Where there's war, oil, gas and pipelines are never far away. Petroleum issues are typically kept in the shadows.
Wars for resources are illegal under the UN Charter - yet petroleum appears to play a role in the complex geopolitics of each hot spot. The Landscape-Scarring, Energy-Sucking, Wildlife-Killing Reality of Pot Farming. Starting about 90 miles northwest of Sacramento, an unbroken swath of national forestland follows the spine of California's rugged coastal mountains all the way to the Oregon border.
Near the center of this vast wilderness, along the grassy banks of the Trinity River's south fork, lies the remote enclave of Hyampom (pop. 241), where, on a crisp November morning, I climb into a four-wheel-drive government pickup and bounce up a dirt logging road deep into the Six Rivers National Forest. I've come to visit what's known in cannabis country as a "trespass grow. " "This one probably has the most plants I've seen," says my driver, a young Forest Service cop who spends his summers lugging an AR-15 through the backcountry of the Emerald Triangle—the triad of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties that is to pot what the Central Valley is to almonds and tomatoes.
Consumer-Study-Marketing-Mattering. Australia's dirty secret: who's breathing toxic air? - News. Australia's environmental protection laws do not adequately or equally protect all communities from the health effects of air pollution.
These are the key findings from the first Australian study to assess the relationship between industrial air pollution and the communities most exposed to it, which has just been published in the international journal Environmental Research Letters. Our study evaluated industry-reported estimates of air emissions, which are available from the Australian government's National Pollution Inventory (NPI), which details annual pollution from facilities like mines, power stations and factories. Global riot epidemic due to demise of cheap fossil fuels. If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming.
The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession. But this hasn't happened. And it won't. Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. A Sotchi, les sacrifiés des Jeux Olympiques - Monde. On accède difficilement au village d’Akhshtyr, à 15 km de l’aéroport de Sotchi, via une petite route cabossée par le passage des camions. « Nous pensions que les Jeux Olympiques allaient nous apporter la civilisation… Les déchets, la saleté, le bruit, c’est tout ce que nous avons eu !
», lance en guise d’accueil Alexander Koropov, l’un des anciens du village. L’euphorie des premiers temps a fait place à la réalité. Les quelque 160 habitants de cette bourgade montagnarde ont assisté impuissants à la dégradation de leurs conditions de vie. Un village pollué par une décharge de déchets Déçus, en colère, ils pâtissent depuis plus de cinq ans des travaux de l’autoroute et de la ligne de chemin de fer reliant l’aéroport de Sotchi au site olympique de montagne Krasnaya Poliana. . « Les autorités ont confisqué une partie de mon jardin, affirme Alexander. Plus d’eau potable. Sochi - an Olympiad of environmental destruction - News. The IOC has provided tacit backing to the organisers' rampage through the delicate and diverse ecology of the Caucasus.
The reports from Sochi’s newly built hotels and Olympic Village have not painted their construction in the best light, with tales of doors that wouldn't open, yellow drinking water, and collapsing fixtures and fittings. Unfortunately, the situation doesn’t look any better on the environmental front. In fact the most symbolic failure of the 2014 Winter Olympics came before even a brick was laid, when the government decided to host the games inside the Sochi National Park.
The greatest biodiversity in Russia. « L'Everest est devenu une boîte à fric » Le Monde.fr | • Mis à jour le | Par Henri Seckel Après l’avalanche – ou plutôt la chute de sérac – qui a tué seize d’entre eux sur le flanc népalais de l’Everest, vendredi 18 avril, les porteurs d’altitude ont annoncé qu’ils renonçaient à toute ascension du plus haut sommet du monde cette saison (avril-mai).
Sans ceux que l’on appelle les sherpas – la majorité appartient effectivement à l’éthnie népalaise des Sherpa, mais certains porteurs d’altitude peuvent être Tamang, Gurung, ou Chhetri par exemple –, pour préparer la voie (échelles, cordes, etc.) menant du camp de base au sommet, et pour porter bagages et bouteilles d’oxygène, le toit du monde n’est plus accessible qu’aux alpinistes professionnels. Lire : Saison terminée sur l'Everest après une nouvelle avalanche. Gas company: Amazon tribes vulnerable to 'massive deaths' - News. Epidemics of infectious and exogenous viral diseases, such as acute diarrhea or acute respiratory infections, can cause 'prolonged periods of illness, massive deaths ... ' Pluspetrol also acknowledges that contact between its workers and indigenous peoples in 'voluntary isolation' and 'initial contact' (IPVIIC) is "probable" during its planned gas exploration and construction operations in the Amazon.
Kenya - forest people facing violent eviction - News. Dead or in prison before we allow the KXL pipeline - News. When you have a society and a nation built upon the subjugation of people of color, you can expect nothing more than the constant erasing of certain histories.
Ukraine - it's the gas, gas, gas. The intention is to dissolve the nation-state in order to remove any obstacle to resource extraction, which is why failed states are popping up wherever the US sticks its big nose.
What does a pipeline in Afghanistan have to do with the crisis in Ukraine? Everything. It reveals the commercial interests that drive US policy. Just as the War in Afghanistan was largely fought to facilitate the transfer of natural gas from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea, so too, Washington engineered the bloody coup in Kiev to cut off energy supplies from Russia to Europe to facilitate the US pivot to Asia. Les crimes contre la nature sont des crimes contre la paix et l'humanité. En 2010, la juriste britannique, Polly Higgins, a proposé que le crime d’écocide soit reconnu. Elle a ainsi proposé à la Commission du droit international des Nations Unies que le crime d’écocide devienne le cinquième crime contre la paix, au côté des crimes contre l’Humanité ou des crimes de guerre. Dans la foulée, il y a deux ans, sept citoyens européens ont lancé une « initiative citoyenne européenne » (ICE) (1) dont le but était de faire reconnaître en Europe le crime d’écocide par le biais d’une directive européenne.
Mongolian herders protest - 'protect our grazing land!' Revealed: Qatar's World Cup 'slaves' Dozens of Nepalese migrant labourers have died in Qatar in recent weeks and thousands more are enduring appalling labour abuses, a Guardian investigation has found, raising serious questions about Qatar's preparations to host the 2022 World Cup. This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks.
The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022. According to documents obtained from the Nepalese embassy in Doha, at least 44 workers died between 4 June and 8 August.
More than half died of heart attacks, heart failure or workplace accidents. The investigation also reveals: Blood on our clothes - News. The Cambodian government is using violence not only against national opposition, but also in defence of its position within the neoliberal world order. Last Friday garment workers, alongside a wide range of activists, blocked a road south of Phnom Penh. In the ensuing clash security forces opened fire, killing four people and injuring many more. This was the culmination of a week of increasingly violent protests in which garment workers' demanded an increase in their meagre salaries - from the current US$100 per month to $160.
At the time of writing, the Cambodian government has issued a ban on assembly and public gatherings. These clashes represent the escalation of a rather complex political crisis in Cambodia, involving not only workers and unions but also opposition parties and different civil society groups, united against Prime Minister Hun Sen. Les esclaves de la Chinatown toscane. L’émotion est arbitraire. Même au beau milieu d’une tragédie, un simple détail suffit à la déclencher.
Sur le carrelage noir de cendres et d’eau, des boutons. Des centaines, des milliers de boutons, de toutes les formes et de toutes les couleurs. Qatar World Cup: 400 Nepalese have died since construction began. More than 400 Nepalese migrant workers have died on Qatar's World Cup building sites as the Gulf state prepares to host the event in 2022, a report will reveal this week.
The grim statistic comes from the Pravasi Nepali Co-ordination Committee, a respected human rights organisation which compiles lists of the dead using official sources in Doha. Economic Democracy. The accumulation of wealth is a morally and socially bankrupt goal The Trouble with Billionaires skilfully conveys the truly extraordinary extent of inequality in the UK and other nations where greed has been transformed from a sin to a virtue. Breaking the despotic power of finance. Money is not and never has been a commodity ... money is a social construct - a social relationship based primarily and ultimately on trust. The global finance sector today exercises extraordinary power over society. Challenging 'growthism' - Comment. Neo-liberalism has tried to convince us that we are simply individuals and that there is no such thing as society. Ending hunger - the rich world holds the keys - Comment. Leur écologie et la nôtre. « Réforme ou révolution ?
» Extreme Inequality. Extreme inequality is not inevitable but is the result of policy choices. Les champs français, nouveau placement des sociétés financières.