JBW » environmental law

Is this the final act for the Gulf of Mexico?

19th June 2010

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4itfAVq19U]

The article, Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world, written by Naomi Klein in today’s Guardian is by far and away the most cogent piece of analysis I’ve come across to date on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. To summarise the piece in a few hundred words would do Ms Klein a great disservice because the article needs to be read in its entirety. The Fault Lines film (see above) for which she served as consultant is also an eye-opener. The article (and the film) sift through events surrounding the disaster before, during (right now), and in the future, at different levels and in all its multiple dimensions, and one is inexorably led to the conclusion that — as a social-ecological system — the Gulf of Mexico could well be playing out its final act. The system has been under strain for some considerable time but, as resilience theorists will tell you, there comes a point where Gaia will simply not take any more abuse, a threshold is crossed, and the social-ecological system enters a new regime, where there is no going back to the old regime. The scary thing is that the collapse of the Gulf of Mexico social-ecological system would not necessarily end there. It is not an isolated system, but one that is inextricably linked to many more.

Delhi to outlaw plastic bags

2nd February 2009

Image source: http://flickr.com/photos/meredith415/2252409702/

As an anti-plastic bag nazi and frequent traveller to India, this news item caught my attention today. This is not the first time the authorities in Delhi have shown some environmental leadership. It was the first city to introduce the use of compressed natural gas (CNG) for public transport in 1998 with startling results, and now it has introduced jail sentences of up to five years if people are caught using plastic bags!

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The not-so-lame duck president?

21st November 2008

Image source: cbsnews.com

Back in August, it was revealed that the Bush Administration planned to relax endangered species rules that would cut out the advice of government scientists who have had an input on such matters for 35 years. If successful, Bush would accomplish through rule changes what conservative Republicans have been unable to achieve in Congress; namely, ending environmental reviews that developers blame for delays and cost increases on projects. Undeterred by the 250,000 objections received by lawmakers and environmentalists, the Interior Department has been rushing to bring in the rule changes by 21November, or Obama can undo them with the stroke of a pen when he is sworn on 20 January. However, if the new rules do go through, they will be difficult to overturn since it would require the new administration to restart the rule-making process. The only way to avoid this scenario would be for Congress to reverse the rule changes through the Congressional Review Act; a law that allows review of new federal regulations. This law has only been used once in the last 12 years, but given the huge antipathy towards the Bush Administration, there would appear to be a high probability that this law will be employed to block the endangered species rules and other ‘last minute’ regulation changes.

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A green ‘new deal’

4th November 2008

GND
Image source: neweconomics.org

I am a little perturbed by the reactionary position taken by some on the right of the political spectrum, that the economic downturn is reason enough to shelve plans for ecological tax reform (e.g. the Liberal Party in Australia). On the contrary, the economic crisis is an opportunity to do something to engineer radical change, hence the appeal of what some people are referring to as the Green New Deal. The New Economics Foundation in the UK is one group that is doing some interesting work in this area.

GDP that kills GDP (as well as people)

31st January 2008

Image source: Economist.com

An article appearing in The Economist last week, Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air (reproduced below), provides a commentary on the largely impotent State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in China. The Deputy Director, Pan Yue, is one of the most outspoken Chinese bureaucrats you are ever likely to come across, but his dire warnings go unheeded, largely because SEPA does not carry much weight alongside the big Ministries.

Despite its best efforts, SEPA has been unable to secure support from the government to publish a green GDP because it was “not internationally accepted”. Interestingly, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) did publish one figure; namely, that environmental damage in 2004 cost 3.05% of that year’s GDP. Maybe this kind of statistic will resonate more deeply with the Chinese government than the number of deaths each year as a result of pollution. According to Pan Yue, 70% of China’s more than 2 million annual deaths from cancer are pollution-related.

China environment update

30th March 2007

Image source: www.spiegel.de

My travels in southern China this week did nothing to convince me that the authorities are making any progress in dealing with their environmental problems. The air quality in Guangzhou and Shenzhen was diabolical, and as Jennifer Turner of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars noted recently when she was interviewed by Phillip Adams (listen here), it is not just the Chinese who are affected by this. Mercury is being transported to Korea in dust storms, and it is also believed that 1/5 of the mercury entering rivers in Oregon in the US originates from China.

The challenge is therefore geopolitical but, ultimately, it is economic. One of the great virtues of an authoritarian state is that once it makes up its mind to do something, execution of the plan is straightforward (in contrast to democracies where the gestation period for environmental policy can be painstakingly long). However, despite the ‘environmental authoritarianism’ being exercised (increasingly) by the Chinese central government, it is not being policed by local governments. Thus, coal scrubbers might be installed and waste water treatement plants may be in place, but these facilities are not being turned on because they are deemed ‘too costly’. ‘Cost’, however, does not include the cancers, low IQs and miscarriages being attributed to the high level of pollutants in the air and in China’s waterways, 50% of which are running black (i.e. they are completely dead and cannot be used for anything, even for industrial purposes), and the 700 million people who now lack access to safe water (the people living in the Huai River basin being amongst the worst affected).

While there have been some signs of improvement, environmental policy is not keeping up with the pace of environmental degradation, and unless there is some technology transfer to overcome the economic obstacles to sustainable production, I do not foresee any change in the immediate future. National laws will continue to be flouted at the local level, and firms will continue to destroy the natural environment. It is not a case of trying to stop China, it a question of how China can helped. Weaning this country off its heavy reliance on coal is a start. CO2 emissions are set to surpass those of the US in 2009, and they will get a whole lot worse after that.

Image source: www.spiegel.de

A trip to Sembawang

22nd April 2005

Sembawang beach (facing south)

After perusing the Singapore weekend papers on the ‘raging debate’ (sic) about the proposed casino (should Singapore be hip and have one to bring in squillions of dollars of tourist revenue each year, or take the moral high ground and remain boring), I decided that this was way too controversial for me and I set out to see if this country I temporarily call home has the remnants of a ‘soul’ somewhere. I’d read in a Reuters report that, amazingly, the Republic of Singapore has grown in size by around 20% over the last 40 years — that’s not population, but area. Roy and HG once joked that such was the Singaporean zeal for land reclamation, it wouldn’t be long before ex-pats like me could take a weekend drive back to Australia. Maybe the only thing that’s preventing this happening is that there aren’t many hills left to bulldoze in Singapore, and the Indonesians stopped them dredging sand from the ocean bed a couple of years ago because it was starting to affect their coastline! Anyway, in this Reuters report, a reference was made to Sembawang Beach at the northern tip of the island, and how this was one of the last remaining ‘natural’ beaches, the others being man made, a few dumper loads of sand having been tossed around the concrete retaining walls after the land reclamation process. I also read that a small group was lobbying to save this beach from reclamation and development and had even gone to the extent of setting up a web site to “provide quiet feedback” to the government. This sent my pulse racing and I simply had to see this beach with my own eyes.

US energy policy

17th August 2004

The cover story of the latest edition of Business Week (Asian edition) should be a bit of an eye-catcher for sustainable development types.

The Preventable Cancer Epidemic

13th March 2004

One of my fellow ecol-econ list members tipped me off about a report, recently released by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, entitled The Cancer Epidemic as a Social Event. The increasingly large percentages of Canadian men and women contracting cancer is quite staggering, and while the medical profession attributes the cancer epidemic to genetic and lifestyle factors, the authors of the report maintain that carcinogens in our air, water, food, and workplaces are the significant causes of cancer. The full report is well worth reading. At the end of it one is left wondering what is going on those parts of the world where regulatory regimes are lax or non-existent. A media release on the report is reproduced below:

The disappearing arbres d’alignement

17th February 2004

That trashy, left-wing environmental mag The Economist is at it again — this time printing an article, Killer trees, that laments over the removal of roadside trees. Incredibly, some 3 million such trees (90 per cent in total) have been cut down in the last 30 years because of road ‘improvements’ and fears about road deaths. For non-subscribers the full article is reproduced below.

Tag: environmental law