Tag Archives: ecuador

World Briefing: Ecuador: Permit Issued for Drilling in Amazon Reserve

by Myrna Posted on May 22, 2014

Ecuador’s government has issued an environmental permit for oil drilling in a pristine Amazon reserve that President Rafael Correa initially offered to exempt from exploration if rich countries would pay his government. Link: World Briefing: Ecuador: Permit Issued for Drilling in Amazon Reserve ; ;Related ArticlesExtreme Weather: How El Niño Might Alter the Political ClimateThe Big Melt AcceleratesIn California, Climate Issues Moved to Fore by Governor ;

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World Briefing: Ecuador: Permit Issued for Drilling in Amazon Reserve

Posted in Citizen, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, Monterey, ONA, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on World Briefing: Ecuador: Permit Issued for Drilling in Amazon Reserve

Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños

by OpalSkillen Posted on January 21, 2014

Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños

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Batten down the worldwide hatches. Scientists say baby Jesus’ meteorological namesake will become a thundering hulk more often as the climate changes.

The latest scientific projections for how global warming will influence El Niño events suggest that wild weather is ahead. El Niño starts with the arrival of warm water in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and it can culminate with destructive weather around the world. It was named by Peruvian fishermen after the infant Jesus because the warm waters reached them around Christmas.

We’ve previously told you that El Niños appear to be occurring more frequently as the climate has been changing. The authors of the latest paper on this subject, published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change, don’t project that El Niños will become more common in future. What they do project, though, is that twice as many El Niños will be of the “extreme” variety.

Extreme El Niños happened in the early 1980s and again in the late 1990s when surface water temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean shot up, triggering global weather pandemonium. Here’s a reminder of what that was like, taken from the new paper:

Catastrophic floods occurred in the eastern equatorial region of Ecuador and northern Peru, and neighbouring regions to the south and north experienced severe droughts. The anomalous conditions caused widespread environmental disruptions, including the disappearance of marine life and decimation of the native bird population in the Galapagos Islands, and severe bleaching of corals in the Pacific and beyond. The impacts extended to every continent, and the 1997/98 event alone caused US$35–45 billion in damage and claimed an estimated 23,000 human lives worldwide.

Jeez, that was a pretty horrible reminder. What’s worse than being reminded of past such disasters, though, is imagining more of them in the future — and that’s just what authors of this paper say we should be doing.

After aggregating the findings of different climate simulations, the scientists found that “the total number of El Niño events decreases slightly but the total number of extreme El Niño events increases.”

The slight decrease in the frequency of El Niños detected by the models wasn’t statistically significant, meaning there’s considerable uncertainty over whether such a decrease would actually occur. But the increase in extreme such events was statistically significant. That means that if the researchers’ models produced accurate simulations, we could start to expect extreme El Niños once every decade by the end of the century.

“Potential future changes in such extreme El Niño occurrences could have profound socio-economic consequences,” the scientists warn in their paper.


Source
Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming, Nature Climate Change

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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Get ready for more “extreme” El Niños

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Chevron scores legal and PR victories in Ecuador pollution case

by graptorm Posted on September 23, 2013

Chevron scores legal and PR victories in Ecuador pollution case

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Between 1964 and 1990, Texaco drilled for oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon and left an outrageous mess, dumping 18.5 billion gallons of toxic sludge and wastewater into local waterways. Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001, was ordered by an Ecuadorian judge in 2011 to pay $19 billion for the damage. Chevron said, to paraphrase, “Eff you,” and has been fighting the judgment ever since.

It’s little wonder, then, that Ecuador’s president is calling for a boycott of Chevron. In launching the “Chevron’s Dirty Hand” campaign last week, President Rafael Correa visited a rainforest area left polluted by the company, plunged his hand into a pool of oil, and held it up for members of the media to photograph.

Reuters/Guillermo Granja

A nice photo op, but Chevron is still winning the war.

Here are the latest legal developments from ABC News:

Plaintiffs’ hopes for collecting a $19 billion judgment awarded by an Ecuadorean court against Chevron Corp. for oil contamination in the Amazon have suffered another potential setback.

A three-judge international arbitration panel in The Hague has ruled that an agreement signed in 1995 by Texaco Corp., which Chevron later purchased, released the oil giant from financial responsibility from any claims of “collective damage.”

However, the interim ruling Tuesday by the Permanent Court of Arbitration left open the possibility that Chevron could still be liable for damages incurred by individuals.

And the U.S. government appears to be doing its part to help Chevron avoid bad PR.  From PressTV:

Ecuador’s Foreign Ministry says the US has denied visas to a delegation, which was to travel to the UN General Assembly in New York to present testimony against oil giant Chevron.

In a statement on Friday, the ministry announced that the American Embassy in Quito returned the visas for five Ecuadorian nationals “without any explanation.”

The delegation was scheduled to give testimony during a special event at the UN regarding the environmental impact of the oil giant’s operations in the Ecuadoran region of the Amazon forest.

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.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology

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Chevron scores legal and PR victories in Ecuador pollution case

Posted in ALPHA, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chevron scores legal and PR victories in Ecuador pollution case

By 2050, flooding could cost the world’s coastal cities over $60 billion a year

by Fredrick Wise Posted on August 21, 2013

By 2050, flooding could cost the world’s coastal cities over $60 billion a year

By Claire Thompson

Oliver Rich

Hurricane Sandy was a wake-up call for New York City, one of the 20 cities expected to see the most damages from flooding.

In 2005, flooding caused $6 billion worth of damage globally. By 2050, we could be hit with 10 times that much in losses — and that’s only if the world’s biggest coastal cities make significant investments to mitigate risk. If we do nothing, costs could soar to $1 trillion.

These sobering statistics come from a new study in Nature Climate Change which identifies the 20 coastal metropolises that stand to lose the most when (not if) major flooding occurs in the future. Sea-level rise, subsidence (the land sinking), and increasingly strong storms — all related to climate change — increase the risk of flooding. But much of the growing price tag of future flood losses is thanks to the growing numbers of people crowding along the world’s coasts.

Time reports:

[T]he most immediate threat is the sheer increase in people—and their property—put in harm’s way in coastal cities. In the U.S. 87 million people now live along the coast, up from 47 million people in 1960, and globally six of the world’s 10 largest cities are on the coast. Of the $60 to $63 billion in flood risk the Nature Climate Change study estimates the world’s cities will face by 2050, $52 billion is due to economic and population growth—the rest is due to sea level rise and land use change.

The study looks not only at which cities will face the highest absolute costs as a result of increased flooding, but also at which will see the largest relative increase in average annual damages, and which had the highest losses as a percentage of GDP in 2005. In terms of absolute losses, Miami and New York — places with large populations and high concentrations of wealth — face the most risk among cities in developed nations. In fact, in 2005, New York, Miami, and New Orleans accounted for 31 percent of total damage costs across all 136 cities studied (perhaps Katrina had something to do with that).

This chart of relative increases in average annual losses (AAL) includes some places that may not be accustomed to thinking of themselves as particularly flood-prone, but are going to have to adapt fast: Houston and Tel Aviv, for instance, are facing at least a 50 percent increase in AAL, while Alexandria, Egypt, and Barranquilla, Colombia, could see 100 percent increases or more.

Nature Climate ChangeClick to embiggen.

When it comes to cities whose 2005 losses made up the highest percentage of their GDP, New York and Miami don’t appear in the top 10, but New Orleans is No. 2, joined by places like Guayaquil, Ecuador, and Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. While making aggressive adaptation moves — improving infrastructure, developing evacuation plans, establishing (literal) rainy day funds to prepare for economic rebuilding — will substantially lower future flooding losses, such measures won’t come cheap: The report estimates they’ll cost cities around $50 billion a year from now until 2050.

The extreme solution would be to start relocating everyone inland, reducing potential loss of life and property in flood zones. But what are the chances of getting all those coastal elites to move into flyover country? We’ll just keep pouring money into our pleasure boats as they sink.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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By 2050, flooding could cost the world’s coastal cities over $60 billion a year

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, Dolphin, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on By 2050, flooding could cost the world’s coastal cities over $60 billion a year

Lawyer Who Beat Chevron in Ecuador Faces Trial of His Own

by Magdalynamez Posted on July 30, 2013

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Lawyer Who Beat Chevron in Ecuador Faces Trial of His Own

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Monterey, ONA, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lawyer Who Beat Chevron in Ecuador Faces Trial of His Own