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Cheaters

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013

When commercial fishers fish illegally they can seriously reduce the fishing success of adjacent coastal communities, creating greater poverty in the process. When illegal fishing occurs at the level of national fleets, both national economies and global fish stocks suffer. Yet it persists.

The impact can be immense. The famous attacks on tankers and other passing craft off the Somalia coast over the past decade was at least in part a response to foreign fleets fishing illegally in Somalia waters, taking all the fish, and forcing retaliation. Criminal piracy as a response to fishing piracy, also criminal.

The West African coast is very productive but difficult to monitor, and is easy prey to fishing pirates (wikimedia.org)

The West African coast is very productive but difficult to monitor, and is easy prey to fishing pirates (wikimedia.org)

Now the productive West Coast of Africa – the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem – is the target of most current pirate fishing: almost 40% of its fish are caught illegally. It is a vulnerable region – lots of fish, weak governance and fragile post-war economies, susceptible to corruption and plagued by inadequate regulations and insufficient monitoring. Like Somalia.

Cheating by the illegal ships, mostly trawlers, comes in many forms. International firms use single licenses to cover multiple vessels, employ small mesh nets, launder the fish, and bribe local enforcement officials. Vessels cover their names and markings. Corporations register ships to flags of convenience, eg Panama and Korea, who get paid and don’t care. The fish from West Africa often turn up in European markets, and though the EU now has a blacklist of companies and countries, it has been largely ineffective.

Coastal, community-based artisanal fisheries cannot compete with illegal fishing from pirate trawlers (nature.com)

Coastal, community-based artisanal fisheries cannot compete with illegal fishing from pirate trawlers (nature.com)

China is a major player fishing the West African Guinea Current, and no doubt doesn’t want to be accused of piracy. But China has now been charged with under-reporting its global catch by an order of magnitude: instead of an average of of 368,000 tons/yr from 2000-2011, analysts estimate the reality to be 4.6 million tons/yr. Most of that, 2.9 million tons/yr, is from West Africa. This is cheating on a massive, global scale.

China has an ocean going fleet of 900, the world’s largest, operating in the EEZs of 93 coastal nations. Currently 345 ships fish in West Africa, and of these 256 are bottom trawlers. Fairly secret contracts exist between Chinese companies and African nations, and Chinese vessels also sometimes operate under local flags. The coastal fishermen report that the Chines trawlers violate near-shore no-fishing zones, crippling artisanal fisheries. They accuse them of looting their fish and acting like bullies.

China is now one of the more aggressive fishing nations, with a large fleet searching the world's oceans, and under-reporting their catch (asiancorrespondent.com)

China is now one of the more aggressive fishing nations, with a large fleet searching the world’s oceans, and under-reporting their catch (asiancorrespondent.com)

But isn’t this the age of ever greater surveillance? Though most of us may hate it, it may still has its uses. Supported by London’s Environmental Justice Foundation, 23 communities on the coast of Sierra Leone have cooperated to report the pirate trawlers, recording their GPS coordinates, filming them, identifying them, and sending the information to EU and African ports.

The pirate trawlers have mostly left Sierra Leone, but where have they gone? Maybe just along the coast. The problem of cheating is unresolved, but surveillance by communities is at least a start.

Illegal trawler is tracked, identified and reported by surveillance crew on coast of Sierra Leone (guardian.co.uk)

Illegal trawler is tracked, identified and reported by surveillance crew on coast of Sierra Leone (guardian.co.uk)

More initiatives like that on the Sierra Leone coast are essential, and possible. Continued pressure on Panama and Korea to cease renting out their flags will eventually work. Every ship registered in the EU is now tracked by the VMS Satellite Monitoring System, providing an hourly report of of location and speed. Though this may keep those ships honest, vessels exporting fish to EU under other flags can avoid the monitoring.

This too can be fixed. Global ports can agree to do business only with monitored ships, and to blacklist pirate vessels. Monitoring every move of every vessel should not be any more difficult than monitoring the individual surfing and purchasing habits of internet users or the movements of every smart phone user, or using existing meta-data mining techniques to analyse our telephone use.

Electronic surveillance by empowered coastal communities along with vessel tracking and enforced blacklisting of cheating vessels and countries is a powerful combination. Cheating may well be an essential feature of human culture, but given the fragility of global fish stocks and coastal fishing communities, eliminating cheating in fisheries seems like a pretty good use for the technologies now abusing us all in so many other ways.

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Posted in International Affairs, Marine Conservation, Sustainable fisheries | Comments Off

Dan Brown’s Inferno

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

Dan Brown’s Inferno is now at the top of best seller lists wherever it has been published. A lot of people are going to read it.

Dan Brown's Inferno could influence millions (wikipedia.com0

Dan Brown’s Inferno could influence millions (wikipedia.com)

Apart from its loving detail of Dante, art, museums, Florence, Venice and Istanbul to support the chase and adventure, it has a very serious central theme: we are rushing toward a catastrophic end to human society as we know it. The amazingly intelligent characters in the book who are worrying most about all of this conclude that human over-population is the underlying cause.

A hard-to-read graph in the book condenses the evidence. It is a compilation of graphs of the acceleration of pretty well everything in the past 50 to 250 years, originally published in The New Scientist on Oct 12, 2008 as a Special Report, entitled How Our Economy is Killing the Earth. You may need library access or a subscription to read the whole report but the link lets you see some of the underlying data. It is certainly worth looking at, for it bears no good news:

Color version of the graph from Inferno (newscientist.com)

Color version of the graph from Inferno (newscientist.com)

To help you read it where the print is too small:
Time runs along along the bottom or x axis – 1750 on the left with 50 year increments to 2000 on the right. The scales on the vertical or y axis are all relative to a low starting point on the left, but of course vary immensely depending on what is being measured, so no numbers are included.

12 measures are graphed, 5 starting in 1750, 4 in 1900, and 3 in 1950. Some graph global data, some are restricted to the USA.

Starting in 1750, and working down, are Northern hemisphere surface temperature (orange), Global population size (red), CO2 level in atmosphere (blue), GDP (dark red), and Loss of tropical forests and woodland (green).

Starting in 1900, and again working down, are Water use (blue), Paper consumption (yellow), Species extinctions (green), and Number of motor vehicles (black).

And starting in 1950, Tons of fish caught (blue), Foreign investment (light grey), and Ozone depletion (dark grey).

Obviously this is an odd graph, for the scales on all of the measures have been adjusted to make the lines coincide as much as possible. But the essential point is still a valid one – all measures increase rapidly, on their own scales, at about the same rate, at about the same time, and none show signs of slowing down.

Although Brown’s characters are convinced that the causal, driving force is the growth of the global human population, the reality is of course a lot more complicated, for consumption and capitalism also do a lot of the driving.

A famous view of Earth, a reminder that population and consumption are only loosely correlated (earthlights.com)

A famous view of Earth, a reminder that population and consumption are only loosely correlated (earthlights.com)

While we wait for the human population to finally level off, we could do a lot to reduce the rate of growth of almost all of the other measures.

Meanwhile, the graph should worry us all. If it looks like we are generally out of control, we are. With luck, some of the people now in power will read Inferno and become infected by its sense of urgency.

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Posted in Books, Movies and One Aquarium, Global warming, International Affairs | Comments Off

The State of Global Fisheries

Friday, May 31st, 2013

So what is the global state of wild-caught or capture fisheries?

In recent decades, the amount of wild caught fish has leveled off, even declined, while the amount of farmed fish and shrimp has grown ever greater. We could conclude that we are now fishing sustainably from wild populations, and the surge in farming has helped reduce the pressure on them.

We would be so wrong.

Though the global sale of fish continues to climb, farmed fish are responsible for all the recent growth (earth-policy.org)

Though the global sale of fish continues to climb, farmed fish are responsible for all the recent growth (earth-policy.org)

Instead over the past few decades fishing fleets have grown in size and searched for fish ever further in the world’s oceans. The result is ever greater fishing effort, but increasingly less catch per unit effort. These are features of unsustainable fishing, not sustainable. The FAO estimates that 57% of fish stocks are fully exploited, and 30% are over-exploited. That doesn’t leave much.

As effort in fishing has increased (number and size of vessels), the catch per effort has decreased (worldbank.org)

As effort in fishing has increased (number and size of vessels), the catch has decreased (worldbank.org)

How can an industry continue to grow despite declining yields? This is a result of huge government subsidies, valued at about 19 billion dollars US per year for developing countries and about nine billion for developed.

Another view - as more and more of the world's oceans have been fished, the catch per effort has declined (worldbank.com)

Another view – as more and more of the world’s oceans have been fished, the catch per effort has declined (worldbank.com)

And there is much more.

For instance, we know that bottom trawling with its indiscriminate destruction of bottom habitats and of non-target species continues to occur on almost every coast and in increasingly deep water despite condemnation by conservation organizations and fisheries scientists.

We also know that for both fish stocks and coastal fishing communities to persist, large areas of coastline need to be protected as ‘no-take’ areas, but still only about 1% of the world’s coastlines are protected in any way. That number should probably be around 20-30%. Even where no-take areas exist, enforcement is often difficult or impossible.

No-take zones in marine protected areas work - like this area in the Dry Tortugas off of Florida where yellow tailed snapper and red grouper have a chance of survival (saltwatersportsman.com)

No-take zones in marine protected areas work – like this area in the Dry Tortugas off of Florida where yellow tailed snapper and red grouper have a chance of survival (saltwatersportsman.com)

If you want to really dig into the state of the world’s fisheries, the best place to go is The Sea Around Us Project where you can explore what is happening and what has happened in each of the world’s 65 coastal Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs). It is a very sobering journey.

Much of all of this of course has been known for decades, but what’s new is that the amount of data, of evidence, has become immense. What’s now emerging is an ability to assess things accurately on a global scale.

For example, we now know that global fishing effort needs to be cut by about 40% in order to keep fish stocks sustainable. To get there, government subsidies need to eliminated, the number of large fishing vessels and licenses need to be reduced through buy-back programs, and smaller quotas need to be enforced. Reducing the industrial scale and increasing the locally managed fleets of smaller craft would mitigate some of the economic pain and support community-based management.

At the same time, the goal of global fisheries scientists remains to manage fisheries not at the species level but at the ecosystem level, even the level of the LME. Almost all nations except for USA and North Korea have ratified the UN Law of the Sea, agreeing to accept the associated obligations and commitments. Imperfect though it no doubt is, it is a vehicle for regulating fishing pressure and resolving differences. We know that where a few or more nations share an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), fisheries agreements are elusive at best and dangerously volatile at worst (as they currently are in the South China Sea). But treaties continue to emerge, and opportunities for cooperative management at least exist.

Worth watching: China claims most of the South China Sea, and may reject the lines drawn as a result of UN Law of the Sea adjudication (victoryinstitute.net)


Worth watching: China claims most of the South China Sea, and may reject the lines drawn as a result of UN Law of the Sea adjudication (victoryinstitute.net)

With increasing global information about the world’s oceans – including challenging data on coastal development, pollution, ocean warming and acidification – we can encourage decisions that recognize that the Earth is a single, dynamic and adaptable system whose resilience in the face of rapid change is clearly not unlimited.

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Mitigation Still Has a Pulse

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

Finally, in his inauguration speech, President Obama spoke some of the words we so badly need to hear from him: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.”

Given the Congress he has been dealt, there is little that he can actually do that requires Congressional approval. But those working at other levels of government should feel reassured.

And there are critical initiatives at other levels, planning various efforts to mitigate climate change, not just adapt to it with fortifications.

The principle of cap-and -trade is simple. Making it work in the real world can be very complicated (climatepedia.org).

The principle of cap-and -trade is simple. Making it work in the real world can be very complicated (climatepedia.org).

Both the State California and the Province of Quebec have now instituted cap-and-trade policies to try to curb carbon emissions. Cap-and-trade may not be everyone’s preferred approach to mitigation, but it is a start, and the two jurisdictions are attempting a concerted effort – in itself an important event.

Governors of some states – New York and New Jersey, so battered by Hurricane Sandy come to mind – are determined to protect their coasts from the predicted greater storms accompanying climate change, and they are also exploring mitigation, seeking ways to reduce carbon emissions.

Hurricane Sandy was the largest hurricane yet seen (telegraph.co.uk)

Hurricane Sandy was the largest hurricane yet seen (telegraph.co.uk)

But what if a state governor or provincial premier provides no leadership, or even worse, like Governor Rick Scott of Florida, still denies that climate change is human-caused? The four counties of southeast Florida provide us with a remarkable model for response.

The counties are Monroe (includes Key West and the Everglades), Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. Five million people live there, responsible for 37% of the state economy. Political leaders from both political parties have formed the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, ratified by all four counties in late 2009 and early 2010. Last month they held their 4th annual meeting.

Using the best science available, they are responding to what is already happening and preparing for what’s ahead. Rising sea level, salt-water intrusion into underground aquifers and increased violence of storms bashing the coast are their major concerns. And they should be concerned – all the maps of rising sea level indicate that southeast Florida is one of the most vulnerable regions in the US.

Southeast Florida is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise

Southeast Florida is particularly vulnerable to sea level rise

Although adaptive engineering (raised and rerouted roads, pumps on canals, protected buffer areas to create resilience) understandably dominate their plans, they also plan to reduce carbon emissions and to create and encourage rapid public transit. Most importantly, though, they show us that significant action can occur at the county level.

Probably the most effective of all the initiatives are occurring at the city level. The World Mayors Council on Climate Change emphasizes initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. At their meeting three months ago, chaired by the mayor of Seoul, they said the appropriate things, but many of the 260 cities represented are small, and real action is limited. Still, the Council is an important one if only for political reasons.

The most impressive global organization though is C40 Cities Climate Change Leadership Group. Membership in C40 depends on the existence of actual action to mitigate carbon emissions. The mayors of the 63 included megacities and innovator cities share efforts to reduce carbon emissions, providing models for other cities and national governments. This month Vancouver, Oslo, Venice and Washington,D.C. were invited to join.

As NYC Mayor Bloomberg points out, city government has the ability to be ‘nimble’, able to take action quickly.

Adaptation to climate change of course remains essential everywhere on the planet. But mitigation of carbon emissions is not a futile hope. President Obama may not be able to deliver Congressional action to reduce carbon emissions, but he can encourage nimbleness at the state, county and city level. His endorsement can only help.

Now we have to find some way to encourage Canada’s Prime Minister Harper to say something helpful.

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Salmon and Ocean Iron Fertilization

Saturday, December 8th, 2012

Last summer a Haida community on the coast of British Columbia arranged and funded a rogue initiative involving ocean iron fertilization in hopes of helping their vanished salmon to return. This didn’t hit the press until late October, and then pretty well everyone - government agencies in Canada and the US, along with environmental organizations both moderate and extremist – criticized the community for doing something so risky, without government regulation or monitoring, in violation of international agreements.

Areas (in purple) of the Pacific Ocean where levels of iron are too low to support extensive growth of phytoplankton. Most experiments were done in the Southern Ocean in the early 1990s.

The community hired Russ George to do the work for $2.5 million. He persuaded the community that by dumping iron sulphate in the ocean not only would plankton bloom and fish return, but also that the carbon sucked out of the atmosphere by phytoplankton photosynthesis would sink and become sequestered in deep water, allowing them to sell carbon credits to CO2 emitters elsewhere in the world and get their money back.

So what happened? Russ George scattered 100 tons of iron sulphate over 10,000 sq km in the North Pacific west of Haida Gwaii, the largest iron fertilization of ocean surface waters yet attempted. The phytoplankton bloomed, for that part of the North Pacific is low in iron. Herring, salmon, tuna, dolphins and even whales arrived in the area to feed over the next couple of months.

Haida Gwaii refers to the islands along the northern coast of British Columbia. The reds and yellows indicate areas where chlorophyll and therefore phytoplankton levels are high. The blues, offshore in the Gulf of Alaska where the salmon spend a couple of years, indicate areas of very low levels of chlorophyll (globeandmail.com).

This isn’t a surprise. Twice in the relatively recent past, volcanic eruptions sent clouds rich in iron dust over the same part of the Pacific, and phytoplankon blooms then occurred, followed by bumper salmon runs in the coastal rivers a couple of years later. That part of the science is solid.

But what happened to the dead phytoplankton and its carbon? Did it sink? Or did it recirculate instead? Only one study, an experiment done in 1994 in the Southern Ocean and finally published last summer, indicates that a reasonable amount of the carbon might sink. Does that apply to the North Pacific? Are there other unexpected side effects involving nitrous oxide or methane that should worry us? No one knows as yet and because of the risks there has been a moratorium on iron fertilization experiments since 1994, unbroken until now.

Does the Haida community really deserve criticism? At most it is guilty of trusting Russ George, who surely knew exactly what he was doing.

Wild salmon have always been central to Haida culture. What happens when the fish become so rare that few return to breed in the coastal rivers they were born in? The crash of the salmon fishery in recent years sent unemployment in the community from 0% up to 70%. Some kind of action was needed. The last thing they wanted was this attention. They just wanted to try to get their salmon back.

Salmon have long played a critical role in Haida culture.

The Haida community trusted someone they shouldn’t have. They won’t have a chance to continue with further fertilizations, for repaying their current debt will be hard, and now too many eyes are on them, including those of the very aggressive Sea Shepherd.

So what’s the right answer here? We loudly criticize and prevent any actions like that of the Haida, while we remain complicit partners with the global extractive corporations and carbon emitters that made their action necessary.

The Haida of Old Massett, on the north coast of Haida Gwaii, are no doubt frustrated and may be embarrassed by how this worked out.

But they are not wrong

Haida Gwaii, once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, remote from the over-populated parts of the world, but still deeply impacted by the depletion of the salmon (huffington.post.ca).

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The Niger Delta

Monday, November 19th, 2012

There are a lot of environmentally wrecked places around the planet, sites we have known about for years. Generally they involve our efforts to extract stuff.

Of course environmentalists are frustrated that evidence – the photographs, videos and data on contamination and destruction – is largely ignored, but we shouldn’t be surprised. These are not rational times.

Another approach is through fiction, and a new and award-winning book, ‘419‘ by Will Ferguson, does it really very well.

Winner of Canada’s 2012 Giller Prize, this is an outstanding story.

The book is about Nigeria, framed by the emailed money-requesting scams we are so familiar with. (419 refers to the Nigerian law that prohibits such fraud). It is a terrific book, a tight and evocative tale of the harsh scramble that is life in Nigeria and how it can reach out to naive North Americans – well, in this case Canadians.

The oil fields along the coast of the Niger Delta are rich, exploited by many oil companies, subjected to minimal regulations (i-er.com)

A lot of the book takes place in the Niger Delta in Nigeria in west Africa, once home to many tribes living on the fishing the delta once provided. The destruction of the delta by the oil companies has involved mangrove destruction, air and water contamination, eliminated fisheries, militancy and the ‘Mosquito’ resistance and kidnappings for ransom, impressive levels of graft, and the complicity of the Nigerian government. As a result the history is one of destroyed cultures, far too familiar and horrible, and should never have occurred.

Natural gas is burned off as ‘flares’ wherever oil is drilled – but existing regulations on flaring are rarely enforced in Nigeria. The CO2 emitted by flaring in the Niger Delta is about equal to the CO2 emissions of Italy (nair aland.com)

If improvements can occur, if the destruction is to be successfully reduced and even perhaps reversed, the spotlight on the Delta needs to be a bright and strong one. ’419′ will be read for its absorbing plot of relationships, manipulation, scams and life-and-death events. But as well it evokes an environmental hell, one for which we are all to blame.

Many very fine non-fiction books have been written by fluent and lucid environmentalists. Books that should have influenced the political leaders of the world, books that should have scared them into action. They obviously didn’t. Probably they didn’t get read by the people who most needed to read them.

So let’s see where good fiction takes us.

The Niger Delta is a reasonable target – if it can be in part recovered, probably anywhere can. Responsible drilling, gas flares eliminated, contamination cleaned up, communities made part of the solution, government laws concerning environmental and cultural protection not just passed but actually implemented: is this too much to strive for?

It can’t be – though in his book Ferguson offers only the very slimmest of hopes.

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Measuring Ocean Health

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

On a scale of one to 100, the health of the oceans has been given a 60.

We now have an index of ocean health for coastal waters – both global and national. Published in Nature in August, and the result of a huge amount of analysis by a large number of people, it has received a lot of generally favorable press attention. It is intended to be a measure of sustainability, representing benefits that a healthy ocean can provide to people.

The global index of 60 is the area-weighted average score of 10 goals. A comparable graph has been constructed for each of the 171 countries and associated territories that have any coastline at all (oceanhealthindex.org).

The website associated with the Index is excellent. It lets you explore the scores of each country goal by goal, with some detail on what the scores mean actually mean. It’s worth a visit just to see the graphics. If you want to see all the goals for all the countries on a single table, then you’ll need to go to the supplementary material published with the Nature article.

The index for countries ranges from 36 (Sierra Leone) to 73 (Germany and the Seychelles). For the US it is 63, for Canada 70.

The Seychelles, with the highest index (driversforce.ca)

At first blush, this all seems to make some sort of intuitive sense.

But what does it really mean? Unless we have confidence in the choice of goals and the methods of measuring them, the value of the Index may be very limited.

There are some goals (Natural Products, Carbon Storage and Coastal Protection, for example) that look particularly useful – they are based on reliable data and not too many assumptions, and result in a decent spread in scores.

But in contrast, there are two examples (the Mariculture half of the Food Provision goal, and Tourism) where 90% of the world get scores far too close to zero, while a very few countries get around 100. Both goals are important to include, but they clearly need better ways to measure them. Including them at this stage undermines the validity of the Index.

The scores for Fisheries (the other part of the Food Provision goal) are worrisome for a different reason, for they can be difficult to interpret. Generally the scores are all quite low, which seems reasonable. But here a low score can mean either that overfishing has been extensive, or instead that fish are not being harvested up to sustainable limits.

Both the authors and the reviewers agree that this is a first cut that will be improved as more data are gathered. However, if the scores for a few of the goals are unreliable or ambiguous, then the Index is unreliable. And certainly reducing it all to a single number for the world, or even per country, becomes increasingly meaningless.

But I think there is a greater problem with the Index, one that is fixable.

How can we try to compare Barbados with Japan, or the Seychelles with Germany? We can’t, and we shouldn’t. Yet, if you look at the global distribution of index scores, some obvious patterns pop out. For instance, the countries with the lowest index scores are clustered along west Africa. (Map from oceanhealthindex.org)

If you then look at a global map of the 64 Large Marine Ecosystems that have been identified, covering all of the world’s coasts, those countries all share a single Large marine Ecosystem: the Guinea Current, LME #28. That does make sense – it ties the countries and their coastal problems together in a meaningful way.

The Large Marine Ecosystem: The Guinea Current (lme.noaa.gov)

So why not use the index to assess and compare LME’s instead of countries? We would then, for instance, be able to compare the Caribbean LME with the Mediterranean or any other LME, and not have to break it into many small island pieces, or alternatively have to compare it with the entire coastline of Canada or Russia. Comparisons become far more defensible.

This would encourage countries that share an LME to work together to make it more sustainable. In fact, most have agreed for years that the LME approach is the best way to go. The Index could and should provide strong evidence to support this.

So let’s get this right. The Index has great potential, but not in its current form. Its value is in its details, and in its use in guiding us on how to improve the health of LMEs, not in ranking and scoring individual countries.

The current global score of 60 tells us nothing.

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ExxonMobil The Evil Empire

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

After waiting years to get permission, Royal Dutch Shell finally began drilling its first exploration well in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest Alaskan coast this past summer. Tests of its safety equipment have not gone well, and wind-driven sea ice has threatened the operation. Any further drilling of the exploration well has now been postponed until next summer.

Shell’s Noble Discoverer drilling rig on the Chukchi Sea, seen from the deck of the Tor Viking icebreaker. (Royal Dutch Shell, latimes.com))

This has been a benign season in the Arctic, and still the result is failure. This does not bode well for Arctic drilling, but if we can be sure of anything in this uncertain world, we can expect Shell, and BP, and Chevron, and the biggest of them all, ExxonMobil – as well as the Norwegian and Russian oil companies – to explore the Arctic and then to drill it over the next decades.

A recent book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll tells the tale of ExxonMobil from the catastrophic spill by the Exxon Valdez in 1989, through its rise in reach, power and wealth to become the most profitable of global corporations, to its present belated enthusiasm for fracking. It is an extraordinary tale of bald self-interest and cynicism.

Steve Coll’s book, published in 2012, is long, detailed, short on reflection, and frightening (nytimes.com)

Over the past 20 years, ExxonMobil has moved slowly and reluctantly through a series of attitudes about climate change. Of course it denied the reality of global warming for as long as possible, and funded the research of the skeptics. Then, eventually, it agreed that burning carbon-based fuels was in fact warming the planet – but its own analysis determined that the global demand for energy is growing so fast that even if alternate sources are available, they will only fill a small part of the need. We will remain dependent on ExxonMobil and the other oil companies for oil and natural gas for the next decades.

Seeing how the wind is now blowing in the US, ExxonMobil now supports the call for energy independence and even says that it could tolerate a carbon tax – but it believes in neither taxes nor the need for US energy independence.

ExxonMobil is a huge global corporation whose products are natural gas and oil, and whose sole motive is profit. It is present in 200 countries, extracting oil and gas from dozens of them. It is resistant to any action that might decrease its global access and profit. Its influence in US flows through through the efforts of lobbyists working on congressmen, cabinet members, and presidents. Access is never denied.

No government can resist the oil companies, not even the US. Coll’s book is very sobering.

Meanwhile, despite the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, offshore exploration and drilling is expanding around the world. Taking the risks, especially in the Arctic, is madness. Unfortunately, the oil companies, in their endless quest for more profits from more exploitable oil and gas deposits, remain indifferent to the long-term impact of what they do.

ExxonMobil has drilled a well offshore California that extends more than six miles horizontally and more than 7,000 ft below sea level. It was drilled from the Heritage platform using the company’s Fast Drill technology. (drillingcontractor.org)

The only concern ExxonMobil and the other oil companies express is that at some point the nations of the planet finally will become really afraid of the effects of global warming and agree to take concerted, major action.

Our challenge then is to bring that about now, not decades from now. We can start with the current US election – although neither party talks about climate change, at least President Obama understands that it exists and that it poses great dangers. In Canada we can try to constrain the development of the Alberta oil sands and the exploration for oil and gas in Canada’s Arctic.

And we can push back against the oil companies. They need our encouragement to do the right thing.

As do our governments.

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The Open Arctic

Thursday, June 14th, 2012

Everyone is preparing for an Arctic Ocean open for business at least through the summer months.

Seasonal shipping is increasing, and ports are growing, especially along the Russian coast.

The North Pole, April 2004: HMS Tireless, a nuclear sub, measured sea ice thickness of the melting ice cap (seaice.org.uk)

The Arctic rim countries – Canada, Norway, Denmark, Russia and the US – are under some pressure to agree to a moratorium on exploiting the Arctic fisheries at least until enough is known about the ecosystem to do so sustainably.

Beluga whales feed on a school of Arctic cod (the dark streak), a species of potential commercial value but about which we know very little (arkive.org)

The tension over who if anyone owns any of the international waters in the huge center of the Arctic continue to grow, with Russia planning to reopen long closed Soviet bases, Canada considering using drones to monitor the region, and the US getting increasingly nervous about not having a vote in the UN negotiations concerning international boundaries.

The international water of the Arctic Ocean (red lin e)(oceansnorth.org)

Meanwhile China and South Korea are building icebreakers and intend to be players in the search for Arctic fish and other resources.

And then there are the oil companies.

The huge BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 is largely forgotten. Canada, the US and Norway are all inviting oil companies to bid for licenses to explore for oil and natural gas along their Arctic coastlines from Alaska and the Beaufort Sea to the Barents Sea. After a relentless, seven year campaign, Shell begins to drill on the Alaskan North Slope this summer, with Greenpeace watching closely. All the companies are eager to drill in international waters when that becomes possible.

Canada opens the Beaufort Sea for bids for drilling licenses

They are preparing to work in the cold, in darkness, in sea ice a long way from any supportive infrastructure. Still they claim development can be done sustainably.

In fact, nine of the major oil companies, including Statoil, Total, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Shell, have launched a research program where they will assess how spills flow in the Arctic, how to track them remotely, and how to recovery spilled oil. They will do this with ‘controlled’ spills.

Missing from this initiative are the Russian companies, Gazprom and Rosneft. No one seems confident that they will comply with regulations that the others accept. The Gazprom rig that capsized off Sakhalin last December, killing 50, is not reassuring.

Actually, no company is ready for offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, for no proven method for clean-up there exists.

Resistance to drilling has failed. The US sees the Arctic resources as part of its route to energy independence. Norway needs to replace its lucrative but depleted offshore southern oil fields with new northern ones. Canada wants to sell its resources to anyone who will buy them. Russia is Russia.

We hoped the rules of the game might be different in the Arctic as it opens up, based on all that we have learned over the past few decades. In fact they look exactly like they always have: power wins; the idea of endless economic growth remains unchallenged; resources exist to be exploited; environmental concerns are recognized and then largely ignored.

As elsewhere in our modern world, our response has become not to stop it, but at best to try to make it less bad.

At the least, a vigilant and activist press is increasingly critical – reminding us of past initiatives and failures, of the importance of evidence and precaution, and of the fragility and vulnerability of our natural world.

Walruses meet to debate the future of the Arctic Ocean (washingtonpost.com)

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Return of the Law of the Sea

Saturday, June 9th, 2012

The US helped to create the the UN Law of the Sea in 1982, but has never ratified it (squidoo.com)

I started this series of blogs almost three years ago with a commentary on the Law of the Sea, ending with the hope that Senator Kerry, as the new Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, would take the initiative and try to get Congress to finally ratify it.

Three years of silence. In that time, Thailand, the Dominican Republic, Malawi and Switzerland have ratified it, bringing the total to 162 of the world’s nations. All industrialized nations have ratified it, and the US remains in the embarrassing company of Ethiopia, Burundi, Iran and North Korea.

All industrialized countries except the US have ratified the UN Law of the Sea (middlebury.edu)

Now, however, Senator Kerry has decided to bring it before the Foreign Relations Committee once again (it has been approved there once before). In support of it, the Committee will hear from the Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, oil companies and potential mining companies, various environmental organizations, and even the US Chamber of Commerce. Quite astonishing to see all of these on the same side of any issue.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the Foreign Relations Committee on May 23, 2012. Beside her are Secreatary of Defense Leon Panetta, and General Martin Demsey, Chariman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (knoxnews.com)

Why now? Well, increasingly the US needs to be a legal player in the territorial negotiations that are underway in both the Arctic and the South China Sea. The stakes for the US in both regions are very high. It has no official vote, and anyway how can it push for enforcement of international laws that it hasn’t itself been able to ratify?

The Law of the Sea concerns so much that is of interest to the US – navigation rights, fisheries access, environmental protection, seabed-mining rights, prosecution of pirates like those of Somalia, as well as determination of territorial boundaries.

Refusal now to ratify the Law of the Sea will continue to embarrass the US, and will erode and destabilize emerging international agreements. The US loses authority, credibility, influence and certainly prestige while it remains unwilling to ratify the Law.

China claims most of the South China Sea, with resistance from four other nations, particularly the Philippines and Vietnam. The US has growing interests in the region. (middlebury.edu)

So surely this time it will be ratified.

Dream on.

In the US Congress, the House of Representatives has already passed a bill refusing any funds for implementing the Law if it is ratified. Meanwhile, in the Senate – where any treaty needs to be passed by a 2/3 majority (67 votes) – 27 senators have already signed a letter pledging their opposition to the Law. Senator Kerry has agreed to delay any votes on the Law of the Sea until after the November election. This does not look hopeful

Shrill opposition, still easily found on the Internet, comes from those who think the Law would curtail US sovereignty, from those who hate and fear the UN, from those who believe the US should use its power to go its own way against the rest of the world, from those who believe the are two sets of rules – one for the US, one for everyone else.

The Law of the Sea assumes that the rule of law, based on negotiations and cooperation, is essential and valuable for all players. No one thinks the Law of the Sea is perfect, but it can evolve, as treaties do. The advantages of ratification for the US are overwhelming.

The US now has the another opportunity to regain some of its lost status, and to show some true leadership, with maturity and cooperation.

Failure to ratify the Law of the Sea is so dangerous.
We have so little time to try to get things right.

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