news20100523cnn

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[Asia]
By the CNN Wire Staff
May 23, 2010 -- Updated 0743 GMT (1543 HKT)
Search on for missing Air India flight data recorder
｛エアインド航空機のフライトデータレコーダー探索中｝

{Workers on Sunday sift through the wreckage of the Air India jetliner that crashed in Mangalore, India.}
｛土曜日に関係者、インドのマンガロールで墜落したエアインドジェット機の残骸を捜査｝

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Searchers looking for plane's flight data recorder
｛捜索者、航空機のフライトデータレコーダー探索｝

> Bodies of 87 of the 158 victims identified and claimed
｛１５８人の犠牲者のうち８７体の死亡が確認される｝

> Eight people survived crash
｛事故で８人が生存｝

> Officials asked relatives for DNA samples to help with identification
｛当局者、身元確認のため近親者のＤＮＡのサンプルを求める｝

Mangalore, India (CNN) -- Searchers on Sunday combed through the charred wreckage of the Air India plane that crashed in southern India, looking for the flight data recorder.

The recorder -- commonly known as the "black box" -- will allow authorities to piece together the flight's last minutes.

Of the 158 people who perished when the plane crashed in Mangalore on Saturday, 87 bodies have been identified and claimed, said Harpreet Singh, the airline's emergency response coordinator.

Only eight of the 166 people on board Air India Flight IX-812 survived the crash and were taken to hospitals.

Air India spokesman K. Swaminathan said about 30 to 40 relatives of the crash victims have been flown into India from the United Arab Emirates in two separate flights.

At the mortuary in Mangalore, family members waited for hours for authorities to let them in and identify the victims. But with many burned beyond recognition, loud speakers urged relatives to donate DNA samples to make the identification process possible.

The National Transportation Safety Board announced Saturday that it will send a team to India to assist in the investigation.

The Boeing 737 took off from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and crashed while trying to make its scheduled landing in Mangalore at 6:30 a.m. Saturday (9 p.m. ET Friday).

Some of those flying back from Dubai were among the millions of Indians who work as laborers in Persian Gulf states.

Ummerfarook Mohammed told CNN's sister station, CNN-IBN, that the cabin filled quickly with smoke after the jet skidded off the runway and hit a boundary wall. The impact created a hole in the plane's body, he said, through which he crawled out and ran for his life.

Nearby villagers carted him in a rickshaw to a hospital.

A medical student said she escaped from the plane and free fell until she was snagged by a tree, where rescuers found her.

Mangalore's airport was "technically certified" by the country's civil aviation regulator.

India's civil aviation minister Praful Patel said weather conditions were good -- calm winds, no rain and good visibility of 6 kilometers -- and that both the pilot and co-pilot were experienced and had landed many times before at the Mangalore airport.

They did not report any problems before landing the plane, the ministry said.

However, the 90-meter spillover sand bed beyond the runway was not able to stop the aircraft after it overshot the tarmac, Patel said. Only the tail of the aircraft was left intact.

Witnesses said the plane crashed through the hilltop airport's boundary wall and fell into a valley before bursting into flames, CNN-IBN reported.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced financial aid for the victims Saturday and canceled scheduled events at his residence to mark the end of his first year in office.

The government said families would receive 200,000 rupees, or about $4,260, for each dead passenger and 50,000 rupees, or $1,064, for every injured passenger.

Boeing released a statement saying the company would send a team to provide technical assistance to Indian authorities during their investigation.

The NTSB team is expected to arrive in Mangalore on Tuesday morning and will include a senior air safety investigator, a flight operations specialist, an aircraft systems specialist and technical advisers for Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, the NTSB said in a statement.

The city of Mangalore, situated in the state of Karnataka along India's Western Ghats or hills, had just christened a new terminal. A week later, it was marred by the crash, India's worst aviation disaster in a decade.

In 2000, an Alliance Air jet crashed while trying to land in the northeastern city of Patna, killing about 60 people.

news20100523reut

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][U.S. | Politics | Green Business | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg - Analysis
VENICE, Louisiana
Sat May 22, 2010 1:18pm EDT
Experts say plan to keep oil off Louisiana coast is flawed
｛専門家によると、ルイジアナ海岸への原油の不着岸計画が駄目になった｝

(Reuters) - Louisiana authorities are desperate to start building sand levees to keep a massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill from swamping their coast, but experts have serious doubts about the $350-million project.

The plan would reinforce and extend barrier islands in the Gulf by taking sand from the sea floor and placing it to form walls extending around 40 miles on each side of the Mississippi River, state and local leaders said.

The resulting berms -- which are narrow ledges or shelves -- would then snag oil gushing from the uncapped BP Plc well before it entered into the coast's fragile wetlands, where it could do great harm to fishing grounds and wildlife.

Scientists, environmentalists, engineers and other experts who have studied the Gulf coast said the plan could not be implemented fast enough to stop the encroaching oil from the uncapped well.

"There are two major problems: where we would find the sand? How would we mobilize in time to make this effective?" said Robert Dalrymple, professor of civil engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Some experts also complained of being excluded from the Louisiana plan and said it was being conducted hastily.

"The scientific community has been ostracized by the way the whole thing has been approached," said Gregory Stone, professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University.

"I applaud the concept. My concern is that we are doing this haphazardly and it comes around and bites us and that has longer term implications," said Stone, who said sandbags and protective booms would make a better stopgap measure.

A little over a month after the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers, sheets of rust-colored heavy oil have already come ashore in dozens of places along Louisiana's coast and in Alabama and Mississippi.

Fears that more is on its way reinforces the state's view that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers should immediately grant permission for the plan to start, Governor Bobby Jindal said.

"There is no reason for delay. Every day that goes by without this permit being issued, without these dredgers being out there, is another day we are losing in terms of fighting this oil off of our shores," he said earlier this week.

The U.S. Coast Guard would build the levees and London-based BP would be made to fund it, said Jindal, adding that dredgers were being prepositioned, surveys being conducted and water sampling already was under way.

Given the pressure on various governments to respond decisively to the political storm the spill has provoked, it appears that it will be difficult to reject Jindal's appeal, especially when he is backed by local officials.

The Corps said in a statement on Friday it "understood the importance and significance of this emergency permit request" and was treating it as a top priority, soliciting comments from other agencies as required by law.

DOUBTS

Experts in Louisiana said the plan puts them in a bind: reinforcing barriers such as the Chandeleur Islands is a long-term goal of coastal restoration and it would not be right to express doubts at a time when an environmental peril looms.

But they still have reservations:

* The berms could restrict the flow of Gulf water into the Delta, but too little is known about how that might impact the region's ecology.

* The new levees would be vulnerable to tropical storms. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 washed away 80 percent of the Chandeleur Islands, a barrier chain in the Gulf, said Abby Sallenger, an oceanographer at the U.S. Geological Survey.

* The massive works project could threaten marine life such as sea turtles.

* The state has made insufficient use of the vast array of coastal research and the models used to compute the impact of projected man-made interventions to protect it from erosion.

State leaders say levees could be erected in a few days to join some barrier islands, increasing protection -- and any protection is better than none.

But completing comparable projects in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey has taken years and required many millions of cubic feet of sand, Dalrymple said.

Given the complexity of the Delta marshlands, oil would likely get in anyway.

"There's no real way of keeping it (oil) out of the marshes using any kind of barrier except very locally in quiescent bayous," said Paul Kemp, director of the National Audubon Society's Gulf Coast Initiative.

"There is a lot of consternation and part of it is that we know so little about this plan and what do know shows a lack of thought," Kemp said.

(Editing by Paul Simao)


[Environment News][U.S. | Politics | Green Business | COP15 | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg
VENICE, Louisiana
Sun May 23, 2010 1:21am EDT
U.S. environment chief to visit Gulf, spill spreads
｛米環境保護庁長官、メキシコ湾の流出原油の拡散状況を視察｝

(Reuters) - The top U.S. environmental official was to visit the Gulf Coast on Sunday as energy giant BP Plc scrambled to contain a widening oil spill.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson planned to return to the Gulf to monitor the EPA's response, while Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to travel to the BP Command Center in Houston to get an update from the federal science team working on the problem.

The two Cabinet members' missions underscore the rising political and economic stakes for the Obama administration in dealing with the environmental disaster, which grows worse as oil gushes from a ruptured well on the sea floor.

Salazar was also to address the media the day after U.S. President Barack Obama blamed the spill on "a breakdown of responsibility" at BP. Obama also unveiled a commission to investigate the disaster.

The Democratic president, in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, said offshore drilling could go forward only if there were assurances that such accidents would not happen again.

The spill has raised major questions about Obama's earlier proposal to expand offshore drilling as part of strategy to win Republican support for climate change legislation.

Analysts say mounting ecological and economic damage could also become a political liability for Obama before November's congressional elections.

POLITICAL PRESSURE

While also promising to hold Washington accountable for proper oversight of the industry, Obama ramped up pressure on companies linked to the spill: BP, Halliburton and Transocean Ltd

"First and foremost, what led to this disaster was a breakdown of responsibility on the part of BP and perhaps others, including Transocean and Halliburton," Obama said in his toughest remarks yet on companies linked to the spill.

"And we will continue to hold the relevant companies accountable," he said.

BP stocks have taken a beating in the markets in the month since the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers and touched off the spill. Its share price shed another 4 percent on Friday in London, extending recent sharp losses.

Sheets of rust-colored heavy oil are clogging fragile marshlands on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, damaging fishing grounds and wildlife.

Many believe it has already become the worst U.S. oil spill, eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska.

In his executive order announcing former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and former EPA chief William Reilly would co-chair the commission, Obama also made his first reference to the possibility of a criminal probe.

BP made no immediate comment on Obama's suggestion that it was to blame for the deep-sea disaster. But the company's chief executive, Tony Hayward, said he welcomed the establishment of the commission and pledged to work with its co-chairmen.

BP and the EPA are locking horns over the dispersants the company is using to try to contain the spill.

The spill has hurt fishermen because federal authorities have closed a wide slew of Gulf waters to fishing. Wildlife and migrating birds have also suffered.

BP on Friday revised downward an earlier estimate that one of its containment solutions, a 1-mile-long siphon tube inserted into the larger of two seabed leaks, was catching 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) of oil per day.

Its latest figures show 2,200 barrels a day.

The company's next planned step is a "top kill" -- pumping heavy fluids and then cement into the gushing well to plug it.

Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil -- often defended by BP executives -- as ridiculously low and say it could be 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million liters) per day or more. (Writing by Ed Stoddard; Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Doina Chiacu)

news20100522cnn

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[Asia]
May 22, 2010 -- Updated 0935 GMT (1735 HKT)
At least 158 feared dead in India plane crash
｛インドの航空機が墜落、少なくとも158人が死亡したとみられる｝

{The Air India flight from Dubai is believed to have overshot the runway before crashing in a valley and bursting into flames.}
｛ドバイ発エアインド航空機は、滑走路をやり過ごし、谷に墜落し爆発炎上したと思われる｝

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> 116 bodies recovered from the wreckage, Air India director says
｛エアインドの責任者によると瓦礫から１１６体を回収した｝

> Eight of 165 passengers aboard plane taken to hospitals
｛乗客乗員１６５人のうち８人が病院に搬送された｝

> Remaining passengers feared dead after plane crashed into valley, burst into flames
｛残る乗客乗員は航空機が谷に墜落、爆発炎上で死亡したとみられる｝

> Boeing 737 flew from Dubai to Mangalore in southern India
｛ボーイング ７３７機はドバイからインド南部のマンガロールへの飛行だった｝

(CNN) -- At least 158 people are feared dead after a passenger jet overshot a runway, crashed into a valley and burst into flames in southern India on Saturday morning, officials said.

Eight of the 166 people on board Air India Flight IX-812 were taken to hospitals after the crash outside Mangalore International Airport, the airline's director told reporters.

The Boeing 737 took off from Dubai and crashed while trying to make its scheduled landing in Mangalore at 6:30 a.m. Saturday (9 p.m. ET Friday), Air India Director Anup Srivastava said.

Witnesses said the plane crashed through the hilltop airport's boundary wall and fell into a valley, CNN-IBN reported.

Survivors told CNN's sister network that they jumped out of the plane after it crashed, seconds before it burst into flames.

Rescue workers struggled to reach the crash site in a hilly wooded area beyond the 2,038-foot runway, the network said. Smoke from the plane also hampered rescue efforts, CNN-IBN reported.

Rescuers had recovered 116 bodies from the wreckage, Air India Director Anup Srivastava told reporters Saturday as the search for others victims of the plane crash continued.

Abhay Pathak, a regional manager for Air India based in Dubai, said there were 160 passengers on board the plane and six crew members.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced financial aid for the victims Saturday and canceled scheduled events at his residence to mark the end of his first year in office.

The government said families would receive 200,000 rupees, or about $4,260, for each dead passenger and 50,000 rupees, or $1,064, for every injured passenger.

The airline has offered any relatives of crash victims in the United Arab Emirates free passage to India, Pathak said, and about 20 people have accepted the offer.

Srivastava said India Air was investigating the crash and trying to confirm casualties.

The pilot did not report any problems before landing the plane, the civil aviation ministry said.

The Mangalore airport reported calm wind, no rain and a visibility of 6 km at the time of the crash, the ministry said.

Boeing released a statement saying the company would send a team to provide technical assistance to Indian authorities during their investigation.

The 8,000-foot runway at Mangalore's airport opened in 2006, and officials say it has an end-safety area of about 90 meters.

Air India has released the following telephone numbers to learn more information about the crash:

General: +91 2560 3101 +91 2565 6196

In Mangalore: 0824 222 0422

Dubai (Air India Express): 00971 4 2165828/29

news20100522wsj

[Today's Paper] from [The Wall Street Journal]]

[BusinessBUSINESS MAY 21, 2010
By PAUL BECKETT And ARLENE CHANG
Air India Crash Kills 158
｛エアインド航空機、墜落で１５８人死亡｝

NEW DELHI — An Air India Express plane crashed at Mangalore airport in southern India Saturday morning with 158 of the 166 people on board now feared dead.
｛ニューデリー発--エアインドエクスプレス航空機が土曜日の朝、インド南部のマンガローブ空港で墜落、現在のところ乗客乗員１６６人のうち１５８人が死亡したと思われる｝

There were eight survivors, according to the Minister of Civil Aviation. The plane, arriving from Dubai, overshot the runway at the airport around 6:30 a.m. local time and burst into flames, Anup Srivastava, an Air India spokesman, said at a press conference.

He declined to comment on the cause of the crash. "We have regulatory authorities that will conduct investigations according to procedure," he said. "There will be an inquiry, and the reason will emerge."

{Firefighters try to put out the fire on the Air India plane. It overshot the runway while landing in the southern Indian city of Mangalore.}

There was good visibility and light rain at the time of the crash, the worst in India in a decade.

A police spokesman said that rescue operations, including 25 fire-operation units and ambulances, were stationed at the site.

"This is a major calamity," said V.S. Acharya, home minister for the state of Karnataka, on CNN-IBN TV. Television pictures showed rescue workers struggling to deal with the wreckage in a small valley near the airport.

The crash is believed to be the first major crash of an airliner in India since July 17, 2000, when an Alliance Air Boeing 737-200 crashed into houses during a second landing attempt at Patna, killing 51.

At the scene Saturday afternoon at an impromptu press conference, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said the pilot appeared to have lost control of the plane. He said the weather during the landing was fine. The pilot reportedly had flown into the airport several times. He said all the crew on the plane had died. He said the Indian government will probe the cause of the accident and that the black box inflight recorder had yet to be recovered.

Mr. Patel also said the aircraft was one and a half years old.

Dubai and southern India have close ties because of the number of migrant workers who go from southern India to Dubai for work.

One survivor, interviewed in the hospital by NDTV, a New Delhi television channel, said the one of the plane's tires had burst on landing and that passengers had little time to escape the plane before it burst into flames after crashing off the end of the runway.

"It was not smooth, the flight shook on landing," said the survivor, whose name was not given. "Our hands and feet caught fire."

Air India has been struggling to overcome the global recession, payments for new aircraft, an entrenched staff, a botched merger and increasing competition from private carriers. In the year ended March 31, its parent company National Aviation Company of India Ltd. is estimated to have posted losses totaling about $1.2 billion, making it one of the global industry's most unprofitable carriers and a major financial problem for the Indian government.

Chairman Arvind Jadhav has been trying to turn the airline around by seeking to cut employee ranks, increase cargo on long-haul flights and persuade the government to inject about $2.2 billion in funds.

The airline's origins date to 1932, when Indian industrialist and aviation pioneer J.R.D. Tata founded Tata Airlines. It later became government-owned Air India. In 2007, Air India was merged with Indian Airlines, the state-run domestic service. But the merger has only been partially completed.

In the meantime, Indian private carriers such as Kingfisher Airlines Ltd. and Jet Airways have eaten into its domestic market share. And international carriers have begun flying directly from abroad to Indian cities beyond Delhi and Mumbai.

— Amol Sharma contributed to this article.

news20100522reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][Science | Green Business | COP15]
Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO
Fri May 21, 2010 1:03pm EDT
Africa revives hardy, local rice vs Asian cousin
｛アフリカの米が耐候性で蘇る、アフリカ米とアジア米で｝

(Reuters) - Scientists are reviving long-ignored African rice to cut dependence on Asian varieties that may be less able to withstand the impact of climate change on the poorest continent, a report said on Friday.

Historically, scientists have focused on breeding useful traits such as disease resistance from African rice into Asian rice. Now the focus is on the reverse -- using African rice as the basic crop and improving it with Asian genes. "African rice was initially ignored by mainstream research," said Koichi Futakuchi, a scientist at Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice) in a statement.

"Now for the first time, we're reversing the gene flow."

Asian and African rice are the only two cultivated species of the crop in the world but the usually higher-yielding Asian type, introduced to Africa by the Portuguese in the 16th century, has become the dominant type to meet surging demand.

Africa imports 40 percent of its rice with import bills estimated at $3.6 billion in 2008.

"With climate change a reality, the work of developing crop varieties adapted to the changing environment is going to keep plant breeders busy for decades," AfricaRice said in a study coinciding with U.N. International Biodiversity Day on May 22.

Better breeding will help to raise yields of the African species, formally known as Oryza glaberrima, which has pear-shaped grains and a nutty flavor and was domesticated about 3,500 years ago in West Africa.

It often grows better in harsh conditions than its Asian cousin, Oryza sativa, but yields less in good soils. "Overall it is grown only in scattered pockets, near the brink of extinction," the Benin-based AfricaRice said.

WEEDS, DISEASE

"African rice species are known for their hardiness -- their strong ability to compete with weeds, pests and diseases, volatile weather, infertile soils (including toxic levels of iron), and even human neglect," it said.

Scientists say they are overcoming problems with African rice -- the plants often fall over near maturity or scatter their seeds before harvest -- and foresee yields of 5-6 metric tones per hectare (2.471 acres) in favorable, rainfed soils.

"Farmers will only change to new varieties if they are at least as good as what they already have," AfricaRice's Semon Mande, a rice breeder, told Reuters.

The panel of U.N. climate scientists has projected that between 75 and 250 million people in Africa may face extra stress on water supplies by 2020 with everything from desertification to floods. And crop yields may fall sharply.

Countries including Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia have already used African rice varieties developed since the 1990s. In Uganda, farmers grew 35,000 hectares (86,490 acres) of African rice in 2007 and halved rice imports from 2002-07.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)


[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business | Gulf Oil Spill]
WASHINGTON
Fri May 21, 2010 4:53pm EDT
Scenarios: Limits to government on plugging Gulf oil leak
｛シナリオ： メキシコ湾原油流出事故処理対策での米政府の限界｝

(Reuters) - A month-old gusher of oil into the Gulf of Mexico off the U.S. coast has resisted efforts by BP Plc to plug it up, and the Obama administration is under increasing pressure to do something about it.

President Barack Obama has sought to respond actively to the disaster and limit the environmental and economic impact in the Gulf.

Here are some potential scenarios for what might happen next.

WHITE HOUSE PUSHES BP

The federal government, not in the oil well business, is limited by what direct impact it can have on stopping the leak. The U.S. military does not have skills in the oil sector and officials have stressed the Pentagon is already providing whatever support it can to assist the U.S. response to the disaster.

The Obama administration has piled heavy pressure on BP to speed up its efforts to plug it up. "We are continuing to push BP to do everything that it can," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

LEGAL ACTION

In terms of potential legal action, the Obama administration's Justice Department eventually could charge BP with violating U.S. environmental laws. So far, the Justice Department has not launched an investigation. Officials there say they are monitoring the situation to ensure BP pays for the cleanup as promised.

Reparations for the last major oil spill, the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, were tied up in court for years as the company appealed an Anchorage, Alaska jury's award of $5 billion in punitive damages and it was reduced to $2.5 billion. The U.S. Congress has talked of raising a liability cap of $75 million to $10 billion for such disasters.

PAYING THE BILL

The federal government will pile heavy pressure on BP to foot the complete bill, with Americans in no mood to use taxpayer dollars for the disaster after the billions of dollars spent to bail out banks and auto companies.

ProPublica is reporting that that the Environmental Protection Agency is considering whether to bar BP from receiving U.S. government contracts, a move it said would cost the company billions of dollars in revenues and could end its drilling in federally controlled oil fields.

Obama is creating a commission to investigate the cause of the spill, evaluate industry practices and study government oversight. One likely scenario is that Obama will put off his plans to expand offshore oil drilling, making it unlikely that Republicans would join in energy legislation.

The president, whose Democrats face congressional elections in November, is getting modest marks from the public on his handling of the spill.

A Pew Research Center poll on May 11 found 38 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the oil leak and 36 percent disapproved. Opinion about Obama's performance is not as negative as opinion about former President George W. Bush's response to the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

WORST-CASE SCENARIO

The worst-case scenario is that it takes BP two more months to complete drilling a relief well that the company has said would provide the ultimate solution to halt the oil flow. A better solution: BP is working on attempting a "top kill" -- pumping heavy fluids, and then cement, into the well to stop the flow in the next few days.

"I think the best-case scenario is actually either late Sunday or early Monday as this top kill procedure works and the flow stops. ... I think worst case is it takes us until the relief well gets down which is probably early August," BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said on CBS's "The Early Show."

(Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by Will Dunham)

news20100522reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business | Gulf Oil Spill]
Matthew Bigg
VENICE, Louisiana
Sat May 22, 2010 2:30am EDT
Criticism mounts as BP struggles to curb oil spill
｛ＢＰ社の原油流出阻止の取組に非難が高まる｝

(Reuters) - Energy giant BP Plc scrambled to contain a month-old seabed well leak billowing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday as anger mounted among affected residents and political leaders in Washington.

A month after the well blowout and rig explosion that killed 11 workers, sheets of rust-colored heavy oil are starting to clog fragile marshlands on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, damaging fishing grounds and wildlife.

"To me from the very beginning with BP it was nothing but public relations," said Roger Halphen, a south Louisiana school teacher who has worked both in the oil industry and as a commercial fisherman.

"It's just a disaster. Everybody was sleeping on this and now all of a sudden here it is," he said of oil washing up on the coast.

BP's battered reputation has been reflected in its share price which lost more than 4 percent in London on Friday, extending recent sharp losses.

U.S. lawmakers and scientists have accused BP of trying to conceal what many believe is already the worst U.S. oil spill, eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska. It represents a potential environmental and economic catastrophe for the U.S. Gulf coast.

The London-based energy giant, facing growing federal government and public frustration and allegations of a cover-up, said its engineers were working with U.S. government scientists to determine the size of the leak, even as they fought to control the gushing crude with uncertain solutions.

It also reiterated on Friday that it was making an effort to be transparent about the unfolding situation.

"We are committed to providing the American people with the information they need to understand the environmental impact from the spill and the response steps that have been taken," BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward said in a statement.

"We share with you a strong commitment to transparency. BP is working hand-in-hand with federal, state and local governments to gather data on the seabed and in the water, and to incorporate those learnings so that we can continually improve the effectiveness of our response efforts," he said.

President Barack Obama's administration has kept up the pressure on BP. Obama is naming former Democratic Senator Bob Graham and former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly to co-chair a bipartisan commission to investigate the of spill, a White House official said on Friday.

The panel is patterned after past commissions that have probed incidents such as the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

BP's next planned step is a "top kill" -- pumping heavy fluids and then cement into the gushing well to plug it. That operation could start next week, perhaps on Tuesday, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.

CONFUSION ABOUT LEAK

Adding to the confusion, BP revised downward on Friday an estimate from Thursday that one of its containment solutions -- a 1-mile-long siphon tube inserted into the larger of two seabed leaks -- was capturing 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) of oil per day.

A BP spokesman said the amount of crude oil it sucked from the leak fell to 2,200 barrels (92,400 gallons/350,000 liters) a day in the 24-hour period ended at midnight on Thursday.

"The rate fluctuates quite widely on this tool," Suttles told reporters at a briefing in Robert, Louisiana.

Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil -- often defended by BP executives -- as ridiculously low and say it could be as high as 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million liters) per day or more.

"There's a huge amount of uncertainty around that number and it could have a fairly wide range," Suttles said.

A federal panel will release its estimate of the actual flow rate as early as next week, a Coast Guard official said.

Scientists fear parts of the huge fragmented surface slick will be sucked to the Florida Keys and Cuba by ocean currents.

(Writing by Ed Stoddard; editing by Mohammad Zargham)


[Environment News][Politics | Green Business | China | Gulf Oil Spill]
Doug Palmer
TIANJIN, China
Sat May 22, 2010 4:24am EDT
U.S. could fall behind China in clean energy: Locke
｛米国、クリーンエネルギーで中国に後れをとる： ロック商務長官｝

(Reuters) - The United States could fall behind China and other countries in clean energy technology unless Congress passes energy legislation, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said on Saturday.

Many U.S. investors were reluctant to plough money into big solar, wind and other clean energy sectors until they knew what technologies U.S. government policy was going to favor, he said.

"There's too much capital sitting on the sidelines for lack of an energy policy," Locke said during a stop at U.S. and Chinese joint venture project to build batteries for electric vehicles.

"The longer we wait, the more that others, whether it's China, Germany and other countries, will be moving ahead."

While legislation to fight global warming and provide stronger economic incentives for renewables energy still faces an uncertain fate in Congress, China is pushing clean energy projects on a number of fronts.

"The opportunities are stunning in China because China has enormous economic growth and that economic growth has led to enormous demands for energy," said Locke, who headed a group of 24 U.S. clean energy companies on a trade mission to Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing this week.

The joint venture between U.S. company Coda and its Chinese partner, Tianjin Lishen Battery, was a model of how cooperation in the clean energy sector could create jobs in both countries, Locke said.

Lishen builds the batteries for an electric vehicle that Coda plans to sell in the United States. The Chinese state-owned oil company, CNOOC, is also an investor in the project.

Locke also visited the Tianjin facility of a joint venture between United Solar Ovonic, a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, and Tianjin Jinneng Investment Company to convert U.S.-made solar cells into solar modules for the Chinese market.

"We do about 75 percent of the manufacturing in Michigan and then we roll it up and we ship it to Tianjin, where they finish it, cut it up into the sizes that they need," said Uni-Solar Vice President Martha Duggan.

Uni-Solar signed an agreement during Locke's trip to sell 500 kilowatts of its thin-film solar laminates to NYKE Solar Integrators, a Chinese company, for a demonstration project.

"Our theory is that by doing this particular business model, we're creating and sustaining jobs in Michigan and in China," Duggan said.

(Reporting by Doug Palmer; Editing by Nick Macfie)

news20100521bbc

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Science & Environment]
Page last updated at 23:39 GMT, Thursday, 20 May 2010 0:39 UK
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
Japan launches Akatsuki probe to Venus
｛日本、金星探査機”あかつき”を打ち上げ｝

{Japan's Venus probe lifts off}
｛日本の金星探査機打ち上げ｝

Japan has sent a sophisticated probe to Venus to study its atmosphere in unprecedented detail.
｛日本、最先端技術を駆使した探査機を金星へ、先例のない環境を細部にわたって調査する｝

The Akatsuki orbiter was put on a path to the inner-world by an H-IIA rocket launched from the Tanegashima spaceport in the south of the country.

The vehicle left its pad at precisely 2158 GMT (0658 local time Friday).

Akatsuki will arrive at Venus in December. Key goals include finding definitive evidence for lightning and for active volcanoes.

It was the H-IIA's second attempt at a launch. A previous effort earlier in the week was aborted because of a thick covering of cloud at the Tanegashima facility.

Thursday's get-away, by contrast, was made into a bright sky. The 53m-high rocket climbed south-east over the Pacific Ocean, its lift-off timed to the second to make sure Atkatsuki picked up the correct trajectory to make it out to Venus.

The H-IIA vehicle had a busy flight. It also deployed five piggy-back experiments, including a small satellite to practise the technique of sailing on sunlight.

Once Akatsuki gets to Venus, it will not be alone. The probe will conduct joint observations with a European Space Agency craft - Venus Express - that arrived at the planet in 2006.

Planetary comparisons

Venus is almost identical in size to our planet, and is thought to have a similar composition. But there the resemblance ends.

{The surface of Venus is hidden beneath thick cloud}

A dense, largely carbon dioxide, atmosphere acts as a blanket, trapping incoming solar radiation to heat the planet's surface to an average temperature of 460C (860F).

Surface pressure is about 90 times that on Earth. Several Soviet probes sent to Venus in the 1960s were crushed as they approached the surface.

By studying this hostile world, scientists hope to understand better how a warming future on our own planet might evolve.

"Although Venus is believed to have formed under similar conditions to Earth, it is a completely different world from our planet with extremely high temperatures due to the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and a super rotating atmosphere blanketed by thick clouds of sulphuric acid," explained Takeshi Imamura, Akatsuki's project scientist.

"Using [Akatsuki] to investigate the atmosphere of Venus and comparing it with that of Earth, we hope to learn more about the factors determining planetary environments."

Volcano hunt

The thick Venusian atmosphere is opaque to instruments that operate at visible wavelengths and so the Japanese probe carries five cameras that are sensitive in the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This instrument suite will enable scientists to investigate the clouds layer by layer.

{{AKATSUKI ('DAWN') VENUS ORBITER}
> Will study atmosphere and surface
> Size: 1.0m by 1.4m by 1.4m
> Mass at lift-off: About 500kg
> 5 cameras; 1 radio experiment
> Designed for 4.5-year life
> Will sit in 300km by 80,000km orbit }

The Japanese team wants to get a better understanding of why Venusian weather systems moves so swiftly.

"On Venus, a high-speed wind called super-rotation is blowing all over the planet, in the direction of planetary rotation, with a velocity reaching 400km per hour at an altitude of around 60km from the surface," explained Dr Imamura.

"This wind blows 60 times faster than the planet's rotation, which is very slow (one Venusian day takes 243 Earth days). Akatsuki will investigate why this mysterious phenomenon occurs. Another objective is to study the formation of the thick sulphuric acid clouds that envelop Venus, and to detect lightning on the planet."

Infrared sensitivity can also be used to study surface composition.

Akatsuki will use this capability to try to find active volcanoes.

Europe's Venus Express probe recently found lava flows that could have been younger than 250,000 years old.

Solar 'yacht'

Akatsuki's H-IIA rocket carried aloft a group of smaller satellites, some weighing just a few kilos.

A lot of interest has centred on a solar sail project called Ikaros (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun).

{ An artist's impression of how Ikaros will look in space}

In the coming days, this 320kg, 1.6m-wide, disc-shaped spacecraft will deploy an ultra-light membrane.

The pressure of sunlight falling on this thin film should drive the disc out to Venus behind Akatsuki.

This type of "solar sailing" technique has long been touted as a means of moving spacecraft around the Solar System, or even just helping conventional satellites to maintain their orbits more efficiently.

The large sail (14m along the square) will also incorporate solar cells to generate power.

The mission team will be watching to see if Ikaros produces a measurable acceleration, and how well its systems are able to steer the craft through space.

The Ikaros team acknowledges that deploying the large sail and controlling it will be extremely difficult.

"We conducted many experiments on the ground, and also launched the film aboard a sounding rocket," said project leader, Dr Osamu Mori.

"We even sent it high up in the sky in a big balloon, to spread the film in a near-vacuum environment. We experienced many failures, but we kept searching for the most reliable deployment method, and that led us to the model we've now built. I believe it will be successful."

news20100521cnn

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[Asia]
May 21, 2010 -- Updated 1212 GMT (2012 HKT)
Clinton: N. Korea must face consequences
｛クリントン氏、北朝鮮は執った行動を正視し大責任を負う必要がある｝

{U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives for meetings with Japanese counterparts in Tokyo on Friday.}
｛米クリントン国務長官、日本政府との会談で金曜日に訪日｝

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> Sec. of State Clinton says North Korea must face consequences
｛クリントン国務長官、北朝鮮は行動の結果に責任をとる必要がある｝

> South Korea's Lee: North's alleged attack violates armistice agreement
｛韓国の李大統領、北朝鮮の攻撃問題は停戦協定に違反｝

> North Korea accuses Seoul of creating an atmosphere conducive to war
｛北朝鮮、韓国が戦争を助長するするように仕向けている｝

> North Korea denies it sank a South Korean warship in March
｛北朝鮮、3月の韓国哨戒艦の沈没には関与せず｝
　
(CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Friday that North Korea must faces consequences over the alleged sinking of a South Korean warship which has stoked tensions in the divided peninsular.

A South Korean military report published this week claimed that the sinking of the Cheonan was caused by a North Korean torpedo attack.

Pyongyang denies that claim and said Friday that it could back out of a nonaggression pact between the neighbors if Seoul attempted to punish it over the sinking.

North Korea and South Korea have remained officially at war since an armistice in 1953 brought their three-year Cold War conflict to an end.

"I think it's important to send a clear message to North Korea that provocative actions have consequences," Clinton said Friday as she began a week-long Asian tour in Tokyo, Japan. "We cannot allow the attack on South Korea to go unanswered by the international community."

She said she was consulting with international allies to find the appropriate reaction.

Meanwhile, North Korea said Friday that it would "regard the present situation as the phase of a war" after South Korean President Lee Myung-bak accused it of engaging in military provocation and violating the armistice agreement between the nations, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

South Korean military officials on Thursday announced the results of an official investigation into the sinking of the Cheonan, which concluded that North Korea fired a torpedo that cut the vessel in half.

Lee vowed Thursday to take "resolute countermeasures" against North Korea for its alleged attack, according to his office.

Should South Korea take steps to retaliate, North Korea will "strongly react to them with such merciless punishment as the total freeze of the inter-Korean relations, the complete abrogation of the north-south agreement on nonaggression and a total halt to the inter-Korean cooperation undertakings," North Korea's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said in a statement, Yonhap reported.

North Korea denied Thursday that it sunk the warship, which went down on March 26, killing 46 sailors.

"We had already warned the South Korean group of traitors not to make reckless remarks concerning the sinking of warship Cheonan of the puppet navy," North Korea's national defense commission said in a statement Thursday responding to the investigators' report, according to the Korean Central News Agency.

"Nevertheless, the group of traitors had far-fetchedly tried to link the case with us without offering any material evidence," the statement said.

The South Korean military group that presented its report on the ship's sinking Thursday comprises experts from South Korea, Australia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

"The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine," said Dr. Yoon Duk-yong, the group's co-chair.

"There is no other plausible explanation," he said.

China asked both sides to stay calm to avoid an "escalation of the situation," said the country's foreign affairs ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu.

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said the status of the 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea has not changed because of the findings.

"They are on their normal state of readiness. They are engaged very routinely out there," Mullen said.

{{"Firstly, from now on (North Korea) will regard the present situation as the phase of a war}
--Yonhap cites Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea as saying}

The United States is bound by treaty to assist South Korea if it goes to war.

Japan said it stands behind South Korea. "We had received extensive explanation from the ROK [Republic of Korea] side prior to today's announcement," Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama said in a statement.

"On this basis, Japan strongly supports the ROK. North Korea's action cannot be condoned by any means, and Japan together with the international community strongly condemns North Korea," the prime minister said.

"In handling this matter, Japan will continue its close coordination and cooperation for regional peace and stability with the countries concerned, including the ROK and the United States."

Military and civilian briefers said that damage to the Cheonan's hulk and injuries on the bodies of the sailors were consistent with the kind of "shock-wave and bubble effect" produced by a homing torpedo attack. Seismic data, witness statements and computer modeling provided further corroboration, Yoon said.

Briefers displayed torpedo parts recovered from the Cheonan wreck site: part of a motor, a shaft and parts of the propeller. Korean writing, with the words "Number 1" were inscribed on fragments of the weapon. The parts displayed in a glass case were compared and shown to be identical to the blueprint of a 7.35 meter torpedo, obtained from a North Korean weapons export brochure.

General Han Won-dong, director of South Korea's Defense Intelligence Agency, declined to state how or where South Korea had obtained the brochure, citing security sensitivities.

International members of the investigative team agreed with the conclusions.

"We worked closely and collaboratively, using separate tools and methods," said Adm. Thomas Eccles of the U.S. Navy, adding that all members of the international team were in agreement.

Military officials also identified what they believe to be the type of vessel responsible.

"A few small submarines and a mother ship supporting them left a North Korea naval base in the West Sea [Yellow Sea] two - three days prior to the attack," Yoon said, citing information gathered by a multinational task force made up of Australia, Canada, South Korea, the UK and the U.S.

The likely culprit was a midget submarine of the Yeono ("Salmon"), a vessel equipped with night vision equipment, Han said.

This is not the first clash the two Koreas have had near the maritime border.

In 1999 and 2002, there were fatal naval clashes between surface patrol boats near the inter-Korean maritime border in the Yellow Sea. A November shooting incident also may have killed North Korean sailors.

However, the use of a submarine is a significant escalation in terms of weapons used. It's also the deadliest North Korean attack since the bombing of a South Korean airliner killed 115 people in 1987.

Gen. Park Jung-i, who co-chaired the investigative committee, said that South Korea would give the evidence to the Armistice Commission that oversees the ceasefire that ended the 1950-1953 on the Korean peninsula. The commission would make the findings available to North Korea, he said.

Asked what defensive moves the South Korean navy is taking to prevent a recurrence, Han said that that the navy would establish anti-submarine detection measures, but admitted the difficulty of detecting an underwater submarine once it has left its base.

news20100521reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business | Lifestyle]
Daniel Trotta
NEW YORK
Thu May 20, 2010 3:40pm EDT
NY skyscraper wins highest "green" certification
｛ニューヨークの摩天楼、最高のグリーン認定証を獲得｝

(Reuters) - The U.S. Green Building Council gave the Bank of America Tower its highest rating for environmental performance and sustainability on Thursday, meaning New York City's second-tallest building is also its greenest.

The 54-story building completed in 2008 at a cost of $2 billion became the first commercial high-rise to win the "platinum" certification from the non-profit council that promotes environmentally friendly construction and design.

The certification was based on water and energy efficiency, indoor air quality, the environmental friendliness of construction materials and other criteria.

At 1,200 feet, it is the second tallest building in the city after the Empire State Building. Years before the building opened, Bank of America and developers from the Durst Organization decided to create an example at the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

"They came to us and said they wanted to build the largest environmentally responsible building they could. That was our goal from the get-go," said project architect Serge Appel of Cook+Fox Architects.

The building has its own 4.6-megawatt co-generation plant, and its floor-to-ceiling windows reduce the need for artificial lighting. The roof captures rainwater. Waste water from the sinks is recycled. The men's rooms even have waterless urinals. The measures save an estimated 8 million to 9 million gallons of water per year.

The steel was made of 87 percent recycled material, and the concrete from 45 percent recycled content -- in this case, blast furnace slag.

The project broke ground in 2004, four years before the financial crisis that led to Bank of America acquiring Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, and the accolade comes as Wall Street's reputation with the public is poor.

"It's helped with employee morale. In terms of how the financial services industry is seen by the public ... a more buoyant economy and lower unemployment will make a bigger difference in our image," said Anne Finucane, the bank's global strategy and marketing officer.

Developers say the lower carbon dioxide content in the air helps people avoid that drowsy feeling in the afternoon, and spectacular views from higher floors are enough to keep eyes open.

"There's a psychological advantage to being able to see outside the building," architect Appel said. "It's very different from the way buildings were built in the 1980s with tinted glass windows. It always looked like it was stormy outside."

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Vicki Allen)


[Environment News][Green Business | COP15]
Chris Baltimore
HOUSTON
Thu May 20, 2010 6:13pm EDT
Luminaries urge Obama to act on energy after spill
｛著名人、原油流出事故からオバマ大統領にエネルギー政策の見直しを強く要請｝

(Reuters) - Actor Robert Redford and other big name clean energy advocates are piling pressure on U.S. President Barack Obama to seize upon the giant Gulf oil spill as a catalyst to steer America clear of its oil addiction.

"The Gulf disaster is more than a terrible oil spill," Redford says in a television ad sponsored by environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council that began airing late Wednesday. "It's the product of a failed energy policy."

Redford, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, CNN founder Ted Turner and a host of environmental groups may not have coordinated their messages, but they all have the same thing to say: the oil sloshing ashore on the coast of Louisiana is all the evidence Obama needs to usher the U.S. economy into a new, clean energy future.

"We don't need a disaster manager -- we need a leader," Redford said in an interview on MSNBC television. "Now is exactly the time because the American people are really focused on this."

DECADES DOWN THE ROAD

But experts say celebrities' calls for change may not have much impact in the near term. America's crude oil demand cannot be turned off with a switch and a shift to alternative energy would require a vast change in infrastructure and consumer behavior that could be decades in the making.

"Will there be a push for cleaner sources? Sure," said Frank Verrastro, an energy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"But does it change the calculus aside from the political rhetoric? I don't think so," Verrastro said.

Friedman, influential columnist and author of a book on the green revolution, "Hot, Flat and Crowded," said this week the spill posed a challenge to Obama similar to that which former U.S. President George Bush faced after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Obama, Friedman wrote, should exert his leadership and hammer "The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act" through Congress.

Turner, a billionaire and environmentalist, said the oil spill may be a divine message to pursue clean energy sources.

"I'm just wondering if God is telling us he doesn't want us to drill offshore," Turner said in a CNN interview this week.

But even divine intervention may not be enough to change the course in Washington. A climate change bill in the works by Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Senator Joseph Lieberman is unlikely to pass the Senate, Verrastro said.

'GREAT VISION'

The oil spill could, however, boost the likelihood for passage of clean energy legislation that requires U.S. utilities to get more of their electricity from clean sources like wind and solar, he added.

Weaning the world economy off crude oil would require building the equivalent of 6,020 nuclear power plants, about 14 times the current operating fleet, said Amy Myers Jaffe, director of the Baker Institute Energy Forum at Rice University in Houston.

"The guy's got a great vision for 50 years from now," Jaffe said, referring to Redford. "But what about this year?"

In the end, even fellow environmentalists question whether celebrity voices like Redford's can have a meaningful impact on the U.S. energy policy debate.

"I'm not sure who Obama would be swayed by at this point," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. "I wouldn't bet the ranch that Robert Redford is going to make Obama sit up and go 'Geez, I didn't realize I was missing the boat.'"

(Reporting by Chris Baltimore; editing by Mary Milliken and Todd Eastham)


[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business]
Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska
Thu May 20, 2010 11:05pm EDT
Shareholder sues BP leaders over alleged lapses
｛株主、原油流出の過失容疑でＢＰ社の幹部を訴える｝

(Reuters) - A BP Plc shareholder in Alaska on Thursday sued the corporation's chairman and board members, alleging the officials' mismanagement led to the disastrous Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and spill and have devalued BP stock.

The lawsuit, filed in Alaska Superior Court in Anchorage by local attorney Jeff Pickett, accuses BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward and the corporation's board of "breaches of fiduciary duties and gross mismanagement," resulting in "improper, reckless and illegal health, safety and environmental practices at the Company."

The lawsuit seeks undetermined compensatory and punitive damages, plus appointment of an independent corporate monitor to oversee safety and environmental compliance at BP.

The complaint was similar to an earlier action filed four years ago in state court by Pickett and two labor groups that had invested in BP.

Plaintiffs in that 2006 lawsuit included the UNITE HERE National Retirement Fund, owned by a union representing mostly hospitality-industry workers, and the London Pension Fund, owned by public-sector employees in the city of London.

That 2006 lawsuit charged the then-chief executive Lord John Browne and other BP leaders of negligence in their management of pipelines at the Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska's North Slope. A corrosion-eaten hole in one pipeline caused the largest-ever oil spill on the North Slope, and another corrosion-related spill prompted a partial shutdown of Prudhoe Bay, the nation's biggest oil field.

That lawsuit was settled in 2008 with an agreement by BP managers to undertake several management reforms. That settlement also followed an agreement by BP managers to reduce Browne's retirement benefits.

A week ago, the plaintiffs in that case filed a motion to essentially reopen the matter, asking the court to compel BP to abide by settlement terms they said had been breached.

Thursday's lawsuit also alleges that the settlement terms were breached. Despite promises of reform made by the corporation in 2008, the lawsuit said, "the culture of ignoring safety requirements and excessive risk taking at the company remains and BP's violations have continued."

A BP spokesman was not immediately available to comment on the new lawsuit.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)

news20100521reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business]
Matthew Bigg
PASS A LOUTRE, Louisiana
Fri May 21, 2010 12:46am EDT
Louisiana fears oil onshore is just the start
｛ルイジアナ、原油が陸上部にも拡散の恐れ｝

(Reuters) - The oil slick that has started sloshing through marsh grass at the southern tip of the Mississippi Delta gives coastal Louisiana a glimpse of what it fears may be its future.

In the last few days, acres of oil have penetrated low-lying islands at the point where the river rolls into the sea, forming a dark red band at the bottom of the roseau cane.

Thick black sludge blocks at least one inlet, and a much larger area off the coast glistens with a rainbow sheen dotted with oil globules, suggesting that more will reach land soon.

"This is what we hoped wouldn't happen but we knew would happen," said Andy Nyman, associate professor of wetland and wildlife ecology at Louisiana State University.

Energy giant BP, accused by the U.S. government of falling short in providing information about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, was forging ahead on Friday with efforts to contain the crude gushing from one of its undersea wells.

The sight and smell of a slick in fragile wetlands and the ecologically-rich Delta adds urgency to efforts to contain a disaster sparked a month ago when an explosion sank a rig, killing 11 workers, and ripped open the well.

It also casts doubt on a prediction by BP's Chairman Tony Hayward this week that the leak would have only a modest environmental impact.

At the same time, it calls into question the effectiveness of the miles of booms arranged in the water by BP, federal and local authorities in a bid to protect the coastline.

At Blind Bay Louisiana and elsewhere, oil has drifted under or over the booms onto land. Elsewhere, some of the worst-affected islands were entirely unprotected.

In and of itself, the affected area represents just a fragment of the southern tip of the Delta and is dwarfed by the network of waterways that stretch around 100 miles 160 km inland.

But the slick could have an exponential impact on sport fishing, which is a lifeblood of small villages like Venice, Louisiana, and threatens commercial fisheries.

Fishermen and boat owners said they feared what they saw was simply the beginning.

"This could get 100 times worse than what it is today," said fisherman Carey O'Neil, who knows the area intimately as he grew up at an encampment that can only be reached by boat.

RACE TO FIND ANSWERS

Now that oil has begun to wash ashore in significant quantities, scientists are racing to understand its impact.

Some say they are hampered by a lack of information about dispersants, the volume of oil in the water and the extent to which oil loses its toxicity as it rises from the leak up through the water column toward the surface.

But some consequences were easy to predict, said Maura Wood, program manager with the National Wildlife Federation's coastal Louisiana restoration project.

"This is an area where tiny juveniles (marine life) will be coming in looking for a haven and nibbling on the plant stems," said Wood as she wiped oil from her gloves after collecting a sample in a bottle.

"So this can start to move up through the food chain. Toxics start to magnify as bigger fish eat the little fish and that's a real concern," she said.

Even if time in the warm Gulf waters and dispersants make the oil less poisonous, it will still likely smother the marsh grass, exposing the matrix of sand and roots that forms the islands, said environmentalists.

"Once these plants die there is nothing to hold the mud and then it becomes open water. Once that happens it's really hard to get that to come back," said Randy Lanctot, executive director of Louisiana Wildlife Federation.

Many residents say they are bewitched by the beauty of the Delta, a vast maze of canals, islands and river channels where brown pelicans skim low across waters abundant with fish.

Right now, the area is at the epicenter of a political storm over the spill and its consequences, with extensive news coverage and frequent visits by the governor and other state politicians.

Yet many residents say their biggest fear is for the months ahead when the oil is still washing ashore but national attention has turned elsewhere while.

(Editing by Ed Stoddard and Philip Barbara)


[Environment News][Green Business]
Wojciech Moskwa and Gwladys Fouche
OSLO
Fri May 21, 2010 3:48am EDT
Statoil evacuates North Sea platform due "unstable" well
｛スタットオイル社、北海のプラットフォームの油田が不安定として退避｝

(Reuters) - Norwegian oil and gas producer Statoil said on Friday it had evacuated the Gullfaks C platform in the North Sea after changes in well pressure led to a fault on one of two valves designed to prevent a blowout.

Environmental group Bellona said the situation was "very critical" and highlighted continued risks of offshore oil and gas exploration in the wake of BP's well blowout and environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

"There are no leaks and no injuries," Statoil spokesman Gisle Johanson said. "The situation on the platform is stable and we are planning for further operations to normalize the situation."

Johanson said the evacuation of about 90 people was caused by an "unstable pressure situation" in a Gullfaks well, which he said meant "too much or too little" pressure.

"They have a situation in which there is uncontrolled pressure from the well, one of the barriers is gone and one barrier is left," said Frederic Hauge, head of Bellona, one of the leading environmentalist groups in Norway.

"Uncontrolled pressure is very serious and has the capability of being a large accident," he said, adding that in the first quarter of 2010, eight incidents took place in the Norwegian oil industry that had "large scale potential."

"That is very serious," Hauge said. "Regulatory work in Norway may look nice from outside, but we have a lot of security issues in the Norwegian industry," he said.

Gullfaks is an oil and gas-producing field in the Tampen area of the Norwegian section of the North Sea. It produces 78,000 barrels of oil per day and 420 million standard cubic meters of gas per year.

Gullfaks C is one of three platforms at the site, which handle oil and gas from the Gimle, Tordis, Vigdis, Visund, Gullfaks and Gullfaks Soer fields.

The sea depth at the site is 130 to 220 meters, with the reservoirs 1,700 to 2,000 meters below the sea level.

Statoil is the majority owner in the field with 70 percent, with Norwegian-state owned firm Petoro the minor partner with 30 percent.

(Editing by James Jukwey)

news20100521reut3

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business]
Jeff Mason - Analysis
WASHINGTON
Fri May 21, 2010 1:06am EDT
Oil spill's political consequences rise for Obama
{原油流出事故で政治責任がオバマ大統領にのしかかる｝

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama has prevented the BP oil spill from becoming his own Katrina-like nightmare so far, but the political and policy consequences of the disaster are likely to increase as the oil spreads.

By repeatedly assigning blame to energy giant BP Plc and focusing ire on the government agency responsible for regulating offshore drilling, Obama has deflected criticism that his administration was sluggish in its initial response to the Gulf of Mexico spill.

That may not last. A month since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank, killing 11 people and leaving a ruptured well that has been leaking crude ever since, the feared environmental catastrophe is becoming more and more real.

Heavy oil is hitting Louisiana's wetlands. Oil-stained animals are being rescued and cleaned. Gulf Coast economies are suffering and preparing for drawn-out damage.

Analysts say as the ecological crisis gains traction, voters will punish the president regardless of who is responsible -- an important consideration for Obama ahead of congressional elections in November.

"There is a strong tendency for the public to penalize incumbents even for natural disasters if there is a plausible governmental angle -- regardless of whether the government failed to respond adequately," said Eric Schickler, a political science professor at the University of California, Berkley.

"If the oil spill has a significant impact on the Gulf Coast economy -- and as a result, on the U.S. economy as a whole -- it is likely to impose at least some damage on the president and his party."

Obama's Democrats, who control both houses of Congress, are expected to lose seats in the election and want to avoid shifting power to Republicans, who would make it more difficult for the president to achieve his policy goals.

Obama is aware of the government angle in the crisis and has made his displeasure with the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the Interior Department agency that regulates offshore drilling, very clear.

That agency is now being restructured, but other policy consequences loom, most notably the president's efforts to pass energy legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase domestic production of renewable fuels and -- tricky under current circumstances -- expand offshore drilling.

John Leshy, who served as general counsel for the Interior Department in the Clinton administration, said the spill could hurt Obama's short-term prospects for an energy overhaul.

"Clearly the spill has dramatized the cost of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and gas, particularly oil. So to that extent it has, I think, boosted the idea that there needs to be energy reform," said Leshy, now a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.

"But in the short term you have to get 60 votes in the Senate," he said. "I think the spill has made that harder."

An energy bill introduced by Democratic Senator John Kerry and independent Senator Joe Lieberman is languishing in the 100-member legislative body. The offshore drilling provisions were meant to attract Republican support for the bill.

Obama's action plan for advancing that energy law is not clear, but his strategy for dealing with the oil spill has been to act fast.

Mindful of the political damage incurred by President George W. Bush's administration for its response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Obama has not wasted any opportunity to show he is moving quickly and assigning blame.

'MADE-TO-ORDER BAD GUY'

"Katrina was a natural disaster. This is a man-made disaster," said Ken Medlock, an energy fellow at Rice University in Houston, Texas. "With this particular case, from Day One the Coast Guard has been on the scene. The federal government, as a result, has been involved from Day One."

Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said Obama had learned from Katrina and made clear BP carried the blame for this Gulf disaster.

"Obama has a made-to-order bad guy in BP. And he sure hasn't been hesitant about pointing fingers," Sabato said.

Bad guy or not, public anger about the spill has not helped Obama prevail in getting Congress to raise the cap on oil companies' liability for big spills.

It has also given Republicans, whose support Obama needs to achieve his energy overhaul, potential ammunition against the administration if MMS is found to have been negligent.

"The president has spent a whole lot of time pointing the finger at BP and you should point a finger at BP and the other companies involved," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" show.

"We're also interested to know what the administration did. Was the Mineral Management Service a part of this administration that approved this site? It also approved this spill response plan. What kind of oversight did the administration provide during the course of the drilling?"

Obama plans to create a presidential commission to answer questions such as these and identify the causes of the spill.

The amount of time he has will depend on how soon BP plugs the well, how far the oil flows, and how focused the U.S. public remains on the role of companies rather than the role of the government in this environmental crisis.

(Editing by Todd Eastham)


[Environment News][U.S. | Green Business]
Matthew Bigg
BLIND BAY, La
Fri May 21, 2010 4:14am EDT
Oil fouls Louisiana as BP scrambles to contain spill
｛ルイジアナ、ＢＰ社の流出原油の封じ込めの緊急処置でも原油で汚染｝

(Reuters) - Energy giant BP, accused by the U.S. government of failing to share information in a timely fashion about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, was forging ahead on Friday with efforts to contain the gushing crude.

The pressure to act is huge. TV images of oil sloshing into Louisiana's marshes has underscored the gravity of the situation and raised public concern about the catastrophe, keeping it high up on the political agenda in Washington.

"It's depressing for sure. This is what we were hoping wouldn't happen," said Randy Lanctot, executive director of the Louisiana Wildlife Federation.

Deep red oil coated miles of coastline along the southern tip of the Mississippi River delta, the harbinger of what many in Louisiana fear will be a much more devastating inundation.

In places, a thick oily sludge had washed up into coastal inlets where it nestled amid the marsh grass while elsewhere a rainbow sheen of oil floated off the coast suggesting more oil would soon wash onto the low-lying islands.

In a clear sign of Washington's growing frustration with BP's handling of the spiraling environmental disaster, the U.S. government accused BP of being less than transparent about the unfolding situation, while a senior lawmaker said its actions amounted to a "cover-up."

"In responding to this oil spill, it is critical that all actions be conducted in a transparent manner, with all data and information related to the spill readily available to the United States government and the American people," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said.

They said in a letter on Thursday to BP CEO Tony Hayward that despite claims by BP that it was striving to keep the public and the government informed, "those efforts, to date, have fallen short in both their scope and effectiveness."

The statement followed allegations that BP had failed to share everything it knew about the extent of the damage and the amount of crude flowing unchecked from the ruptured well.

BP's stock fell 2.40 percent in early London trading on Friday. The company has lost around $30 billion in value in the month since the rig explosion, which killed 11 workers, sparked the disaster.

BP said on Thursday it was siphoning 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) per day of oil from the gusher, from 3,000 barrels a day previously.

"The oil plume escaping from the riser pipe has visibly declined today," BP spokesman Mark Proegler said after the company announced that a mile-long tube was tapping into the larger of two leaks from the well.

However, a live video feed of the leak, provided by BP, showed a black plume of crude oil still billowing out into the deep waters.

BP has been estimating the leak was flowing at a rate of 5,000 barrels per day, but scientists and the government have questioned that figure.

Scientists analyzing video of the oil gushing from the seabed have pegged the spill's volume at about 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million liters) per day.

"It's just not working," U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told CNN as she watched the BP video. The California Democrat denounced a "cover-up" of the real size of the oil spill.

BP is scrambling on other fronts as well after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered it to identify safer dispersants by Friday that can be used to contain the spill.

And a lawsuit was filed on Thursday by a BP shareholder in Alaska's state Superior Court in Anchorage alleging BP failed to follow safety rules and procedures in the Gulf and in its North Slope operations in Alaska.

BP did not immediately respond to the suit.

(Writing by Ed Stoddard; editing by Todd Eastham)

news20100520cnn

[Top stories] from [CNN.com]

[Asia]
By Andrew Salmon for CNN
May 20, 2010 -- Updated 1240 GMT (2040 HKT)
North Korea slams report that it torpedoed South Korean ship
｛北朝鮮、韓国船を魚雷攻撃したという報道を激しく糾弾｝

{The Cheonsan, a 1,200-ton corvette, sank after a mysterious explosion tore it into half near disputed waters in the Yellow Sea.}
｛哨戒艦、天安、１２００トンが紛争中の海域で不可解な爆発で真っ二つ、沈没｝

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
> North Korea denies it sank a South Korean warship in March
｛北朝鮮、３月に韓国の軍艦を沈没させたことを否定｝

> Official investigation in South Korea finds N.Korea to blame
｛韓国の公式な調査で北朝鮮が関与｝

> Investigators recovered a propeller from torpedo, committee's co-chair said
｛調査団の共同責任者、魚雷のプロペラを回収｝

> The 1,200 ton ship sank near disputed waters off North Korea on March 26
｛１２００トンの軍用艦が３月２６日に北朝鮮の沖合の係争中の海域付近で沈没｝

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- North Korea denied Thursday that it fired a torpedo that sank a South Korean warship in March, killing 46 sailors.

South Korean military officials on Thursday announced the results of an official investigation into the sinking of the Cheonan, prompting North Korea to accuse them of fabricating evidence.

"We had already warned the South Korean group of traitors not to make reckless remarks concerning the sinking of warship Cheonan of the puppet navy," North Korea's national defense commission said in a statement, according to the Korean Central News Agency. "Nevertheless, the group of traitors had far-fetchedly tried to link the case with us without offering any material evidence."

The 1,200 ton corvette sank after a mysterious explosion tore it into half near disputed waters off North Korea on March 26.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak vowed to take "resolute countermeasures" against North Korea for its alleged attack, according to his office.

"The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine," said Dr Yoon Duk-yong, co-chair of a military group formed to investigate the incident.

The group comprises of experts from South Korea, Australia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. "There is no other plausible explanation," he said.

Meanwhile, China asked both sides to stay calm to avoid an "escalation of the situation," said the country's foreign affairs ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu.

Military and civilian briefers said that damage to the Cheonan's hulk and injuries on the bodies of the sailors were consistent with the kind of "shock-wave and bubble effect" produced by a homing torpedo attack. Seismic data, witness statements and computer modeling provided further corroboration, Yoon said.

Briefers displayed torpedo parts recovered from the Cheonan wreck site: part of a motor, a shaft and parts of the propeller. Korean writing, with the words "Number 1" were inscribed on fragments of the weapon. The parts displayed in a glass case were compared and shown to be identical to the blueprint of a 7.35 meter torpedo, obtained from a North Korean weapons export brochure.

General Han Won-dong, director of South Korea's Defense Intelligence Agency, declined to state how or where South Korea had obtained the brochure, citing security sensitivities.

International members of the investigative team agreed with the conclusions.

"We worked closely and collaboratively, using separate tools and methods," said Adm. Thomas Eccles of the U.S. Navy, adding that "all members" of the international team were in agreement.

Military officials also identified what they believe to be the type of vessel responsible.

"A few small submarines and a mother ship supporting them left a North Korea naval base in the West Sea [Yellow Sea] two - three days prior to the attack," Yoon said, citing information gathered by a multinational task force made up of Australia, Canada, South Korea, the UK and the U.S.

The likely culprit was a midget submarine of the Yeono ("Salmon"), a vessel equipped with night vision equipment, Han said.

This is not the first clash the two Koreas have had near the maritime border.

In 1999 and 2002, there were fatal naval clashes between surface patrol boats near the inter-Korean maritime border in the Yellow Sea. A November shooting incident also may have killed North Korean sailors.

However, the use of a submarine is a significant escalation in terms of weapons used. It's also the deadliest North Korean attack since the bombing of a South Korean airliner killed 115 people in 1987.

Gen. Park Jung-i, who co-chaired the investigative committee, said that South Korea would give the evidence to the Armistice Commission that oversees the ceasefire that ended the 1950-1953 on the Korean peninsula. The commission would make the findings available to North Korea, he said.

Asked what defensive moves the South Korean navy is taking to prevent a recurrence, Han said that that the navy would establish anti-submarine detection measures, but admitted the difficulty of detecting an underwater submarine once it has left its base.

The White House backed the report, saying it "points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the attack."

"This act of aggression is one more instance of North Korea's unacceptable behavior and defiance of international law," said a statement by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

"This attack constitutes a challenge to international peace and security, and is a violation of the Armistice Agreement."

The statement noted that President Barack Obama spoke with his South Korean counterpart Monday and "made clear that the United States fully supports the Republic of Korea, both in the effort to secure justice for the 46 service members killed in this attack and in its defense against further acts of aggression."

news20100520reut1

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][Green Business]
TORONTO
Wed May 19, 2010 3:05pm EDT
Toronto zoo to turn pachyderm poop to power
｛トロント動物園、厚皮動物の糞が電力に転換｝

(Reuters) - The Toronto Zoo has a solution to global warming: elephant dung.

Canada's biggest zoo is inviting bids for a gasification plant that will turn its elephant, rhino and other large animal manure into clean electricity and heat.

"No other zoo in the world is doing this," zoo conservation program head Dave Ireland said on Wednesday.

The zoo produces about 1,000 tonnes of manure and other organic waste each year. This will be fed into the biogas plant, to be built on land adjoining the zoo, where bacteria will munch through the waste and excrete methane gas.

Leftover heat will be piped to the zoo to warm buildings and animal pavilions. Ireland expects this to substantially reduce the zoo's natural gas bill of C$1.4 million ($1.3 million) a year.

Zoo waste will make up only a portion of the fuel needed by the 3 to 5-megawatt biogas facility, which will generate enough heat and electricity to power 5,000 homes. The rest will come from organic waste from restaurants, grocery stores and other industrial sites in the area.

(Reporting by Nicole Mordant and Allan Dowd in Vancouver; Editing by Chris Wilson)

($1=$1.05 Canadian)


[Environment News][Green Business]
KIGALI
Wed May 19, 2010 3:12pm EDT
Four endangered mountain gorillas die in Rwanda
｛ルワンダ、絶滅危惧種のマウンテンゴリラ四頭が死ぬ｝

(Reuters) - Three baby mountain gorillas and an adult female have died in Rwanda's Volcanoes National Park, possibly from a combination of extremely cold and rainy weather, wildlife authorities said on Wednesday.

Around 680 mountain gorillas remain in the wild, making them one of the world's most endangered great apes, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said in a statement.

The cause of death is not yet known but there was no indication of foul play, the statement added.

"We are all shocked and saddened by the death of these baby gorillas as well as the adult female, and by the grave implications for the mountain gorilla population as a whole," Eugene Rutagarama, director of the International Gorilla Conservation Program (IGCP), said in the statement.

Around half the mountain gorilla population live in the Virunga chain of volcanoes, which straddle the central African countries of Rwanda, Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The rest live in Bwindi Impenetrable Park in Uganda.

The primates are under threat from poachers, the destruction of their habitat, the live ape trade, disease and fragmentation, the WWF said.

Rwanda's gorilla-viewing tourism industry is a leading source of foreign exchange.

(Reporting by Hereward Holland; Editing by Michael Taylor)


[Environment News][Green Business | COP15]
Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON
Wed May 19, 2010 3:24pm EDT
U.S. reports urge a price on climate emissions
｛米の報道機関、ＣＯ2排出量取引の価格設定を要請｝

(Reuters) - The best way to curb global warming is to put a price on climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions, according to a trio of reports from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released on Wednesday.

In blunt language at odds with the unwieldy climate change debate in the U.S. Congress, the academy said: "A carbon-pricing system is the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions. Either cap-and-trade, a system of taxing emissions, or a combination of the two could provide the needed incentives."

In one report on the science of climate change, academy experts discounted doubts about climate warming after revelation of embarrassing e-mails by scientists provided fodder for critics.

"Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for -- and in many cases is already affecting -- a broad range of human and natural systems," the reports concluded.

Senator John Kerry, co-author of new U.S. legislation to curb planet-warming emissions, said the reports which were requested by congressional committees, were "yet another wake-up call on the threats of global climate change."

"These studies clearly demonstrate the urgency for Senate action on the American Power Act," Kerry said in a statement.

The academy, which advises the government on science and technology, drew praise from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the Union of Concerned Scientists and other environmental groups.

EMISSIONS 'BUDGET'

A second report, which focused on limiting climate change, said strong U.S. actions would encourage other countries to join in a global response.

"The U.S. should establish a greenhouse gas emissions 'budget' that sets a limit on total domestic emissions over a set period of time and provides a clear, directly measurable goal," the report said.

Legislation aimed at curbing global warming was unveiled last week in the U.S. Senate. Despite support from President Barack Obama, its chances of becoming law this year are slim. The bill would cut domestic greenhouse emissions by 17 percent in the next decade.

The academy's report did not recommend a specific emissions reduction target, but suggested a range of emissions that are roughly in line with the legislation.

Even getting to the high end of that range will require a departure from business as usual, the report said.

Carbon pricing alone will not do the job, the scientists said.

Other policies are needed to ensure progress on energy efficiency, renewable energy, new-generation nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and fixing or replacing emissions-intensive energy infrastructure, the report said.

A third report said that even with these moves, steps must be taken to ease the most damaging effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, disappearing sea ice and more frequent and intense extreme weather events like heavy precipitation and heat waves.

(Editing by Xavier Briand)


[Environment News][Green Business | COP15]
Pete Harrison
BRUSSELS
Wed May 19, 2010 3:42pm EDT
EU agrees mandate for "nearly zero energy" homes
｛ＥＵ，ほぼゼロベースエネルギーのホームの権能に同意｝

(Reuters) - All new buildings constructed in Europe after 2020 will have to be virtually carbon-neutral after the European Parliament gave new energy standards the last approval they needed Tuesday.

The standards are expected to have a significant long-term impact on the EU's bills for gas imports for heating from Russia, Norway and Algeria, worth tens of billions of euros each year.

The European Union's mandate for "nearly zero-energy buildings" will kick in for all new public buildings in the European Union after 2018, and for all new homes and offices two years later.

Environmentalists gave the standards a guarded welcome, but said they would take effect too late and would do little to encourage the renovation of Europe's existing housing stock.

"Investing in building renovation is a win-win scenario, creating jobs in Europe's largest employing sector, reducing energy bills and improving our energy security," said Green group politician Claude Turmes.

Europe's construction sector directly employs 14 million workers and contributes about one tenth of EU gross domestic product, says the European Builders Confederation.

"With buildings accounting for 36 percent of the EU's greenhouse gases, improving their energy efficiency is also crucial for meeting the EU's climate change goals," said Turmes.

The 27-country EU plans to cut carbon emissions to a fifth below 1990 levels by 2020. It is currently debating whether to tighten those curbs after the recession caused an 11 percent cut from industry in just one year.

The Parliament had originally proposed that from 2018, all new buildings would have to reduce their carbon footprint to zero, but European governments said that was too ambitious and diluted the plan.

The standards eliminate an earlier threshold of 1,000 square meters, meaning the new rules apply to all buildings, big or small.

"This will heavily improve the impact of the directive and offer great potential for small and medium-sized enterprises, since refurbishment requirements will now cover almost all homes," said the European Builders Confederation.

The EU's executive arm, the European Commission, now has the complex task of defining the technical specifications for such minimum energy buildings.

(Editing by James Jukwey)

news20100520reut2

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][Green Business | Cuba]
Pascal Fletcher
MIAMI
Wed May 19, 2010 5:13pm EDT
Washington, Havana talk about oil spill risk to Cuba
｛米国とキューバ、原油流出事故でキューバへのリスクを話し合い｝

(Reuters) - The United States and Cuba, close neighbors but ideological foes, are talking about the potential risks from a huge Gulf of Mexico oil spill that forecasters say could be carried to Cuban shores by strong ocean currents.

The oil gushing from a blown out seabed well owned by London-based BP Plc in U.S. waters already has affected some parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast shoreline in what officials fear will inflict an ecological and economic catastrophe.

Oceanographers are predicting that a powerful ocean flow known as the Loop Current could carry some of the oil southeast through the Florida Straits, threatening the coastlines of southern Florida and the northwest of Cuba.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Virginia Staab said U.S. diplomats in Havana delivered a note to communist-ruled Cuba's foreign ministry on Wednesday informing it about the oil spill and what was known about the slick's projected movement.

"We have had working-level discussions with the Cuban government to keep them informed of developments," she said.

"We also communicated the U.S. desire to maintain a clear line of communication with the Cuban government on developments," Staab added, stressing that "stopping the oil leak is our top priority."

Cuba has said it is monitoring the U.S. oil spill.

Washington and Havana do not have formal diplomatic relations, which were broken off in the wake of Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution that ushered in one-party communism to Cuba.

The United States maintains a long-standing trade embargo against Cuba. The two governments, despite President Barack Obama's wishes for a "new beginning" in relations, remain at odds over human rights and many other issues.

They have, however, initiated talks on matters deemed of mutual interest, such as migration and resuming postal service. Supporters of increased contacts say environmental protection should be high on that agenda.

Two Cuba experts who are advisors to the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank said in a May report that environmental cooperation was essential for both countries to be able to work together effectively against the kind of ecological disaster that the Gulf oil spill heralded.

"Obviously, the establishment of working relations between the United States and Cuba to facilitate marine environmental protection is the first step in the contingency planning and cooperation that will be necessary to an effective response and early end to an oil spill," attorney Robert Muse and oil expert Jorge Pinon said in the joint paper.

CUBAN DRILLING PLANS

Although the oil that could threaten Cuba is gushing from a well in U.S. waters, Muse and Pinon said there was the same possible risk of an accident in Cuba's plans to move forward with deepwater exploration drilling in its own territorial segment of the Gulf of Mexico.

"The sobering fact that a Cuban spill could foul hundreds of miles of American coastline and do profound harm to important marine habitats demands cooperative and proactive planning by Washington and Havana to minimize or avoid such a calamity," they wrote.

Like the United States, the world's top oil consumer, energy-starved Cuba also is anxious to expand its own hydrocarbons resources. Havana has contracted out parts of its Gulf of Mexico zone for exploration by oil company partners from Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Muse and Pinon said any effective U.S.-Cuban response to a catastrophic oil spill would require free movement of equipment and expertise between the two countries, something currently blocked by the U.S. trade embargo.

Urging more cooperation, they said "the Obama administration, irrespective of the current embargo, has the power to license the sale, lease or loan of emergency relief and reconstruction equipment to Cuba (and) also has the authority to license U.S. citizens to perform emergency response and subsequent reconstruction services in Cuba."

The United States should hold joint exercises with Cuba to coordinate emergency responses, and facilitate immediate scientific cooperation, Muse and Pinon said.

The Miami Herald reported on Wednesday that U.S. scientists who have been working on marine research and conservation issues with Cuban officials for nearly a decade were pulling together information on the spill for their peers in Cuba.

(Additional reporting by Deborah Charles in Washington and Esteban Israel and Marc Frank in Havana; Editing by Will Dunham)


[Environment News][Green Business]
VENICE, Louisiana
Wed May 19, 2010 6:36pm EDT
Heavy oil "blanket" hits Louisiana wetlands
｛大量の原油”ブランケット”、ルイジアナの湿地帯を襲う｝

(Reuters) - A blanket of heavy oil has washed ashore in Louisiana's fragile marshlands, in the first significant heavy oil landfall from the Gulf of Mexico spill, state Governor Bobby Jindal said on Wednesday.

"The day that we have all been fearing is upon us today," Jindal said after a boat tour to the southernmost point of the Mississippi river estuary.

"This wasn't tar balls. This wasn't sheen. This is heavy oil in our wetlands," he told a news conference in Venice, Louisiana. "It's already here but we know more is coming."

Previously, officials had been reporting "oil debris" in the form of tar balls, or light surface "sheen" coming ashore in outlying parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Jindal said Louisiana's wetlands were "the Gulf's nursery," nurturing diverse wildlife and protecting the coastline against erosion.

He appealed to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue a permit to allow the construction of 80 miles of sand levees to protect the Louisiana coastline from further damage.

That project, which would cost $350 million, has been delayed despite an intense effort by the state and Plaquemines Parish (county) officials to comply with the Corps' requirements, added Jindal.

He said crews were ready to start building the network of sand levees as soon as permission was granted.

Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser said the sight of the oil and the delay in granting permission for the levees project affected him physically.

"Everything that that blanket of oil has covered will die. There is no way to clean it. ... I am sick to my stomach right now," he said.

(Reporting by Matt Bigg; Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Todd Eastham)


[Environment News][Green Business]
Wed May 19, 2010 6:36pm EDT
FACTBOX: What are tar balls and what is their impact?
｛ファクトボックス： タールボールとは？、またその影響は？｝

(Reuters) - Tar balls found on beaches in the Florida Keys this week are not from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill leaking from a well owned by BP, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Wednesday, citing laboratory tests.

But tar balls linked to the spill have been found elsewhere on the Louisiana and Alabama coastlines, raising concerns about the disaster's ecological impact.

Following are some facts about tar balls:

- They are the remnants of crude oil dumped into the ocean by marine vessels or, in this case, by a blown-out undersea well. They are "little, dark-colored pieces of oil that stick to our feet when we go to the beach," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

- During the initial stages of a spill, the oil will spread into a thin slick, leaving it susceptible to tearing by wind and wave action. The smaller patches that result often disperse over a wide area and some of the crude mixes with water to form an emulsion that looks like chocolate pudding.

- This mix is thicker and stickier than the original oil in the spill, but it can still be torn by wind and waves. The smaller pieces it breaks into are tar balls.

_ They can be as big as pancakes but are mostly coin-sized, according to NOAA.

THREATS TO HUMAN HEALTH/WILDLIFE

- Tar balls "are very persistent in the marine environment and can travel hundreds of miles," NOAA said

- "For most people, an occasional brief contact with a small amount of oil, while not recommended, will do no harm. However, some people are especially sensitive to chemicals, including the hydrocarbons found in crude oil," it said. "They may have an allergic reaction or develop rashes."

- Sea turtles are known to eat tar balls. Dr Gilly Llewellyn, the Oceans Program Manager for WWF-Australia, a conservation group, said tar balls can "attract a curious or hungry turtle" with often fatal results.

- Tar balls can also heat up and ooze into the sand, fouling crucial nesting habitat for turtles, said John Hocevar, the Oceans Campaign Director for Greenpeace USA.

TAR BALL CLEAN UP

- "There is no magic trick to making tar balls disappear. Once tar balls hit the beaches, they may be picked up by hand or by beach-cleaning machinery. If the impact is severe, the top layer of sand containing the tar balls may be removed and replaced with clean sand," NOAA said.

(Sources: Reuters, NOAA, WWF, Greenpeace)

(Compiled by Ed Stoddard)

news20100520reut3

[Top News] from [REUTERS]

[Environment News][Green Business]
SAN FRANCISCO
Wed May 19, 2010 10:28pm EDT
Schlumberger says its crew left Horizon day of fire
｛シュルンベルジェ社、火災の日に、塔乗員がホライズンを離塔｝

(Reuters) - Schlumberger Ltd, the world's largest oilfield services company, said on Wednesday it had a crew on the Deepwater Horizon that departed only hours before the explosion and fire that engulfed the rig.

The company, which had not previously revealed its work on the Horizon, said in an emailed statement that it performed wireline services for BP Plc on the rig in March and April, completing the last services on April 15 and leaving a crew on standby in case any more were needed.

"On the morning of April 20, 2010, BP notified the Schlumberger crew that it could return to its home base in Louisiana," Schlumberger said in a statement, which a company spokesman confirmed by phone. He declined to comment further.

Wireline services relate to any aspect of well measurement logging that employs an electrical cable to lower tools into the borehole and to transmit data.

The wireline standby crew departed the Horizon at about 11 a.m. on one of BP's regularly scheduled helicopter flights, Schlumberger said. The explosion occurred at about 10 p.m. that night, and the rig sank into the Gulf of Mexico two days later as a massive leak from the well started.

Other oilfield services companies whose names were attached to the Horizon have seen their share prices battered due to fears about liability over the loss of the rig and 11 workers, and the resulting environmental damage of the oil spill.

Shares of Halliburton Co, which did various services on the Transocean-owned rig including well cementing, are down 22 percent since it sank. Shares of Cameron International Corp, maker of the rig's blowout preventer, are down 23 percent.

Schlumberger shares have fallen about 8 percent over the same period.

(Reporting by Braden Reddall; Editing by Bernard Orr and Lincoln Feast)


[Environment News][Green Business]
LONDON
Thu May 20, 2010 4:31am EDT
World's water steadily warming up
｛世界の海水、徐々に上昇｝

(Reuters) - The top layer of the world's ocean has warmed steadily since 1993, a strong sign of global warming and a key driver of sea level rise, according to a study by an international team of scientists.

"The ocean is the biggest reservoir for heat in the climate system, so as the planet warms, we're finding that 80 to 90 percent of the increased heat ends up in the ocean," said Josh Willis, an oceanographer at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Scientists from NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Britain's Met Office, the University of Hamburg in Germany and the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan analyzed different estimates of heat content in the upper ocean from 1993 to 2008 to assess the size and certainty of growing heat storage in the ocean.

They estimated that the heat content of the ocean has increased over the last 16 years and the energy stored is now enough to light nearly 500 100-watt light bulbs for every person on the planet.

Warmer oceans cause sea levels to rise as seawater expands as it heats up, accounting for about one-third to one-half of global sea level rise, scientists say.

(Reporting by Daniel Fineren)


[Environment News][Green Business]
Matthew Bigg
VENICE, Louisiana
Thu May 20, 2010 4:41am EDT
Louisiana shore sees heavy oil as BP prepares plug
｛ルイジアナの海岸、ＢＰ社の封じ込め作業の中、大量の原油が見られる｝

(Reuters) - Heavy oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill threatened Louisiana marshlands on Thursday after washing ashore for the first time since a BP-operated rig exploded a month ago, sparking ecological disaster.

Calling it a "day that we have all been fearing," Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said on Wednesday that heavy oil -- not simply tar balls or sheen -- had entered the state's prized wetlands.

"It's already here but we know more is coming," he said.

The marshes are the nurseries for shrimp, oysters, crabs and fish that make Louisiana the leading producer of commercial seafood in the continental United States. A large no-fishing zone in Gulf waters seen as affected by the spill has been imposed.

Energy giant BP Plc scrambled to contain crude from the gushing undersea well, which ruptured after an April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers.

The company said it is now siphoning about 3,000 barrels (126,000 gallons/477,000 liters) a day of oil, from what it has estimated was a 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 liters) a day gusher.

The company said it could begin injecting mud into the well as early as Sunday in a bid to permanently plug the leak.

BP shares rose nearly 3 percent on Thursday in early London trading.

Adding another name to the group of companies connected to the doomed rig, Schlumberger Ltd said it had a crew on the Deepwater Horizon that departed only hours before the explosion and fire that engulfed it.

The world's largest oilfield services company had not previously revealed its work on the Horizon.

FALL-OUT INCREASES

The discovery of heavy oil in marshlands at the southern tip of Louisiana's peninsula showed that authorities lacked the capacity to track undersea oil effectively, marine conservation biologist Rick Steiner said.

It also called into question a containment effort that focused on oil on the surface of the Gulf, Steiner said.

"I am very confident that a lot of the oil that has come out has not surfaced yet and the government can't track subsurface plumes," said Steiner, a retired professor at the University of Alaska who has just spent a week on the Gulf coast.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government's top weather forecaster said a small portion of light sheen from the giant oil slick had entered the powerful ocean flow known as the Loop Current, which could carry the oil down to the Florida Keys, Cuba and up the U.S. East Coast.

Wildlife and environmental groups accused BP of holding back information on the real size and impact of the growing slick, and urged President Barack Obama to order a more direct federal government role in the spill response.

Obama plans to create a commission to investigate the cause of the spill, evaluate industry practices and study government oversight.

Fall-out in Washington increased. The U.S. Interior Department said on Wednesday its embattled Minerals Management Service will be broken up into three separate divisions, as part of an effort to restructure the way the department handles offshore energy production.

Top Democrats in the U.S. Senate urged Obama to order immediate, enhanced inspections of all offshore oil rigs and production platforms.

"Until we can ensure the safety of our offshore platforms, our nation's coastlines will be threatened by the possibility of more man-made catastrophes," the letter said.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)