A Change in the Wind

The fall of a mighty oak: The Guardian notices

Nothing against new style longform journalism, but let's give credit where credit is due to a tradional but awesome story from The Guardian on the greatest tree in Wales, and how it fell (but could possibly have been saved).

No one knew quite how old it was because it had lost its heartwood, but Michael Lear, a tree expert with the National Trust, visited Pontfadog in 1996 and wrote to Josie Williams: "Using Forestry Commission techniques, the youngest it can be is 1,181 years, the oldest 1,628 years. "I cannot find a record of an oak tree of any of the 500 species internationally which has a greater girth anywhere in the world."

Yet, for all its local renown, the Pontfadog oak was barely known outside the small Ceiriog valley and the community of ancient tree experts. It was mentioned by George Borrow on his journey across Wales in 1862 but, like most other ancient trees in Britain, it was never fenced off or protected, and no one was ever asked to pay to see it – although Huw Williams's grandmother used to put out a collection box for the local Cheshire home, sometimes raising £5 a year. "It was just our tree, part of the landscape. We were very proud of it," said one woman from the valley the next day. Last week, some of Britain's specialists on ancient trees gathered at Pontfadog for a post mortem.

"It was the national tree of Wales and one of the oldest oaks in Europe. I'm desperately trying to find people who can help in propagating from the tree by either grafting or micro-propagation in order to maintain its genotype. Kew Gardens have said they are interested," said Simpson.

In fact, the tree could have been saved for many more years. Last year a group from the Ancient Tree Forum visited Pontfadog and, seeing it was vulnerable to a big wind, put together a list of actions costing £5,700 that they thought might have protected it. Despite a petition of 6,000 signatures to the Welsh assembly, no money could be found.

Wonder if tree lovers in this country could call on a group such as the Ancient Tree Forum to save a great old tree, if they feared one was in trouble somewhere in this land.  

Want to boycott Koch Bros. products? There's an app...

The 21st century has another technological moment. Yesterday a new application for mobile phones was released. It can reveal to a shopper with a smartphone what products profit the fossil fuel billionaires the Koch brothers. The app, called Buycott, is eighteen months in the making, and actually is designed to reveal the corporate structures behind products, so it's not necessarily anti-Koch brothers...or even liberal.

Clare O'Connor writes for Forbes:  

"Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food."

What can you say about this software but -- that's cool. (Well, we could add that the Koch industries take in $98 billion a year, according to Forbes.) 

Climate change denial stands on one leg: Money

Chris Hayes throws a fit over climate denial and inaction tonight on his MSNBC show:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

 

Extensively quotes from a speech of true outrage and conviction on climate conservation, seventeen minutes long, delivered on the Senate floor by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Includes this: 

There is only one leg on which climate change denial stands: Money.

Wild Ones: Saving Endangered Species (w/soundtrack)

Ever heard of a soundtrack to a book? Me neither, but that's what we have here with blackprairie (including members of the Decembrists) and their lovely, moving collection of songs to a forthcoming book about efforts to save three endangered species, called Wild Ones. The author got to know Chris Funke and friends before they hit it big, and he sent them chapters, and they traded him songs. 

Speaking of which...author Jon Moonallem writes in Slate and tells the story of "A Tranquilized Polar Bear Rising Thru an Autumn Sky":

The town of Churchill, Manitoba is a shivering little settlement on the edge of Hudson Bay that, every fall, gets overrun with about 900 polar bears and 10,000 polar bear tourists. Polar bears routinely wander into town—they especially love hanging out by the elementary school. When they do, folks call 675-BEAR and a squad of bear patrol officers tries to herd the animals back onto the tundra, firing off pyrotechnics and noise-makers. Bears that won’t budge are tranquilized and transferred to a Quonset hut near the airport, a facility sometimes referred to as the “Polar Bear Jail.” Each bear serves a month sentence—enough to dissuade it (hopefully) from entering town again—then it’s drugged again, packed in a net, and airlifted under a helicopter to a safer area north of town while crowds of tourists gather to watch. It’s a breathtaking thing to see: a polar bear lifting off the ground and flying away.

Really lovely. Really.

Alice Waters comes to Ojai for Food for Thought

Alice Waters, famous for Chez Panisse, the restaurant, and for her many cookbooks, brought her own wise self to a celebration of the tenth year of Food for Thought, friends Dave White and Jim Churchill's effort to bring gardens, fresh food, and more to the schoolchildren of Ojai. Wonderful produce (produced in the schoolyards) along with inexpensive and great picnic food, some heartfelt words, music, kids, festivity. And a lovely picture of Jim, Dave, and Alice, courtesy of photographer and nice guy Rich Reid:

Visited with Alice briefly to rave about her great cookbook The Art of Simple Food, from which I have learned so much. (It's also a fav of Michael Pollan's.) She said a new edition will be out this fall. 

Students confront climate change denying scientist

It's almost impossible to quote this story without snark, but I'm going to try. At Michigan State University, a conservative group sponsored a presentation by a notorious climate change skeptic named Willie Soon, an astrophysicist. A small group of students, 21 in all, showed up to hear him, five of which were affiliated with a campus group, MSU Greenpace.  

Greenpeace, MSU Greenpeace’s parent organization, released an investigation in 2011 based upon documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act alleging Soon has become increasingly under the thumb of the fossil fuel industry. From 2001 to 2012, Soon received about $1.33 million in funding from sources such as the American Petroleum Institute, the ExxonMobil Foundation and the Charles G. Koch Foundation , according to Greenpeace.

Soon's reaction is fascinating/horrifying.

When asked about these criticisms, Soon looked haggard and asked to sit down. He complained that he had been “tortured” by environmental activists throughout the four-stop university tour.

“It’s just not about money. I know that it looks bad. Since 2004, I am first unable[sic], then I decided to not take (government) money anymore,” Soon said. “I’ve been trying to get funding from whoever foundation or anybody who wants to give me money. Coal, anything, I don’t care. Really, I don’t, because I know that I’m not being influenced by money.”

It's the denouement of a bad horror movie, in which the villain breaks down and confesses.

Related articles

Koch & Exxon climate denial scientist confronted by Greenpeace Students (VIDEO)

Billionaires Secretly Funded Vast Climate Denial Network

Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks

How The Dirty Energy Money Funding Climate Inaction Slips By The Press

Fracking in Ventura County: the next oil boom?

Great op-ed from Marianne Ratcliff in today's Star on fracking in Ventura County. How much fracking is going on, and how much more will be going on? Difficult to say. According to her research, most wells in this area have already been fracked -- but that's not to say that more couldn't be, or couldn't be hazardous. 

Fracking is such a proven method of increasing oil and gas production in the Silverthread lease in Upper Ojai that it is the rare well that has not been fracked, according to a 1975 Society of Petroleum Engineers report on the Ojai Silverthread Field.

Ambitious energy companies are reporting plans in company prospectuses and investor reports, such as the one published in March 2012 by Underground Energy Corp., reporting that Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s Vintage Production California LLC subsidiary, the largest Monterey landholder in the Ventura, Los Angeles and San Joaquin basins, has “200,000 acres and 520 drilling targets de-risked for oil-prone shale development.”

"De-risked?" For them or us? Here's a map from CNN, showing the oil formation overlaid on the state.

Will attend the meeting on Tuesday, in which the county will hear from its legal counsel on fracking locally. All but one of the supervisors want to know more...as do some of us. 

Obama quails on Keystone XL: Poll shows why

Looks like Obama intends to back down and let Keystone XL bitumen pipeline go through.

From the NY Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Appearing at the home of an outspoken critic of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama on Wednesday night told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.”

Mr. Obama appears to be leaning toward the approval of the pipeline, although he did not specifically mention it to the donors. But he acknowledged that it is hard to sell aggressive environmental action — like reducing pollution from power plants — to Americans who are still struggling in a difficult economy to pay bills, buy gas and save for retirement.

“You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your No. 1 concern,” Mr. Obama said. “And if people think, well, that’s shortsighted, that’s what happens when you’re struggling to get by.”

Maybe the Prez saw this poll from Pew Research: 

And maybe it's not a coincidence that this past week James Hansen decided he had to quit his job working for the federal government, and this today argued fiercely against the pipeline:

The perspective of pipeline apologists is contrary to the laws of physics and basic economics, neither of which gives a damn about politics. [edit]

The science on climate change has been in for a quarter of a century. There are no more mixed messages, just catastrophe after catastrophe. The president stands at a fork in the road: Rejecting the pipeline will show the world we are serious and determined to be on the right side of history. Approving it will signal we are too entrenched with business-as-usual to do what's right by the people, planet and future generations.

Meanwhile atop the NY Times, a disturbing story from perhaps the second best-known of all climate scientists, Lonnie Thompson, on the rapid melting of an ice cap in Peru. 

Glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes that took at least 1,600 years to form has melted in just 25 years, scientists reported Thursday, the latest indication that the recent spike in global temperatures has thrown the natural world out of balance.

It's much more than Obama's legacy that hangs in the balance. Regrettably. 

Related articles

Billionaire vs. climate change: Thomas Steyer

Keystone XL: The Pipeline to Disaster

Keystone XL: The Science, Stakes, and Strategy Behind the Fight Over the Tar Sands Pipeline

Why Keystone XL Matters

Earthquakes and fracking well issue brewing in Upper Ojai

As discussed in this piece from Scientific American, there is good reason to think disposal wells for fracking fluids can cause earthquakes. To wit:

Earthquakes have become more than 10 times more common in normally quiescent parts of the U.S., such as Ohio and Oklahoma, in the past few years. Given the simultaneous uptick in fracking—an oil and gas drilling technique that involves fracturing shale rock deep underground with the use of a high pressure water cocktail—it’s common to suspect a link. There might be one, but the real culprit behind the largest earthquake in Oklahoma’s recorded history is not what goes down but what comes up with the oil: wastewater.

Oklahoma has long benefited from a robust oil industry. One of the side effects of oil production is that a lot of water flows back to the surface with the petroleum. That flowback water must be disposed of, because it is laced with all kinds of contaminants the liquid solvent has picked up during its long residence deep underground, ranging from trace amounts of radioactive elements to lots of salt.

In Oklahoma and in much of the rest of the country, the most common burial ground for such wastewater—whether we’re talking oil or gas—is a disposal well back underground. Oil producers in central Oklahoma had been using this approach for 18 years when a swarm of powerful earthquakes rumbled across the countryside starting on November 5, 2011. The biggest temblor, a magnitude 5.7 felt as far away as Milwaukee, was linked to pumping yet more wastewater down old oil wells in the vicinity. (The wastewater pumping there continues despite the quakes.)

According to a new study published online March 26 in Geology, the earthquake was indeed caused by filling up the old oil cavities with water until there was simply too much pressure on the surrounding rock. Records showed that after years of requiring little pressure to dump the wastewater, oil operators recently have had to actively pump the water down the old wells to overcome a more than 10-fold increase in underground pressure, which peaked at 3.6 megapascals, or 525 pounds-per-square-inch. That’s because the volume of wastewater pumped down had exceeded the volume of oil extracted, suggests the team of researchers from the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University and the U.S. Geological Survey. That increased pressure then caused the rock to jump along a pre-existing fault, known as the Wilzetta Fault.

Which makes me wonder about the advisability of allowing a new disposal well field for fracking fluids in this active earthquake zone, and near a college, no less.

From the Ojai Valley News, dated March 7. 2013:

By Kimberly Rivers

"A new oilfield waste disposal facility, including an underground injection well for storing oilfield fluids (and potentially fracking fluids) could become a reality in Ojai’s backyard in the very near future.

Pending before county planners is a proposal from Anterra Waste for a new Class II oilfield waste disposal facility, near the Santa Clara River in Santa Paula. “Class II fluids are waste streams associated with oil and natural gas production operations,” according to the notice on the county’s website.

Related to that proposal, Anterra is pursuing a lease for county land — about a half mile from proposed facility — to drill and operate a Class II injection well that would inject waste from oil and natural gas production deep into the earth for disposal and storage.

Mirada Petroleum also has applied to the county of Ventura to expand an existing conditional use permit for oil leases in Upper Ojai behind St. Thomas Aquinas College, paving the way for eight new oil wells."

Okay. Now. If the injection of fracking fluids into a disposal field set off an earthquake, that damaged the college or its cathedral, wouldn't regulators be potentially liable for approving it, knowing the risks?

Fracking in Upper Ojai: the latest

Fracking -- which as you all no doubt know is the injection of water and chemicals below ground at pressure, to break up rock formations and release natural gas and/or oil -- has come to rural Upper Ojai and Ventura County.

In truth, fracking turns out to have been going on in this area for a long time -- decades. How long in this neighborhood is a little unclear. I have been told by neighbors that "all the wells in Upper Ojai" have been fracked. I also have been told that oil companies have applied to drill hundreds of new wells in Ventura County and the backcountry. I have heard that fracking is not a danger to our water supply because the oil wells being fracked are so far below the surface they can't possible contaminate surface waters. I am skeptical, after reading the latest on fracking from ProPublica. 

At the same time, I am aware that oil production is what first brought white people like me to this area, beginning in 1867, so perhaps I am complicit, in a sense, and should be a little more open-minded. 

The irony is that there is so little regulation on fracking in California that oil companies wishing to frack have to jump through more hoops to drill in the National Forest backcountry, where no one lives, and on which wells have stood for decades, than in neighborhoods such as ours. 

Here are some links to the latest: 

Chevron offers public tours of fracking site: Ventura County Star. 

“The most dangerous thing you will do today is climb in and out of the vans, so please watch your step,” said Leslie Klinchuch, Chevron’s project manager for what’s officially known as the Pacific Coast Pipeline Superfund site.

The point was that the site, despite being contaminated with a known cancer-causing substance and other pollutants, is safe to visit. It’s also safe to live near, according to decades of testing by Chevron and the EPA. Hundreds of Fillmore residents do live nearby, separated from the refinery site by the Pole Creek concrete drainage channel, and a few of them were on Tuesday’s tour to see the property for themselves.

Fracking has been going on in the nearby National Forest for decades, and four wells were fracked int he last couple of years. An investigatory report: 

The ForestWatch investigation revealed that at least four wells were fracked in the Sespe Oil Field in 2011, and at least three additional wells were fracked in 2012. The fracking occurred on private land owned by Seneca Resources Corporation, a Texas-based oil company that operates the vast majority of wells in the Sespe Oil Field. The company relies on slant drilling to reach oil deposits on federal leases beneath the Los Padres National Forest. The chemicals, supplies and equipment were provided by Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil field service companies with revenues of $24.8 billion in 2011 and also headquartered in Texas.

The recent fracking operations were approved without any public notice or environmental review. This is because fracking is unregulated in the State of California, and is typically rubber-stamped by the California Department of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (“DOGGR”), the agency charged with regulating oil and gas extraction throughout the state. In one of the recent Los Padres fracking operations, DOGGR officials received a Notice of Intention to Rework Well 48-33 on the White Star lease on June 22, 2012, and three days later issued a one-page Permit to Conduct Well Operations authorizing the fracking. According to records submitted by Seneca Resources Corporation, the fracking operation was completed a few days later on July 5, 2012.

Fracking consumes millions of gallons of water a year in Ventura County (Ojai Valley News)

According to the voluntary reporting site www.fracfocus.org, 13 wells have been fracked in Ventura County since January 2011. Based on the water volume listed for those wells, 3,679,879 gallons of water were used during the franking process. According to the site, that total could include fresh water, produced water and/or recycled water.

Produced water comes up during drilling and has to be separated from the oil or gas. Fracfocus reports that 99.2 percent of the mixture injected underground during fracking is water; the remaining .79 percent is chemicals. That means 29,071 gallons of chemicals, gellants and other components were used in the 13 wells that were voluntarily reported.

Aera Energy — the largest oil producer in Ventura County, according to its website — did not respond by press-time to requests for information about its water sourcing and the quantity of fresh water it has used in drilling operations.

James Hines of the Sierra Club of Ventura County claims industry sources have disclosed that “60 wells have been fracked in Ventura County alone, along the Ventura River and Rincon. Those areas drain to the ocean. And along Sespe Creek,” said Hines. “With the new permits in Upper Ojai and old wells which can be re-drilled, there is nothing to stop them from fracking (in the valley),” he said. “There are plugged and covered wells in the Casitas watershed area.”

Yikes! My thought is to try and learn how to identify a fracked well by sight, for my own knowledge, and potentially to get neighbors involved. But is that even possible?