Creature Feature: Wildlife Crime

More: Bangkok, Thailand is hosting the CITES conference and Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra used the international forum to announce that Thailand will start a legislative process to end ivory trade in her country.  WWF credited the move to  1.5 million supporters (including Leonardo DiCaprio and US Person) who signed a petition to ask the Thai government to ban the legal trade in ivory.  Currently the country is the world's largest unregulated ivory market in the world and serves both as an end user and transshipper of ivory products.  Thailand allows trade in ivory from domesticated Asia elephants, but conservationists say the legal trade provides cover for traffickers in illegal ivory.  Without effective, consistent enforcement bans on trading ivory will not save elephants and rhinos from extinction in the wild.  It is an urgent crisis, so political leaders need to follow up their pledges with swift action.  In her welcoming speech on Monday, Minister Shinawatra recognized her country's elephant culture and the established scientific fact that elephants are sentient beings with complex emotional lives.  She said elephants deserve more caring treatment from humans.  Indeed!

{31.2.13}This World Wildlife Fund video shows the tragic business of wildlife trafficking which unsurprisingly is connected to insurrectionist activity in Africa. The Empire already has a substantial military presence in Africa with special ops forces and advisors fighting insurrectionists threatening sources of valuable commoditites. It is time those assets were turned against wildlife poachers, a real embodiment of evil.

Appeals Court Says Polar Bears Not Endangered

The refusing to substitute its judgment for the responsible agency's the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled on Friday the Fish & Wildlife Service used reasonable decision making by listing the polar bear {Ursus maritimus} as only "threatened" by global warming. The Arctic ice cap is melting rapidly making it near impossible for the bears to hunt seals. Conservation groups want the bear declared "endangered" so it can receive the benefit of the highest level of protection under the Endangered Species Act. The agency conducted a three year review of the polar bears plight and concluded it was likely to become endangered in the future. Melting ice cap will kill a third of existing polar bears thought to number 20,000-25,000 according to one estimate. Oil companies definitely do not want increased protection for the bear since habitat would have to be set aside for it and that action could interfere with their plans to drill for oil. Oil companies are already exempted from incidental taking of small numbers of walruses and bears under a regulation upheld by the Ninth Circuit in August 2012. This latest ruling demonstrates the plutocracy's concerted effort to keep an ice free Arctic region open to exploitation for oil. In US Person's humble opinion that policy was confirmed when the oil patch Charlatan, and Alaska's wild woman Sarah Palin, opposed efforts to control warming to preserve Arctic habitat for wildlife. Their tortured reading of the Endangered Species Act motivated by potential oil profits was upheld by a federal court, and the current administration decided to keep the Section 4(d) rule challenged by conservation organizations.

COTW: The Future Is Now for the Arctic

Satellite imagery (European Space Agency's CryoSat 2) has confirmed the prediction of computer modeling that the total volume of Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly. The total volume is now one-fifth of the 1980 level. If the trend continues the Arctic will be ice free in summer within the decade which will result in more rapid global warming with characteristic extreme, prolonged weather events.

credit: Stroeve et al

The area of ice cover has been shrinking over the last decade too, reaching a record minimum in September 2012, but the volume decease is more troubling since it indicates sea ice is becoming progressively thiner more rapidly than previously thought. Warmer arctic temperatures also mean vast areas of permafrost will begin thawing thereby releasing even more carbon to the atmosphere. This amplification loop will intensify the effects of global warming including significantly raising sea levels. If the ice sheet on Greenland melts--and many climate scientists think it will--sea levels will rise twenty feet or enough to flood lower Manhattan, all of New Orleans, and other coastal population centers worldwide. Greenland is at a tipping point now with surface melting at the highest elevations and in record extent:

credit: J.E. Box et al

melt index = the number of days melting occurred x area melting occurred

Putting the Grease on Keystone XL

Breaking: Environmentalists cannot be truly surprised by the State Department's supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) for the Keystone Pipeline that like the original version finds burning oil strip-mined from the Alberta oil sands is "unlikely to have a substantial impact" on the planet's climate. While the finding is not related to reality, it makes clear the fix is in to build the pipeline. Even the timing of the SEIS Friday afternoon release is suspicious with Secretary Kerry on the other side of the world and official Washington heads up their sequester. B. O'Drama has a few short months to make a final decision, so it will be an uphill battle for Americans who want him to live up to his rhetoric about doing something to counteract climate change. He could make no more decisive first step than denying a permit for the 800,000 barrel a day carbon bomb from the oil industry. Even the lubricating report admits making oil from bituminous sands produces 5 to 19% more greenhouse gas emissions than other crude oil sources.

Normally cautious Time magazine put it bluntly, "There are many climate problems a President cannot solve, but Keystone isn't one of them. It's a choice between Big Oil and a more sustainable planet." Royal Dutch Shell reported in 2006 that its oil sands unit made an after tax profit of $21.75 per barrel, or almost double the company's worldwide profit per barrel. Pressure against approving this disaster in the making has to be applied consistently and often to overcome the paid influence of the oil industry. It is no accident that Secretary Kerry's first official visit in Washington from another foreign leader was the Canadian foreign minister on February 8th. The Canadian government is counting on approval of the pipeline to expand strip-mining of its oil sand deposits, contrary to the State Department's assessment. The Athabasca, Cold Lake, and Peace River deposits in Alberta are enormous. One estimate is the unconventional oil in the sands is seven times that of Saudi Arabia's reserves, and there is an insatiable market for all that oil just south of the border. The problem is how to transport bitumen to the nearest capable refineries cost effectively. XL is intended unlock the oil sands' vast economic value.

Nine refineries at the pipeline's southern terminus are equipped to produce petcoke or synthetic coal, a waste product of refining bitumen that when combusted will emit 13% more CO₂ than the State Department even considered in its recycled SEIS. The largest global petcoke trader in the world is Oxbow Carbon Corporation owned by--wait for it--William Koch brother of Charles and David. The US exported 8.6 million tons of petcoke to China in nine months, most of which was probably burned in coal-fueled power plants because it is 25% cheaper than conventional coal. Oxbow Carbon spent over $1.3 million on Washington lobbyists in 2012 while contributing $4.25 million to GOP super-PACs making it the largest corporate contributor to this relatively new form of political bribery. Tapping into the dirty bitumen now would guarantee the United States will be dependent on oil for generations to come. Public comment on the project is only for a period of 45 days, so you need to make your voice heard if you care about the future of Earth. Send comments to: US Department of State, 2201 C Street NW, Room 2726, Attention: Genevieve Walker, NEPA Coordinator or keystonecomments@state.gov

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Creature Feature: Why Does a Linx Cross the Road?

Rare pictures of a Canadian lynx and her blue-eyed cub in Banff National Park come to PNG from Parks Canada via WildlifeExtra.com. The sequence demostrates just how flexible a cat can be and that highway fencing, while not perfect, is very effective in reducing vehicle collisions with large mamals. Fence and wildlife overpasses on the Trans-Canada highway installed since 1996 have reduced collisions by 80% for large mammals and 96% for elk and deer. Good news indeed for both humans and creatures! Alert drivers called Parks Canada dispatch line prompting an animal welfare officer to immediately go to the scene and keep the lynxes out of danger until they disappeared back into their forest home.

'Toontime: Sequestration, a Real Boring Game

[credit: Joe Heller, Green Bay Press-Gazette]

If it was not the nation's future at stake, US Person would have moved on to something more elucidating. But the sad fact is Washington continues to play chicken with our fiscal credibility. The sequester is a band-aid on the festering national debt and a poor one at that, but it is better than nothing to which the two parties where able to agree. Mitch Feirstein, a hedge fund manager and author of Planet Ponzi writes that an IMF working paper estimated the United States would need to raise taxes and cut expenditures both by 35% to close its fiscal gap! Or, Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University calculates the actual size of the United States' indebtedness including the present value of unfunded commitments (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) is around $202 trillion--more dollars than stars in the Milky Way. Naturally, the theoretical level of fiscal sobriety is well beyond political reality, but there are democratic countries which provide a decent level of social service to their citizens including universal health care and are managed well enough to have net surpluses or reasonable deficits in comparison to their GDP. One can think of Sweden, Norway or even Canada and Australia. To be honest the United States is in the same fiscal profligacy league as Italy and Japan. The nation benefits enormously from the twin towers of owning the planet's trade currency and fielding its largest military force. In times of turmoil the dollar is still considered a safe haven. How long America's financial corner will last as the dollar is depreciated by its central bank, inflation rages, and the overseas military empire shrinks by necessity is an open question. B. O'Drama has made the political calculation that the forced reductions in federal spending will hurt the Repugnants more than his party. That may be correct, but at the cost of some genuine social discomfort.

[credit Joel Pett, Lexington Herald-Leader]

Wackydoodle sez;  I know a Greek feller that can get you a deal on some ulcer pills!