Still Not Gone, Still NOT Clean

Posted: January 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, Gulf Oil Spill, New Orleans, toxic waste | Tags: , , , , | 25 Comments

THEN.

Well, it’s time for my bimonthly rant about the total lack of concern by any one above the I-10 on the fact we’re still swimming in oil down here.  The Cost Guard is still doing the Dosey-Do.  Obama doesn’t swim here so he doesn’t care.  There was some MSM press coverage.

Hello?  Is any body there?


Here’s the latest via MSNBC:

PORT SULPHUR, Louisiana — Federal and Louisiana officials got into a heated argument Friday over the cleanup of oiled marshes during a tour of an area that remains fouled 8½ months after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

State and Plaquemines Parish officials took reporters on a boat tour of Barataria Bay, pointing out an area where oil continues to eat away at marshes and protective boom is either absent or has been gobbled up by the oil. The heavily saturated area that reporters saw was 30 feet to 100 feet wide in sections. No cleanup workers were there when reporters toured the area.

The marshes are critical to the Louisiana coast because they protect the shore from hurricanes and serve as a nursery for Gulf sea life.

“This is the biggest cover-up in the history of America,” Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told reporters, gesturing with his gloved right hand, which was covered in oil.

Nungesser was accompanied by Robert Barham, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

As the two were answering questions from reporters, representatives from the U.S. Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration interrupted to point out that a plan is being developed to clean up the marshes. They also insisted that the government has not abandoned the Gulf, nor has it lost sight of the fact that BP is a responsible party.

“Clearly there is oil here in the marsh but we are working as a team to find a best way to clean it up,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer. “It’s a high priority.”

RIGHT NOW.

You could tell it’s a high priority.

There were no clean up crews.

There was oil everywhere.

People down here are getting pretty tired of the excuses.

We’ve heard enough of them since Katrina and Rita.

Read the rest of this entry »

Didn’t we just do this?

Posted: January 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Environment, Farming, Food, toxic waste | Tags: , , , , , | 36 Comments

(In which Sima works herself up into a frothing rant.)

Commodity futures prices, wheat, rice and corn, are rising again after a brief fall. In fact, they are supposed to top the records set in 2007/08 during the global food bubble.
Supposedly, Corn Rationing Needs to Begin:

“The corn market has one job and one job only—to go high enough to make people stop using the product,” says Ryan Turner, risk management consultant for FCStone, Kansas City. “We are past the point of encouraging more supply.” Turner predicts 2011 corn futures prices will exceed 2008 highs. “I don’t know if it will happen in January or June, but it will happen,” he says.

Soaring corn prices will slice into demand, with corn exports expected to fall first followed by feed usage. Analysts anticipate the cattle industry to begin rationing earlier than other livestock sectors due to poor margins, but rationing in poultry, hog, and dairy will be close behind. “It will be very painful,” Turner adds.

Those greedy so-and-sos! Imagine, eating corn and corn products? Making corn into feed to raise farm animals and then slaughtering those animals to feed humans. And furthermore, they feed the corn to dairy cows and produce milk and cheese and butter! Will the horror never end!

Obviously, everyone needs to suffer (UN: World Food Prices Hit a Record High in December). Especially the world’s poor. And those who produce the meat we Americans so love to eat are not to be excluded from the necessary pain. And those who produce the dairy we love to drink and nosh on with our imported European crackers. And those who make corn into tortillas, and those who make corn into corn syrup and those who make corn into ethanol… oh wait. Not those. In fact, those last ones may be part of what is driving the rise in corn prices. Nearly 1/3 of the 2010 US corn production was diverted to ethanol, after all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dying birds and fish: Are we living in an M. Night Shyamalan movie?

Posted: January 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Environment, The Media SUCKS | Tags: , , , , , | 62 Comments

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening

Just saw this headline from Raw Story… “Mass bird and fish deaths becoming worldwide phenomenon.”

From the link…

Birds:

The mysterious deaths of thousands of birds and fish is no longer confined to the US.

About 50 to 100 dead birds were discovered on a highway in central Sweden Tuesday. Scientists don’t know what killed the jackdaws but one veterinarian suspects they may have been frightened by fireworks and then run over by a car.

Fish:

The Brazillian site Paraná-Online noted that 100 tons of fish have turned up dead off the coast of Paraná since last Thursday.

“We will wait to see what happened, but speculations suggest that fish may have died due to an environmental imbalance, dropping a fishing boat or leakage of chemicals,” Captain Edson Oliveira Avila, regional coordinator of Civil Defense in the Paraná region, told Paraná-Online.

Then I saw this in the comments at the Raw Story link — from the Baltimore Sun — “Frigid water blamed for 2 million dead fish in Chesapeake Bay“:

An estimated 2 million fish have been reported dead from the Bay Bridge south to Tangier Sound, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment, which investigates fish kills. The dead fish are primarily adult spot, with some juvenile croakers.

One of the blackbirds that fell out of the sky on New Year's Eve lies on the ground in Beebe, AR. (Arkansas Game and Fish Commission/Handout/Reuters)

This of course is all on the heels of the mass bird deaths in AR and LA, as the Christian Science Monitor sums up:

Thousands of red-winged blackbirds, cowbirds, starlings, and grackles dead in Arkansas. Five hundred more in Louisiana. Fifty jackdaws fall on a street in Stockholm. And around the world, millions of fish floating belly-up.

The CS Monitor article goes on to say:

It’s the stuff of apocalyptic novels. Scientists have not yet ruled out pollution or chemical toxins as the cause of nearly a dozen mass animal die-offs, from Arkansas to Brazil, in the last week. But as officials investigate, both the mundane and the intriguing are emerging as potential causes.

Because birds are considered indicator species that reflect the health of the surrounding environment, the spate of mass deaths has unsettled many Americans.

Over in Sweden, via thelocal.se — “Swedish birds ‘scared to death’: veterinarian“:

Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, residents found 50 to 100 jackdaws on a street in Falköping southeast of Skövde. The incident echoed a number of unexplained incidents earlier this week across the southern US.

County veterinarian Robert ter Horst believes that the birds may have been literally scared to death by fireworks set off on Tuesday night.

“We have received information from local residents last night. Our main theory is that the birds were scared away because of the fireworks and landed on the road, but couldn’t fly away from the stress and were hit by a car,” he explained to The Local on Wednesday.

I skimmed through Huffpo’s reporting on the bird and fish deaths real quick and looks like New Zealand is joining the unfortunate club.

From the NZ Herald — “Hundreds of snapper dead on beaches“:

Fisheries officials are investigating the death of hundreds of snapper washed up on Coromandel Peninsula beaches.

Beachgoers at Little Bay and Waikawau Bay found the fish – many with their eyes missing – dead on the sand yesterday.

A Department of Conservation official told Mr Hughes fish in the Coromandel area were starving because of weather conditions.

I don’t want to jump to any rash conclusions or bypass the work of experts to tease out what’s really going on here using the scientific method, but I have to say that thus far all these “official” attempts to explain what happened are sounding even hokier than the apocalyptic and government conspiracy scenarios.

I glanced over at the Scientific American to see if by chance there was anything there yet that could shed some light on what in the world is happening. I didn’t find anything on the current spate of deaths, but I found this entry on SciAm’s Extinction Countdown blog, from a week ago:

Frigid waters off the coast of Florida have killed a record number of endangered manatees this year, according to state wildlife officials. The manatee—full name, the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus)—has been protected by the Endangered Species Act since 1974.

Read the rest of this entry »

Newer Entries →