Other environmental disasters

The BP oil spill is an unmitigated man-made disaster. But it happens elsewhere, and we generally do not hear about it. Until now: The Oil Spills We Don't Hear About:

I would be willing to bet that even residents of the smallest Nigerian villages have heard about the Gulf oil spill. By contrast, I know few people in the United States who have heard about the oil spills in the Niger Delta. Yet Nigeria is among the top five suppliers of oil to the U.S.

The Niger Delta, which is home to more than 30 million people and is considered one of the world’s most important ecosystems, produces almost all of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings. Dead fish and oily water are part of daily life for Niger Delta residents, as are gas flares. Some middle-aged Niger Delta residents have never had a night of total darkness. There is a law against gas flaring in Nigeria, but it continues to be widely breached. Oil companies operate in Nigeria with little or no oversight from the government. It must be noted that the government has part ownership in the subsidiaries of all the oil multinationals which operate in Nigeria.

A year ago, Amnesty International published a report, “Petroleum, Pollution and Poverty in the Niger Delta.” The report focused on Royal Dutch Shell because Shell is by far the largest operator in the Delta. According to the Oil Spill Intelligence Report, a 10-year study commissioned by Greenpeace, although Shell operates in more than 100 countries, 40 percent of all its oil spills happen in Nigeria. That’s simply staggering. The Greenpeace and Amnesty reports tell of spills that had been continuous for years and many that had never been cleaned up (despite claims by Shell to the contrary).

According to the Amnesty report, “Oil spills, waste dumping and gas flaring are notorious and endemic in the Niger Delta.” Residents of the Niger Delta “have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water, and eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins.” The fish that is not polluted is killed by the oil and toxins, making earning a livelihood impossible for many who depended on the sale of fish.

Gulf oil spill

Let's hope and pray that the following live feed from the Gulf of Mexico will become unnecessary in the very near future. There can be no doubt that heads will roll over this ecological catastrophe when the air — and water — clears.

Earth Hour

I must admit to a certain ambivalence about the forthcoming "Earth Hour" on saturday. Of course I recognize the need to conserve energy, but I find the overt soteriological language of the proponents off-putting: One hour to save Earth. And the Timmins Daily Press is not alone, as this google search indicates. Perhaps the National Post goes too far: Earth Hour's soft fascism. But Terry McCrann of Australia's Herald Sun points out the incongruity of turning out lights for an hour at a massive carbon-emitting ball in an airplane hangar. Even burning candles is not obviously a "carbon-neutral" activity.

It should be possible to have a sensible and stewardly approach to the physical environment without recourse to redemptive language and expectations. That Earth Hour comes less than a week after Easter in the western church calendar is ironic. Christians confess that salvation is found in Jesus Christ alone. My own sense is that, if environmentalists do not recognize this truth, they will be forced to find a substitute to give their efforts meaning. For many the earth itself becomes a god and extinguishing the lights takes on salvific significance.

In the meantime we would do well to remind others of Jesus' outrageous claim: "I am the Light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12).

Climate change

I am old enough to remember reading this article when it was first published in Newsweek: The Cooling World. More than a generation later, it is evident that the apocalyptic projections therein were not borne out. Yet the author of this next article argues that average global temperatures did indeed drop between 1998 and 2005: Global Cooling? So who's right in all this? Is the earth heating up or cooling down?

Conservative environmentalists

For some odd reason concern for the environment has come to be associated with those conventionally styled "leftists." Here's evidence that not all professed conservatives are willing to concede such concern to their opponents: Conservative Principles and the Environment. Author John R. E. Bliese writes:

In the often quoted words of Edmund Burke, society is "a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." Therefore, we have obligations and duties to future generations. We have no right to trash the earth in an orgy of consumption and leave our children and grandchildren a polluted and depleted planet. The idea of "sustainable development" is a perfectly conservative one. We have a moral obligation to design our economy in such a way that we can produce our goods without reducing the ability of the planet to support future generations.