Wednesday, 10 Jul 2002

Yuck.

The U.S. Senate voted yesterday to approve storage of nuclear waste from around the nation at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, ending, for the moment, one of the most contentious environmental battles of recent decades. The 60-to-39 vote was a blow for environmentalists and Nevadans, who dubbed the plan the "Screw Nevada Bill" when it was preliminarily approved by Congress 15 years ago. The Energy Department must now seek permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build facilities to store as much as 70,000 metric tons of highly radioactive waste in desert tunnels 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, a process that could take up to five years. Work on Yucca Mountain is expected to be further delayed by challenges in the courts, the last refuge of opponents to the plan. One of the most outspoken foes, Nevada Sen. John Ensign (R), who met individually with the great majority of his party's 49 senators to try to win them over to his side, said of the vote, "It feels like somebody has punched me about 100 times in the gut."

A Thousand Acres ... Well, Make That 4.7

Global standards of living will plummet by mid-century unless human beings drastically decrease their use of natural resources, according to a report issued yesterday by the World Wildlife Fund. The main culprits in the overuse of resources are the world's richest countries: the U.S., Canada, Japan, and most of Western Europe, according to "Living Planet Report 2002." The report found that more than 20 percent more natural resources are used every year than can be regenerated, meaning that by 2050, a second Earth would be necessary to meet human demand. To mitigate the problem, the report suggested using technology to cut down on waste, gradually abandoning reliance on fossil fuels, and promoting health care and education to control population growth. Implicitly, it also suggested living more like people in Africa, where each household consumes on average natural resources from 3.4 acres -- compared to the Western European average of 12.5 acres. There are about 28.5 billion productive acres of land and sea on Earth, or about 4.7 acres for each of the planet's 6 billion people.

Slippery Slope

Cleaning up the mess left by the oil industry on Alaska's North Slope could cost anywhere from $2.7 billion to $6 billion, but oil companies have so far set aside just a fraction of that money and are not under any legal obligation to meet specific cleanup standards, the General Accounting Office announced yesterday. The report, which was requested by congressional Democrats opposed to additional oil drilling in the Arctic region, found that oil companies operating on federal land need only be bonded for about $500,000 each, and that cleanup standards imposed by the state of Alaska are "generally insufficient to ensure that any federal lands disturbed by oil industry activities will be restored." State officials criticized the report as a partisan ploy and defended their regulations, saying the vagueness was deliberate and would allow specific standards to be established when the oil fields actually close, some 30 to 50 years in the future. There are more than 3,000 active wells in the North Slope, connected by a massive network of roads, drilling pads, production facilities, and pipelines, all of which will have to be removed when the industry leaves the area.

We Do More Spinning Before 9 a.m. Than Most People Do All Day

It seems the General Accounting Office has been busy of late; in a report completed in May that surfaced yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the congressional auditors found little evidence to support the Bush administration's claims that environmental regulations are interfering with military training. The administration has asked Congress to exempt the military from some major environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but the GAO rejected the assertion that environmental "encroachment" on military bases had hampered training efforts. In response to the report, Gen. John Keane, Army second-in-command, said, "It is true we have not documented any environmental degradation [of the military's ability to train], but we all know it's true."

Lima Beaned

Roughly 1,000 Peruvian peasants arrived in their nation's capital this week to demand that the government take action against contamination or seizure of land by mining companies. Peru is the world's fifth-largest producer of copper and eighth-largest producer of gold, and the mining industry is responsible for half of the nation's annual export income. But big mining companies, often foreign-owned or backed by foreign investments, frequently clash with local farmers, who say their livelihood is imperiled by uncontrolled exploitation of the land. And the government hasn't helped, instead upholding a "law of mining servitude" whereby mining companies negotiate a price for agriculture lands and the state relocates the inhabitants. "The government is not interested in solving our problems caused by mining companies that contaminate land, rivers, and undermine our health," said Miguel Palacin, head of an organization representing 1,135 communities affected by mining.