Oil spill: A 'Cri de Coeur' in Congress

Dennis Kucinich, from the heart, on the floor of the Congress:

Giant Plumes of Oil Found Forming Under Gulf

An alarming report from The New York Times, May 16:

"Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.
"There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water," said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. "There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column."
The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes. . . 

"Scientists studying video of the gushing oil well have tentatively calculated that it could be flowing at a rate of 25,000 to 80,000 barrels of oil a day. The latter figure would be 3.4 million gallons a day. But the government, working from satellite images of the ocean surface, has calculated a flow rate of only 5,000 barrels a day. . . The undersea plumes may go a long way toward explaining the discrepancy between the flow estimates, suggesting that much of the oil emerging from the well could be lingering far below the sea surface.
BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.
"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We’re not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

(see full article NYTimes 5/16)

Obama 'Fuming' at Big Oil's "Cozy Relationship"

"President Barack Obama on Friday angrily decried the "ridiculous spectacle" of oil industry officials pointing fingers of blame for the catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico and pledged to end a "cozy relationship" between the oil industry and federal regulators that he said had extended into his own administration..." (HuffPo 5/14)


Watch the video:

Video of Main 'Leak' Released

BP had refused to release this footage of the largest of the leaks, but had to give in under pressure. Here it is (the white is natural gas, the black is oil):

NPR has reported that the flow of oil is estimated at  ten times greater than the Coast Guard's 'guesstimate' of 5,000 barrels a day. (report)  -  (NPR audio)

Video Showing Undersea Oil Spew in the Gulf

In this excerpt of a video released yesterday by the UAC Joint Information Center ("DeepWater Horizon Response ROV May 6 2010") one can see parts of the oil spew happening at 5000 feet below the surface in the Gulf, and the awkward efforts of the remote-controlled robotic vehicles to deal with the crisis.

Oil Spill Disaster Keeps Growing

Yikes! Now it's a estimated at  million gallons a day, with no end in sight, and it could get worse: there is a reservoir of "tens of millions" of barrels according to a company insider (that's tens of millions of barrels, not gallons; 42 gallons per).
This might just kill the Gulf before it's over, turn the whole thing into a dead zone.
And it will likely flow into the Gulf Stream, proceed down along Florida's west coast, through the keys, then up to Miami and on up the Atlantic coast to the Jersey Shore and Long Island and beyond, to Europe. And it will keep flowing, until someone figures out a way to stop it.
Tell me again, how this is less expensive than going with renewable energies?

A Story for Earth Day

Miss Capucine's version of Winnie the Pooh... see more of Capucine at her Vimeo channel.

This will be the 40th Earth Day since the first in 1970. While a lot has been accomplished since then, it is  clear  we are  not doing anywhere near enough. For just one example:  in 1970 the U.S. produced nine million tons of hazardous waste. 40 years later, the U.S. produces over 500 million tons of hazardous waste per year. Are we just going to keep going like this until the planet is ruined for us? Let's think of the children, at least.

Obama and Offshore Drilling

Perhaps Obama calculated that he could get the carbon trading and caps legislation through if he threw the oil and gas interests a bone. In other words, a strategic political calculation. Apart from the damage to the environment and endangered habitats, there is a raw scientific calculation which we ignore at our peril-

James Hansen has said "I've come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty." (ref: ecoversity.org)

So every time we find yet more fossil fuel sources to burn, we are only rushing faster to that runaway greenhouse in our future. Nothing to celebrate, to the contrary.

Here is a KSFR Santa Fe interview with New Mexico's Senator Jeff Bingaman on the subject of the offshore drilling plan.

Update April 30:
Seems the furies have rushed to greet the administration's plan to give coal a pass and boost offshore drilling. Following the coal mine disaster in West Virginia, now an enormous oil rig has blown up in the Gulf, and an undersea geyser of oil is pumping at 5000 barrels a day from the ocean floor, a mile deep, too deep for human divers, and it could take 90 days to stop the hemorrhaging.
Reality check.

Food, Fruit, and The Botany of Desire

A well-reasoned and well-sourced OpEd in the Times today (Oct 30) by Nicolette Hahn Niman argues that the problem with carnivory in the context of greenhouse emissions is with the industrialization of the meat industry, not with meat-eating per se. She details how meat can be raised for food without excessive greenhouse emissions, which is essentially a case for conscious, local, organic, free range, non-industrialized meat-raising. (NYT OpEd: The Carnivore's Dilemma)

Some further thoughts:
The industrialization of food production occurred not in order to feed the planet's growing population, but rather to create gigantic profit-vehicles for multi-national corporations vying for dominance in the food supply "industry".

It has in fact weakened or destroyed local food production wherever "free trade" has penetrated.

I was thinking about an eating strategy for future humanity when I wrote the earlier post about fruit. It seems to me our best strategy would be to develop partner species which produce for us our food willingly, without us having to kill individual beings on a massive scale. In return we give them warmth and comfort, and a survival alliance for their species.

Ants do that for example. They feed and care  for their aphids, which make the ant's  food.

We humans have fruit. Fruit fits the bill. Fruiting trees compete with each other to be desirable and beneficial to humans, as we are it's primary partner, the seed-spreader. (Though we are no longer leaving the seeds in the forest under a mat of our own natural fertilizer, we fulfill that part of the contract in a different way by offering a survival alliance whereby we humans assure the long-term well-being of the species.)
So far we've only bred fruit trees for such traits as appearance, sweetness, long shelf life. We should get serious about the potential of fruit and select for nutritional targets, so as to replace other sources in our diets as we make the transition. Fruiting plants are happy to comply- one might even say they are happy to be drawn into what for them may be a kind of conversation with us humans, species to species.

And by the way…

This conversation is in a way the theme of Michael Pollan's fascinating book "Botany of Desire", as seen in our relationship with the apple, tulip, potato, and marijuana.
Whether you've read the book or not, you'll enjoy the excellent PBS Special based on it, and especially the smart and attractive show's website, with 'web extras'- like the interview segments with Pollan linked above, and a graphically rich dedicated website to explore further the themes and frames of the book.

PBS show segments and extras online
Botany of Desire- website

Thinking About Fruit

When we were hunter-gatherers, we ate other animals and plants like the rest of creation; and since we were few, our appetite had little impact on the biosphere, we were naturally integrated with the web of life and it's give and take. When we became numerous, we made a kind of pact with nature, to wit: we will eat enormous amounts of certain species, but we will also guarantee their survival as species, domesticating and elevating them in the best of conditions (in principle).

I've been thinking about not eating large animals anymore. Partly because the raising of farm animals alone accounts for an enormous amount of greenhouse gas, soil degradation, habitat destruction, marine pollution, and public health risks. Partly because of the fact that I no longer want to be part of the cause of the suffering and death of these animals, which, if they lived in my garden, I'd rather make friends with than kill and eat. In fact, since I have no doubt that all creatures have some kind of self-awareness and inner life, the more I think about it, the more eating even fish and fowl seems barbaric. After all you can have a pet chicken, or a pet fish. It even seems presumptuous to draw a line at, say, shrimp. I knew a boy once who had a pet huntsman spider, and who was depressed for days when the spider moved on as winter came.
Imagine if we didn't kill and eat- or just kill- the other creatures in our earth family. Imagine if butterflies and birds, deer and squirrel gathered and played with us in our gardens. I'd like that. Maybe we would learn how to communicate.

I happened upon a dog-eared copy of The Secret Life of Plants, in which I was reminded that plants have anxiety attacks when someone starts "harvesting" their garden-mates, or even when this person enters the greenhouse. So how will billions of humans live peaceably on the planet with a natural biosphere flourishing around them... what would they eat, if not everything?

Then I thought of fruit. Not so much apples and pears and the other northern fruits, but the wildly diverse fruits of the tropics from which our species came: mangos and mangosteen, rambutan, salak, durian and papaya... and dozens of others, which surely, in their great variety, might cover most of our nutritional needs. After all, if a giant fruitbat, with a six foot leathery wingspread can fuel it's flight on fruit, I should do fine.

Fruit, alone among all the things we eat, are made for us (primates primarily) to eat. That's why they generally come in lovely colors, smell good, taste sweet and moist, and give us energy; they want us to eat them, so we'll deposit their seeds in a fertilizer envelope at some distance from the tree.. They seduce us to have a taste.*

If we ate only fruit, we wouldn't be chopping up or slaughtering other life forms. Fruit-bearing trees release their ripened fruit all by themselves -a bright and transportable pod of nourishment, essentially saying, "Here, take this, it's ready to eat"; the tree lives happily on for decades. Like a cow gives milk, fruiting trees will continue to produce food for us as long as they live.

I can imagine a world in which fruiting plants have been cultivated for a wide range of nutritional benefits, and most of the growing land on the planet is devoted to our fruiting companions.

*And they may tend to make us more seductive to each other- fruiting trees would select for traits which by some means could over time increase the number of their 'seed-porters', thus securing their future generations. The way to do that, beyond offering essential nutrients and energy, would be to stimulate mating activity on the part of the seed-porting species. Clearly, forage-able vegetables would have no interest in offering such an inducement, lest they be eaten up by rapidly multiplying herbivores.

___________________

Update: Here's a video peek at some of the tropical fruits mentioned in this article...

Indian Summer in Santa Fe

Jellyfish Loop

You've heard intermittent reports of jellyfish invasions here and there in the world over the last years. Sometimes even 'giant jellyfish' invasions. The efflorescence of these animals (I believe they are technically 'animals') is commonly ascribed to the warming of the ocean, and there has been some concern voiced that jellies might take over the seas as they continue to warm.

Here's a new angle though: jellyfish, in their continuous vertical wanderings, are mixing upper and lower layers of ocean water, thus boosting the ocean's absorption of CO2, and this may account for the fact that the ocean has 'sunk' more CO2 than had been expected and predicted.

Interesting! It seems the jellyfish is embodying and performing a Gaian stabilization function, amounting to a natural feedback loop to soak up more CO2 when the sea temperatures rise!

We haven't paid much attention to the jellyfish, but I'm sure we will in the future- and not just as a plentiful potential food, or because they boost the ocean's CO2 sink, but because in one jelly species, there's a gene-set giving it, well, immortality. Specifically, this jellyfish, once it has matured and mated and reproduced, can revert to a juvenile stage and start all over again. I think I might like that! I guess we'd better start colonizing some planets before we implant that gene in ourselves...