Tag Archives: civil

GOP House Candidate: There’s a Gay Plot to Recruit and Sodomize Your Kids

by bimfwc5k Posted on May 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his seven years in Congress, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) distinguished himself by calling biology “lies straight from the pit of hell” and accusing President Barack Obama of establishing a secret national police force to push a Marxist dictatorship. But the man who may replace Broun in Washington could outdo him.

In a 2012 book, that candidate—pastor and talk radio host Jody Hice—alleges the gay community has a secret plot to recruit and sodomize children, In It’s Now or Never: A Call to Reclaim America, Hice also asserts that supporters of abortion rights are worse than Hitler and compares gay relationships to bestiality and incest. He proposes that Muslims be stripped of their First Amendment rights.

On Tuesday, Hice clinched a spot in the runoff to replace Broun, who declined to run for re-election in order to run for Senate. Hice will face businessman Michael Collins in the July 22 runoff. In a district that gave 62 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney two years ago, Hice, the leading vote-getter in the first round of balloting, stands a good chance of being elected to Congress.

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GOP House Candidate: There’s a Gay Plot to Recruit and Sodomize Your Kids

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Finally, the NYPD Will Stop Seizing Condoms from Suspected Sex Workers

by KathiIvest Posted on May 13, 2014

Mother Jones

The New York Police Department announced this week that its officers would stop seizing unused condoms as evidence of prostitution, which is a significant win for public health advocates. Because prostitution charges rarely go to trial, advocates have long argued that the main consequence of arresting suspected sex workers for carrying condoms is to discourage protected sex—and sabotage efforts to bring down the rate of HIV/AIDS.

On Monday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed. “A policy that inhibits people from safe sex is a mistake and dangerous,” he said. “And there are a number of ways you can go about putting together evidence without condoms.”

Still, New York police may continue to use condoms as evidence for arrests in sex trafficking and promotion of prostitution cases, which civil rights and health advocates say leaves a huge loophole in the law. And the practices of counting condoms as evidence of a crime or confiscating them remain widespread in urban centers across America, with devastating health effects.

Police departments in Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all use similar tactics, even as these cities spend millions distributing free condoms and trying to protect sex workers at risk for contracting or transmitting HIV. In these cities, a 2012 Human Rights Watch report found, “Police stops and searches for condoms are often a result of profiling, a practice of targeting individuals as suspected offenders for who they are, what they are wearing and where they are standing, rather than on the basis of any observed illegal activity.”

The best example of this practice gone wrong may be New Orleans. Civil rights advocates there blame aggressive police tactics—including the seizure of condoms—for Louisiana’s staggering HIV/AIDS rate. A December Human Rights Watch report found that “sex workers, transgender women and others at high risk of HIV infection told us that they were afraid to carry condoms and that they sometimes had to engage in sex without protection out of fear of police harassment.” Partly as a result, the state’s infection rate is twice the national average.

The problem, the report continues, is not just that criminalizing condoms makes people less likely to carry them. Arresting individuals on such a thin premise guarantees that people at a high risk for contracting or transmitting HIV/AIDS get arrested a lot. This interferes with their medical treatment. “One transgender woman was arrested for prostitution 10 times in three years, and has yet to keep her appointment with the clinic,” the report states.

The New York general assembly and the California legislature are both pushing measures to ban the use of condoms as evidence across the state. Health advocates across the country have vocalized their support for these bills, but their merits may be best summed up by Maria, a sex worker in San Francisco who spoke to Human Rights Watch in 2012: “Why is the city giving me condoms when I can’t carry them without going to jail?”

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Finally, the NYPD Will Stop Seizing Condoms from Suspected Sex Workers

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Europe wimps out again on airlines’ carbon pollution

by PorfiriBidencop Posted on April 4, 2014

Europe wimps out again on airlines’ carbon pollution

By

Shutterstock / Lukas Rebec

European efforts to force international airlines to pay for their carbon pollution will stay parked on the runway for at least several more years.

Airlines are covered by the European Union’s Emissions Trading System. Airfares for flights within Europe have included a carbon fee under that system since the beginning of 2012. The plan has been to expand the program to include international flights that begin or end in Europe, but that proposal has been vigorously opposed by China, the U.S., and other countries. China had put a large order for aircraft from Europe-based Airbus on hold over the dispute.

On Thursday, amid promises that the climate-unfriendly airline industry will soon launch its own climate program, the U.S. and China prevailed, again, clinching a years-long delay. Members of the European Parliament voted 458 to 120 to exempt flights in and out of Europe from the emissions trading program until early 2017. A bid to delay the program until 2020 was rejected by the lawmakers.

“We have the next International Civil Aviation Organization assembly in 2016,” parliamentarian Peter Liese said. “If it fails to deliver a global [climate] agreement, then nobody could justify our maintaining such an exemption.” But so far the aviation industry’s efforts to develop its own climate plan have been feeble.

“The [European] Commission would of course have preferred and fought for a higher level of ambition,” E.U. Climate Commissioner
Connie Hedegaard said. “It would’ve been better for Europe’s self-respect and reputation and even more important, for the climate. But we are where we are.”


Source
EU drops plan to extend CO2 rules to international flights, Reuters
EU Lawmakers Limit Carbon Charge on Airlines, The Wall Street Journal
EU backs compromise on plane CO2 emissions, BBC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Europe wimps out again on airlines’ carbon pollution

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In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

by ClaritaINAJ Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Thomas Nast/Library of Congress; Scott Brown: Seamas Culligan/ZUMA

Scott Brown has a carpetbagging problem. On Monday, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts—who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire—defended his Granite State bona fides by taking a page from Lisa Simpson: “Do I have the best credentials? Probably not. ‘Cause, you know, whatever.”

At this point, it’s the rare Brown story that doesn’t at least allude to the dreaded c-word. “Carpetbagger or Comeback Kid?” asked the Washington Examiner‘s Rebecca Berg. “Scott Brown’s first hurdle in the Granite State will be addressing the carpetbagging charge,” argued US News & World Report‘s David Catanese. Respondents to a March poll from Suffolk University, a plurality of whom disapproved of Brown, used words like “carpetbagger” and “interloper” to describe the ex-senator. His opponent in the Republican primary, former Sen. Bob Smith, has even offered to buy Brown a road map to the state—although Smith has run for Senate in Florida twice in the last decade.

If Brown wants to go back to Washington next winter, he should probably come up with a better response than “whatever.” But his critics in Washington have it all wrong. For more than a century, carpetbaggers have gotten a bad rap for all the wrong reasons.

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In Defense of Scott Brown, Carpetbagger

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Why There’s an Even Larger Racial Disparity in Private Prisons Than in Public Ones

by czeajanvsn Posted on February 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s well known that people of color are vastly overrepresented in US prisons. African Americans and Latinos constitute 30 percent of the US population and 60 percent of its prisoners. But a new study by University of California-Berkeley researcher Christopher Petrella addresses a fact of equal concern. Once sentenced, people of color are more likely than their white counterparts to serve time in private prisons, which have higher levels of violence and recidivism (PDF) and provide less sufficient health care and educational programming than equivalent public facilities.

The study compares the percentage of inmates identifying as black or Hispanic in public prisons and private prisons in nine states. It finds that there are higher rates of people of color in private facilities than public facilities in all nine states studied, ranging from 3 percent in Arizona and Georgia to 13 percent in California and Oklahoma. According to Petrella, this disparity casts doubt on cost-efficiency claims made by the private prison industry and demonstrates how ostensibly “colorblind” policies can have a very real effect on people of color.

The study points out an important link between inmate age and race. Not only do private prisons house high rates of people of color, they also house low rates of individuals over the age of 50—a subset that is more likely to be white than the general prison population. According to the study, “the states in which the private versus public racial disparities are the most pronounced also happen to be the states in which the private versus public age disparities are most salient.” (California, Mississippi, and Tennessee did not report data on inmate age.)

Private prisons have consistently lower rates of older inmates because they often contractually exempt themselves from housing medically expensive—which often means older—individuals (see excerpts from such exemptions in California, Oklahoma, and Vermont), which helps them keep costs low and profits high. This is just another example of the growing private prison industry’s prioritization of profit over rehabilitation, which activists say leads to inferior prison conditions and quotas requiring high levels of incarceration even as crime levels drop. The number of state and federal prisoners housed in private prisons grew by 37 percent from 2002 to 2009, reaching 8 percent of all inmates in 2010.

The high rate of incarceration among young people of color is partly due to the war on drugs, which introduced strict sentencing policies and mandatory minimums that have disproportionately affected non-white communities for the past 40 years. As a result, Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows that in 2009, only 33.2 percent of prisoners under 50 reported as white, as opposed to 44.2 percent of prisoners aged 50 and older.

So when private prisons avoid housing older inmates, they indirectly avoid housing white inmates as well. This may explain how private facilities end up with “a prisoner profile that is far younger and far ‘darker’… than in select counterpart public facilities.”

Private prisons claim to have more efficient practices, and thus lower operating costs, than public facilities. But the data suggest that private prisons don’t save money through efficiency, but by cherry-picking healthy inmates. According to a 2012 ACLU report, it costs $34,135 to house an “average” inmate and $68,270 to house an individual 50 or older. In Oklahoma, for example, the percentage of individuals over 50 in minimum and medium security public prisons is 3.3 times that of equivalent private facilities.

“Given the data, it’s difficult for private prisons to make the claim that they can incarcerate individuals more efficiently than their public counterparts,” Petrella tells Mother Jones. “We need to be comparing apples to apples. If we’re looking at different prisoner profiles, there is no basis to make the claim that private prisons are more efficient than publics.”

He compared private prisons to charter schools that accept only well-performing students and boast of their success relative to public schools.

David Shapiro, former staff attorney at the ACLU National Prison Project, agrees. “The study is an example of the many ways in which for-profit prisons create an illusion of fiscal responsibility even though the actual evidence of cost savings, when apples are compared to apples, is doubtful at best,” he says. “Privatization gimmicks are a distraction from the serious business of addressing our addiction to mass incarceration.”

But in addition to casting doubt on the efficacy of private prison companies, Petrella says his results “shed light on the ways in which ostensibly colorblind policies and attitudes can actually have very racially explicit outcomes. Racial discrimination cannot exist legally, yet still manifests itself.”

Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, calls the study a “compelling case” for a link between age disparities and race disparities in public and private prison facilities. “The modern private prison industry has its origins in the convict lease system that developed during the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War, as a means of incarcerating freed slaves and leasing them to private companies,” he says. “Sadly, Mr. Petrella’s research indicates that the exploitation of minority prisoners continues, with convict chain gangs being replaced by privately-operated prisons and jails.”

*The study draws on data from nine states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas—selected because they house at least 3,000 individuals in private minimum and medium security facilities.

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Why There’s an Even Larger Racial Disparity in Private Prisons Than in Public Ones

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Mark Ruffalo Wants You to Imagine a 100 Percent Clean Energy Future

by ker3roa Posted on January 3, 2014

green4us

The celebrity activist isn’t just against fracking; he wants to turn the conversation to green solutions. Mark Ruffalo at a New York City anti-fracking demonstration in 2010. Bryan Smith/ZUMA For Mark Ruffalo, environmental activism started out with something to oppose, to be against: Fracking. It all began when the actor, perhaps best known for his role as Bruce Banner (The Hulk) in Marvel’s The Avengers, was raising his three small children in the town of Callicoon, in upstate New York. At that time the Marcellus Shale fracking boom was coming on strong and was poised to expand into New York, even as the area also saw a series of staggering floods, each one seemingly more unprecedented than the last. “That was alarming,” remembers Ruffalo on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream below). “Not only alarming to me, but also alarming to all the farmers who used to make fun of me for talking about climate change and global warming.” In response, Ruffalo launched Water Defense, a nonprofit that takes on fracking and extreme or unconventional energy extraction in general (from mountaintop removal mining to deep sea drilling), and does so with a focus on grassroots activism. In the process, Ruffalo has become quite the visible spokesman: He even unleashed some Hulk-style anger toward the energy industry on the Colbert Report. But if you think Ruffalo is just another celeb with an anti-corporate tilt, you’re missing the real story. His true passion is promoting a clean energy solution to our climate and water problems, and demonstrating how feasible it is. Today. Like, now. Mark Ruffalo The Toronto Star/ZUMA “For the first time in human history, we’re actually at a place, technologically speaking, where we can make this transition,” explains Ruffalo. “And the amount of money, and resources, that we pour into this fossil fuel infrastructure, which has been an appendage to us, like a third leg that we’re dragging around, will be freed up, and no longer will we be worrying about having to extract energy. We’ll be just harvesting what’s already pouring on us every single day.” Ruffalo’s shift toward clean energy advocacy was a natural evolution from the fracking fight. “What I started to feel was, you can’t credibly say ‘no’ to something unless you can come up with an alternative that is equal to or better than what is being offered,” he says. And for that alternative, he naturally turned to scientists. Ruffalo had come across research by Mark Jacobson, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, on the potential for the US to move to 100 percent renewable energy in the coming decades. “So I went to him and I said, ‘Hey Mark, could you make a plan for New York state based on this broad concept that the United States could actually do it, and do it in my lifetime hopefully, and definitely in my kids’ lifetime?” Jacobson initially demurred, saying he didn’t have time to write down much more than a few paragraphs. But he didn’t hold out for long. “The next day in my email inbox I had 40 pages of what is now a feasibility study on moving New York state from fossil fuels to renewable energy by 2030,” laughs Ruffalo. That study is here; it describes a state drawing 50 percent of its power from wind (10 percent onshore and 40 percent offshore), 38 percent from various forms of solar power, and the remainder from sources like geothermal and hydroelectric power—all while saving money, producing more jobs, and even saving lives (thanks to cleaner air). Notably, the New York state plan doesn’t just eliminate oil and coal; it also avoids nuclear power and natural gas. Here’s a figure from Jacobson’s paper, showing how much of New York’s total area would have to be devoted to clean energy projects to pull it off: Area required to implement a 100 percent clean energy plan for New York based on wind, water, and solar (“WWS”). Mark Jacobson et al, Energy Policy. To be sure, critics have questioned the feasibility of such a swift and absolute energy transformation. But Ruffalo isn’t deterred; the New York state study was just the beginning. “In the next few months, we will be dropping 50 plans for 50 states,” he says. The draft plans for California and Washington are already available. Meanwhile, Jacobson, Ruffalo, banker Marco Krapels, and documentary filmmaker Josh Fox have formed a new organization called the Solutions Project, which declares that “it’s not enough to simply be against something”; rather, the organization wants to use “science + business + culture to accelerate the transition to 100% renewable energy.” So is all of this just crazy and unrealistic? Consider some facts about the impressive growth of solar energy of late: A solar energy system is now installed every four minutes in the US, according to GTM Research. By 2016, that’s projected to be down to 83 seconds. According to the Solar Energy Industry Organization, the price of a solar panel has declined 60 percent just since 2011. Walmart is now producing more solar power at its stores than 38 US states. But the most impressive statistics about solar power involve its abundant supply and stunning potential. According to one estimate, the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface in one and half hours exceeds the entire world energy consumption in the year 2001. Such are the facts, but grasping what they really mean is another matter. And to hear Ruffalo talk about clean energy is to encounter a degree of optimism that is as infectious as it is rare. “We’re not getting the messaging about how wonderful a world we’re going to be living in when we make this change,” he says. People don’t know, Ruffalo continues, “what it will look like to go outside and see no smog. What it will look like to have cars that don’t make any noise, or have any exhaust come out of them.” To help in that visualization, Ruffalo is teaming up with the filmmaker and TV personality Jason Silva to make short-subject videos about “this beautiful concept of the abundance that will be manifested to us once we move to renewable energy.” And he has partnered with Mosaic, a company that helps to crowd-fund solar projects, in a “Put Solar on It” campaign to rapidly increase the number of US solar installations in 2014 (while making money for investors along the way). Just last week on the Fox Business Network, Ruffalo could be found promoting the Mosaic project to an audience of not-exactly-lefty investors. So will Ruffalo ever act in or produce a clean energy or global warming movie? He’s “mulling it over,” he says. “An issue has got to mature to a place that that story can be told without it smacking as a polemic,” he adds. You have to hit a kind of cultural sweet spot, sort of like what happened with Ruffalo’s influential 2010 film The Kids Are All Right, about same-sex parenting. In the meantime, Ruffalo wants you to simply imagine what our energy future could be. “A spill for a solar panel,” he says, “is a sunny day.” You can stream the full Inquiring Minds interview with Mark Ruffalo here: This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by best-selling author Chris Mooney and neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas, also features a discussion of what the year 2013 meant for climate and energy. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunesorRSS. You can also follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ shows on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Mark Ruffalo Wants You to Imagine a 100 Percent Clean Energy Future

Posted in alo, Anker, Citadel, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Mark Ruffalo Wants You to Imagine a 100 Percent Clean Energy Future

“Unruly Passengers” Increased 12x in Four Years. I Wonder Why?

by ColinEllzey Posted on December 23, 2013

Mother Jones

Speaking of airlines, two stories crossed my radar by chance today. Here’s the first:

The number of incidents of unruly passengers jumped from less than 500 in 2007 to more than 6,000 in 2011, according to the International Air Transport Assn., the trade group for world airlines, which has been keeping track of the incidents….A meeting has been scheduled for March by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a branch of the United Nations, to discuss new rules on how to deal with unruly passengers. A location for the meeting has not been set.

And here’s the second:

On Jammed Jets, Sardines Turn on One Another

With air travelers increasingly feeling like packed sardines, flying has become a contact sport, nowhere more than over the reclined seat.

Now, it is only getting worse, as airlines re-examine every millimeter of the cabin. Over the last two decades, the space between seats — hardly roomy before — has fallen about 10 percent, from 34 inches to somewhere between 30 and 32 inches. Today, some airlines are pushing it even further, leaving only a knee-crunching 28 inches.

….Southwest, the nation’s largest domestic carrier, is installing seats with less cushion and thinner materials — a svelte model known in the business as “slim-line.” It also is reducing the maximum recline to two inches from three. These new seats allow Southwest to add another row, or six seats, to every flight — and add $200 million a year in newfound revenue.

I wonder if these could possibly be related in any way?

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“Unruly Passengers” Increased 12x in Four Years. I Wonder Why?

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This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

by DougE92 Posted on November 20, 2013

This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

By

Forest and Kim Starr

There’s so much plastic crap floating in the Pacific Ocean and washing up on shorelines that one atoll in the midst of the mess could be declared a Superfund site.

Tern Island is the largest island in the French Frigate Shoals, a coral archipelago 550 miles northwest of Honolulu, part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Replete with lagoons, wildlife, and alluring white sands, the island could be a paradise on Earth. But it’s not. Plastic pollution there is so bad that a year ago the Center for Biological Diversity asked the feds to consider adding Tern Island and the rest of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, plus a part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that’s in federal waters, to its Superfund list — a list of the nation’s most polluted places. From the petition [PDF]:

The reefs and shores of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are littered with hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic garbage. Derelict fishing gear and debris entangles innumerable fish, sea birds, and marine mammals, often resulting in injury and death. Plastic pollution harms wildlife via entanglement, ingestion, and toxic contamination, causes substantial economic impacts, and is a principal threat to the quality of the environment.

A Superfund designation would help mobilize federal efforts to clean up the area. But it would be unprecedented — out of the hundreds of sites on the Superfund list, none was put there because of plastic pollution. “It’s not really common for people to make petitions like this,” an EPA spokesman said after the petition was filed.

But after giving the unusual request some consideration, the feds are on board with a preliminary study that will help decide whether such a listing is warranted.

Well, they’re kind of on board.

The EPA and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service don’t plan to study the whole region as requested, but they have committed to assessing whether Tern Island, which at 25 acres is the area’s biggest island, should be added to the Superfund list. From Honolulu Civil Beat:

[W]hat has distinguished Tern Island from the other islands, and piqued the EPA’s interest, is that the island’s monk seals are showing elevated levels of PCB’s. The toxic, cancer-causing chemicals may be entering the marine food chain through tiny plastics, said Dean Higuchi, a spokesman for the EPA. …

The environmental study will focus on whether toxic substances are entering the marine food chain through micro-plastics and potentially accumulating at increasing levels, as well as the general effects of micro-plastics on marine creatures and wildlife.

The EPA is also concerned about old landfill sites with buried electrical equipment on the island, which may be releasing PCBs and other hazardous contaminants. Tern Island was the site of a U.S. Naval Station during World War II. 

The federal study could ultimately affect an area larger than the 25-acre island. Improving the government’s understanding of micro-plastics in the environment could lead to more stringent controls on pollution from storm-water drains and water-treatment plants.


Source
Plastic Debris Could Make Remote Pacific Island a Superfund Site, Honolulu Civil Beat

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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This Pacific island has so much plastic pollution it might become a Superfund site

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Go (slightly) greener by getting your groceries delivered

by ggkk2121333 Posted on May 2, 2013

Go (slightly) greener by getting your groceries delivered

By John Upton

Peapod

          Be lazy, be green.

Do you drive to the grocery store? That’s not very green, nobody needs to tell you that. New research suggests you could halve the carbon footprint of your shopping just by putting your feet up and getting your groceries delivered to your door.

That’s according to calculations by University of Washington engineers. They point out in a paper published in the Transportation Research Forum journal [PDF] that delivery trucks follow efficient routes as they drop off groceries at customers’ homes.

Consider the following diagrams:

University of Washington

 Click to embiggen.

From a university press release:

“A lot of times people think they have to inconvenience themselves to be greener, and that actually isn’t the case here,” said Anne Goodchild, UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “From an environmental perspective, grocery delivery services overwhelmingly can provide emissions reductions.”

Consumers have increasingly more grocery delivery services to choose from. AmazonFresh operates in the Seattle area, while Safeway’s service is offered in many U.S. cities. FreshDirect delivers to residences and offices in the New York City area. Last month, Google unveiled a shopping delivery service experiment in the San Francisco Bay Area, and UW alumni recently launched the grocery service Geniusdelivery in Seattle. …

Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.

“We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well,” Wygonik said.

Just another excuse to give the car a rest, really.

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As BP battles in court over Deepwater Horizon, oil spills are happening all over the place

by da3xs1z Posted on March 1, 2013

As BP battles in court over Deepwater Horizon, oil spills are happening all over the place

By John Upton

U.S. Coast GuardA “small” spray of crude gushes into the Gulf after a boat crashed into a wellhead.

BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill was notable because of the huge number of barrels leaked, the economic and environmental devastation wrought, and the number of people directly affected. But oil spills are not an aberration. Spills are a constant and poisonous cost of the world’s dependence upon fossil fuels.

Little attention is paid to this steady stream of spills. That’s in part because company and government officials often labor to convince us that each single spill is minor, unimportant, and environmentally benign.

This week, while BP was defending itself in court against claims and potential fines stemming from the 2010 disaster, emergency responders were kept busy dealing with new oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and around the world.

Louisiana

A 42-foot offshore oil service boat crashed Tuesday evening into a retired oil and gas wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico near Port Sulphur, La., causing a geyser of crude to spray into the air.

The wellhead, owned by Swift Energy, was recapped two days after the crash and a cleanup crew of more than 40 people has so far recovered about 40 barrels of watery oil from the Gulf. As usual, officials are downplaying the incident as “small.” See this Reuters report:

Swift said the collision had damaged the wellhead but that it “appears to be primarily releasing water and a small amount of oil.”

The company said containment booms and skimming equipment had been deployed around the well to protect nearby shorelines.

A Coast Guard spokesman, Ensign Tanner Stiehl, said a small sheen had developed around the accident site.

But nobody knows for sure how much oil was spilled. (Such an assessment misses a more important point anyway: The spill of any oil is bad — it suffocates microscopic organisms, smothers larger wildlife, and poisons the air and water with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The idea that an oil spill could be dismissed as “small” shows how desensitized we have become.) Houston-based Swift Energy claims that the last time the well was tested it was capable of releasing 18 barrels of oil a day. The Coast Guard, which scrambled to respond to the “small” spill with a flotilla of 12 vessels, says the ruptured well might have released as much of 40 barrels of crude oil every day, plus 36 more barrels daily of “oily water.”

UpStream, an oil and gas trade publication, went so far as to put quotation marks around the words “oil spill” in its headline, as if to suggest that the spill was so small that the normal definition of the term might not even apply here. Judging by the picture that accompanied the article — which you can also see at the top of this post — perhaps “oil explosion” would have been more appropriate.

Louisiana, meanwhile, considers the “small” spill to be so serious that it has banned harvesting of oysters in the area while health officials conduct tests.

Texas

After a resident of Tyler County, Texas, noticed a disgusting smell last Saturday, oil was discovered leaking from a pipeline and into a creek a couple of miles away. The oil had likely been leaking for at least several days before it was noticed. The pipeline was shut down, but not before an estimated 550 barrels seeped into the environment. Crews are working to mop up the oil and officials are downplaying the incident as, yes, small. Move along folks, nothing to see here. From KLTV:

“The pipeline company here is taking care of the situation. They have a full blown incident command set up. We have approximately 160 workers on the ground in the creek bed. They’re mopping up the oil and getting every bit of it that they can,” [Tyler County Emergency Management Coordinator Dale] Freeman said.

Absorbent pads and fresh water from Russell Creek are being used to clean the spill.

Many miles down the stream the water runs into Neches River but no oil has been found there according to Freeman. He said the leak has no affect on drinking water in Tyler County, and no wildlife or residents have been harmed by the oil spill.

“There’s no dead fish in the creek. The affects to the environment is minimal at this point,” Freeman said.

The Philippines

From the Philippine Information Agency:

Personnel from the Office of the Civil Defense (OCD) and the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) have been deployed since Tuesday (February 26) to conduct clean-up operations following reports that oil traces were spotted along the shorelines of La Union, Ilocos Sur, including Ilocos Norte.

Melchito Castro, chief of the OCD in the Ilocos, said on Thursday that the joint team began removing oil sludge from the shorelines mostly in the coastal towns of La Union and Ilocos Sur where the slick began to spread.

Castro said that authorities have yet to determine where the oil seepage originated. Initial reports show that the spill might have come from the M/V Arita Bauxite, a Myanmar vessel that sank off the coast of Bolinao town on February 17.

Nigeria

A pipeline ruptured recently in Izom, Nigeria, coating nearby rivers and farms in crude oil. The pipeline, which had been laid in 1977, was repaired last weekend and put back into service by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. From Daily Trust:

Notwithstanding the spillage, the villagers were still seen fetching water from the polluted river which is the only source of drinking water for the villagers, their animals and crops.

A villager who spoke with reporters, Yelo Sariki said their lives were in danger following the spillage.

He described the situation as a serious one which could consume the whole area.

Between Alberta and Texas, in the near future?

But don’t you worry about the Keystone XL pipeline. TransCanada assures us it will be safe:

Each year, billions of gallons of crude oil and petroleum products are safely transported on pipelines. If they do occur, pipeline leaks are small; most pipeline leaks involve less than three barrels, 80% of spills involve less than 50 barrels, and less than 0.5 percent of spills total more than 10,000 barrels.

Safety of the public and the environment is a top priority for TransCanada.

Phew!

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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As BP battles in court over Deepwater Horizon, oil spills are happening all over the place

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