It’s legal to dump industrial diesel into rivers in the USA?
May not be legal, but the current administration in charge of enforcing environmental laws doesn't seem very interested in doing so.
Yes, it's sad. It's a possible argument against old leaders - they're likely to be less forward thinking than someone with more life left. Plus people of that generation care a lot less about the environment.
It's obviously also a consequence of the short term focus of having fixed term limits.
I don't know how to fix these things, but it's irritating that nobody even tries to fix it.
Kamchatka isalso home to a great deal of volcanic and geothermal activity. The cause here might not be human. https://youtube.com/watch?v=KILQ0M5ilIo
It's always worth raising this possibility, though it looks really unlikely in this case. Volcanic and geothermal activity has never released toxic phenols as far as I can tell. Instead you get simpler compounds like carbon dioxide, sulfate, etc. which can also be deadly but only at higher concentrations. This appears to keep killing after dilution.
Fair enough. I saw yellow and though "hrm, sulfur?"
I would like to see documentation of the state of US waters. Air quality, for example, has been worsening recently: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/10/25/study-finds-deterioratio... And the water quality is not far behind, as it seems like every month has some new repeal of protections in order to benefit a few cronies of the current regime at the expense of national interests. For example: https://www.hrw.org/report/2…
Exceptions don't make the rule though. There has been lots of information on the results of the clean water act. One example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181009115102.h...
I have no doubt that the Clean Water Act has been super effective at cleaning up water. I do think that environmental protections have been significantly damaged, and that if we do not yet see those effects on water, like we currently do for air, then it's likely that water quality will soon decline.
There was a huge change in the 70s, but those changes are currently being rolled back.
May not be legal, but the current administration in charge of enforcing environmental laws doesn't seem very interested in doing so.
Yes, it's sad. It's a possible argument against old leaders - they're likely to be less forward thinking than someone with more life left. Plus people of that generation care a lot less about the environment. It's obviously also a consequence of the short term focus of having fixed term limits. I don't know how to fix these things, but it's irritating that nobody even tries to fix it.
It's not just the leaders. There's a large body of voters in both the US and Canada who are strongly in favor of coal, oil and gas and vehemently opposed to any limits being placed on those companies
And the shit that goes down in Canada is incredible. Trudeau. Young liberal, right? Ran on an anti-pipeline platform, but when he took office, he bought the pipeline for $7B and fully indents to build it.
Yes, it's sad. It's a possible argument against old leaders - they're likely to be less forward thinking than someone with more life left. Plus people of that generation care a lot less about the environment. It's obviously also a consequence of the short term focus of having fixed term limits. I don't know how to fix these things, but it's irritating that nobody even tries to fix it.
It's not just the leaders. There's a large body of voters in both the US and Canada who are strongly in favor of coal, oil and gas and vehemently opposed to any limits being placed on those companies And the shit that goes down in Canada is incredible. Trudeau. Young liberal, right? Ran on an anti-pipeline platform, but when he took office, he bought the pipeline for $7B and fully indents to build it.
I think I'm in favor of the pipeline, the alternative is shipping oil via rail which is riskier and burns more oil. Sadly it doesn't stay in the ground without a pipeline.
However, Canada should get smart here and do what Norway does with their oil profits. Invest it in a sovereign wealth fund that's diversified away from oil. Because the oil age is ending and it will hit the most expensive producers, like the oil sands the hardest.
That seven billion spent on converting to renewable energy might have made more sense.
There's Kozelsky pesticides landfill in the area. It was started there circa 1980, 35 km to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. There were 108 tons of unusable pesticides. The spill comes from the river Nalycheva, and the landfill is on the river Mutnushka which flows into the Nalycheva river.
Very interesting. It is mentioned here: "Regionally Based Assessment of Persistent Toxic Substances: Central and Northeast Asia Regional Report" United Nations Environment Programme, December 2002 https://iwlearn.net/resolveuid/1946c1f28aed08b804427301ae5e0... Kamchatka Oblast - Pesticide landfill built in 1979-1982 at foot of Kozelsky volcano. 102 t of various pesticides. ... In the Central and North East Asia Regio…
"After nearly two decades, Kamchatka recorded a net natural population growth instead of decline in 2007. However, in first half of 2008, the trend was reversed and population decline was observed again, partly due to an increased mortality rate among the rural population."
What country do you live in? In mine, the good ol' USA, captured regulators just make it all legal. See fracking, for example.
Yet the waterways in the USA have never been cleaner in the last hundred years. There are regulations and they are enforced, imperfectly like everything. I live in Canada where we take the environment more seriously still.
By exporting a lot of industry, we pollute more, just other people's water.
It's not just the leaders. There's a large body of voters in both the US and Canada who are strongly in favor of coal, oil and gas and vehemently opposed to any limits being placed on those companies And the shit that goes down in Canada is incredible. Trudeau. Young liberal, right? Ran on an anti-pipeline platform, but when he took office, he bought the pipeline for $7B and fully indents to build it.
I think I'm in favor of the pipeline, the alternative is shipping oil via rail which is riskier and burns more oil. Sadly it doesn't stay in the ground without a pipeline. However, Canada should get smart here and do what Norway does with their oil profits. Invest it in a sovereign wealth fund that's diversified away from oil. Because the oil age is ending and it will hit the most expensive producers, like the oil sa…
Agree with your comments regarding Norway and renewable energy.
However, I suspect that if the pipeline is built they will still ship via rail if it is profitable - thus the net effect will just be more oil coming from the oil sands.
The only scenario were a pipeline could help the environment (relative to the status quo - it's still bad) would be it rail usage was displaced by pipeline usage. This could be true only when the price of oil holds stable between a narrow range such that pipeline shipments profitable, but not rail shipments. The price is unlikely to ever hold at such a range long enough such that Suncor, etcf.. would adjust production to ship by pipeline only. High sunk capital costs have meant that historically these companies run close to full capacity regardless of price.
It seems that's the same bay as for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which with a population of 180,000 is Kamchatska's largest city. So this is very close to what amounts to a large population for Kamchatka. The Russians have always been cavalier about pollution and, as much as it may be hard to believe for some Americans, even more cavalier than here in the US. Not the Russian people of course but their political systems…
> Sort of like the intermontane west generally in the US. Wasteland, right? Well the western US is generally considered to be a delicate arid ecosystems that is really easy to mess up permanently. A lot of it was really messed up from timber cutting, mining, and cattle ranching in the 1800's. And it only looks like it's recovered because no one remembers what it was like before. There is a valley where the Mormons fo…
Timber cutting also destroyed the majority of old growth trees, causing high densities of smaller and younger trees to grow in their place. Today we often think of forests being healthy when we see dense uninterrupted lush green trees. However forests in the western US were sparser previously, with regular wildfires thinning younger trees, sparing older/tougher trees, modulating forest density, and altering the mix of undergrowth/young trees/old growth. There are videos on YouTube showing comparisons of forests from 100 years ago and today, and they look very different as a result of these changes.