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Posts: 15244
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:19 am
$1: The Seattle Times
Originally published Saturday, March 22, 2014 at 8:48 PM
Guest: Promises broken by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, 25 years later
As we mark the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska on March 24, recall the history of previous industry promises made and broken, writes guest columnist Richard Steiner
AS we mark the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska on March 24, recall the history of previous industry promises made and broken. That troubled past should help inform the future of energy policy for Arctic offshore drilling, tar-sands and oil-shale pipelines. The typical oil-spill message from industry and government is that the risk of a catastrophic spill is small, government oversight will be rigorous, any spill will be promptly cleaned up and environmental harm will be minimal and short-term. History tells a different story. Seeking approval to build the Trans Alaska Pipeline in the early 1970s, industry and government promised that oil would be shipped safely from Alaska, and not one drop would be spilled. The public and environment would be protected by double-hulled tankers, a fail-safe tanker-tracking system, state-of-the-art spill-response capability and the watchful eye of government. Soon after approval was granted, all these promises were abandoned. On March 24, 1989, the single-hulled tanker Exxon Valdez grounded in Prince William Sound, causing, at the time, the nation’s worst oil spill. Millions of gallons of oil spread across Alaska’s coastal ocean, contaminating 1,300 miles of shoreline, and killing millions of seabirds, marine mammals, fish and other organisms. An Alaska Native elder referred to the spill as “the day the water died.” So much for not one drop.
Twenty-five years later, the injured environment has still not fully recovered. In fact, only 13 of the 32 fish and wildlife populations, habitats and resources monitored by the government are listed today as “recovered” or “very likely recovered.” Some, such as herring, pigeon guillemots and the AT1 orca whale pod, are still listed as “not recovering.”
The AT1 orca pod declined after the spill from 22 to just 7 whales, and has yet to birth a new calf. The government concludes that, for this unique group of whales, “there appears to be no hope for recovery,” and the population “will likely become extinct.”
There are still thousands of gallons of Valdez oil in beach sediments, which the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council representing state and federal governments says is “nearly as toxic as it was the first few weeks after the spill,” and will take “decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely.”
Government litigation with Exxon, now Exxon Mobil, remains unresolved as the company refuses to pay the government’s final $92 million claim presented in 2006 for unanticipated ecological damage, making this now the longest-lasting environmental litigation in history. So much for short-term effects. Five months before the 2009 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, representatives of the oil industry and government regulators assured Congress that offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico was perfectly safe, and the existing regulatory regime was sufficient.
Based on such assurances, President Obama announced an expansion of offshore drilling, declaring that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.” Three weeks later, the Deepwater Horizon exploded, causing the largest accidental oil spill in history.
And now, with the rush to drill in the Arctic Ocean and to build new tar-sands and oil-shale pipelines and terminals, we hear the same old empty promises. Shell’s 2012 Arctic drilling fiasco, in which one drilling rig ran aground and both rigs were deemed unfit for service, shows the same pattern of betrayed promises. Clearly, hoping for the best and rolling the dice is no longer acceptable.
If we care about a coastal area, we should not expose it to the risk of oil development. Spills will occur, they can’t be cleaned up, they can cause long-term damage and restoration is impossible.
Where we do continue to produce and transport oil, it should be done with the highest possible safety standards, regardless of cost. We need to use oil much more efficiently and stop wasting it. Above all, we urgently need to kick our hydrocarbon habit and transition to a sustainable society.
Richard Steiner was a marine professor with the University of Alaska from 1980 to 2010, stationed in the Arctic and Prince William Sound. He advises on oil and environment through Oasis Earth. http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2023193362_richardsteineropedexxonvaldez24xml.html
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Posts: 13404
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:21 am
Above all, we urgently need to kick our hydrocarbon habit and transition to a sustainable society.
Hey, nothing to it.
Step one (1) is to get rid of about 3 billion extra bodies that petroleum-based agriculture has allowed to survive above and beyond sustainable numbers.
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andyt
CKA Uber
Posts: 33492
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:24 am
Exactly. It's a nice dream, but we're not in a position to do so. Anyway 7 billion people are just not a sustainable society no matter what we do. Well, if we cut out hydrocarbons, it would kill many billions, so I guess then we might be sustainable.
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Posts: 15244
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:37 am
$1: about 3 billion extra bodies that petroleum-based agriculture has allowed to survive above and beyond sustainable numbers
^ suspicious claim. Especially when you consider that in North America, about 40% of food supply ends up in the trash and not eaten - a typcial family of 4 throws out about $2,000 worth of groceries per year. 
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andyt
CKA Uber
Posts: 33492
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:40 am
REally. YOu think without modern agricultural methods that are so heavily reliant on hydrocarbon use we could feed the world without it? And preserve and ship the food to where people need it?
Our whole economy is based on cheap oil. Take that away, and they would collapse. There's nothing on the horizon to replace oil except coal (worse). Maybe nuclear, but it has it's own problems. We've walked off the cliff like Wylie Cyote, and are just kept from falling by relatively cheap oil.
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Posts: 13404
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:47 am
North America is less than 5% of the population of this planet. It feels like we're the whole enchilada but in some ways, we are hardly significant, statistically. We produce an inordinately high percentage of the World's food supply but we do it by turning petroleum fertilizer, pesticides, machinery fuel, transportation fuel into an edible form ... usually a grain of some sort. If we stopped throwing out leftovers, there would not be enough left over to feel the billions but it is a nice thought, none the less.
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Posts: 15244
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:53 am
No. I just think that:
1) As a stand-alone statement, we over-produce food generally. We are the world's largest over-eaters, beset with skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, etc. and yet we still throw out 40% of our food.
2) We haven't ever shipped the food to "where people need it." In fact, with globalization, the people who need it (ie. 3rd world countries)ship it to us so that we can buy it at ever-cheaper prices, which encourages more waste.
The world's food problems are laregely a distribution problem, not a production problem. End the subsidies that encourage domestic farmers to produce above demand and curb the influx of cut-rate foreign produce, which simultaneously encourages people to buy more than they intend to eat and simultaneously causes domestic farmers trying to compete with 3rd world labour to demand the afore-mentioned subsidies.
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Posts: 13404
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 10:02 am
1) As a stand-alone statement, we over-produce food generally. We are the world's largest over-eaters, beset with skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, etc. and yet we still throw out 40% of our food.
If we all halved our caloric and protein intake, we could feed another 350,000,000. The difference between a sustainable population and one we have now that (literally) eats petroleum is ten times that. Billions will die when the petroleum runs out. At the rate that we are going, there will be ten billion humans in one more generation. More than half of them will have to die quickly if you try to feed everyone using organic techniques.
Last edited by Jabberwalker on Mon Mar 24, 2014 12:11 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Posts: 15244
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 10:22 am
$1: MYTH: With food-producing resources in so much of the world stretched to the limit, there’s simply not enough food to go around. Unfortunately, some people will just have to go hungry. We must put all our efforts into boosting agricultural production in order to minimize hunger.
OUR RESPONSE: The world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being on the planet with 3,500 calories a day.1 That’s enough to make most people fat! And this estimate does not even count many other commonly eaten foods—vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. In fact, if all foods are considered together, enough is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs.2 Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today. Increases in food production during the past 35 years have outstripped the world’s unprecedented population growth by about 16 percent.3 Indeed, mountains of unsold grain on world markets have pushed prices strongly downward over the past three and a half decades.4 Grain prices rose briefly during the early 1990s, as bad weather coincided with policies geared toward reducing overproduction, but still remained well below the highs observed in the early sixties and mid-seventies.5 All well and good for the global picture, you might be thinking, but doesn’t such a broad stroke tell us little? Aren’t most of the world’s hungry living in countries with food shortages— countries in Latin America, in Asia, and especially in Africa? Hunger in the face of ample food is all the more shocking in the Third World. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, gains in food production since 1950 have kept ahead of population growth in every region except Africa.6 The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) found in a 1997 study that 78% of all malnourished children under five in the developing world live in countries with food surpluses.7 Thus, even most "hungry countries" have enough food for all their people right now. This finding turns out to be true using official statistics even though experts warn us that newly modernizing societies invariably underestimate farm production—just as a century ago at least a third of the U.S. wheat crop went uncounted.8 Moreover, many nations can’t realize their full food production potential because of the gross inefficiencies caused by inequitable ownership of resources. Finally, many of the countries in which hunger is rampant export much more in agricultural goods than they import. Northern countries are the main food importers, their purchases representing 71.2 percent of the total value of food items imported in the world in 1992.9 Imports by the 30 lowest-income countries, on the other hand, accounted for only 5.2 percent of all international commerce in food and farm commodities.10 Looking more closely at some of the world’s hunger-ravaged countries and regions confirms that scarcity is clearly not the cause of hunger.
India India ranks near the top among Third World agricultural exporters. While at least 200 million Indians go hungry,11 in 1995 India exported $625 million worth of wheat and flour, and $1.3 billion worth of rice (5 million metric tons), the two staples of the Indian diet.12
Bangladesh Beginning with its famine of the early 1970s, Bangladesh came to symbolize the frightening consequences of people overrunning food resources. Yet Bangladesh’s official yearly rice output alone — which some experts say is seriously under-reported13— could provide each person with about a pound of grain per day, or 2,000 calories.14 Adding to that small amounts of vegetables, fruits, and legumes could prevent hunger for everyone. Yet the poorest third of the people in Bangladesh eat at most only 1,500 calories a day, dangerously below what is needed for a healthy life.15 With more than 120 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin, Bangladesh may be judged overcrowded by any number of standards, but its population density is not a viable excuse for its widespread hunger. Bangladesh is blessed with exceptional agricultural endowments, yet its 1995 rice yields fell significantly below the all-Asia average.16 The extraordinary potential of Bangladesh’s rich alluvial soils and plentiful water has hardly been unleashed. If the country’s irrigation potential were realized, experts predict its rice yields could double or even triple.17 Since the total calorie supply in Bangladesh falls only 6% short of needs,18 nutritional adequacy seems an achievable goal.
Brazil While Brazil exported more than $13 billion worth of food in 1994 (second among developing countries), 70 million Brazilians cannot afford enough to eat.19
Africa It comes as a surprise for many of us to learn that the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, home to some 213 million chronically malnourished people (about 25 percent of the total in developing countries),20 continue to export food. Throughout the 1980s exports from sub-Saharan Africa grew more rapidly than imports,21 and in 1994, 11 countries of the region remained net exporters of food.22 The Sahelian countries of West Africa, known for recurrent famines, have been net exporters of food even during the most severe droughts. During one of the worst droughts on record, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the value of the region’s agricultural exports—$1.25 billion—remained three times greater than the value of grain imported,23 and such figures did not even take into account significant unreported exports. Once again, during the 1982-85 drought food was exported from these countries.24 Nevertheless, by 1990, food production per person had apparently been declining for almost two decades,25 despite the productive capacity suggested by Africa’s agricultural exports, and in 1995 over one third of the continent’s grain consumption depended on imports.26 We use the word "apparently" because official statistics notoriously under-report, or ignore all together, food grown for home consumption, especially by poor women, as well as food informally exchanged within family and friendship networks, making a truly accurate assessment impossible.27 In fact the author of the AAAS report referred to earlier, argues that despite inaccurate statistics and misleading media imagery, hunger is actually less severe in Sub-Saharan Africa than in South Asia.28 Repeated reports about Africa’s failing agriculture and growing dependence on imports have led many to assume that too many people are vying for limited resources. Africa’s food crisis is real, as evidenced by moderately high rates of childhood malnutrition—but how accurate is this assumed cause of the crisis? Africa has enormous still unexploited potential to grow food, with theoretical grain yields 25 to 35% higher than maximum potential yields in Europe or North America.29 Beyond yield potential, ample arable land awaits future use. In Chad, for example, only 10% of the farm land rated as having no serious production constraints is actually farmed. In countries notorious for famines like Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and Mali, the area of unused good quality farm land is many times greater than the area actually farmed,30 casting doubt on the notion that there are simply too many people for scarce resources. Many long-time observers of Africa’s agricultural development tell us that the real reasons for Africa’s food problems are no mystery31. Africa’s food potential has been distorted and thwarted. The colonial land grab that continued into the modern era displaced peoples and the production of foodstuffs from good lands toward marginal ones, giving rise to a pattern where good land is mostly dedicated to the production of cash crops for export or is even unused by its owners.32 Furthermore, colonizers and, subsequently, national and international agencies, have discredited peasant producers’ often sophisticated knowledge of ecologically appropriate farming systems. Promoting "modern," often imported, and ecologically destructive technologies,33 they have cut Africa’s food producers out of economic decisions most affecting their very survival.
Public resources, including research and agricultural credit, have been channeled to export crops to the virtual exclusion of peasant-produced food crops such as millet, sorghum, and root crops. In the 1980s increased pressure to export to pay interest on foreign debt further reinforced this imbalance.34
Women are principal food producers in many parts of Africa, yet both colonial policy and, all too often, ill-conceived foreign aid and investment projects have placed decisions over land use and credit in the domain of men. In many cases that has meant preferential treatment for cash crops over food crops, skewing land use and investment patterns toward cash crops.35
Aid policies unaccountable to African peasant producers and pastoralists have generally bypassed their needs in favor of expensive, large-scale projects. Africa has historically received less aid for agriculture than any other continent, and only a fraction of it has reached rainfed agriculture, on which the bulk of grain production depends.36 Most of the aid has backed irrigated, export-oriented, elite-controlled production.
Because of external as well as domestic factors African governments have often maintained cheap food policies whereby peasants are paid so poorly for their crops that they have little incentive to produce, especially for official market channels.37 The factors responsible for these policies have included developed country dumping of food surpluses in African markets at artificially low prices, developed country interest in cheap wages to guarantee profitable export production, middle class African consumer demand for affordable meat and dairy products produced with cheap grain, and government concerns about urban political support and potential unrest.38 The net effect has been to both depress local food production and divert it toward informal, and therefore unrecorded, markets.
Until recently many African governments also overvalued their currencies, making imported food artificially cheap and undercutting local producers of millet, sorghum, and cassava. Although recent policy changes have devalued currencies, which might make locally produced food more attractive, accompanying free trade policies have brought increased imports of cheap food from developed countries, largely canceling any positive effect.39
Urban tastes have increasingly shifted to imported grain, particularly wheat, which few countries in Africa can grow economically. Thirty years ago, only a small minority of urban dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa ate wheat. Today bread is a staple for many urbanites, and bread and other wheat products account for about a third of all the region’s grain imports.40 U.S. food aid and advertising by multinational corporations ("He’ll be smart. He’ll go far. He’ll eat bread."41) have played their part in molding African tastes to what the developed countries have to sell.42
Thus beneath the "scarcity diagnosis" of Africa’s food situation lie many human-made (often Western influenced) and therefore reversible causes. Even Africa’s high birth rates are not independent variables, but are determined by social realities that shape people’s reproductive choices. A Future of Scarcity? A centuries-old debate has recently heated up: just how close are we to the earth’s limits? Major studies have arrived at widely varying conclusions as to the earth’s potential to support future populations. In a 1995 book Professor Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University surveyed estimates put forth over four centuries.43 Always a slippery concept,44 estimates of the Earth’s "carrying capacity," or the number of people who could be supported, have varied from a low of one billion in a 1970 study to a high of 1,022 billion put forth in 1967. Among studies published between 1990 and 1994 the range was from "much less than our current population of 5.5 billion" according to Paul Ehrlich and others, to a high of 44 billion estimated by a Dutch research team, with most estimates falling into the 10 to 14 billion range.45 By contrast the 1996 United Nations forecast, generally considered to be the best future population projection, predicts that the world population will peak at 9.36 billion in the year 2050, and stabilize thereafter46 (projections of the maximum future population have been coming down over the past few years). This is well within what most experts view as the capacity of the Earth. In view of today’s abundant food supplies as well as the potential suggested here and elaborated in World Hunger: Twelve Myths, we question the more pessimistic predictions of demographic catastrophe. Only 50 years ago, China pundits predicted that famine-ridden nation could never feed its population. Today more than twice as many people eat—and fairly adequately47—on only one-fourth the cropland per person used in the United States.48 Not that anyone should take the more pessimistic predictions lightly; they underscore the reality of the inevitably finite resource base entrusted to us. They should therefore reinforce our sense of urgency to address the root causes of resource misuse, resource degradation, and rapid population growth. Lessons from Home Finally, in probing the connection between hunger and scarcity we should never overlook the lessons here at home. In the 1990s over 30 million Americans can not afford a healthy diet, and 8.5% of U.S. children are hungry and 20.1% more are at risk of hunger.49 But who would argue that not enough food is produced? Surely not U.S. farmers; overproduction is their most persistent headache. Nor the U.S. government, which maintains huge storehouses of cheese, milk and butter. In 1995, U.S. aid shipments abroad of surplus food included more than 3 million metric tons of cereals and cereal products,50 about two thirds consisting of wheat and flour. That’s enough flour to bake about 600 loaves of bread per year for every hungry child in the U.S.51 Here at home, just as in the Third World, hunger is an outrage precisely because it is profoundly needless. Behind the headlines, the television images, and superficial clichés, we can learn to see that hunger is real; scarcity is not. Only when we free ourselves from the myth of scarcity can we begin to look for hunger’s real causes. That search is what World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Second Edition is about. Insitute for Food and Development Policy Backgrounder
Spring 1998, Vol. 5, No. 1 http://www.foodfirst.org/node/239
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Posts: 7835
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 11:03 am
...How does any of that discredit the sheer importance of petroleum based products in agriculture? Right now, with proper distribution, and more efficient practices, most of the world's hunger issues might be solved (not exactly an easy task). Areas like, say, Zimbabwe, could become breadbaskets once more if it wasn't for such corruption and mismanagement of their fertile land. All that is well and good, but the Green Revolution is what led to the massive food production we see today. "High yield" crop strains, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and advances in irrigation and machinery. Just as an example:  You can obviously see the massive increase in crop yields in developing countries between the start of the Green Revolution and today. There are serious concerns about the shrinking supply of oil and how that might impact food production. This is one of the major reasons why oil will be around for a long time to come, even if we remove the transportation and electrical generation aspect of hydrocarbon use.
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Posts: 14139
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 11:09 am
I've said it before and I'll say it again; Oil doesn't just help run the global economy, it IS the gloabal economy. From food to transport, from housing to every day consumer goods, it's all about oil.
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Posts: 13404
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 12:16 pm
Our entire civilization is predicated on cheap chemical energy. Unless another cheap energy source (petroleum-followed-coal-followed-wood) comes along, our civilization ends with our petroleum reserves. Perhaps, fusion power will be the magic fairy but it seems to be going just about nowhere, right now and it could be a dead end. Fission power? Uranium is quite rare, Thorium is more plentiful. How are we going to eat that stuff?
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Posts: 15244
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 2:06 pm
Yeah like but much like anything it becomes a crutch and the input becomes a substitute for good practise and actually leads to inefficiencies. For example, using fertilizer instead of traditional crop rotation to keep soil fertile. Another examplie is inustrial ag growing crops in massive mono-cultures (i.e. acres and acres consisting exclusively of the exact same plant)which are more prone to spreading disease so more pesticides are used. You may not know this but the banana in your lunchbox today is different from the banana that your parents took in their lunchbox, because that banana was wiped out in a massive species-specific banana blight that spread through plantations unchecked like fire without a firebreak due to this exact practise. Industry's solution: more pesticide instead of responsible crop planning.
I'm not saying that we can remove petroleum-based inputs from food production, I'm saying that we over use them and use them inefficiently. And that these advances in technology have allowed agriculture to be "de-skilled".
Or, as one author put it:
"[Industrial] farming is inefficient and does not represent the cutting edge of modern farming. In 1940, we produced 2.3 food calories for every 1 fossil fuel calorie used. By industrializing our food and farming systems, we now get 1 food calorie for every 10 fossil fuel calories used — a 23-fold reduction in efficiency. Following this path we have become dependent on cheap, abundant oil, and on quick chemical "fixes" for agro-ecosystem challenges that are complicated and require deep, local and hands-on knowledge. In relying on chemical inputs, we have un-learned how to farm."
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Posts: 13404
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 4:43 pm
...and we have increased our yields way beyond what is natural and sustainable. Our huge population increase in the 20th century to levels way beyond what is naturally sustainable is a direct result of our highly successful but unsustainable petroleum based agriculture.
We are about to do an "Easter Island" on a colossal scale.
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Posts: 13404
Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2014 4:52 pm
In 1940, we produced 2.3 food calories for every 1 fossil fuel calorie used.
We used one hell of a lot of manual labour instead and farm families had to be large. You used to have ten+ people working land that one person farms now ... with quintuple the output per acre.
I suppose that you can do the Pol Pot thing and force the decadent bourgeois back on to the land to do some honest labour ... or else.
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