Methane Leak in California a 'Major Catastrophe' — Could Take 4 Months to Stop

Environmentalists estimate the effect is comparable to the tailpipes of up to seven million cars venting directly into the atmosphere every day.

Screen capture from YouTube video.

By Kim Brunhuber
About 42 kilometres from Los Angeles, above the houses nestled in the mountains of Porter Ranch, Calif., a plume of methane is shooting into the sky. The cloud is invisible but it stretches for kilometres, as though a forest fire has been continually burning for months. All of this is emanating from a tiny pipe about 20 centimetres wide, more than a kilometre underground.

"The amount of methane and natural gas that's coming out of the Aliso Canyon Facility really is probably one of the largest volumes of gas ever recorded from a single leak," says Tim O'Connor, an oil and gas specialist with the non-profit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).

The Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility, owned by SoCalGas, is the fifth biggest of its kind in U.S. But in late October, the company realized one of its wells was leaking. At first the company tried to close the leak using the conventional method of pouring fluids and mud down the well.

"We have tried that seven times and have been unsuccessful in trying to stop the leak," said SoCalGas spokesman Michael Mizrahi. "I have to say more than likely it's [because] the pressures that are coming up from the leaking well are so intense."

The company says it doesn't know exactly how much gas is escaping. But environmentalists estimate the effect is comparable to the tailpipes of up to seven million cars venting directly into the atmosphere every day.

"Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas; over the first 20 years it's released, it has a climate impact 84 times that of carbon dioxide," said O'Connor. "There's no telling what the far reaches of the overall end results are going to be. Air quality, public health, ecological — it's all on the table." The Federal Aviation Administration has imposed a no-fly zone because of the small risk that a plane could ignite a pocket of methane.

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Did The Red Cross Scam Donators After Haiti Earthquake?: Collected $500 Million — Built Only 6 Homes

By Justin Elliott, ProPublica, and Laura Sullivan, NPR
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.

RELATED STORY: "The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster" - Charity Prioritized PR over People After Superstorm Sandy — Report (Video)

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

In statements, the Red Cross cited the challenges all groups have faced in post-quake Haiti, including the country’s dysfunctional land title system.

“Like many humanitarian organizations responding in Haiti, the American Red Cross met complications in relation to government coordination delays, disputes over land ownership, delays at Haitian customs, challenges finding qualified staff who were in short supply and high demand, and the cholera outbreak, among other challenges,” the charity said.

The group said it responded quickly to internal concerns, including hiring an expert to train staff on cultural competency after St. Fort’s memo. While the group won’t provide a breakdown of its projects, the Red Cross said it has done more than 100. The projects include repairing 4,000 homes, giving several thousand families temporary shelters, donating $44 million for food after the earthquake, and helping fund the construction of a hospital.

“Millions of Haitians are safer, healthier, more resilient, and better prepared for future disasters thanks to generous donations to the American Red Cross,” McGovern wrote in a recent report marking the fifth anniversary of the earthquake.

In other promotional materials, the Red Cross said it has helped “more than 4.5 million” individual Haitians “get back on their feet.”

It has not provided details to back up the claim. And Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake, doubts the figure, pointing out the country’s entire population is only about 10 million.

“No, no,” Bellerive said of the Red Cross’ claim, “it’s not possible.”

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Eritrea: Surviving Climate Disaster in Africa's Sahel

The small, fiercely independent nation of Eritrea has mobilized its entire population to combat the effects of climate change. “When the rains failed in 2013, we had enough to eat while in much of the rest of the Sahel hundreds of thousands starved to death.” Reforestation and reservoir-building are key to surviving drought in new climate disorder.







By Thomas C. Mountain

“By the time Eritrea won its independence on the battlefield in 1991 less then 2% of our forests remained.”

ASMARA – For over 30 years the great Sahel Desert region in Africa has been a harbinger of the coming climate disaster our planet is facing and surviving such has become a national priority here in Eritrea on the eastern end of the Sahel.

Remember Michael Jackson and the great Ethiopian drought and famine of the early 1980’s? That was just the beginning. In 2003 and 2004 we here in Eritrea next door to Ethiopia suffered the first two year drought in history, followed in 2008 and 2009 by another back to back drought. Including the failure of the rains in 2013, Eritrea suffered 5 years of drought in a single decade.

This isn’t climate change, this is climate disaster and science tells us that the world should be preparing for even worse things to come. Thanks to the mainly western countries contribution to rising CO2 levels heating up the planet droughts will test the very ability of our species to survive, something we here in Eritrea know all to well.

After the droughts of 2003 and 2004 the government here initiated a major water conservation plan that, along with reforestation and soil conservation, is a template for other countries to use to prepare for the climate catastrophe being predicted.

"Our school children spend a month every summer planting trees."

What this means is that, everywhere possible, micro dams, dams and major water reservoirs are being constructed to capture the rains that do fall and use them to irrigate our fields, beginning to break the age old dependence on rain-fed agriculture.

Disastrous drought interrupted by record breaking floods is what is being foretold by scientists and the only way to survive these man made disasters is recognizing what needs to be done – and then busting ass to see it gets accomplished.

This may explain why Eritrea’s president is away from his office for weeks at a time overseeing the construction of major water reservoirs around the country. And all this hard work being lead from the very top has paid off for when the rains failed in 2013 we here in Eritrea had enough to eat while in much of the rest of the Sahel hundreds of thousands starved to death.

Water conservation is critical but so is reforestation and soil conservation, for without trees to help absorb the water and hold the soil in place and terraces to catch the soil the floods wash away our water reservoirs, which will fill with silt and undo all our hard work. As a result our school children spend a month every summer planting trees and communities, alongside the national service army, regularly schedule work days to build stone wall terraces to trap the soil run off.

“Everywhere possible, micro dams, dams and major water reservoirs are being constructed to capture the rains that do fall.”

Colonialism and deforestation go hand in hand everywhere for forests are the natural sanctuary for rebels fighting their colonial masters. Therefore, whether in Haiti or Eritrea, cutting down trees became a weapon against insurgency by our western colonializers.

When the Italians began to colonize Eritrea in the 1880’s over 30% of our country was forested. By the time Eritrea won its independence on the battlefield in 1991 less then 2% of our forests remained. This man made environmental holocaust left Eritrea very little in the way of reserves to survive the CO2 driven climate disasters we have since faced and forced our leaders to sacrifice a lot of other development projects that would have raised the standard of living for our people in our need to prepare for worse disasters to come.

Some years back the Eritrean president was ridiculed in the western media for calling for ten years of grain reserves being kept in storage, but today his plan is making all too much sense. Only time will tell if all our hard work will be enough to prevent the worse climate disasters foretold from wreaking havoc on this country, but what choice do we have?

Hopefully Eritrea’s efforts will provide a role model for other countries around the world and help prevent untold suffering by our brothers and sisters internationally.

_______________
Thomas C. Mountain has been living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. He can be reached at thomascmountain at gmail dot com or, when he is off in the field and away from the internet, which is much of the time, via mobile at 2917175665.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Japan's Ongoing Nuclear Disaster: Expert Says It May Be Impossible to Close Down Nuclear Plants that Melted Down After Japan's Earthquake (Video)

The expert in charge of decommissioning the nuclear plants admits he doesn't have the slightest idea of how to go about it.

150 Dead So Far - Hundreds Trapped in Coal Mine Explosion in Turkey

Screen capture from YouTube video.

By Humeyra Pamuk and Orhan Coskun
An explosion and fire in a coal mine in western Turkey killed at least 151 miners and trapped hundreds more on Tuesday, with the death toll expected to rise in the country's worst mining accident for more than two decades.

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said 787 workers had been in the mine in Soma, around 120 km (75 miles) northeast of the Aegean coastal city of Izmir, when the blast occurred.

Carbon monoxide poisoning killed most of those confirmed dead, while another 76 were injured and hospitalized, he told reporters at the scene of the disaster.

Rescue workers pumped oxygen into the mine to keep those trapped by the blaze alive, as thousands of family members and fellow workers, clamoring for information, gathered outside the town's hospital. A line of police held back the crowd as ambulances arrived.

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The Anniliation of the Globe's Honeybees Linked To Globes Most Used Pesticides: Imidacloprid and Clothianidin

Give Bees a Chance campaign launch, European Parliament - Jan 22, 2013. (Photo by
greensefa)

By Fabien Tepper
A new study from Harvard implicates two neonicotinoid pesticides, imidacloprid and clothianidin, in the ongoing plague of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder. Imidacloprid is the most widely used pesticide in the world, and both are approved by the EPA.

RELATED STUDY: Do Not Replace Honey Bees With RoboBees

A team of Harvard biologists has come closer to cracking the mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), eight years after its appearance.

CCD persists in transforming bee colonies around the world into ghost towns: by the end of each winter, some colonies wind up littered with dead bees and emptied of many more, with no signs of renewal.

"One of the defining symptomatic observations of CCD colonies is the emptiness of hives in which the amount of dead bees found inside the hives do not account for the total numbers of bees present prior to winter when they were alive," states the report, published May 9 in the Bulletin of Insectology.

The exact mechanism behind these collapses remains dauntingly unclear, but they have been linked with pathogen infestation, malnutrition, and pesticide exposure.

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Do Not Replace Honey Bees With RoboBees

Honey bee. (Photo: Andrew / Flickr)

By REV. BILLY TALEN
On May Day, we marched honey bee-pollinated food (a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, berries) into the Microrobotic Lab at Harvard University. We wore our bee-swarm costumes and the Queen Bee was regal (see video here). In this facility, scientists are sinning big time. They are accepting government money to design a replacement for the honey bee. The robot bee is called the RoboBee.

Two of the RoboBee project goals on the Microrobotics Lab website are artificial pollinaton and military surveillance. With the RoboBee research we have a blend of the visions of Monsanto's industrial agriculture and of world-wide military surveillance and control.

The project director, Dr. Robert J. Wood, is a wunderkind in drone technology, receiving grants and awards from the Navy and Air Force, as well as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - also known as DARPA. The notorious terror of the skies has long heralded the arrival surveillance and bombs that would have the flight capabilities of insects.

Monsanto and the Big Chem companies like Bayer, BASF and Syngenta are waiting in the wings for the robot bees to fly, not yet showing public support for the SmartBee. Perhaps their marketing people are telling them that they would look like opportunists if they seemed glad about the fake bees, since it is their neuropathic pesticides that are the main suspect in the "Colony Collapse" of the bees, with a 50 percent drop in its population since 2006. Big Chem is both a cause and beneficiary of this research.

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Stronger ‘Frackquakes’ Are On The Way, Scientists Warn: An Inevitable Result of Widespread Hydrolic Fracking

A Frack-Quake Future? - King Library, San José, CA -
San José Earthquake, 2007 (Photo by San José Lib)

By Emily Atkin
The man-made earthquakes that have been shaking up the southern United States only stand to get stronger and more dangerous as the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, increases, scientists warned at a Thursday conference.

According to multiple reports, scientists attending the Seismological Society of America annual meeting agreed that fracking can change the state of stress on existing faults to the point of failure, causing earthquakes. That stress is generally not caused by fuel extraction itself, but by a process called “wastewater injection,” where companies take the leftover water used to frack wells and inject it deep into the ground.

Though it was previously believed that the man-made earthquakes could not exceed a 5.0 magnitude, many now say that larger quakes could become the norm as more and more water is stored underground.

“I think ultimately, as fluids propagate and cover a larger space, the likelihood that it could find a larger fault and generate larger seismic events goes up,” Western University earth sciences professor Gail Atkinson reportedly said at the meeting.

Because of this and other warnings, the U.S. government also announced on Thursday that it would begin to track the risks that these so-called “frackquakes” pose, and start including them on official maps that help influence building codes.

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Train Crash Death Toll At Least 74 in DR Congo — Injured Trapped in Mangled Wreckage for Days

Scene of train wreck in the southern province of Katanga,
Democratic Republic of Congo, on April 22, 2014. (Numbi
Mathys/AFP)

Toll in DR Congo train crash rises to 74 dead (via AFP)

The toll in a train crash in DR Congo last week was raised to 74 dead on Sunday, the country's health minister said. Many people were trapped for days in the mangled wreckage of the goods train that flew off the rails in a swampy region about 65 kilometres…

Military Radar Tracked Doomed Flight MH370 — The Malaysian Prime Minister Finally Admits: Says He Will Give 'Full' Report 'Over the Course of the Week'

Malaysia PM Najib Razak. (Photo from APEC 2013)

By Adam Withnall
The Malaysian prime minister has finally confirmed reports that the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 was tracked by military radar, as he prepared to host US President Barack Obama in Kuala Lumpur seven weeks after the plane disappeared.

Najib Razak said a preliminary report into the incident would be made available to the public over the course of the coming week. It is expected to raise the issue of how Malaysia's air force and surveillance networks failed to track the plane once it lost contact with civilian air traffic controllers.

Previous reports have suggested that on the night of MH370's disappearance on 8 March, military radar picked up a mysterious aircraft moving across the Malaysian peninsula, but government officials have remained vague on any link to the missing Boeing 777.

Speaking to CNN, Najib confirmed that the radar did indeed track the plane once it had turned back from its original flight path — but said that this was only established "after the event".

He said he believed there was someone monitoring the radar at the time, but that nothing more was done to investigate the unidentified aircraft because "it was deemed not to be hostile".
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15 Years To Armageddon: UN Report Concludes Globe Has 15 Years for Massive Pollution Control — Or Global Warming Will Cause Mass Disaster

People holding signs like this use to be considered "crazy."
Today? - Not so much. (Photo by Matt Reinbold)

"Effective mitigations will not be achieved if individual nations advance their interests independently. The high-speed mitigation train would need to leave the station soon, and all of global society would have to get on board." —IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri

By Lisa Friedman and Tiffany Stecker
Averting a climate catastrophe won't be cheap, but it will be affordable as long as countries act urgently to set the wheels of a low-carbon transition into motion, the United Nations declared yesterday.

The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found greenhouse gas emissions steadily on the rise, growing more quickly between 2000 and 2010 than in any of the three previous decades. That's despite the global economic crisis, the creation of carbon markets and reams of city- and state-level policies worldwide aimed at curbing carbon.

If the world hopes to avert the worst impacts of warming and cut emissions 40 to 70 percent by midcentury, the next 15 years will be critical. After that, the report warns, options become more limited and the costs rise dramatically. But the good news, the panel found, is that the price of current solutions is "relatively modest" and governments are increasingly preparing to tackle the challenge.

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That 'Exxon Valdez' Oil Spill That Caused the Environmental Disaster in Alaska... Was In Fact Caused by BP

Photo by ARLIS Reference

By Greg Palast
Two decades ago, I was the investigator for the legal team that sold you the bullshit that a drunken captain was the principal cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the oil tanker crackup that poisoned over a thousand miles of Alaska’s coastline 25 years ago on March 24, 1989.

The truth is far uglier, and the real culprit—British Petroleum, now BP—got away without a scratch to its reputation or to its pocketbook.

Just this month, the Obama administration authorized BP to return to drilling in the Gulf.

It would be worth the time of our ever-trusting regulators to take a look at my Exxon Valdez files on BP. They would see a decades-long pattern of BP’s lies, bribes and cover-ups that led, inexorably, to the Deepwater Horizon blowout—and that continue today within BP’s worldwide oil operations.

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