Friday, 10 Dec 2004

Downright Unalaskan

Shipwreck oil spill in Alaskan waters threatens wildlife refuge

A cargo ship that ran aground Wednesday on the shore of Unalaska Island, 800 miles southwest of Anchorage, has begun to leak fuel into sensitive wildlife habitat. After an unsuccessful search for lost crew members, officials have begun to survey the damage from the wreck; the freighter, which was loaded with soybeans and headed from Seattle to China, is now neatly split in two halves and creating a major oil spill that may take months to clean up. The slick measures 2.5 miles in diameter and is expanding farther into waters managed by the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, home to endangered marine mammals and threatened seabirds as well as healthy populations of salmon, halibut, and crab. Officials from Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation say the extreme weather conditions in the area and the dense, viscous nature of the vessel's fuel will prove to be a challenge for those involved in the cleanup effort. Said DEC spokesperson Lynda Giguere, "It's not good stuff."

What in the Sam Hill?

Bush nominates little-known official to be energy secretary

President Bush surprised D.C. insiders today by nominating a virtually unknown Treasury Department official, Sam Bodman, to serve as secretary of energy. "Sam who? I've never heard of this guy," said one energy-industry lobbyist, echoing what most everyone else inside the Beltway seemed to be thinking. A former chemical-engineering professor at MIT, head of an investment firm, chair of a chemical company, and Commerce Department official who oversaw the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Bodman has little experience in the field of energy. If approved by the Senate to replace outgoing secretary Spencer Abraham (and no one thinks he won't be), Bodman would be expected to advocate for the GOP-backed energy bill, help win approval for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, pave the way for building the first new nuclear reactor in the U.S. since 1973, and press ahead with a plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Hamburger Patty

Chitchat about food safety

Readers are understandably anxious about the healthfulness and security of the food they eat, and many wrote to Public Citizen's Patricia Lovera lamenting the dearth of reliable information available on the matter. They will be gratified with her responses, which shed light on the dangers of irradiation, issues of food security (turns out a possible terror attack may be the least of our problems), benefits of local produce, and more. She also includes many links to other sources of information, so education can continue apace -- in InterActivist, today on the Grist Magazine website.

Royally Screwed

Oil production takes heavy toll on Nigerian villagers

In the oil-rich Niger Delta, an area that produces nearly all of Nigeria's 2.5 million barrels of oil a day, environmental degradation and political and class conflict are the prices of development. While a booming oil business has generated billions of dollars each year for the Nigerian government and oil companies like Royal Dutch/Shell, little of the revenue has filtered down to the impoverished residents of the delta, though they are the ones most affected by the 221 oil spills reported by Shell last year -- a small fraction of the some 4,000 spills in the delta over the last 47 years. Poverty and growing income disparities are the cause of violent conflict leading to over 1,000 deaths a year, according to a report prepared by consultants for Shell. The report concludes what many in the delta -- most recently hundreds of protestors who occupied an oil rig in the area demanding talks on jobs and development -- have been charging for years: "It is clear that [Shell] is part of Niger Delta conflict dynamics and that its social license to operate is fast eroding."

Putting the "Pact" in "No Impact"

Tony Blair trying to entice U.S. into "Kyoto-lite" climate treaty

With much of the industrialized world heaping scorn on the U.S. for spurning the recently ratified Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration may soon get a chance to regain a smidgeon of international cred on the climate-change issue. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in an effort to bolster his tarnished green image, is secretly developing plans for a new international climate treaty -- dubbed "Kyoto-lite" by one insider -- that he hopes President Bush can be convinced to embrace. Blair met with U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) last week to discuss ways to broker such an agreement. Of course, because the fledgling treaty is meant to be palatable to Bush, it won't actually call for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Rather, it'll focus on developing new, clean technologies, as well as acknowledging scientific agreement on the nature and scale of the climate-change threat, something the Bush administration has resisted. But hey, admitting you have a problem is the first step, right?