includes an opening monologue, roundtable discussions with panelists, and interviews with in-studio and satellite guests.The roundtable guests this week are former Mich. Gov. Jennifer Granholm, reporter Matt Lewis and former La. Gov. Buddy Roemer; commentator Bill Moyers and Vt. Sen. Bernie Sanders are interview guests.
Hey, Buddy, while you're there: Why don't you ask Bill about that "New Rules" segment he did about Gulf Coast residents in the wake of the BP oil disaster?
And finally, New Rule: Stop talking about jobs being lost in a murderous, hateful industry like it's a bad thing. Now, last week, I may have hurt a few feelings when my response to the complaint that jobs will be lost in the offshore drilling business was, "F**k your jobs!" But, I meant it. And it goes double for burning coal and chopping down redwoods. Sorry, roughnecks*, but eventually, you're going to have to find something else to do. Try building windmills. You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.You know, it's Washington gospel that jobs in the private sector are better than government jobs. You even hear Democrats saying it. But, oil jobs are private, and look at the toll this industry takes: cooking the planet, enslaving us to Saudi Arabia, killing animals. If the government hired away all the 58,000 oil workers who work now in the state of Louisiana and paid them their same salary to work repairing infrastructure and building solar panels, it would cost us $5.5 billion, which the Pentagon loses every day in the couch.
Wouldn't that be worth it? Is working on an oil rig really that great a job anyway? You spend weeks at a time on a floating well in the ocean. If you want to avoid your family that bad, take up golf. Yes, the oil industry creates jobs. So does the kiddie porn industry.
If Maher blamed Appalachian coal miners after mine collapses, I don't remember seeing it.
* I remember that word pretty clearly as 'rednecks,' not 'roughnecks,' but the HBO transcript has the latter.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Louisiana gets 16 young whooping cranes
Posted by Kandace Graves on Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 9:39 PM
- Photo courtesy LDWF
- Sixteen young whooping cranes are released in Louisiana.
Southwest Louisiana’s colony of endangered whooping cranes grew to 19 Tuesday, when wildlife officials released 16 young birds into the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area in Gueydan to join the three adult cranes placed there in March. The releases are part of a 15-year experimental program to establish a nonmigratory population of whooping cranes in Louisiana.
Similar programs to build whooping crane populations in the wild are under way in two other locations, and captive-breeding projects are being conducted at a dozen locations across the U.S. and Canada. The only self-sustaining natural wild population of whooping cranes nests in Canada, according to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) website. It also warns, “It is that all or most of the populations of these endangered birds could be wiped out from a single event such as a hurricane, disease outbreak, toxic spill, or prolonged drought. This makes the species vulnerable to extinction.”
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Sec. of Interior gives greenlight to Lafitte Corridor greenway
Posted by Alex Woodward on Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:25 PM
Ken Salazar, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, met with Friends of the Lafitte Corridor today on the banks of Bayou St. John, flanked by a post office and Parkway Bakery & Tavern. Salazar announced the Obama Administration's prioritized commitment to the to the Lafitte Corridor project via the Urban Waters Federal Partnership, led by the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and coordinated by the White House Domestic Policy Council. It also partners with local communities, specifically for outdoor and parks projects like the Lafitte Corridor. (To clarify a previous post: Salazar's mention of $7 million is from an already-in-place Community Development Block Grant from the Louisiana Recovery Association, allocated to the Lafitte Corridor.)
"This is part of the revitalization of New Orleans," Salazar told Gambit. The project will break ground in 2013.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
A Norwegian music video celebrating the joys of oil drilling
Posted by Kevin Allman on Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 3:10 PM
Workers from the Norwegian oil giant Statoil seem to have produced this paean to their chosen profession, a song titled "Black Gold Hunters." In it, a man wearing a petrochemically-inspired jacket performs a duet with what looks like Norway's answer to Rhonda Shear. Later in the video, the guys back at the office get their turn.
My Norwegian is faulty. I don't know what "Robbery!/Heavy metal Christmas tree" means, but I think we can all agree these people are, indeed, "the executive crew from Booty Town."
"Getting it UP! Drilling isn't BORING!"
* h/t Noladishu
Friday, October 14, 2011
First impressions: oil disaster doc The Big Fix
Posted by Alex Woodward on Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 11:22 AM
The Big Fix's cold open starts years before the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion on April 20, 2010. Archive footage illustrates how the company then-named British Petroleum, aided by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, wrangled control of Iran's government and retained rights to its plentiful oil fields. The Islamic revolution, in part a response to the Western seizure of Iran, ended BP's occupation — leaving the documentary to consider where else BP would need to go to support its oil habits: The Gulf of Mexico.
What follows is nothing new, synthesizing the last year of oil disaster coverage — from its victims living on the coast, impacts to their health and wellbeing, impacts to wildlife, bumbling media coverage, lack of media coverage, denied media access, seafood safety, the countdown "soap opera" drama, Tony Hayward and the inevitable transfer of power, the oil's return... a dizzying display of corporate defiance, government ineptitude and flat-out lies and deceptions, all stacked into a two-hour block for national and international viewers. It has the makings of a conspiracy thriller, but clearly this is for a disaster we know is real, ongoing, and has nothing working against it.
Louisiana native Josh Tickell and with his wife Rebecca direct the film, a sort of follow up to their 2008 doc Fuel, which had its New Orleans release in June 2010. Tickell takes the same celebrity players along for the ride to south Louisiana: Peter Fonda and Amy Smart visit shrimpers, residents, captains and beaches. Tickell narrates, but frequently the film gets personal — hidden cameras, sneaking onto beaches, and Rebecca experiencing symptoms doctor-diagnosed as chemical exposure following several boat trips in dispersant-sprayed waterways.
The film takes a step back and evaluates just how much influence oil and gas companies have on national politics. From post-Kingfish Louisiana to the "revolving door" policy (a la the John Breaux-Trent Lott lobby group) to campaign contributions — a network of clear-cut influence from Big Oil into Washington D.C. and elsewhere, while oil companies stomp out legislation for environmental and regulatory oversight, leaving companies like BP to get away with as much as possible with as little interference as possible. We know the consequences. The Gulf Waterkeeper Alliance just released its 2011 State of the Gulf report, counting millions of gallons of oil and gas discharged into Gulf waters from September 2010 to September 2011. BP plugged its leaking well in August 2010.
For all its messy imagery and oftentimes hamfisted civil rights rallying cries, The Big Fix is a massively important film, if only because, as American Zombie writes, it "may be the best opportunity we have to get the truth out about the reality of this oil spill." Rolling Stone contributor Jeff Goddell says we need so badly a wakeup call — and if this disaster isn't big enough, what the hell is?
The film screens tonight at 8:45 p.m. at the Prytania Theater, and again 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 19 at Chalmette Movies. Tickets are available online for the Wednesday screening.
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