Invasive Species prevent new species from evolving: human induced mass extinction recovery will take longer than thought

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Richard A. Kerr. February 10, 2012.More Than One Way for Invaders to Wreak Havoc.   Science: Vol. 335:646

Ravenous pythons and anacondas invading the Florida Everglades are ravaging the local ecology. But a study published last month suggests that invasive species can have a more insidious effect on natural systems.

About 380 million years ago in the Devonian period, invasive species reigned rampant in the world ocean as the number of marine animal species plummeted. That ecological crisis has been classed as one of the Big Five mass extinctions. But paleontologists think the main problem was not that existing species died out but that new ones failed to form. And the new paper—published in the January issue of GSA Today—holds invasions responsible for that failure to speciate, at least in some marine animal groups.

The new look at the Devonian “has hit on something very interesting,” says paleontologist George McGhee of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. “We don’t know where modern invasives will lead us,” McGhee says, but the study raises the possibility that recovering from the current human-induced mass extinction could be much more difficult than thought.

Her deep-time study holds timely lessons for modern humans, Stigall says. Loss of habitat and the introduction of new predators and diseases may be driving the current mass extinction, she says, but “we’re looking at a worse outcome than currently predicted.” Whenever the human-induced mass extinction has run its course, invasives will be seriously inhibiting the creation of new species and retarding recovery. And the greater vulnerability of specialist species compared with generalists means that “even if tremendous resources are devoted to [specialist] species, they probably won’t be sustained in the long term.” Given limited resources, she says, conservationists should give more-resilient species in the middle range the highest priority.

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Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face & Pumalin NP in Chile

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Article 1  Jimmy Langman. Spring 2012. Conversation: Doug Tompkins. Earth Island Journal.

I see Chile as overdeveloped. We have gone way past the carrying capacity of Earth to sustain all these people, activities, and consumption. Using all government measurements, nobody has shown that we’re as a globe underdeveloped. And yet we’re going for more overdevelopment.

Unemployment is preferable to doing harm. You got to take the long view: There are going to be tremendous ecological collapses from the overshoot perspective. A few years ago, we were called the doom-and-gloomers, but it’s all being borne out every day. There are limits to growth. Go back and look at William Catton’s book, Overshoot, on the ecological footprint from 1980. It’s better today than it was when he wrote it. Better in the sense that people accept it hands down today.

I joined the Sierra Club when I was 16. I hadn’t a clue about the deeper issues, the structural problems, the root causes of the extinction crisis, for example. And then how the worldview was affecting all of this: our epistemologies, our worldviews, our decisions, how we formed economies, and even down to our personal lifestyles. It took me a long time to get to this point. And I think for the most part I don’t believe that young people today are really clued in either. It takes a lot of scholarship. You have to read a lot. Activism helps.

You go back to places that you had been to ten years before, and there are clearcuts everywhere, bulldozers pushing a road into wilderness areas. You just keep seeing this interminable growth, this sort of implacable march of so-called progress, and you start saying, “Hey, wait a minute!”

And you start extending that idea into just about everywhere you look, and you see things are getting uglier. You start paying more attention to what’s happening in the media, such as reporting on everything from oil spills to lack of fish in the ocean to loss of forest cover, the 1,001 different environmental disasters that we read about every day. Every day they come up with something new!  It is one thing after another.

I feel lucky that I somehow escaped from the confines of the business class. Hardly anybody can escape there. They’re just chained under that worldview, whether they believe that capitalism is sacred, and, you know, the cornucopia of resources are for our exploitation. I feel so fortunate that somehow I managed to break out of that world and get to do something that really had more meaning.

I learned from my parents that you have to get pleasure out of what you’re doing, or don’t do it. And I also learned that you do a lot better and have a lot more satisfaction, and a lot more fun for that matter, by striving after excellence in the craft that you’re involved in. You can be in the wrong craft. That is why I got out of making stuff that nobody needs, because I came to realize that all that needless overconsumption is one of the driving forces of the extinction crisis.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that there’s no future in capitalism. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s probably no more than 500 years old, and it’s demonstrating over and over again that it is destroying the world. We are going to have to rethink that, and I wouldn’t even suggest that we are talking about other failed systems such as socialism and communism. We should take the best of socialism, the best of capitalism, and form new economic technologies that are going to sustain nature and not destroy it. I don’t think capitalism can survive: It’s built on the premise of endless growth, and anybody in their right mind knows you cannot grow endlessly. Even the worst impulses of capitalism are very difficult to contain, and the reforms end up changing it into something else.

———–

In 1990, Doug Tompkins, founder of clothing companies Esprit and The North Face, decided to get out of “making stuff that nobody needed” and instead focus on the issues that really mattered to him: corporate globalization, sustainable agriculture, preserving wild places, and stopping the clearcutting of ancient forests. Or, as he puts it, saving the environment and communities from an out-of-control economic model that each day is edging civilization “closer to the abyss.”

So Tompkins started the Foundation for Deep Ecology and moved to Chilean Patagonia, where he began using his fortune to buy up large parcels of land to form Pumalin Park. In the last two decades, Tompkins has expanded his holdings to include 740,000 acres of snow-capped volcanoes, Andean mountains, temperate rainforest, and turquoise-colored rivers. Today, Pumalin Park is considered the world’s largest private nature preserve.

Among his other conservation initiatives, Tompkins has donated private land to establish two coastal national parks in Chile and Argentina. A third, the half million-acre future Patagonia National Park in the Aysen region, is in the process of being transferred to Chile. His most ambitious project is still in the works: a huge property at Esteros del Ibera in northeastern Argentina, which he aims to make the key piece of a 6,500-square-mile national park to protect that region’s wetlands. (Langman)

Article 2. Jo Confino.11 July 2013. How technology has stopped evolution and is destroying the world. Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face, on battles with Steve Jobs and why we need to dismantle our techno-industrial society. The Guardian.

It has become something of a mantra within the sustainability movement that innovations in technology can save the world. But rather than liberating us, Doug Tompkins, the cofounder of retail brands The North Face and Esprit, believes technology has enslaved us and is destroying the very health of the planet on which all species depend.

Tompkins, 70 has used his enormous wealth from selling both companies to preserve more land than any other individual in history, spending more than £200m buying over 2 million acres of wilderness in Argentina and Chile.

He challenges the view that technology is extending democracy, arguing that it is concentrating even more power in the hands of a tiny elite. What troubles him the most is that the very social and environmental movements that should be challenging the destructive nature of mega-technologies, have instead fallen under their spell.

“We have been poor on doing the systemic analysis and especially in the area of technology criticism,” says Tompkins. “Until we get better at that, I think we’re cooked, we’re going to continue to extinct species and we’re going to continue to dig the hole deeper of the whole eco-social crisis.

“If you just hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up there. You can’t have that device without everything that goes with it. You see mining, transportation, manufacturing, computers, high-speed communications, satellite communications, it’s all there, you see and it’s that techno-industrial culture that’s destroying the world.”

Championing the environment

Tompkins is considered a hero in the deep ecology movement and works hand in hand with his wife Kris, the former CEO of the outdoor clothing and equipment company Patagonia.

They have been instrumental in creating two huge nature reserves and are in the process of creating another one in the South American region of Patagonia, despite opposition within Latin America, including being accused by rightwing Chilean politicians of effectively splitting the country in two in a conspiratorial land grab.

Together, they also fund numerous small activist NGOs, arguing that more established organizations such as WWF and Greenpeace have become too closely enmeshed with corporations.

“When WWF started out, they were doing some good stuff,” says Tompkins. “Now, they’re burning up money like crazy and they don’t really get too much done. Most all of these organizations grew too big for their own good”

Tompkins derides those who pin their hopes on technological developments in areas such as wind, solar and nuclear as coming from the smart resource management school, saying they fail to understand that this will not address the core issue, which is that capitalism is addicted to growth.

“Resource efficiency is the wrong metric,” he says. “We should use nature as the measure, using nature’s wisdom as a template for our economic systems.

“Capitalism doesn’t function when it starts to contract and we can see that quite clearly right here in the eurozone. It’s like pushing a giant monster underwater that’s gasping for air. It goes nuts. Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately it’s bad for everyone.”

Tompkins believes most sustainability practitioners have made the mistake of spending their time creating strategies and projects, without taking the time to gain a deep understanding of how we got into a mess in the first place. As a result, they may end up doing more harm than good.

“As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we’re in,” he warns.

“It’s similar to air; we’re basically unconscious about the air. What we need is to understand what technologies themselves bring with them when they’re introduced into culture.

“If you extinct all the biodiversity and we end up living on a sandheap with a Norwegian rat and some cockroaches, that doesn’t have too much logic to it. That would show that our behavior as a civilization today is to the pathological. But, if you make a systemic analysis, that’s exactly where we’re going.”

A strategic embrace, not a substantive embrace

Tompkins was a friend of Steve Jobs and the two men had many arguments over the years, with the former Apple CEO trying to convince Tompkins that computers were going to save the world, and Tompkins insisting the opposite.

Tompkins recalls the Apple advertising campaign that highlighted the 1,001 great things that the PC was going to give to us and would tell Jobs that these represented a mere 5% of what the computer did while the other 95% was all negative and exacerbating the biodiversity crisis.

“He’d get mad at me when I’d tell him that,” says Tompkins.

“He was locked into a view that these technologies were going to bring all these good things. But that’s typical of the purveyors of new technology. They’re selling their product and their idea, and their prestige, their power and their influence. Their self-esteem is wrapped up in that. It’s impossible for them to see it or to admit it, you see? Because, it pulls the rug out from underneath their purpose, especially when it’s attached to a moral purpose.

“That’s typical of everybody who introduces a new widget into society. They don’t tell you the negative side effects that this introduction of this new invention could provoke.”

While there has been much talk of the democratization that the internet has brought, Tompkins points out that while individuals use it largely for their own narrow interests, large corporations are the big winners as they are able to take advantage of it to become ever more powerful.

Is technology stemming evolution?

Rather than adding to our knowledge, Tompkins argues computers and smartphones represent “deskilling devices; they make us dumber. We’re immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.

“The computer is a mechanism for acceleration, it accelerates economic activity and this is eating up the world. It’s eating up resources, it’s processing, it’s manufacturing, it’s distributing, it’s consuming. That’s what the computer’s real work does and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop just to satisfy our own narrow needs.”

Tompkins foresees a dark future dominated as he puts it by more ugliness, damaged landscapes, extinct species, extreme poverty, and lack of equity and says humanity faces a stark choice; either to transition now to a different system or face a painful collapse. “The extinction crisis is the mother of all crises. There will be no society, there will be no economy, there will be no art and culture on a dead planet basically. We’ve stopped evolution.”


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China the epicenter of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics

Posted on July 13, 2013 by
Mara Hyistendahl  Science 18 May 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6083 p. 795

China Takes Aim at Rampant Antibiotic Resistance

Bacteria that cannot be stopped by common drugs are proliferating around the world (Science, 18 July 2008, p. 356). But a health care system that encourages doctors to churn out prescriptions, intensive marketing by pharmaceutical companies, and heavy use of antibiotics in animal husbandry and fisheries make China a special case. More than 60% of Staphylococcus aureus isolates from Chinese patients in surveyed hospitals in 2009 were methicillin-resistant—the dreaded MRSA—up from 40% in 2000. The proportion of Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates resistant to macrolides, meanwhile, now tops 70%. Roughly the same share of Escherichia coli isolates are resistant to quinolones—the highest rate in the world.

“Antibiotic resistance is a serious public health threat in China,” says Xiao Yonghong, an infectious disease specialist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.  Drug resistance is most acute in densely populated cities in the east. Erythromycin-resistant S. pneumoniae, for example, appeared in 94% of isolates from children tested in hospitals here in 2004 and 2005.

China’s woes are in part the consequence of earlier health care reforms. Until the early 1980s, China had government-provisioned care bolstered by “barefoot doctors”: minimally trained health workers who ministered to patients in remote areas. But near-universal care was ultimately scrapped in favor of a free-market approach. Hospitals needed new revenue streams.

A burgeoning drug industry came to the rescue. The government allowed hospitals to skim a 15% profit from pharmaceutical sales, and doctors’ pay was soon linked to sales. Over-prescription became rampant. “The whole thing really boils down to perverse incentives,” says Lucy Reynolds, a public health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s European Center on Health of Societies in Transition. By the 1990s, Xiao, who then worked in a hospital in Chongqing, noticed that something was awry: “Patients weren’t responding to treatment.”

In the meantime, growing numbers of Chinese farmers discovered that rearing livestock on antibiotics yielded larger animals and boosted profits. In a 2007 survey, Xiao estimated that nearly half of the 210,000 tons of antibiotics produced in China end up in animal feed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned in 2007 that Chinese farm-raised fish are laced with fluoroquinolones and other antibiotics not approved for use in U.S. seafood.

Those drugs find their way into the human gut. In an unpublished study, Zhu Baoli of the Institute of Microbiology in Beijing and colleagues sequenced gut microbes in Chinese, Danish, and Spanish people. Chinese guts had the highest number of antibiotic-resistant genes. They were also dominated by genes resistant to tetracycline, which in China is mostly used in animal feed. While that might not affect clinical treatment with drugs other than tetracycline, Zhu says, “some drugs that are used in animals are also used in humans.”

Some Chinese pop antibiotics the way Americans pop vitamins. Until 2004, antibiotics were legally available over the counter in China, and families sometimes kept a stash at home.

Even with further reforms, significant obstacles remain. In a survey in Guizhou Province in southwest China, Reynolds found that many doctors mistakenly believed their patients—not the bacteria inhabiting their bodies—had developed antibiotic resistance. Meanwhile, resistance is climbing. Says Zhu: “You now have genes resistant to almost every antibiotic available on the market.”

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Phytoplankton have declined 40%: they provide food and oxygen for all creatures on Earth

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

This article from NewScientist discusses how phytoplankton are disappearing — and they provide half of the food animals both in the ocean and on land depend on, plus produce a great deal of the oxygen we breathe.

Throw in overfishing, pollution, ocean acidification from rising carbon dioxide levels and ocean deoxygenation due to warmer water, and both the rate and amount of extinction of homo sapiens and most other species looks pretty grim.

7 April 2012. Bob Holmes. Too-blue oceans: The invisible famine. NewScientist.

The invisible world [of microscopic plants and animals in seawater] is absolutely vital to life on Earth:

  1. Most of the oxygen you are breathing was made by minuscule algae and bacteria.
  2. These plants, known as phytoplankton, provide half of the food on which all the animals on this planet depend.
  3. Not just ocean creatures, but land-dwellers too.  Three billion people depend in part on seafood for protein, and the livelihoods of nearly a tenth of the world’s population are linked to fisheries.
  4. Phytoplankton levels have dropped by almost 40 per cent since the 1940s (Worm, 2010. (Nature, vol 466, p 591).
  5. Their numbers have declined in 8 out of 10 ocean regions at about 1 per cent per year over the last 40 years.

Why?

What we do know is that in many parts of the oceans, phytoplankton growth is limited by a lack of “fertilizer” – vital nutrients such as nitrate, phosphate and iron.

Upwelling of deep water and big storms that stir the oceans are the main source of these nutrients.

What makes Worm’s decline so scary is that it seems to be happening worldwide at the same time.

The obvious suspect is global warming. More than 90% of the heat retained by Earth as a result of rising greenhouse gases ends up in the sea. Plankton do grow faster in warmer conditions, but warming has a far less desirable effect, too. As surface waters warm, they become less dense and this makes it harder for cold, nutrient-rich water to rise to the surface. Less mixing means less fertilizer, and if phytoplankton run out of nutrients they cannot grow however warm the water is. So on balance, warmer waters are expected to reduce phytoplankton growth, and this is just what Worm’s team found. Apart from in the Arctic and Southern oceans, there was a strong link between higher sea surface temperatures and lower phytoplankton levels.

Oceanographers almost all agree that warming will lead to a decline in phytoplankton, but most expected only a small fall over the coming decades. And while there have already been dramatic falls in fish catches in many parts of the world, these have been attributed to overfishing rather than falling phytoplankton.

Other scientists disagreed with these numbers, so Worm and his team went back to their original data, and pulled in other data from scientific teams studying this issue. Their initial results still point to a worldwide decline of somewhere between 20 and 70 per cent.

“From everything we have done so far, we’re seeing a decline,” says Worm. “No matter what we include or exclude, we are always seeing a decline. The magnitude of the decline, and the regional detail, is still in question – but that there is a decline, I have very little doubt.”

A similar study in 2006 came to much the same conclusions. “What we see in the satellite record, very clearly, is there is a very strong relation between climate-driven changes in the surface temperature and the plankton,” says team member Michael Behrenfeld of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

The Future

There’ll be winners and losers because of big regional differences —  phytoplankton levels rose in two-fifths of the ocean.

The bad news is that even in areas where productivity rises, there will not necessarily be more fish in the sea. In temperate regions, the phytoplankton tends to consist of large cells that are eaten by large zooplankton, such as copepods, and then by fish. Phytoplankton in the tropics, in contrast, tend to be tiny cyanobacteria, which are eaten by tiny zooplankton, which are eaten by slightly larger ones and so on. There are several more links in the food chain – and 90% of the energy is lost at each link. This is part of the reason why tropical waters tend to support fewer fish, and thus less vigorous fisheries, than cold waters.

As the oceans get warmer, some cold-water regions are shifting towards the longer-food-chain regime. In the North Atlantic, the boundary between the two types of food chain has already shifted 1000 kilometers north in recent decades.

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Whirlwind Power

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

Sounds great — but will it scale up?  That’s been the downfall of many projects that work small scale, like biofuels from algae & cellulosic, etc.  And as I say at the top of many of these posts, this is an oil crisis, that’s what 97% of our transportation system runs on.  Plus our electric grid is aging and falling apart, not being geared up for handling more electricity, which doesn’t solve our problems, and the grid and this whirlwind device depend on oil throughout their life cycle from mining, construction, transport, and maintenance.

11 March 2013. Hal Hodson. Reap the whirlwind for cheap renewable power. NewScientist

The Solar Vortex system (see diagram) is the brainchild of Mark Simpson and Ari Glezer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. It relies on the temperature difference between hot air close to the ground and cooler air just a meter or so above it. As the hot air rises and cool air falls, convection currents form between these layers, leading to small whirlwinds or dust devils.

Solar Vortex channels these currents with an array of fixed blades or vanes. They funnel the airflow into a vortex, which turns a turbine at the device’s center. No power is needed to kick the process off as the position of the vanes helps the vortex to start spontaneously. As the warm air rises, more air rushes in, fueling the artificial whirlwind.

Maintenance and installation costs are much lower than for a conventional wind farm because there is no need to put turbines on high towers to catch the wind. Since ground temperature varies slowly through the day, the system’s energy output is more constant too, and stays steady for a few hours after sunset, when consumer demand is often highest.

Glezer had the idea after living in Arizona. “He had experienced naturally occurring dust devils and the kinetic energy they contain, and wanted to create a method for extracting that power,” Simpson says.

Simpson has tested a small, 1-meter version of the vortex that drives a turbine to create a few watts of power using nothing more than a hot, sun-baked metal sheet. However, the power output scales up rapidly as you increase the turbine’s diameter. Simpson calculates that a 10-meter turbine will produce 50 kilowatts of power using the same method. The team says that an array of these vortex turbines could produce 16 megawatts for every square kilometer they cover. This is not bad considering conventional wind turbines yield just 3 and 6 megawatts per square kilometer. In fact, the team estimates that the electricity produced by a Solar Vortex will be 20% cheaper than energy from wind turbines and 65% cheaper than solar power.

The US government’s clean energy start-up shop is convinced: the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E) announced its decision to fund some large-scale trials last week. Simpson is due to present a paper in July detailing the trials at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Working with ARPA-E, Simpson and Glezer plan to have a 10 kW model running within two years, with tests on intermediate models scheduled for July. They want to build a 50kW model in the future.

“The science is solid,” says Nilton Renno, who researches thermodynamics at the University of Michigan. “Once you induce circulation nearby, the vortex can be self-sustaining.”

Steven Chu, the outgoing energy secretary, is interested; he visited the team briefly at the ARPA-E conference in Washington DC last week. “We would like to start with building a small-scale farm of these things,” Simpson says. “At that point we start to produce real

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Laughing Gas — nitrous oxide — could deplete ozone and cook the planet

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

2 Sep 2009. Laughing gas set to deplete the ozone layer. NewScientist.

28 August 2009. Lisa Grossman. Laughing gas is biggest threat to ozone layer. NewScientist.

21 July 2012. Michael Marshall.  Laughing gas may cook the planet. NewScientist.

The ozone layer shields Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which increase the risk of cancer and threaten crops and aquatic life.

Nitrous oxide is also a heat-trapping greenhouse gas in the league of methane or carbon dioxide, so regulating it would also be good for the climate.

In fact the last ice age may have ended due to a huge release of nitrous oxide 14,500 years ago, when Europe warmed up by about 5 degrees centigrade due to a pulse of nitrous oxide, which is 310 times as warming as carbon dioxide.

The release came from arcitc plants such as peatlands, and could happen again as Arctic ice shrinks.

“If we have climate change proceeding very quickly, the huge amounts of nitrogen stored in our ecosystem may be released as nitrous oxide,” says Klaus Butterbach-Bahl of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), deplete ozone but aren’t regulated.  Human activity now accounts for nearly 40 per cent of N2O emissions (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1176985).

N2O could become 50 per cent more destructive as stratospheric CFCs return to pre-industrial levels. That’s because nitrogen and chlorine compounds counteract each other’s effects on ozone: the more chlorine there is, the less destructive nitrogen is, and vice versa. “N2O is the most important ozone-depleting gas that’s being emitted,” says Ravishankara.

 

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Climate change concentrates toxins in plants – bad news for herbivores

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

Michael Marshall. June 1, 2012. Climate change will create a toxic brew for herbivores. NewScientist.

A warmer world could lead to more concentrated and higher levels of toxins in plants.  Herbivorous animals are also less able to process toxins when they’re warm because their livers function less well. To some extent animals can work around this by eating a wider range of plants (Journal of Comparative Physiology B, DOI: 10.1007/s00360-012-0670-y).

The effect could also apply higher up the food chain – predators often have to deal with toxins produced by their prey, such as scorpion venom.

Nathalie Pettorelli at the Institute of Zoology in London says herbivores in dry regions, such as the Arabian oryx, have a limited range of plants to choose from, so if one becomes too toxic they may have little else to eat.

And just to make things a little more interesting, there is also evidence that plants produce more toxins as temperatures creep up. If that is the case, herbivores face a double whammy.

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Dying seagrass is releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

23 May 2012. Mowing down seagrass meadows will cut loose carbon. NewScientist.

SEagrass has as much carbon as the world’s forests and the carbon dioxide contained in them could be released as they are dying off from water pollution, dredging, and climate change.  They’re already declining 1.5% per year, releasing 299 million tons of carbon back into the environment (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1477).  So much carbon is stored by seagrass now and since the ice age in the top few feet of soil below, that if the seagrass dies, more than twice the Earth’s world-wide emmissions from fossil fuels in 2010 would be released.

“These are scary numbers,” says Kendrick, from the University of Western Australia. “It does look like there’s going to be a global tipping point for many of these environments.”

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Oil and Gas infrastructure are falling apart

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

Beneath Cities, a Decaying Tangle of Gas Pipes

March 23, 2014. Patrick McGeehan et al. New York Times

It is a danger hidden beneath the streets of New York City, unseen and rarely noticed: 6,302 miles of pipes transporting natural gas.

Leaks, like the one that is believed to have led to the explosion that killed eight people in East Harlem this month, are startlingly common, numbering in the thousands every year, federal records show.

The chief culprit, according to experts, is the perilous state of New York City’s underground network, one of the oldest in the country and a glaring example of America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In 2012 alone, Con Edison and National Grid, the other distributor of natural gas in the city, reported 9,906 leaks in their combined systems, which serve the city and Westchester County. More than half of them were considered hazardous because of the dangers they posed to people or property, federal records show. (There are more than 1.2 million miles of gas main pipes across the country. Last year, gas distributors nationwide reported an average of 12 leaks per 100 miles of those pipes.)

“It’s like Russian roulette,” said Robert B. Jackson, a professor of environment and energy at Stanford University who has studied gas leaks in Washington, D.C., and Boston. “The chances are, you are going to be lucky, but once in a while, you’re going to be unlucky.”

Nearly half of the gas mains operated by Con Edison and National Grid were installed before 1940, according to federal records. More than half of the mains are made of cast iron, wrought iron, or unprotected steel — materials that are vulnerable to corrosion and cracking, especially in cold weather.

Communities across the country have been struggling to replace thousands of miles of these old, metal pipes with pipes made of plastic or specially coated steel that are less prone to leakage. Few, however, face as daunting a challenge as New York City.

To replace all of the old mains in its network right now would cost as much as $10 billion, Con Edison estimates. Much of that expense would fall on the residents and businesses that use the gas for heating and cooking.

Despite the high cost and logistical hurdles, alarmed regulators at the state’s Public Service Commission have ordered the company to significantly step up its replacement schedule, from 50 miles of pipe a year to 70 by 2016, in the city and in Westchester. Even at that rate, it would still take nearly three decades for the utility to finish swapping out what regulators have identified as the most leak-prone pipes.

Gas Infrastructure Is Falling Apart in Cities Around the Country

March 12, 2014. Lily Hay Newman. Slate.com

A report out Tuesday from the Center for an Urban Future reveals that New York City’s infrastructure is extremely old. It may not be surprising, exactly, given that New York is known to have been densely populated for hundreds of years, but seeing it all laid out is still pretty stunning.

The report notes that New York’s 6,300 miles of gas mains are 56 years old and that leaks in the system cause Con Ed to lose more than 2 percent of the gas it sends to customers every year. Additionally, 60 percent of New York gas mains are made of unprotected steel or cast iron, which are no longer used in gas main fabrication because they spring too many leaks.

And New York isn’t the only city with these problems. In January, researchers from Duke and Boston University mapped Washington, D.C.’s gas leaks and found 5,893 places where the city’s buried gas mains were leaking enough methane to detect it from the street. They also noted that many sites had the potential to cause explosions. A group including several of the same researchers had similar findings about Boston in 2012.

Floods Put Pipelines at Risk Records Suggest Erosion of Riverbeds Jeopardizes Oil and Gas Infrastructure

December 3, 2012. Jack Nicas. Wall Street Journal.

Floodwater causes pipelines to fail because it’s fast and weighs a lot, so flood water can scour dozens of feet of soil and gravel from a river bed, exposing pipelines buried below.

It’s likely that pipelines need to be buried under rivers a great deal deeper than they are now – just four feet, which river engineers say is grossly inadequate.

Future problems: 24 of the 55 oil and gas pipelines beneath the Missouri river are less than 10 feet below the riverbed.

After the Exxon pipeline rupture, Montana officials pushed pipeline operators to inspect their river crossings in the state. The review found that about a quarter of the roughly 90 pipelines inspected were dangerously close to exposure.

Those findings “tell me that we’re vulnerable. But not just in Montana. The whole pipeline system across the country’s vulnerable,” Mr. Opper said.

Some examples of failed pipelines:

  • An Exxon Mobil Corp pipeline on the Yellowstone River in Montana in 2011 released 1,000 barrels of crude
  • An Enterprise Products Partners pipeline burst in the Missouri River floodplain in Iowa, spilling 818 barrels of a gasoline additive.
  • In 1994, scouring on a flooded river near Houston exposed 37 pipelines, including eight that broke, spilling 35,000 barrels of petroleum.
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Asian medicine a major cause of biodiversity loss

Posted on July 8, 2013 by

I haven’t noticed any shortage of people in China – what a tragedy the men there feel like they need to eat endangered animal penises, and for the government not to stop it.

6 Mar 2003. S. Malik et al. Pinniped Penises in Trade: A Molecular-Genetic Investigation. Conservation Biology.

Our results confirm that penises from different pinnipeds are in international trade.  These findings are consistent with other recent evidence that the lucrative market for pinniped penises may be encouraging the unregulated hunting of seals, including protected species, and the harvesting of other unidentified mammalian species [for use in traditional Chinese medicine].

Deer Penis (Wikipedia)

The deer penis is typically very large and, proponents claim, for it to retain its properties it must be extracted from the deer while still alive.Often it is then sliced into small pieces, typically by women and then roasted and dried in the sun.

During the 2008 Summer Olympics, China banned deer penis potions from athletes’ diets. This is because according to traditional Chinese medicine, deer penis, especially if ingested while soaked in alcohol (deer penis wine), is an effective remedy for athletic injuries.  When consumed, a deer penis or tiger penis is also said to enhance virility, and is thought by some to be an aphrodisiac.

Tiger Penis (Wikipedia)

In traditional Chinese medicine, a tiger penis is said to have important therapeutic properties. However, modern science does not support the belief that the tiger penis possesses any special potency. Furthermore, the demand for tiger parts exacerbates the endangered status of the tiger by providing a market for poachers. While the tiger penis is consumed in parts of China and Southeast Asia, particularly in Laos and Cambodia, its preparation is generally condemned by modern nations.  The penis of a tiger when consumed is said to enhance male virility and be an aphrodisiac, although no scientific studies support these claims. In parts of southeast Asia it is seen as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. This has contributed to the poaching of tigers for their presumed benefits, the penis being just one of many of its assets. As a result the tiger penis is usually sold on the black market in China.

But it’s not just penises — virtually any kind of endangered plant or animal is used to the point of extinction.

9 March 2012. Xiuxiang Meng et al. Asian Medicine: Exploitation of Wildlife. Science.

Traditional asian medicine’s effects on wildlife conservation cannot be ignored. The endangered musk deer provides a typical example.

9 March 2012. Shixiong Cao and Qi Feng. Asian Medicine: Exploitation of Plants. Science.

As the market demand for wild Chinese herbs has grown, the production scale of the Chinese herb industry has expanded dramatically. However, concealed by the prosperity of the Chinese medicinal herb industry is a huge ecological problem. In recent years, intensive and unrestrained exploitation of wild Chinese herbs has damaged natural resources. An estimated 2000 wild Chinese herbs are at risk of extinction.  Severe ecological deterioration and soil erosion seriously threaten the habitats of many wild Chinese herbs, especially in fragile ecological environments such as high-altitude areas or arid regions.

Navjot S. Sodhi, et. al. Dec 2004. Southeast Asian biodiversity: an impending disaster. Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol.19 No.12.

Southeast Asia has the highest relative rate of deforestation of any major tropical region, and could lose three quarters of its original forests by 2100 and up to 42% of its biodiversity. If present levels of deforestation were to continue unabated, Southeast Asia will lose almost three-quarters of its original forest cover by the turn of the next century, resulting in massive species declines and extinctions. More importantly, this biodiversity crisis is likely to develop into a full-fledged disaster, as the region is home to one of the highest concentrations of endemic species. Many animal and plant products are used in traditional Chinese medicine, which dates back 5000 years. Trade in the raw materials of traditional Chinese medicine has a detrimental impact on many vertebrates in Southeast Asia, including tigers, bears, rhinos, turtles, snakes, tokay geckos, pangolins, monkeys and swiftlets. This is exemplified by the Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sumatrae, from which body parts such as bones and penises are used in traditional medicine.

 

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