Empty nets in Louisiana three years after the spill – ‘Looks like somebody poured motor oil all over the marsh there’

Across the Mississippi from Pointe a la Hache, beyond the West Bank levees, lie some of the waterways that saw the heaviest oiling: Barataria Bay and its smaller inlets, Bay Jimmy and Bay Batiste.

Louisiana State University entomologist Linda Hooper-Bui tracks the numbers of ants, wasps, spiders and other bugs at 40 sites in the surrounding marshes, 18 of which had seen some degree of oiling.

She is part of a small army of researchers who have been trying to figure out what effect the spill will have on the environment of the Gulf Coast. Since 2010, she’s recorded a sharp decline in several species of insects — particularly spiders, ants, wasps and grasshoppers, which sit roughly in the middle of the food web.

They’re top predators among insects but food for birds and fish.

Hooper-Bui said she expected their numbers to bounce back the following year: “Instead, what we saw was worse.”

The reason, she suspects, is that the oil that sank into the bottom of the marsh after the spill hasn’t broken down at the same rate as the crude that floated to the surface.

Instead, it’s in the sediments, still giving off fumes that are killing the insects.

Some napthalenes — crude oil components most commonly known for their use in mothballs — appear to have increased since the spill, 

From;  http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/04/empty-nets-in-louisiana-three-years.html

Biological condition in rivers and streams across nine U.S. ecoregions

The proportion of rivers and streams in poor biological condition, based on the Macroinvertebrate MMI, ranges from 26% in the Western Mountains ecoregion to 71% in the Coastal Plains ecoregion.

The three most widespread stressors to rivers and streams — phosphorus, nitrogen, and riparian vegetative cover are depicted by ecoregion.

A clear pattern is evident: the easternmost ecoregions (generally east of the Mississippi River) have a higher proportion of rivers and streams scoring in poor biological condition than those in the western U.S. In the east, the percent of river and stream miles in poor biological condition ranges from 55% to 71%. In the western ecoregions, the percent in poor biological condition ranges from 26% to 43%.

From;  http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/04/graph-of-day-biological-condition-in.html

Youth unemployment

Generation jobless

Around the world almost 300m 15- to 24-year-olds are not working. What has caused this epidemic of joblessness? And what can abate it?

A World Bank database compiled from households shows more than 260m young people in developing economies are similarly “inactive”. The Economist calculates that, all told, almost 290m are neither working nor studying: almost a quarter of the planet’s youth

On the other hand, many of the “employed” young have only informal and intermittent jobs. In rich countries more than a third, on average, are on temporary contracts which make it hard to gain skills. In poorer ones, according to the World Bank, a fifth are unpaid family labourers or work in the informal economy. All in all, nearly half of the world’s young people are either outside the formal economy or contributing less productively than they could.

Young people have long had a raw deal in the labour market. Two things make the problem more pressing now. The financial crisis and its aftermath had an unusually big effect on them. Many employers sack the newest hires first, so a recession raises youth joblessness disproportionately. In Greece and Spain over a sixth of the young population are without a job (see chart two). The number of young people out of work in the OECD is almost a third higher than in 2007.

Second, the emerging economies that have the largest and fastest-growing populations of young people also have the worst-run labour markets. Almost half of the world’s young people live in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. They also have the highest share of young people out of work or in the informal sector. The population of 15- to 24-year-olds in Africa is expected to rise by more than a third, to 275m, by 2025.

From;  http://www.economist.com/news/international/21576657-around-world-almost-300m-15-24-year-olds-are-not-working-what-has-caused

“Gross containment failure” of Fukushima reactors — Now we are seeing plutonium far from plant

There was a melt-down and a melt-through of the nuclear reactor vessels, but that wouldn’t be enough unless the containment failed too […]

Now we are seeing heavy isotopes like plutonium out at 20 to 30 kilometers […]

All these are signs of gross containment failure

From;  http://enenews.com/gross-containment-failure-fukushima-reactors-plutonium-plant

What the Transtion movement acknowledges is that we have come to a point where we need to begin making other arrangements; as Odum asked, How do we begin the transition away from the high energy arrangements of our industrial/information society and toward levels of energy use that are sustainable on the back end of the energy pulse?

Transition connects the dots between fossil fuel energy use and it’s affect on the climate, as well as it’s relationship to a ‘peak economy’, ‘peak debt’ and the over-arching conclusion that we may have reached The End of Growth. Hopkins wrote about the relationship to the economy in 2009:

Chris Martenson again put it well in the Crash Course: “Our economy must grow to support a money system that requires growth, but is challenged by an energy system that can’t grow, and both of these are linked to a natural world that is rapidly being depleted.”

The Transition model assumes a re-localisation of life and work due to the end of cheap fuels for food production, transport and energy generation, but today almost everyone is part of a globalised economic system highly dependent on imports. Politicians and business leaders have recently distanced themselves from the worst extremes of the weakly regulated financial activities, but whether it’s credit crunch, energy crunch or climate crunch the biggest employment crisis ever seen is already unfolding across international boundaries.

We are about halfway through that blip of oil, and that the first half we used was the cheap, easy, high quality oil, and that the second half would be increasingly difficult to extract, expensive, and of lower quality. I came to understand that timing wise, the important point wasn’t when we “run out,” but when we reach the peak – the all time high of production. The peak is the important thing, because our whole society is built around the idea of continual growth. Continual growth is dependent upon reasonably cheap energy resources, and we tend to just take for granted that they’ll always be there, and growth (with a few inconvenient ups and downs here and there) will always continue. After all, it’s all we’ve known…that is, until we get a bigger perspective than just the industrial/informational ages of the past 200 years.

From;  http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-04-26/the-wave-pulse-of-human-history

wotfigo; Modern civilisation depends entirely on the two fundamental energy supplies notably, electricity & liquid fuels. There are many energy sources to produce electricity. But there are no substitutes for liquid energy. Liquid energy sources can include oil derivatives, and liquefied gasses. There are really no substitutes for liquid energy other than some possible conversion to electricity. We can convert a large part of our road transport infrastructure energy source from liquid energy to electricity. For example electric trains, electric cars, electric trams & buses. Even electric trucks. But it is not possible to convert our air or ocean transport to electricity in any meaningful extent. Also liquid fuels are the prime energy source in the farming, mining,  & construction industries. Complete conversion to electricity is not possible without loss of energy output. For this reason it appears that the imminent decline in liquid energy supplies will mean a decline in the quality of food and goods & services in our civilisation. Human population is tied to energy sources. As the energy that powers our civilisation declines so too will our population. Let’s hope that the decline is as gradual as this graph depicts.

wotfigo. Graph; The light blue line is the oil & gas production which peaks before the year 2025 & then declines. The dark green line is the worlds population which peaks around 9 to 10 billion people in about  the year 2050. Population then goes into decline following the loss of the hydrocarbon energy sources. This projection (& there are many others) predicts a low human population without hydrocarbon energy sources of only 1 billion people by the year 2200.

Graph from ; http://www.oilcrisis.com/laherrere/supply.htm

wotfigo; One of the main themes of Entropy Wins is the direct connection between energy sources & the rise & eventual fall of all civilisations. Fossil fuels have given modern humans the energy intensive culture we enjoy with motor cars, international air plane flights, electrified houses, modern communication & entertainment industries and modern medicine. But there has been a massive price to pay which includes overpopulation, factory food farming, huge environmental destruction and global pollution including greenhouse gasses produced by the fossil fuel bonanza. All civilisations over grow their resource base. We have done the same. Our addiction to high energy intensive fossil fuels will ensure their continued use as we watch the problems mentioned above continue to escalate.Government & private efforts to use fewer carbon based fossil fuels will not occur until the last economically viable chunk of coal or litre of oil is mined & burned.

Energy Use In 2030

wotfigo; The above graph is a BP prediction & it might be wrong but it probably won’t be far out.Yes, the total amount of energy produced by carbon free renewables plus hydro does increase. But so too does the amount of fossil fuel use. There is NO SLOWDOWN in carbon pollution. I have demonstrated in many other posts that the world is now locked in to a greater than 2.5 degree C temperature rise. By 2030 this guaranteed  future global warming rise will be close to a catastrophic 4 degrees.

Graph above from; http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9949#more

Despite the clean technology of the past decade, we continue to extract and burn fossil fuels more than ever before

The industrial revolution that kick-started the human impact on the climate was driven by just such a feedback. The steam engine enabled us to drain coal mines, providing access to more coal that could power more steam engines capable of extracting yet more coal. That led to better technologies and materials that eventually helped ramp up production of oil as well. But oil didn’t displace coal, it helped us mine it more effectively and stimulated more technologies that raised energy demand overall. So coal use kept rising too – and oil use in turn kept increasing as cleaner gas, nuclear and hydro came on stream, helping power the digital age, which unlocked more advanced technologies capable of opening up harder-to-read fossil-fuel reserves.

Seen as a technology-driven feedback loop, it is not surprising that nothing has yet tamed the global emissions curve, because so far nothing has cut off its food supply: fossil fuels. Indeed, though our governments now subsidise clean-power sources and efficient cars and buildings – and encourage us all to use less energy – they are continuing to undermine all that by ripping as much oil, coal and gas out of the ground as possible. And if their own green policies mean there isn’t a market for these fuels at home, then no matter: they can just be exported instead.

This extraordinary double-think is everywhere to be seen. Take the US. Obama boasts that American emissions are now falling due to rising auto efficiency standards and gas displacing dirtier coal in the energy mix. But the US is extracting carbon and flowing it into the global energy system faster than ever before. Its gas boom has simply allowed it to export more of the coal to other countries such as China – which of course uses it partly to produce goods for US markets. Not happy with increasing US carbon extraction, Obama is also set to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline that will enable Canada to flood the global markets with crude produced from dirty tar sands. So much for carbon cuts.

Or take Australia, which in the same year introduced a carbon tax and started debating plans for a series of “mega-mines” that would massively increase its coal exports, helping build confidence among the companies and governments planning no fewer than 1,200 new coal-fired power stations around the world. Even the UK, with its world-leading carbon targets, gives tax-breaks to encourage oil and gas recovery and has been growing its total carbon footprint by relying ever more on Chinese factories – and therefore indirectly its reliance on American and Australian coal. And not just that. Although it rarely gets commented on, Britain – along with other supposedly green nations such as Germany –regularly begs Saudi Arabia and the other Opec nations to produce not less oil, but more. As journalist George Monbiot once put it, nations are trying simultaneously to “reduce demand for fossil fuels and increase supply”.

It is not just governments that are in near-universal denial about what needs to happen to the fossil fuel sector. Blithely ignoring the fact that there is already far more accessible fuel than can be safely burned, pension fund managers and other investors are allowing listed fossil fuel companies to spend the best part of $1tn a year (comparable to the US defence budget, or more than $100 for every person on the planet) to find and develop yet more reserves.

From;  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/17/why-cant-we-give-up-fossil-fuels

CO2 emissions since 1850 (red); exponential growth (blue); cuts to hit climate target (dashed). Photograph: guardian.co.uk

Given what is at stake, it is no wonder that governments agree global warming must be stopped. But that is where the common sense ends and the cognitive dissonance begins. Because to have a decent chance of not exceeding the already risky global target, we need to start phasing out fossil fuels now at a fast enough rate to bring down emissions globally by a few percent a year, and continue doing so for decades to come.

Now compare that with what is actually happening. As with the climate, to understand the situation properly it is necessary to zoom right out to see the long-term trend. Doing so reveals something fascinating, worrying and oddly overlooked. As scientists from Lancaster University pointed out last year, if you plot a graph showing all the carbon emissions that humans have pumped into the air, the result is a remarkably clear exponential curve stretching all the way back to the mid-19th century. Zoom back in on the past decade and it is clear that for all the mounting scientific concern, the political rhetoric and the clean technology, nothing has made a jot of difference to the long-term trend at the global level – the system level. The growth rate in total carbon emissions in the past decade, at around 2% a year, was the same as that of the 1850s.

That might sound hard to believe. After all, thanks to green policies and technologies, emissions have been falling in Europe, the US and many other countries. Wind turbines and solar panels are ever-more common, not just in the west but in fast-growing China. And the energy efficiency of cars, light bulbs, homes and whole economies has been improving globally for decades. So why isn’t the carbon curve showing any let up? Some might instinctively want to blame the growing population but that doesn’t stack up. The rate of population growth has dropped like a stone since the 1960s and is no longer exponential, but the carbon curve doesn’t appear to have noticed that any more than it has noticed the Kyoto protocol or whether you cycled to work this morning. For whatever reason, cutting carbon has so far been like squeezing a balloon: gains made in one place have been cancelled out by increases elsewhere.

From;  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/17/why-cant-we-give-up-fossil-fuels

Japan and IAEA “grossly downplaying” Fukushima cesium releases — Chernobyl-like levels leaked from plant 

From;  http://enenews.com/japan-and-iaea-grossly-downplaying-fukushima-cesium-releases-audio