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Shell ordered to stop wasteful, poisonous ‘gas flaring’ in Nigeria
Haider Rizvi, OneWorld.net via Common Dreams
Multinational oil companies were ordered by Nigeria’s highest court this week to stop engaging in a decades-old process that indigenous and environmental rights groups say has been poisoning the oil-rich area where Africa’s Niger River meets the Atlantic Ocean.
“This victory marks a new dawn in the struggle of the communities of the Niger Delta,” said Reverend Nnimmo Bassey, executive director of the Nigerian group Environmental Rights Action, soon after the Federal High Court announced its judgment Monday against the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria. The decision is expected to have far-reaching implications for the local activities of ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, and other multinational oil giants as well.
“We expect this judgment to be respected and that for once the oil corporations will accept the truth and bring their sinful flaring activities to a halt,” Bassey added.
The case was brought by the indigenous Iwerekan community in Delta State, with support from the Environmental Rights Action group affiliated with Friends of the Earth (FoE) International, a federation of environmental campaigners that claims 1.5 million members and supporters in 70 countries.
Justice C.V. Nwokorie ruled that the damaging and wasteful practice of flaring by all the major companies operating in the region, which also include TotalFinaElf and Agip, cannot lawfully continue.
Nigeria has been the world’s largest gas flarer for years. It has caused more greenhouse gas emissions than all other sources in Sub-Saharan Africa combined, according to environmental groups.
Gas is burned off–or “flared”–when it is found in association with oil, explains FoE. This “associated gas” is often seen as a waste product because the company drilled for oil, not gas.
Gas flaring wastes millions of cubic feet of gas every day, costing Nigerians at least $2.5 billion per year, according to the group, which says the World Bank estimates flaring in Africa could produce about 50% of the current power consumption of the entire African continent.
(15 November 2005)
Sun shines a light on efficiency
Joel Makower, WorldChanging
Add Scott McNealy to GE’s Jeff Immelt among business leaders trying to turn sustainability into a big business opportunity.
With great fanfare, McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, announced on Monday the introduction of a new energy-efficient processor that will debut in a new line of servers by the end of the year. The company is calling the chip “the world’s first Eco-responsible processor.” Its research shows that its UltraSPARC T1 processor “could eliminate the number of Web servers in the world by half, slashing power requirements and having the same effect in reducing carbon dioxide emissions as planting one million acres of trees.”
This is no small matter. While a great deal of focus has been on reducing the energy use of consumer electronics, such as PCs and TVs, far less has gone into the energy impacts of server farms
(15 November 2005)
David Holmgren speaks with GPM’s Julian Darley (audio, transcript)
Global Public Media
David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, talks in depth about the implications of peak oil for for food security and a post-petroleum future.
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Growing your own food is a political act because it contasts with the way most people get their food which is through huge food supply chains that basically involve earth destroying practices.
…Our food habits, I suppose, are as unsustainable as our food production systems. And it could be argued that they are actually more the driver to the unsustainability of agriculture than what is happening at the production end.
Most dramatically is the demand for constant steady supply of out of season fresh produce, because this requires enormous manipulation of the growing environment through greenhouses and other methods, and most particularly long distance transport…
…Now since that time during the 80’s and the 90’s a lot of permaculture activism has inevitably worked within a social context where food has been the cheapest it has been in human history relative to wages, electricity and fuel costs have in many cases fallen relative to real wages, so many of the other reasons for permaculture strategies like community gardens and city farms, to take one example, it was the social values and other environmental values that became the points of arguing for or proposing these things rather than food security. So permaculture, like a lot of other environmental strategies has had to work within this environment where the really fundamental, if you like, “survival reasons” for doing some of these things didn’t really seem to have any credibility.
…This problem of how the reduction in energy will play out especially in relation to food supply is enormously complex and it’s one I’ve thought about for almost thirty years, and constantly new information, new insights add bits to that picture, but I think inherently we are dealing with unpredictable systems. Not just because we don’t have enough information about what is going on, we are dealing with points of chaotic change and mergents of new possibilities and the backwash of environmental, social, psycho-social debt, if you like, which we’ve pushed away with the power of energy and resource use. We’ve pushed these problems away and these problems are coming back that have been accumulating. And we don’t know exactly how those are going to play out.
…Some of the positive things that can come from that is the low input and organic ways of farming for the first time start to become competitive, not because there’s a premium for organic produce, but because of the lower exposure to input costs. So that the more self-reliant the farm is in its own fertility cycle the more it is able to continue producing at a lower cost structure in a world of greater energy costs. The other factor of course is the localisation of what I mentioned before where home food gardening disconnects this chain of supply. So that means locally produced food, again, has a competitive advantage against large scale global supply. So some of the things that have been extremely difficult in the past thirty years to argue in terms of reform of agriculture and food supply along ecological lines actually may happen without anyone even thinking it’s a good idea. So there’s an enormous number of positives that can come from this process, but I think it’s unlikely to be a smooth transition even in the best of circumstances and I think it’s inevitable that people will look back on the time where they could just go down to the shop and get this huge list of things of whatever they chose, but I suppose there’s also what I spoke about: the joy of reconnecting with a local and seasonal food supply that could become more positive outcomes.
(7 September 2005)
The transcript of this interview is now online.
Farmers benefited from clean energy
Xinhua News Agency (Chinese govt.)
It is lunch time. Zhang Guifang, a woman from Duyao, a far-flung village in Qingyuan County, northwest China’s Gansu Province, starts fire and cooks food on a stove powered by methane gas. A lavish lunch is ready in 40 minutes. “Cooking with a methane gas stove is convenient and no longer a nuisance: it not only saves half the time with a stove fired by straw or firewood, but is also less polluting,” said Zhang.
Apart from cooking, Zhang also boils water on her methane gas stove, which is connected to a methane gas pond dug beneath the family’s pig sty via a white plastic tube. Zhang is just one of the many beneficiaries from a provincial new energy promotion scheme for rural areas, with financial support from the provincial government of Gansu, according to Pan Xiaoren, an official with the office for promotion of new energiesin rural areas of Gansu Province. Under the program, each rural household is provided with construction materials worth 1,200 yuan (about 147.97 US dollars) for building methane gas ponds.
Duan Chengyi, chief of the station for the promotion of agrotechniques with Dalu Township, which exercises jurisdiction over Zhang’s village, said methane gas ponds were now very popular among rural households as they found using methane gas as a source of energy caused no smoke. Up to now, rural households in Gansu have built 123,000 methanegas ponds.
With the energy provided by methane gas ponds around legions ofrural houses, farmers in Gansu burn less straws or firewood for cooking or keeping warmth, saving 20,000 hectares of forested land from destruction or energy equivalent to 1.5 million tons of standard coal, said Pan. In the meantime, methane gas ponds have offered organic fertilizers to 4,667 hectares of arable land in this landlocked province, said Pan, who added that each rural household that uses methane gas as a source of energy could save 1,000 yuan (123.4 US dollars) a year.
(15 November 2005)
