UPI– International humanitarian organization Oxfam in Washington said global food prices could double in the next two decades.
The report released Tuesday, “Growing a Better Future,” said prices of staples such as corn were already at record highs.
The largest single factor, Oxfam said, is climate change. “Up to half of this rise is due to climate change and the world’s poorest people, who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, will be hardest hit,” Oxfam said in a statement.
Rising prices for staples in 2010 “pushed an estimated 44 million people into poverty,” Oxfam said.
The report, which kicks off a GROW campaign within the organization, “catalogs the symptoms of today’s broken food system. It warns we have entered a new age of crisis,” Oxfam said.
TRUTH OUT– For the first time, a scientific study has linked natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing with a pattern of drinking water contamination so severe that some faucets can be lit on fire.
The peer-reviewed study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stands to shape the contentious debate over whether drilling is safe and begins to fill an information gap that has made it difficult for lawmakers and the public to understand the risks.
The research was conducted by four scientists at Duke University. They found that levels of flammable methane gas in drinking water wells increased to dangerous levels when those water supplies were close to natural gas wells. They also found that the type of gas detected at high levels in the water was the same type of gas that energy companies were extracting from thousands of feet underground, strongly implying that the gas may be seeping underground through natural or manmade faults and fractures, or coming from cracks in the well structure itself.
“Our results show evidence for methane contamination of shallow drinking water systems in at least three areas of the region and suggest important environmental risks accompanying shale gas exploration worldwide,” the article states.
The group tested 68 drinking water wells in the Marcellus and Utica shale drilling areas in northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. Sixty of those wells were tested for dissolved gas. While most of the wells had some methane, the water samples taken closest to the gas wells had on average 17 times the levels detected in wells further from active drilling. The group defined an active drilling area as within one kilometer, or about six tenths of a mile, from a gas well.
CONSUMERIST– A group of art activists this week staged an unsanctioned protest
inside the world-famous Tate Modern museum in London by pouring oil over
a naked body lying on the floor.
Wearing black hoods, two of the artists slowly pour the oil from gas
cans painted with the BP logo over the fetal form of a third member
lying naked. A Bach piece in minor plays underneath the video, which is
safe for work.
The group behind the protest is called Liberate Tate, whose aim is to
get the museum to break off ties with BP and stop taking sponsorship
payola from the oil giant. The group was formed in 2010 during a
workshop on art and activism that the museum itself sponsored. “The art
activists running the workshops,” says the group on its website,
“were told by Tate curators that no interventions could be made against
the museum’s sponsors. The workshop participants refused this
censorship, ended the workshop with an intervention and decided to
continue their work together, setting up Liberate Tate the following
spring.”
“Liberate Tate believes Tate’s sponsorship by BP, a corporation engaged
in socially and ecologically destructive activities, is incompatible
with the museum’s ethical guidelines,” continues the group’s statement.
“Tate’s stated vision in regard to sustainability and climate change and
its reputation as a progressive institution is damaged by its
association with oil companies. In addition, Tate’s mission is
undermined if visitors to its galleries cannot enjoy great art without
the museum making them complicit in creating climate chaos. Liberate
Tate calls on the museum’s governing body to recognise this and end its
relationship with BP.”
Human Cost, Tate Britain Performance (87 minutes), charcoal and
sunflower oil 20 April 2011– First anniversary of the Gulf of Mexico
disaster.
LIBERATETATE– On the same day, 166 people who work in the arts
published a letter in the Guardian calling on Tate to end its
sponsorship relationship with BP. “In the year since its catastrophic
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, BP has massively ramped up its
investment in controversial tar sands extraction in Canada, has been
shown to have been a key backer of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, and has
attempted to commence drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean. While BP
continues to jeopardise ecosystems communities and the climate by the
reckless pursuit of “frontier” oil, cultural institutions like Tate
damage their reputation by continuing to be associated with such a
destructive corporation.
The massive cuts to public arts funding
in the UK have left hundreds of culturally important arts organisations
in a position of great financial vulnerability, which means that the
debate about the appropriateness of particular potential corporate
sponsors like BP and Shell is more relevant than ever. As people working
in the arts, we believe that corporate sponsorship does not exist in an
ethical vacuum. In light of the negative social and ecological impacts
of BP around the world, we urge Tate to demonstrate its commitment to a
sustainable future by ending its sponsorship relationship with BP.”
‘End oil sponsorship of the arts’ on Facebook, @liberatetate on twitter
RAW STORY– Governments approved on Monday a U.N. report projecting that
renewable energies such as solar, wind or hydropower could leap to
supply almost 80 percent of the world’s demand by 2050, with the right
policies.
The study broadly matched a draft written by scientists before the
meeting, but environmental group Greenpeace said some findings were
watered down due to opposition by OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia and also
by Brazil.
The report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) also said that a shift to cleaner energies would help cut
greenhouse gas emissions, which it blamed for climate change including
floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.
“Close to 80 percent of the world energy supply could be met by
renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public
policies,” it said in a statement after government delegates approved a
special report at talks in Abu Dhabi.
INSTITUTE FOR SOUTHERN STUDIES – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically
increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water,
food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or “dirty
bomb” attacks.
The move preceded the nuclear disaster now unfolding in Japan in the
wake of last month’s devastating earthquake and tsunami. Documents released today by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility show the plan has sparked concerns within EPA.
The
agency’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air (ORIA) has prepared an
update of the 1992 “Protective Action Guides” for radiation exposure.
Other EPA divisions have raised concerns about how much the new
guidelines would raise allowable exposures.
As Charles Openchowski of EPA’s Office of General Counsel wrote in a January 2009 e-mail to ORIA:
“[T]his
guidance would allow cleanup levels that exceed MCLs [Maximum
Contamination Limits under the Safe Drinking Water Act] by a factor of
100, 1000, and in two instances 7 million and there is nothing to
prevent those levels from being the final cleanup achieved (i.e., it’s
not confined to immediate response of emergency phase).”
Other
EPA officials have raised concerns that drinking water containing
radioactive contamination at the proposed limits would result in acute
health effects such as vomiting and fever. PEER obtained the internal
EPA e-mails after filing a lawsuit last fall under the Freedom of
Information Act. It is still waiting for the agency to turn over
thousands more communications.
UPI– International humanitarian organization Oxfam in Washington said global food prices could double in the next two decades.
TRUTH OUT
INSTITUTE FOR SOUTHERN STUDIES