Fossil Fuel Companies are the biggest Threat to Life.

                                                          Comments due by April 5, 2015

“Will we go ahead?” asked Shell CEO, Ben van Beurden, rhetorically, about the oil company’s plans to drill in the Arctic. “Yes if we can. I’d be so disappointed if we wouldn’t.” Van Beurden had the grace to concede that his plans “divide society,” but he seemed unable to comprehend that they might condemn it.

From new research showing that recent sea level rise is “far worse than previously thought”, to updated confirmation of how far we are transgressing our planetary environmental boundaries, an almost daily accumulation of evidence seems unable still to connect van Beurden’s words to their full implication.

What if, instead, he had said to the press conference gathered to hear Shell’s quarterly financial results a few days ago: “We wish to inform you that our business plan is to destabilise permanently the climate on which you, your families and society depend.”

Harsh? Perhaps, but their strategy will end the party for the rest of us, so that their corporate party might continue. In fact, it seems that extreme weather in the form of drought is already breaking hearts in Brazil by forcing cities to cancel carnival, the greatest party of all.

It’s ironic. Those who argue it’s a good idea to respect nature’s various thresholds (like not making farming so toxic that you poison the bees who kindly pollinate our food crops) traditionally get labelled as fun-free spoilsports. But it seems it’s those who recognise no limits at all who represent the greatest threat to life’s party.

While the global industrial exploitation of nature drives a mass extinction event on land and sea, it becomes ever clearer that our own well-being is dependent on the general condition of the environment. Our health, both physiological and psychological, is deeply connected to and relies on the diversity of life.

Now, a new global calculator developed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, suggests a course of action to prevent irreversible warming that could be as good for the web of life as it is for our quality of life. Radical changes to farming, transport, food and fuel will be needed, but it envisages a world of spreading forest canopies, clean, quiet electric transport and healthy, increasingly vegetarian diets. With such a potential win-win, why would anyone choose bad times with business as usual? The status quo is tenacious.

If you look at the UK’s biggest lobbying groups at the centre of European power in Brussels, their scale seems to be in direct proportion to the damage they do and how likely they are to resist progressive change. Oil, finance and aviation are all in the top five. And, even as the economics of fracking and remote oil exploration, such as in the Arctic, have fallen apart, their lobbies remain persistent and audacious. How else could a Conservative party, which extols the notion of an English person’s home being their castle, be persuaded to promote changes in the trespass law to allow fracking firms to drill beneath homes without the owners’ permission?

Logic, consistency and science become inconvenient to indefensible positions. When the US Senate last month voted on whether climate change was real and caused by human activities it was creating future folklore. Accepting the first, but not the second proposition, the Senate put its debate on a par with the famous, and now seen as absurd, 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ case in theUS, which effectively put the theory of evolution on trial.

History is littered with the sorrow of foreknowledge of terrible things about to happen. “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families,” a line written in a letter by Tutsi pastors in 1994 must be among the saddest words ever written, as they proved correct and became the title of a book on the Rwandan massacres. Like the Holocaust of half a century earlier, there were signposts pointing toward impending atrocity. Yet, a strange disbelief about the possibility of truly extreme action left even informed observers paralysed.

Don’t we now have enough foreknowledge on global warming to call a halt in the face of those who would not only burn all currently known fossil fuel reserves, but search for more?

Knowledge and learning from history are themes in The Edge of Extinction: Travels with Enduring People in Vanishing Lands, by the author Jules Pretty who draws a map of hope from the mountains of China to the Russian steppe and the snows of Canada. He describes an astonishing diversity of human experience in which our species has learned to live well with, rather than against, nature and often each other.

Done intelligently and not dogmatically, we might still make a pleasant and lasting home for everyone on our blue and green planet. But, to make the most of it and keep the party going, we’ll have to stop clinging to dead economic models which wreck our environmental foundations. Because, sadly, for those excited by the possibility of planetary relocation, the nearest known other Earth-like planet is around 13 light years away and would probably take a few hundred thousand years to get to. That’s a long time to wait to get another party started, when you can keep the one you’re already at going strong. (The Guardian)

A California town decides whether to drill or not?

                                                    Comments due March 29, 2015

— This quaint and quirky seaside community south of Los Angeles has had a conflicted relationship with the oil industry for close to a century. It has variously approved oil drilling, banned it, approved it and prohibited it again. During one yes­on­oil stretch, it contracted with an energy company to put 34 wells on a 1.3­acre city maintenance yard a few blocks from a stretch of beach that normally bustles with surfers and swimmers. On Tuesday, the residents of Hermosa Beach are going to vote yet again on an oil and gas drilling initiative — whether to allow a contract with the energy company E&B Natural Resources Management to proceed despite a current drilling ban. The contract, which could mean hundreds of millions of dollars for the local government, received final approval from the City Council in 1992, but it has been in limbo ever since. A vote to block the drilling would come at an unusual cost: $17.5 million in damages to the energy company, the equivalent of about half the annual general fund budget in this city of almost 20,000 people. There have been voter initiatives to restrict oil drilling, particularly fracking, up and down the California coast, but none seem to have quite the complications and emotions associated with the one here. Across this community on a hillside rising up from the beach, homes are blistering with signs urging a no vote on Measure O, as the drilling initiative is known: “Keep oil out of Hermosa.” All five members of the City Council, including the mayor, have urged voters to defeat it, despite the huge penalty — part of an agreement the city signed with the company to end a lawsuit — and the loss of future oil revenue. “It’s a little more than we probably should have paid,” Mayor Peter Tucker said, referring to the deal for potential damages. “But if it gets us out of this constant, constant oil issue we’ve had hanging over us for 30 years, I think it’s money well spent.” “We are not an oil town,” Mr. Tucker said. “We don’t need the money.” E&B has begun an all­out campaign to persuade voters to approve the initiative, including the kind of television commercials that seem more suited to a governor’s race. (No local cable for this campaign: E&B says it has bought time on Fox News and CNN.) The advertisements, with a backdrop of sun­dappled beaches and comforting music, dispute claims that the project would harm the environment and note that the method of drilling would mean no unsightly oil platforms on the horizon. The wells would drop straight into the ground before turning toward the oil under the ocean. Officials said the project was being jeopardized by unfounded fears in a state that has long been protective of the environment and wary of oil companies. “It’s the California coastline, and that’s always a challenge,” Michael Finch, a vice president with E&B, said. “We suffer from the ‘I don’t want it in my backyard’ syndrome. But you are talking about a 1.3­acre site that would be behind a 35­foot wall.” He said it would be more environmentally sound to drill for the oil here and put it right into the California distribution system than to ship it from across the globe. The campaign has set off fraught neighbor­versus­neighbor debates about the future of this peaceful community, while fueling pointed questions about how the city ended up in such a financially vulnerable position. (City officials noted that the energy company had originally pushed for a much higher penalty for breaking the contract.) An environmental­impact statement commissioned by Hermosa Beach listed nine potential areas of concern that it said the company would be unable to mitigate, including air quality, aesthetics and noise. “Hermosa Beach is a real small beach town,” said Hany Fangary, an environmental lawyer who is a member of the City Council. “We like the feeling of a beach town. If you have someone coming in and putting 34 oil wells right near the beach, it changes the character of the city.” Supporters of the project say the fears voiced by opponents — declining property values, offensive odors and the potential for a spill that could spray fuel into the water, on the beach or over neighboring houses — are exaggerated. “I’m very much in favor of it,” said Jim Sullivan, a commercial real estate broker. “It’s the best thing to come down the road for Hermosa Beach in its entire history.” Concern is driven in no small part by the conspicuous location for the proposed wells: a maintenance yard, now used to store city vehicles, that is in the middle of the city and surrounded by homes and businesses. For months at a time, drill rigs would soar as much as 110 feet, and construction is supposed to take at least three years. This is hardly a community of beachfront mansions. The streets are lined with small (but not inexpensive) homes where people, though able to feel the sweep of Pacific Ocean breezes, do not exactly have privacy: The entire community fills just 1.4 square miles. “We are all kind of crammed in here,” said George Schmeltzer, 76, a former mayor who has lived here for 53 years and is a leader of the opposition. “You can hear your neighbor brush his teeth. We are off­kilter in a pleasant kind of way.” “It’s not an atomic bomb,” he said of the project. “But doggone it, it doesn’t seem right for a residential neighborhood.” The company anticipates that the drilling would produce 35 million barrels over the 34­year life of the project, producing a potential $500 million windfall for Hermosa. (The revenue projection was made when the price of oil was close to $100 a barrel; it is about half that now.) But the more pressing question may be whether to pay $17.5 million to terminate the drilling contract. The initial ban on drilling was passed in 1932, about 13 years after California awarded Hermosa Beach the tidelands with the oil fields. In 1984, with the promise of much­needed revenue for the city, voters approved initiatives granting two exemptions to permit oil drilling. In 1986, the City Council approved the first version of a contract that would be repeatedly amended over the next six years, awarding drilling rights to a company that was a predecessor to E&B. In 1995, voters reinstated the ban on oil drilling, leading the company to sue for damages. After years of litigation, the city in 2012 said it would let drilling begin only if approved by a ballot measure, and agreed to pay E&B the penalty if the initiative was defeated. The city has a surplus of close to $7 million that it has put aside to help pay the penalty. The rest would be paid in roughly $800,000 annual installments. “An $800,000­a­year payment to preserve the quality of life and the special beach community that we have certainly seems worth it,” said Stacey Armato, one of the leaders of the anti­drilling effort. (NYT March3, 2015)